Shriek: An Afterword

This time, Duncan had a haunted look about him, the joy of his previous underground adventures stripped away, leaving behind only a gauntness akin to death. The paleness that had taken over his features had blanched away any expression, any life, in his limbs, in his movements. He:

Beard like the tendrils of finely threaded spores.

Swayed in the doorway like a tall, ensanguinated ghost, holding the door open with one shaking, febrile arm.

Shoes tattered and torn, as if savaged by a dog.

Muttered my name as if in the middle of a dream.

Clothes stained everywhere with spores, reduced to a fine, metallic dust that glittered blackly all around him.

Trailed tiny obsidian mushrooms, trembling off of him at every turn.

Eyes embedded with black flecks, staring at some nameless vision just beyond me.

Clutched something tightly in his left hand, knuckles pale against the dark coating of spore dust.

He staggered inside, fell to the floor amid the paintings, the curled canvases, the naked frames vainglorious with the vision of the wall behind them. The gallery smelled of turpentine, of freshly cut wood, of drying paint. But as Duncan met the floor, or the floor met Duncan, the smells became one smell: the smell of Duncan. A dark green smell brought from deep underground. A subtle interweaving of minerals and flesh and fungus. The smell of old water trickling through stones and earth. The smell of lichen and moss. {Flesh penetrated by fungus, you mean—every pore cross-pollinated, supersaturated. Nothing very subtle about it. The flesh alive and prickly.} The smell, now, of my brother.

I locked the door behind him. I slapped his face until his gaze cleared, and he saw me. With my help, he got to his feet and I took him into the back room. He was so light. He might as well have been a skeleton draped with canvas. I began to cry. His ribs bent against my encircling arm as I gently laid him down against a wall. His clothes were so filthy that I made him take them off and put on a painter’s smock.

I forced bread and cheese on him. He didn’t want it at first. I had to tear the bread into small pieces and hold his mouth open. I had to make him close his mouth. “Swallow.” He had no choice. He couldn’t fight me—he was too weak. Or I was, for once, too strong.

Eventually, he took the bread from my hands, began to eat on his own. Still he said nothing, staring at me with eyes white against the dust-stippled darkness of his forehead and jutting cheekbones.

“When you are ready, speak,” I said. “You are not leaving here until you tell me exactly what happened. You are not leaving here until I know why. Why, Duncan? What happened to you?” I couldn’t keep the anguish from my voice.

Duncan smiled up at me. A drunkard’s smile. A skeleton’s smile. My brother’s smile, as laconic as ever.

“Same old sister,” he said. “I knew I could count on you. To half kill me trying to feed me.” {To help me. Who else would help me back then?}

“I mean it. I won’t let you leave without telling me what happened.”

He smiled again, but he wouldn’t look at me. For a long time, he said nothing as I watched him.

Then the flood. He spoke and spoke and spoke—rambling, coherent, fragmented, clever. I began to grow afraid for him. All these words. There was already less than nothing inside of him. I could see that. When the last words had left his mouth, would even the canvas of his skin flap away free, the filigree of his bones disintegrate into dust? Slowly, I managed to hear the words and forget the condition of the one who spoke them. Forget that he was my brother.

He had gone deeper into the underground this time, but the research had gone badly. He kept interspersing his account with mutterings that he would “never do it again.” And, “If I stay on the surface, I’m safe. I should be safe.” At the time, I thought he meant staying physically aboveground, but now I’m not so sure. {Be sure.} I wonder if he also meant the surface of his mind. That if he could simply restrain himself from the divergent thinking, the untoward analysis, that had marked some of his previous books, he might once again be a published writer. {Who knows? I might have given up on myself if forced to listen to my own ravings. I might have even become a respectable citizen.}

As he spoke, I realized I wasn’t ready for his revelations. I had made a mistake—I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. I needed distance from this shivering, shuddering wreck of a man. He clung to the edges of the smock I had given him like a corpse curling fingers around a coffin’s lining. The look on his face made me think of our father dying in the summer grass. It frightened me. I tried to put boundaries on the conversation.

“What happened to the book you were working on?” I asked him.

He grimaced, but the expression made him look more human, and his gaze turned inward, the horrors reflected there no longer trying to get out.

“Stillborn,” he gasped, as if breaking to the surface after being held down in black water. He lurched to his feet, fell back down again. Every surface he touched became covered in fine black powder. “Stillborn,” he repeated. “Or I killed it. I don’t know which. Maybe I’m a murderer. I was…I was halfway through. On fire with ancient texts. Bloated with the knowledge in them. Didn’t think I needed firsthand experience to write the book. Such a web of words, Janice. I have never used so many words. I used so many there weren’t any left to write with. And yet, I still had this fear deep in my skull. I couldn’t get it out.” {I still can’t get it out of my head, sometimes. Writing a book and going underground are so similar. That fear of the unknown never really goes away. But, after a while, it becomes a perverse comfort.}

He relinquished his grasp on the object in his hand, which I had almost forgotten.

It rolled across the floor. We both stared at it, he as astonished as I. A honey-and-parchment-colored ball. Of flesh? Of tissue? Of stone?

He looked up at me. “I remember now. It needs moisture. If it dries, it dies. Cracks form in its skin. It’s curled into a ball to preserve a pearl of moisture between its cilia.”

“What is it?” I said, unable to keep the fear from my voice.

He grinned in recognition of my tone. “Before Dad died,” he said, “you would have found this creature a wonderful mystery. You would have followed me out into the woods and we would have dug up fire-red salamanders just to see their eyes glow in the dark.”

“No,” I said. “No. There was no time when I would have found this thing a wonderful mystery. Where did you find it?”