Shriek: An Afterword

Perhaps more disquieting was that, unknown to me, each week brought Sabon’s flesh necklace, and thus Duncan’s final humiliation, closer.

I had an intimation of the future when, two years into her relationship with Duncan, Sabon finally visited me at my gallery, probably at Duncan’s request. {No—she decided to do that on her own. You were my only family besides Mom. She was curious. It’s your guilt showing through here—that you weren’t supportive, that you were so negative despite never having met her. It strikes me now, Janice, that as much as we talked over the years perhaps we never talked about the right things.} You might well ask why she waited so long, why I waited so long, but I think she must have realized how deeply I disapproved of my brother sleeping with a student. {I’ll grant you this now: you seem to have a sixth sense for impending tragedy. At the time, it just seemed like pettiness on your part.}

By then, I had begun to shed even my less respectable artists. But my gallery still maintained an aura of the respectable. I kept it Morrow-clean and replaced each departed painting with some admirable imitation. After that strange cold winter, the weather in Ambergris had been near-perfect for more than eighteen months. Good weather meant more walk-ins, and more walk-ins meant more sales. A few more tourists and I might again be as green as mint-scented, treelined Albumuth Boulevard.

So at first I saw Mary Sabon as only another potential buyer. Besides, from Duncan’s feverish descriptions, I would have expected someone taller, wiser, more voluptuous. She was short but not slight, her frame neither fat nor thin, and from her shiny red hair to her custom-made emerald-green shoes, from the scent of perfume to the muted red dress that hung so naturally off of her shoulder, she radiated a sense of wealth and health. {She dressed up for you, Janice, in her Truffidian Cathedral best.}

She nodded to me as she came in and wandered from wall to wall, glancing at the paintings with nervous little turns of her head. Her hands, held behind her back, clutched a purse. She had not yet attained the artful guile of poise and positioning that would someday make her the center of attention. The necklace had not yet begun to form.

“Can I help you?” I asked, half rising from my desk. I remember wondering if I might interest her in one of the pathetic landscapes that had come to fill my walls—indeed, whether the listed prices were high enough to match her wealth. I had, at that time, some masticated and mauled views of Voss Bender Memorial Post Office—popular since Lake’s success—as well as some nicely watered-down panoramas of the docks and the River Moth. All made respectable by the nearby presence and divine quality of two Lake sketches of fishermen cutting apart the carcass of a freshwater squid.

She turned to face me, smiled, and said, “I’m Mary Sabon.” Despite her nerves, she carried herself with an assurance I have never had. It rattled me.

“Mary Sabon,” I said.

She nodded, looked down at her shoes, then up at me again. “And you, of course, are Janice. Your brother has told me a lot about you.” And laughed at her cliché.

“Yes. Yes, I am,” I said, as if surprised to learn my own identity. “So you’re Sabon,” I said.

“Indeed,” she replied, her gaze fixed on me.

I said: “Do you know that what you’re doing could get Duncan fired by the Academy?”

It just came out. I didn’t mean to say it. Ever since the Attempt, I haven’t had any tact. {Ever since? You’ve never had any tact!}

Sabon’s smile disappeared, a look of hurt flashing across her face. In that hurt expression I saw a flicker of something from her past coming back to haunt her. I never found out what it was.

“We love each other, Janice,” she said—and there’s a surprise, a shock. Something unexpected brought to the surface by the clacking of keys against paper: she’s just a girl. When we met that first time, she was just a girl, without guile. I am ashamed of something and I’m not sure what. She was young. I was older. I could have crushed her then, but did not know it. {Dead. It’s all dead. It’s all gone. Senseless.}

“We love each other, Janice,” Mary said. “Besides, your brother is a historian. He teaches for now, but he’s working on new books…. And, besides, I won’t be a student forever.”

I think now of all the things I could have said, gentle or cruel, that might have led away from a marble staircase, a raised hand, a fiery red mark on her cheek.

I sat down behind my desk. “You know he’s sick, don’t you?”

“Sick?” she said. “The skin disease? The fungus? But it disappears. It doesn’t stay long. It isn’t getting worse. It doesn’t bother me.”

But I could tell it did bother her.

“Did he tell you how he got the disease?” I asked.

“Yes. He’s had it since he was a boy, when he went exploring. You know—BDD. It comes and goes. He’s very brave about it.”

Never mind the magnitude of Duncan’s lie; it was the BDD that caught me. All the breath left my body, replaced by an ache. Before Dad Died was something between Duncan, my mother, and me. {And yet here you are, sharing it in a manuscript that might be read by any old drunk off the street.}

“Are you all right?” she asked.

There must have been a pause. There must have been a stoppage, a shift of my attention away from her.

“I’m fine,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “As long as you know about it.”

Yes, the fungus left his skin for weeks, sometimes months, but when it returned, it was always more insidious, more draining of his energy. How could I possibly explain to her about Duncan’s obsession with the underground, especially now that he swore it no longer obsessed him?

She smiled, as if forgiving me for something. The simplicity of that smile charmed me for only a moment. Simplicity, where no simplicity should exist. She would always be complex, complicated, devious, in my mind.

“I want to buy a painting,” she said.

I had a feeling this was her last-ditch effort to make nice. She would buy my friendship.

“A painting,” I echoed as if I were a carpenter, a butcher, a priest, anything but a gallery owner.

“Yes,” she said. “What do you recommend?”

This was a good question. I wanted to recommend that she never see Duncan again. That she leave Duncan alone before she hurt him irrevocably. That she never return to my gallery because…because…Did I say these things? No. I did not. I held my tongue and pointed out the most expensive items in my gallery: the two squid sketches by Lake called, perversely, “Gill” and “Fin.”