Shriek: An Afterword

“Yes, well, Duncan, it’s been a long night,” I started to say, but then his eyes rolled up in their sockets and he fell to the soft floor, dead asleep. I had to drag him to the couch.

There he remained for two days. I took time off from my job at an art gallery to watch over him. I went out only for food and to buy him new clothes. He slept peacefully, except for five or six times when he slipped into a nightmare that made him twitch, convulse, cry out in a strange language that sounded like birdsong. I remember staring down at his pale face and thinking that he resembled in texture and in color nothing more or less than a mushroom.

Duncan had no believable explanation for his enfeebled state when he finally awoke on the third morning. As I fed him toast and marmalade at the kitchen table, I tried to get some sense of what he might have endured in the six months since I had last seen him. Although I had swept away the remains of the mushrooms, their presence haunted us.

Elusiveness, vagueness, as if a counterpoint to the terrible precision of his writing, had apparently become Duncan’s watchwords. I had never known him to be talkative, but after that morning, his terseness began to take on the inventiveness of an art form. I had to pull information out of him. {I was trying to protect you. Clearly, you still don’t believe that, but I will give you this: you’re right that I should have found a way to tell you.}

“Where have you been?” I asked him.

He shrugged, pulled the blanket closer around him. “Here and there. Mostly there,” and he giggled, only trailing off when he realized he had lapsed into hysteria.

“Was it because of the Truffidian ban?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, no, no. That silliness?” He raised his head to stare at me. His gaze was dark and humorless. “No. Not because of the ban. They never published my picture in the newspapers and broadsheets. No Truffidian outside of Morrow knows what I look like. No, not the ban. I was doing research for my next few books.” He rolled his eyes. “This will probably all go to waste.”

“Did you only go out at night?” I asked. “You’re as pale as I’ve ever seen you.”

He would not meet my gaze. He wrenched himself out of the chair and walked to the window, hands in his pockets. “It was a kind of night,” he said.

“Why can’t you just tell me?”

He grinned. “If you must know, I’ve been with Red Martigan and Aquelus, Manzikert and Samuel Tonsure.” A thin smile, staring out the window at some unnamable something.

A string of names almost as impenetrable as Sabon’s necklace of human beads, but I did recognize the names Manzikert I and Tonsure. I knew Duncan had continued to study Tonsure’s journal.

“I found,” Duncan said in a monotone, as if in a trance, “something in Tonsure’s journal that others did not, because they were not looking for it….”

Here I mix my memories of the conversation with a transcript of the account found in my brother’s journal, which I am lucky enough to have in a trunk by my side along with several other things of Duncan’s. {It’s something of a shock to find you rifling through my papers and notebooks. Usually, it takes a person years to develop the nerve to attempt outright theft. For a moment, I was upset, even outraged. But, really, Janice, I’d rather you quote me than paraphrase, since the meaning becomes distorted otherwise.}

I found something in Tonsure’s journal that others did not, because they were not looking for it. Everyone else—historians, scholars, amateurs—read it as a historical account, as a primary source to a time long past, or as the journal of a man passing over into madness. They wanted insight into the life of Tonsure’s captor, Manzikert I. They wanted insight into the underground land of the gray caps. But although the journal can provide that insight, it is also another thing entirely. I only noticed what was hidden because I had become so accustomed to staring for hours at the maps and diagrams on the walls of my rooms at the Institute. I fell asleep to their patterns. I dreamed about their patterns. I woke up to their patterns.

When I finally began to read Tonsure’s journal, I was alive with patterns and destinations. As I read, I began to feel restless, irritable. I began to feel that the book contained another level, another purpose. Something that I could catch only flashes of from a copy of the journal, but which might be as clear as glass or a reflecting mirror in the original.

As I reached the end of the journal—the pages and pages of Truffidian religious ritual that seem intended to cover a rising despair at being trapped belowground—I became convinced that the journal formed a puzzle, written in a kind of code, the code weakened, diluted, only hinted at, by the uniform color of the ink in the copies, the dull sterility of set type.

The mystery ate at me, even as I worked on On the Refraction of Light in a Prison, especially because one of the footnotes added to The Refraction of Light in a Prison by the editor of my edition contains a sentence I long ago memorized: “Where the eastern approaches of the Kalif’s empire fade into the mountains no man can conquer, the ruined fortress of Zamilon keeps watch over time and the stars. Within the fortress, humbled by the holes in its ancient walls, Truffidian monks guard the last true page of Tonsure’s famous journal.”

That the love of a woman might one day become as mysterious to Duncan as a ruined fortress, that he could one day find the flesh more inexplicable than stone, must have come as a shock.

After the discovery, my curiosity became unbearable. I could not fight against it. As soon as I graduated, I began to make plans to visit Zamilon. These plans, in hindsight, were pathetically incomplete and childish, but, worse, I didn’t even follow the plans when I finally made the journey.

One night, as I stared at the maps on my walls, the pressure grew too great—I leapt out of bed, put on my clothes, took my advance money from Frankwrithe & Lewden from the dresser, peeled a map of the eastern edge of the Kalif’s empire from the wall, and dashed out into the night.

Without a thought for my peace of mind, or our mother’s. Typical. How many times should we have to forgive Duncan just because he was always the eccentric genius in the family? {Surely this doesn’t reflect your feelings now, but only your emotions at the time? Not with everything you’ve seen since? I refuse to defend myself on this count, especially since we would have need to forgive you many times over in the years to come.}

The wanderings and mishaps of the next two months are too strangely humorous for me to bother relating, but suffice it to say that my map was faulty, my funds inadequate. I spent as many days earning money as traveling to my destination. I became acquainted with a dozen different forms of transportation, each with its own drawbacks: mule, mule-drawn cart, mule-powered rolling barge, leaky canoe, the rare smoke-spitting, back-farting motored vehicle, and my own two slogging feet. I starved. I almost died from lack of water. Once, when I had had the good fortune to earn some money as a scribe for an illiterate local judge, I was robbed within minutes of leaving the accursed town. I survived a mudslide and a hailstorm. My feet became thick, insensate slabs. My senses sharpened, until I could hear the stirrings of a fly on a branch a hundred feet away. In short, in every way I became more attuned to the details of my own survival.