Shriek: An Afterword

“Don’t be,” he said. “Don’t be afraid,” scaring me even more. “It’s a function of diet. It’s a function of disguise. I haven’t changed. I’m still your brother. You are still my sister. All of this will wash away. It’s just the layers added to me the past three months. I need help scraping them off.”

I laughed. “You look like some kind of clown…some kind of mushroom clown.”

He took off his overcoat, let it fall to the floor. “I agree—I look ridiculous.”

“But where have you been? How did this happen?” I asked.

He put a finger to his lips. “I’ll answer your questions if you’ll help me get rid of this second skin. It itches. And it’s dying.”

So I helped him. It was not as simple as having him step out of his clothes, because the mushrooms had eaten through his clothes and attached themselves to his poor pale skin. A madness of mushrooms, mottling his skin—no uniform shape or variety or size. Some pulsed a strobing pink-blue. Others radiated a dull, deep burgundy. A few hung from his waist like upside-down wineglasses, translucent and hollow, the space inside filled with clusters of tiny button-shaped green-gold nodules that disintegrated at the slightest touch. Textures from rough to smooth to rippled to grainy to slick. Smells—the smells all ran together into an earthy but not unpleasant tang, punctuated by a hint of mint. The mushrooms even made noises if you listened carefully enough—a soft pough as they released spores, an intermittent whine when left alone, a pop as they became ghosts through my rough relocations.

“Remember BDD when you three had to wash all that mud and filth off of me?” he asked, as we worked with scrubbing implements and towels in the bathroom.

“Of course I do,” I said.

Before Dad Died, BDD, a grim little acronym meant to help us remember when we had been a happy family. If we had arguments or bouts of depression that threatened to get out of control, one of us would remind the others that we had all behaved differently before Dad died. We held BDD time in our heads as a sanctuary whenever our anger, our loss, became too great.

Once, Duncan, his usual mad, exploring, BDD self, had managed to get stuck in a sewer pipe under our block and we had had to pull him out after a frantic half hour searching for the source of his pathetic, echoing voice. Then Mom, Dad, and I spent another three hours forcing the black-gray sludge off of him, finally standing back to observe the miracle we had wrought: a perfectly white Duncan, “probably as clean as he’s ever been,” as Dad observed.

I wonder, Mary, if Duncan ever shared memories like this with you, while the lights flickered outside his apartment windows?

“Remember BDD….”

Duncan’s remark made me laugh, and the task at hand no longer seemed so strange. I was just helping clean up Duncan after another BDD exploration mishap, while Duncan looked on half in relief, half in dismay, as the badges of his newly gained experience fell away, revealed as transitory. {I was losing sensation with each new layer peeled off—reduced to relying on old senses. I knew it had to be done, but I felt as if I were going blind, becoming deaf, losing my sense of smell.}

Me, I felt as if I were destroying a vast city, a community of souls. On one level, I lived with the vague sense of guilt every Ambergrisian feels who can trace their family’s history back to the founding of the city. Even for me, even come late to Ambergris, a mushroom signifies the genocide practiced by our forefathers against the gray caps, but also the Silence and our own corresponding loss. Can anyone not from Ambergris, not living here, understand the fear, loss, guilt, each of us feels when we eradicate mushrooms from the outside of our apartments, houses, public buildings? The exact amount of each emotion in the pressure of my finger and thumb as I pulled them from their suction cup grip on Duncan’s skin.

It took five hours, until my fingertips were red and my back ached. Duncan looked not only exhausted but diminished by the ordeal. We had moved back into the living room, and there we sat, surrounded by the remains of a thousand mushrooms. It could have been a typical family scene—the aftermath of a haircut—except that Duncan had left behind something more profound than his hair. Already the red brightness had begun to fade from his eyes, his hands less rubbery, the half-moons of his fingernails light purple.

I had opened a window to get the smell of mushrooms out and now, by the wet, glistening outdoor lamps, I could see the beginning of a vast, almost invisible spore migration from the broken remains at our feet, from the burgundy bell-shaped fungi, from the inverted wineglasses, from the yellow-green nodules. Like ghosts, like spirits, a million tiny bodies in a thousand intricate shapes, like terrestrial jellyfish—oh what am I trying to say so badly except that they were gorgeous, as they fled out the window to be taken by the wind. In the faint light. Soundlessly. Like souls.

In that moment, almost in tears from the combination of beauty, exhaustion, and fear of the unknown, I think I caught a glimpse of what Duncan saw; of what had created the ecstasy I had seen in him when he had stumbled into my apartment five hours before. A hundred, a thousand years before. {I tried so hard to capture this for Mary, and yet I couldn’t make her see it. Maybe that is where the failure occurred, and maybe it is my failure. Not all experiences are universal, even if you’re in the same room when something miraculous occurs. I suppose it was too much to ask that she take it on faith?}

“Look,” I said, pointing to the spores.

“I know,” my brother said. “I know, Janice.”

Such regret in that voice, mixed with a last, lingering joy.

“I’m less than I was, but I’ve captured it all here.” He tapped his head, which still bore the scars of its invaders in the vague echo of color, in the scrubbed redness of it. “The spores are part of the record. They will float back to where I’ve been, navigating by wind and rain and by ways we cannot imagine, and they will report to the gray caps. Who I was. Where I was. What I did. It will make it all the more dangerous next time.”

I sat upright in my chair. Next time? He stood there, across the room from me, dressed in the rags of his picked-apart clothes, surrounded by the wreckage of fungal life, and he might as well have been halfway across the city. I didn’t understand him. I probably never would. {I didn’t need you to understand what I myself saw but dimly. I wanted you to see—and you saw more than most, even then. Mary saw it all, by the end, and she stitched her eyes shut, stopped up her ears, taped her mouth.}