Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Duncan stopped. I was so used to hurrying to keep up that I almost bumped into him.

  “There,” he said, pointing, a smile creasing his face.

  And I gasped, for there, ahead of us, stood a statue.

  Made of solid gray stone, fissured, splashed with light, overgrown with an emerald-and-crimson lichen, the idol had a face with large, wide eyes, a tiny nose, and a solemn mouth. The statue could not have been taller than three or four feet.

  We walked closer, in an effortless glide, so enraptured by this vision that we forgot the ache in our legs.

  Iridescent beetles had woven themselves into the lichen beads of its smile, some flying around the object, heavy bodies drooping below their tiny wings. Other insects had hidden in the fissures of the stone. What looked like a wren’s nest decorated part of the top of the head. A whole miniature world had grown up around it. It was clearly the work of one of the native tribes that had fled into the interior when our ancestors had built Stockton and claimed the land around it. This much I knew from school.

  “How?” I asked in amazement. “How did you know this was here, Duncan?”

  Duncan smiled as he turned to me. “I didn’t. I just knew there had to be something, and if we kept looking long enough, we’d find it.”

  At the time, while we stood there and drank in the odd beauty of the statue, and even as Duncan unerringly found our way home, and even after Mom and Dad, waiting in the backyard as the sun disappeared over the tree line, expressed their anger and disappointment at our “irresponsibility”—especially mine—I never once thought about whether Duncan might be crazy rather than lucky, touched rather than decisive. I just followed him. {Janice, I lied to you, just a little. It’s true I didn’t know exactly where to find the statue, but I had already heard about it from one of the older students at our school. He’d given me enough information that I had a fairly good idea of where to go. So it wasn’t preternatural on my part—it was based on a shred, a scrap, of information, as are all of my wanderings.}

  Just as Duncan pushed me and himself farther than was sane that day, so too Duncan pushed Blythe Academy. It was not only the impending matter of Mary Sabon—it was the clandestine way in which Duncan used the Academy to further his primary lifelong interest: the gray caps and their plans.

  I’ve no inkling about Duncan’s ability to teach {thanks a lot}. I never sat in on his classes. I never even asked him much about the teaching. I was too busy. But I do know he discovered that he enjoyed “drawing back the veil of incomprehension” as he once put it { jokingly}. The act of lecturing exercised intellectual muscles long dormant, and also exorcised the demons of self-censorship by letting Duncan speak, his words no longer filtered through his fear of the reading public. {Not to worry—I never had a real reading public, or I’d have continued to find publication somewhere. But, yes, I was fearful that I might one day develop one. Just imagine—someone actually reading those thick slabs of paper I spent years putting together.} He could entertain and educate while introducing his charges to elements of the mysterious he hoped might one day blossom into a questioning nature and a thirst for knowledge.

  But was it all innocent education? Was there, perhaps, something else beneath it?

  An examination of his lesson plans reveals a pattern not unlike the pattern formed by the poly-glut documents, maps, illustrations, and portraits that had once lined Duncan’s room at the Institute of Religiosity. {I never told you, but I received word only a year ago that, at Cadimon Signal’s request, the entire display had been lovingly preserved under glass, framed, and spirited away to some dark, vile basement in Zamilon for a prolonged period of zealot-driven dissection. What they hope to find amongst my droppings, I don’t know, but the thought of their clammy hands and ratty eyes pawing through my former wall adornments is a bit much.}

  While Duncan could not, and would not, divulge the essence of his underground journeys, he taught a stunningly diverse series of social, economic, religious, cultural, psychological, geographic, and confessional texts intended to re-create a complete context for the formation of the early Truffidian Church. The course centered around The Journal of Samuel Tonsure—ostensibly to give them a feel for Truffidian twaffle, pamp, and circumglance—and included a number of supporting elements, such as Truffidian folklore, study of the mushroom dwellers, and scrutiny of transcripts of conversations between Truffidian priests around the time of Tonsure’s adventures.

  I have, in this trunk of Duncan’s papers that I have half dragged, half had dragged here, some of his lesson plans. For example:

  Spring Semester

  Primary Texts

  Cinsorium: teacher’s copy; to be loaned, three days each student

  The Journal of Samuel Tonsure by Samuel Tonsure

  Red Martigan: A Life by Sarah Carsine

  The Relationship Between the Native Tribes of Stockton & the Gray Caps by Jonathan Shriek: thesis paper; copies to be distributed

  The Refraction of Light in a Prison by the Imprisoned Truffidian Monks

  Zamilon for Beginners by Cadimon Signal: in preparation for next semester

  Areas of Study

  Samuel Tonsure’s Journal: The Apparently Impossible Spatial Perspective Expressed in the Sections on the Underground. {I’ve since come to understand that the problem lies with the limitations of human senses, not Tonsure’s account.}

  Evidence of the Gray Caps in Morrow: A Selection of Texts, including a cavalryman’s diary from the period of the Silence. {Alas, this now appears to have been at worst a hoax, at best bad research.}

  An Examination of Fungi Found on Religious Structures: Field trip.

  Guest Lecture by James Lacond {Oddly, Lacond and I did not converse much during that first face-to-face meeting. He was polite but not inquisitive, gave his lecture on his own theories about the gray caps, and left. This was the first and only time Bonmot met Lacond. They circled each other warily, looking at each other as if two creatures from vastly different worlds. A muttered pleasantry or two, and they set off in opposite directions, literally and figuratively, Bonmot not staying for the lecture. Yet, how similar they were in many ways.}

  Alas, Duncan either did not preserve his accompanying private notes or did not include them with these plans. However, after a careful review of all of the lesson plans—most too tedious to replicate here—I believe Duncan had more on his mind than teaching students. I believe he sought independent verification of his own findings. He thought that, subjected to the same stimuli, his students—maybe only one or two, but that would be enough—would one day vindicate him of historical heresy. How ironic, then, that his efforts would instead lead one of his students to convict him of historical heresy.

  {Janice, enough! You had ample opportunity to ask me about any and all of this, and would have received a more honest answer than the one generated by your suppositions. We may be siblings, but you cannot see into or through my mind. You have gotten it half-right—which means you have gotten it all wrong. I did seek to educate my students first and foremost. This did require a varied and wide approach, primarily because few existing texts interwove the complexity of historical issues with a thorough cross-disciplinary approach. Why do you think I had to create that “document” on my wall back at the Institute in the first place? So I taught them, and taught them well. The subtext of my teaching—yes, there was a subtext, I admit it—had nothing to do with hoping my students would replicate my work. The only true way any of them could replicate my work would be to follow me underground, and, as you well know, I made that mistake only once.

  {No. What you fail to see are the truly diabolical intentions behind my approach. You underestimate me. Validation? Hardly. Three hundred students could validate my findings and still not a soul would believe them, or me. No, my plan concerned additional research. With plucking the half-formed thoughts like plums. With growing another thirty or forty brains and limbs each semester, to become this multi-spined creature that might, in its fla
iling, lurching way, accomplish more than a single, if singular, scholar, ever could. Each text I made them read, every essay question answered, every research paper written, corresponded to a section of the grid in the incomplete map of my knowledge. They taught me in many cases. They didn’t have the scars I had, or the foreknowledge; they were unblinkered, unfettered by my peculiar brand of orthodoxy. I used to watch them, heads bowed, heavy with knowledge, working on the latest test, each swirling loop of letter from their pens on paper signifying a kind of progress—this permutation, that permutation, forever tried, discarded, yielding nothing, and yet valuable for that fact alone. Discount this, and you can begin testing that. Sabon was part of it at first, certainly—she bought into it, and may even have understood what I was doing.

  {When one puzzle piece—and a semester of thirty students might fill in a single puzzle piece, at best—had been locked into position, we would move on to the next. A careful observer might have noticed that my curriculum began to resemble cheese cloth. Much of it was useless, much of it redundant, much of it insanely boring and obscured by lazy or talentless students. But they did receive a relatively full education from me. And keep in mind that I was not their only teacher.

  {In time, the game did outgrow its original boundaries. At every opportunity, I would murmur in the ears of my fellow instructors, like an echo of their own desires, hints of scholarship and glory if they only turned their attention to this or that ignored corner of history. “I wonder if anyone has ever compared the version of Nysman’s report on the Silence stored at Nicea with the version stored at Zamilon. I am told they diverge in ways that speak to issues of authenticity in Samuel Tonsure’s journal.” Casually, off-the-cuff, as if it fell outside my area of expertise, but should be pursued by someone, with great rewards for any enterprising scholar. In all of this, Bonmot was an interesting factor. He guessed what I was up to rather early on, I think, but never did anything to stop me. Raised an eyebrow, gave me a penetrating stare, but that was it.

  {And so, by the fourth year of my employment at Blythe Academy, I had built my own machine, fully as terrible and far-reaching as the Machine I had encountered underground. You understand now, I hope? I had managed to subvert and divert the resources of an entire institution of higher learning to the contemplation of a single question with many branches. The diagram I drew to exemplify this question was based on Tonsure’s account and deliberately resembled the gray caps’ most recurrent symbol, which had been drawn on walls, on cobblestones, but never explicated.

  {Intentionally incomprehensible to outsiders, the diagram helped me see the relationships between various people and concepts in a new way. Manzikert I had triggered the Silence, I felt certain, with his actions in founding Ambergris. Samuel Tonsure had somehow catalogued and explained the gray caps during his captivity underground. Aquelus, a later ruler of Ambergris, had suffered Manzikert’s same fate, but survived to return aboveground. As Zamilon held some answer, so too did Alfar, the ruined tower to which Aquelus’ wife had retired prior to the Silence, thus ensuring her survival. And then there were the Silence and the Machine. How did they connect? And how did it all tie back in to the gray caps? These were the perhaps unanswerable questions I struggled with, and the structure through which I examined them.

  {Although this is perhaps the least of what I unearthed during that time, it still represents an impressive experiment in collective unconsciousness, in beehive mentality. Did more than a few of those brains set diligently upon the course plotted for them ever suffer a tremor, a tickle of an inkling of my manipulation? I doubt it. I’m too proud of my work, perhaps, but I did little harm and much good. Several instructors published papers in prominent journals without ever knowing I had color-coded their innocent discoveries into a vast pattern of conspiracy and misdirection. They stood in their sunlit lecture halls turning their ideas over and over in their hands—brightly colored baubles for their students to applaud, confident they had solved a complete puzzle rather than assembled a single piece. The students, meanwhile, became specialists sensitive to the rhythms of synergy, analysis, and synthesis. Tuning forks for knowledge, they vibrated prettily, their shiny surfaces one by one catching the light. I admit, I derived great satisfaction from all of this. To have such a measure of control made me nearly ecstatic at times, fool that I was. And still, I wasn’t gathering enough knowledge fast enough. I felt frustrated, twice-removed from where I needed to be: underground. Ironic that, aboveground, I felt much as James Lacond once described Tonsure underground:

  Most of the time [Tonsure] walks in the darkest night. Now and again, a wavering finger of light flutters across the darkness, teasing him with the outline of a path. Hopeful, he runs toward it, only to find himself in another maze. The hope that night must give way to day allows him to continue, and he tries to guess where a more permanent light might break through—a crack, a crevice, a hole—but the end of night never comes.}

  Early on, I met these students, Duncan’s unwitting accomplices in esoteric, possibly meaningless, research. They made no particular impression on me: a formless row of fresh-scrubbed faces attached to identical dark blue uniforms. The eyes that populated those ruddy faces sparkled or flared or reflected light according to the intensity of their ambition. Some students stared defiantly at you. Some let you stare through them. Still others looked away, or down at their feet—every foot hidden by proper white socks, sheathed in black, brightly polished shoes. They smelled like soap and sweat. Their voices cracked and buzzed and sang out with equal innocence and brashness. In their uniformed rows, I could not tell the poor from the rich, the smart from the stupid. Thus did Blythe Academy serve as an equalizer of souls.

  Never once did I think to challenge that semblance of equality, to search for that one variant, that one mimic cleverly made up to resemble the others, but actually of a different species altogether. {She was just another student in so many ways. You shouldn’t think that she was other, or different. I was the mimic, if anyone was. I threw off the balance in that place.}

  Mary’s presence, when I look back, first resonated as a faint music vibrating through the strings of my golden metaphor: a resonance neither sinister nor angelic. In that respect, she reminds me of a character in a novel by Sirin. She exists on the edges of the pages, in the spaces between the words, her name unwritten except in riddles: a woman’s green-and-gold scarf on Duncan’s apartment desk, sudden honeysuckle in a glass in his school office, a puzzling hint of cologne during lunch. A half-dozen passive yet sensual details a jealous wife might hoard—or that a sibling might half-remember with amusement, but later revisit harshly.

  Duncan never mentioned Mary during that time. {She was my student, for Truff ’s sake! Why would I mention her? You make this all sound so tawdry yet ethereal. Is it possible she just escaped your myopic powers of observation? Is it possible you were so continually drugged and drunk that you noticed no one? You should strike all of this from the record. There’s no reason for it and no one cares. I don’t even care anymore, except the now-dulled sting that you tried to undermine my relationships rather than support them.} Curiously, though, Duncan’s postcards began to contain more personal information than our lunchtime conversations, possibly because of Bonmot’s presence.

  Sometimes the postcards consisted of odd lines that told me he had reopened his investigations well beyond Blythe Academy:

  Even the flies have eyes, Janice. Eyes for them. There is no corner of this city they cannot see in some form. But it’s too much information. They cannot review it all at once. I imagine them down there, in the fungal light, reviewing intelligence gathered a decade ago—awash in information, none of it useful to them because it overwhelms them. And yet—why? Why attempt to gather it?

  If Dad had actually studied Tonsure’s journal, I wonder if he would have found what I found. Even more important—what would he have done with the knowledge?

  Sometimes they gather around my door. Sometimes they burrow up from below. W
hen they get in—which isn’t often; I’ve learned some of their tricks—they watch me. Observe. It is more unnerving than if they were to hurt me.

  Either he, in a sense, hoped to distance himself from such knowledge by physically sending it away from him on postcards or, intensely involved in his studies, cast off these postcards in the fever of scholarship, like heat lightning. Anyone other than his sister would have thought these notes the ramblings of a madman. {Actually, Bonmot and I discussed “personal information,” as you call it, quite often, and he never thought I was mad. I admit to writing most of the postcards during bouts of considerable pain caused by my diseases. Sometimes they reflected my research. Sometimes they simply reflected my agony. Even the starfish had been unable to remove the source of the infection. I was changing, and I was changing my mind to come to terms with that fact.}

  More alarmingly, Duncan changed his living quarters with insane frequency, sending dozens of change-of-address postcards to the {newly renamed but still comfortingly inept} Voss Bender Memorial Post Office before finally giving up and listing the Academy as his mailing address. He refused to live at the Academy, although he would sleep in a guest room on nights when he worked late. Even after he met Sabon, Duncan moved from apartment to apartment. He never signed a lease of more than six months. He never took a ground floor apartment. He always moved up—from the second floor, to the third, to the fourth, as if fleeing some implacable force that came up through the ground. {Yes—bad plumbing. Not to mention gray caps.}

  Clearly he was hiding from something, but why should his plight affect me? After all, he had been stumbling into danger even BDD. Yes, I had written him the note about golden threads, the way our lives touch each other, but do you know how hard it is to keep that in mind from day to day? You’d have to be a priest or a martyr. So I let him go his separate way, confident that, like the time we had gotten lost in the forest, he would find his way out again.