Shriek: An Afterword

Duncan: “I’ve seen a kind of a god. It lives underground.”

Bonmot: “The Silence was more about sin than mushrooms.”

Duncan: “But rats, Bonmot? Why do you have to worship rats?”

Bonmot: “The ways of God are mysterious, Duncan. And, besides, you are coming perilously close to blasphemy…only some of us worship rats. I do not worship rats.”

Duncan: “Rats, Bonmot? Rats?”

We talked about serious subjects, yes, but we also told dirty jokes and teased each other mercilessly. I shared wicked stories about the outrageous behavior of my artists, while Bonmot shared tales from his days at the religious academy in Morrow. {My personal favorites concerned the exploits of the head instructor, Cadimon Signal.} Rarely were our conversations revelatory. That’s not the point. These were people I loved and came to love. For me, some months, it saved me to be in such company. It took me out of the self-destructive spiral of my own thoughts in a way that even Sybel couldn’t. For Bonmot, I think our lunches allowed him to relax in a way he had not relaxed since he entered the priesthood. {And I had fun, too. But, really, Janice, you make it all sound so perfect. It was fun, but it wasn’t perfect.}

I should have been envious of the way Duncan and Bonmot talked, but the truth is, it made me happy for them both: the hulking giant and my relatively “dainty” brother. When I approached them with my sandwiches, I often felt guilty for taking them from their collective world of words and ideas, twinned heads turning to look up at me, bewildered—who was this intruder?—followed by recognition and a gracious acceptance into their company. {This is a subtle piece of misdirection that allows you to keep your own emotional intimacy with Bonmot secret, I think. As I had Lacond later, so you had Bonmot, in a way I didn’t. I was often the intruder, Janice. You two took so easily to one another it was remarkable. But if you don’t want to share such details here, I won’t make you.}

I still remember how Bonmot’s generous drum of a laugh, deep and clear, often drew disapproving looks from the students studying nearby. And yet even then, during what I considered retreats from the exhausting carnality of my “normal” life, Mary Sabon was with us, folded into the pages of the grade book Duncan kept with him. There never really is a finite beginning, is there? No real starting point to anything. Beginnings are continually beginning. Time is just a joke played by watchmakers to turn a profit. Through memory, Time becomes conjoined so that I see Mary as a physical presence at those lunches, leaning against Duncan, trying to get his attention.

She is everywhere now. I am, almost literally, nowhere.

5

Can a childhood memory be misconstrued as starting over? I don’t think so. Not if I tell it this way:

The forests outside Stockton remain as real to me as the humid, fungi-laden streets of Ambergris, maybe more so. The dark leaves, the mottled trunks, the deep green shadows reflected on the windows of our house, as of some preternatural presence. All sorts of trees grew in Stockton, but the difference between the staid oaks that lined our street and the misshapen, twisted, coiled welter of tree limbs in the forest seemed profound. It both reassured us and menaced us in our youth: limitless adventure, fear of the unknown.

Our house lay on the forest’s edge. The trees stretched on for hundreds of miles, over hills and curving down through valleys. Various were the forest’s names, from the Western Forest to the Forest of Owls to Farely’s Forest, after the man who had first explored the area. Stockton had been nestled comfortably on its eastern flank for centuries, feeding off of the timber, the sap, the animals that took shelter there.

By the time I had turned thirteen and Duncan was nine, we had made the forest our own. We had colonized our tiny corner of it—cleared paths through it, made shelters from fallen branches, even started a tree house. Dad never enjoyed the outdoors, but sometimes we could persuade him to enter the forest to see our latest building project. Mom had a real fear of the forest—of any dark place, which may have come from growing up in Ambergris. {I never had the sense that growing up in Ambergris had been a trauma for her—she lived there during very calm times—but it is true she never talked about it.}

One day, Duncan decided we should be more ambitious. We had made a crude map of what we knew of the forest, and the great expanse labeled “Unknown” irked him. The forest was one thing that could genuinely be thought of as his, the one area where he did not mimic me, where I followed his lead.

We stood at the end of our most ambitious path. It petered out into bushes and pine needles and the thick trunks of trees, the bark scaly and dark. I breathed in the fresh-stale air, listened to the distant cry of a hawk, and tried to hear the rustlings of mice and rabbits in the underbrush. We were already more than half a mile from our house.

Duncan peered into the forest’s depths.

“We need to go farther,” he said.

Back then, he was a mischievous sprout, small for his age, with bright green eyes that sometimes seemed too large for his face. And yet he could effortlessly transform into a little thug just by crossing his arms and giving you an exasperated look. Sometimes he’d even sigh melodramatically, as if fed up with the unfairness of the world. His shocking blond hair had begun to turn brown. His bright green eyes sometimes seemed too large for his face. He liked to wear long green shirts with brown shorts and sandals. He said it served as a kind of camouflage. {Camouflage or comfort—I don’t remember.} I used to wear the same thing, although, oddly enough, it scandalized Mom when I did it. Dad couldn’t have cared less.

“How much farther?” I asked.

I had become increasingly aware that our parents counted on me to keep watch over Duncan. Ever since he’d gotten trapped in a tunnel the year before, we’d all become more conscious of Duncan’s reckless curiosity.

“I don’t know,” he said. “If I did, it wouldn’t be much of an adventure. But there’s something out there, something we need to find.”

His expression was mischievous, yes, but also, somehow, otherworldly. {Otherworldly? I was nine. There was nothing “otherworldly” about me. I liked to belch at the dinner table. I liked to blow bubbles and play with metal soldiers and read books about pirates and talking bears.}

“But there’s all that bramble,” I said. “It will take ages to clear it.”

“No,” he said, with a sudden sternness I found endearing, and a little ridiculous, coming from such a gangly frame. “No. We need to go out exploring. No more paths. We don’t need paths.”