Shriek: An Afterword

3

The closer I get to the end, the closer I get to the beginning. Memories waft up out of the ether, out of nothing. They attach themselves to me like the green light, like the fungi that continue to colonize my typewriter. I had to stop for a while—my fingers ached and, even after all that I have seen, the fungi unnerved me. I spent the time flexing and unflexing my fingers, pacing back and forth. I also spent it going through a box of my father’s old papers—nothing I haven’t read through a hundred times before. Drafts of history essays, letters to colleagues, perhaps even the letter he received from the Kalif’s Court, if I dig deep enough. On top, Duncan had placed the dried-up starfish, its skeleton brittle with age. {I kept it there as a reminder to myself. After your letter to me—which, while reading this account, I sometimes think was written by an entirely different side of your personality—I wanted to remember that no matter how isolated I might feel, separated from others by secret knowledge, I was still connected. It didn’t help much, though—it reminded me how different I had become.}

I’ve put the starfish on my table here, as something akin to a good luck charm. Perhaps it will help me finish.

Next to the starfish, I found sea shells, dull and chipped—the last remnants of our most noteworthy vacation. I was ten, Duncan six. Our dad had gone on sabbatical from his position as a history professor at the Porfal College of History and Advanced Theory {or as Dad called it, “Poor Paul’s Collage of Hysterics and Advanced Decay”} in Stockton. I cannot recall ever taking a weeklong vacation before or since. Dad had bought berths on a river barge for us. Mom was relaxed, happy. Dad was as calm and at peace as I’ve ever seen him.

I remember one habit he picked up during that vacation. He liked to take a stalk of sedge weed and hold it in his mouth like a pipe, gnawing on the end, a wide-brimmed hat shading his face. We’d sit in the deck chairs and read, or watch the countryside go by.

In those days, the west side of the River Moth was almost entirely uninhabited. We saw strange animals come to the water’s edge to drink; they would look at us with curiosity, but no fear. Once, we saw odd, short people dressed in outlandish clothes, staring across the water at us with a peculiar intensity. The water formed a mirror in which our images reached out to theirs across the waves—stretched, unreal.

We took the barge down to the Southern Isles, where we spent four days on the beaches. We couldn’t afford to go farther than the northernmost island of Hathern, with its black sand and the melancholy ruins of the long-dead Saphant Empire, but we still had a good time.

Mom refused to go in the water, so she had to put up with Dad splashing water at her. Dad loved to swim—although “bob” or “float” might more accurately describe what he looked like when he took to the waves. Mom loved to watch the sunrises and sunsets from our little rented bungalow. During the day, she would walk along the beach for hours, and always brought back shells and shiny rocks for us. Sometimes Duncan and I went with her, sometimes we stayed with Dad.

At dusk, we sat on a blanket together and Dad would make a fire, cooking fish over the flames. I can’t remember if he bought the fish or caught them. I don’t remember him being much of a fisherman.

Then Dad would lecture us in a teasing way about the mighty Saphant Empire.

Pointing to the black-gray nubs and jagged walls drowning in the sand and sea, suffused with the orange of sunset, he would say, “Those are the result of war. A naval conflict and then the survivors fought on this very beach. There used to be a city here. Now, just what you see. And then…and then!” And then he would find a way to bring pirates and adventures into his history lesson.

I didn’t give his words about war much thought at the time. The ruins were just great rocks to climb on, tidal pools to explore. That men had fought and died there hundreds of years ago seemed too remote from our vacation to be real.

Another time, Dad presented me with a tiny hermit crab in a white coiled shell.

“Don’t hurt it,” he said, “and leave it on the beach when we go.”

“I will,” I said, marveling at the feel of its tiny legs against the skin of my palm.

The sand crunching between my toes; the heat and breeze off the sea, the lights of boats far offshore.

Mom looked after Duncan for most of the trip, because he was young and needed constant attention. {I remember only the vaguest flash of sunlight, the most tenuous thread of a memory of water—it was all too idyllic for me to retain, I suppose.}

It is one of the only times I can recall the full attention of my father upon me. Five years later, he would die. Eight years later, my mother would bring us to Ambergris and the house by the River Moth. Twenty years later, Duncan would feel the first twinge of the fungal colonization occurring within him. Twenty-five years after our long-ago vacation, I would try to kill myself. Thirty years later and the War of the Houses would almost kill us all.

How can such a pleasurable memory as a childhood vacation coexist comfortably with memories of the war? How can the world contain such extremes? I thought about such things as I lay among the bodies in the Truffidian Cathedral. Each question begat another question, so that soon the questions seemed to contain their own answers.

I lay there for a very long time, gazing at nothing and no one while the gray caps rummaged all around me, each syllable of their clicking speech a knife slid between my shoulder blades. I do not know what they were looking for, nor whether they found it. I could hear them rolling bodies over, rifling through the pockets of the dead. Once, a clawing hand brushed against the side of my face. I could feel someone or something looking at me; I refused to look back. I could feel the breath of one of them upon me, smell the spurling tangle of scents that clung to them like their skin: must and mold and funk and dust and a trace of some spice.

And then, finally, the stained glass above me refracted the light of the sun, and it was dawn, and the gray caps were gone, and I was still alive, surrounded by hundreds of the dead, the blood upon them dark and caked.

Stiffly, like an old woman, I propped myself up, struggled to raise myself onto my foot, stared around me at the carnage.

The dead did not look peaceful. The dead did not look planned or purposeful, or at rest, or any other combination of words that might signify comfort or the rule of law. Legs and arms lay at unnatural angles, torn or contorted or dislocated from torsos. Mouths were caught in extremes of pain and fear and surprise. Dried blood and gathering flies. Skin a pale yellow tinged with blue. Great wounds, like vast claws, had cut into chests leaving dull red furrows. A row of heads disembodied. After a while, I had to stop looking. I had to stop myself from looking.