Shriek: An Afterword

Then, as the other tourists entered the room, two things happened.

“First, the gray cap pulled a mushroom out of its pocket. Then it blew on the mushroom, softly.”

A thousand snow-white spores rose up into Duncan’s face, “and then the gray cap disappeared.”

The gray cap, my father said, melted into, blended in with, the wall and wasn’t there anymore. Although he knew this couldn’t have happened, although he knew there must be something—a secret passageway, a trapdoor in the floor—to explain it….

Duncan, awash in the milk-white spores, turned at the sound of his father’s voice—which he could finally hear—and smiled so broadly, with such delight, that our father, for a moment, smiled back. {It’s true. When the gray cap disappeared, a feeling of utter well-being came over me, and of wonder. Again, I can’t say why. I don’t know why. I was too young to know why. The gray caps and the underground have rarely since provided me with anything approaching a sense of calm.}

“Jonathan took Duncan to the doctors right away, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with him. Duncan was the same as he ever had been, even if Jonathan wasn’t. Jonathan was shaken by what had happened. It even changed the nature of his research. Suddenly, he became interested in The Refraction of Light in a Prison instead of the rebellion of Stretcher Jones against the Kalif. The Refraction of Light led him to the monks of Zamilon, and from there to the Silence. {Much as it led me there. The key may still be in Zamilon, but not at this time.}

“I never told you because I didn’t know how to explain it. It sounded absurd. It sounded dangerous.”

They never found anything wrong with Duncan, although they took him to doctors frequently over the next year. Gradually, they forgot about it, buried the memory alongside other memories because, in their hearts, it terrified them. {There were several times I thought about telling you, Janice. I would open my mouth to tell you and the image of the gray cap standing silent in front of me would come to me, and somehow I couldn’t say anything. After a while, it was no longer possible to tell you without it being clear I’d kept it from you. I still don’t know why I felt such a compulsion against telling you. Was I protecting you? Was I protecting myself? I was so young, perhaps I just couldn’t express what I’d seen.}

“What terrified Jonathan the most,” my mother said, “was not the gray cap, or the spores, but the happy smile on your brother’s face.”

The beans were in the pot. The rice was on the boil.

I asked, “So Duncan wasn’t changed by the event? No nightmares? No insomnia?”

My mother shook her head. “Nothing like that.”

She paused, put her hand to her throat, her gaze distant. “There was one change, although I’m sure it’s just that he was growing up. A year after he came back, he began to explore the drain tunnels near the house. Before that, I remember he hated dark places. But then he just…lost the fear.” {Is it possible my encounter had been an invitation? That the point had been to invite me to explore?}

Old mysteries, brought home to me in a new way. I kept thinking back, trying to remember my impressions of Duncan at the age of four or five. There was precious little. I remembered him smiling. I remembered him blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, and the time I made him cry by pinching him because he’d pulled apart one of my dolls.

My mother’s story gnawed and gnawed at me, even though I could not see the greater significance of it. {What were you meant to see, do you think? That I’ve been an agent of the gray caps my entire life? What, exactly, are you trying to say, Janice?}

Suddenly, it no longer seemed so safe to talk about Duncan. For the first time, I felt the urge to return to Ambergris, to my gallery, to my life. So I left the very next day, surprising myself as much as I surprised my mother. Even by then, though, we had slowly grown apart, so that I am sure that she, like me, in that awkward moment by the front door, with the motored vehicle waiting, thought that five years until my next visit might be no great hardship.

8

Nothing was the same when I came back.

It’s night here, as I type, and hot, and I don’t know if it’s a normal kind of heat or something related to the Shift. Something is gnawing away at the wood between the ceiling of this place and the roof. I find it almost relaxing to listen to the chewing—at least, I’d rather listen to that than to the sounds I sometimes hear coming from below me. It does not bear thinking about, what may be going on below me. Really, this afterword has been the only thing saving me from too many thoughts about the present. The green light is ever-present, but the clientele is not. It’s late. They’ve gone home. It’s just me and the lamp and the typewriter…and whatever is chewing above me and whatever is moving below me. And I feel feverish. I feel like I should lie down on the cot I had them bring in here. I feel like I should take a rest. But I can’t. I have to keep going on. Despite the heat. Despite the fact that I’m burning up. I have some mushrooms Duncan left behind, but I’m not sure I should eat them, so I won’t. They might help, but they might not. {Good decision! Those are weapons. If you’d eaten them, it would’ve been like eating gunpowder.}

So, instead, to stave off burning up, I’ll write about the snow. I’ll write about all of that wonderful, miraculous snow that awaited me on my return to Ambergris. Maybe the gnawing will stop in the meantime. Unless it’s in my mind, in which case it may never stop.

I returned to an Ambergris transformed by snow from semi-tropical city to a body covered by a white shroud. Every street, alley, courtyard, building, storefront, and motored vehicle had succumbed to the mysteries of the snow. Ambergris was not suited to white. White is the color of surrender, and Ambergris is unaccustomed to surrender. Surrender is not part of our character.

At first, the city appeared similar to dull, staid Morrow, but underneath the anonymous white coating lay the same old city, cunning and cruel as ever. Merchants sold firewood at ten times the normal price. Frankwrithe & Lewden, in a hint of the strife to come, raided a warehouse of Hoegbotton books and distributed the torn pages as tinder. Beggars contrived to look as pathetic as possible, continuing a trend that had been refined since before the advent of Trillian the Great Banker. Thieves took advantage of the icy conditions to make daring daylight purse-pinchings on homemade ice skates. Priests in the Religious Quarter preached end-of-the-world hysteria to boost dwindling congregations. Theaters rushed a number of “jungle comedies” and other warm-weather fare into production, finally dethroning Voss Bender’s Trillian, that play’s six acts too long for most theater admirers, frozen bottoms stuck to icy seats. Swans died shrieking in ice that trapped their legs. Lizards shrugged philosophically and grew fur. Sounds once dulled by a species of heat intense enough to corrode even hearing were now bright and brassy.