Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  {Of course, I saved a vial of the spores to spread underground. No part of Ambergris was going to get rid of James as easily in death as in life.}

  Somewhere, somewhen, in the last year, my {our!} mother also died, out in her mansion by the river. Her neighbors found her sitting in a chair, staring out at the water. She looked happy, they said, but no one likes dying, so I don’t see how that could be true. She looked as if she understood everything, they said. Or, at least, understood more than I ever did, despite my restless searching.

  The strange thing is, the night before she died, the telephone rang at about three in the morning. When I answered it, there was no voice on the other end. Maybe it was a wrong number. Maybe she had decided there was nothing left to say. Maybe she just wanted to hear my voice before the end. I don’t know.

  This was in the spring. The trees all around her home were in bloom—white-and-pink blossoms that drooped heavily from the branches. The lawns strewn with petals. It didn’t seem like the time for a funeral. The scent of the flowers drove out the scent of death.

  Duncan and I accompanied the casket back to Stockton, over the River Moth by barge, and then by mule-drawn carriage. We buried her next to our father in the old communal cemetery next to the library where our father had spent so much of his time. There weren’t many people there for the ceremony: a few relatives, the Truffidian priest, an old friend of Dad’s—an ancient fossil of a man, stooped, bent, and a little confused {throughout the ceremony, the clasps of his suspenders hung over his shoulders, where he had flung them up while using the gents’ room}—and a couple of young people whose parents had known Mom. Standing there, surrounded by tombstones and bright green grass, it didn’t quite seem real. It didn’t seem true.

  We didn’t stay in Stockton long—we had no connection to it any longer. It seemed like a foreign place, somewhere we’d never visited before. {Ambergris will do that to you—it becomes so central to your life that any other place is a faint echo, a pale reflection, a cliché in search of originality.}

  When we arrived back at her mansion, we realized how much of a storehouse it had become—she had so filled it up with things, made by her, bought by her, and placed by her, that it almost didn’t seem as if she had left. {And yet, as it turned out, most of it had been stored on behalf of other people, the house emptying with each new relative who stumbled inside.}

  “She was always so distant,” Duncan said, as we stood in the hallway looking at all of the portraits and photographs of family members she had collected over the years. We had an entire constellation of relatives we could seek out—some we’d met at the funeral—but, really, why bother now? It was too late. We’d been taken to a foreign place, and since then all the old bonds had snapped like rotted rope. The people we’d met in Stockton were just polite faces now, and I only resented that a little bit. Part of me was relieved to excuse myself from all the work it would have taken to hold on to those relationships. Better that they remain photographs, vague smiles and handshakes and fondly remembered hugs from childhood. We had been cast adrift by father’s death, and we had taken to it, in our way.

  “She was always so distant,” Duncan said again. It took me a while to hear him, in that empty and cavernous place, surrounded by the images of so many dead people. There were as many tombstones framed on the mantel in that place as puncturing the earth in the Stockton graveyard.

  When I did hear him, I turned toward him with a look of irritation on my face.

  “She wasn’t distant. We were distant. We were odd and surly and distant. We crawled through tunnels and we didn’t talk much and we were always alone in our own thoughts. Not much of a family, if you think about it. We never knew how to be there for anyone else. So how do we know?” I said, and by now I’d raised my voice. What did it matter in that place? It would just echo on forever, the sound captured in the swirls of the staircase, floating down into the flooded basement. “How do we know it wasn’t us?”

  Duncan’s face scrunched up and turned red, and I could tell he was fighting off tears. It was difficult to know, though, because most of the time he couldn’t produce tears anymore—or if he did, they were purple tears, semi-solid, that hurt as they slid out of his tear ducts. It’s a measure of how accustomed I’d grown to Duncan that this didn’t seem odd to me.

  “I hardly ever visited her,” he said. {I meant I hardly ever saw her. I did visit her, but I never saw her. I tunneled up through a dry corner of the basement and left her gifts from the underground—things I thought she might appreciate. I’m sure she knew they came from me.}

  “She didn’t mind. She was a solitary person. That was her choice.”

  Before Dad Died, she had been as sunny and well-adjusted as the rest of us. {We were never well-adjusted, Janice.} But that death had killed us all as surely as it had killed our father. How could we deny that?

  Surrounded by the awful weight of Mom’s things—the rugs, the paintings, the sculptures, the books, the bric-a-brac of collecting gone wrong—it seemed all too apparent. While the river, oblivious, gurgled and chuckled to itself outside the window. {Everyone always tells you that you become more alone as you get older. People write about it in books. They shout it out on street corners. They mumble it in their sleep. But it’s always a shock when it happens to you.}

  We couldn’t keep the house. {How could we keep the house? We made all the inquiries, but it was impossible—Mom had been too much in debt, her money so ancient it didn’t really exist except as run-down property.} And we couldn’t keep much from the house {because it wasn’t ours!}. But I couldn’t bear to lose the hallway of portraits and photographs. Somehow, to lose the only tenuous connection between ourselves and those people we should have known felt as wrong as seeking them out, trying to enter into a relationship with strangers. {Those polite protestations of “we should make plans to get together,” which no one really ever believes, as we stood there by the gravesite in Stockton. Why did I make that effort for strangers and not for my own mother? I truly don’t know. Unless I had truly believed that she would outlive me. Or that she had died a long time ago.}

  “I’m not coming back,” Duncan said as I closed the door behind us and we walked out into the glorious hot spring day, the sun lithe and yellow above us, the River Moth smooth and light and glistening beyond the mansion.

  In the sun, he had a diaphanous look to him. He seemed like an avant-garde sculpture, a person from a myth or fairy tale. The light slid through his face. In the sudden glow, I could see the white hairs at his temples, the gray-and-white of his beard, the lines that had sculpted his mouth, his forehead, the way his eyes had sunk a little into the orbits. He was old. We were old. Prematurely.

  “Not coming back?” I said. “Back here?”

  “I’m not coming back,” he repeated, but he wouldn’t meet my gaze.

  And he didn’t. He didn’t come back. I saw him only one more time.

  The owner of the spore came in here again, muttering about unpaid bills. I gave him a smile and tried to fend him off with a couple of coins I’d hidden in a sock. Apparently, he has realized that he has begun to let me have this room for free. I wonder if he would understand if I told him I am standing vigil for Duncan. There is an old Truffidian ritual where you wait for a dead loved one out of respect. For three days, you wait as if for a resurrection, but what you are really waiting for is your own grief to subside, just a little. But the fact is, Duncan might crawl out of that hole in the ground behind me at any moment. {True enough. But you shouldn’t have waited for me.}

  The owner liked Duncan, but if Duncan came crawling out of the underground, the owner and his friends might have set upon him with clubs. I will have to leave soon, one way or another, so it strikes me that now might be a good time to tell you about the last time I saw Duncan. The very last time, three weeks before Martin Lake’s party. Surprise, surprise—this is the last time Mary saw Duncan as well, although she didn’t mention it to her flesh necklace while vilifying m
y brother at the party. I guess she didn’t think it important. Perhaps her fear had become too great by then.

  The reason Mary saw Duncan at all was because Duncan, throughout everything that had happened, had never given up on her. He was still trying, right up to the end—although the end of what, I don’t know, and may never know. {I hardly know myself, Janice—I don’t even know where you are now. I finally “creep out of that hole” as you put it so eloquently, and you’re nowhere to be found—just this profane, infuriating, opinionated account.}

  Dusk of a spring day, and I sat at my desk in the Hoegbotton & Sons building on Albumuth Boulevard. The weather had been strange as usual. The sun shone hazy through a layer of fog: a faint shedding of light through glass doors festooned with flyers and broadsheets proclaiming the restorative virtues of various Ambergrisian tours.

  I had put a lamp or two near my desk, and since the weather had scared off my fellow tour guides and, apparently, any potential customers, I was spending my time paying off my bills and writing letters of circuitous regret to the artists who blamed me for losing their artwork during the war. Yes, I still owed money to a lot of people. I don’t believe most of them are going to get anything, though—I’ve given all my money to the owner of the Spore.

  I was in the middle of calculating how much I could give to Roger Mandible and also pay my rent, when it dropped from the ceiling, onto my desk. I suppressed a scream, internalizing it as a long, violent shudder, but backed away from the desk, holding my pen like a knife.

  Anticlimax. It took me a second to identify what had dropped onto my desk, because the desk was so cluttered. The only unfamiliar object proved to be a pair of peculiar glasses, right side up atop a program from an old Voss Bender play. A red triangle of fabric had been knotted around one arm of the glasses. I circled the glasses slowly, looked up at the ceiling once or twice, my impromptu weapon still raised above my head. Still nothing there. Anyone observing from the street would have thought me crazy.

  My heartbeat began to slow. I lowered my pen, set it down on the desk, and sat down, chuckling at my own fear. Glasses. Stuck to the ceiling? Falling onto my desk? I still could not grasp the chain of events. Had a colleague or tourist stuck them to the ceiling months ago and they had finally succumbed to gravity? At least I seemed to be in no danger. It would make a semi-interesting story to tell my fellow tour guides in the morning.

  I picked up the glasses. The metal was warm to the touch, almost sinewy, but eyelash thin. A strangely golden, pinkish hue suffused the frames, the texture both rough and smooth. The lenses shared the thinness of the frames, but of a different order: thin as a dragonfly wing. The lenses too were hot, and my questing finger recoiled when the minute translucent scales that comprised them almost seemed to move under my touch, though it must have been the texture of finger and lens combined that produced the sensation.

  I laughed when a hum rose from the glasses. I had the sense of a practical joke, of a whimsy that was almost within my comprehension, not of any danger. A vibration mixed with a sound, I thought, but I could not at first tell if this was simply the shaking of my own hand, a ringing in my ears.

  I tapped the glasses against my desk. A sound tinny and fine, like the sound of a tuning fork, emanated from them. Out of the same sense of curiosity that pulls the wings from flies, I first tried to bend the glasses, and when that failed, break them against the side of the desk. Fully engaged in a series of experiments now, perhaps glad to turn my fear into aggression, I took a pen knife from the drawer and tried to scratch the lenses. I could not.

  Then I set the glasses down, more confused than before. What should I do with them?, I wondered. Outside, the fog had deepened, come hard off the River Moth. No one had entered the office during my explorations. No one would. The fading sun had shrunk to a feeble white point outshone for brilliance by the luminescence of the fog.

  I took a closer look at the red swatch of fabric. It did not look as if it belonged with the glasses. It did not have the same elegance or precision. With a slightly trembling hand, I unknotted it from the glasses. Now it looked familiar. The shade of red, the triangular shape. Where had I seen it before? I remembered a moment before I saw words written on the fabric in a familiar hand:

  Put on the glasses. Follow the red path.

  Do not be afraid.

  Remember BDD.

  Duncan. The red swatch was a piece of a gray cap flag, most commonly seen atop a wooden stake driven into the ground near any gray caps that had not returned underground during the daylight. Suddenly the flag and the glasses seemed very connected indeed. My mouth was dry, my heartbeat rapid again.

  Put on the glasses? The thought had never occurred to me. I held the glasses up to the lamplight and looked through them, but did not put them on. Up close, they smelled like lavender and brine. Although the “scales” of the lenses distorted my view of the fogged-in window, I suffered no change of perspective, no clarity or fuzziness. These were not prescription lenses.

  The scrap of red cloth on my desk stood out from all the mundane, colorless bits of minutiae that had begun to take over my life—the bills, the relentless letters from angry artists, the descriptions of various tours of the city, all the awkward geography of my daily life. And in the middle of it all, a scrap of color, a scrap of blood, a scrap of message.

  What harm, after all, could there be in putting on a pair of glasses?

  I stared out at the fog-shrouded sky. I walked to the door. I opened the door and walked outside. The fog clung to my skin. The faint tinkle and chime of distant conversation. The melodious roar of a motored vehicle. The smell of flames. The taste of metal. Could these glasses allow me to see through the fog? Could they undo the mist? I still held them in my left hand, away from my body, as if they might explode and shower me with shards.

  Before Dad Died.

  I hadn’t seen or heard from Duncan in months.

  I put on the glasses. They fit snugly against my nose, the arms sliding neatly over my ears; again they pulsed, as though alive.

  For a long moment nothing happened, and in that moment I grinned. My poor brother had me staring through distorted dragonfly lenses into a world of mist. What was new?

  But then the frames tensed, tightened around my ears. For a moment I experienced an intense heat, but so briefly that I did not have time to make a sound.

  Then the glasses began to fill up with blackness. The blackness oozed from the top of the frames and, with a methodical precision, filled first one distorted scale and then the next. Slowly, as I stood there fascinated and horrified all at once, the liquid occluded my vision, replacing it with its own reality.

  When the blackness was complete, the fog no longer existed, swept away, banished, along with all things unclear, diffuse….

  My world now consisted of two…levels? Layers? The world I knew had become subservient to a second world. It is not so much that the world I knew disappeared, but that it, still sharply in focus, became the translucent background to a new world. I could distinctly see the street, the stores opposite my office, the street lamp on the corner, the two women standing under the street lamp, the pigeon asleep atop the lamppost, the facade of store fronts that extended down the street—every solid brick or stone of it.

  What stood revealed, however, made my reality seem very poor indeed. How to explain it? I was never a very good painter—how now to paint with words a picture that few if any have ever seen? {Start with color. Start with symbols. Start with texture. Start with hue. Start anywhere, but start!}

  Example: across the street, the printer’s store front…it was “painted over” with a living swath of minute, glowing red fungus. In amongst this fungus moved slow accumulations of emerald light, harvesting it. How can I describe it when I couldn’t even paint it for you? The vision defeats the pen. It would take a better writer than I to begin to describe the least of it.

  Every building—every surface—had symbols and words written upon its sides: glowin
g and bold, in phosphorescent greens, yellows, reds, purples, blues. Arrows and road signs in a foreign language. The etched equivalent of clicks and whistles. Like the difference between the city before and during the Festival of the Freshwater Squid—when the lights festoon every balcony, every flourish of filigree. Now I was looking at the city as the gray caps saw it, I began to realize. Conveniently portioned out and mapped and described for their benefit. This was their city, still—this overlay the skin of their control. It was like a dream and a nightmare all at once. On the edges of my vision, I could see things moving in ways that seemed unnatural. In the air, a million spores leapt together, suffusing the sky in a vermilion orgy of renewal, the sky itself more dusk than dawn, the stars pale ghosts, larger and more opalescent than in our world. “Scents” hung in the air, in clouds and yet not-clouds, ripples and veins of texture that were not ripples or veins of texture.

  BDD. BDD. I repeated the acronym over and over to myself. I tried to be calm. What had Duncan written? Follow the red. I should follow the red, and trust in Duncan.

  Follow the red. There, before me, appeared a red path composed of tiny writhing tendrils. If I took off the glasses—could I take off the glasses?—I knew I wouldn’t see the path, wouldn’t see the fungus. Did I want to try to rip off the glasses and leave Duncan to his own devices? For a moment I hesitated, and then I followed the red path through the transformed city.

  My self dissolved into…something else. How do I describe? How do I begin? Where do I begin? {Oh for Truff ’s sake, Janice! Start at the beginning. Proceed to the middle. Finish with the end. Muddle through.} The city darkened to black, with people like quicksilver flashes against that background, each composed of a thousand brushstrokes of individual whorls of activity. The red path erasing itself behind me, urging me on by erasing itself more quickly if I slowed.