Shriek: An Afterword

Binder, David—A stuffed shirt fool, head of Morrow Studies, who used to chatter on endlessly while I was trying to get to my next class. Now he’s gone silent as dumb stone, as useless to me now as he was to my research. {I stand by my assessment, especially now that he, too, is dead, run over by a motored vehicle.}

Bittern, Ralstaff—The gardener! Even the gardener won’t talk to me, won’t look at me. Although, in truth, he never liked me much. But I thought he at least enjoyed matching wits with me in his efforts to uncover the scope of my midnight perambulations. It seems I was incorrect. {Now he’s the gardener for the grounds around the Truffidian Cathedral, and his attitude is absolutely the same. He spits at me when he sees me.}

Cinnote, Fiona—Indigenous Tribes Studies. Beautiful in her own way. She used to laugh at my jokes. I used to laugh at hers. There was a world-weariness behind her eyes that made me think she had an interesting history. But she had an affair with Binder, for Truff ’s sake. How dare she judge me! {And how dare I judge her, truly. I actually thought about suggesting lunch, but she quit the Academy and mounted an expedition to the Southern jungles, never to be seen again.}

…and on, and on…

When it came to Blythe Academy, all Duncan could think of for several years was how he had been wronged by them. He couldn’t see how he’d hurt the Academy, or his fellow professors. There was nothing in him, then, that was able to accept the guilt of his misdeeds. {Perhaps not on the surface, Janice. But I’ve made up for it since. I think I’ve made up for it thrice over. But I guess no one makes it out, a line Lacond was fond of quoting from Tonsure.}

Even worse, these were people Duncan had never mentioned to me or hadn’t known while at Blythe. He had never cared about them before, but their features came into sharp relief after he believed himself wronged by them. {I have no comment, no defense.}

So Duncan became absent from Blythe Academy, no longer roaming its halls, its gardens, its classrooms. The effect of Duncan’s sudden removal on Mary, paradoxically, was an unlikely blossoming. Released from the constant “tutelage” and the equally lustful pressure of Duncan’s ideas, she, Bonmot told me, had become one of the school’s best students. With Bonmot to guide but not smother, Mary began to develop her own theories, the seeds that would eventually lead to disagreement and betrayal. {You find her theories totally without merit, Janice, yet claim that I constricted her intellectual freedom like some monstrous…monster. You can’t have it both ways. I don’t deny I made some mistakes, as I’m sure you’ll soon demonstrate, but I’m not totally at fault. I’m not sure anyone is at fault.}

I can only guess how no longer having access to the Academy affected Duncan’s studies of the gray caps. I imagine it hurt him to the core, if he could even register that pain above the intensity of his lust for Mary. {Wrong again! Wrong! You are setting new records for presumption in this account. By the time of my expulsion, I had nearly completed my experiments. There was little else I could set my students to doing that would not arouse suspicion. My classes had, by that point, become mockeries of classes, mockeries of studies. The students themselves sensed it. That the results were inconclusive does not mean the experiments were incomplete. I just moved my laboratory and studies to another location—namely, my own body. And quite a schooling that proved! As I began to live with my condition, and then find ways to control it, it became less of a disease and more of a transformation.}

A week after Duncan told me about his expulsion from Blythe Academy, the late afternoon brought not only rain and the murmur of prayers from the Religious Quarter, but also a knock on the door. Duncan stood on the porch in the rain, his hair plastered to his head and puddles around his booted feet. Gray as a mushroom dweller, and smelling of mildew. Eyes like phosphorescent green circles with dead black centers. For a startled second, I saw him as Mary would later—not of this world, but not having left it. Half-invisible spores, caught by the porch light, formed a hazy halo around his head. His hair had begun to thin and I noticed, with a pang of recognition, the emergence of gray at his temples. And yet, once again, he was fleeing the ruins of a self-made disaster. A part of me could not sympathize.

“This is becoming routine,” I said.

“Can you find me a job?” he asked, grinning. “I’m broke.” As matter-of-fact as that. With the old glow of fragile confidence you find in people held together by nothing more substantial than affection {and fungi}.

“Hello to you, too,” I said, walking back into the apartment to find him a towel, vaguely happy that I would not be asked to scrape mushrooms off of him this time.

As I threw the towel in his face, I said, “Of course I can find you a job. There are lots of available positions for a paranoid, discredited, fringe historian with a fungal disorder who has recently been laid off for laying his students.”

Duncan winced. “Student. Singular.”

“Singular. Plural. Does it really matter?” I turned away from him. “So. Should I go or do you want to?” I asked. “Neither of us really has a choice. It’s not like my gallery is going to pay your bills when it doesn’t even pay mine.”

“Go?” He stared quizzically at me for a moment, and then he understood. “You should go. What if he disapproves of me now?”

“You assume he knows.”

“He knows everything. And what he doesn’t know, he finds out quickly. You should go.”

So I went. And that was the start of something altogether different.

Sirin’s office occupied part of the second floor of Hoegbotton & Sons’ headquarters on Albumuth Boulevard. The dull mass of red bricks always smelled of packing sawdust and exotic spices. It had gained a kind of inbred notoriety due to a novel that had used the offices as a prop to its fading plot during its climactic scenes. The building had survived not only that malaprop, but centuries of other challenges—from the Gray Tribes, to Festivals gone bad, to fires set by outraged monks from the Religious Quarter protesting unsavory business practices. {Not to mention the ongoing assault on its editorial domains by a certain pair of increasingly toothless and shrill Shrieks.} “There are only two times not to trust a Hoegbotton: when you’re selling and when you’re buying” was a common saying down at the docks.

Sirin’s office—a haven for culture within the blunt instrument of greed that formed the building proper—had a seasonal quality to it. In the winter and early spring, Sirin’s rosewood desk would be buried in contracts, manuscripts, proposals, financial information, and related books, all in preparation for publication. {Not then, but soon—perhaps even within three or four years—one of those manuscripts would be Mary’s. She truly was gifted at one point. And prolific—positively fecund—once she got started.} As the year progressed, his desk would slough off much of the clutter, until, by autumn, all but the finished books had vanished, and the magazines or broadsheets pregnant with reviews, both bright and dark, had taken their place. Then winter would once again obscure the lovely rosewood of his desk with the weight of things promised and things promising. His office had the most wonderful smell: of parchment pages, of ink, of newly printed books.