Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Then down the cramped stairs, stinking of sweat, and out the front door into the night, running, all too aware now of the new sound of what would turn out to be the Kalif’s mortars, set up to ring the city. Shells hurtled through the air, poorly aimed and indiscriminate. {We knew them as the Kalif’s because the unique sound had no parallel to H&S weapons. And unlike F&L bombs, they did not become a writhing explosion of fungi and spores. They just smashed into things and sent shards of those things crackling across the space between, then lay inert. Why we feared those mortars more than the weapons of the Houses, I do not know. Perhaps the sheer unfamiliarity of them. We had grown accustomed to our other assailants.}

  And that was our night at the opera, which I remember more clearly than all the rest.

  It had been a strange, strange war long before the opera—two years of watching Ambergris, like some sun-drenched, meat-gorged reptile, make one of its random attempts to molt, to shed its skin, to become something new. All across the city, from the narrow alleys of the ruined Bureaucratic Quarter to the wide bustle of Albumuth Boulevard, we could sense it coming. Odd alliances formed under stark orange skies. The vertical invasion of telephone poles, for example, once a random dotting, had become a concerted march from the docks into the city’s scaly white underbelly. Guns poured in with the telephones, both originating from the Kalif’s empire {although often by way of F&L’s agents, already gathering in the city, fly-thick and as black-swarming}. The guns came in every size and description, most of them oddly bulky and gleaming with the kaleidoscopic reflection of unknown metals. They smelled both new and old at the same time, smelled of far-off places, as if the metal had soaked up the essence of the foundries and factories that had produced them. The guns frightened me. They seemed like an emanation from some future Ambergris, some place that did not yet exist, but soon would.

  Outdoor café life became charged with danger and interruptions. Shootings and stabbings became all too frequent. {The novelty of guns was too much temptation for the average Ambergrisian.} Motored vehicles began to reemerge—dark, dank metallic beetles long dormant—as new Hoegbotton resources brought barrels of sticky black fuel into the city.

  The very air smelled different—it had a charged quality, as if we were all breathing tiny particles of gunpowder; our lungs burned even without the impetus of pollen in the spring, and, in the fall, even on days when the air wasn’t cold and dry. {This was not your imagination—the spore content of the city began to change, to be transformed. The gray caps had begun the process of slow but inexorable translation/transformation that would culminate in the Shift.}

  At the time, none of us thought much about these changes. Ambergris, for all its history, its secrets, its allure, had always been dirty, sickly, on the verge of crumbling back into itself—battered, babbling, incoherent in its design and intent. We all thought that, ultimately, the molt wouldn’t take, and the reptile that was the city would sink back into the mud a little, its skin ever more mottled from the experience.

  Into this strangeness, this bubble of trapped amber, in which everything and nothing was happening all at once, the war intruded. Suddenly, what had seemed random had form and structure: it was Us against Them: a Hoegbotton many of us could not tolerate against Frankwrithe & Lewden, an Other that was far worse: an invader, usurper, the likes of which we had not known since the Kalif’s temporary Occupation generations before.

  It was in this atmosphere that we became reporters for The Ambergris Daily Broadsheet under the guidance of the Broadsheet’s editor and publisher, James Lacond.

  Duncan, in the absence of Mary—still, in those early days of the war, imprisoned by the two-semester ban—decided to take it upon himself to visit Lacond and make the arrangements with him. I can’t say I minded Duncan going instead of me. I had made some inquiries about Lacond and discovered a man of many vices—he smoked at a ridiculous rate, he drank, often while on the job, he swore constantly, and he sometimes participated in the dangerous fungal drug trade. {All vices you once possessed, Janice!}

  At first, Duncan found Lacond to be cantankerous and irritating. He seemed unable to understand the value of adding us to his stable of broken-down journalistic nags. However, he had met Duncan before, read his work, and even reviewed one of his books in the past, and that made him warm to us. {Warm to me. I don’t know if he ever really warmed to you. It certainly wasn’t your fault—he was, without much doubt, a blustery old fart. The day I went to see him, James had already begun a downward spiral. I think this is why he wound up liking me when we got to know each other better. He saw in me a fellow lost soul, an underachiever, a candidate for an early reputational grave. As I was to find out, I had crossed his path as his expectations were decaying—journalism was as much a low point for him as for us. When I came upon him—bloated, red-nosed, squat, a cigar in his mouth—setting type for the printing presses that clacked and rattled and sobbed behind him, I sensed a stubbornness, a refusal as yet to acknowledge his fate. He was talking fast, his stubby fingers working the type in and out of position with an unexpected grace. The man liked plain shirts, over which would hang striped suspenders, holding up pants that he tucked into short boots. He often muttered to himself—always muttering to himself as long as I knew him, whether about the price of ink or the vagaries of typefaces.

  {“What do you want?” he asked, never looking up from his work. He didn’t need to look up. I could guess our connection from the faint black stippling around his chin, his ears. He had been underground. And when he finally did look up, he recognized the same in me. After that, any reluctance on his part was mere economics.}

  For Lacond, by fate or fortune, or both, was the founder of the Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society, a historical organization known for its outlandish theories and high fatality rates. As Duncan wrote in his Early History of Ambergris several years later:

  Never has membership in a historical society been so fraught with peril. Every two or three years, another few members succumb to the temptation to pry open a manhole cover and go spelunking amongst the sewer drains. Inevitably, someone gets stuck in a drainpipe and the others go for help, or the gray caps, presumably, catch them and they disappear forever. One imagines the helpful AFTOIS members waving their official membership cards at the approaching, unimpressed gray caps. When not conspiring to commit assisted suicide, the AFTOIS publishes The Real History Newsletter.

  This newsletter would later become Duncan’s eccentric flagship as he led a fearless crew of “fringe historians” into the uncharted and unclaimed waters of Oblivion. These hardy men and women subsisted at the far reaches of popular acclaim and derived what little sustenance they could from peripheral mentions in the lesser-known broadsheets and journals—lingering in the brackish backwaters of footnotes in papers by their more famous colleagues. {Mary’s footnotes would eventually take on this preservative quality, often the only extant mention of any number of historians, myself included. Although some felt gratitude, for most living in the margins proved a grim and unfulfilling existence.}

  Our dad loved historians, of course, but he had always hated journalists. He considered them the juvenile, larval stage of the historian, and as with certain reptilian or insect species that eat their own young, he believed they should be done away with for society’s greater good. I remember he used to call journalists “Historians without the wisdom of perspective.”

  As Duncan used to say, though, after the war, “Father was wrong. Journalists are just frightened people with notepads who are trying very hard not to get killed.” It was, paradoxically, a boring time, what with all the running around. All we did was skulk and hide, then run somewhere. Record what we saw—the aftermath of an explosion, an outbreak of illness, a battle—run somewhere else. Hide. Report. Run. Hide. Report. Run.

  “Bring me the story!” Lacond used to bellow from his chosen spot behind the typesetting machine. “There’s a story out there—find it now!”

  Even as, s
ome weeks, he was reduced to paying us for those stories with bread, vegetables, and milk.

  Bring me the story! This command became our lives. Rather than a slow, bleary-eyed stagger down to the gallery, my day would begin—in the deepest part of the night—with the telephone ringing. I would fumble for the phone, offer a mumbled “Hello?” A voice, usually Lacond’s, sometimes his assistant, would whisper “123 So-and-so Street—there’s been a bombing.” If the phones weren’t working, it would be a knock on the door from a runner, usually Sybel, who’d taken the job because there was nothing else for him in the city. Where once Sybel had dressed outrageously, now he wore clothes that allowed him to blend right into the wall. “To each time and place its own apparel,” he told me. “Not that I don’t miss the bad old days.” {Miss them? He was still living them. Acting as a runner for a broadsheet gave him a certain amount of neutrality in sections of the city critical for him to reach if he wanted to continue providing “substances to those who desire them,” as he was fond of saying. It certainly made it more convenient for Sybel to slip me my “peace of mind,” as he called the tincture I required. As for Sybel’s wartime clothes, they hardly taxed his skill at camouflage. You should have seen what he wore while in his natural element, the trees. Except…you couldn’t see him there.}

  I would then rush into a shirt and trousers—the only practical clothes for a woman in such circumstances—shove big black boots over cold feet—and careen out the door, pen and notebook clutched in one hand. In my pants pocket, the dried mushrooms Duncan had given me. If a spore bomb exploded near me, I was to swallow them as an antidote. Of course, this only helped against F&L’s unconventional weapons. I would still be vulnerable to the shrapnel bombs of H&S.

  I cannot think—through all of our transformations of position, location, and function—of a change more bone-crunching than that which made us reporters. I had never counted physical endurance among my attributes, but now I had to call on hidden reserves almost every day. I kept spraining my ankles, too, whether running toward a story {or away from one that had proven too hostile}, walking across an uneven island of pavement disfigured by fungi, or fighting to avoid being trampled by a mob of fleeing citizens. Eventually, I wrapped both ankles in bandages before I went out, hoping that the extra support would help.

  Considering the ease with which death had found our father, it can only be luck that saved us. Sometimes, as we stared at the smoldering remains of a grocery store, the clerks reduced to red ash, the stench unbearable, I wondered if I wasn’t trying to kill myself all over again.

  {If so, then the entire city was trying to kill itself. One of the strangest things about the war for me was the calm in the midst of violence that sometimes came over people—a state of grace, or denial, perhaps. I can remember watching from one end of a street as a fungal bomb blew up a few blocks away. It was one of those hideous creations that, dissolving into a fine purple mist, travels forward from the impetus of the blast and enters the lungs of anyone in its path, making of them brittle statues that disintegrate at the slightest touch or breath of wind. I ducked into a side alley, even though I was already immune—the purple mist would encounter and be neutralized in my lungs by the green mist already residing there—and watched as people ran by, screaming. There was no help for them, no help I could give. Across the street, though, I saw a man in a long overcoat standing calmly by a lamppost. He had on thick glasses and he had covered his nose and mouth with a mask of cloth. As the mist washed over him, bringing with it the usual, if incongruous, smell of limes and lemons, he did not panic. He just stood there. As others were brought up short in midflight, rendered motionless, their eyes rolling into their sockets, a light purple fuzz hardening on their lips and eyebrows, crawling up their legs, this man stood there for a moment, and then went on about his business. Over time, as more and more precautions were taken, you would see people going about their daily lives with a calm, with a sense of peace, that astounded me. Only in Ambergris! For, incredibly enough, very few people fled the city during the war. Stockton and Morrow combined received no more than a few thousand refugees.}

  Poor Duncan, meanwhile, had different afflictions. His seasonal fungal diseases intensified under the stress, until he jokingly said to Lacond that at times he could lean against a fungus-covered wall and no one would see him. His trench coat grew oddly empty or full depending on the virulence of the attack, a hat hiding most of the tendrils that insisted on colonizing his scalp. Thick coatings of cologne helped disguise the reek of decaying mushroom matter—at least until the second year of the war, when so many people had contracted their own fungal diseases that disguise was no longer necessary. {Often, Janice, I was flexing my newfound control of my affliction. My changes in shape, in density, were but responses to the spores in my immediate surroundings. They were how I defended myself—and, not coincidentally, you. Although sometimes I was hiding an awfully big gun under my coat; some threats are best met with bullets.}

  But this was not the full extent of my brother’s handicap. The rest, in those early days, was expressed by his longing for Mary to return to him. I can remember the two of us running down a deserted alley, my swollen ankles killing me, Duncan’s disease in full bloom—tendrils of bright green fruiting bodies shooting forth from his hatless head like flares signaling the enemy—while behind us, through the billowing smoke of an H&S grenade attack, some dozen F&L irregulars chased us, intent on making us pay for someone else’s transgression…and as we ran, Duncan wrote a love letter to Mary—a jotted phrase or two at a time, scribbled on a thrice-folded piece of paper. One such “letter” ends, “Must wrap this up, my love! Would like to write more, but am late to an appointment.” Truff knows how he smuggled them into Blythe Academy and, later, Mary’s parents’ house.

  Blythe Academy stayed open for one and a half of the two semesters Mary needed to complete her degree, although the professors and priests continued to use it as a safe haven after the students had been sent home. For the coursework Mary and all the students in similar straits still needed to complete, Bonmot made weekly rounds to their parents’ houses. Typical of him, he ignored the danger implicit in crossing barricades and encountering militia checkpoints. I imagine him, solid, strong, in his green robes, walking down the street, impervious to the bloodshed occurring all around him. To be a priest during that war required a certain amount of dissociation from the real world.

  I knew what it was like to lead such a life—it conferred an illogical form of immunity by forcing you to become separate from your surroundings. You had to separate yourself, pull yourself out of the context swarming all around you. There was no choice. To allow yourself to become part of it would have meant a kind of death. {Odd you should think that, Janice, because most of the time, while not attending to my job, I was fleshing out theories of history at odds with that opinion. To me, the events of the war—the chaos—mimicked the worst qualities of my precarious relationship with Mary. My own body seemed able to express emotion through transformation. As I felt, so the world around me felt, or vice versa. I did not, of course, believe that my mental turmoil created the conflict—this was a metaphorical connection only, but no weaker because of it. Would it not be true, I began to think, that a historian could best explain those periods of history that most closely imitated the events or significant emotions of his own life?}

  I’m sure some of the regulars here at the Spore of the Gray Cap remember the insanity of the war—there are certainly enough gray beards and grizzled voices among them. Even this green glass that provides my only light beyond candles—this glass that distorts the quick, rhythmic stride of walkers making floorboards creak, the random punctuation of a cane—has experience of the war: it was caused by clear glass fusing with a fungal bomb. The result is beautiful, if unintentional. {And since the glass seems to shift and re-form every so often, who knows if an end result has yet been reached? Perhaps it is transforming into something else altogether.}

  But the intens
ity or scope of the conflict never gave me pause—it was the nature of the weapons. It was as if the gray caps had come aboveground in disguise and started to slaughter us. Guns now shot fungal bullets that, upon hitting flesh, burrowed deep into arteries and created thoroughfares of spores that hardened within seconds, making the victim as brittle as any coral from the Southern Isles. Certain special fungi could serve as bombs or mines or grenades, decomposing a body in seconds, or release spores that choked the victim to death. Telephones soon became dangerous, used as the emissaries of assassination—the victim would pick up the phone only to hear a high-pitched scream that burst the eardrums and the heart {said screams very similar to those attributed to the giant “gray whale” mushrooms that became common in Ambergris immediately prior to the Silence}. Henry Hoegbotton’s brother Frederick died in this manner, as did several other merchants. {Did F&L realize what they were doing when they found a way to procure such weapons from the gray caps? Probably not. They probably didn’t have a clue. They just wanted results.}

  One of our first joint reports dealt with the issue of the new weapons.

  BOMBS ARE BREAD

  by D.J. Shriek

  This past weekend, a disturbing new fact has come to light regarding the weapons being used by House Lewden: they can be eaten. In certain parts of the Merchant Quarter, which has sustained heavy bombing damage in recent weeks, citizens have been hunting through the rubble not for other survivors or the bodies of loved ones, but for the bombs themselves.

  Dr. Alan Self, a physician employed by a House Hoegbotton militia, confirms this information. “I don’t know how it started, but because of the food shortage in parts of the city, starving people have begun to eat the remains of House Lewden’s infernal fungal bombs,” he said.