Shriek: An Afterword (30 page)

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.

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 stared 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.

Already a lump was forming in my throat. My apartment looked unbearable. My leg was heavy and inert and aching.

I rarely tell any reporter what I remember—to them I give platitudes, clichés, spirals of brave words that mean nothing. Because it’s painful. Because we lost so much during the war.

“No one makes it out.” Those were among Samuel Tonsure’s last written words, according to what Duncan had uncovered at the fortress-monastery of Zamilon, and it’s a good piece of life advice:
No one makes it out.
Enjoy what you can while you can.

I was tempted to repeat Tonsure’s wisdom to the reporter, but I had already begun to feel self-conscious, and irrelevant. Besides, he had a question.

“And what about the opera?”

I smiled and leaned forward, staring into his pretty face and untroubled eyes.

“What I remember about the War,” I said, “is that right in the middle of it near the very epicenter of the conflict, when hundreds of men, women, and children might be blown up or turned to spores in the next week, the creative powers that be in Ambergris decided to stage the most ridiculous folly in the city’s entire ridiculous history: an opera.”

And what an amazing enterprise
that
was, the opera described in advertisements as:

In hindsight, no matter what happened, the opera would be the one great success of the war, the only sign that there might still be a city called Ambergris afterwards.

The city at that time—after more than two years of conflict—had begun to tear itself apart, like a beast that hates itself with a passion born of long familiarity. Every night, the deafening thunder of bombardment, the lights in the sky—the purple, red, or green of fungal bombs—the continuous, monotonous noise, so febrile, soaking into the very ground so that even the strange new flocks of crows, come to peck at our dead, became married to it, their cries the perfect mimic of fungal mortar fire. {No one knew whether they were about to duck death or bird shit.} And in the morning: the self-inflicted wounds, buildings sliced in half or crumbled into dust, the great, slashing scars in the earth…

In the weeks before the announcement of the opera—ragged hand-lettered posters nailed to charred posts and crumbling walls—a fear had begun to overcome many of us: a fear that Ambergris, as a place or an idea, could not last, that it might fall for the first time, and fall forever. With the fear came a terror of our own mortality that we had put aside through the first years of the war. With the evidence all around us that the city itself might die, we could no longer ignore thoughts of our own individual fates. Now we all seemed to shine with a clarity that imbued our forms with a figurative kind of light, a light we had not had before. It shone out through our eyes, our mouths, our movements. It made us all noble, I suppose, this fatalism, in a disheveled, unwashed way. {Such a lovely way to put it, but all I saw was grime and dirt and blood and death. The only real beauty lay underground, and it was a deadly beauty. How strange to be caught between such extremes.}

When Hoegbotton & Sons and Frankwrithe & Lewden came together at Borges Bookstore the week before the opera to announce a ceasefire, we all relaxed a little. We all let down our guard. If they could call a ceasefire for an opera, then perhaps they might one day call a ceasefire for more important things.

It had been a hard {not to mention dangerous} two years for Duncan and me, chasing after this or that story. We needed the rest. We needed the comfort. {The opera occurred, I felt later, almost out of the collective consciousness of the city—an impulse toward a remembered harmony Ambergris had never really known. When I heard the rumors of the opera’s impending production, I thought of them as horrible lies, intended to make us hope. It never occurred to any of us that one night House Hoegbotton and House Frankwrithe & Lewden would find themselves entangled in a temporary peace, and we would find ourselves in front of the Trillian Opera House.}

The night of the opera, we formed a party of five: me, Sybel, our employer James Lacond in the middle, Duncan, and Mary. Sybel, Lacond, and my brother served as an impregnable barrier to any potential unrest involving myself and the Lady Sabon. Sybel had recently reentered my life as a runner for Lacond and sometimes stayed at my apartment, just like old times.

“An opera?” Sybel had said when I told him. “Is there a building left standing to stage it in?”

Miracle of miracles, the Trillian Opera House stood conspicuously intact between two mounds of red fungi—seething rubble that had once been a bank and a restaurant. Granted, a huge wedge-shaped gouge {the classic indication of a fungal bomb} broke the opera house’s skin, running from the roof down to the second floor and exposing the rough-hewn timbers that formed the building’s skeleton. Such a minor wound, compared to so many buildings that had collapsed, unable to withstand the insidious veins of invading fungus.

It was dusk and the blood clot of a sun sawed through the opera house’s wound, lit the street with a deep orange light that I had never seen before. We waded through this light, our party and many others approaching the opera house. A smell permeated the street that made us anxious to get inside—the all-too-familiar stench of mold, afterbirth of some fungal weapon, fired a week ago or a day ago or an hour ago. One could never tell.

The doors, unharmed, swung open on their rusty gilded hinges, ready to receive us all, whether Hoegbotton, Lewden, or neutral. No one would be turned away who wanted a seat, even though certain seats would require more bartering than others. {Tickets in such a context would have been too specific a madness. It was such an odd experience to enter the opera house that night, in that context, after so many years of stealing away at lunch for a performance, or taking students there for an assignment, or going with you, Janice.}

As I recall, Mary and I looked magnificent in our sequined dresses, perfumed and powdered. I had taken from a safe place the finest of my outfits from the height of the New Art’s popularity. A curving neckline. An audacious black hat. Shoes made from lizard and mole skin. A handbag of a texture and design rare in any but the most southern of the Southern Isles. My hair was still a bit of a mess—that could not be helped; scarcely a mirror survived in the city, most fragmented by bombardment or wrinkled by filaments of fungi. For me, wearing such clothes reminded me of what had been, which made me sad—but also made me stand taller, for back in my glory days I had practically owned the opera house. I cannot remember what Mary wore, but whatever she wore, it could only presage future glory.

Mary and Sybel and I had one thing in common: none of us had succumbed to any of the fungal diseases that had so ravaged the general population as a side effect of the ceaseless bombardments. The same could not be said for many of those who surrounded us as we jostled our way through the door.

Toadlike James Lacond, ever-present cigar between his lips—his usual Nicean Reserve—had a patch of tendrils, a brilliant green, growing off the left side of his balding head. Nothing in his sour demeanor, however, revealed even the slightest discomfort. {As always, for a fat man he moved with surprising grace.} “Lie down with the gray caps,” he was fond of saying, “and you make your peace with them, in one way or another.”