Shriek: An Afterword

When Duncan showed me pieces of his essay so that I could report to Sirin on his progress, he did so by reading selections of it to me aloud.

“The importance of squid to the Ambergrisian economy cannot be overstated,” he would say.

“Not squid again,” I would say, and he would make a hushing sound.

“Certainly the rebel Stretcher Jones learned to appreciate the freshwater squid, as it sustained his army for long periods of time when they were relegated to the salt marshes on the fringes of the Kalif’s empire,” he would intone.

I would catch Sybel’s eye and he would fold his arms and shake his head, while I nodded in agreement. {How like you to conjure up a dead man to agree with you.}

“The type of cannonballs used by the Kalif during the Occupation proved useful in the creation of walls during the rebuilding efforts.” {A very interesting fact that many a tourist would have found useful, if it had survived Sirin’s sword.}

And on and on. It didn’t sound much like a tourist guide, based on my experience guiding tourists around, but at least Duncan was making progress toward completion. I didn’t think it productive to give him advice until he had finished it.

But, at the end of two months, Duncan bypassed me completely and sent his finished manuscript to Sirin via courier. It was six hundred pages long. Of those six hundred pages, two hundred and fifty pages consisted of long, convoluted footnotes, some of which had their own footnotes and additional annotations. I think he knew what I would have said had I read it first.

Sirin called me up to his office, where we could both contemplate the green-stained pages that lay in an awkward lump on his desk. Some of the pages looked like dried, veined lettuce leaves. Others had the consistency of moist glue. Still others had a dark phosphorescence to them. I could have sworn I could hear a low hum coming from the pile.

“What,” he asked, “am I to make of this?”

“It does look a bit long,” I said.

Sirin spluttered. “The length? Are you looking at the same pages I am? The length is not really the issue. I mean, certainly, the length is an issue, but not the issue. Have you read it?”

“Only the parts Duncan read aloud to me.”

Sirin sat back in his chair, a look of disgust on his face.

“Everything I hate about AFTOIS is in this manuscript, and then some, Janice. Every old wives’ tale, every fear, every paranoia. He even tries to tie your father’s death into his web of gray cap conspiracy theories.”

“Is it really that bad?”

“Janice, not only that, but he attributes any number of insane theories to James Lacond that sound beyond the pale even for that old rogue.”

I didn’t bother to tell him that this was intentional. Duncan had disclosed to me that Lacond’s reputation had been so compromised by his obsessions that he found it useful to let others use his name as cover for those theories that might discredit them, while he wrote under his own pseudonyms. {“James Lacond” became a house name at the newsletter. It got out of control, but it felt good, too. A kind of self-destructive impulse embedded in it, a way of acknowledging our own irrelevance, but reveling in it. It embodied Lacond’s self-deprecating manner. I merely played off of this in the Early History. Ultimately, Sirin ignored it and left it in, much to our delight.}

“You can’t edit it into shape?” I said instead, already knowing the answer.

“No, I can’t,” Sirin said. “I can’t save this.” A pause, a calculating stare. “Why? Do you think you can?”

“Maybe,” I said, knowing the real trick would be to get Duncan to agree to change even one comma of it. {How little you understood me, Janice.}

I met Duncan at the Spore again, in this room. As I approached the door, the flickering light within played a trick. I thought I saw his shadow, impossibly vast, curled around the edges, snap into a more human shape. A gurgle and whine that coalesced into a human voice.

“Janice,” came a throaty greeting, then, “Janice,” in my brother’s true voice.

I hadn’t entered the room yet. He couldn’t have seen me. {Not with my own eyes.}

When I did enter, I found him pale and shrunken, folding and unfolding his arms.

“You’ve come from Sirin,” he said. It was not a question.

“Yes.”

“So you’ve seen…you’ve seen my early history?”

“Yes.”

“And he has read it.”

“Yes.”

He looked up at me, his gaze suddenly desperate.

“Does he like it?”

“Does he like it?” I echoed. “No, Duncan—he loves it. He absolutely loves it. He asked for a travel guide version of an early history of Ambergris and you gave him a tome large enough to contain every Truffidian hymn ever sung—and half of it in footnote form. He absolutely despises it.”

Duncan began to mutter to himself. It was a habit he’d developed in the years after the war. It did not endear him to many people.

“But I’ve finally gotten it right,” he said. “I’ve finally documented all of it.”

Sirin had let me read some of the manuscript in his office. It was riddled through with strange symbols, strange characters. It contained much that was personal to Duncan’s life. It rambled. It made sense only in spurts. I felt, reading it, that several different people had collaborated to write it, only two or three of whom were sane or had consulted with the other writers. {I agree. It was a bad time. I could not control my shape. I could not get my bearings. Keeping myself cooped up in that room, working on the essay, I let other parts of me infiltrate the text with their opinions. From hour to hour, my body changed, making it hard to concentrate on my task. In the end, it all seemed right to me, but there were so many of me then.}

Duncan frowned and looked away {to hide a mushroom blossoming on my cheek}. “So he doesn’t want it.”

“Duncan,” I said, “I’m not sure even AFTOIS will want it. It doesn’t make all that much sense.”

Duncan stood, pasted a smile onto his face, kept to the darkness.

“What about you, Janice?” he said. “You could edit it. You could give Sirin what he wants. At least some of what he wants. And I’ll save the rest for something else.”

This response shocked me. The old Duncan—or at least a Duncan who wasn’t this vulnerable—would have taken his manuscript back from Sirin. But I remember making excuses for Duncan as I stood there. The times had passed us by. Duncan needed money to pay for his tiny apartment and his space at the Spore, so we had to take what we could get. But I never really understood why he didn’t fight for himself more, why he gave in so easily. I’m not sure I ever will. {Because, Janice, I was becoming what I believed in. I was becoming it. And it might have been strange and unknown, never to be recognized, but it meant more to me than words on a page by then.}