Shriek: An Afterword

Having already exhausted the careers of respectable historian and pseudonymous writer-for-hire, I would have thought Duncan would be wary of ruining a third. And in a way, I guess he was—he took great care to be precise. His meticulousness took the form of a map to guide him in his strategic penetrations of Sabon’s room. Each method of penetration had elements to recommend it. Some involved the excitement of speed, while others, in their lengthy explorations, yielded pleasures of a different kind. All, however, flirted with discovery; there would never be any safe way to enter Sabon’s room. “Neither in the morning nor the night,” Duncan wrote with a kind of unintentional poetry, “neither at noon nor at sunset.” {Bonmot thought it showed a new level of devotion to the Academy, the way I would often trade the comforts of my apartment for a sad barren room on the premises.}

Complicating matters, Academy rules dictated that all students change rooms every semester, presumably to make trysts more difficult, although two or three girls got pregnant every year anyway. Therefore, Duncan had to readjust his perambulations every six months or so.

Duncan used three routes to Sabon’s room during her sixth semester at the school. These routes constitute “love letters” in the purest sense of the term. Indeed, in his madness, in his missives to Sabon he even gave them names:

Route A: The Path of Remembering You. This path, this love, can never lead me to you fast enough and yet, cruelly, reminds me of you in every way—from the rough rooftops where we sat and watched the sky turn to amber ash, to the gardens where your walking silhouette would confuse my mind with your scent, with the sight of pale perfect legs sheathed in clean white socks. This path requires that I slip past all the male students who cannot have you as I have had you and, at the center of their snoring rooms, ascend the stairs to the roof. On the roof, I gaze out upon the line between the dormitory and the classrooms where I teach you things that no longer seem important. Then into the sometimes moonlit gardens, rushing through shrubbery as I throb for you—using the blind shoulder of the storage room to hide me from the night watchmen, only to arrive below your window, your outline ablaze against the curtain.

Route B: The Path of Naked Necessity. When I burn for you and I do not care for anything but you, I use this path, for it is as direct as my desire—past the Royal’s sleeping quarters, past all teachers’ rooms, on to the border, there to creep over unforgiving gravel below every student’s dormitory window, not caring that an errant head might poke out between curtains after curfew and recognize me—and so once again, in the urgency of my need, I come to your window and you.

Route C: The Path of Careless Ecstasy. When my love for you quivers between caution and bravery, when I am too full of joy to be either brief or circumspect, this is when I glide through the alley that separates dormitory from classroom and brazenly stride down the path past the cafeteria in time to dance with the night watchman at the front gate—zigzagging between entrances, climbing up the fence and back again, waiting in shadow as he walks by oblivious. And then down the wall that separates gardens and the second wing of classrooms—until, once again, breathless but happy, I am outside your window.

He alluded to them at the time, even seemed proud of himself, but I didn’t discover the full sad weight of his obsession until I read those descriptions in his journal. My favorite phrase is “rushing through shrubbery as I throb for you” {allow a love-besotted fool some latitude}. As Sabon wrote in her response to this letter, “I throb for you, too, dear-heart, especially rushing through the shrubbery.” Sarcasm? Or gentle mockery? When, exactly, did Sabon’s intent become treacherous? {Never, really. It was an incidental treachery.}

All rushing throbbery aside, this was dangerous work for Duncan. He used the paths not according to his mood, but according to the by now well-known and ritualistic bumblings of Simon and Jonathan Balfours, the two sixty-year-old night watchmen, twins of {in} habit{s}. He would also factor in the arrival of guests who might conceivably tour the academy at night and the random nocturnal walks of Bonmot. {However, by far the most dangerous person in all of Blythe Academy was Ralstaff Bittern, the gardener. What a tough old buzzard! Stringy as a dead cat, and twice as ugly. He had it in for me from the day I accidentally stepped on one of his precious rose bushes. He’d lie in wait for me at night, positioned strategically behind a willow tree, where he could see the entire courtyard. Many a night, I dared not brave his gaze.}

Indeed, Duncan came close to discovery every few weeks. The first time, Duncan, using the Path of Naked Necessity and disguised as a priest, rounded a corner and came face to face with a fellow Naked Necessitator: a third-year boy, as petrified as Duncan, the two of them sneaking so noisily through the gravel that neither had heard the other coming.

Duncan wrote later:

If he had uttered a single sound, I would have lived up to my surname—I would have shrieked and begun a babbling confession. But his face in the moonlight reflected such a remarkable amount of fear concentrated in such a small space that I found my tongue first and, shaky but firm, let him know that this—whatever this was—would not be tolerated at Blythe Academy. Continuing on, as much from my own exquisite terror as anything else, I proceeded to drive the demons out of the boy with such overwhelming success that I believe he—certain he could never match the conviction and fervor of the mouth-frothing apparition he met that night—eventually abandoned the priesthood as a vocation and started a brothel on the outskirts of the Religious Quarter. Meanwhile, as he ran away from me, gasping over gravel right out of the Academy, I was shaking so hard my teeth ground together. How close I had come to discovery! What was I to do?

What Duncan did, cynically, was volunteer for “tryst duty” as much as possible, which meant that he joined the ceaseless wanderings of the old night watchmen, supposedly on the lookout for those lean and compact boys, their dark wolf eyes shining, who might defy curfew in hopes of bedding a female student. {I performed a valuable service, whether hypocritically or not. And much of the time, frankly, we caught female students sneaking into the boys’ rooms.} This helped, but there were still unwelcome encounters with unexpected teachers or priests at unfortunate times—“Why, I was just checking the window to make sure it was securely locked”—and pricked bu**ocks from sudden jumps into rose bushes to avoid Bonmot, whom Duncan could not lie to. {The crushed bushes only made the gardener more relentless. Bittern complained to Bonmot several times, but Bonmot was not ready to believe him.} As his fellow history professor Henry Abascond once said to Duncan at a meeting of teachers, “A taste for the night life, have you? A taste for the dark, the shroud?” in typically pompous Abascond fashion. {And he wasn’t joking about it, much as others thought he was referring to my area of study. I thought for one paranoid moment that he and Bittern had formed a conspiracy to ruin me, but there was only one genuine conspiracy: my conspiracy to ruin myself.}