Shriek: An Afterword

2) Sabon has written 16 books…Alas, the number continues to rise, each new eviscerating tome kept in print by a necromancy beyond my understanding, and each leading to a more complete flesh necklace. What is Sabon’s appeal to readers? Why is she always more popular than Duncan? {And why should the answer interest us? Get on with the underground adventures.} In page after page of exquisite prose, much of which I cannot bring myself to read, Sabon has, over the years, reassured her readers, made them feel intelligent, offered rational commonsense explanations for even the most miraculous and profound of events. {Although even she cannot explain away the Silence!} It doesn’t seem to matter if her answers are wrong or incomplete. It does not matter that her answers often diminish the complexities of the world—leach it of its sorrow and its joy in favor of a comforting numbness, a comforting sameness: the husk of a starfish, not its living body. {And yet, you must admit, Sabon enlivens the corpses with wit and glamour.}

Duncan, conversely, liked to provoke his readers, poke them with a sharpened stick, to emphasize the supreme unknowable irony of the world and then, in marching toward the truth, unearth new mysteries, so that every so-called solution begged a hundred questions. The reader left Duncan’s books shaken and unmoored from what he or she had always taken for granted.

In short, if reduced to a single point of punctuation, Sabon’s work would have been a period {sometimes an emphatic exclamation mark!}, Duncan’s a question mark. Closed doors. Open doors. All shrouded, all revealed. {It could just be that I wrote bad books.} The average reader likes to return home after a long journey, not be left stranded in the middle of nowhere, with dark coming on and the printed pages a desert devoid of comfort. {You make my books sound like mirthless lumps of coal hidden at the bottom of a dry well, Janice! I refuse to believe you didn’t see the humor, the enthusiasm, in my books. Replace “desert” with “a mysterious foreign land,” with all the danger and excitement that entails.}

3) …over her distinguished twenty-year career. Unfortunately, this number also continues to rise, although riddled with inaccuracy. Seven years after Sabon graduated from Blythe, the author’s note read “ten.” Ten years after her graduation, the note read “fifteen.” Regardless, I’m sure Bonmot was always glad to see a mention of Blythe Academy bereft of any hint of scandal.

4) The Influence of Pig Cartels on Ambergrisian History…The most unintentionally humorous book I have ever read. At its core, Sabon’s atrocity is based on Duncan’s observation in an article for the Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society’s Real History Newsletter that Trillian the Great Banker fell from power due to his battle with the leader of a powerful pig cartel over the favors of a woman {you can’t be sure my mention sparked her book—the anecdote is, more or less, common knowledge}, which prompted Sabon to devote a 175-page book to the futile task of trying to convince the reader that pig cartels have wielded immense power throughout Ambergrisian history—and all the sentences that I read at least, are as breathlessly long as this one. {I admit, the book did bewilder me, as did its popularity. But we’re all entitled to one bad book. I’m sure the pig cartels were flattered, at the very least.}

5) The Gray Caps’ Role in Modern Literature: The Dilemma of Dradin, in Love…The only dilemma, to my way of thinking, being how to dignify as “literature” such a collection of angst, stupidity, and old wives’ tales. At least Sabon left my brother out of this one.

6) Cinsorium: Rethinking the Myth of the Gray Caps…I don’t feel up to addressing this book for now. It requires more explanation than I have the strength to give it. Besides, Nativism was born from it, and that’s too horrible to contemplate at the moment.

7) At the age of 47…Thankfully, this number also continues to rise. One day it, and she, will pass on to the Infinite. {As will we all, without a little bit of luck or planning. And then none of this will matter to anyone, not that it matters to many people at the moment, anyway.}

8) Sabon remains… “Remains” best describes the current content of her books: the remains of Duncan’s theories, devoured and spat out by Sabon. {That’s the way it often happens, although usually, I think, the author stolen from is already dead or senile. Still, the sting of it is there, I cannot deny it.}

9)…shedding light on history and her fellow historians alike… This latest addition to the Sabon Canon {or cannon} at least begins to acknowledge that most of her books feast off of the carcasses of other historians.

10) This mention of Mary’s parents reminds me that I have lied a little for the sake of dramatic tension, I think. There was one time I saw Mary before she visited my gallery. I just didn’t realize it was her.

I saw her with her parents at Blythe Academy once, surrounded by the controlled chaos that is the start of the spring semester. A spray of sudden greenery from the trees, the clatter of shoes on walkways and stairs as students—nervous and excited—tried to find their classes. As I passed by on my way to visit Duncan, one family caught my eye by their very stillness. They stood in the center of the courtyard and also at the center of a kind of calm. The girl stood, legs slightly apart, staring down at the ground, schoolbooks held carelessly in one hand, a pensive look on her face. Her parents stood like towers to either side of her, the space between them containing a daughter not quite belonging to the same world.

Their unlined, unremarkable faces expressed no great joy or sorrow, or none that I could discern, and yet I could feel a tension there; the presence of some overwhelming emotion. I almost felt as if I were a witness to some kind of ritual or ceremony. Was the girl’s head bowed in prayer? As I walked away, I turned to watch them, and it seemed as if they were receding from me at a glacially slow pace.

That must have been Mary’s first year at the Academy, and I find it interesting that even then I noticed her, before Duncan ever pointed her out to me, before I even knew who she was.

When I read Sabon’s biographical note in her various books, what I envision when I come across the sentence beginning “Her early interest in nature studies…” arises not from her gallery visit, but from that first glimpse: of twinned parents standing guard on either side of a daughter whose face is tilted toward the ground. Something about their wary stance still worries me now, even after my research has made of them more than silent statues.

In fact, my research has somehow lessened their pull on my imagination, for the facts do not particularly impress. {They impressed me!}