Shriek: An Afterword (4 page)

Recognizing both his genius and his desire for lack of contact, the Institute, its generosity heightened by the small scholarship our father had endowed it with as well as the memory of him walking its hollowed halls, had, by the second semester, isolated Duncan in rooms that expanded with his loneliness. My brother’s only window looked out at the solid, unimaginative brick of the Philosophy Building, giving him no alternative to his vibrant inner life. {This was, after all, the point of the Institute—to focus on the unexamined life. Nothing wrong with that.}

As if to embody the complexity and brittle joy of his inner life in the outer world, Duncan slowly covered the walls of his rooms with maps, pictures, diagrams, even pages torn from books. Ambergrisian leaders stared down impishly, slightly crooked, half-smothered by maps of the Kalif’s epic last battle against the infidel Stretcher Jones. Bark etchings by the local Aan tribespeople shared space with stiff edicts handed down by even stiffer Truffidian priests. James Alberon’s famous acrylic painting of Albumuth Boulevard formed the backdrop for a hundred tiny portraits of the original Skamoo synod. The bewildering greens and purples of Darcimba’s “The Kiosks of Trillian Square” competed with the withered yellows of ancient explorers’ maps, with the red arrows that indicated skirmishes on military schemata.

Duncan devoted one dark, ripe little corner to the “changing facade of Ambergris,” as he called it. At first, this corner consisted only of overlapping street plans, as if he were building an image of the city from its bones. The stark white paper, the midnight black veins of ink, contrasted sharply with everything else in his rooms. The maps were so densely clustered and layered that the overall effect reminded me of a diagram of the human body. Or, perhaps more metaphorically accurate, like a concentrated forest of intertwining vines {recalling the forests of my youth in Stockton}, through which no one could possibly travel, even armed with a machete. {My first great accomplishment—a way of cross-referencing dozens and dozens of seemingly unrelated phenomena so that, in a certain light, in a certain darkness, I could begin to see the patterns, the connections. Later, I would use this same technique, on a vastly different scale, at the Blythe Academy.}

With each visit, I noticed that the forest had grown—from a dark stain, to a presence that variously resembled in shape a mushroom, a manta ray, and then some horribly exotic insect that might kill you with a single sting. Gradually, in an inexorable invasion through both time and space, Ambergris came to dominate his rooms, and then layer itself to a thickness greater than the walls, or so it often seemed, sitting in my chair, looking over a manuscript.

The stain had become the wallpaper, and the last remnants of non-Ambergris materials had become the stain. Looking back on those earliest diagrams and montages on his walls, could he have guessed how far they would lead him? How far he would travel, and at what price? {Underneath, any astute observer could have found a wealth, a riot, of new information. You had only to peel away a corner and there, revealed, the secret obsession: the ghosts of the Silence, the gray caps, and much else. “I’m going underground,” it all said. For those who could read it.}

“Your wall has changed. Has it changed your focus?” I asked him once.

“Perhaps,” he replied, “but it still doesn’t make sense.”

“What doesn’t make sense?” I asked.

“They’re the only ones who could have done it. But why? And how?”

I looked at him in confusion.

“The Silence,” Duncan said, and a shiver, a resonance, passed through me.
The Silence and the gray caps.

More than two hundred years before, twenty-five thousand people had disappeared from the city, almost the entire population, while many thousands had been away, sailing down the River Moth to join in the annual hunt for fish and freshwater squid. The fishermen, including the city’s ruler, had returned to find Ambergris deserted. To this day, no one knows what happened to those twenty-five thousand souls, but for any inhabitant of Ambergris, the rumor soon seeps through—in the mottling of fungi on a window, in the dripping of green water, in the little red flags they use as their calling cards—that the gray caps were responsible. Because, after all, we had slaughtered so many of them and driven the rest underground. Surely this was their revenge?

I had only learned about the Silence the semester before; it was frightening how adults could keep the details of certain events from their children. It came as a revelation to me and my classmates, although it is hard to describe how deeply it affected us.

“It keeps coming back to the Silence,” Duncan said. “My studies, Dad’s studies. And Samuel Tonsure’s journal.”

Tonsure, Duncan had told me, was one of those who pursued the gray caps underground during the massacre that had preceded the founding of Ambergris. He had never returned to the surface, but his journal, a curious piece of work that purported to describe the gray caps’ underground kingdoms, had been found some seventy-five years later, and subsequently pored over by historians for any information it might impart on the Silence or any other topic related to the gray caps. They were studying it still, Duncan included.

“You’re not Dad, Duncan,” I said. “You could study something else.”

Even then, before he was employed by James Lacond, before he met Mary, I sensed the danger there for Duncan. Even then, I knew somehow that Duncan was in peril. {We’re all in peril from something. I count myself lucky not to have succumbed to the usual perils, like addiction to mushrooms or alcohol.}

But Duncan just stared at me as if I were stupid and said, “There’s nothing else to study, Janice. Nothing important.”

I remember the inevitable progression of the images on his walls with the clarity of dream. However, beyond the few words reproduced above, our conversations have faded into the oblivion of memory.

Duncan emerged from those rooms with a degree and good prospects {an exaggeration; I perhaps had the prospect of a brief flash of fame, followed by an urgent need to make a living in a profession other than the one I had chosen as my passion}, but even then he was different from the other students. I watched his professors circle him at the various graduation parties. They treated him with a certain worried detachment, perhaps even fearfully, as if he had grown into something they could no longer easily define. As if they dared not develop any emotional attachment to this particular student. {Mom, who had continued to recede into her memories, did not come up for the ceremony—and we rarely went to see her, now that we were grown.}

Later, Duncan told me that he had never known solitude, never known loneliness, as he did in those few hours after graduation when he walked like a leper through gilded rooms tabled with appetizers and peppered with conversations meant for everyone but him. The tall towers of senior professors glided silent and watchful, the antithesis of Mary Sabon and her quivering, eager necklace of flesh. {Everyone feels isolated at those types of events, no matter how good the party, or how scintillating the conversation, because you’re about to be expelled into the world, out from your own little piece of it.}

Yet out of his zeal, his loneliness, his passion that had literally crawled up the walls of his rooms, Duncan had already created something that might take the place of the silence or at least provide an answer to it. He had written a book entitled
On the Refraction of Light in a Prison.

Despite countless exams, essays, and oral presentations, Duncan had found the time to write a groundbreaking tome that analyzed the mystical text
The Refraction of Light in a Prison
{written by the imprisoned Monks of Truff from their high tower in the Court of the Kalif}. It will not surprise anyone that this was one of the subjects our father had meant to tackle prior to his sudden death. {How could I not tackle it before going on? It was like completing my father’s life in some small part. I remember looking at the finished book, with the inscription, “To my father, Jonathan Shriek,” and thinking that I had resurrected him for a time, that he was alive again in my book. When I sent the book to our mother, she broke from her usual stoic silence to write me a long letter relating stories about Dad she had never felt comfortable telling me before.}

I had the privilege of reading the book {and helping to edit it, in your incendiary way} in manuscript form on one of my trips to Morrow. By then, my own education in Stockton and Ambergris had reached its somewhat disappointing end, and I was torn between pursuing a career in art or diving into art history. I had done much advanced research and encountered much in the way of genius, but I remember even then being astounded by the brilliant audacity of my brother’s conclusions. At the same time, I was concerned that the book might be too good for its intended audience. Perhaps my brother was destined for obscurity. I admit to a sting of satisfaction in the thought, for nothing is more savage than sibling rivalry.

In any event, Duncan found a publisher in Morrow after only three months: Frankwrithe & Lewden, specialists in reference books, odd fictions, and histories. Frankwrithe & Lewden was an ancient publisher, rumored to have been established under the moniker “Writhelewd” during the last century of the Saphant Empire. Then, as the Empire collapsed into fragments not long after “Cinsorium” became “Ambergris,” they transplanted their operations to Morrow, their name mangled and transformed during the long trek upriver in flat-bottomed boats. Who better to publish Duncan’s esoteric work?

Frankwrithe & Lewden published fifteen thousand copies of
On the Refraction of Light in a Prison.
By barge, cart, and motored vehicle, the book infiltrated the southern half of the continent. Bookstores large and small stocked it. Traveling book dealers purchased copies for resale. Review copies were sent out with colorful advance blurbs from the dean of the Institute and the common man on the street {a badly-conceived F&L publicity stunt, soliciting random opinions from laypeople that resulted in blurbs like, “‘Not as good as a bottle of mead, but me and the missus quite enjoyed the bit about monk sex.’—John Tennant, plumber”}.

At first, nothing happened. A lull, a doldrums of no response, “as if,” Duncan told me later, “I had never written a book, never spent four years on the subject. In fact, it felt as if I, personally, had never existed at all.” Then, slowly, the book began to sell. It did not sell well, but it sold well enough: a steady drip from a faucet.

The critical response, although limited, did give Duncan hope, for it was, when and where it appeared, enthusiastic: “After an initial grounding in cold, hard fact, Shriek’s volume lofts itself into that rarefied air of unique scholarly discourse that distinguishes a good book from a bad book” {Edgar Rybern,
Arts & History Review
}. Or, this delicious morsel: “I never knew monks had such a difficult life. The overall sentiment expressed by this astonishing book is that monks, whether imprisoned or not, lead lives of quiet contemplation broken by transcendental bursts of epiphany” {the aforementioned James Lacond, Truff love him, with a rare appearance in the respectable
Ambergris Today
}.

The steady drip became stronger as the coffers of the various public and private libraries in the South, synchronized to the opinions of men and women remote from them {who might well have been penning their reviews from a lunatic asylum or between assignations at a brothel}, released a trickle of coins to reward words like “rarefied air,” “good,” and “astonishing.”

However, even the critics could not turn the trickle into a torrent. This task fell to the reigning head of the Truffidian religion, the Ambergris Antechamber himself, the truculent {and yet sublime} Henry Bonmot. How dear old Bonmot happened to peruse a copy of
On the Refraction of Light in a Prison
has never been determined to my satisfaction {but it makes me laugh to think of how he became introduced to us}. The rumor that Bonmot sought out blasphemous texts to create publicity for Truffidianism {because the rate of conversions had slowed} came from the schismatic Manziists, it was later proved. That Duncan
sent
Bonmot a copy to foment controversy demonstrates a lack of understanding about my brother’s character so profound I prefer not to comment on it.

The one remaining theory appears the most probable: Frankwrithe & Lewden conspired to place a copy on the priest’s nightstand, having first thoughtfully dog-eared those pages most likely to rescue him from his impending slumber. Ridiculous? Perhaps, but we must remember how sinister F&L has become in recent years. {Once upon a time, in a still-distant courtyard, I did ask Bonmot about it, but he couldn’t recall the particulars.}

Regardless, Bonmot read Duncan’s book—I imagine him sitting bolt upright in bed, ear hairs singed to a crisp by the words on the page—and immediately proclaimed it “to contain uncanny and certain blaspheme.” He banned it in such vehement language that his superiors later censured him for it, in part because “there now exists no greater invective to be used against such literature or arts as may sore deserve it.” {It was my good fortune that he turned to my explication of Chapter One of
The Refraction of Light in a Prison,
“The Mystical Passions,” which in its protestations of purity manages to list every depraved sexual act concocted by human beings over the past five thousand years. It was my theory, and Dad’s, that this was the monks’ method of having it both ways. It didn’t help that I included Dad’s mischievous footnote about the curious similarity between the form of certain Truff rituals and the acts depicted in the chapter.}