Perhaps I should start with color. Perhaps I should try to paint it for you. The way an artist layers paints, these glasses layered information. Or, as an artist layers paints to reveal, to accentuate, some facet, some theme, some previously unknown truth, so these glasses revealed a different city, a city which the gray caps had returned to, recolonized, without our knowledge. {Never left, Janice, dear sister. They never left. The glasses didn’t reveal what was hidden. They merely showed what had always been there throughout the centuries.}
Everything had become a negative of itself so that the fog snuck in like coal smoke and the dark, hard brick of buildings became as light, as insubstantially white, as glass. Burned into this real world, the world by which we are assured of our own foundations, our own existence—by which I mean our bedrock; assuming, of course, that the world interpreted by our senses has any objective reality—burned into it, I tell you, were all the signs and symbols of the gray caps.
Superimposed. A nice word, but not the one I’m searching for, because this might imply some ethereal, unreal attribute for something that was all too unbearably real.
What I am trying to say is that the real world, the world I had known for over fifty years, no longer held true when confronted by this other world that existed on top of it and yet also within it.
But what, really, did I see as I walked that red carpet toward the Spore of the Gray Cap? I saw a phosphorescent cloud of green spores dancing in the midst of the fog, the glistening, swooping fullness of them almost that of a single, sentient entity. I saw a wall of brick covered—clotted?—with insect-harsh letters and symbols, in a welter of colors so diverse it destroyed the imagination. I saw long, centipedal creatures rippling and undulating, blending into the translucence of the brick. I saw stretching out before me, threading its way through a street littered with clumps of glowing yellow, blue, green spores, a continuing trail of red splotches, etched into the street as if by a painter.
As if in a dream, I followed the path. I had no choice.
The trick was not to flinch at the suddenly mobile, unlikely things that might sputter and lunge into the corner of your vision. The trick was to imagine it was all a dream, to lie to yourself as much as possible. Sometimes I felt as if the skin of the city had been torn away to reveal another place—a parallel world that shared only a few points of similarity with ours.
{Ah, well, perhaps no one could have done it justice, or injustice. How to describe something not so much seen as observed through some sixth sense, some place between eye and brain that should not exist. Some who see it for the first time go mad. A monk living in the fortress at Zamilon saw it and jumped from the fortress walls. It didn’t drive Tonsure mad only because so many other revelations overwhelmed his senses. You did well, sister. Very well. Better than Mary.}
Duncan waited for me in this very room. He sat on a chair near the hole in the ground, table in front of him. He couldn’t be seen from the doorway. I sat down in the chair opposite him. With the glasses on, the entirety of the room shone in shades of violet and gold; things floated in the air, things like clear jellyfish.
With the glasses on, Duncan’s body was transformed. Fungus moved across the outlines of his bones, reshaping him, slowly, patiently. Or was it fungus? I caught a glimpse of brown-gold cilia, of protrusions eerily reminiscent of a giant starfish. He smelled of stagnant wine left out overnight. He smelled of sewers scoured clean with an essence of honeysuckle and sandalwood, with the sewer smell still lingering in the background. Rotting flesh. Cinnamon. Blended into a smell, a vibration, never intended for a human nose.
“Can I take the glasses off now?” I asked Duncan. I didn’t like seeing him this way.
“Don’t you wonder?” he said, his voice throaty, harsh. “Don’t you wonder what you’re looking at? I would if I were you.”
Something about the way he held his head—his head an oval of incandescent light, his neck a slab of mottled darkness—made me think he was drunk.
“Are you all right?” I asked him. Something told me to run away from him, to get away, to wrench the glasses from my head. {Those were good instincts.}
“I said—don’t you wonder?” he replied, and smashed his fist down against the table. Orange spores rippled from his fist and across the whorled grain of the table. For an instant, it looked as though the table had burst into flames. Then it dissipated and the orange evaporated into nothing.
“Yes—I wonder. I wonder about the way you look. I wonder why you chose this way to bring me here. But I asked—are you all right?”
A rough laugh. “Have I ever been all right? In your experience.”
“Yes. I’ve even seen you laugh on occasion.”
Duncan held out one hand and I could see that it was engulfed by the pointed translucent pseudopod of some creature.
“Remember your letter?”
“Which one?” I asked. There had been so many letters. Letters litter the floor of this place even now.
“Golden strands of connections. No one is alone. Everything is joined. When someone dies, there is a keening across the lines. Something of that nature.”
He was definitely drunk, or not himself. {Oh, I was myself—the self I’d been suppressing for years.}
“I remember,” I said. “What does it have to do with this, now?”
Duncan laughed. “Everything! Because you were more right than you knew. What you are looking at, my dear sister, is the starfish I showed you so many years ago. It never died—it just shed its skeleton and its corporeal presence: Skeletonless and invisible, it has expanded to encompass my body. It feeds off of my disease.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
“In the gray caps’ world nothing ever really dies—it just transforms. To other flesh. Other spirit. Other vessels. Look at it from their perspective and it’s quite beautiful. It flenses me of disease, but at a cost. It brings me closer and closer to the world you see through those glasses.”
You’ll doubt me now, dear reader, even if you didn’t already, even though this is all true. I doubt myself. I doubt the evidence of my eyes. Doubt was a great friend to my father. To Jonathan Shriek, it was the Great Ally. “Doubt,” he would say, raising a finger, “is what will see you through. It is a great truth.” Dad doubted every word he’d ever written. He told me so once, in the living room, at the end of a long, exhausting day. Every word. I thought he was joking, but now I can see that he wasn’t.
So you can choose to disbelieve if you wish—whatever part you want to disbelieve. But don’t disbelieve my intent: to set the record straight, to explain Duncan to you, to explain myself.
“Take off the glasses,” Duncan said.
“I’m not sure I want to now,” I replied. I had begun to understand that there could be worse things in the real world than what I saw through the glasses. Even as the invisible starfish made its slow orbit of Duncan’s body, feeding off of his disease, cilia rotating madly.
I took off the glasses. It was no surprise to me when they scurried to the middle of the table and crouched there, waiting. Waiting for what? Me to put them on again?
Without the glasses, Duncan came into focus as…assimilated, made over in the image of some gray cap’s imagination. A camouflage that seeped into the flesh so that it became entity, identity. He was slow and fast in that attire, that disguise, that incarnation. Swift and slow. He formed runnels of himself, the “particulate matter” of his left arm shining and purple, studded with the hoods of thousands of tiny mushrooms. The arm extended like a trickle, a slender stream, ending in a formless puddle of flesh. The strands of his other arm coalesced, recombined, came undone, came back together again.
Of his body, the less said, the better. {It was definitely not my best day.} There was nothing left to him that was Duncan, except for his eyes and a wry smile like liquid gold with a vein of granite running through it.
“What happens when it begins to infiltrate my brain?” Duncan said, though I�
��d said nothing. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m no longer Duncan. Maybe I begin to know all there is to know about the gray caps.”
But by now I was not afraid. I really wasn’t, I was surprised to find. He didn’t scare me. He was my brother, no matter what. I’d become accustomed. I realized now that even from the first time he’d stumbled into my apartment, covered in mushrooms, I had known it would come to this one day. {You weren’t scared? Maybe because it wasn’t happening to you. Me, I was fascinated and terrified at the same time.}
I reached out toward the shimmering, simmering writhing of his arm and touched him lightly.
“Tell me what happened,” I said.
“We were both drunk,” he said.
“Who?”
“Mary and me.” He choked out the words.
“Where?”
“At a gallery opening. This afternoon. I happened to be there and she happened to be there. We had both had some wine before we met, and I guess that’s why she didn’t ignore me. She seemed in a good mood. She’d just finished a new book. She wanted to talk about it. I didn’t mind. There was something about both of us, and the day, that allowed it. Everything from before had become ancient history.”
I didn’t believe him. That they had met by accident? That they had happened to attend the same gallery opening? Unlikely, knowing my Duncan. But I let it pass. {It’s true. You’re right. I planned it, down to the last detail. One last chance. I wanted to show her everything—all of it, from root to root, cavern to cavern.}
“Did you…did you look like you look now?” I asked him.
Duncan scowled. “No. I had control. I was keeping it all in. She didn’t see any of this. I’m sure I looked a little fatter than when she’d last seen me, from everything I was keeping bottled up inside. But that’s all.”
“What happened?”
Duncan looked over at me, his frown enough to tell me before he said anything.
“We went outside. I began to talk about my theories. I had the eyeglasses in my pocket. Like I said, we were both a little drunk. We’d shared some pleasant memories from the Academy. I’d made her laugh. Now I think she was taking pity on me. At the time, I thought I saw in her face, her movements, a willingness to be friends again. And I couldn’t help myself. I just couldn’t. I pulled out the glasses. I told her to put them on. She giggled and said, ‘What’s this?’ and then she put them on. She looked so beautiful then. I could not bear it. I think at first she thought it was a kaleidoscope, or some sort of party trick. At first, she laughed in delight. She let me take her by the hand and walk down the street. But somehow…”
“What?” I asked.
“Somehow, she guessed what she was looking at—she saw something that frightened her, something that made her so frightened that she got mad. She flung the glasses into the street. She began to curse me. I think she would have hit me if I hadn’t backed away. I followed her for a while, to make sure she got back to the gallery safely. And that was it. I left her and came here. Then I sent my glasses to find you.”
“That was it,” I echoed.
After a pause, I said, “What did you think would happen?” Duncan shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I thought she would finally see, that if she could see as I saw, then I could make everything all right.”
Instead, in her fear and his distress, he had finally realized that he would always be alone, that he would never have the luxury of a normal life.
He winced at the look on my face.
“Janice! I didn’t think it would make everything like it was before, but I thought it would make her see that I’m not a crackpot, not a liar, not crazy. At least that…I spent a long time making those glasses for her, so she could experience it.” {Ten years. It took ten years of research to make them. But no one wanted to see through them when I was done, except you, Janice, and you already believed me.}
“Did you really think that it could end well?” I asked.
The look of grief he gave me made it hard to judge him.
“Do you know how long I’ve protected her, looked out for her?”
I began to wonder whether Duncan’s madness lay more in his inability to put Mary behind him than any of his more outlandish obsessions. {I had to try. I had to make the effort. Even if I knew how useless it was from the moment I entered the gallery.}
“Anyway,” he said, “it’s over now. I don’t think I’m long for Ambergris, at least not aboveground.”
“Going on another trip?” I asked.
“Not a trip. I wouldn’t be the first. There are others down there. In the dark, rejecting the false light, as Bonmot liked to say. It’s a choice. We all have a choice. So I think I’ll travel there again.”
“For good?” A panic threatened to overcome me, a panic that at first had no source.
“Probably. There isn’t much left aboveground for me.”
Which is when I realized, dear reader, that there wasn’t much left aboveground for me, either. What would it mean to be a tour guide for the rest of my days, fated to point out landmarks that would always be personal for me, signs of success and failure? What kind of life would that be? Would I wind up like my mother? Perhaps I would try to kill myself again at some point, when the loneliness of it got too bad. Or perhaps I would let it happen to me, go through the same routines day after day, allow myself to fall into repetitions that masked the truth. And some days wonder, Did Duncan make it? Did he find some kind of final truth? Did he find some kind of final happiness? Could it have worked for me?
It might seem more like surrender to you, but right now it feels like defiance.
“You should join me,” Duncan said. “They’ve moved the Machine. I have to find it before they bring it aboveground. Because when they do that, they’ll be coming with it.” He gave a little laugh, almost a yelp, as if something had stung him. “So it really doesn’t matter where we are—above or below. It really doesn’t.”
“Coming aboveground?”
“The Machine is a door, Janice. But the flaw in it wasn’t about the door itself. It was the location. They have to bring it aboveground. They have to reclaim the city. To use the door, to get back to wherever they came from. I’ve studied it. I’ve gotten close to it. It could take me to a new place.”
As he had written in his journal:
Ghosts of images cloud the surface of the machine and are wiped clean as if by a careless, a meticulous, an impatient painter. A great windswept desert, sluggish with the weight of its own dunes. An ocean, waveless, the tension of its surface broken only by the shadow of clouds above, the water such a perfect blue-green that it hurts your eyes. A mountain range at sunset, distant, ruined towers propped up by the foothills at its flanks. Always flickering into perfection and back into oblivion. Places that if they exist in this world you have never seen them or heard mention of their existence. Ever.
“It’s great detective work on my part, Janice,” he said. “I just had to wait long enough and be patient. I just had to let the fungus eat me alive. The door is opening. The gray caps are almost ready. There will be a green light in the sky and between the towers another world will arise. Something Tonsure wrote in his journal put me onto the trail, of course—something about the fortress of Zamilon. So why not go to meet it? Why wait? No matter where it leads me.”
It was at this point, even with all that I had seen, all that I knew, that I thought for a moment that my brother was crazy, that Mary was right, that everything he had ever told me was a lie; that he was more insane than Lacond had ever been; that Mary had been fleeing, as she’d written to her friend, a madman; that I had been living a life fueled by reports delivered from the insane asylum of Duncan Shriek’s brain. It has certainly occurred to me that the readers of this account may have reached that conclusion many, many pages ago.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Are you sure?”
Duncan had been steeped in decades of alternative history, discussing his theories with the dead by way of their books, a
nd with the living, yes, but an assortment of crackpots and eccentrics such as to make the Cult of the Lord’s Botches look positively mundane. He had developed a skin as tough as oliphaunt hide. {Yet it occurs to me now that I’ve never really wanted to be a historian, let alone a journalist. I’ve always wanted to create history, even if no one ever realizes what part of it I helped create.}
But I saw the look when I said that. The sudden, unexpected, hurt look. Was I going to second-guess him? Betray him?
“Yes, I’m sure,” he said.
“Then that’s good enough for me,” I said, and smiled.
When he rose to hug me with his fungal arms, I let him, and I hugged him back and tried not to shudder. {That moment saved me. If you had stopped believing in me too, I would have been lost.}
Then I took the glasses and left, not knowing that I’d be back soon enough.
I received one last postcard from Duncan before he disappeared. It had lodged on the doorstep, caught in a crack in the wood, as if it were an errant leaf. It read: It’s time. That’s all, just: “It’s time.” And it was true. Everyone we cared about was dead or lost to us. Why stay above?
Worried, I visited his apartment, where I received partial confirmation that he had left: the door stood open a crack, and inside, other than a large trunk, it was empty of anything important to him. As I walked through those bare rooms, I remembered something else I said to him, when we had finished talking about the Machine.
I told him, “No matter what you do. No matter how much you publish. No matter how much you transform yourself, you’re going to die. Aren’t you?”
He laughed, even though his eyes weren’t his, and gave me a grin that showed his teeth.
He said, and it sent a shiver through me and a calm such as I had never felt before, “There may be a way.”
Sybel and Bonmot stood there like ghosts, gazing over that empty apartment. We were all wondering what was in the trunk, I think.
There may be a way. I’ve thought about Duncan’s words for a long time now. I have pondered what he might have been suggesting, and I think I know what he meant. I just don’t know if it could really be true. Do I believe deeply enough in everything he’s shown me?
Shriek: An Afterword Page 39