Shriek: An Afterword (34 page)

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 intensity 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

As might be expected, such incendiary stories led to Lacond’s offices being bombed so many times that he eventually moved his printing presses, under cover of night, to a secret location in the forests outside of Ambergris.

“Let them stop me now!” he would say, face flushed with defiance. “Those pompous, homicidal swine can blow me up as much as they like—the presses will keep churning out the pages!” {The war, I must say, revitalized Lacond for a time.}

While the fuel lasted, motored vehicles brought the broadsheet in every morning, and fast runners—usually boys and girls from ten to fifteen years of age, the only group with the stamina for the job who had not already been conscripted by the Hoegbotton militias—would distribute it to a few safe or neutral locations, where it instantly sold out. Distribution was dangerous, and sometimes our runners did not come back. Sybel kept at it for a time, but it wore on his nerves.

“I can’t take it,” he said one morning. Dark circles had formed around his eyes and he had developed a habit of blinking rapidly, his left hand subject to uncontrollable quivering no matter what his mood. “I can’t take it. I can’t take it.” {What he couldn’t take was working so many jobs at once. Although he did have several disturbing episodes involving either militia members who robbed him at gunpoint, or bombs.}

Lacond had come to love our work by this time, so he let us use Sybel for our personal missions, which didn’t mean he was in any less danger—just a different kind.

“You must be doing a good job,” Lacond said once, while all three of us sat on the floor of his office, sweaty and exhausted. “Both sides want your heads on a platter.”

Thus, it became wiser for us to publish our reports under pseudonyms like Michael Smith and Sarah Pickle. I even began to sleep in different locations, seldom returning to my apartment for fear of a fungal bullet to the back of the head.

And yet, on certain days, in certain parts of the city, you could walk down a dozen streets and not even realize a war was going on—if you could rationalize the mortar fire as thunder. Markets were open, people walked to work, the telephones operated {even if few wanted to use them}, restaurants served what food they had. The Religious Quarter, for political reasons, remained largely safe, with both H&S and F&L doing a respectable trade in foodstuffs and clothing—sometimes while fighting raged only a few blocks away. {War was also an opportunity for the native tribes, the Dogghe in particular, to make a killing supplying food and collaborating with the enemy—either enemy.} A few times, I was even able to meet with artists and gallery owners, regaining a little respect from them because of my new profession.

This sometimes sense of safety was in part caused by a retrenchment by both sides following the first seven or eight months of the war. House Lewden’s original probes centered on feints to the southeast and southwest, with the aim of control of H&S headquarters and the docks. But after several intense battles, F&L had been restricted to the northern third of Ambergris. They controlled part of the docks and a portion of Albumuth Boulevard, but they could not smash through to H&S headquarters. Recovering from the initial shock, H&S had found the morale and discipline to hold their ground. Thus, the “front” became relatively stable, except for some porousness due to spies, sneak attacks and, eventually, the Kalif’s mortar fire. The regularity of it became a kind of comfort. {I was never comforted. The whole conflict had troubled me from the beginning. Just trying to guess the reasons for gray cap involvement bothered me. Never before had they backed one faction over another, or even seemed to recognize the difference between factions—or, if they did understand the difference, to care. Why now should they change tactics? Also, their weapons were everywhere, but
they
were nowhere to be seen.}