Shriek: An Afterword

“Ah, Duncan,” he said, wiping a tear from his cheek. “I admit it is convenient. That I should have been redeemed so easily. Such a pat revelation. But the good news is, the same may happen for you one day, if you have need of it.”

“I do need a few revelations,” I said.

“Maybe you need God,” Bonmot said, though with a lilt to his voice that let me know he might be teasing. “Do you think maybe that’s why you’ve come to me?” His tone made it so. I hadn’t come to him for that reason, and yet I was almost open to it in a strange way.

“You have faith in something you cannot see,” I said. “I can understand that, but I can’t believe in it.”

He shrugged. “‘There is no speech, there are no words; the song of the heavens is beyond expression.’ Not just something, but someone.”

“Someone, then,” I said. “So tell me—why are we so different? I also believe in something or someone I cannot see. It just happens to live underground.” I said it casually, and it came out like a joke, but my breath quickened, and I think that on some level, I really wanted a profound answer. I wanted an answer of some kind, at least—one that would help me understand why I could not stop pursuing my mystery.

“There’s a difference,” Bonmot said, although I’ve wondered ever since how he could know such a thing, without having seen what I’ve seen, down there.

“What is the difference?”

“Your unseen world only exists inside your head,” he said, in as gentle a way as he could—he even reached out across the table with his huge hands, as if, for a second, he meant to console me. “My unseen world, however, is the truth. It is truth that convinces and the divine that gives the gift of true faith.”

I’ve always had a problem with Truth and those who espouse Truth, no matter how much I might love and respect them. Faith, on the other hand, has never been an issue for me. But, I said, because I could: “I thought it might be a question of scale. Of the number of souls infected with the delusion.”

Bonmot wasn’t smiling anymore. “No, it’s not a matter of scale.”

{But of course it was a question of scale. That’s why I failed. You must infect the minds of hundreds of thousands to get anything done, to make an impact. You can’t live out your days presenting your theories to a hundred souls at a meeting of a discredited historical society. It doesn’t make a difference.}

“What, then?”

Bonmot said, “I told you already. But you aren’t ready to listen. You have to know the truth—have something worth believing in. Over time. Over centuries. Something so important people are willing to form their whole lives around it. To live, and, yes, die for it. And that means it must be much bigger than anything imaginable. ‘Silence with regard to You is praise,’” he quoted. “‘The sum total of what we know of You is that we do not know You.’”

I leaned closer, across the table. “What if you could know, though? Would that diminish it? If you could see what I have seen. I think it might change your mind.” {And, toward the end, didn’t he change? And didn’t I wish then that I’d never tried to see him uncertain.}

“‘The angels of darkness, whose names I do not know,’” Bonmot said. “You must take care to resist the false light.”

“The false light.” I shivered. Samuel Tonsure had written that once in his journal. But Tonsure hadn’t known about the Machine, about the door. There was, I had become convinced, a real door, not just an illusion or a delusion or a mirror. A door. And here Bonmot was talking about not letting in a false light. For a moment, just a moment, I asked myself if he might have some insight into the same truth I sought. {After all, Bonmot often professed to be an expert on Zamilon, a place I had become convinced held, in some time period, the answer to the mystery of the Machine. But the tough old bastard never imparted what he knew, no matter how I tried to pry that knowledge from him. And then it was too late.}

I pulled away, sat up straight on the bench, felt the lacquered rough-smoothness of its grain against my palms. Felt the sun against my face. Felt the breeze. Wondered at how I could get so lost in a conversation that I forgot the world around me.

I started again. I don’t know why I tried. Bonmot couldn’t convince me and I couldn’t convince him. “It is that important to me, Bonmot. It’s a religion to me.”

“I’ve no doubt of your sincerity,” Bonmot said. “I’m just not sure what you want from me.”

“To say my theories are not incompatible with your beliefs,” I said.

“But your theories are impossible. Nor are they truly relevant to the larger world.”

This made me angry for an instant. “Relevant? Relevant. How about this—our future survival in Ambergris. A second Silence. Is that relevant enough for you?”

Bonmot sighed. It was like stone or solid earth sighing. “That’s what Truffidianism is all about, my friend. Exactly that—you should read our texts more closely in future. ‘The same fate is in store for everyone, pure and impure, righteous and wicked, the good and the sinners.’”

“‘No one makes it out,’ as Tonsure once wrote,” I said. “But what if that fate is coming sooner to all of us than it should?”

Bonmot shrugged. “I don’t believe in what you believe.”

But I knew that, faced with the reality of it, he would not be so calm or accepting. I knew that the reality of what might one day happen would trump the imaginations of even those who had the capacity to believe in an all-powerful being that had never once manifested in the flesh to Bonmot or, to the best of my knowledge, anyone else.

{I once had a conversation about Faith and Truth with Sybel while waiting for him to relinquish a tincture. “What’s the attraction of Truffidianism? Of a single Truth, Sybel?” I asked. “It’s simple,” he replied. “You don’t have to search anymore. You can just be.” “So can a tree, Sybel,” I said, which was probably the wrong thing to say.}

Conversations like this one usually ended amicably on both sides—for Duncan because he found much about Truffidianism compelling {that may be wish fulfillment on your part, Janice} and for Bonmot because he had been too flawed in his past to judge the disbelief of others too harshly. And still they went back and forth, sometimes comically.