Shriek An Afterword

CAN A CHILDHOOD MEMORY be misconstrued as starting over? I don’t think so. Not if I tell it this way: the forests outside Stockton remain as real to me as the humid, fungi-laden streets of Ambergris, maybe more so. The dark leaves, the mottled trunks, the deep green shadows reflected on the windows of our house, as of some preternatural presence. All sorts of trees grew in Stockton, but the difference between the staid oaks that lined our street and the misshapen, twisted, coiled welter of tree limbs in the forest seemed profound. It both reassured us and menaced us in our youth: limitless adventure, fear of the unknown.

Our house lay on the forest’s edge. The trees stretched on for hundreds of miles, over hills and curving down through valleys. Various were the forest’s names, from the Western Forest to the Forest of Owls to Farely’s Forest, after the man who had first explored the area. Stockton had been nestled comfortably on its eastern flank for centuries, feeding off the timber, the sap, the animals that took shelter there. Even though Stockton was marginally to the south of Ambergris – across the River Moth from it – Stockton was much more temperate because of the forest. It never got as sweltering as Ambergris.

By the time I had turned thirteen and Duncan was nine, we had made the forest our own. We had colonized our tiny corner of it – cleared paths through it, made shelters from fallen branches, even started a tree house. Dad never enjoyed the outdoors, but sometimes we could persuade him to enter the forest to see our latest building project. Mom had a real fear of the forest – of any dark place, which may have come from growing up in Ambergris. (I never had the sense that growing up in Ambergris had been a trauma for her – she lived there during very calm times – but it is true she never talked about it.)

One day, Duncan decided we should be more ambitious. We had made a crude map of what we knew of the forest, and the great expanse labelled ‘Unknown’ irked him. The forest was one thing that could genuinely be thought of as his, the one area where he did not mimic me, where I followed his lead.

We stood at the end of our most ambitious path. It petered out into bushes and pine needles and the thick trunks of trees, the bark scaly and dark. I breathed in the fresh-stale air, listened to the distant cry of a hawk, and tried to hear the rustlings of mice and rabbits in the underbrush. We were already more than half a mile from our house.

Back then, he was a mischievous sprout, small for his age, and yet he could effortlessly transform into a little thug just by crossing his arms and giving you an exasperated look. Sometimes he’d even give a melodramatic sigh, as if fed up with the unfairness of the world. His shocking blond hair had begun to turn brown. His bright green eyes sometimes seemed too large for his face. He liked to wear long green shirts with brown shorts and sandals. He said it served as a kind of camouflage. (Camouflage or comfort – I don’t remember.) I used to wear the same thing, although, oddly enough, it scandalized Mom when I did it. Dad couldn’t have cared less.

I had become increasingly aware that our parents counted on me to keep watch over Duncan. Ever since he’d been trapped in a tunnel the year before, we’d all become more conscious of Duncan’s reckless curiosity.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘If I did, it wouldn’t be much of an adventure. But there’s something out there, something we need to find.’

His expression was mischievous, yes, but also, somehow, otherworldly. (Otherworldly? I was nine. There was nothing ‘otherworldly’ about me. I liked to belch at the dinner table. I liked to blow bubbles and play with metal soldiers and read books about pirates and talking bears.)

‘But there’s all that bramble,’ I said. ‘It will take ages to clear it.’

‘No,’ he said, with a sudden sternness I found endearing, and a little ridiculous, coming from such a gangly frame. ‘No. We need to go out exploring. No more paths. We don’t need paths.’

But he was already off, tramping through the bramble like some miniature version of the Kalif, determined to claim everything he saw for the Empire. He had always been fast, the kind to set out obstinately for whatever goal beckoned, whatever bright and shiny thing caught his eye. Usually, I had control over him. Usually, he wanted to stay on my good side. But when it came to the forest, our relationship always changed, and he led the way.

So off he dashed into the forest, and I followed, of course. What choice did I have? Not that I hated following him. Sometimes, because of Duncan, I was able to do things I wouldn’t have done otherwise. And, such a relief, when I followed him, the weight of being the eldest lifted from me – that was a rare thing, even BDD.

The forest in that place had a concentrated darkness to it because of the thick underbrush and the way the leaves and needles of the trees diluted the sun’s impact. To find a patch of golden light in the gloom was like finding gold, but those patches only accentuated the surrounding darkness. The smell of rot caused by shadow was a healthy smell – I didn’t mind it; it meant that all of the forest still worked to fulfill its cycle, even down to the smallest insect tunnelling through dead wood. It did not mean what it would come to mean in Ambergris.

Duncan and I fought our way through stickery vines and close-clumped bushes. We felt our way over fallen trees, stopping in places to investigate nests of flame-coloured salamanders and stipplings of rust-red mushrooms. The forest fitted us snugly; we were neither claustrophobic nor free of its influence. The calls of birds grew strange, shrill, and then died away altogether. (As if we had gone through a door to a different place, a different time, Janice. I could not believe, sometimes, while in the forest, that it existed in the same world as our house.)

At times, the ground rose to an incline and we would be trudging, legs lifting for the next step with a grinding effort. The few clearings became less frequent, and then for a long time we walked through a dusk of dark green vegetation under a canopy of trees like black marble columns, illuminated only by the stuttering glimmer of a firefly and the repetitive clicking of some insect. A smell like ashes mixed with hay surrounded us. We had both begun to sweat, despite the coolness of the season, and I could hear even undaunted Duncan breathing heavily. We had come a long way, and I wasn’t sure I could find the route back to our familiar paths. Yet something about this quest, this foolhardy plunge forward, became hypnotic. A part of me could have kept on going hour after hour, with no end in sight, and been satisfied with that uncertainty. (Then you know how I have felt my entire adult life – except that we’re told there is no uncertainty. No one makes it out, we’re told, from birth until our deathbed, in a thousand spoken and unspoken ways. It is just a matter of when and where – and if I could discover the truth in the meantime.)

The sting, the burn, of hard exercise, the doubled excitement and fear of the unknown, kept me going for a long time. But, finally, I reached a point where fear overcame excitement. (You mean common sense overcame excitement.)

‘Duncan!’ I said finally, to his back. ‘We have to stop. We need to find our way home.’

He turned then, his hand on a tree trunk for support – a shadow framed by a greater gloom – and I’ll never forget what he said. He said, ‘There is no way to go but forward, Janice. If we go forward, we will find our way back.’

Duncan shook his head. ‘I’m not lost. I know where we are. We’re not there yet. I know something important lies ahead of us. I know it.’

‘Duncan,’ I said, ‘you’re wearing sandals. Your feet must be pretty badly cut up by now.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m fine.’ (I wasn’t fine. The brambles had lacerated my feet, but I’d decided to block out that discomfort because it was unimportant.)

‘Yes, more forest,’ I said. ‘It goes on for hundreds of miles.’ I thought about whether I had the strength to carry a kicking, struggling Duncan all the way back to the house. Probably not.

I looked up, the long trunks of trees reaching toward a kaleidoscope of wheeling, dimly light-spackled upper branches, amid a welter of leaves. In those few places where the light was right, I could see, floating, spore and dust and strands of cobweb. Even the air between the trees was thick with the decay of life.

‘Trust me,’ Duncan said, and grinned. He headed off again, at such a speed that I had no choice but to follow him. In the shadows, my brother’s thin, wiry frame resembled more the thick, muscular body of a man. Was there any point at which I could convince him to stop, or would he stop on his own?

Another half-hour or so – just as I could no longer identify our direction, so too I had begun to lose my sense of time – and a thick, suffocating panic had begun to overcome me. We were lost. We would never make it home. (You should have trusted me. You will need to trust me.)

But Duncan kept walking forward, into the unknown, the thick loam of the forest floor rising at times to his ankles.

Then, to my relief, the undergrowth thinned, the trees became larger but spread further apart. Soon, we could walk unimpeded, over a velvety compost of earth covered with moist leaves and pine needles. A smell arose from the ground, a rich smell, almost like coffee or muted mint. I heard again the hawk that had been wheeling overhead earlier, and an owl in the murk above us.

Duncan stopped for me then. He must have known how tired and thirsty I was, because he took my hand in his, and smiled as he said, ‘I think we are almost there. I think we almost are.’

We had reached the heart – or a heart – of the forest. We had reached a place that in a storm would be called the eye. The light that shone through from above did so in shafts as thin as the green fractures of light I can see from the corner of my eye as I type up this account. And in those shafts, the dust motes floated yet remained perfectly still. Now I heard no sound but the pad of our feet against the earth.

Duncan stopped. I was so used to hurrying to keep up that I almost bumped into him.

Made of solid gray stone, fissured, splashed with light, overgrown with an emerald-and-crimson lichen, the idol had a face with large, wide eyes, a tiny nose, and a solemn mouth. The statue could not have been taller than three or four feet.

We walked closer, in an effortless glide, so enraptured by this vision that we forgot the ache in our legs.

Iridescent beetles had woven themselves into the lichen beads of its smile, some flying around the object, their heavy bodies drooping below their tiny wings. Other insects had hidden in the fissures of the stone. What looked like a wren’s nest decorated part of the top of the head. A whole miniature world had grown up around it. It was clearly the work of one of the native tribes that had fled into the interior when our ancestors had built Stockton and claimed the land around it. This much I knew from school.

Duncan smiled as he turned to me. ‘I didn’t. I just knew there had to be something, and if we kept looking long enough, we’d find it.’

At the time, while we stood there and drank in the odd beauty of the statue, and even as Duncan unerringly found our way home, and even after Mom and Dad, waiting in the backyard as the sun disappeared over the tree line, expressed their anger and disappointment at our ‘irresponsibility’ – especially mine – I never once thought about whether Duncan might be crazy rather than lucky, touched rather than decisive. I just followed him. (Janice, I lied to you, just a little. It’s true I didn’t know exactly where to find the statue, but I had already heard about it from one of the older students at our school. He’d given me enough information for me to get a fairly good idea of where to go. So it wasn’t preternatural on my part – it was based on a shred, a scrap, of information, as are all my wanderings.)

JUST AS DUNCAN pushed me and himself further than was sane that day, so too Duncan pushed Blythe Academy. It was not only the impending matter of Mary Sabon – it was the clandestine way in which Duncan used the Academy to further his primary lifelong interest: the gray caps and their plans.

I’ve no inkling about Duncan’s ability to teach (thanks a lot). I never sat in on his classes. I never even asked him much about the teaching. I was too busy. But I do know he discovered that he enjoyed ‘drawing back the veil of incomprehension’ as he once put it (jokingly). The act of lecturing exercised intellectual muscles long dormant and also exorcised the demons of self-censorship by letting Duncan speak, his words no longer filtered through his fear of the reading public. (Not to worry – I never had a real reading public, or I’d have continued to find publication somewhere. But, yes, I was fearful that I might one day develop one. Just imagine – someone actually reading those thick slabs of paper I spent years putting together.) He could entertain and educate while introducing his charges to elements of the mysterious he hoped might one day blossom into a questioning nature and a thirst for knowledge.

But was it all innocent education? Was there, perhaps, something else beneath it?

An examination of his lesson plans reveals a pattern not unlike the pattern formed by the poly-glut documents, maps, illustrations, and portraits that had once lined Duncan’s room at the Institute of Religiosity. (I never told you, but I received word only a year ago that, at Cadimon Signal’s request, the entire display had been lovingly preserved under glass, framed, and spirited away to some dark, vile basement in Zamilon for a prolonged period of zealot-driven dissection. What they hope to find amongst my droppings, I don’t know, but the thought of their clammy hands and ratty eyes pawing through my former wall adornments is a bit much.)

While Duncan could not, and would not, divulge the essence of his underground journeys, he taught a stunningly diverse series of social, economic, religious, cultural, psychological, geographic and confessional texts intended to create a complete context for the formation of the early Truffidian Church. The course centred round The Journal of Samuel Tonsure – ostensibly to give them a feel for Truffidian twaffle, pamp, and circumglance – and including a number of supporting elements, such as Truffidian folklore, study of the mushroom-dwellers, and scrutiny of transcripts of conversations between Truffidian priests around the time of Tonsure’s adventures.

I have, in this trunk of Duncan’s papers that I have half-dragged, half had dragged here, some of his lesson plans. For example:

— Cinsorium: teacher’s copy; to be loaned, three days each student

— The Journal of Samuel Tonsure by Samuel Tonsure

— Red Martigan: A Life by Sarah Carsine

— The Relationship Between the Native Tribes of Stockton & the Gray Caps by Jonathan Shriek: thesis paper; copies to be distributed

— The Refraction of Light in a Prison by the imprisoned Truffidian Monks

— Zamilon for Beginners by Cadimon Signal: in preparation for next semester

AREAS OF STUDY

— Samuel Tonsure’s Journal: The Apparently Impossible Spatial Perspective Expressed in the Sections on the Underground. (I’ve since come to understand that the problem lies with the limitations of human senses, not Tonsure’s account.)

— Evidence of the Gray Caps in Morrow: A Selection of Texts, including a cavalryman’s diary from the period of the Silence. (Alas, this now appears to have been at worst a hoax, at best bad research.)

— An Examination of Fungi Found on Religious Structures: field trip.

— Guest Lecture by James Lacond

(Oddly, Lacond and I did not converse much during that first face-to-face meeting. He was polite but not inquisitive, gave his lecture on his own theories about the gray caps, and left. This was the first and only time Bonmot met Lacond. They circled each other warily, looking at each other as if two creatures from vastly different worlds. A muttered pleasantry or two, and they set off in opposite directions, literally and figuratively, Bonmot not staying for the lecture. Yet, how similar they were in many ways.)

Alas, Duncan either did not preserve his accompanying private notes or did not include them with these plans. However, after a careful review of all of the lesson plans – most too tedious to replicate here – I believe Duncan had more on his mind than teaching students. I believe he sought independent verification of his own findings. He thought that, subjected to the same stimuli, his students – maybe only one or two, but that would be enough – would one day vindicate him of historical heresy. How ironic, then, that his efforts would instead lead one of his students to convict him of historical heresy.

(Janice, enough! You had ample opportunity to ask me about any and all of this, and would have received a more honest answer than the one generated by your suppositions. We may be siblings, but you cannot see into or through my mind. You have it half right – which means you have it all wrong. I did seek to educate my students first and foremost. This did require a varied and wide approach, primarily because few existing texts interwove the complexity of historical issues with a thorough cross-disciplinary approach. Why do you think I had to create that ‘document’ on my wall back at the Institute in the first place? So I taught them, and taught them well. The subtext of my teaching – yes, there was a subtext, I admit it – had nothing to do with hoping my students would replicate my work. The only true way any of them could replicate my work would be to follow me underground, and, as you well know, I made that mistake only once.

(No. What you fail to see are the truly diabolical intentions behind my approach. You underestimate me. Validation? Hardly. Three hundred students could validate my findings and still not a soul would believe them, or me. No, my plan concerned additional research. With plucking the half-formed thoughts like plums. With growing another thirty or forty brains and limbs each semester, to become this multi-spined creature that might, in its flailing, lurching way, accomplish more than a single, if singular, scholar, ever could. Each text I made them read, every essay question answered, every research paper written, corresponded to a section of the grid in the incomplete map of my knowledge. They taught me in many cases. They didn’t have the scars I had, or the foreknowledge; they were unblinkered, unfettered by my peculiar brand of orthodoxy. I used to watch them, heads bowed, heavy with knowledge, working on the latest test, each swirling loop of letter from their pens on paper signifying a kind of progress – this permutation, that permutation, forever tried, discarded, yielding nothing, and yet valuable for that fact alone. Discount this, and you can begin testing that. Sabon was part of it at first, certainly – she bought into it, and may even have understood what I was doing.

(When one puzzle piece – and a semester of thirty students might fill in a single puzzle piece, at best – had been locked into position, we would move on to the next. A careful observer might have noticed that my curriculum began to resemble cheesecloth. Much of it was useless, much of it redundant, much of it insanely boring and obscured by lazy or talentless students. But they did receive a relatively full education from me. And keep in mind that I was not their only teacher.

(In time, the game did outgrow its original boundaries. At every opportunity, I would murmur in the ears of my fellow instructors, like an echo of their own desires, hints of scholarship and glory if they only turned their attention to this or that ignored corner of history. ‘I wonder if anyone has ever compared the version of Nysman’s report on the Silence stored at Nicea with the version stored at Zamilon. I am told they diverge in ways that speak to issues of authenticity in Samuel Tonsure’s journal.’ Casually, off-the-cuff, as if it fell outside my area of expertise, but should be pursued by someone, with great rewards for any enterprising scholar. In all of this, Bonmot was an interesting factor. He guessed what I was up to rather early on, I think, but never did anything to stop me. Raised an eyebrow, gave me a penetrating stare, but that was it.

(And so, by the fourth year of my employment at Blythe Academy, I had built my own machine, fully as terrible and far-reaching as the Machine I had encountered underground. You understand now, I hope? I had managed to subvert and divert the resources of an entire institution of higher learning to the contemplation of a single question with many branches. The diagram I drew to exemplify this question was based on Tonsure’s account and deliberately resembled the gray caps’ most recurrent symbol, which had been drawn on walls, on cobblestones, but never explicated.

(Intentionally incomprehensible to outsiders, the diagram helped me see the relationships between various people and concepts in a new way. Manzikert I had triggered the Silence, I felt certain, with his actions in founding Ambergris. Samuel Tonsure had somehow catalogued and explained the gray caps during his captivity underground. Aquelus, a later ruler of Ambergris, had suffered Manzikert’s same fate, but survived to return above ground. As Zamilon held some answer, so too did Alfar, the ruined tower to which Aquelus’ wife had retired prior to the Silence, thus ensuring her survival. And then there were the Silence and the Machine. How did they connect? And how did it all tie back in to the gray caps? These were the perhaps unanswerable questions I struggled with, and the structure through which I examined them.

(Although this is perhaps the least of what I unearthed during that time, it still represents an impressive experiment in collective unconsciousness, in beehive mentality. Did more than a few of those brains set diligently upon the course plotted for them ever suffer a tremor, a tickle of an inkling of my manipulation? I doubt it. I’m too proud of my work, perhaps, but I did little harm and much good. Several instructors published papers in prominent journals without ever knowing I had colour-coded their innocent discoveries into a vast pattern of conspiracy and misdirection. They stood in their sunlit lecture halls turning their ideas over and over in their hands – brightly coloured baubles for their students to applaud, confident they had solved a complete puzzle rather than assembled a single piece. The students, meanwhile, became specialists sensitive to the rhythms of synergy, analysis, and synthesis. Tuning forks for knowledge, they vibrated prettily, their shiny surfaces one by one catching the light. I admit, I derived great satisfaction from all of this. To have such a measure of control made me nearly ecstatic at times, fool that I was. And still, I wasn’t gathering enough knowledge fast enough. I felt frustrated, twice-removed from where I needed to be: underground. Ironic that, above ground, I felt much as James Lacond once described Tonsure underground:

Most of the time [Tonsure] walks in the darkest night. Now and again, a wavering finger of light flutters across the darkness, teasing him with the outline of a path. Hopeful, he runs toward it, only to find himself in another maze. The hope that night must give way to day allows him to continue, and he tries to guess where a more permanent light might break through – a crack, a crevice, a hole – but the end of night never comes.)

Early on, I met these students, Duncan’s unwitting accomplices in esoteric, possibly meaningless, research. They made no particular impression on me: a formless row of fresh-scrubbed faces attached to identical dark blue uniforms. The eyes that populated those ruddy faces sparkled or flared or reflected light according to the intensity of their ambition. Some students stared defiantly at you. Some let you stare through them. Still others looked away, or down at their feet – every foot hidden by proper white socks, sheathed in black, brightly polished shoes. They smelled like soap and sweat. Their voices cracked and buzzed and sang out with equal innocence and brashness. In their uniformed rows, I could not tell the poor from the rich, the smart from the stupid. Thus did Blythe Academy serve as an equalizer of souls.

Never once did I think to challenge that semblance of equality, to search for that one variant, that one mimic cleverly made up to resemble the others, but actually of a different species altogether. (She was just another student in so many ways. You shouldn’t think that she was other, or different. I was the mimic, if anyone was. I threw off the balance in that place.)

MARY’S PRESENCE, when I look back, first resonated as faint music vibrating through the strings of my golden metaphor: a resonance neither sinister nor angelic. In that respect, she reminds me of a character in a novel by Sirin. She exists on the edges of the pages, in the spaces between the words, her name unwritten except in riddles: a woman’s green-and-gold scarf on Duncan’s apartment desk, sudden honeysuckle in a glass in his school office, a puzzling hint of cologne during lunch. A half-dozen passive yet sensual details a jealous wife might hoard – or that a sibling might half-remember with amusement, but later revisit harshly.

Duncan never mentioned Mary during that time. (She was my student, for Truff’s sake! Why would I mention her? You make this all sound so tawdry yet ethereal. Is it possible she just escaped your myopic powers of observation? Is it possible you were so continually drugged and drunk that you noticed no one? You should strike all of this from the record. There’s no reason for it and no one cares. I don’t even care any more, except for the now dulled sting that you tried to undermine my relationships rather than support them.) Curiously, though, Duncan’s postcards began to contain more personal information than our lunchtime conversations, possibly because of Bonmot’s presence.

Sometimes the postcards consisted of odd lines that told me he had reopened his investigations well beyond Blythe Academy:

Even the flies have eyes, Janice. Eyes for them. There is no corner of this city they cannot see in some form. But it’s too much information. They cannot review it all at once. I imagine them down there, in the fungal light, reviewing intelligence gathered a decade ago – awash in information, none of it useful to them because it overwhelms them. And yet – why? Why attempt to gather it?

If Dad had actually studied Tonsure’s journal, I wonder if he would have found what I found. Even more important – what would he have done with the knowledge? Sometimes they gather around my door. Sometimes they burrow up from below. When they get in – which isn’t often; I’ve learned some of their tricks – they watch me. Observe. It is more unnerving than if they were to hurt me.

Either he, in a sense, hoped to distance himself from such knowledge by physically sending it away from him on postcards, or, intensely involved in his studies, cast off these postcards in the fever of scholarship, like heat lightning. Anyone other than his sister would have thought these notes the ramblings of a madman. (Actually, Bonmot and I discussed ‘personal information’, as you call it, quite often, and he never thought I was mad. I admit to writing most of the postcards during the bouts of considerable pain caused by my diseases. Sometimes they reflected my research. Sometimes they simply reflected my agony. Even the starfish had been unable to remove the source of the infection. I was changing, and I was changing my mind to come to terms with that fact.)

More alarmingly, Duncan changed his living quarters with insane frequency, sending dozens of change-of-address postcards to the (newly renamed but still comfortingly inept) Voss Bender Memorial Post Office before finally giving up and listing the Academy as his mailing address. He refused to live at the Academy, although he would sleep in a guest room on nights when he worked late. Even after he met Sabon, Duncan moved from apartment to apartment. He never signed a lease for more than six months. He never took a ground-floor apartment. He always moved up – from the second floor, to the third, to the fourth, as if fleeing some implacable force that came up through the ground. (Yes – bad plumbing. Not to mention gray caps.)

Clearly he was hiding from something, but why should his plight affect me? After all, he had been stumbling into danger even BDD. Yes, I had written him the note about golden threads, the way we all touch each other, but do you know how hard it is to keep that in mind from day to day? You’d have to be a priest or a martyr. So I let him go his separate way, confident that, like the time we had been lost in the forest, he would find his way out again.

Besides, I was distracted. By then, I had ascended to the very height of my powers. I led a council of gallery owners. I wrote withering and self-important reviews for Art of the Southern Cities. I had lunch with Important People like Sirin and Henry Hoegbotton at such upscale restaurants as the Drunken Boat.

For two years running, my stable of artists had received more critical attention and created more sales than the rest of the city’s galleries combined. A word from me could now cripple an artist or redeem him. Utterance of such words became almost sexual, each syllable an arching of the back, a shudder of pleasure. Even when Martin Lake moved his best paintings to his own gallery, leaving me only his dregs, I told Sybel not to worry, for surely a thousand Lakes waited to replace him.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked me. ‘I expected the world to leave Lake behind, which hasn’t happened. That we could deal with. But his leaving you behind could cause you damage.’

I dismissed his concerns with a wave of my hand. ‘There are more where he came from.’

I should have taken heed of his astonished look. I had yet to realize that my power had limits – that it could recede like the River Moth during drought.

The sheer opulence of my life disguised the truth from me. Not content with attending parties, I had begun to host parties. I entertained like one of Trillian’s Banker-Warriors from the old days, my parties soon so legendary that some guests were afraid to attend. Legendary not just for the food or music or orgies, but how all three elements could be artfully combined in new and inventive ways. Outside the incessant, unceasing rumours that they were ‘squid clubs’ (a euphemism for the more sado-masochistic sex parlours, so named for the habit of squid hunters of tying up their catch and delivering it alive to the buyer), nothing could diminish the allure of my parties.

Sybel was a great help in this arena – he took to party planning as if he had found his true calling. Under his artful administration, we staged many delightful debacles of alcohol and drugs. Each weekend, we would move to some new, more exotic, location – the priests of the Religious Quarter, in their greed, would rent to me their very cathedrals. Or Sybel would hire ‘party consultants’ to scout the burnt-out Bureaucratic District for suitable locations. Then, to the surprise of the homeless and the criminal element, some blackened horror of a building – say, the former Ministry of Foreign Affairs – would, well after midnight, erupt with light and mirth and the loud confusion of alcohol-aided conversations. The artists so elsewhere that they stood in corners talking to statues, coat racks, and desks. Morning revealed as grainy light touching pale bodies that in turn touched each other casually amongst the random abandoned divans and couches and makeshift beds crusted with cake and cum.

I remember waking up once, in the middle of the night, my cold sweat moistening the bed-sheets, my skin crawling with a nameless dread. Sybel sat in a chair beside my bed, snoring.

I woke him up in a complete panic, chest tight, lungs heavy. I couldn’t bear to be alone with my thoughts. ‘How long can we keep this up? How long can we keep going like this?’

Poor beautiful, sly Sybel rubbed his eyes, looked up at me, smiled a sleepy smile, and said, ‘As long as you tell me to.’

I hit him in the shoulder. The smile never left his face. ‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

Sybel’s gaze sharpened and he sat up in the chair. ‘Forever, Janice. Or close enough. This is just the beginning.’

THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING. And so it was. But the beginning of what? The beginning of the end, really. The one time Janice Shriek’s life significantly impacted Duncan Shriek’s life. I became addicted to hallucinogenic mushrooms. Little purple mushrooms with red-tinged gills. So tiny. So cute. They magnified the minute and humbled the magnificent, and I couldn’t get enough of them. I’d have a meeting with Sirin while on them and watch as his head became bigger and bigger, eclipsing his body. I would eat one while in the middle of another all-night drunken escapade and suddenly the noise and confusion around me would:– stop. I would see the glittering detail of a street lamp light shining off the water in the gutter, and that sudden moment would become as large as the world. A comfort, really. A solace. (A plague. A way for you to escape the world.)

Sybel called them Tonsure’s Folly, and I can’t really complain because I asked him to get them for me. And I can’t even blame the mushrooms for everything that happened next. I was wandering further and further from the golden threads of my note to Duncan. I was becoming more and more unhappy, even though I was filling myself with so many substances and preying off enough new people, new experiences, that my distress was for the longest time just an echo of an ache in my belly. (No, you can’t blame the mushrooms. But those mushrooms, over time, make the user more and more depressed. And you were already in a fragile state. I’m afraid I’d lost the thread of your life, caught up in my own problems, or I would have insisted that Sybel intervene.)

The parties I still remember with fondness, although the only one I’ve really come close to describing happened ages afterward – the Martin Lake party I was asked to help organize recently. The first party I’d been to for years, and haunted by the ghosts of other, grander parties. These ghosts lingered long enough to laugh at the staid properness of Janice Shriek in her old (c)age. No guests rolling naked over the carpet. No fruit served from the delicious concavities of the lithe bodies of young men and women. Not even the simple pleasures to be found in bowls of mushroom drugs. Just guests, music, light dancing, and lighter punch, not even spiked. Oh, what humiliation!

‘She’s deep in thought, she is – but what could she be thinking about, do you think?’

The careful reader will remember that when I last left off the story of my final confrontation with Mary Sabon and her necklace of flesh – which, if you will remember, consisted, before the metaphor came to life and lurched forward, of two dozen of those social climbers who had become convinced she was the best historian since my brother – I was walking down the marble stairs in their direction.

I descended to the foot of the stairs. The marble shone like glass; my face and those of the others reflected back at me. The assembled guests slowly fell apart into their separate bead selves. Blank-eyed beads wink-winking at me as they formed a corridor to Sabon. Smelling of too little or too much perfume. Shedding light by embracing shadows. A series of stick-figures in a comedy play.

‘At least five days. I bring her food and drink. I take it out again. She’s enough paper in there to last another week.’

‘What? They? Haven’t seen them here for weeks. They’ll not be around again.’

Mary Sabon. We are approaching Sabon now. Or I am, now that I’ve made it down the marble staircase. I suppose I must conjure her into existence before I can banish her . . . Red hair. Massive long locks of red hair, forest-thick and as uncivilized. Emerald eyes – or, perhaps, paste pretending to be jewel. A figure that. A voice which. A smile of.

I’m afraid I cannot do her the justice Duncan did in his journal entries, so I will stand aside to let him speak, even if he does stutter, enraptured by a school-girl-smell, white-socks fantasy with as much reality to it as a paper chandelier.

Mary Sabon. Sabon, Mary. Sabon. Mary. Mary. Mary Sabon. Sabon. Sabon. Sabon. The name burns like a flame in my head like her hair burns like her name burns like a flame in my head. She burns in my head. She burns in my head. I am delirious with her. I am sick with her. Blessed infection. I think of nothing but her. Walking home today, I could sense that the trees lining the boulevard contained her. I see her features when I stare down at the pavement upon which I tread. She is half-formed in the air. The faint smell of Stockton pine needles and incense. As of her. As of an echo of her. Her form a flame in the world that burns through everything, and there is nothing in the world but her – the world revealed as paper that burns away at the first hint of her. Above and below, a flame in my head. I cannot get her out. I am not sure I want to get her out. Rather banish myself from myself than to banish her from me.

They are beginning to annoy me. I cannot keep them out of the text. Everything around me is going into the text – every dust mote, every scuff upon the floor, the unevenness of this desk, the clouded quality of the windows. I cannot keep it out right now.

Flame or not, at my party, Mary Sabon wore dark green. She almost always wore dark green. She might as well have been a shrub or a tree or a tree trunk.

Ignoring my presence – something she would have done at her peril in the old days – she said, ‘Duncan Shriek? Why, Duncan is not a human being at all, but composed entirely of digressions and transgressions. Assuming he is still alive, that is.’

I stared at her for a moment. I let her receive the venom in my eyes. Then I walked up to her and slapped her hard across the face. The impact shone as red as her hair, as flushed as the gasp from the necklace of flesh. It lit up her face in a way that made her look honest again. It spread across her cheek, down her neck, swirled between the tops of her breasts, and disappeared beneath her gown.

If the world is a just place, that mark will never leave her skin, but remain as a pulsing reminder that, at some point in the past, she hurt someone so badly that she hurt herself as well.

What did I do? You’ll find out soon enough. Jump pages. Jump time. Skip through the rest as if it were a park pathway on a Sunday afternoon, and you eager to feed the ducks at the far end, in Trillian Memorial Square. But I haven’t written the path yet, and you’d get lost without it – and, paper cuts aside, I’ll find ways to make you wait. Waiting is good. I’ve been waiting for over five days now. I know something about waiting. And afterwords.

‘I say again: what’s she typing in there? Clack-clack-clack – it’s disturbing my peace of mind.’

‘The story of your life, Steen. A history of the Cappans. How should I know?’

She’s what? Typing your inane speech, perhaps? Why not? You’ve become my companions after a fashion. Although I’ve never talked to them, I’ve shared this place with them for days now. I ought to feel grateful for their interest. I ought to get out of this dank back room and go over and suggest a game of darts.

I think I’ll go for a walk. I’m going to go for a walk. My hands are cramping. My stomach growls. The clock on the wall tells me I’ve been here much longer than I thought.

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