Shriek: An Afterword

What other rhetorical gems might have escaped Gaudy’s lips, we will never know, for Duncan chose that moment to overcome his inertia and leave Frankwrithe & Lewden’s offices—forever.

“It’s not so much that he frightened me,” Duncan told me later. “Because after going belowground, really, what could scare me? It was the monotone of his delivery until that last spit-tinged frothing.” {I was terrified, Janice. This man was the head of an institution that had been extant more than five hundred years ago. And he was telling me my work was worthless! It took a month before I even had the nerve to leave my apartment in Ambergris. I rarely visited Morrow again, and kept a low profile whenever I did.}

Later, during the War of the Houses {as it came to be called}, we realized that Gaudy, for political reasons, could hardly have reacted any other way to Duncan’s manuscript. But how could Duncan know that at the time? He must have been shaken, at least a little bit. {Yes. A bit.}

Undaunted, Duncan found a new publisher within six months of Gaudy’s strange rejection. Hoegbotton Publishing, a newly created and over-eager division of the Hoegbotton & Sons trading empire, gave Duncan a contract. In every way, the book struck Duncan’s new editor, Samuel Hoegbotton—an overbearing and inconsequential young man with hulking shoulders, a voice like a cacophony of monkeys, and severe bad breath {who would never find favor in the eyes of his tyrannical father, Henry Hoegbotton}—as “A WORK OF GENIUS!” Duncan was happy to agree, bewildered as he might have been, unaware at the time that Samuel had transferred from the Hoegbotton Marketing Division. Samuel had not set foot in a bookstore since his twelfth birthday, when his mother had presented him with a gift certificate to the Borges Bookstore. {“Promptly traded in for its monetary value,” Sirin, our subsequent editor, mused disbelievingly some years later.} That Samuel died of a heart attack soon after publishing Duncan’s fifth book surprised no one. {Except me!}

The book, published with the full {perhaps crushing} weight of the Hoegbotton empire behind it, was called Cinsorium: Dispelling the Myth of the Gray Caps. It became an instant bestseller.

Despite this success, Cinsorium signaled the beginning of Duncan’s slide into the obscurity I had previously wished upon him. If he had dreamt of a career as a serious historian—the sort of career our father would have died for—he should have suppressed the book and moved on to a new project. Samuel Hoegbotton, contributing to the disaster, ordered the printing of a banner across the top of the book {almost, but not quite, obscuring my name} that proclaimed: “At Last! The Truth! About the Gray Caps! All Secrets! Revealed!”

I bought the book as soon as it came out, not trusting Duncan to send me a copy. {I would have, if you’d asked.} It disappointed me for contradictory reasons: because it showed little of the scholarly care displayed by On the Refraction of Light in a Prison, and because it never mentioned, even once, Duncan’s underground journey. I had already accepted the irritation of waiting to read about the trip along with everyone else. This I could have tolerated, even though it indicated a lack of trust. But not to mention it at all? It was too much. {I did mention Zamilon, though. Wasn’t that enough? To start with?}

The book did not “reveal” all secrets. It obscured them. Duncan tantalized readers with incredible images he claimed had come from ancient books, the existence of which most scholars discounted. Mile-high caverns. Draperies of fungi that “undulated in time to a music conveyed at too high a pitch for the human ear.” Mushrooms that bleated and whined and “talked after a fashion, in the language of spores.” {Yes, perhaps I obscured some deeper truths, but nothing was made up.}

In typical Duncanesque prose, it tried with almost superhuman effort to hide the paucity of its insight:

Although the inquisitive reader may wish for further extrapolation regarding this aspect of Tonsure’s journal, such extrapolation would be so speculative as to provide a poor gruel of a meal indeed, even for the layperson. Some mysteries are unsolvable.

{One part fear, I suppose. One part truth. Some mysteries are unsolvable. Just when you unearth the answer, you discover another question.}

A beautiful sword, but blunt, the book relied on quotations from “unnamed sources” for the bulk of its more exotic findings. Although claiming to know the truth about the gray caps, Duncan instead spent most of the book combining a history of fungi with historical suppositions that made me laugh:

Could it be that the rash of suicides and murders in the Kalif’s Court fifty years before the Silence were the result of emanations from a huge fungus that lay under the earth in those parts? Might much of the supposed “courtly intrigues” of the period actually have more to do with fruiting bodies? Might this also reveal the source of the aggression behind so-called “bad Festivals” in Ambergris?

The book, in short, violated most rules of historical accuracy and objective evidence. Duncan mentioned that he had journeyed to examine the page of Tonsure’s journal, but he gave no specifics of location or content. Certainly nothing like the detail and “local color” provided by his own journal. {I admit Cinsorium was hardly my finest hour, although I had my reasons for writing it at the time. My thoughts turned to Tonsure and his encryptions. My need for encryption was not as urgent as his, or as profoundly solitary, but I still felt a certain danger. Not just from the gray caps, but from those who might read the unexpurgated truth and…reject it. And reject it violently. Couldn’t I, I reasoned—falsely—allude to and suggest that truth so that, perhaps, even if in just a thousand minds, my suspicions might harden into certainty? It is a question I wrestled with even later, working with James Lacond, although by then I had come to realize that the best I could hope for was a hardening certainty in a mere handful of souls.}

The most daring idea in Cinsorium was the theory that Tonsure had rewritten the journal after completing it, which alienated dozens of influential scholars {and their followers, don’t forget} who had based hundreds of books and papers on the conventionally accepted chronology. {I don’t think it alienated them—most of them lacked the resources or the knowledge to verify or deny the discovery. I didn’t feel like an outcast, at first. Besides, is it fair to chastise me for both poor scholarship and unique ideas?}

As I read, I became struck by the way that half-truths wounded Duncan’s cause more seriously than outright lies. He stumbled, he faltered throughout the book, but continued on anyway—persevering past the point where any reasonable person might have given up on such a hopeless trek.