Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  He sidled over to the golden ball of flesh, poured water into his hand.

  He looked up at me, the expression on his face taking me back to all of his foolish explorations as a child. “Watch now! Watch carefully!”

  Slowly, he poured water over the golden ball. After a moment the gold color blushed into a haze of purple-yellow-blue-green, which then returned to gold, but a more vibrant shade of gold that flashed in the dim light. Duncan poured more water over the creature. It seemed to crack apart, fissures erupting across its skin at regular intervals. But no—it was merely opening up, each of its four legs unfurling from the top of the ball, to settle upside down on the floor. Immediately, it leapt up, spun, and landed, cilia down, revealed as a kind of phosphorescent starfish.

  Duncan dribbled still more water over it. Each of its four arms shone a different glittering shade—green-blue-yellow-purple—the edges of the blue arm tinged green on one side, yellow on the other.

  “A starfish,” I said.

  “A compass,” he said. “Just one of the many wonders to be found belowground. A living compass. North is blue, so if you turn it like so,” and he reached over and carefully turned the starfish, “the arm shines perfectly blue, facing as it does due north.”

  Indeed, the blue had been cleansed of any green or yellow taint.

  “This compass saved me more than once when I was lost,” he said.

  I stared at my ungainly, stacked frames. “I’m sick of wonders, Duncan. This is just a color to me, just a trick. The true wonder is that you’re still alive. No one could have expected that. You suffer what may have been a mental breakdown, go down below, return with a living compass, and expect me to say…what? How wonderful that is? How awed I am by it all? No. I’m appalled. I’m horrified. I’m angry. I’ve failed at one career after another. I’m about to open my own gallery. I haven’t seen you in almost ten years, and you shamble in here, a talking skeleton—and you expect me to be impressed by a magic show? Have you seen yourself lately?”

  I can’t remember ever being so furious—and out of nowhere, out of almost nothing. My hands shook. My shoulders had become rigid blocks of stone. My throat ached. And I’m not even sure why. {Because you were scared, and because you were my sister, and you loved me. Even when you were mad at me, I was your family.} I almost want to laugh, typing this now. Having seen so many strange things since, having been at peace lying on a floor littered with corpses, having accepted so much strangeness from Duncan, that starfish seems almost mundane in retrospect, and my anger at Duncan self-indulgent.

  He scooped up the starfish, held it in his hands. It lay there as contentedly as if in a tidal pool. “I don’t expect anything, Janice,” he said, each word carefully weighed, wrapped, tied with string before leaving his mouth. “I have no one else to tell. No one else who saw me the last time. No one else who might possibly believe anything I saw. Starfish or no starfish.”

  “Tell Mom then. Mom would listen. If you speak softly enough, Dad might even pick up a whisper of it. Did you meet him down there?”

  He winced, sat back against the wall, next to a leering portrait by a painter named Sonter. The shadows and the sheen of black dust on his skin rendered him almost invisible.

  Coated by the darkness, he said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—I didn’t realize…But you know, Janice, you are the only one who won’t think me crazy.”

  The starfish had begun to explore the crook of Duncan’s arm. Its rejuvenated cilia shone wetly, a thousand minute moving jewels amongst the windless reeds of his arm hairs.

  “It’s so hard,” he said. “Half of what you see seems like a hallucination, or a dream, even while you’re living it. You are so unsure about what’s real that you take all kinds of stupid risks. As if it can’t hurt you. You float along, like a spore. You sit for days in caverns as large as cities, let the fungi creep up and devour you. The stars that can’t be stars fall in on you in waves. And you sit there. An afternoon in the park. A picnic for one.

  “Things walk by you. Some stop and stare. Some poke you or hit you, and then you have to pretend you’re in a dream, because otherwise you would be so afraid that nothing would stop you from screaming, and you’d keep screaming until they put a stop to you.”

  He shivered and rolled over on his side. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he whined, the starfish on his shoulder a golden glimmer.

  “Was it worth it?” I asked him, not unkindly. “Was it?”

  “Ask me in fifty years, Janice. A hundred years. A thousand.” {It didn’t take that long. Within five years, I began to recognize that my sojourn underground was akin to one more addict’s hit of mushrooms. It took ten years of these adventures for me to realize that I could only react to such journeys, never predict. Always absorbing, but mostly in the physical sense.}

  He twisted from side to side, holding his stomach.

  “I thought I could get it out of me if I talked about it,” he said. “Flush it from my brain, my body. But it’s still in there. It’s still in me.”

  Again, he was talking about two things at once, but I could only bear to talk about what I might be able to help him with right then.

  “Duncan,” I said, “we can’t wash it off of you this time. I think it’s inside of you, like some kind of poison. Your pores are clogged with black spores. Your skin is…different.”

  He gasped. Was he crying? “I know. I can feel it inside of me. It’s trying to change me.”

  “Talk about it, then. Talk about it until you talk it all out.”

  He laughed without any hint of humor. “Are you mad? I can’t talk it out of my skin. I can’t do that.”

  I joined him along the wall, moving Sonter’s portrait to the side. The starfish had splayed itself across the side of his neck like an exotic scar.

  “You’re due north,” I said. “Its arm is blue. And you’re right, Duncan. It’s beautiful. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”

  He moved to pull it off, but I caught his arm. “No. Don’t. I think it’s feeding on the spores embedded in your skin.” It left a trail of almost-white skin behind it.

  “You think so?” His eyes searched mine for something I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to give.

  In that moment before he began to really tell me his story, to which all of this had been foolish, prattling preamble—in that moment, I think I loved my brother as much as I ever had in all the years since his birth. His face shone darkly in my doomed gallery, more precious than any painting.

  We lay side by side, silent in the semi-darkness of the back room, surrounded by dead paint. The now-reluctant glare from the main room meant the sun had begun to fade from the sky. The starfish flinched, as if touched by the memory of light, as it continued its slow migration toward the top of Duncan’s head.

  I could remember afternoons when Duncan and I would sit against the side of the house in Stockton, out of the sun, eating cookies we’d stolen from the kitchen while we talked about school or the nasty neighbor down the street. The quality of light was the same, the way it almost bent around the corner even as it evaporated into dust motes. As if to tell us we were never alone—that even in the stillness, with no wind, our fingers stained by the grass, we are never really outside of time.

  Duncan began to talk while I listened without asking questions or making comments. I stared at nothing at all, a great peace come over me. It was cool and dark in that room. The shadows loved us.

  But memory is imperfect, incomplete, fickle. It tells us the exact shade of our mother’s blouse the day our father died, but it cannot accurately recall a conversation between siblings decades after that. Thus, I resort, as I already have through most of this afterword, to a much later journal entry by Duncan—clearly later because it is polluted by the presence of Mary Sabon; so polluted that I could not easily edit her out of it. {You can’t erase the past just because you wish it hadn’t happened.}

  Does it make any difference now to Duncan who sees it?
None. So why not steal his diary entry and spill his innermost thoughts like blood across the page, fling them across the faces of Sabon’s flesh necklace in a fine spackle of retreating life. I’ll let Duncan tell us about his journeys underground. {Do I have a choice? But you’re right—it doesn’t matter anymore. I will not edit it, or anything else, out, although I may protest from time to time. I haven’t decided yet if you’re a true historian or one step removed from a gossip columnist.}

  Tonsure got parts of it right—the contractions of spaces, small to large, and how mysterious perspective becomes after long periods underground. The way the blackness picks up different hues and textures, transformed into anti-color, an anti-spectrum. The fetid closeness and vastness, the multitude of smells, from the soothing scent of something like mint to the putrid stench of rotting fungi, like a dead animal…and yet all my words make of me a liar. I struggle to express myself, and only feel myself moving further from the truth. No wonder Mary thinks me a fool. No wonder she looks at me as if I am much stranger than the strangest thing she has ever seen. I caught a glimpse of her soft white breast when she leaned down to pick up a book. I’d be rougher than nails to her skin. The thought of being close tantalizes and yet makes me sick with my own clumsiness.

  That is one thing I prefer about the underground: the loss of self to your environment is almost as profound as orgasm or epiphany, your senses shattered, rippled, as fragmented and wide as the sky. Time releases its meaning. Space is just a subset of time. You cease to become mortal. Your heartbeat is no longer a motion or a moment, but a possibility that may someday arrive, and then pass, only to arrive again. It’s the most frightening loss of control imaginable.

  For me it was still different than for Tonsure. He had no real protection, no real defenses, until he adapted. At least I had the clues Tonsure left behind. At least I knew how to make myself invisible to them, to lose myself but not become lost. To become as still as death but not dead. Sometimes this meant standing in one place for days. Sometimes it meant constant, manic movement, to emulate the frantic writhing of the cheraticaticals [no known translation].

  I found the standing still worse than the walking and running. I could disguise myself from the gray caps, but not from their servants—the spores, the parasites, the tiny mushroom caps, fungi, and lichen. They found me and infiltrated me—I could feel their tendrils, their fleshy-dry-cold-warm pseudopods and cilia and strands slowly sliding up my skin, like a hundred tiny hands. They tried to remake me in their image. If it had been you, Mary, I would not have minded. If you had found me, I would have given up my identity as easily as a wisp of cloud.

  I drifted and drifted, often so in trance that I did not have a single conscious thought for hours. I was a pair of eyes reporting to a brain that had ceased to police, to analyze, the incoming images. It all went through me and past, to some place other. In a way, it was a kind of release. Now, it makes me wonder if I had learned what it feels like to be a tree, or even, strike me dead, a gray cap. But, that cannot be so—the gray caps are always in motion, always thinking. You can see it in their eyes.

  Once, as I stood in one of my motionless trances, a gray cap approached me. What did he do? Nothing. He sat in front of me and stared up at me for hours, for days. His eyes reflected the darkness. His eyes had a quality that held all of me entirely, held me against my will. Mary holds me, but not against my will—her eyes and my will are in accord. Her eyes: green, green, green. Greener than Ambergris. Greener than the greenest moss by a trickling stream.

  After a time, I realized the gray cap had gone, but it took me weeks to return to the surface of my thoughts, and months to find the real surface, and with it the light. The light! A weak trickle of late afternoon gloom, presage of sunset, and yet it pierced my vision. I could not open my eyes until after dusk, fumbling my way along the Moth riverbank like some pathetic mole. The light burned into my closed eyelids. It seemed to crack my skin. It tried to kill me and birth me simultaneously. I lay gasping in the mud, writhing, afraid I would burn up.

  I took a long sip from the canteen at this point, if only to assuage Duncan’s remembered heat. The starfish now served as an exotic, glowing ear, eclipsing flesh and blood. It hummed a little as it worked. A smell like fresh-cut orange surrounded it.

  I offered Duncan the canteen. He used the opportunity to pour more water on his pet. I was about to prod him to continue when he pulled the starfish from his ear, sat up, and said, looking down at the compass as it sucked on his fingers, “Do you know the first sentences of the Truffidian Bible?”

  “No,” I said. “Do you?” Our parents had treated religion like a door behind which stood an endless abyss: better not to believe at all, the abyss revealed, than have it be closed over, falsified, prettied up. {And yet, there is something in my skin now, after all these years, that hums of the world in a way that predicts the infinite.}

  “Yes, I do know them. Would you like to hear them?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “No. Those words are ‘The world is broken. God is in exile.’ Followed shortly thereafter by ‘In the first part of creation, God made light and made vessels for the light. The vessels were too fragile: they broke, and from the broken vessels of the supernal lights, the material world was created.’”

  Something very much like a void opened up inside me. A chill brought gooseflesh to my skin. Each word from my mouth sounded heavier than it should have: “And what does the creation of the world have to do with the gray caps?”

  He put a finger to his lips. His face in the sour light gave off a faint glow, pale relative to the illumination of the starfish. His skin winked from behind the mushroom dust. He looked so old. Why should he look so old? What did he know?

  He said: “A machine. A glass. A mirror. A broken machine. A cracked glass. A shattered mirror.”

  I remember now the way he used the phrases at his disposal. Clean, fine cuts. Great, slashing cuts. Fractures in the word and the world.

  “Some things should not be articulated. Some words should never be used in exact combination with other words.” My father said that once, while reading a scathing negative review of one of his essays. He said it with a tired little sigh, a joke at his expense. His whole body slumped from the words. Weighed down with words, like stones in his pocket.

  A machine. A glass. A mirror. Duncan’s journal, with the advantage of distance, described his discovery much more gracefully….

  But it doesn’t work right. It hasn’t worked right since they built it. A part, a mechanism, a balance—something they don’t quite understand. How can I call it strictly a machine? It is as much organic as metallic, housed in a cavern larger than three Truffidian Cathedrals. You feel it and hear it before you see it: a throbbly hum, a grindful pulse, a sorrowful bellow. The passageways rumble and crackle with the force of it. A hot wind flares out before it. The only entrance leads, after much hard work, to the back of the machine, where you can see its inner workings. You are struck by the fact of its awful carnality, for they feed it lives as well as fuel. Flesh and metal bond, married by spores, joined by a latticework of polyps and filaments and lazy strands. Wisps and converted moonlight. Sparks and gears. The whole is at first obscured by its own detail, by those elements at eye level: a row of white sluglike bodies curled within the cogs and gears, eyes shut, apparently asleep. Wrinkled and luminous. Lacking all but the most rudimentary stubs of limbs. But with faces identical to those of the gray caps.

  You cannot help but look closer. You cannot help but notice two things: that they dream, twitching reflexively in their repose, eyelids flickering with subconscious thought, and that they are not truly curled within the machine—they are curled into the machine, meshed with it at a hundred points of contact. The blue-red veins in their arms flow into milk-white fingers, and at the border between skin and air, transformed from vein into silvery wire. Tendrils of wire meet tendrils of flesh, broken up by sections of sharp wheels, clotted with scraps of flesh,
and whining almost soundlessly as they whir in the darkness.

  As you stare at the nearest white wrinkled body, you begin to smell the thickness of oil and blood mixed together. As the taste bites into your mouth, you take a step back, and suddenly you feel as if you are falling, the sense of vertigo so intense your arms flail out though you stand on solid ground. Because you realize it isn’t one pale dreamer, or even a row of them, or even five rows of five hundred, but more than five thousand rows of five thousand milk-white dreamers, running on into the distance—as far as you care to see—millions of them, caught and transfixed in the back of the machine. And they are all dreaming and all their eyelids flicker in unison, and all their blood flows into all the wires while a hundred thousand sharpened wheels spin soundlessly.

  The hum you hear, that low hum you hear, does not come from the machinery. It does not come from the wheels, the cogs, the wires. The hum emanates from the white bodies. They are humming in their sleep, a slow, even hum as peaceful as they are not—how can I write this, how? except to keep writing and when I’ve stopped never look at this again—while the machine itself is silent.

  The rows blur as you tilt your head to look up, not because the rows are too far away, but because your eyes and your brain have decided that this is too much, this is too much to take in without going mad, that you do not want to comprehend this crushing immensity of vision, that if comprehended completely, it will haunt not just your nightmares for the rest of your life—it will form a permanent overlay upon your waking sight, and you will stumble through your days like a blind man, the ghost-vision in your head stronger than reality.

  So you return to details—the details right in front of you. The latticework of wires and tubes, where you see a thrush has been placed, intertwined, its broken wings flapping painfully. There, a dragonfly, already dead, brittle and glassy. Bits and pieces of flesh still writhing with the memory of interconnection. Skulls. Yellowing bones. Glossy black vines. Pieces of earth. And holding it all together, like glue, dull red fungus.