Shriek: An Afterword

Duncan was forgotten, except for Sabon’s continued cruel resurrections. Bonmot died—in the long view of things, one moment he was there and the next he was not—much to my ever-growing sadness. I would sit at the old stone bench with my sandwich at lunchtime and try to conjure up the image of those wonderful conversations, that gravel voice, but it was never the same. Memory may be all we have, but it’s a poor substitute for flesh and blood.

And still, even as he seemed to make little progress regarding his theories, Duncan was changing, becoming other, the process always ongoing. He never recovered fully from Sabon {or AFTOIS, for that matter}, rarely expressed interest in other women, never took enough of a break from his work to notice them, really. Sometimes, Duncan later confessed to me, he would still haunt Sabon from the shadows outside her current house, or her current lover’s house. {I went a little crazy at times. Late in the game, I set traps for Mary in the AFTOIS newsletter, using Lacond’s name for crazy theories that I thought she would be forced to refute, wasting her energy and, at the same time, unknowingly engaging me in a kind of dialogue. It never happened, to my knowledge.} Between his obsession and my tour guide job, we were a veritable team of stalkers, me during the day, him at night. {The only thing that comforted me: she never married. Surely that meant something?}

Somewhere along the way—I don’t know exactly when—we grew old, Duncan and I. Old and yet defiant; if not wise, then wizened, at least. Exactly as we had always been, only more so. No one makes it out.

Even as we stayed the same, the city changed again and again, as it always would, its grime-smeared head, its soiled towers, its debauched calls to prayer the same, and yet always it changed. I grew to love and appreciate it more than I ever had before. It was all I knew, and I knew it almost too well by now. {Yet neither of us ever found out if it loved us back.}

Then, some four or five years ago, the Shift began to affect Ambergris, disrupting the flux and flow of the city. All became unpredictable, save for one constant: as once it had become colder, now the city seethed with heat, even in the winter and spring. With this heat has come the rain, sliding down in oily sheets, or mumbling to itself in little gusts and flurries, or dissipating into a fine gray mist.

In a Broadsheet article Duncan cut out and stuck into his journal, the strangeness of the rain is remarked upon in detail:

This rain behaves oddly sometimes. It forms funnels in the sky. It falls one way on the left side of Albumuth Boulevard and at a different angle on the right side of Albumuth Boulevard. It delivers a puzzling bounty: fish and tiny squid and crabs that are not native here. They lie struggling in piles of seaweed as alien to the city as we are to them while crowds form around them, or do not; many among us try to ignore such happenings.

Over the River Moth, the rain behaves as if with a conscious will, for there it will sometimes form columns on two sides with no rain between, and the air there, as one eyewitness put it, “turns to darkness with a weight and smell unlike the rest of the sky.” {A door, Janice.}

With the rain has come, again, as in the old days, a proliferation of fungus, so that the business of mushroom culling and cleaning is once again very profitable. And yet the gray caps have become absent even during the deep night.

That no one knows what these signs mean may be more troublesome than the signs themselves.

Even House Hoegbotton, in the past three years, has looked askance at the weather, seemed oddly humbled by an enemy it can neither predict nor defeat.

With the heat and rain have come the agents of House Frankwrithe & Lewden once again, infiltrating Ambergris, although this time with no discernible gray cap support. And yet, with murder on the rise and rumors of war constant now, our nerves have once again become as frayed as they were on the eve of conflict so many years ago.

None of this has helped the tourist trade. The number of people attending my increasingly rote tours has dropped off. Incidents such as having to walk around a three-foot crimson mushroom suddenly erupting from the pavement near their feet, or ducking a torrent of tiny silver fish delivered by a thunderstorm, has positive novelty value to only a select few.

I know that even these simple statements of fact about the Shift will outrage some readers, most of them Nativists. To them, there has been no Shift. To them, the continued “strange-ification of the city,” as Duncan once put it, has no pattern to it, no rhythm or cause. Some still deny anything odd is happening at all, pitiable fools. I suppose, in our usual way, even those amongst us who admit to the Shift have begun to become accustomed to it. {We shouldn’t become accustomed to anything anymore. We are beginning to live in our own future, and it should feel strange.}

Perhaps this will make it more personal, more real: at the beginning of the symptoms of the Shift, James Lacond fell ill. When I say he fell ill, I mean that his fungal disease finally overwhelmed him, as it had sometimes threatened to overwhelm Duncan. {Alas, he hadn’t traveled far enough underground, or for long enough. Which is worse than going too far. I told him more than once that he needed to experience more, to know more, inside his body, to survive it. He refused the advice.} He was forced to retire to a back room in his own offices while Duncan ran everything in his name, instead of just part of it. After a while, he couldn’t hold on any longer and almost literally faded away.

{No one knew how ill he was until after he passed away. Janice, you should have visited him toward the end. I was there every day, hunched over a chair beside his fungus-riddled bed, trying to pry an intelligible word from between the rotted teeth of the poor feeble wreck, to no avail. “Hmmmm bwatchee thoroughgard stinmarta,” he would say to me with the perfect clarity of those beyond hope. I would nod wisely and continue to work on my own diatribes against Nativism and all the other dangerously deluded theories.

{He smelled of the rum I gave him to soothe his agony. He smelled musty, like rooms not opened to the air since the Silence. It’s true I loved him dearly and I helped him as best I could, but you could never say he was a substitute for Bonmot—that would be unfair to both of them. More correctly, when I looked at him, I saw a mirror of my own future self: gray-bearded, addlepated, a half-century’s study of history dribbling out of my brain through a mum-mumbling mouth. I cannot say it comforted me much, and yet how much more tenderly I cared for him because of it!

{There might have been no coherence to his speech, but Lacond could still write at times. Once, he drew me close and showed me some words scribbled on a scrap of paper: “I am concerned that disintegration and ensuing death will blunt my ability to continue to coherently put forth my usual arguments with the customary vigor.” It made me laugh, and that made Lacond smile, as much as he was able. I nodded, to let him know I understood. When he did pass away and I assumed the editorship of the AFTOIS newsletter, it seemed natural to continue, to dig up an almost endless series of “newly discovered” papers by the old rogue, as if he still mumbled nothing-nothing-nothing in my ear.