THE THEORY

NOW, AS WE COME TO THE CRUCIAL POINT, I SHALL BEGIN TO shed my horrible verbosity as if it were just my human skin. My words, I promise, shall become sure and fleet, as if my feet were different than those a poet knows (this squidologist’s fleeting fancy).45 I realize that I have, for the most part, documented the ridiculous theories of others in hopes of dissuading the reader from holding credence in them. However, I beg for the reader’s indulgence and endurance as I expound upon my own, scientifically-based theory about the King Squid, derived from my ceaseless and exhaustive study of this fascinating creature,⁴⁶ both in its natural state and flatly two-dimensional within the pages of various books. (I have tried to hold back and speak only of these matters at the end, when you might be most receptive to what could, in the light of day that is the beginning of an essay rather than the dusk at the end, appear absurd. But now I am duty-bound to discuss it.)

Preamble is overrated: In short, I believe that the King Squid serves as host for the so-called King Fungus cultivated by the gray caps—the purple wedge of evil that so proliferated across the city’s streets and dwellings prior to the murder we call The Silence. I do not suggest, as some have, that the gray caps’ spores alone cause the violence and disorientation that is the Festival. No, the truth is more insidious and invasive, dear reader. The unique symbiosis between fungi and squid is the reason why we remain in subconscious thrall to the gray caps.⁴⁷ We should not eat the flesh of the squid, for it has been contaminated by the fungus. (I say this having momentarily set aside my mantle as squid advocate.) Or, more specifically, the fungus incubating within the flesh of the squid. The fungus in the squid.

The concept may be difficult for the layperson to understand, or to accept, but I base it on very sound invertebrate intuition. Squidologists, for example, have long wondered how the King Squid attains the raw intensities of red and green that make it burn with light under the stress of hunger or courtship—intensities impossible in any other squid, and strangely akin to the lights seen over landbound Alfar directly prior to the mass murder of The Silence. Not to mention the evidence of intelligence, landward jaunts, and messages sent to squidologists writ in pulsing skin.

As all of these developments have occurred over the past 100 years, I believe it is only recently that the gray caps have fed a special fungus to the squid, using their submerged metal boats. These feedings have increased the squid’s color intensity and its ingenuity, while simultaneously contaminating the meat in such a way as to make Ambergrisians more susceptible to the gray caps’ spores during the (ironically-named) Festival of the Freshwater Squid. From squid steaks to squid stews, we poison ourselves more and more each year. Thus does the Festival violence spread and intensify.⁴⁸

If this monograph serves any useful purpose beyond the mundane, it is to caution against the eating of squid flesh.

A VISION

A vision may have no place in a serious monograph, but having come this far, I am reluctant to stop. This vision comes to me on days when I am fed squid meat. Alas, I cannot, even now, knowing what I know, being what I am, stop eating squid meat, such is the compulsion of the fungus within the squid.

The vision that has reached me in my sleep of recent months is worthy of the likes of Hellatose: I travel across a great chasm of Time that passes as quickly as clouds in a storm and as that time trickles past I see the squid taking more and more to the land, their bewitching eyes hidden by the globes of water, their skin a translucent silver, while, fed on spores and the meat of an animal more intelligent than they know, Ambergris’ true inhabitants grow watery and ill, their flesh moist, sallow, and ever more boneless, until eventually the squid take their place and the current Ambergrisians recede into the waters as if they had never been anything but a fiction, remnants, revenants, in this great city, globules of infected fat and skin—too dazed and decadent to fight back when the gray caps flood the city and we, long-prepped for invasion, scuttle into Ambergris, our arms and tentacles wrapped around buildings and vehicles, the very stones marked by the claw and the sucker, while the humans, pale underclass, pale underbelly, are but servants for our will.

The advance guard and scouting parties have already begun—what are the water-globed squid if not this? I would not be at all surprised if the King Squid were already among us, their spies having perfected the art of camouflage so as to replicate setting and human alike.

There are those idiots here who would escape their fate more literally, and with haste, their means as simple as they are and yet myriad—sneaking into the pill cabinet, sharpening a spoon for their wrists, tearing their clothes up for a noose. You see it here all the time. None of them in death will better understand the mysteries of their lives and I do not envy them this state, even when my own transformation seems so far away.