Shriek: An Afterword

I loved helping Duncan in this way. I loved that his style and my style became entangled so that we could not between us tell where a Janice sentence began and a Duncan sentence ended. For this meant I was very nearly his equal. {No comment.}

It was during this period that the Spore of the Gray Cap first became his favorite haunt. He had begun to put on a little weight, to grow a mustache and beard, which suited him. He even began to smoke a pipe. Thus outfitted, he would spend a few hours a day at the Spore, sitting in the {this very} back room, where he could keep a friendly eye on the bar’s regulars and yet not have to speak to them. The bartenders loved him. Duncan never made a fuss, tipped well when he could, and added a sense of authentic eccentricity that the Spore needed. {These were not the only or even the primary reasons I spent so much time here. At some point, Janice, you will have to abandon suspense for a fully dissected chronology, will you not? Or perhaps I can help. It just so happens that below the back room of the Spore lies the easiest portal to the gray caps’ underground kingdom.}

This deception continued for over three years, to the continued glorification of Janice Shriek, with rarely even the warmth of reflected light for poor Duncan. Hoegbotton did pay very well, and I dutifully gave Duncan sometimes as much as three-fourths of our earnings. {H&S could afford to pay well—not only were its trading activities booming, but it had managed to make inroads into the Southern jungles, and to consolidate control of almost all trade entering Ambergris. This was no benevolent organization, but perhaps being an anonymous thrall was better than the alternative.}

I suppose for this reason alone Duncan would have continued to supply his work for my byline. But we eventually put a stop to it anyway. I believe it was because my own instability made him yearn for stability of his own. When your sister continually looks pale as death, throws up on a regular basis, introduces you to a new boyfriend every other week, and is given to uncontrollable shaking, you begin to wonder how long it will be before people stop assigning her freelance work. {Not true—you flatter yourself. There were two reasons. First, I was sick of writing fluff. You try writing seventy-five articles on vacation opportunities in the Southern Islands and you will have written a new definition of boredom. Vomiting would be the least of your worries. Second, freelancing did not appeal because there was no set schedule, and I could never know when you might have work for me. Third, I began to see that this facile copy writing was taking a lot of energy away from my underground inquiries, which became more urgent the more it seemed that the symptoms I’d manifested after coming aboveground were not going away.}

Besides, Sirin, now my editor at Hoegbotton, had published all manner of pamphlets early in his career, passing off fiction as nonfiction and nonfiction as fiction; when his readers could not tell the difference between the two, it filled him with a nonsensical glee. Several times, he wrote an essay in a periodical, a scathing review of it under a pen name, then a letter to the editor under yet another pen name, this alter-alter ego defending Sirin’s original point. In short, Sirin was as apt to ape a novel in his essays as to mummify a treatise in his fancies. He was also a scrupulous rewriter of other writers’ work, always sensitive to a change in tone or style, and drove Duncan to near insanity with his relentless line edits. With such an editor, it would not have been long before Sirin sniffed out the hoax. {I’m sure he sniffed out the hoax from nearly the beginning but chose not to say anything. What did it matter to him who wrote what so long as someone wrote it?}

For these reasons {and more, too tedious to, etc., etc.}, the arrangement did not last. One day I came to Duncan with an assignment {the abysmal task of creating an “upbeat” listing and description of funeral homes and cemeteries in Morrow; it made me suspicious—had Sirin come up with that to torment me?} and Duncan told me he couldn’t do it. No, Duncan had taken a “regular” job.

My brother, Duncan Shriek, the fearless explorer, had finally accepted everyday reality as his own—just as I had begun to reject it. Joined the humdrum, wash-the-dishes, take-out-the-garbage, go-to-bed-early, get-up-and-go-to-work life shared by millions of people from Stockton to Morrow, Nicea to Ambergris. My shock only amused him. {Actually, dear sister, it was your squinty-eyed, sallow face, the way your pupils seemed ready to rise up into your head as your jaw, as if in balance, dropped. You looked, in short, as if we had traded places, sunshine for the subterranean. At least one of us was taking out the garbage.}

What job had Duncan taken? A teaching job at Blythe Academy, a minor Truffidian religious school. Blythe might have been best known for its longevity—it had been established some years before the Silence, although it had wandered from place to place, finally coming to rest a few blocks from the Truffidian Cathedral. In a bit of irony I’m sure they had thought made good sense, Blythe’s library had been superimposed on the ruins of an old gray cap library. {It wasn’t ever a library. It was more of a marker for the Machine.} In the center of their main reading room, the circular nubs of that former structure remained, looking cold, remote, and threatening.

Blythe had a pointed history of accepting as many students from “artistic” or “creative” parents as possible, especially those of a certain social status—regardless of whether they believed in Truffidianism. I suppose the founders believed that the rote, compulsory weekly religious services in the small chapel behind the school might eventually permeate the brains of their charges—or at the very least instill the kind of guilt that in later years results in large sums of money being sent in to support new buildings, philosophies, or styles of teaching.

Blythe had also had famous teachers from time to time—Cadimon Signal for a few years, and even some of the Gorts who had gained such fame from the statistician Marmy Gort’s controversial findings. Certainly, there was no shame in attending as a student or teaching at the school. However, as Duncan soon found out, greater shame could be found in those serving as headmaster, or Royal, to the school.

Imagine Duncan’s shock the first day, arriving in starched collar and suffocating tie, to find his interviewer, the Vice Royal of Blythe Academy, joined by the Royal himself, who turned out to be none other than the former Antechamber, Bonmot. His features, already naturally condensed into a look of continual bemusement by the circumstances of his fall from grace, had attained a sublime parody of surprise {did anything really surprise him anymore?} as he looked up at Duncan and slowly realized who he was.