Shriek: An Afterword (17 page)

Duncan never mentioned Mary during that time. {She was my student, for Truff ’s sake! Why would I mention her? You make this all sound so tawdry yet ethereal. Is it possible she just escaped your myopic powers of observation? Is it possible you were so continually drugged and drunk that you noticed no one? You should strike all of this from the record. There’s no reason for it and no one cares. I don’t even care anymore, except the now-dulled sting that you tried to undermine my relationships rather than support them.} Curiously, though, Duncan’s postcards began to contain more personal information than our lunchtime conversations, possibly because of Bonmot’s presence.

Sometimes the postcards consisted of odd lines that told me he had reopened his investigations well beyond Blythe Academy:

Either he, in a sense, hoped to distance himself from such knowledge by physically sending it away from him on postcards or, intensely involved in his studies, cast off these postcards in the fever of scholarship, like heat lightning. Anyone other than his sister would have thought these notes the ramblings of a madman. {Actually, Bonmot and I discussed “personal information,” as you call it, quite often, and he never thought I was mad. I admit to writing most of the postcards during bouts of considerable pain caused by my diseases. Sometimes they reflected my research. Sometimes they simply reflected my agony. Even the starfish had been unable to remove the source of the infection. I was changing, and I was changing my mind to come to terms with that fact.}

More alarmingly, Duncan changed his living quarters with insane frequency, sending dozens of change-of-address postcards to the {newly renamed but still comfortingly inept} Voss Bender Memorial Post Office before finally giving up and listing the Academy as his mailing address. He refused to live at the Academy, although he would sleep in a guest room on nights when he worked late. Even after he met Sabon, Duncan moved from apartment to apartment. He never signed a lease of more than six months. He never took a ground floor apartment. He always moved up—from the second floor, to the third, to the fourth, as if fleeing some implacable force that came up through the ground. {Yes—bad plumbing. Not to mention gray caps.}

Clearly he was hiding from something, but why should his plight affect me? After all, he had been stumbling into danger even BDD. Yes, I had written him the note about golden threads, the way our lives touch each other, but do you know how hard it is to keep that in mind from day to day? You’d have to be a priest or a martyr. So I let him go his separate way, confident that, like the time we had gotten lost in the forest, he would find his way out again.

Besides, I was distracted. By then, I had ascended to the very height of my powers. I led a council of gallery owners. I wrote withering and self-important reviews for
Art of the Southern Cities.
I had lunch with Important People like Sirin and Henry Hoegbotton at such upscale restaurants as The Drunken Boat.

For two years running, my stable of artists had received more critical attention and created more sales than the rest of the city’s galleries combined. A word from me could now cripple an artist or redeem him. Utterance of such words became almost sexual, each syllable an arching of the back, a shudder of pleasure. Even when Martin Lake moved his best paintings to his own gallery, leaving me only his dregs, I told Sybel not to worry, for surely a thousand Lakes waited to replace him.

“Are you sure?” he asked me. “I expected the world to leave Lake behind, which hasn’t happened. That we could deal with. But his leaving
you
behind could cause you damage.”

I dismissed his concerns with a wave of my hand. “There are more where he came from.”

I should have taken heed of his astonished look. I had yet to realize that my power had limits—that it could recede like the River Moth during drought.

The sheer opulence of my life disguised the truth from me. Not content with attending parties, I had begun to host parties. I entertained like one of Trillian’s Banker-Warriors from the old days, my parties soon so legendary that some guests were afraid to attend. Legendary not just for the food or music or orgies, but how all three elements could be artfully combined in new and inventive ways. Outside of the incessant, unceasing rumors that they were “squid clubs” {a euphemism for the more sadomasochistic sex parlors, so named for the old squid-hunter habit of tying up their catch and delivering it alive to the buyer}, nothing could diminish the allure of my parties.

Sybel was a great help in this arena—he took to party planning as if he had found his true calling. Under his artful administration, we staged many delightful debacles of alcohol and drugs. Each weekend, we would move to some new, more exotic, location—the priests of the Religious Quarter, in their greed, would rent to me their very cathedrals. Or Sybel would hire “party consultants” to scout the burnt-out Bureaucratic Quarter for suitable locations. Then, to the surprise of the homeless and the criminal element, some blackened horror of a building—say, the former Ministry of Foreign Affairs—would, well after midnight, erupt with light and mirth and the loud confusion of alcohol-aided conversations. The artists so
elsewhere
that they stood in corners talking to statues, coat racks, and desks. Morning revealed as grainy light touching pale bodies that in turn touched each other casually amongst the random abandoned divans and couches and makeshift beds crusted with cake and cum.

I remember waking up once, in the middle of the night, my cold sweat moistening the bedsheets, my skin crawling with a nameless dread. Sybel sat in a chair beside my bed, snoring.

I woke him up in a complete panic, chest tight, lungs heavy. I couldn’t bear to be alone with my thoughts. “How long can we keep this up? How long can we keep going like this?”

Poor, beautiful, sly Sybel rubbed his eyes, looked up at me, smiled a sleepy smile, and said, “As long as you tell me to.”

I hit him in the shoulder. The smile never left his face. “What does that mean?” I asked.

Sybel’s gaze sharpened and he sat up in the chair. “Forever, Janice. Or close enough. This is just the beginning.”

Poor stupid me. I believed him.

This is just the beginning.
And so it was. But the beginning of what? The beginning of the end, really. The one time Janice Shriek’s life significantly impacted Duncan Shriek’s life. I became addicted to hallucinogenic mushrooms. Little purple mushrooms with red-tinged gills. So tiny. So cute. They magnified the minute and humbled the magnificent, and I couldn’t get enough of them. I’d have a meeting with Sirin while on them and watch as his head became bigger and bigger, eclipsing his body. I would eat one while in the middle of another all-night drunken escapade and suddenly the noise and confusion around me would: stop. I would see the glittering detail of a streetlamp light shining off of the water in the gutter, and that sudden moment would become as large as the world. A comfort, really. A solace. {A plague. A way for you to escape the world.}

Sybel called them Tonsure’s Folly, and I can’t really complain, because I asked him to get them for me. And I can’t even blame the mushrooms for everything that happened next. I was wandering further and further from the golden threads of my note to Duncan. I was becoming more and more unhappy, even though I was filling myself with so many substances and preying off of enough new people, new experiences, that my distress was for the longest time just an echo of an ache in my belly. {No, you can’t blame the mushrooms. But those mushrooms, over time, make the user more and more depressed. And you were already in a fragile state. I’m afraid I’d lost the thread of your life, caught up in my own problems, or I would have insisted that Sybel intervene.}

The parties I still remember with fondness, although the only one I’ve really come close to describing happened ages afterward—the Martin Lake party I was asked to help organize recently. The first party I’d been to for years, and haunted by the ghosts of other, grander parties. These ghosts lingered long enough to laugh at the staid properness of Janice Shriek in her old {c}age. No guests rolling naked over the carpet. No fruit served from the delicious concavities of the lithe bodies of young men and women. Not even the simple pleasures to be found in bowls of mushroom drugs. Just guests, music, light dancing, and lighter punch, not even spiked. Oh, what humiliation!

“Do you think she can see us from in there?”

“Naw—she’s busy.”

“She’s deep in thought, she is—but what could she be thinking
about,
do you think?”

“About the next word she puts her hard finger to.”

Distractions abound. Sometimes they become part of the story. Anyway:

The careful reader will remember that when I last left off the story of my final confrontation with Mary Sabon and her necklace of flesh—which, if you will remember, consisted, before the metaphor came to life and lurched forward, of two dozen of those social climbers who had become convinced she was the best historian since my brother—I was walking down the marble stairs in their direction.

I descended to the foot of the stairs. The marble shone like glass; my face and those of the others reflected back at me. The assembled guests slowly fell apart into their separate bead selves. Blank-eyed beads wink-winking at me as they formed a corridor to Sabon. Smelling of too little or too much perfume. Shedding light by embracing shadows. A series of stick-figures in a comedy play.

“What can she be typing so furiously?”

“How long’s she been in there?”

“At least five days. I bring her food and drink. I take it out again. She’s enough paper in there to last another week.”

“Do
they
mind?”

“What?
They?
Haven’t seen them here for weeks. They’ll not be around again.”

Mary Sabon. We are approaching Sabon now. Or I am, now that I’ve made it down the marble staircase. I suppose I must conjure her into existence before I can banish her…. Red hair. Massive long locks of red hair, forest-thick and as uncivilized. Emerald eyes—or, perhaps, paste pretending to be jewel. A figure that. A voice which. A smile of.

I’m afraid I cannot do her the justice Duncan did in his journal entries, so I will stand aside to let him speak, even if he does stutter, enraptured by a schoolgirl-smell, white-socks fantasy with as much reality to it as a paper chandelier.