Shriek: An Afterword

“We’re near the end,” he said one evening eighteen months into the war, as we sat in the smoldering remains of the Café of the Ruby-Throated Calf. It was more or less neutral ground now that most of it had been destroyed by mortars. At least we could count on no one trying to kill us as we sat there, protected by overturned tables and a few strategically placed shrubs. The service was terrible, but, then, all the waiters were dead.

Duncan was pale but whole, face dark with dirt, a flurry of cuts rubbed red. We were drinking a couple of bottles of Smashing Todd’s Wartime Stout, which we had found—miraculously whole under a fallen, splintered door—in an abandoned store.

“Near the end?” I prompted.

“Yes,” he said, and took a long pull on his beer. “We’re near the end. Something has to give. Someone has to blink. To change. It can’t go on this way. It can’t.”

“It’s done a fine job of going on this way for a while now, Duncan,” I reminded him. I took a sip of ale. It was warm, almost hot, but the bite of it still tasted good.

“Maybe I mean I can’t go on this way,” he said.

“You mean, being paid in eggs, cauliflower, and milk?” I said.

He laughed, but I knew he was thinking about Mary, always Mary.

How to express the overlap between war and blissful domesticity? For this was the time of Duncan’s purest happiness—when, for those few months before they began to tear each other apart, he had Mary’s body, her mind, and the little apartment they shared. Mary had come free of her Academy obligations a couple of months before and graduated with honors. Bonmot had no hold over her anymore, except for the hold created by her gratitude. She and Duncan moved into an apartment off of Albumuth Boulevard. A nice little arrangement. In his journal he wrote of a contentment that served as a welcome respite from his aboveground and underground adventures, almost as if Manzikert had confessed to enjoying sewing.

I wake early to make a pot of tea and to cook up some eggs. We have matching placemats but the plates are all mixed up. A few I bought have some kind of whale motif, while others Mary stole from her father’s house, and these have a tracery of ivy on them. I like mine better. But the forks are all the same.

It was almost as if he had lost his mind. Didn’t he know the Family Shriek is condemned to wander above and belowground like the most transient of Skamoo nomads? Or like the foraging armies of the doomed infidel Stretcher Jones? {No, I most certainly did not know this, Janice. Until Dad died, we were most assuredly stay-put people. Nothing fated us for a lack of domestic bliss. Besides, without that fragile calm, I don’t think we could have survived the war. It’s odd what stays with you. I still remember the tracery of ivy on those plates she stole, and the pleasure she got from the theft, and the tiny and not-so-tiny cracks that those plates acquired over time from the constant echo of bombardment.}

What for me had always been like quicksilver, the intense heat of a caress that faded from my memory over time, was for him long, and drawn-out, never far from his thoughts. Another typical entry, from several weeks later, read:

In the morning: sunshine and her. I’m not sure which I’m more enamored of. This freedom after so much heartache seems almost unreal. She’s here, in front of me, sleeping. I can watch her as long as I like—catalogue the elements of her beauty, from her rose-colored mouth to the fine down above her upper lip to the soft line of her nose to the long lashes that frame her closed eyes to the neck with its delicate glide to the lightly freckled arm that slid out from beneath the sheets during the night. I should wake her. I should. But I can’t. She’s so peaceful right now, and the world outside is not. I gain strength from watching her like this, and I hope I give it back to her as well when she is awake. I must cut this short—the mortars are going off again, and she is beginning to stir.

{That’s a nice entry, if atypical for more than a short while. I almost feel as if I was trying to convince myself with that entry, considering the horrors of the world around us. I went home to her every night after hours of hard, dangerous work. Under even the best of circumstances, I would hardly have made what you would call a stable lover. But with bombs exploding everywhere, screaming shells digging into the street only blocks away, and the random violence of the militias, I was very unstable. There were times when the danger brought us close together, when we didn’t need words or other constraints, like it had been back at Blythe. And then it was good. But the rest of the time, I struggled to love her despite the tense, closet-like atmosphere. I admit it—there was no way to preserve the allure of the forbidden, of having to sneak into her room at night. Now I was the man who snored at night and sometimes, choking on the spores in my throat, woke gagging. I think I began to scare her almost from the beginning. This was everything she hadn’t seen yet. She wasn’t ready for me. She was brave in many ways, but not in that way. And I can’t blame her.}

We sat there in the café and watched as, across the street, six Hoegbotton irregulars took up positions behind a stand of trees and began firing into the buildings, from which came spiraling the distinctive crimson bullets that had become known as “Lewden Specials.” Two of Hoegbotton’s men went down writhing and clutching their chests. An F&L supporter fell from the third story of one of the buildings and landed with a wet thud on the pavement below in a confusing welter of blood and bone.

And we just sat there, watching and drinking our ale. Really, it was tame next to what we had already seen. Really, it was expected. So we sat there for another half hour and talked while men killed each other across the street.

Then, of course, the Kalif invaded during the night of the opera performance, and we suddenly had a new topic to write about.

KALIF’S MEN SURROUND CITY:

OCCUPATION, PHASE II? ONE MAN’S OPINION

D.J. Shriek

The Kalif has in the past given us telephones, guns, and a variety of delicious cheeses. Now, it appears that the current Kalif wishes to give us two things we already have in abundance: bombs and war.

Clearly, the Kalif has forgotten the essential lessons of history. During the first Occupation, before the Silence, the citizens of Ambergris set aside their petty squabbles long enough to thoroughly demoralize and defeat the Western Menace.

Now the Kalif has returned, bombarding the city with mortar fire from the outskirts. Despite a brief foray into Ambergris, apparently for the sole purpose of ruining our enjoyment of a humble but entertaining opera, the Kalif seems generally reluctant to send his troops into our streets. Apparently, he believes he will not need to enter Ambergris, that we will simply capitulate like some Stockton ne’er-do-well.