Shriek An Afterword

It’s night here, as I type, and hot, and I don’t know if it’s a normal kind of heat or something related to the Shift. Something is gnawing away at the wood between the ceiling of this place and the roof. I find it almost relaxing to listen to the chewing – at least, I’d rather listen to that than to the sounds I sometimes hear coming from below me. It does not bear thinking about, what may be going on below me. Really, this afterword has been the only thing saving me from too many thoughts about the present. The green light is ever-present, but the clientele is not. It’s late. They’ve gone home. It’s just me and the lamp and the typewriter . . . and whatever is chewing above me and whatever is moving below me. And I feel feverish. I feel like I should lie down on the cot I had them bring in here. I feel like I should take a rest. But I can’t. I have to keep going on. Despite the heat. Despite the fact that I’m burning up. I have some mushrooms Duncan left behind, but I’m not sure I should eat them, so I won’t. They might help, but they might not. (Good decision! Those are weapons. If you’d eaten them, it would’ve been like eating gunpowder.)

So, instead, to stave off burning up, I’ll write about the snow. I’ll write about all of that wonderful, miraculous snow that awaited me on my return to Ambergris. Maybe the gnawing will stop in the meantime. Unless it’s in my mind, in which case it may never stop.

I RETURNED TO an Ambergris transformed by snow from semi-tropical city to a body covered by a white shroud. Every street, alley, courtyard, building, store front, and motored vehicle had succumbed to the mysteries of the snow. Ambergris was not suited to white. White is the colour of surrender, and Ambergris is unaccustomed to surrender. Surrender is not part of our character.

At first, the city appeared similar to dull, staid Morrow, but underneath the anonymous white coating lay the same old city, cunning and cruel as ever. Merchants sold firewood at ten times the normal price. Frankwrithe & Lewden, in a hint of the strife to come, raided a warehouse of Hoegbotton books and distributed the torn pages as tinder. Beggars contrived to look as pathetic as possible, continuing a trend that had been refined since before the advent of Trillian the Great Banker. Thieves took advantage of the icy conditions to make daring daylight purse-pinchings on home-made ice skates. Priests in the Religious Quarter preached end-of-the-world hysteria to boost dwindling congregations. Theatres rushed a number of ‘jungle comedies’ and other warm-weather fare into production, finally dethroning Voss Bender’s Trillian, that play’s six acts too long for most theatre admirers, frozen bottoms stuck to icy seats. Swans died shrieking in ice that trapped their legs. Lizards shrugged philosophically and grew fur. Sounds once dulled by a species of heat intense enough to corrode even hearing were now bright and brassy.

But I remember most the smell, or lack of it. Suddenly, the ever-present rot-mould-rain scent was missing from the air, replaced by the clean, boring smell of Morrow. It was as if Morrow had colonized a vital element of the city, presaging the war.

(Not to mention the fungi, which adapted almost as if the gray caps had planned the change in the weather. There was something unreal about seeing mushroom caps in jaunty bright colours rise through the snow cover, unaffected by the cold.)

SYBEL FORCED ME to go back to the gallery. I would have stayed in my apartment for weeks, if I’d had the choice, conveniently ignoring a few bloodstains my brother had missed when cleaning up. I no longer felt hollow, but I did feel weak, sluggish, indecisive. I didn’t have any of the normal props that used to stop me from thinking about . . . everything.

Sybel looked like he always looked – a faint half-smile on his face, eyes that stared through you to something or somewhere else, presumably his future.

On the way to the gallery, walking through the frozen streets, Sybel turned to me, and said, ‘You don’t know who your friends are, do you?’

INSIDE THE GALLERY, the only element that remained the same was my desk, with its two dozen bills, five or six contracts, and a litter of pens obscuring its surface. The rest had been stripped bare. Those paintings least popular, hung for several months, had left the beige shadow of their passing, but otherwise I might as well have been starting up a gallery, not losing control of one. Everyone had abandoned me, as if I were whirling so fast toward oblivion that, at some point, they were simply flung clear by my momentum.

‘Gradually, over months,’ Sybel said, throwing the gallery keys on the desk and sitting in a chair. ‘They were pretty thorough, weren’t they?’

I looked around. The gallery had, in its emptiness, taken on aspects of my life. What was I to do?

‘I couldn’t be here day and night,’ Sybel said. Unspoken: I had parties to plan. I had a suicidal boss to worry about.

A sudden anger rose up inside me, though I had no reason to be angry at Sybel. What could he have done?

He shook his head. ‘David let them in. David’s the one who started it . . .’

David. Former boyfriend. A not-unpleasant memory of David and me escaping into the gallery’s back room to make love.

Sybel stared up at me. ‘There’s nothing left to manage, Janice. There’s no gallery. I wish there were. But,’ and he stood, ‘there’s nothing here for me to do. I’ll find another job. I’m not a rebuilder, I’m a manager. If you need help in the future, let me know.’

I would need help in the future. A lot of help, but he couldn’t know that now. He couldn’t know how quickly everyone’s fortunes would change.

Sybel shrugged. ‘I’ll take some time off. I’ll climb trees. I will enjoy the feel of the sun on my face in the morning. I will swim in the River Moth.’ (Right. And after about thirty minutes, when he was done gambolling about in the sunlight, Sybel would go on providing people with whatever they most desired. Specifically, providing me with what I most desired – whatever could get me through the night.)

‘You wouldn’t like it,’ Sybel said, somewhat wistfully, I thought. ‘You would be bored.’

At the door, Sybel turned to me one last time and said, ‘I’m glad you made it back. I really am. But you’ll find it’s changed out there. It’s no longer the same place.’

LATER, A SHORT investigation would prove Sybel right. While everyone’s attention had been on the New Art, real innovation had been occurring outside our inbred, self-congratulatory little circle. Real imagination meshed with real genius of technique had been bypassing and surpassing the New Art, sometimes with a chuckle and condescending nod. This was the era during which Hale Jargin first displayed his huge ‘living canvases’, complete with cages for small creatures to peep out from shyly. Sarah Frayden began to create her shadow sculptures, too. But neither of these qualified as New Art, in part because the galleries they showed in had no connection to the New Art.

By the time those of us associated with the New Art realized New Art was Old Art – my only excuse being my forced absence from the scene – the only one who had the option of escaping the death of the term was the only one who had never uttered the words in the first place: Martin Lake.

If they hadn’t fled my gallery, I would have been stuck with a long line of has-beens who, squinting, had emerged from their corridor of tunnel vision to realize that, far from being on the frontier, they’d been in a backwater, as obsolete as the first generation of Manzikert motored vehicles the factories had trundled out over a hundred years ago.

‘There is no New Art any more,’ Sybel said, and then was gone, leaving me in my empty gallery, wondering what to do.

WHAT COULD I DO? I needed to find my brother – and find him I did, amid the tinkling rustle of the frozen willow trees outside Blythe Academy. I think he knew I was coming. I think he knew I was looking for him. There he was in a long coat, sitting at a stone table and smiling at me. (Grimacing, actually. I experienced a lot of pain during the early days of my transformation. I was still changing.) He had regained his customary thinness.

‘Hello, helpless helping brother,’ I said, smiling back as I sat down across from him. Behind him, the Academy was just waking up. It was a beatific morning – the sun lit the snow and ice into a fractured orange blaze.

‘Hello, suicidal sister,’ he said, his gaze clear, focused on the present, on me.

‘You should use more careful language,’ I told him. ‘I could do it all over again, and you’d have to send me on another tour of the world.’

Duncan grinned. His teeth revealed an underlying rot, despite his apparent health: they were stained a gray-black along the gums.

‘Not likely,’ he said. ‘I’ve already sent you to every head doctor within three hundred miles. If you were going to do it again, you would have done it while listening to the seventh or eighth as he droned on about your disturbed dream life.’

‘But I am fragile,’ I insisted. ‘I’ve been without drugs for weeks. I’ve been getting lots of sleep. I’ve been eating well. I could suffer a mental collapse at any moment.’

(To see you that way, tired but whole, made me happy. A few months before I had had no idea if you would survive, or if you’d be the same person afterwards. It didn’t matter that you were thin or drawn, just that you seemed sane once more.)

‘The city is falling apart, not you. The snow. Look – it’s snowing again.’

I rolled my eyes to cut him off. ‘You think they’re responsible for everything.’ (Because they are, Janice!)

‘Actually, no,’ I replied. ‘I brought the snow with me from Morrow – the most heartless, boring, terrible place you could possibly have sent me to.’

Anger, rising up. It felt good. It felt right. It was the only thing I’d felt besides pain and sorrow in a long time.

‘No,’ Duncan said, shivering, ‘I don’t think you wanted to be dead. I think you didn’t want to feel. There’s a difference. And I know all about not wanting to feel.’

All the air went out of me with a single sigh. The truth was, it took too much energy to talk about such things.

Duncan grimaced, as if from some physical pain. (As if? Every time I moved, I could feel them all over me, burrowing into my skin.)

He looked away. ‘I have . . . friends . . . who tell me things. That’s all. It’s the same reason I found you in time.’

I laughed, said, ‘Friends! I can only guess what kinds of friends. Do they have legs or spores? Do they walk or do they float?’

Duncan stared down at the snow. Now I could see, where the light caught his cheek, the side of his neck, that a faint black residue, insubstantial as smoke, had attached itself to his skin.

I stared at him, the anger boiling over. What could I say to him? Why should I say anything to him?

‘What kind of answer would you like?’ I asked him. ‘Would you like me to say the pressure was too much? That I couldn’t handle it? Do you want me to say I was under the influence of drugs? Do you want me to say my relationships all failed and I was lonely?’

My voice had risen with each new question until I was shouting. I stopped. Abruptly. While Duncan stared at me, concerned.

I realized I didn’t know why I had done it. Not really. Every reason I could dredge up seemed ridiculous. I had written lots of notes about it, true. All the doctors wanted me to write things down, as if they could pull it out of me through ink applied to paper. I wrote nonsensical sentences, pompous things like:

I have finally figured it out. We are redeemed, if at all, by love and by imagination. I had imagination enough to realize I was not receiving enough love, and so I allowed myself to be seduced by those who did not love me, and whom I did not love. And then convinced myself, in my imagination, that I did love them, and that they did love me.

I spent my youth gripped in the fear of a sudden exit – like that of my father. I too might run across the sweet, strange grass only to fall prematurely inert at someone’s feet. (‘Sudden exit’? ‘prematurely inert’? For someone who wanted to die you have a real aversion to the word death.) And yet as an adult I have tried my best to run to meet that exit anyway, despite all those careful steps. Driving my gallery into ruin. Driving my relationships into ruin with excess and promiscuity. Over-indulging in drugs and sex.

My dad was a hard man to love. He lived for his work, and anyone who did not live for that work would receive very little love. Not a bad man, or a man who could be intentionally cruel. Not a man like that, no, but a man who could ignore you with an imperiousness that could burn into your soul. Duncan rarely saw that side of our father. Duncan was protected by his interest in the mysteries of history. Me, I couldn’t have cared less about history growing up. I was interested in many things – painting, reading, singing lessons, boys, in that order – but not history. I never could see the personal side to history until I started living it. Until Mary and Duncan showed me what history could mean. And by then it was too late: Dad was dead, and nearly me as well.

The doctors had made me do it – had made me feel like a political prisoner of the Kalif, forced to recant my beliefs and spout pseudo-personal parody to regain my freedom. (And yet, Janice, some of it rings true. I wish I could say it didn’t.)

‘I don’t need an answer,’ Duncan said quietly. ‘I just thought I’d ask.’

But I needed an answer, so I could stop it from happening again. Why had I done it?

I don’t recall what I said to Duncan next, sitting in the freezing cold outside Blythe Academy, students beginning their groggy paths across the courtyard to their classes. I don’t remember any of the rest of our conversation. (We talked about the past, Janice. We talked about what Bonmot had been up to at the Academy. You told me about Mom and the condition of that old mansion. I told you about the research I had my students doing on Zamilon. Nothing you needed to remember.) I’m sure it didn’t satisfy him. It didn’t satisfy me.

I could remember, however, the night of the attempt – a night that seemed to epitomize the parties, the drugs, the lack of direction, the stretched, unreal quality of my existence. The late, late nights merging into days, the black of the sky, the hunt for yet another bar.

I had blown half of my remaining money on what I now realize was a suicide banquet – so much food, so many bodies, so little restraint. The pale white of people in a corner of the room, in a writhing orgy of legs and arms and torsos. The leering smiles of the onlookers. The smell of wine, of rot, of decay, of sex. But it wasn’t enough for me, even then. We kept going elsewhere.

We were in a café. We were inside a burned-out building. We were in the street, giggling under a street lamp. It was all merging together into one place, one time. I didn’t know where I was. Sybel was there, then he wasn’t there, then he was.

Finally, we came to the steps of an abandoned church. Sybel stood on one side and David, the cipher I was sleeping with at the time, stood on the other. I floated between them, staring at the huge double doors of the church, the old oak bound in iron and carved with flourishes. I could hear people talking loudly inside.

‘Did I pay for this?’ I asked. It had become my standard question over the past few months.

‘No,’ Sybel said. ‘You didn’t pay for this. You didn’t like your own party.’

‘You wanted us to take you somewhere else,’ David said, an arm around my shoulders.

Sybel laughed. ‘Yes, to something you didn’t pay for. And you definitely didn’t pay for this – this is a party sponsored by one of the new galleries.’

‘In a church?’ I said, incredulous, forgetting all of the blasphemous functions I’d sponsored inside even holier buildings.

David said, ‘It used to be for the Church of the Five-pointed Star, but they don’t really exist any more.’

Obviously. The grass was high and the steps cracked with vines. The door was beginning to rot on its hinges.

Sybel pushed open the door and we walked inside, the two of them practically carrying me – into the cacophony of music, the swirl of lights. We blended in perfectly. Same clothes. Same attitude. Within minutes, while Sybel and David looked on, I was carrying on a conversation with a young male artist who had the kind of pale waif look I find irresistible. It was crowded. I had to shout. I didn’t know what I was shouting. I didn’t know who I was rubbing up against. Sybel and David tried to act as my bodyguards; I ignored them. I was babbling.

At some point, I lost focus and stopped talking, trying unsuccessfully to nod as the young artist who I really didn’t give a damn about rambled on about ‘the inspiration for my art’. I was standing on a stool by then. I don’t know who had provided the stool, but it gave me enough height to survey the crowd.

Off to the side, I could see the rival gallery owner, John Franghe, chatting up a couple of my clients, oblivious to my presence. I recognized darling Franghe’s hand gestures. I recognized his body language. The odd combination of fawning flattery and absolute authority. He had a glass in his hand and was obviously drunk. He kept putting his hand on the arm of the prettier of the two artists and squeezing it, giving her a quick glance to catch her eye. There was nothing artful about it.

At some point while watching, I fell off my stool. My head was full of nails. My thoughts were coiled and frightened. David and Sybel came to my aid, set me down on a chair beside a table, beside two old veterans of the art movement. Bodies were swirling around me. The texture of the table even seemed to swirl, to become a whirlpool of wooden grain. I could smell the beer, the drugs, the sweat of all of those bodies in such an enclosed space.

At some point, I realized that none of it mattered, that none of it meant anything. I hated what I saw – the corrosion of fame, the accretion of falseness, the misuse of sex and desire. A strange dread came over me. I was alone in that church. I did not know who I was, or how I had come to this. I had become an observer in my own life.

I sent David and Sybel off on a mission to ask the hosts to find more of my favourite mushrooms. As soon as they had been swallowed up by the crowd, I stood up and snuck out of the church, through those rotting oak doors.

Stumbling, drunk out of my mind, I made my way down to a dirty little club at the dock end of Albumuth Boulevard. Through the murmurous sounds of the River Moth, right outside, I listened to an old singer that someone said had once been famous.

As one will, I quickly became close friends with everyone at the bar, but even as I sat there joking and drinking with them in the dark, I knew I was all alone. I knew the singer realized this, too. He seemed to sing for me and me only. No one else paid attention to him. It was horrible and wonderful at the same time. He would never reach the heights he had once known. One day, the people in the bar might not even recognize his best-known songs. But he sang them with a kind of terrible defiance. It wore me out to watch him. The empty laughter of the bar wore me out. All of it wore me out.

I sat there smoking a mushroom someone had given me and looking at the singer, but really staring past him into the distance, the foreground a blur, with not a thought in my head other than the melody of the song, the voice of the singer.

You become what you pretend to be. I could pretend that I was pretending when it came to the New Art, but eventually I had begun to believe the lies that justified the excesses.

Slowly, over time, a thought snuck past the music and the voice: that I could never be as brave as that singer, that I could never sing old songs to people who didn’t care. (Though, ironically enough, some would say that is what you’ve wound up doing with this account.)

I LIED EARLIER, though. I do remember something else from my conversation with Duncan in the frozen courtyard. I remember that I smelled perfume on him. It brought me up short, changed the subject forever.

Sybel was right – the New Art was dead. But it wasn’t just the New Art that had died.

Before my ‘accident’ I had lived almost exclusively within the secret history of the city – a history of moments, not events, a history that vanished as it came and lived on only in the shudder of remembered ecstasy. This secret history descends (transcends) through the bedrooms of a hundred thousand houses, in the dark, through the tips of our fingers as we learn that our bodies have a thousand eyes to feel with, a thousand ways to learn the true meaning of touch. From foreplay to orgasm, from first touch to last, everything we know is in our skins – this secret history that so few people will be part of. We don’t talk about this history, although it made us and will make us and is the only way to get as close as we can to each other: an urgent coupling to close the space, to experience a pleasure that – excuse me as I stumble into this rapturous gutter (can we stop you?) – is on one level being filled or filling, but is also so much more. This is where I was and what I lived for before the accident. Afterwards, I gave it all up, even though it wasn’t the problem.

I traded my secret history for another type of history altogether. I saw the backs of a lot of heads, sang a lot of songs, and had my fundament put to sleep by the hard wood I was sitting on on more than one occasion. Chanting, reading ancient books, fingering beads on a necklace much more humble than Sabon’s. Always worried that this new dependency might end as the old one had, but willing to take the chance anyway.

But, in some great confluence of chance and destiny, as my erotic star fell, Duncan’s rose, and shone all the more passionately, as his ardour – unlike mine – was directed towards one person: Mary Sabon.

I already knew Mary, although I did not realize it at the time. Duncan had talked about her for several months before the details of his attraction to her became clear. There was a potentially brilliant student in his class, he told me at lunch one day while Bonmot stared at both of us from beneath his bushy eyebrows. A student who absorbed theory like a sponge and immediately applied it to her own interests. A student who could, moreover, write, and write well. It was so obvious that this student should be in a more advanced class that at first he was undecided as to whether to let her go to some other school, but, finally, could not bring himself to suggest it.

‘She does not have the necessary social maturity,’ I remember him saying. ‘She’s still young. To go to the Religious Academy in Morrow, with much older students,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘She needs more time. Extraordinary student.’

‘Sometimes,’ he said to Duncan pointedly, ‘it’s better to let them go. Better for the student and better for the teacher.’

I should have known from the way he refused to use her name. Thank God I missed the courtship. Thank God I was trying to die.

For Duncan had, while hounding me from hospital to ward, ward to doctor’s office, been displaying all the conjoined lust and random stupidity of a rabbit. He ‘succumbed to temptation’ as he put it in his journal, when, one afternoon while tutoring Mary privately after class, his hand crossed that space between how-it-is and how-it-might-be . . . and found purchase on the other side.

‘Tell me you don’t love me and I will be glad to escape this fever, this vision,’ he wrote in his journal, and much else I cannot tell from the torn pages. ‘I’ve never been more naked,’ he tells her, apparently forgetting the night I scraped the fungus from his body, surely his most naked moment.

She did not leave him alone in his nakedness, for as he succumbed, and kept succumbing, without thought of the link between bliss and torment, she reciprocated, and continued to reciprocate. (Truly the driest account of making love I’ve ever read.) What promises they made to each other in those first few sweet, fumbling hours, I cannot tell you. Duncan has ripped those pages from his journal in such brutal fashion that even the pages surrounding that night are shredded – mangled words, mutilated phrases, quartered sentences. No one can read between lines that no longer exist.

Did he tear them out from anger later, or love before? (I’m not telling.) Did he premeditate their slaughter, or was it a crime of passion? For that matter, why would he rip out those pages as opposed to – for example – the pages about the gray caps’ infernal Machine? With the pages lost, and Duncan with them, we can only guess. (And yet, dear sister, here I am, editing your work, even after ‘death’. Some things never change.)

All I have left as proof are a few short, unintentionally humorous letters from Sabon to Duncan, and from Duncan to Sabon – shaken out of Duncan’s journal like dead moths.

Sabon: My love, last night was wonderful. I’ve never talked to anyone the way I’ve talked to you. You teach me so much. You make me understand things so well. You make me feel like I’m floating on a cloud, on a star, so light do you make me feel. Until next time, I am sorrowful and sick. I will not sign this letter, in case it is discovered, but you know who I am.

Duncan: Your skin is so smooth I want to lick it all day long. Your body makes my body hum with pleasure. Your hair, your breasts, your small hands, your ears, as delicate as the most delicate of fungi, your strong thighs, your elbows, your eyes, your kneecaps, even! I want all of you, again and again.

Sabon: My beautiful love – last night I felt I knew you better than before, if that is possible. In the dark where we could not see each other, I still felt I could somehow see you. (Humorously enough, there was, thinking back, a certain glow to me back then, due to the colonization by the fungi.) The way you talk to me – I don’t know if I’m worthy of the love I hear in your voice. But I will try.

Duncan: It is truly amazing, the way our bodies fit together like some kind of perfect jigsaw puzzle. Yours makes mine feel so good. I hope I make yours feel half as good. Every night I cannot come to you is agony. I can’t think of anything else – even in the classroom when I’m supposed to be teaching. And when you are near me then, I tremble. My hands, my legs, shake, and I cannot hear anyone but you, and I want you there, then. This is a craving I cannot satisfy.

Standard nattering romantic fare, uttered from the lips and pens of a thousand lovers a year, although perhaps not in such a staccato point-counterpoint of romance/lust, romance/lust. (Not fair! That was early on, Janice! When I remained acutely aware that I was older and she was younger, and she worried that she was too young and I was too mature. So we each tried to shed our age, to reverse the expected. It might have been foolish, but it reflected concern, affection, care, for the other. Besides, we used to hide these letters in dozens of places inside Blythe and on the grounds. Some never reached the intended recipient. Of those that did, I only kept a few of hers, and not all of mine were returned. Sometimes she was lustful and I was loving. Sometimes I would look out across the Academy from my office and see nothing but a world of potentially hidden love letters, all for me or by me.)

Following that first contact and conquest, Duncan offered up a marvellous spectacle to an unsuspecting potential audience of students, teachers, administrators, and five different orders of monks, none of whom would have sanctioned the holiness of lust between teacher and student if they’d been awake to see it. For more than two years, Duncan slunk, sneaked, crept, crawled, climbed, and slithered past various obstacles to be with his beloved. The logistics of these lust-driven manoeuvres were perhaps as complex as Duncan’s perilous wanderings below ground, and almost as dangerous. If caught, Duncan would be fired and barred from teaching elsewhere in the city.

Having already exhausted the careers of respectable historian and pseudonymous writer-for-hire, I would have thought Duncan would be wary of ruining a third. And in a way, I guess he was – he took great care to be precise. His meticulousness took the form of a map to guide him in his strategic penetrations of Sabon’s room. Each method of penetration had elements to recommend it. Some involved the excitement of speed, while others, in their lengthy explorations, yielded pleasures of a different kind. All, however, flirted with discovery; there would never be any safe way to enter Sabon’s room. ‘Neither in the morning nor the night,’ Duncan wrote with a kind of unintentional poetry, ‘neither at noon nor at sunset.’ (Bonmot thought it showed a new level of devotion to the Academy, the way I would often trade the comforts of my apartment for a sad barren room on the premises.)

Complicating matters, Academy rules dictated that all students change rooms every semester, presumably to make trysts more difficult, although two or three girls got pregnant every year anyway. Therefore, Duncan had to readjust his perambulations every six months or so.

Duncan used three routes to Sabon’s room during her sixth semester at the school. These routes constitute ‘love letters’ in the purest sense of the term. Indeed, in his madness, in his letters to Sabon he even gave them names:

Route A: The Path of Remembering You. This path, this love, can never lead me to you fast enough and yet, cruelly, reminds me of you in every way – from the rough rooftops where we sat and watched the sky turn to amber ash, to the gardens where your walking silhouette would confuse my mind with your scent, with the sight of pale perfect legs sheathed in clean white socks. This path requires that I slip past all the male students who cannot have you as I have had you and, at the centre of their snoring rooms, ascend the stairs to the roof. On the roof, I gaze out upon the line between the dormitory and the classrooms where I teach you things that no longer seem important. Then into the sometimes moonlit gardens, rushing through shrubbery as I throb for you – using the blind shoulder of the storage room to hide me from the night watchmen, only to arrive below your window, your outline ablaze against the curtain.

Route B: The Path of Naked Necessity. When I burn for you and I do not care for anything but you, I use this path, for it is as direct as my desire – past the Royal’s sleeping rooms, past all teachers’ quarters, on to the border, there to creep over unforgiving gravel below every student’s dormitory window, not caring that an errant head might poke out between curtains after curfew and recognize me – and so once again, in the urgency of my need, I come to your window and you.

Route C: The Path of Careless Ecstasy. When my love for you quivers between caution and bravery, when I am too full of joy to be either brief or circumspect, this is when I glide through the alley that separates dormitory from classroom and brazenly stride down the path past the cafeteria in time to dance with the night watchman at the front gate – zigzagging between entrances, climbing up the fence and back again, waiting in shadow as he walks by oblivious. And then down the wall that separates gardens and the second wing of classrooms – until, once again, breathless but happy, I am outside your window.

He alluded to them at the time, even seemed proud of himself, but I didn’t discover the full sad weight of his obsession until I read those descriptions in his journal. My favourite phrase is ‘rushing through the shrubbery as I throb for you’ (allow a love-besotted fool some latitude). As Sabon wrote in her response to this letter, ‘I throb for you, too, dear heart, especially rushing through the shrubbery.’ Sarcasm? Or gentle mockery? When, exactly, did Sabon’s intent become treacherous? (Never, really. It was an incidental treachery.)

All rushing throbbery aside, this was dangerous work for Duncan. He used the paths not according to his mood, but according to the by now well known and ritualistic bumblings of Simon and Jonathan Balfours, the two sixty-year-old night watchmen, twins of (in) habit(s). He would also factor in the arrival of guests who might conceivably tour the Academy at night and the random nocturnal walks of Bonmot. (However, by far the most dangerous person in all of Blythe Academy was Ralstaff Bittern, the gardener. What a tough old buzzard! Stringy as a dead cat and twice as ugly. He had it in for me from the day I accidentally stepped on some of his precious rose bushes. He’d lie in wait for me at night, positioned strategically behind a willow tree, where he could see the entire courtyard. Many a night, I dared not brave his gaze.)

Indeed, Duncan came close to discovery every few weeks. The first time, Duncan, using the Path of Naked Necessity and disguised as a priest, rounded a corner and came face to face with a fellow Naked Necessitator – a third-year boy, as petrified as Duncan, the two of them sneaking so noisily through the gravel that neither had heard the other coming.

If he had uttered a single sound, I would have lived up to my surname – I would have shrieked and begun a babbling confession. But his face in the moonlight reflected such a remarkable amount of fear concentrated in such a small space that I found my tongue first and, shaky but firm, let him know that this – whatever this was – would not be tolerated at Blythe Academy. Continuing on, as much from my own exquisite terror as anything else, I proceeded to drive the demons out of the boy with such overwhelming success that I believe he – certain he could never match the conviction and fervour of the mouth-frothing apparition he met that night – eventually abandoned the priesthood as a vocation and started a brothel on the outskirts of the Religious Quarter. Meanwhile, as he ran away from me, gasping over gravel right out of the Academy, I was shaking so hard my teeth ground together. How close I had come to discovery! What was I to do?

What Duncan did, cynically, was volunteer for ‘tryst duty’ as much as possible, which meant that he joined the ceaseless wanderings of the old night watchmen, supposedly on the lookout for those lean and compact boys, their dark wolf eyes shining, who might defy curfew in hopes of bedding a female student. (I performed a valuable service, whether hypocritically or not. And much of the time, frankly, we caught female students sneaking into the boys’ rooms.) This helped, but there were still unwelcome encounters with unexpected teachers or priests at unfortunate times – ‘Why, I was just checking the window to make sure it was securely locked’ – and pricked buttocks from sudden jumps into rose buses to avoid Bonmot who Duncan could not lie to. (The crushed bushes only made the gardener more relentless. Bittern complained to Bonmot several times, but Bonmot was not ready to believe him.) As his fellow history professor Henry Abascond once said to Duncan at a meeting of teachers, ‘A taste for the night life, have you? A taste for the dark, the shroud?’ in typically pompous Abascond fashion. (And he wasn’t joking about it, much as others thought he was referring to my area of study. I thought for one paranoid moment that he and Bittern had formed a conspiracy to ruin me, but there was only one genuine conspiracy: my conspiracy to ruin myself.)

Of course, nothing lasts forever, least of all desperate, ridiculous sexual melodrama, and Duncan would prove no exception to the cliché. But that day was as yet far off. In the meantime, Duncan revelled in his love for Sabon – you could see it in his distant enthusiasm at our lunches in the courtyard: a brightness to his eyes, a sheen to his skin that was impervious to rainy days or scholarly disappointments (or the more sympathetic interpretation, that it was the effect of the fungi).

Still, I noticed that Bonmot scrutinized us both with a certain suspicion, no matter how pleasant our conversations. With me, I believe he was just worried – looking for signs of a despair that might lead me to cut my wrists again – and with Duncan, searching for something hidden that Bonmot could not quite, for all his wisdom, figure out. (I am sure that if not for my secret studies, he would have found out about Mary much sooner. But rumours that I snuck around at night had, to his mind, more the feel of hidden tunnels and underground depths than of secret assignations with students. My prowess, in his eyes, was the prowess of research and obsession.)

I did not meet Sabon until ten months after I returned to Ambergris. Duncan did not seem eager for me to meet her – perhaps he was afraid Mary would know he had confided in me about their relationship, even if inadvertently; perhaps he was afraid something in our conversation might give him away to Bonmot. For whatever reason, for a long time I continued to hear about Sabon second-hand, through the mirror of Duncan’s love for her.

For this first part of their relationship, I cannot bring myself to blame Sabon, not for their mutual seduction. She eventually ruined my brother in many different ways, but at first she made him see a different life – as if all these years there had been another Duncan Shriek, or the possibility of another Duncan Shriek, completely different from the person I knew as my brother. Because they could not be seen together, they devised complex ways of meeting in public. Mary would invite Duncan to one of her parents’ parties along with all her other teachers, and then seek Duncan out for a ‘fatherly’ dance or conversation.

Similarly, Duncan began to make the most of social functions at the Ambergris Historical Society by inviting his students to attend for ‘educational’ reasons. Most students would not show up, conveniently leaving Duncan required to escort Mary for the evening. (You can sneer all you want, Janice, but that was the primary purpose. In fact, I also met other people there who were useful to my career. I re-met James Lacond there, for example, long before he broke with the Society. You are suggesting I was not just incompetent, but actively sabotaging myself, which is not the case. It was coincidence that Mary sometimes appeared at those events, which were so public that there could be no chance of an assignation.) It was through his attendance at these events that he had his first real conversations with James Lacond, an active member of most of Ambergris’ cultish ‘research’ collectives – the beginning of a friendship that would affect Duncan in many ways.

Duncan discovered that he didn’t even mind dancing and that, ‘with a drink or two in me’, as he puts it in his journal, he could ‘endure chit-chat and small talk’. He began to put on some weight, but it looked good on him, and his new beard, prematurely shot through with gray, gave him a scholarly and respectable appearance. He discovered that people liked to hear him talk, liked to hear his opinions, something that had only been true at the very beginning of his career. Suddenly, he began to have a foothold in another, different life. It was that simple. Somehow, he saw a future in which he might settle down with Sabon.

Duncan’s journal expresses no guilt for his AHS deception, or the many other deceptions ‘forced’ upon him over the next two years. (My journal could not express such guilt – after all, my journal is an inanimate object, although you are doing a fine job of forcing it, by tortuous miscontext, into confessions it would not otherwise make.) Nor does Duncan’s journal offer much in the way of gray cap research over the next two years. Sabon might have inspired him, but she also took up much of his time. (True, but by then I had other professors unwittingly carrying out my research.) Sabon had so altered his perceptions that a journal entry from the time reads:

All my research, even the gray caps themselves, seems remote, unconnected. There might as well not be a Silence, a Machine, an underground. I feel as if I have emerged from a bad dream into the real world. It does not seem possible that one person should be able to lead two such lives at the same time. (And a third life, in a sense. I could not put aside my conversations with Bonmot. I could not find a way to completely discount the spiritual – not when, in some sense, I was becoming so much a part of the world that, in the particles of it that became the particles of me, I sometimes thought I sensed a kind of presence. It maddened me – that I could not be certain of its relevance. That I could not be sure.)

But just because Duncan no longer believed that his life depended on the gray caps did not mean the gray caps no longer believed in Duncan, as he would soon find out.

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