Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  I had known him for many years, and yet I knew little or nothing about him, really.

  Sirin spun around at my approach. {Butterflies and moths lived inside his head, Janice, just as mushrooms lived inside of mine. This made it difficult to hear.} He fixed me with the famous stare that could pierce walls and bring confessions from even the most hardened Truffidian monk.

  “Look at this,” he said, gaze bright but disturbed behind the gold frames of his glasses. “My favorite sapphire cappan has been colonized by the emissaries of the gray caps. It’s a sign, perhaps.” His outstretched hands, smeared with fungal spores and bearing the crumpled corpse of his beloved butterfly, belonged to a piano player, not an editor and writer. {I often thought his piano playing was a step above his editing, to be honest.}

  We met halfway between the door and his glass habitats. I stared at the creature in his hands. True enough—the dead butterfly was completely encrusted with an emerald-green fungus. The outstretched wings had sprouted a thousand tendril colonists, topped with red and resembling a confusion of antennae. It looked like some intricate wind-up toy covered with jewels. It looked more beautiful than it could have alive—not just a butterfly choked with fungus, but a completely new creature. Even the texture of its exoskeleton appeared to have changed, become more supple. I stared at it with sudden irrational fear. It was too similar to the process that had begun to claim my brother. {I am neither butterfly nor fungus, and I chose my fate, but I appreciate your concern.}

  Sirin’s voice brought me back to the present.

  “It’s a shame, Janice,” he said. “A terrible waste. A tragedy of Manzikertian proportions. I should never have left.” He had recently returned from a “vacation” in the Southern Isles forced upon him to avoid the backlash from his role in the Citizen Fish Campaign, about which the less said the better. {Even an aging historian such as I, Janice, must consider that statement a challenge: Senior members of the Hoegbotton clan had suggested Sirin temporarily disappear after it became known through a leak to the city’s broadsheets that Sirin had been behind Citizen Fish, an effort to fill the recently vacated Antechamber position with a stinking, five-day-old freshwater bass.}

  “You had no choice,” I said.

  A dismissive shrug. “We might have won the election. Anyone would have been better than Griswald. He’ll last a few weeks, perhaps, before they tear him down. Figuratively, one can only hope. A shame.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.” But I wasn’t sure if he meant the butterfly or something more elusive, more dangerous. The distance between us grew with each new utterance.

  Sirin turned toward his desk, butterfly still cupped in his hands, and seemed startled by the cacophony of papers, books, pens, manuscripts, newspapers, and contracts that greeted him. Most prevalent were the manuscripts, which had been so thoroughly lacerated with red pen marks that they looked as if they were bleeding out. {Sirin the Invasive, I used to call him. Always trying to put his stink on a poor writer’s immaculate style. Always intimidating people with his little red pen. I used to joke that if he had had to use his own blood to make his marks he’d have been stingier with his criticism.}

  “Sit, sit,” he said, gesturing to a chair piled high with books. “Just push those off.”

  Bent almost double by the burden, I did as he suggested. As I sat down, I could not help but notice a ragged piece of paper, in his handwriting: “Did the arrival of the Manzikert family in some way trigger a change in the gray caps? Did the arrival of M ruin our chance to understand them?” {That is another thing I will never forget about Sirin: his ragged notes, the emissaries of authorial destruction.}

  So Sirin, too, had his finger on the pulse of a mystery {or simply a note mimicking or correcting some book he planned to publish}. I sometimes thought that should Sirin and Duncan ever sit down for a serious talk, all mysteries would be solved, revealed, undone. {No—not true. An altogether uglier scenario comes to mind.}

  Sirin laid his tiny burden down on the desk in front of me, then sat back in his chair, arms crossed, and stared at me, an odd smile flitting across his face. Perhaps he was already contemplating his escape, or perhaps it was one last smile of pain for his sapphire cappan. An exotic jewel, the butterfly looked ever more beautiful in the light streaming from Sirin’s window.

  “I heard a rumor,” Sirin said, “that Duncan has left Blythe Academy under peculiar circumstances. Is this true?”

  “He has left, it’s true,” I said. “There is nothing peculiar about it, however. A difference of opinion, really. Nothing that would get in the way of his being hired by someone else.”

  “Janice. Is Duncan determined to destroy every career he makes some progress toward?” {Typical of the bastard.}

  I gritted my teeth. “It was an amicable parting of the ways.”

  “I hear otherwise,” Sirin said, but dismissed my nascent protest with a wave of the hand. “Not that it matters much.”

  I’m confused now. I can’t remember if we had this discussion in his office or somewhere else, if I’m thinking of another conversation. As I try to imagine his office during our meeting, I see books that belong to other eras, other encounters. I’m fairly sure that The Exchange & Other Stories by Nicholas Sporlender had not yet been published, for example, and that that book of essays about Martin Lake wasn’t published until several years later, either. Why, now that I really look, I can see a cane in the corner of Sirin’s office, although he didn’t use one. And over there—glimmering darkly, like some expanse of black lamp-lit water—a starfish Duncan never showed him. No, actually, it’s a pair of the same glasses I brought with me to Lake’s party. I can see that now.

  Does that mean Sirin knew what Duncan knew? About the glasses? {You worry me, sister. The one thing you had going for you was a kind of grim, lurching linear progression. You seem to be losing that now.}

  It’s darker in here than before, but I can see better, if that makes any sense. The spores are thick. I shall ask the bartender to bring me a fan, or to open the window. I can’t afford to leave again now. It’s getting too late to rewrite. All I want to do is move forward. All I want is to look ahead. Typos will proliferate. Sentences will wind up nowhere. I don’t care.

  But we were in Sirin’s office, attempting to throw off the weight of accumulated memory.

  Sirin told a joke of some kind, but I didn’t understand the punch line. We sat there uncomfortably for a moment before I said, “I came here to see if—”

  “You came here to find work for Duncan, and possibly for yourself. Your gallery is failing. Duncan was indiscreet with a student. Tell me why I should help you?”

  No respite from that uncanny knack he had for knowing things. I said the only thing I could say: “We’ve always done good work for you. Rarely missed a deadline. Our private lives have never affected Hoegbotton.”

  Sirin laughed at that—or perhaps I am again remembering some other meeting—and as his body shook with that not unsympathetic laughter, a strange black dust rose from his suit.

  He sat forward, elbows on the desk, fingers templed. His features took on a sudden intensity. He said: “I am going to recommend you both for positions. Temporary or permanent, who can tell? Something horrible is about to happen that will provide an opportunity for you both to find work. The Ambergris Daily Broadsheet will soon become the only reliable source for information. They will need reporters. Between the two of you, you should be able to supply that need and do a good job.” {Just do a good job? Nothing was ever so simple with Sirin, which is why I kept well away from him.}

  This information stunned me. “How do you know?” I started to say, but then shrugged. I had given up trying to understand how or why Sirin knew so much, or why it continued to surprise me. Someday, I was sure, Sirin would write a book that explained it all.

  “It doesn’t matter why, does it? I’m offering you employment.” {Witty, yes. Clever, yes, with a core of hidden sadness, but also deadly in his way.}

  He
leaned forward, offered me a card from the end of his long fingers. I liked looking into his eyes, used to experience a tiny tremor from the effect of that gaze.

  “Visit the editor at the Broadsheet,” he said, “in about six weeks. When it all begins.”

  “Six weeks is a long time to wait,” I said. Ahead, in those six weeks, lay a period of the doldrums—Duncan stalking Mary from afar, unable to get close, while I piloted the doddering skeleton of my ever-less-seaworthy ship of a gallery. At times, sitting at my desk with no customers on the horizon, I could actually feel the room begin to list from side to side, the gallery anchored to nothing more permanent than perpetual debt.

  Sirin sat back in his chair. “Not as long as you might think.” His gaze softened. “I cannot guarantee you anything, Janice. No one ever receives what might be called an ironclad guarantee. Now, I have another appointment, so you’ll have to excuse me. If you’re lucky, perhaps you can turn your work for the Broadsheet into a book for me. We’ll see about that later, depending on whether or not Ambergris is still standing at the end of this.”

  And that was the end of my meeting with Sirin. As I left, he had returned to his butterflies, clucking his disapproval of the fungus that had swallowed up his sapphire cappan.

  Two things stayed with me from that encounter. First, the name on the card: “James Lacond.” Lacond—thick, stinking of cigars, rumpled, pinkish, rambling—would soon play a large role in Duncan’s life. But as I stared down at the name and tried to understand that our lives would be changing in six weeks, he seemed nothing more than a bit player. This was when it first occurred to me that perhaps Sirin had not received his information about Duncan in quite as intuitive a way as I had thought. As I left, I could have sworn that I saw a manuscript with a title page reading “The Role of Chance in the History of the Southern Cities” pinned between two volumes of The Lore of the Ancient Saphant. Even now, the thought of that title, Sabon’s first book, causes an involuntary shudder.

  {Like those hallucinations you were having a few paragraphs ago, this is clearly impossible. Mary did not publish her first book for four years. For two of those years, I saw her drafts. Such marvelously light, sensual drafts. I would only reluctantly apply my red pen to them, for to edit her, often in the afterglow of making love, was almost to draw upon her skin, to criticize her very form—which I could not do, for she was perfect in every way.}

  Within the hour, Sirin, that elegant man, would disappear from Ambergris for three years. Where he went, what he was doing, no one would ever know.

  A fight broke out in the bar a couple of minutes ago. As I typed, I listened to the raised voices for a few minutes before the screech of chairs and a heavy sound, like a table being overturned, marked its escalation to something more serious. For a moment, I wanted to go out there. I felt insular, removed. I wanted to talk to someone. Anyone. Instead of just “talking” to whoever is reading this account.

  I have wondered, more than once, who will be reading this after I am gone. I am faced with the distinct possibility that the owner of the Spore will read it—or at least glance at it. {Wrong—I got here first.} If this is so, thank you for your hospitality. I wonder what you’ll make of these spore-stained pages. {I wonder what he’ll make of my notes. Except I’m not sure I’ll leave the pages here when I’m done. I might move them somewhere safer.}

  There.

  The bar is silent now. Someone is breathing deeply. Someone is typing and breathing deeply. We’re getting close to the end. I can see Mary at the bottom of that staircase, waiting patiently for me to destroy her world.

  There’s a hole behind me, you know. I may have mentioned it. They’ve filled it in, but on breaks from typing I’ve been reopening it. I’ve cleared away a lot of rubble in the last few days. Something also seems to be working at it from the other side. Maybe it’s yet another indication of the Shift, or maybe it’s just an old-fashioned intrusion. I guess I’ll find out eventually.

  Five weeks after my talk with Sirin, a man later identified as Anthony Bliss walked up to the entrance of a Hoegbotton storage house near the docks. He nodded to the attendant, who stood inside stacking boxes, and then, according to a witness, held out his hand with something in it. The attendant, John Guelard, straightened up, nodded back, and took a step toward Bliss. Bliss tossed the object to the attendant. Guelard caught it with one hand, cupped it with his other hand, and then frowned. He tried to pull his hands away from the object, but he was stuck to it. Bliss nodded, smiled, and walked away into the crowd, while Guelard writhed on the ground, his skin turning rapidly whiter and whiter while beginning to peel off in circling tendrils of the purest white…until nothing remained of him but glistening strands of fungus. The strands of fungus began to darken to a deep red, and then exploded into a gout of flame. Within minutes, before water could be pumped to the scene, the storage house had burned to the ground, taking a considerable portion of Hoegbotton & Sons’ imports for the month with it. The object Bliss had tossed to Guelard had been a kind of spore mine bought from the gray caps: Frankwrithe & Lewden’s first overt action against their mortal enemy, Hoegbotton & Sons, in what would come to be known as the War of the Houses.

  Part 2

  It is perhaps too cruel to think of Tonsure not only struggling to express himself, to communicate, underground, but also struggling aboveground to be heard as [historians try] equally hard to snuff him out.

  —DUNCAN SHRIEK, FROM

  The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris

  1

  “Let no man nor woman say

  they crossed me and lived to tell

  unless in grave discomfort ever after!”

  “What ho! I see Sophia’s Island

  before me, weighted by the night,

  as like an echo as a ghost.”

  “Might we shed our ghastly fate

  and shed with it this war

  that we never should have waged?”

  What do you most vividly remember about the War of the Houses?

  Even as recently as six months ago, some brazen young reporter asked me that question, having taken the time to track me down in my apartment: a ruin crowded with the detritus of a lifetime of false starts. I can’t even remember what broadsheet he represented, to be honest.

  I was surly and morose after a long day of serving as a tour guide for the type of people I call the Ignorants and the Rudes, and I had begun to take on some of their less savory characteristics. Besides, he was very young; even as a child, Sybel had never been that young. I doubted this one had been alive at the start of the war.

  “What do you most vividly remember about the War of the Houses?” he asked me.

  You could see dust motes floating in the air behind his head, revealed by the sunlight of the open window. I rarely opened that window anymore. I didn’t like what it revealed about my apartment: the worn red carpet, the sequined dresses half-hidden on hangers in a corner, draped over a dumpy old sofa chair; the dozens of paintings I’d rescued from my gallery, none of them worth a thing. I even had two ceremonial swords from Truff knew where—and dozens of picture albums I hadn’t had the heart to pull out in years.

  The place needed a serious airing out, although to the reporter’s credit he didn’t so much as wrinkle his nose, even when a plume of dust rose from the impact of his sinewy buttocks meeting the seat of the second sofa chair.

  “What do I remember?” I echoed. Truff, his face was smooth and bare of worry, even in that light. Does every innocent share that look? “Why, the opera, of course,” I said.

  His eyes brightened and widened, and he began scribbling on a useless little pad he had brought with him.

  “When we were reporters during the war—especially by the middle of it—we didn’t have paper,” I said in a helpful tone. “We had to jot notes on handkerchiefs using our own blood. Usually when the ink ran out.”

  He looked up, startled, his brown hair sliding down over his even browner eyes, then st
ared at his pad with an almost guilty expression until I cackled—a sound that startled me more than him—and he realized I was joking.

  “Are you upset with me for some reason?” he asked, all semblance of reporter gone. Suddenly he was just a kid, the way Duncan had once been a kid.

  I stared at this nascent reporter and sighed, sat back in my chair and said, “No. I’m not upset. I’m old and tired. Can I get you something to drink? Or eat? A friend made me some pastries. I think they’re still around here somewhere.” I started to look beneath the pillows assembled at my feet.

  “No,” he said, a little too quickly. “That’s all right. I just want to know more about the war, about the opera.”

  He had lips that would always be full and yet empty of expression or inflection. A serious mouth, without even a hint of an upward or downward curve to reveal whether he was an optimist or pessimist. Because of that alone, he might someday become a good reporter, I thought. Or a good card player.

  But now he was sitting there, waiting for my answer and sweating, the sweet young scent of him filling my apartment.

  “It was a war,” I told him. “A lot of people died. A lot of buildings were destroyed. It was hell—and for what? I don’t think anyone knew why after a while.”

  He nodded as if he understood. But how could he, really? We’d been reporters during wartime and we didn’t even understand it. As my father always said, a reporter is a mirror, not a window, which makes it doubly painful. You don’t just let it flow through the glass of your perspective; you stare back at it.