Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  While Duncan published, I perished half a dozen times. I shed careers like snakeskins, molting toward a future I always insisted was the goal, not merely an inevitable destination. Painter, sculptor, teacher, gallery assistant, gallery owner, journalist, tour guide, always seeking a necklace quite as bright, quite as fake, as Mary Sabon’s. I never finished anything, from the great sprawling canvases I filled with images of a city I didn’t understand, to filling the great sprawling spaces in my gallery. I’ve never lacked energy or drive, only that fundamental secret all good art has and all bad art lacks: a healthy imagination. Which, as I look back, is intensely ironic, considering how much imagination it took to get to this moment with my sanity intact, typing up an afterword that, no matter how sincere, will no doubt be as prone to accusations of pretense and bombast as any of my prior works.

  I did my best to keep in contact with Duncan, although without much enthusiasm or vigor. The long trek to his loft apartment from mine often ended in disappointment; he was rarely home. Sometimes, curious, I would sneak up to the door and listen carefully before knocking; I would look through the keyhole, but it revealed only darkness.

  My reward for spying usually took the form of a rather echoing silence. But more than once I imagined I heard someone or something scuttling across the floor, accompanied by a dull hiss and moan that made me stand up abruptly, the hairs rising on my arms. My tremulous knock upon the door in such circumstances—whether Duncan Transformed or Duncan with Familiars, I wanted no part of that sound—was usually enough to reestablish silence on the other side. And if it wasn’t, my retreat back into the street usually changed from walk to run. {I heard you sometimes, although I was usually engrossed in my work and thought it best that you not enter. Ironically enough, a couple of times, I thought you were them, graycapped sister.}

  I imagine I looked rather pathetic in front of his apartment—this thin, small woman crouched against a splintery door, eagerly straining for any aural news of the interior. I remember the accursed doorknob well—I hit my head on it at least a dozen times.

  Thwarted, I gained any news of Duncan from rare interviews in the newspapers, which usually focused on writing technique or opinions on current events. For some reason, people are under the deluded impression that a historian—blessed with hindsight—can somehow illuminate the present and the future. Duncan knew nothing about the present and the future. {I knew nothing about the present and the immediate past. I would argue, however, that I began to glean an inkling of the future.}

  The biographical notes on the dust jackets of his books were no help—they crackled with a terseness akin to fear: “Duncan Shriek lives in Ambergris. He is working on another book.” Even by investigating the spaces between the words, those areas where silence might reveal a clue, could anyone ever “get to know” the author from such a truncated paragraph? More importantly, no one would ever want to know the author from such a paragraph.

  Only in the fifth book did more information leak through, almost by accident, like a water stain on a ceiling: “Shriek intends to write a sequel to his bestselling tome, Cinsorium.”

  By then, Duncan’s luck had run out, and all because of a single book we must circle back to, a delighted Sabon as raptor swooping down to observe over our feathered shoulder—Mary’s presence doubling, trebling, the scope of the disaster, because it was she who turned Duncan into fodder for her own…what shall we call it? Words fail/cannot express/are not nearly enough. {Triumph. Unqualified. You must give her that. Bewitching eyes and the pen of a poet.}

  Gliding, wheeling, we circle back through the windstream and let the titles fall in reverse order so that we might approach the source by a series of echoes or ripples: Vagaries of Circumstance and Fate Amongst the Clans of the Aan; Mapping the Beast: Interrogatories Between the Moth and Those Who Travel Its Waters; Stretcher Jones: Last Hope of the West; Language Barriers Between the Aan and the Saphant Empire. And the first book, sprawling out below us in all of its baroque immensity: Cinsorium: Dispelling the Myth of the Gray Caps. This maddening book, composed of lies and half-truths, glitters beneath us in all of its slivers and broken pieces, baubles fit for our true crow-self.

  What is it about even half of the truth that can tear at the fabric of the world? Was it fear? Guilt? The same combination of emotions that flickered through my thoughts as I extinguished the welter of mushrooms from Duncan’s poor pale body?

  I don’t mean to speak in riddles. I don’t mean to fly too high above the subject, but sometimes you have no choice. Still, let me land our weary crow and just tell the story….

  Perhaps Duncan should have realized what he had done after Frankwrithe & Lewden’s reaction to the manuscript. {I realized it when I read over the first draft and saw the thousand red wounds of revision marks left by my second editor—lacerations explaining in their cruel tongue that this book would either behave itself or not be a book at all.}

  A month after submission of the book, Duncan’s editor, John Lewden, summoned Duncan to F&L’s offices in downtown Morrow. The journey from Ambergris took Duncan two grueling days upriver by barge, into the heart of what proved to be a glacial Morrow winter. Once there, Duncan found that his editor was “on vacation” and that F&L’s president, Mr. L. Gaudy, would talk to him instead.

  A secretary quickly escorted Duncan into Gaudy’s office, and left immediately. {I remember the office quite well. It was “resplendent,” with a rosewood desk, a dozen portraits of famous F&L authors, and an angry, spitting fireplace in the corner opposite the desk.}

  Gaudy, according to Duncan’s journal, was “a bearded man of indeterminate age, his gaunt flesh wrapped across sharp cheekbones.” He sat behind his desk, staring at the room’s fireplace. {His eyes were like blue ice, and in his presence I smelled a certain cloying mustiness, as if he spent most of his time underground, or surrounded by hundred-year-old books.}

  Duncan moved to sit, but Gaudy raised one hand, palm out, in abeyance. The calm behind the gesture, almost trancelike, made Duncan reluctant to disobey the man, but “also irritated me intensely; I had the feeling he knew something I did not, something I wanted to know.”

  They remained in those positions, respectively sitting and standing, for over five minutes. Duncan somehow sensed that just as he should not sit down, he also should not speak. “I began to think this man held some power over me, and it was only later that I realized something in his eyes reminded me of Dad.”

  When Gaudy finally lifted his bespectacled face to stare at Duncan, the flames reflected in the glass, Duncan saw an expression of absolute peace on the man’s face. Relieved, he again moved to sit down, only to again be told, through a gesture, to remain standing.

  Duncan began to wonder if his publisher had gone insane. “At the very least, I wondered if he had mistaken me for someone else.”

  As the fire behind them began to die, Gaudy smiled and broke the silence. He spoke in a “perfectly calm voice, level and smooth. He stared at the fireplace as he spoke, and steepled his fingers, elbows on the desk. He appeared not to draw a single extra breath.”

  He said:

  “You need not sit and thus defile my perfectly good chair because it will take no time at all to say what needs to be said to you. Once I have said what I am going to say to you, I would like you to leave immediately and never return. You are no longer welcome here and never will be welcome again. Your manuscript has performed the useful function of warming us, a function a thousand times more beneficial than anything it might have hoped to accomplish as a series of letters strung together into words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. The fire has purified it, in much the same manner as I would like at this moment—and will desire at all moments in the future—to purify you, were it not outside of the legal, if not moral, boundaries placed upon us by the law and society in general. By this time it ought to be clear to you, Mr. Shriek, that we do not intend to buy the rights to your ‘book’—and I use the word ‘book’ in its loosest possib
le sense—nor to its ashes, although I would sooner buy the rights to its ashes than to its unblemished pages. However, on the off chance that you still do not comprehend what I am saying to you, and allowing for the possibility that you may have entered a state of shock, I shall continue to talk until you leave this room, which happy event I hope will take place before very much longer, as the sight of you makes me ill. Mr. Shriek, as you must be aware, Frankwrithe & Lewden has a history that goes back more than five hundred years, and in that time we have published our share of controversial books. Your first book—which, by the way, you may be fascinated to know is as of this moment out of print—was the forty-first book to be banned by the various Antechambers of Ambergris over the years. We certainly have no qualms in that regard. Nor have we neglected to publish books on the most arcane and obscure topics dreamt of by the human brain. As you are no doubt aware, despite the fact that many titles no longer have even a nostalgic relevance, we keep our entire, and considerable, backlist in print—Pelagic Snail Rituals of the Lower Archipelago comes to mind, there being no such snail still extant, nor such an archipelago; still, we keep it in print—but we will make an exception for your first book, which shall be banished from all of our catalogues as well. As I would have hoped you had guessed by now, although you have not yet left this office never to return, we do not like your new book very much. In fact, to say I do not like your book would be like calling a mighty tree a seedling. I loathe your book, Mr. Shriek, and yet the word ‘loathe’ cannot convey in even a thousandth part the full depths of my hatred for this book, and by extension, you. But perhaps I should be more specific. Maybe specifics will allow you to overcome this current, potentially fatal, inertia—tied no doubt to the aforementioned shock—that stops you from leaving this office. Look—the last scrap of your manuscript has become a flake of ash floating above the fireplace. What a shame. Perhaps you would like an urn to collect the ashes of your dead newborn? Well, you can’t have one, because not only do we not have an urn, but even if we did, we would not allow you to use it for the transport of the ashes, if only from the fear that you might find some way to reconstruct the book from them—and yes, we do know it is likely you have a copy of the manuscript, but we will feel a certain warmth in our hearts if by burning this copy we can at least slow down your reckless and obstinate attempt to publish this cretinous piece of excrement. Returning to the specifics of our argument against this document: your insipid stupidity is evident from the first word of the first sentence of the first paragraph of your acknowledgments page, ‘The,’ and from there the sense of simple-minded, pitiable absence of thought pervades all of the first paragraph until, by the roaring crescendo of imbecility leading up to the last word of the first paragraph, ‘again,’ any possible authority the reader might have granted the author has been completely undermined by your inability to in any way convey even an unoriginal thought. And yet in comparison to the dull-witted pedantry of the second paragraph, the first paragraph positively shines with genius and degenerate brilliance. Perhaps at this point in our little chat, I should repeat that I don’t very much like this book.”

  Gaudy then rose and shouted, “YOU HAVE BEEN MEDDLING IN THINGS YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT! DO YOU THINK YOU CAN POKE AROUND DOWN THERE TO YOUR HEART’S CONTENT AND NOT SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES?! YOU ARE A COMPLETE AND UTTER MORON! IF YOU EVER COME BACK TO MORROW, I’LL HAVE YOU GUTTED AND YOUR ORGANS THROWN TO THE DOGS! DO. YOU. UNDERSTAND. ME??!”

  What other rhetorical gems might have escaped Gaudy’s lips, we will never know, for Duncan chose that moment to overcome his inertia and leave Frankwrithe & Lewden’s offices—forever.

  “It’s not so much that he frightened me,” Duncan told me later. “Because after going belowground, really, what could scare me? It was the monotone of his delivery until that last spit-tinged frothing.” {I was terrified, Janice. This man was the head of an institution that had been extant more than five hundred years ago. And he was telling me my work was worthless! It took a month before I even had the nerve to leave my apartment in Ambergris. I rarely visited Morrow again, and kept a low profile whenever I did.}

  Later, during the War of the Houses {as it came to be called}, we realized that Gaudy, for political reasons, could hardly have reacted any other way to Duncan’s manuscript. But how could Duncan know that at the time? He must have been shaken, at least a little bit. {Yes. A bit.}

  Undaunted, Duncan found a new publisher within six months of Gaudy’s strange rejection. Hoegbotton Publishing, a newly created and over-eager division of the Hoegbotton & Sons trading empire, gave Duncan a contract. In every way, the book struck Duncan’s new editor, Samuel Hoegbotton—an overbearing and inconsequential young man with hulking shoulders, a voice like a cacophony of monkeys, and severe bad breath {who would never find favor in the eyes of his tyrannical father, Henry Hoegbotton}—as “A WORK OF GENIUS!” Duncan was happy to agree, bewildered as he might have been, unaware at the time that Samuel had transferred from the Hoegbotton Marketing Division. Samuel had not set foot in a bookstore since his twelfth birthday, when his mother had presented him with a gift certificate to the Borges Bookstore. {“Promptly traded in for its monetary value,” Sirin, our subsequent editor, mused disbelievingly some years later.} That Samuel died of a heart attack soon after publishing Duncan’s fifth book surprised no one. {Except me!}

  The book, published with the full {perhaps crushing} weight of the Hoegbotton empire behind it, was called Cinsorium: Dispelling the Myth of the Gray Caps. It became an instant bestseller.

  Despite this success, Cinsorium signaled the beginning of Duncan’s slide into the obscurity I had previously wished upon him. If he had dreamt of a career as a serious historian—the sort of career our father would have died for—he should have suppressed the book and moved on to a new project. Samuel Hoegbotton, contributing to the disaster, ordered the printing of a banner across the top of the book {almost, but not quite, obscuring my name} that proclaimed: “At Last! The Truth! About the Gray Caps! All Secrets! Revealed!”

  I bought the book as soon as it came out, not trusting Duncan to send me a copy. {I would have, if you’d asked.} It disappointed me for contradictory reasons: because it showed little of the scholarly care displayed by On the Refraction of Light in a Prison, and because it never mentioned, even once, Duncan’s underground journey. I had already accepted the irritation of waiting to read about the trip along with everyone else. This I could have tolerated, even though it indicated a lack of trust. But not to mention it at all? It was too much. {I did mention Zamilon, though. Wasn’t that enough? To start with?}

  The book did not “reveal” all secrets. It obscured them. Duncan tantalized readers with incredible images he claimed had come from ancient books, the existence of which most scholars discounted. Mile-high caverns. Draperies of fungi that “undulated in time to a music conveyed at too high a pitch for the human ear.” Mushrooms that bleated and whined and “talked after a fashion, in the language of spores.” {Yes, perhaps I obscured some deeper truths, but nothing was made up.}

  In typical Duncanesque prose, it tried with almost superhuman effort to hide the paucity of its insight:

  Although the inquisitive reader may wish for further extrapolation regarding this aspect of Tonsure’s journal, such extrapolation would be so speculative as to provide a poor gruel of a meal indeed, even for the layperson. Some mysteries are unsolvable.

  {One part fear, I suppose. One part truth. Some mysteries are unsolvable. Just when you unearth the answer, you discover another question.}

  A beautiful sword, but blunt, the book relied on quotations from “unnamed sources” for the bulk of its more exotic findings. Although claiming to know the truth about the gray caps, Duncan instead spent most of the book combining a history of fungi with historical suppositions that made me laugh:

  Could it be that the rash of suicides and murders in the Kalif’s Court fifty years before the Silence were the result of emanations from a huge fungus that lay und
er the earth in those parts? Might much of the supposed “courtly intrigues” of the period actually have more to do with fruiting bodies? Might this also reveal the source of the aggression behind so-called “bad Festivals” in Ambergris?

  The book, in short, violated most rules of historical accuracy and objective evidence. Duncan mentioned that he had journeyed to examine the page of Tonsure’s journal, but he gave no specifics of location or content. Certainly nothing like the detail and “local color” provided by his own journal. {I admit Cinsorium was hardly my finest hour, although I had my reasons for writing it at the time. My thoughts turned to Tonsure and his encryptions. My need for encryption was not as urgent as his, or as profoundly solitary, but I still felt a certain danger. Not just from the gray caps, but from those who might read the unexpurgated truth and…reject it. And reject it violently. Couldn’t I, I reasoned—falsely—allude to and suggest that truth so that, perhaps, even if in just a thousand minds, my suspicions might harden into certainty? It is a question I wrestled with even later, working with James Lacond, although by then I had come to realize that the best I could hope for was a hardening certainty in a mere handful of souls.}

  The most daring idea in Cinsorium was the theory that Tonsure had rewritten the journal after completing it, which alienated dozens of influential scholars {and their followers, don’t forget} who had based hundreds of books and papers on the conventionally accepted chronology. {I don’t think it alienated them—most of them lacked the resources or the knowledge to verify or deny the discovery. I didn’t feel like an outcast, at first. Besides, is it fair to chastise me for both poor scholarship and unique ideas?}