Shriek: An Afterword

Nor were the monks of Zamilon more understanding than the elements of nature or the vagaries of village dwellers. It took an entire week to convince the monks that the rag-clad, unshaven, stinking stranger before them was a serious scholar. I stood in front of Zamilon’s hundred-foot gates, upon the huge path cut out of the side of the mountain, the massive stone sculptures from some forgotten demonology leering at me from either side, and listened while the monks dumped down upon me, like boiling oil, the most obscure religious questions ever shouted from atop a battlement.

However, eventually they relented—whether because of my seriousness or the seriousness of my stench, which was off-putting to other pilgrims, I do not know. But when I was finally allowed to examine the page from Tonsure’s journal, all my suffering seemed distant and unimportant. It was as I had suspected: the original pages, the supposed idiosyncrasies found upon them, created a pattern intended as a map for anyone lucky enough to decipher it. I only had access to one page—and would never see the rest, imprisoned as it was by the Kalif along with the authors of The Refraction of Light in a Prison—but that was enough to parse a fragmented meaning of the whole.

I wrote down my findings—and, indeed, a first account of my journey—on a dozen sheets of paper, forced myself to memorize the evidence before I left Zamilon, and then burned my original scribblings. The knowledge seemed too precious and too personal to commit permanently to paper. It frightened me. With what I had learned, I could now, if I dared, if I desired, access the gray caps’ underground kingdom…and survive.

I thought about at least two things on my long journey to Ambergris from Zamilon. {I had no intention of returning to Morrow.} First, to what extent had Tonsure corrupted his own journal in order to transmit this secret code—or had he corrupted it at all? In other words, did the coherent elements of the journal accurately reflect events and Tonsure’s opinions of those events, or had he, to create a book that was also a map, sacrificed reality on the altar of symbolism?

Further, I was now convinced that Tonsure had written the entire journal after he followed Manzikert I belowground. He had encrypted it in the hope that even if he never made it back to the surface, the gray caps might preserve the journal, not realizing it posed a threat to their secrets. This revelation, if supportable, would change the entire nature of discourse surrounding the journal, render obsolete a hundred scholarly essays, and not a few whole books besides. The battered journal returned to the surface by the gray caps had not been the half-coherent ramblings of a mind slowly going insane, but a calculated risk taken by a man all too aware of his predicament.

What followed from this conclusion is simply this: Another, earlier version of the journal must have, at one point, existed, whether a polished product or a loose collection of notes. And from this earlier version, Tonsure had created a facsimile that contained the map, the schematic, for navigation of the gray caps’ underground strongholds. Something even the gray caps had not been able to decipher. Something that would be Tonsure’s secret and his alone.

Second, and most important, my head was filled with the grandeur of Tonsure’s design, the genius of it, which I had seen but a fragment of and which our father had glimpsed only in the potential for research revealed by the letter that had killed him.

When I finally made my way back to Ambergris and strode down Albumuth Boulevard, I had only one thought. It ran through my mind over and over, like a challenge, like a curse: Did I have the courage to act on what Tonsure had given me? Could I live with not acting on that knowledge?

I found out that my courage outweighed my fear. Perhaps because I could not let Tonsure’s supreme act of communication go to waste. The thought of him reaching out from beyond his own death only to be thwarted by my cowardice…it was too much to bear. More’s the pity.

So I found my way down among them and back again without being disfigured or murdered. It was easy in a way. With Tonsure as my guide, I could not miss this sign here, that symbol there, until even the vaguest scratch in muddied rock, the slightest change in temperature or fruiting bodies alerted me to the next section of the path. It was a strange, dark place, and I was afraid, but I was not alone. I had Tonsure with me.

Do I understand most of what I saw down there? No. Does the memory of seeing things I do not understand help me, do me any good at all? No. For one thing, who would believe me? They would say I am having visions. I’m not sure I believe it all myself. Thus, I have become no better off than Samuel Tonsure, except that I may move above- and belowground at will.

When Duncan related portions of this to me in person, he ended with the lines, “And now you will have to believe me when I say that I cannot tell you anything else, and that it will do no good to press me for information or ask more questions. This is for your own protection as much as anything else. Please trust me on this, Janice.”

Such a sense of finality informed his words that it never occurred to me to probe further. I just nodded, thinking about the mushroom spores floating out the window three nights before, from a room that now seemed so gray and empty. I was still trying to absorb that image. Unhappily, Duncan’s journal entries are no more revealing than our conversations {You didn’t think I’d leave both of my journals aboveground, did you?}, but at the time, I was secretly glad he didn’t tell me more—his experience was so remote from mine that the simplest word sounded as if spoken in another language.

“I’m just glad you’re safe again, and home,” I said.

“Safe?” he said with a bitter little laugh. “Safe? Look at my hands.” He held them out for my inspection. The half-moons of his fingernails shone a faint green. Along the outer edge of both hands a trail of thin, fern-like fungi followed a rough line down to the wrists. Perhaps, in certain types of light, it might be mistaken for hair.

“That will go away in time,” I told him.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think so. I think I’ve been branded. I think I will always have these marks, no matter how they manifest themselves.”

Duncan was right, although the manifestations would not always be fungal: for decades, he would carry everywhere a reproduction of Tonsure’s journal, the pages more worn with each passing year, until finally I began to feel that the diary of the madman had become Duncan’s own. And he would add more marks to the book, nearly silent scars that would leave their own strange language on his skin. Unspoken. Unwritten. But there.