“Anyway,” she said, “it isn’t really that important. One day you feel like dying. The next day you want to live. It was someone else who wanted to die, someone you don’t know very well and you don’t ever want to see again.”
She stood, patted me on the shoulder. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’ll be fine.” And left the room.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did both.
Did I believe her? Was it true that you could leave your old self behind so easily? There was an unease building in me that said it wasn’t true, that I would have to be on my guard against it, as much as Duncan was on guard against the underground. {You misunderstand me—I embraced the underground. It fascinated me. There was no dread, only situational dread—the fear that came over me when I clearly did not fit in underground, when I thought the gray caps might no longer suffer my presence.}
After that, we avoided the subject. I never discussed my suicide attempt with my mother again. But we did continue to talk—mostly about Duncan. Duncan’s books. Duncan’s adventures. Duncan’s early attempts at writing history papers.
We shared memories we both had of Duncan. Back in Stockton, sometimes, after breakfast, Duncan would sit by Dad’s side and scribble intensely, a stern look on his face, while Dad, equally stern, wrote the first draft of some paper destined for publication in The Obscure History Journal Quarterly. Mother and I would laugh at the two of them, for Dad could not contain the light in his eyes that told us he knew very well his son was trying to imitate him. To become him.
It seemed safe, to talk about Duncan in such a way. Or at least it did, until I discovered my mother had one memory of him I did not share with her.
Something “your father would have been able to tell better,” she said. We were in the kitchen preparing dinner—boiling water for rice and preparing green beans taken from the deep freezer in the basement. Outside, the river stared glassily with its limitless blue gaze.
“You know,” she said. “Duncan saw one when he was a child—in Ambergris. Your father went there for research and he took Duncan while I took you to Aunt Ellis’ house for the holidays. You can’t have been more than nine, so Duncan was four or five.” {Yet I remember this trip as if it had happened this morning.}
“What do you mean he ‘saw one’?” I asked.
“A gray cap,” she said, snapping a bean as she said it.
The hairs on my neck rose. A sudden warm-cold feeling came over me.
“A gray cap,” I said.
“Yes. Jonathan told me after he and Duncan came back. He definitely saw one. Your father thought it might be fun to go on an Underground Ambergris tour while in the city. They still offered them back then. Before the problems started.”
“Problems.” My mother had a gift for understatement. The tours to the tunnels beneath the surface stopped abruptly when the ticket seller to one such event popped downstairs for a second, only to run screaming back to the surface. The room below contained no sign of the tour guide or the tourists—just a blood-drenched room lit by a strange green light, the source of which no one could identify. Much like the light I write by at this very moment. {Apocryphal. Most likely, they closed up shop because they were losing money due to their poor reputation. The gray caps have often been bad for certain types of business.}
“They bought their tickets,” my mother continued, “and walked down the stairs with the other tourists. Your father swears Duncan held on to his hand very tightly as they went down into a room cluttered with old Ambergris artifacts. They went from room to musty old room while the tour guide went on and on about the Silence and Truff knows what else…when suddenly Jonathan realizes he’s not holding Duncan’s hand anymore—he’s holding a fleshy white mushroom instead.”
Our Dad stood there, staring at the mushroom, paralyzed with fear. Then he dropped it and began to run from room to room. He was shaking. He had never been so scared in his entire life, he told my mother later. {Where was I? One minute I was holding my father’s hand. The next…}
He started to shout Duncan’s name, but then he caught a blur of white from the next room over. He ran into the room, and there was Duncan, in a corner, staring at a gray cap that stood right in front of him, staring right back. {…I was staring at a gray cap. Just as my mother said. I wish I knew what happened between those two points in time.}
“It was small,” my mother said. “Small and gray and wearing some sort of shimmery green clothing. There was a smell, Jonathan said—a smell like deep river water trickling through lichen and water weeds.” {It smelled like mint to me. It opened its mouth and spores came out. Its eyes were large. I felt a feeling of unbelievable peace staring at it. It immobilized me.}
Our father screamed when he saw the gray cap—and he knows he screamed, because the other tourists came running into the room.
But it was as if Duncan and the gray cap were deaf. They continued to stare at each other. Duncan was smiling. The look on the gray cap’s face could not be read. {Later, I became aware that we had stood there, watching each other, for a long time. At that moment, in that moment, it seemed like seconds. I felt as if the gray cap was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t understand what it was saying. I don’t know why I thought that—it never made a sound. And yet that’s the way I felt. I also felt as if I had been somewhere else part of the time, even if I could not remember it. Somewhere underground. I had a taste of dirt and mud in my mouth. I felt dirt under my fingernails as if I’d been digging, frantically digging for hours. But, later, when I checked them, my fingernails were clean.}
Then, as the other tourists entered the room, two things happened.
“First, the gray cap pulled a mushroom out of its pocket. Then it blew on the mushroom, softly.”
A thousand snow-white spores rose up into Duncan’s face, “and then the gray cap disappeared.”
The gray cap, my father said, melted into, blended in with, the wall and wasn’t there anymore. Although he knew this couldn’t have happened, although he knew there must be something—a secret passageway, a trapdoor in the floor—to explain it….
Duncan, awash in the milk-white spores, turned at the sound of his father’s voice—which he could finally hear—and smiled so broadly, with such delight, that our father, for a moment, smiled back. {It’s true. When the gray cap disappeared, a feeling of utter well-being came over me, and of wonder. Again, I can’t say why. I don’t know why. I was too young to know why. The gray caps and the underground have rarely since provided me with anything approaching a sense of calm.}
“Jonathan took Duncan to the doctors right away, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with him. Duncan was the same as he ever had been, even if Jonathan wasn’t. Jonathan was shaken by what had happened. It even changed the nature of his research. Suddenly, he became interested in The Refraction of Light in a Prison instead of the rebellion of Stretcher Jones against the Kalif. The Refraction of Light led him to the monks of Zamilon, and from there to the Silence. {Much as it led me there. The key may still be in Zamilon, but not at this time.}
“I never told you because I didn’t know how to explain it. It sounded absurd. It sounded dangerous.”
They never found anything wrong with Duncan, although they took him to doctors frequently over the next year. Gradually, they forgot about it, buried the memory alongside other memories because, in their hearts, it terrified them. {There were several times I thought about telling you, Janice. I would open my mouth to tell you and the image of the gray cap standing silent in front of me would come to me, and somehow I couldn’t say anything. After a while, it was no longer possible to tell you without it being clear I’d kept it from you. I still don’t know why I felt such a compulsion against telling you. Was I protecting you? Was I protecting myself? I was so young, perhaps I just couldn’t express what I’d seen.}
“What terrified Jonathan the most,” my mother said, “was not the gray cap, or the spores, but the happy smile on your brother
’s face.”
The beans were in the pot. The rice was on the boil.
I asked, “So Duncan wasn’t changed by the event? No nightmares? No insomnia?”
My mother shook her head. “Nothing like that.”
She paused, put her hand to her throat, her gaze distant. “There was one change, although I’m sure it’s just that he was growing up. A year after he came back, he began to explore the drain tunnels near the house. Before that, I remember he hated dark places. But then he just…lost the fear.” {Is it possible my encounter had been an invitation? That the point had been to invite me to explore?}
Old mysteries, brought home to me in a new way. I kept thinking back, trying to remember my impressions of Duncan at the age of four or five. There was precious little. I remembered him smiling. I remembered him blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, and the time I made him cry by pinching him because he’d pulled apart one of my dolls.
My mother’s story gnawed and gnawed at me, even though I could not see the greater significance of it. {What were you meant to see, do you think? That I’ve been an agent of the gray caps my entire life? What, exactly, are you trying to say, Janice?}
Suddenly, it no longer seemed so safe to talk about Duncan. For the first time, I felt the urge to return to Ambergris, to my gallery, to my life. So I left the very next day, surprising myself as much as I surprised my mother. Even by then, though, we had slowly grown apart, so that I am sure that she, like me, in that awkward moment by the front door, with the motored vehicle waiting, thought that five years until my next visit might be no great hardship.
8
Nothing was the same when I came back.
It’s night here, as I type, and hot, and I don’t know if it’s a normal kind of heat or something related to the Shift. Something is gnawing away at the wood between the ceiling of this place and the roof. I find it almost relaxing to listen to the chewing—at least, I’d rather listen to that than to the sounds I sometimes hear coming from below me. It does not bear thinking about, what may be going on below me. Really, this afterword has been the only thing saving me from too many thoughts about the present. The green light is ever-present, but the clientele is not. It’s late. They’ve gone home. It’s just me and the lamp and the typewriter…and whatever is chewing above me and whatever is moving below me. And I feel feverish. I feel like I should lie down on the cot I had them bring in here. I feel like I should take a rest. But I can’t. I have to keep going on. Despite the heat. Despite the fact that I’m burning up. I have some mushrooms Duncan left behind, but I’m not sure I should eat them, so I won’t. They might help, but they might not. {Good decision! Those are weapons. If you’d eaten them, it would’ve been like eating gunpowder.}
So, instead, to stave off burning up, I’ll write about the snow. I’ll write about all of that wonderful, miraculous snow that awaited me on my return to Ambergris. Maybe the gnawing will stop in the meantime. Unless it’s in my mind, in which case it may never stop.
I returned to an Ambergris transformed by snow from semi-tropical city to a body covered by a white shroud. Every street, alley, courtyard, building, storefront, and motored vehicle had succumbed to the mysteries of the snow. Ambergris was not suited to white. White is the color of surrender, and Ambergris is unaccustomed to surrender. Surrender is not part of our character.
At first, the city appeared similar to dull, staid Morrow, but underneath the anonymous white coating lay the same old city, cunning and cruel as ever. Merchants sold firewood at ten times the normal price. Frankwrithe & Lewden, in a hint of the strife to come, raided a warehouse of Hoegbotton books and distributed the torn pages as tinder. Beggars contrived to look as pathetic as possible, continuing a trend that had been refined since before the advent of Trillian the Great Banker. Thieves took advantage of the icy conditions to make daring daylight purse-pinchings on homemade ice skates. Priests in the Religious Quarter preached end-of-the-world hysteria to boost dwindling congregations. Theaters rushed a number of “jungle comedies” and other warm-weather fare into production, finally dethroning Voss Bender’s Trillian, that play’s six acts too long for most theater admirers, frozen bottoms stuck to icy seats. Swans died shrieking in ice that trapped their legs. Lizards shrugged philosophically and grew fur. Sounds once dulled by a species of heat intense enough to corrode even hearing were now bright and brassy.
But I remember most the smell, or lack of it. Suddenly, the ever-present rot-mold-rain scent was missing from the air, replaced by the clean, boring smell of Morrow. It was as if Morrow had colonized a vital element of the city, presaging the war.
{Not to mention the fungi, which adapted almost as if the gray caps had planned the change in the weather. There was something unreal about seeing mushroom caps in jaunty bright colors rise through the snow cover, unaffected by the cold.}
Sybel forced me to go back to the gallery. I would have stayed in my apartment for weeks, if I’d had the choice, conveniently ignoring a few bloodstains my brother had missed when cleaning up. I no longer felt hollow, but I did feel weak, sluggish, indecisive. I didn’t have any of the normal props that used to stop me from thinking about…everything.
Sybel looked like he always looked—a faint half-smile on his face, eyes that stared through you to something or somewhere else, presumably his future.
On the way to the gallery, walking through the frozen streets, Sybel turned to me, and said, “You don’t know who your friends are, do you?”
I stared at him for a second. “What are you trying to tell me?”
We were only a few minutes from the gallery at that point.
“You gave keys out to people,” he said.
“Gallery keys.”
“Yes.”
“And I shouldn’t have.”
“No. How could I stop them when they had keys of their own?”
I sighed. “Let me guess.”
Inside the gallery, the only element that remained the same was my desk, with its two dozen bills, five or six contracts, and a litter of pens obscuring its surface. The rest had been stripped bare. Those paintings least popular, hung for several months, had left the beige shadow of their passing, but otherwise, I might as well have been starting up a gallery, not losing control of one. Everyone had abandoned me, as if I were whirling so fast toward oblivion that, at some point, they were simply flung clear by my momentum.
“When did this happen?”
“Gradually, over months,” Sybel said, throwing the gallery keys on the desk and sitting in a chair. “They were pretty thorough, weren’t they?”
“They?”
“The artists. I’m fairly certain it was the artists.”
I looked around. The gallery had, in its emptiness, taken on aspects of my life. What was I to do?
“I couldn’t be here day and night,” Sybel said. Unspoken: I had parties to plan. I had a suicidal boss to worry about.
A sudden anger rose up inside of me, though I had no reason to be angry at Sybel. What could he have done?
“You just let them take all of their art?”
He shook his head. “David let them in. David’s the one who started it….”
David. Former boyfriend. A not-unpleasant memory of David and me escaping into the gallery’s back room to make love.
“Oh.” The anger left me.
Sybel stared up at me. “There’s nothing left to manage, Janice. There’s no gallery. I wish there were. But,” and he stood, “there’s nothing here for me to do. I’m not a rebuilder, I’m a manager. If you need help in the future, let me know.”
I would need help in the future. A lot of help, but he couldn’t know that now. He couldn’t know how quickly everyone’s fortunes would change.
“What will you do now, Sybel?”
Sybel shrugged. “I’ll take some time off. I’ll climb trees. I will enjoy the feel of the sun on my face in the morning. I will swim in the River Moth.” {Right. And after about thirty minutes, when he was done
gamboling about in the sunlight, Sybel would go on providing people with whatever they most desired. Specifically, providing me with what I most desired—whatever could get me through the night.}
I smiled and put a hand on his shoulder. “Take me with you.”
“You wouldn’t like it,” Sybel said, somewhat wistfully, I thought. “You would be bored.”
I nodded. “You’re probably right.”
At the door, Sybel turned to me one last time and said, “I’m glad you made it back. I really am. But you’ll find it’s changed out there. It’s no longer the same place.”
“What do you mean, it’s changed?”
“There is no New Art anymore.”
Later, a short investigation would prove Sybel right. While everyone’s attention had been on the New Art, real innovation had been occurring outside of our inbred, self-congratulatory little circle. Real imagination meshed with real genius of technique had been bypassing and surpassing the New Art, sometimes with a chuckle and a condescending nod. This was the era during which Hale Jargin first displayed his huge “living canvases,” complete with cages for small creatures to peep out from shyly. Sarah Frayden began to create her shadow sculptures, too. But neither of these qualified as New Art, in part because the galleries they showed in had no connection to the New Art.
By the time those of us associated with the New Art realized New Art was Old Art—my only excuse being my forced absence from the scene—the only one who had the option of escaping the death of the term was the only one who had never uttered the words in the first place: Martin Lake.
If they hadn’t fled my gallery, I would have been stuck with a long line of has-beens who, squinting, had emerged from their corridor of tunnel vision to realize that, far from being on the frontier, they’d been in a backwater, as obsolete as the first generation of Manzikert motored vehicles the factories had trundled out over a hundred years ago.
Shriek: An Afterword Page 17