Shriek An Afterword

WE DON’T SEE many things ahead of time. We usually only avoid disaster at the last second, pull back from the abyss by luck or fate or blind stupid chance. Exactly nine years before Mary Sabon began to destroy my brother like an old house torn down brick by brick, Duncan sought me out at my new Gallery of Hidden Fascinations. How he found me there, I still don’t know (a mundane story, involving broadsheet adverts and luck). I had just bought the gallery – a narrow place off the Albumuth Boulevard (I remember when it was a sweet shop that also sold mood-altering mushrooms – a much more honest trade) – with the help of a merchant loan against our mother’s property along the River Moth. (That took some persuading!)

Outside, the sky was a blue streaked with gold, the trees once again threatening to release their leaves, turning yellower and yellowest. The smell of burning leaves singed nostrils, but the relief of slightly lower temperatures added a certain spring to the steps of passersby.

Half the proposed gallery lay in boxes around my feet. Paintings were stacked in corners, splashes of colour wincing out from the edges of frames. Piles and piles of papers had swallowed my desk. The smell of turpentine, wood, and glue was wonderful.

I was happy. After years of unhappiness. (It’s easy to think you’d been unhappy for years, but I remember many times you were invigorated, excited, by your art, by your studies. The past isn’t a slab of stone; it’s fragmented and porous.) By now I had given up my dream of a career as a painter. Rejection, rejection, rejection. It had made the part of me that wanted to paint wither away, leaving a more streamlined Janice, a smoother Janice, a less creative Janice. I had decided I would do better as a gallery owner, had not yet realized I was still travelling toward remote regions marked on maps only by terms such as ‘Art Critic’ and ‘Historian’. (You were travelling toward me, Janice. That’s not such a bad thing.) Only later did I come to see my initial investment in the gallery as a form of self-torture: by promoting the works of others I could denigrate my own efforts.

THIS TIME, Duncan had a haunted look about him, the joy of his previous underground adventures stripped away, leaving behind only a gauntness akin to death. The paleness that had taken over his features had blanched away any expression, any life, in his limbs, in his movements. He:

Swayed in the doorway like a tall, ensanguinated ghost, holding the door open with one shaking, febrile arm.

Clothes stained everywhere with spores, reduced to a fine, metallic dust that glittered blackly all around him.

Eyes embedded with black flecks, staring at some nameless vision just beyond me.

Clutched something tightly in his left hand, knuckles pale against the dark coating of spore dust.

He staggered inside, fell to the floor amid the paintings, the curled canvases, the naked frames vainglorious with the vision of the wall behind them. The gallery smelt of turpentine, of freshly cut wood, of drying paint. But as Duncan met the floor, or the floor met Duncan, the smells became one smell: the smell of Duncan. A dark green smell brought from deep underground. A subtle interweaving of minerals and flesh and fungus. The smell of old water trickling through stones and earth. The smell of lichen and moss. (Flesh penetrated by fungus, you mean – every pore cross-pollinated, supersaturated. Nothing very subtle about it. The flesh alive and prickly.) The smell, now, of my brother.

I locked the door behind him. I slapped his face until his gaze cleared, and he saw me. With my help, he got to his feet and I took him into the back room. He was so light. He might as well have been a skeleton draped with canvas. I began to cry. His ribs bent against my encircling arm as I gently laid him down against a wall. His clothes were so filthy that I made him take them off and put on a painter’s smock.

I forced bread and cheese on him. He didn’t want it at first. I had to tear the bread into small pieces and hold his mouth open. I had to make him close his mouth. ‘Swallow.’ He had no choice. He couldn’t fight me – he was too weak. Or I was, for once, too strong.

Eventually, he took the bread from my hands, began to eat on his own. Still he said nothing, staring at me with eyes white against the dust-stippled darkness of his forehead and jutting cheekbones.

‘When you are ready, speak,’ I said. ‘You are not leaving here until you tell me exactly what happened. You are not leaving here until I know why. Why, Duncan? What happened to you?’ I couldn’t keep the anguish from my voice.

Duncan smiled up at me. A drunkard’s smile. A skeleton’s smile. My brother’s smile, as laconic as ever.

‘Same old sister,’ he said. ‘I knew I could count on you. To half kill me trying to feed me.’ (To help me. Who else would help me back then?)

He smiled again, but he wouldn’t look at me. For a long time, he said nothing as I watched him.

Then the flood. He spoke and spoke and spoke – rambling, coherent, fragmented, clever. I began to grow afraid for him. All these words. There was already less than nothing inside of him. I could see that. When the last words had left his mouth, would even the canvas of his skin flap away free, the filigree of his bones disintegrate into dust? Slowly, I managed to hear the words and forget the condition of the one who spoke them. Forget that he was my brother.

He had gone deeper into the underground this time, but the research had gone badly. He kept interspersing his account with mutterings that he would ‘never do it again’. And, ‘If I stay on the surface, I’m safe. I should be safe.’ At the time, I thought he meant staying physically above ground, but now I’m not so sure. (Be sure.) I wonder if he also meant the surface of his mind. That if he could simply restrain himself from the divergent thinking, the untoward analysis, that had marked some of his previous books, he might once again be a published writer. (Who knows? I might have given up on myself if forced to listen to my own ravings. I might have even become a respectable citizen.)

As he spoke, I realized I wasn’t ready for his revelations. I had made a mistake – I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. I needed distance from this shivering, shuddering wreck of a man. He clutched to the edges of the smock I had given him like a corpse curling its fingers around a coffin’s lining. The look on his face made me think of our father dying in the summer grass. It frightened me. I tried to put boundaries on the conversation.

He grimaced, but the expression made him look more human, and his gaze turned inward, the horrors reflected there no longer trying to get out.

‘Stillborn,’ he gasped, as if breaking to the surface after being held down in black water. He lurched to his feet, fell back down again. Every surface he touched became covered in fine black powder. ‘Stillborn,’ he repeated. ‘Or I killed it. I don’t know which. Maybe I’m a murderer. I was . . . I was halfway through. On fire with ancient texts. Bloated with the knowledge in them. Didn’t think I needed first-hand experience to write the book. Such a web of words, Janice. I have never used so many words. I used so many there weren’t any left to write with. And yet, I still had this fear deep in my skull. I couldn’t get it out.’ (I still can’t get it out of my head, sometimes. Writing a book and going underground are so similar. That fear of the unknown never really goes away. But, after a while, it becomes a perverse comfort.)

He relinquished his grasp on the object in his hand, which I had almost forgotten.

It rolled across the floor. We both stared at it, he as astonished as I. A honey-and-parchment-coloured ball. Of flesh? Of tissue? Of stone?

He looked up at me. ‘I remember now. It needs moisture. If it dries, it dies. Cracks form in its skin. It’s curled into a ball to preserve a pearl of moisture between its cilia.’

He grinned in recognition of my tone. ‘Before Dad died,’ he said, ‘you would have found this creature a wonderful mystery. You would have followed me out into the woods and we would have dug up fire-red salamanders just to see their eyes glow in the dark.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No. There was no time when I would have found this thing a wonderful mystery. Where did you find it?’

His smirk, the way it ate up his face, the way it accentuated the suddenly taut bones in his neck, made the flesh around his mouth a vassal to his mirth, sickened me.

I ignored the question, turned away, said, ‘I have a canteen of water in the front, near my desk. But keep talking. Keep telling me about your book.’

He frowned as I walked past him into the main room of the gallery. From behind me, his disembodied voice rose up, quavered, continued. A thrush caught in a hunter’s snare, flapping this way and that, ever more entangled and near its death. His smell had coated the entire gallery. In a sense, I was as close to him searching for the canteen as if I stood beside him. Beyond the gallery windows lay the real world, composed of unnaturally bright colours and shoppers walking briskly by.

‘So I never finished it, Janice. What do you think of that? I couldn’t. Wouldn’t. I wrote and wrote. I wrote with the energy of ten men each evening. All the texts I consulted interlocked under my dexterous manipulations. It all made such perfect sense . . . and then I began to panic. Each word, I realized, had been leading me further and further away from the central mystery. Every sentence left a false trail. Every paragraph formed another wall between me and my thesis. Soon, I stopped writing. It had all been going so well. How could it get so bad so quickly?

‘I soon found out. I backtracked through the abyss of words, searching for a flaw, a fissure, a crack in the foundation. Perhaps some paragraph had turned traitor and would reveal itself. Only it wasn’t a paragraph. It was a single word, five pages from the end of my silly scribblings, in a sentence of no particular importance. Just a single word. I know the sentence by heart, because I’ve repeated it to myself over and over again. It’s all that’s left of my book. Do you want to hear it?’

‘Yes,’ I said, although I wasn’t sure. I was still searching for the canteen under all the canvases.

‘Here it is: “But surely, if Tonsure had not known the truth then, he knew it after travelling underground.” The word was “truth”, and I could not get past the truth. The truth stank of the underground, buried under dead leaves and hidden in cold, dry, dark caverns. The truth had little to do with the surface of things.

‘From that word, in that context, on that page, written in my nearly illegible hand, my master work, my beautiful, marvellous book unravelled syllable by syllable. I began by crossing out words that did not belong in the sentence. Then I began to delete words by rules as illegitimate and illogical as the gray caps themselves. Until after a week, I woke up one morning, determined to continue my surgical editing of the manuscript – only to find that not even the original sentence had been spared: all that remained of my once-proud manuscript was that single word: “truth”. And, truth, my dear sister, was not a big enough word to constitute an entire book – at least not to me.’ (Or my publishers, come to think of it. If there had been any publishers.)

I had found the canteen. I came back into the room and handed it to him. ‘You should drink some. Rinse out the lie you’ve just told.’

He snorted, took the canteen, raised it to his lips, and, drinking from it, kissed it as seriously as he would a lover.

‘Perhaps it is in part a metaphor,’ he said, ‘but it is still, ironically enough, the truth.’

‘Don’t speak in metaphors, then. How do you tell truth from lies otherwise?’

‘You mean literarily, Duncan. Except you’ve already been taken literarily – they’ve all ravished you and gone on to the next victim.’

‘Is that why you brought this horrible rolled-up ball of an animal with you? Metaphor become flesh?’

‘No. I forgot I had it. Now that I’ve brought it here, I can’t let it die.’ (Actually, Janice, I did bring it with me on purpose. I had just forgotten the purpose.)

He looked up at me, the expression on his face taking me back to all of his foolish explorations as a child. ‘Watch now! Watch carefully!’

Slowly, he poured water over the golden ball. After a moment the gold colour blushed into a haze of purple-yellow-blue-green, which then returned to gold, but a more vibrant shade of gold that flashed in the dim light. Duncan poured more water over the creature. It seemed to crack apart, fissures erupting across its skin at regular intervals. But no – it was merely opening up, each of its four legs unfurling from the top of the ball, to settle upside down on the floor. Immediately, it leapt up, spun, and landed, cilia down, revealed as a kind of phosphorescent starfish.

Duncan dribbled still more water over it. Each of its four arms shone a different glittering shade – green-blue-yellow-purple – the edges of the blue arm tinged green on one side, yellow on the other.

‘A compass,’ he said. ‘Just one of the many wonders to be found below ground. A living compass. North is blue, so if you turn it like so,’ and he reached over and carefully turned the starfish, ‘the arm shines perfectly blue, facing as it does due north.’

I stared at my ungainly, stacked frames. ‘I’m sick of wonders, Duncan. This is just a colour to me, just a trick. The true wonder is that you’re still alive. No one could have expected that. You suffer what may have been a mental breakdown, go down below, return with a living compass, and expect me to say . . . what? How wonderful that is? How awed I am by it all? No. I’m appalled. I’m horrified. I’m angry. I’ve failed at one career after another. I’m about to open my own gallery. I haven’t seen you in almost ten years, and you shamble in here, a talking skeleton – and you expect me to be impressed by a magic show? Have you seen yourself lately?’

I can’t remember ever being so furious – and out of nowhere, out of almost nothing. My hands shook. My shoulders had become rigid blocks of stone. My throat ached. And I’m not even sure why. (Because you were scared, and because you were my sister, and you loved me. Even when you were mad at me, I was your family.) I almost want to laugh, typing this now. Having seen so many strange things since, having been at peace lying on a floor littered with corpses, having accepted so much strangeness from Duncan, that starfish seems almost mundane in retrospect, and my anger at Duncan self-indulgent.

He scooped up the starfish, held it in his hands. It lay there as contentedly as if in a tidal pool. ‘I don’t expect anything, Janice,’ he said, each word carefully weighed, wrapped, tied with string before leaving his mouth. ‘I have no one else to tell. No one else who saw me the last time. No one else who might possibly believe anything I saw. Starfish or no starfish.’

‘Tell Mom then. Mom would listen. If you speak softly enough, Dad might even pick up a whisper of it. Did you meet him down there?’

He winced, sat back against the wall, next to a leering portrait by a painter named Sonter. The shadows and the sheen of black dust on his skin rendered him almost invisible.

Coated by the darkness, he said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to – I didn’t realize . . . But you know, Janice, you are the only one who won’t think me crazy.’

The starfish had begun to explore the crook of Duncan’s arm. Its rejuvenated cilia shone wetly, a thousand minute moving jewels amongst the windless reeds of his arm hairs.

‘It’s so hard,’ he said. ‘Half of what you see seems like a hallucination, or a dream, even while you’re living it. You are so unsure about what’s real that you take all kinds of stupid risks. As if it can’t hurt you. You float along, like a spore. You sit for days in caverns as large as cities, let the fungi creep up and devour you. The stars that can’t be stars fall in on you in waves. And you sit there. An afternoon in the park. A picnic for one.

‘Things walk by you. Some stop and stare. Some poke you or hit you, and then you have to pretend you’re in a dream, because otherwise you would be so afraid that nothing would stop you from screaming, and you’d keep screaming until they put a stop to you.’

He shivered and rolled over on his side. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ he whined, the starfish on his shoulder a golden glimmer.

‘Ask me in fifty years, Janice. A hundred years. A thousand.’ (It didn’t take that long. Within five years, I began to recognize that my sojourn underground was akin to one more addict’s hit of mushrooms. It took ten years of these adventures for me to realize that I could only react to such journeys, never predict. Always absorbing, but mostly in the physical sense.)

‘I thought I could get it out of me if I talked about it,’ he said. ‘Flush it from my brain, my body. But it’s still in there. It’s still in me.’

Again, he was talking about two things at once, but I could only bear to talk about what I might be able to help him with right then.

‘Duncan,’ I said, ‘we can’t wash it off you this time. I think it’s inside of you, like some kind of poison. Your pores are clogged with black spores. Your skin is . . . different.’

He gasped. Was he crying? ‘I know. I can feel it inside me. It’s trying to change me.’

He laughed without any hint of humour. ‘Are you mad? I can’t talk it out of my skin. I can’t do that.’

I joined him along the wall, moving Sonter’s portrait to the side. The starfish had splayed itself across the side of his neck like an exotic scar.

‘You’re due north,’ I said. ‘Its arm is blue. And you’re right, Duncan. It’s beautiful. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.’

He moved to pull it off, but I caught his arm. ‘No. Don’t. I think it’s feeding on the spores embedded in your skin.’ It left a trail of almost-white skin behind it.

‘You think so?’ His eyes searched mine for something I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to give.

In that moment before he began to really tell me his story, to which all of this had been foolish, prattling preamble – in that moment, I think I loved my brother as much as I ever had in all the years since his birth. His face shone darkly in my doomed gallery, more precious than any painting.

WE LAY SIDE BY SIDE, silent in the semi-darkness of the back room, surrounded by dead paint. The now-reluctant glare from the main room meant the sun had begun to fade from the sky. The starfish flinched, as if touched by the memory of light, as it continued its slow migration toward the top of Duncan’s head.

I could remember afternoons when Duncan and I would sit against the side of the house in Stockton, out of the sun, eating cookies we’d stolen from the kitchen while we talked about school or the nasty neighbour down the street. The quality of light was the same, the way it almost bent around the corner even as it evaporated into dust motes. As if to tell us we were never alone – that even in the stillness, with no wind, our fingers stained by the grass, we are never really outside of time.

Duncan began to talk while I listened without asking questions or making comments. I stared at nothing at all, a great peace come over me. It was cool and dark in that room. The shadows loved us.

But memory is imperfect, incomplete, fickle. It tells us the exact shade of our mother’s blouse the day our father died, but it cannot accurately recall a conversation between siblings decades after that. Thus, I resort, as I already have through most of this Afterword, to a much later journal entry by Duncan – clearly later because it is polluted by the presence of Mary Sabon; so polluted that I could not easily edit her out of it. (You can’t erase the past because you wish it hadn’t happened.)

Does it make any difference now to Duncan who sees it? None. So why not steal his diary entry and spill his innermost thoughts like blood across the page, fling them across the faces of Sabon’s flesh necklace in a fine spackle of retreating life. I’ll let Duncan tell us about his journeys underground. (Do I have a choice? But you’re right – it doesn’t matter any more. I will not edit it, or anything else, out, although I may protest from time to time. I haven’t decided yet if you’re a true historian or one step removed from gossip columnist.)

Tonsure got parts of it right – the contractions of spaces, small to large, and how mysterious perspective becomes after long periods underground. The way the blackness picks up different hues and textures, transformed into anti-colour, an anti-spectrum. The fetid closeness and vastness, the multitude of smells, from the soothing scent of something like mint to the putrid stench of rotting fungi, like a dead animal . . . And yet all my words make of me a liar. I struggle to express myself, and only feel myself moving further from the truth. No wonder Mary thinks me a fool. No wonder she looks at me as if I am much stranger than the strangest thing she has ever seen. I caught a glimpse of her soft white breast when she leaned down to pick up a book. I’d be rougher than nails to her skin. The thought of being close tantalizes and yet makes me sick with my own clumsiness.

That is one thing I prefer about the underground: the loss of self to your environment is almost as profound as orgasm or epiphany, your senses shattered, rippled, as fragmented and wide as the sky. Time releases its meaning. Space is just a subset of time. You cease to become mortal. Your heartbeat is no longer a motion or a moment, but a possibility that may someday arrive, and then pass, only to arrive again. It’s the most frightening loss of control imaginable.

For me it was still different than for Tonsure. He had no real protection, no real defences, until he adapted. At least I had the clues Tonsure left behind. At least I knew how to make myself invisible to them, to lose myself but not become lost. To become as still as death but not dead. Sometimes this meant standing in one place for days. Sometimes it meant constant, manic movement, to emulate the frantic writhing of the cheraticaticals [no known translation].

I found the standing still worse than the walking and running. I could disguise myself from the gray caps, but not from their servants – the spores, the parasites, the tiny mushroom caps, fungi, and lichen. They found me and infiltrated me – I could feel their tendrils, their fleshy-dry-cold-warm pseudopods and cilia and strands slowly sliding up my skin, like a hundred tiny hands. They tried to remake me in their image, with the ironic effect that I was even more deeply masked from the gray caps, and thus spent even more time there, thinking myself safe. If it had been you, Mary, I would not have minded. If you had found me, I would have given up my identity as easily as a wisp of cloud.

I drifted and drifted, often so in a trance that I did not have a single conscious thought for hours. I was a pair of eyes reporting to a brain that had ceased to police, to analyse, the incoming images. It all went through me and past, to some place other. In a way, it was a kind of release. Now, it makes me wonder if I had learned what it feels like to be a tree, or even, strike me dead, a gray cap. But, that cannot be so – the gray caps are always in motion, always thinking. You can see it in their eyes.

Once, as I stood in one of my motionless trances, a gray cap approached me. What did he do? Nothing. He sat in front of me and stared up at me for hours, for days. His eyes reflected the darkness. His eyes had a quality that held all of me entirely, held me against my will. Mary holds me, but not against my will – her eyes and my will are in accord. Her eyes: green, green, green. Greener than Ambergris. Greener than the greenest moss by a trickling stream.

After a time, I realized the gray cap had gone, but it took me weeks to return to the surface of my thoughts, and months to find the real surface, and with it the light. The light! A weak trickle of late-afternoon gloom, presage of sunset, and yet it pierced my vision. I could not open my eyes until after dusk, fumbling my way along the Moth riverbank like some pathetic mole. The light burned into my closed eyelids. It seemed to crack my skin. It tried to kill me and birth me simultaneously. I lay gasping in the mud, writhing, afraid I would burn up.

I took a long sip from the canteen at this point, if only to assuage Duncan’s remembered heat. The starfish now served as an exotic, glowing ear, eclipsing flesh and blood. It hummed a little as it worked. A smell like fresh-cut orange surrounded it.

I offered Duncan the canteen. He used the opportunity to pour more water on his pet. I was about to prod him to continue when he pulled the starfish from his ear, sat up, and said, looking down at the compass as it sucked on his fingers, ‘Do you know the first sentences of the Truffidian Bible?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Do you?’ Our parents had treated religion like a door behind which stood an endless abyss: better not to believe at all, the abyss revealed, than have it be closed over, falsified, prettied up. (And yet, there is something in my skin now, after all these years, that hums of the world in a way that predicts the infinite.)

‘No. Those words are: “The world is broken. God is in exile.” Followed shortly thereafter by, “In the first part of creation, God made light and made vessels for the light. The vessels were too fragile: they broke, and from the broken vessels of the supernal lights, the material world was created.” ’

Something very much like a void opened up inside me. A chill brought gooseflesh to my skin. Each word from my mouth sounded heavier than it should have: ‘And what does the creation of the world have to do with the gray caps?’

He put a finger to his lips. His face in the sour light gave off a faint glow, pale relative to the illumination of the starfish. His skin winked from behind the mushroom dust. He looked so old. Why should he look so old? What did he know?

He said: ‘A machine. A glass. A mirror. A broken machine. A cracked glass. A shattered mirror.’

I remember now the way he used the phrases at his disposal. Clean, fine cuts. Great, slashing cuts. Fractures in the word and the world.

‘Some things should not be articulated. Some words should never be used in exact combination with other words.’ My father said that once, while reading a scathingly negative review of one of his essays. He said it with a tired little sigh, a joke at his expense. His whole body slumped from the words. Weighed down with words, like stones in his pocket.

A machine. A glass. A mirror. Duncan’s journal, with the advantage of distance, described his discovery much more gracefully . . .

But it doesn’t work right. It hasn’t worked right since they built it. A part, a mechanism, a balance – something they don’t quite understand. How can I call it strictly a machine? It is as much organic as metallic, housed in a cavern larger than three Truffidian Cathedrals. You feel it and hear it before you see it: a throbbly hum, a grindful pulse, a sorrowful bellow. The passageways rumble and crackle with the force of it. A hot wind flares out before it. The only entrance leads, after much hard work, to the back of the Machine, where you can see its inner workings. You are struck by the fact of its awful carnality, for they feed it lives as well as fuel. Flesh and metal bond, married by spores, joined by a latticework of polyps and filaments and lazy strands. Wisps and converted moonlight. Sparks and gears. The whole is at first obscured by its own detail, by those elements at eye level: a row of white slug-like bodies curled within the cogs and gears, eyes shut, apparently asleep. Wrinkled and luminous. Lacking all but the most rudimentary stubs of limbs. But with faces identical to those of the gray caps.

You cannot help but look closer. You cannot help but notice two things: that they dream, twitching reflexively in their repose, eyelids flickering with subconscious thought, and that they are not truly curled within the Machine – they are curled into the Machine, meshed with it at a hundred points of contact. The blue-red veins in their arms flow into milk-white fingers, and at the border between skin and air, transformed from vein into silvery wire. Tendrils of wire meet tendrils of flesh, broken up by sections of sharp wheels clotted with scraps of flesh, whining almost soundlessly as they whir in the darkness.

As you stare at the nearest white wrinkled body, you begin to smell the thickness of oil and blood mixed together. As the taste bites into your mouth, you take a step back, and suddenly you feel as if you are falling, the sense of vertigo so intense your arms flail out though you stand on solid ground. Because you realize it isn’t one pale dreamer, or even a row of them, or even five rows of five hundred, but more than five thousand rows of five thousand milk-white dreams, running on into the distance – as far as you care to see – millions of them, caught and transfixed in the back of the Machine. And they are all dreaming and all their eyelids flicker in unison, and all their blood flows into all the wires while a hundred thousand sharpened wheels spin soundlessly.

The hum you hear, that low hum you hear, does not come from the machinery. It does not come from the wheels, the cogs, the wires. The hum emanates from the white bodies. They are humming in their sleep, a slow, even hum as peaceful as they are not – how can I write this, how? except to keep writing and when I’ve stopped never look at this again – while the Machine itself is silent.

The rows blur as you tilt your head to look up, not because the rows are too far away, but because your eyes and your brain have decided that this is too much, this is too much to take in without going mad, that you do not want to comprehend this crushing immensity of vision, that if comprehended completely it will haunt not just your nightmares for the rest of your life – it will form a permanent overlay upon your waking sight, and you will stumble through your days like a blind man, the ghost-vision in your head stronger than reality.

So you return to details – the details right in front of you. The latticework of wires and tubes, where you see a thrush has been placed, intertwined, its broken wings flapping painfully. There, a dragonfly, already dead, brittle and glassy. Bits and pieces of flesh still writhing with the memory of interconnection. Skulls. Yellowing bones. Glossy black vines. Pieces of earth. And holding it all together, like glue, dull red fungus.

But now the detail becomes too detailed, and again your eyes blur, and you decide maybe movement will save you – that perhaps if you move to the other side of the Machine, you will find something different, something that does not call out remorselessly for your surrender. Because if you stand there for another minute, you will enmesh yourself in the Machine. You will climb up into the flesh and metal. You will curl up to something pale and sticky and embrace it. You will relax your body into the space allowed it, your legs released from you in a spray of blood and wire, you smiling as it happens, your eyes already dulled, dreaming some communal dream, your tongue the tongue of the Machine, your mouth humming in another language, your arms weighed down with tendrils of metal, your torso split in half to let out the things that must be let out.

For a long time, you stand on the fissure between sweet acceptance of dissolution and the responsibility of movement, the enticing smell of decay, the ultimate inertia, reaching out to you . . . but, eventually, you move away, with an audible shudder that shakes your bones, almost pulls you apart.

As you hobble around to the side of the Machine, you feel the million eyes of the crumpled, huddled white shapes snap open, for a single second drawn out of their dreams of you.

There is no history, no present. There are only the sides of the Machine. Slick memory of metal, mad with its own brightness, mad with the memory of what it contains. You cling to those sides for support, but make your way past them as quickly as possible. The sides are like the middle of a book – necessary, but quickly read through to get to the end. Already, you try in vain to forget the beginning.

The front of the Machine has a comforting translucent or reflective quality. You will never be able to decide which quality it possesses, although you stand there staring at it for days, ensnared by your own foolish hope for something to negate the horrible negation of the Machine’s innards. Ghosts of images cloud the surface of the Machine and are wiped clean as if by a careless, a meticulous, an impatient painter. A great windswept desert, sluggish with the weight of its own dunes. An ocean, waveless, the tension of its surface broken only by the shadow of clouds above, the water such a perfect blue-green that it hurts your eyes. A mountain range at sunset, distant, ruined towers propped up by the foothills at its flanks. Always flickering into perfection and back into oblivion. Places that if they exist in this world you have never seen or heard mention of their existence. Ever.

You slide into the calm of these scenes, although you cannot forget the white shapes behind the Machine, the eyelids that flicker as these images flicker. Only the Machine knows, and the Machine is damaged. Its thoughts are damaged. Your thoughts are damaged: they run liquid-slow through your brain, even though you wish they would stop.

After several days, your vision strays and unfocuses and you blink slowly, attention drawn to a door at the very bottom of the mirror. The door is as big as the Machine. The door is as small as your fingernail. The distance between you and the door infinite. The distance between you and door is so minute you could reach out and touch it. The door is translucent – the images that flow across the screen sweep across the door as well, so that it is only by the barely perceived hairline fracture of its outline that it can be distinguished beneath the desert, ocean, mountains, that glide across its surface. The door is a mirror, too, you realize, and after so long of not focusing on anything, letting images run through you, you find yourself concentrating on the door and the door alone. In many ways, it is an ordinary door, almost a non-existent door. And yet, staring at it, a wave of fear passes over you. A fear so blinding it paralyses you. It holds you in place. You can feel the pressure of all that meat, all that flesh, all the metal inside the Machine amassed behind that door. It is an unbearable weight at your throat. You are buried in it, in a small box, under an eternity of rock and earth. The worms are singing to you through the rubble. The worms know your name. You cannot think. Your head is full of blood. You dare not breathe.

There is something behind the door.

The door begins to open inward, and something fluid and slow, no longer dreaming, begins to come out from inside, lurching around the edge of the door. You begin to run – to run as far from that place as you possibly can, screaming until your throat fills with the blood in your head, your head now an empty globe while the rest of you drowns in blood. And still it makes no difference, because you are back in that place with the slugs and the skulls and the pale dreamers and the Machine that doesn’t work that doesn’t work that doesn’t work thatdoesn’twork hat doesnwor atdoeswor doeswor doewor dowor door . . .

This entry about a defective ‘machine’ built by the gray caps is the strangest part of my brother’s journal. By far. In its pure physicality I sense a level of discomfort rare for Duncan. As if, from fretful tossing and turning, he woke, reached for pen and notepad from the nightstand, and wrote down his first impressions of a fading nightmare. He appears at first anxious to record the experience, and then less so, the use of second person intended to place the burden of memory on the reader, to purge the images from his head. (It is more that I could not find words to accurately convey what I saw, and so I tried to describe how I felt instead – in a sense presaging Ambergrisians’ reaction to the recent Shift.)

If Duncan had, in the gallery that afternoon, told me about the Machine with the calm madness of that journal entry, a silence would have settled over us. Our conversation would have faded away into a nothingness made alive and aware by his words. Thankfully, Duncan told his story with less than brutal lucidity. He used stilted words in rows of sentences crippled by fits and starts – a vagabond, poorly rehearsed circus of words that could not be taken seriously. He focused on the front of the Machine with its marvellous visions of far-distant places. He dismissed the back of the Machine with a single sentence. Somehow, I could not reconcile his vision with my memory of the spores floating out of my apartment window.

Even so, an element of unreality entered the gallery following his revelation. I remember staring at him and thinking that his face could not be composed of flesh and blood, not with those words coming from his mouth. The light now hid his features, but his hands, lit by the starfish, glowed white.

Pale hands, darkened face, gray speech. ‘I think they care nothing for us one way or the other, Janice. They have only one purpose now. The same purpose they’ve had for centuries.’

‘In your unconfirmed opinion, brother,’ I said, and shivered at the way the mushroom dust on his face still glittered darkly.

He shook his head. Forgetting the starfish in his hands, he stood abruptly. The starfish fell to the floor and began to curl and uncurl in a reflexive imitation of pain. Now Duncan was stooped over me. Now he was crouched beside me. If there were ever a secret he truly wanted to tell me, this was the secret. This was the cause of it. We had returned to the last survivor of his sixth book, alive amid all the suicides: the truth. As my brother saw it.

‘You learned it wrong,’ he told me. ‘That’s not what happened. It didn’t happen like that. I’ve seen so many things, and I’ve thought a lot about what I’ve seen. They disappeared without a single drop of blood left behind. Not a fragment of bone. No. They weren’t killed. At least not directly. Try to imagine a different answer: a sudden miscalculation, a botched experiment, a flaw in the Machine. All those people. All twenty-five thousand of them. The men, the women, the children – they didn’t die. They were moved. The door opened in a way the gray caps didn’t expect, couldn’t expect, and all those people – they were moved by mistake. The Machine took them to someplace else. And, yes, maybe they died, and maybe they died horribly – but my point is, it was all an accident. A mistake. A terrible, pointless blunder.’

He was breathing heavily. Sweat glistened on his arms, where before the black dust had suppressed it.

‘That’s crazy,’ I said. ‘That’s the craziest thing I have ever heard in my life. They’ve killed thousands of people. They’ve done terrible things. And you have the nerve to make apologies for them?!’

‘Would it be easier to accept that they don’t give a damn about us one way or the other if we hadn’t massacred them to build this city? What I think is crazy is that we try to pretend they are just like us. If we had massacred most of the citizens of Morrow, we would expect them to seek revenge. That would be natural, understandable, even acceptable. But what about a people that, when you slaughter hundreds of them, doesn’t even really notice? That doesn’t acknowledge the event? We can’t accept that reaction. That would be incomprehensible. So we tack the idea of “revenge” onto the Silence so we can sleep better at night – because we think, we actually have the nerve to think, that we understand these creatures that live beneath us. And if we think we understand them, if we believe they are like us in their motivations, then we don’t fear them quite as much. If we meet one in an alley, we believe we can talk to it, reason with it, communicate with it. Or if we see one dozing beneath a red flag on the street during the day, we overlook it, we make it part of the scenery, no less colourful or benign than a newly ordained Truffidian priest prancing down Albumuth Boulevard in full regalia.’

‘You’re crazy, Duncan. You’re unwell.’ Anger again burned inside me. The idea of the Silence reduced to a pathetic mistake enraged me. The idea that my own brother might utter the words that made it so seemed a betrayal of an unspoken understanding between us. Before this moment, we could always count on sharing the same world view no matter what happened, even when we saw each other at wider and wider intervals.

‘It’s more complicated than you think,’ he said. ‘They are on a journey as much as we are on a journey. They are trying to get somewhere else – but they can’t. It doesn’t work. With all they can do, with all they are, they still cannot make their mirror, their glass, work properly. Isn’t that sad? Isn’t that kind of sad?’

I slapped him across the face. My hand came away black with spores. He did not move an inch.

‘Sad?’ I said. ‘Sad? Sad is twenty-five-thousand lives snuffed out, not a broken machine. Not a broken machine! What is happening to you that you cannot see that? Regardless of what happened. Not that I believe you. Frankly, I don’t believe you. Why should I? For all I know, you’ve been in the sewers for the past few weeks, living off rats and whatever garbage you could get your hands on. And all you’ve seen is the reflection of your own filthy face in a pool of scummy water!’

‘Ha!’ I said. ‘It was probably grovelling for garbage along with you. It definitely isn’t proof of anything, if that’s what you mean. Why didn’t you bring something substantive, like a gray cap willing to corroborate your statement?’

‘I did bring a gray cap,’ he said. ‘Several, in fact. Although not by choice. Take a good look through the doorway, then out of the front window to the left. I doubt they would corroborate anything, though. I think they’d like to see me dead.’

Reluctantly, I raised myself, my left leg asleep – even less impressed by Duncan’s story, apparently, than I was. I peered around the doorway. Sheathed like swords by the fading light, more sharp shadow than dream, three gray caps stood staring in through the window. They stood so still the cobblestones of the street behind them seemed more alive. The whites of their eyes gleamed like wet paint. They stared at and through me, as if I meant nothing to them. The sight of them sent a convulsive shudder through me. I ducked back, beside Duncan.

A low, humourless laugh from Duncan. ‘Maybe they came for your gallery opening.’

Every human being is a puppet on strings, but the puppet half controls the strings, and the strings do not ascend to some anonymous Maker, but are glistening golden strands that connect one puppet to another. Each strand is sensitive to the vibrations of every other strand. Every vibration sings in not only the puppet’s heart, but in the hearts of many other puppets, so that if you listen carefully, you can hear a low hum as of many hearts singing together . . . When a strand snaps, when it breaks for love, or lack of love, or from hatred, or from pain . . . every other connected strand feels it, and every other connected heart feels it – and since every strand and every heart are, in theory, connected, even if at their most distant limits, this means the effect is universal. All through the darkness where shining strings are the only light, a woundedness occurs. And this hurt affects each strand and each puppet in a different way, because we are all puppets on strings and we all hurt and are hurt. And all the strings shimmer on regardless, and all of our actions, no matter how small, have consequences to other puppets . . . After we are dead, gone to join the darkness between the lines of light, the strands we leave behind still quiver their lost messages into the hearts of those other puppets we met along the way, on our journey from light into not-light. These lost strands are the memories we leave behind . . . Magnify this effect by 25,000 souls and perhaps you can see why I cannot so lightly dismiss what you call a mistake. Each extinguished life leaves a hole in many other lives – a series of small extinguishments that can never be completely forgotten or survived. Each survivor carries a little of that void within them.

This is part of a letter I wrote to Duncan – the only attempt following our conversation to express my feelings about the Silence to him. One day I came home to my apartment early to find Duncan gone on some errand. For some reason I had been thinking about the Silence that day, perhaps because two or three new acquisitions had featured, in the background, the shadowy form of a gray cap. I sat down at my desk and wrote Duncan a letter, which I then placed in his briefcase full of papers, expecting he’d come across it in a week or a month. But he never mentioned it to me. I never knew whether he had read it or not until, going through his things after this final disappearance, I found it in a folder labelled simply ‘Janice’. (I did read it, and I cried. At the time, it made me feel more alone than I had ever felt before. Only later did I find it a comfort.)

Duncan stayed at my apartment for nearly six months. By the fifth month, he appeared to have made a full recovery. We did not often speak of that afternoon when he had told me his theory about the Silence. In a sense, we decided to forget about it, so that it took on the hazy lack of detail specific only to memory. We were allowed that luxury back then. We did not have Sabon’s glittering necklace of flesh to set us straight.

The starfish lasted four months and then died in a strobe of violent light, perhaps deprived of some precious nutrient, or perhaps having attained the end of its natural life cycle. Its bleached skeleton on the mantel carried hardly more significance than a snail’s shell found by the river bank.

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