Shriek: An Afterword

As he had written in his journal:

Ghosts of images cloud the surface of the machine and are wiped clean as if by a careless, a meticulous, an impatient painter. A great windswept desert, sluggish with the weight of its own dunes. An ocean, waveless, the tension of its surface broken only by the shadow of clouds above, the water such a perfect blue-green that it hurts your eyes. A mountain range at sunset, distant, ruined towers propped up by the foothills at its flanks. Always flickering into perfection and back into oblivion. Places that if they exist in this world you have never seen them or heard mention of their existence. Ever.

“It’s great detective work on my part, Janice,” he said. “I just had to wait long enough and be patient. I just had to let the fungus eat me alive. The door is opening. The gray caps are almost ready. There will be a green light in the sky and between the towers another world will arise. Something Tonsure wrote in his journal put me onto the trail, of course—something about the fortress of Zamilon. So why not go to meet it? Why wait? No matter where it leads me.”

It was at this point, even with all that I had seen, all that I knew, that I thought for a moment that my brother was crazy, that Mary was right, that everything he had ever told me was a lie; that he was more insane than Lacond had ever been; that Mary had been fleeing, as she’d written to her friend, a madman; that I had been living a life fueled by reports delivered from the insane asylum of Duncan Shriek’s brain. It has certainly occurred to me that the readers of this account may have reached that conclusion many, many pages ago.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

Duncan had been steeped in decades of alternative history, discussing his theories with the dead by way of their books, and with the living, yes, but an assortment of crackpots and eccentrics such as to make the Cult of the Lord’s Botches look positively mundane. He had developed a skin as tough as oliphaunt hide. {Yet it occurs to me now that I’ve never really wanted to be a historian, let alone a journalist. I’ve always wanted to create history, even if no one ever realizes what part of it I helped create.}

But I saw the look when I said that. The sudden, unexpected, hurt look. Was I going to second-guess him? Betray him?

“Yes, I’m sure,” he said.

“Then that’s good enough for me,” I said, and smiled.

When he rose to hug me with his fungal arms, I let him, and I hugged him back and tried not to shudder. {That moment saved me. If you had stopped believing in me too, I would have been lost.}

Then I took the glasses and left, not knowing that I’d be back soon enough.

I received one last postcard from Duncan before he disappeared. It had lodged on the doorstep, caught in a crack in the wood, as if it were an errant leaf. It read: It’s time. That’s all, just: “It’s time.” And it was true. Everyone we cared about was dead or lost to us. Why stay above?

Worried, I visited his apartment, where I received partial confirmation that he had left: the door stood open a crack, and inside, other than a large trunk, it was empty of anything important to him. As I walked through those bare rooms, I remembered something else I said to him, when we had finished talking about the Machine.

I told him, “No matter what you do. No matter how much you publish. No matter how much you transform yourself, you’re going to die. Aren’t you?”

He laughed, even though his eyes weren’t his, and gave me a grin that showed his teeth.

He said, and it sent a shiver through me and a calm such as I had never felt before, “There may be a way.”

Sybel and Bonmot stood there like ghosts, gazing over that empty apartment. We were all wondering what was in the trunk, I think.

There may be a way. I’ve thought about Duncan’s words for a long time now. I have pondered what he might have been suggesting, and I think I know what he meant. I just don’t know if it could really be true. Do I believe deeply enough in everything he’s shown me?

I thought back to Duncan’s account of the Machine and the underground. To him, it was another aspect of his quest, his obsession, no matter where it led. For me, it looked like a way out, a door, as Duncan had described it, or an open window into blue sky. What had it looked like to Tonsure, I sometimes wonder.

6

I fell asleep for a while. I couldn’t help it. I’ve been pushing myself to the end ever faster, taking fewer breaks.

I dreamt while I slept. Edward was in my dream. Neither of us had really ever left the insane asylum. We sat there in matching straitjackets in uncomfortable chairs, facing each other. We were surrounded by huge orange-red-and-black mushrooms. The sight of their amber gills above us, slowly breathing in and out in a sussurating mimicry of conscious life, was strangely calming to me.

“Where have you gone?” I asked him.

“Underground,” he said.

“What did you find there?” I asked.

“Acceptance, everlasting life, and mushrooms,” he said, and smiled. It was a lovely smile. It radiated outward to suffuse his entire face in a golden light.

“Is that all?” I said. “Was it worth it? Did you have to give up anything?”

“My fear. My consciousness. My former life.”

“What was that like?”

“Do you remember those trust exercises they made us do? Where one of us would fall into the arms of the others, and you just had to fall and keep falling and believe that they would catch you?”

“It was like that?”

“It was like that. Except imagine falling for a hundred years before you’re caught, looking at a black sky full of cold dead stars in front of you, and the abyss at your back.” {I think you were absorbing a line or two from my journal entries in your sleep.}

“You’re dead,” I said. It wasn’t an accusation.

“Probably,” he replied.

By then, we had shed our straitjackets and we stood in the lonely dull courtyard that the asylum had swallowed whole. At the far end, twelve elegant emerald mushrooms on long stalks were being guarded by two round rolling puffballs that glistened with sticky sea-green spores in an odd approximation of the asylum’s lawn bowling facilities.

“I’m sorry,” I said, although I didn’t know what I was saying sorry for.

“It’s okay, Janice,” he said.

Then he walked away from me down the alley, getting smaller and smaller until he disappeared into the cluster of mushrooms.

Isn’t that odd? I remember thinking in my dream. Isn’t that odd? And I don’t even know what it means.