Shriek An Afterword

THERE CAME A NIGHT so terrible that no one ever dared to name it. There came a night so terrible that I could not. There came a night so terrible that no one could explain it. There came the most terrible of nights. No, that’s not right, either. There came the most terrible of nights that could not be forgotten, or forgiven, or even named. That’s closer, but sometimes I choose not to revise. Let it be raw and awkward splayed across the page, as it was in life.

Words would later be offered up like ‘atrocity’, ‘massacre’, and ‘madness’, but I reject those words. They did not, could not, cannot, contain what they need to contain.

Could we have known? Could we have wrenched our attention from our more immediate concerns long enough to understand the warning signs? Now, of course, it all seems clear enough. Duncan had said the war could not continue in the same way for long, and he was right.

As soon as Duncan and I saw Voss Bender’s blind, blindingly white head floating down the River Moth two days before the Festival, we should have had a clue.

‘There’s a sight you don’t see very often,’ Duncan said, as we sat on an abandoned pier and watched the head and the barge that carried it slowly pull away into the middle of the river. A kind of lukewarm sun shone that day, diluted by swirls of fog.

F&L had cut apart a huge marble statue of Voss Bender that had stood in the Religious Quarter for almost twenty years and loaded it, piece by piece, onto the barge, displaying a remarkably dexterous use of pulleys and levers. There lay the pieces of Bender to all sides of his enormous, imperious, crushingly heavy head. About to disappear up the River Moth. As vulnerable-looking in that weak sunlight as anything I had ever seen.

‘I wonder what the people who live along the banks of the river will think about it,’ I said.

‘Will they see it as the demolition, the destruction, of a god, or will they be strangely unmoved?’

In part, we had come to the pier to relax. We were both still a little rattled from a close call the day before, when we had arrived at what was supposedly the scene of a bomb attack only to find the bombs exploding as we got there. My hair was dirty and streaked with black from the explosion. My face had suffered half a dozen abrasions. Duncan had had a thumbnail-sized chunk of his ear blown off. Already, it had begun to regenerate, which I found fascinating and creepy at the same time. (Do you want a glimpse of something even more fascinating? The real problem was: it wasn’t my ear. That had been blown off a long time before.)

‘I think it’s sad,’ I said. ‘They’re carting off all of our valuables, like common thieves.’

Until then, F&L had contented themselves with bombing us silly day and night. The steady northward stream of goods, art, and statuary had only started in the past week. It should have been a clear sign that the war was about to change again. After all, F&L, with their fungal mines, bombs, and bullets, seemed to have a direct line to a certain disenfranchised underground group.

‘Actually, Janice,’ Duncan said, as he dipped his ugly toes in the Moth, ‘I hesitate to try to convince you otherwise, but I think the sight of Voss Bender’s head floating vaingloriously down the Moth is very funny. So much effort by old F&L, and for what? What can they possibly think they will do with these ‘remains’ when they reach Morrow? Rework the marble into columns for some public building? Reassemble the statue? And if so, where in Truff’s name would they put it? We hardly knew where to put it ourselves.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ I said, ‘but that doesn’t mean it can’t be sad, too.’

DID I ALREADY SAY that there came to be the most terrible of Festival nights? It burned down the Borges Bookstore. It stopped the war between F&L and H&S. It stopped the love between Duncan and Mary, too. Snapped it. Was no more. Never again. (It brought an end to many things, this is true. But the Festival had nothing to do with ending my relationship with Mary. I caused that all by myself.) There had never been a Festival like it, except, perhaps, during the time of the Burning Sun. There may never be another like it again. (Why would there need to be? Every week since the Shift some part of the city is as raw as during Festival time.)

As far as I can remember, our father had never had anything to say about the Festival. (Not true. In his essay ‘The Question of Ambergris’, he wrote [I paraphrase from memory]: ‘At the heart of the city lies not a courtyard or a building or a statue, but an event: the Festival of the Freshwater Squid. It is an overlay of this event that populates the city with an alternative history, one that, if we could only understand its ebb and flow, the necessity of violence to it, would also allow us to understand Ambergris.’ Statements like this led me to my explorations of Ambergris. I remember trying to read my father’s essays at an early age, and only understanding them in fragments and glimpses. I loved the mystery of that, and the sense of adventure, of the questions implied by what I could understand.) However, he did say one or two things about the gray caps. I recall that at the dinner table he would ramble on about his current studies. He had no gift for providing context. He would sit at the table, looking down at his mashed potatoes as he scratched the back of his head with one hand and pushed his fork through his food with the other. There was always about him at these times a faraway look, as if he were figuring something out in his head even as he talked to us. Sometimes, it would be a kind of muttering chant under his breath. At other times he was genuinely talking to us but was really elsewhere. He smelled of limes back then, our mother having insisted he wear some cologne to combat the smell of old books brought back from the rare-book room of the Stockton Library. But since he hated cologne, he would cut up a lime instead and anoint himself with its juice. (I enjoyed that smell of books, though, missed it when it was gone – it was a comfortable, old-fashioned smell, usually mixed with the dry spice of cigar smoke. I came to feel that it was the smell of learning, which provoked the sweat not of physical exertion, but of mental exertion. To me, book must and cigar smoke were the product of working brains.)

At one such dinner, he looked up at us and said, ‘The gray caps are quite simple, really. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. So long as what you’re doing doesn’t interfere with their plans, they don’t care what you do – even if you cause one of them physical harm. But if somehow you step across the tripwire of one of their “activities”, why, then, there is nothing that can save you.’

(I remember that, too. ‘Tripwire’. A word I’d never heard before he used it. Why did he use that word? It fascinated me. While teaching at Blythe, I used the term in connection with the Silence. Had the Silence been caused by some kind of triggering of a ‘tripwire’, a set of circumstances under which the gray caps thought they could activate their Machine successfully? If so, what particular stimuli might have come into play? Could we predict when another such attempt might be made? And yet, even after the most minute study of ancient almanacs, historical accounts, the works of a number of statisticians such as the Marmy Gort, and anything else we could lay our hands on, I still could not divine those finite, measurable values that might have created the ideal conditions. I concluded that the gray caps’ extraordinary ability to collect information, coupled with their additional spore-based senses, made it unlikely that we would ever be able to know. This did not stop me from continuing to try. Or continuing to ask the most important question: why build a Machine? And what – exactly – did it do?)

We were to find out during the Festival of the Freshwater Squid that year just what happened when Ambergris collectively sprang a tripwire. For the bad Festival was like the antithesis of the Silence, sent to convince us that any semblance of law in the city was illusory, that it could not truly exist, whether we thought it resided in the palm of an obese, elderly Hoegbotton, a thin, ancient Frankwrithe, or the wizened visage of a Kalif none of us had ever seen.

THE NIGHT OF the Festival, the sun set red over the River Moth. Most of the paper lanterns that people had set out had already been crushed by rubble or by the motored vehicles of opposing forces. The Kalif’s men had stepped up their bombardment of the city from without. They made no pretence any more of aiming at anything in particular, their strikes as random as the startled flight of pigeons trying to avoid the crossfire. Their bombs were as likely to crack open a hospital ward as a Hoegbotton sentry post. A certain fatalism had crept into the minds of the survivors as a result. Really, it was as random as a heart attack. Why worry about what you cannot defend against? So we walked the streets as calmly as we had before the war, when we hadn’t been hunkered down against real threats, like a fungal bullet to the brain from some trigger-happy F&L recruit.

No gunfire could get to me. What terrified me as I looked out from my apartment at dusk was the proliferation of red flags.

On the way back from our journalistic assignments that day, before we turned in our now infamous ‘The Kalif Yearns for Every Ambergrisian’s Head’ article, the flags of the gray caps had appeared in multitudes – rhapsodies of red that seemed, like the ever-present fungus, always on the verge of forming some pattern, some message, only to fall apart into chaos again.

As we approached Lacond’s offices in the late afternoon, the wind picked up. It rattled the gravel on side streets. It brought with it a strange premature twilight, and a smell that none could identify. Was it a smell come up off the river? It seemed bitter and pleasant, sharp and vague, all at once.

We left Lacond’s offices tired and ready for rest, Duncan to his and Mary’s apartment, me to my own place much further down Albumuth Boulevard in the opposite direction. (Not even Lacond could demand we cover the Festival, not that year. The Kalif’s troops were an unknown factor – they made us nervous, as had the uneventful Festival the year before.) Sybel had decided to take me up on my invitation and stay with me that night, just in case. Either we’d celebrate the Festival together or defend ourselves against it. (I left ample protections; I’m sorry they were not enough.) We had all been through many Festivals. We were old pros at it. We knew how to handle it.

I had thought about making the trek to our mother’s mansion, but Duncan had assured me he could keep her safe. (She was quite safe, for several reasons, not least of which was her location: far enough upriver that the Kalif’s men had not requisitioned the house, and far enough from Ambergris that she would come to no harm from the gray caps.)

Dusk had become night by the time Sybel arrived, breathless from running. After I let him in, I bolted the door behind him.

‘It’s not good out there,’ he said, gasping for breath. ‘The trees are too still. There’s a silence that’s . . . like I imagine what the Silence must have been like.’

That was a thought. I felt light-headed for an instant, a conjoined chill and thrill. What if, tonight, we were to experience what the twenty-five thousand had experienced during the Silence, the city to become another vast experiment if Duncan was to be believed?

Outside, we could hear a few dozen drunken youths pass by, shouting as they stumbled along the street.

‘They’ll be lucky if they survive the hour,’ Sybel said. ‘And it won’t be the Kalif that kills them, either.’

He gave me a look and went back to loading his gun. We had pistols and knives, which Sybel had managed to purchase from, of all people, a Kalif officer. There was a booming black market in weapons these days. Some wags speculated that the Kalif had invaded Ambergris to create demand for surplus.

There seemed about him that night more than a hint of self-awareness, mixed with that rarest of commodities for Sybel: contentment. (It was only rare to you because you never saw him in his natural element.)

WE DIDN’T BOARD UP the window until much later, fearful of losing the thread of what was going on outside. The full moon drooped, misshapen and diffuse, in the darkening sky.

Through that smudged fog of glass, we watched rivulets and outcroppings of the Festival walk or run by. Clowns, magicians, stiltmen and ordinary citizens with no special talent, who had put on bright clothes and gone out because – quite frankly – in the middle of war, how much worse could the Festival possibly make things? True, without the great influx of visitors from other cities there weren’t nearly the numbers of people that we had become accustomed to seeing at the Festival, but Sybel and I still agreed it was a more potent Festival than had been predicted by the so-called experts. (Including us, Janice, in our column in the broadsheet.)

Then the merrymakers began to trail off. Soon the groups had thinned until it was only one or two people at a time, either drunk and careless, or alert and hurrying quickly to their destinations. Every once in a while, something would explode in the background as the Kalif’s men kept at it. The bright orange flame of the shuddering explosions was oddly reassuring. As long as it stayed far away from us, that is. At least we knew where it was coming from. (Yes, with all the force of His benevolent, if distant, love.)

Sybel and I sat there looking out of the window like it was our last view of the world.

‘Remember when we used to host parties in abandoned churches on Festival night?’ Sybel said. He looked very old then, in that light, the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth undeniable.

‘Yes, I remember,’ I said, smiling. ‘That was a lot of fun. It really was.’

At least, more fun than the war. I didn’t want to return to those days, either, though.

Sybel smiled back. Had we ever been close? I search my memory now, thinking of the glance we exchanged back then. No, not close, but comfortable, which is almost more intimate. In the preparations for countless parties, in seeing Sybel day after day at my gallery, a deep fondness and affection had built up between us.

‘Maybe after the war, I can . . .’ The words felt like such a lie, I couldn’t continue. ‘Maybe the gallery can . . .’

Sybel nodded and looked away in, I believe, embarrassment. ‘That would be good,’ he said.

We continued to watch the city through our window: that fungi-tinged, ever-changing painting.

FINALLY, IT BEGAN to happen, at least three hours after nightfall. A stillness crept into the city. The only people on the street were armed and running. Once, a dozen members of a Hoegbotton militia hurried by in tight formation, their weapons gleaming with the reflected light of the fires. Then, for a while, nothing. The moon and the one or two remaining spluttery street lamps revealed an avenue on which no one moved, where the lack of breeze was so acute that crumpled newspapers on the sidewalk lay dead still.

‘It’s coming,’ Sybel muttered. ‘I don’t know what it is, but it’ll happen soon.’

But a chill had crept over me, as it seemed to have crept over the city. It lodged in my throat, my belly, my legs. Somehow, I too could feel it coming, like a physical presence. As if my nerves were the nerves of the city. Something had entered Ambergris. (Creeping through your nervous system, the gray caps’ spores, creating fear and doubt, right on schedule. I’d put the antidote in your food, but an antidote only works for so long against the full force of such efforts.)

Even the moon seemed to gutter and wane a little. Then the lights came back on – all of them – but they were fungus green, shining in a way that hardly illuminated anything. Instead, this false light created fog, confusion, fear.

‘Not yet,’ Sybel said. ‘Not yet. This might be the end of it, you know. This might . . .’ Now it was his turn to trail off. We both knew this would not be the end of it.

We began to see people again on the street below. This time, they ran for their lives. We could not help them without endangering ourselves, and so we watched, frozen, at the window, beyond even guilt. A woman with no shoes on, her long hair trailing out behind her, ran across our line of vision. Her mouth was wide, but no sound came from it. A few seconds later, some thing appeared in the gutter near the sidewalk. It tried to stand upright like a person, tottered grotesquely, then dropped all pretence and loped out of sight after the woman. The roar of the Kalif’s mortar fire followed on its heels.

Sybel didn’t reply. Sybel was whispering something in his native language, the sing-song chirp of the Nimblytod tribes. I couldn’t understand it, but it sounded soothing. Except I was beyond being soothed.

Then a man came crawling down the street, shapes in the shadows pulling at his legs. Still he crawled, past all fear, past all doubt. Until, as the Kalif’s mortars let out a particularly raucous shout, something pulled him off the street, out of view.

Silence again. I was shaking by that time. My teeth were grinding together. I’d never understood that your teeth could actually grind involuntarily, could chatter when they weren’t grinding. Sybel made me bite down on a piece of cloth.

‘The sound,’ he whispered. ‘They’ll hear you.’ (If they heard you, it is because they ‘heard’ my protections on the door of your apartment – my attempt to help you may have endangered you instead.)

The street lay empty, save for the suggestion of shapes at the edge of our line of sight.

Suddenly, the Kalif’s mortar fire, which had been progressing in a regular circle around the city, became erratic. Several explosions occurred at once, quite near us, the characteristic whistle of destruction so banal I didn’t even think of it as a threat at first. The ceiling lifted, the floor trembled, dust floated down.

Then nothing for several minutes. Then another eruption of explosions, further away. On the outskirts of Ambergris, gouts of flame lit up the night sky, whiter than the moon. Slowly, as the fires spread, it became clear that the conflagration was forming a circle around Ambergris.

Nothing rational told us that the Kalif’s positions had been overrun, but we knew it to be true regardless. Someone or something had attacked the Kalif’s troops. And yet not even H&S or F&L would have been foolhardy enough to launch an attack on so unpredictable an evening as Festival night.

That is when we decided to board up the window. Some things should not be seen, if at all possible.

SHALL I TELL YOU Duncan’s crime during the Festival, in Mary’s eyes? While Sybel and I boarded up my apartment window, Duncan was leading Mary to safety – just not a safety she had expected or particularly wanted. It was not the safety provided by a living necklace of acclaim and warmly muttered praise. It was not the kind of safety that reinforces trust or love. For where could Duncan possibly be safe with the surface in so much turmoil? I think you already know, my dear reader, if you’ve followed me this far. Some of us read to discover. Some of us read to discover what we already know. Duncan read Mary the wrong way. He thought he knew her. He was wrong. How do I know? His journal tells me so. It’s all in there.

I took Mary underground as the Festival raged above. Truff help me, I did. Why I thought this might be a good thing for us beyond ensuring our immediate survival, I don’t know. The Kalif’s men were too close to our home, and I could sense the gray caps getting even closer. The spores in my skin rose to the surface and pointed in their direction. My skin was literally pulling in their direction, yearning to join them – that was how close to turning traitor my body had become. Besides, some F&L louts were five doors down, beating an old woman senseless. It seemed clear they’d reach our door before long.

‘Do you trust me?’ I asked Mary. She was pale and shaking. She wouldn’t look at me, but she nodded. I don’t know if I’ve ever loved her more than at that moment, as she left everything familiar behind. I kissed her. ‘Get your jacket,’ I told her. ‘Bring the canteen from the kitchen.’

And then we set off. The place I meant to take her was underground, yes, but a place rarely inhabited by gray caps. The entrance lay halfway between our home and the F&L thugs. We had to hurry. We were scurrying to a rat hole before the other rats could catch us. I had my greatcoat on, which I had seeded with a few varieties of camouflaging fungi. I was carrying an umbrella for some reason – I don’t even remember why any more. Except I remember joking with Mary about it, to make her laugh, at least a little bit. But she was too scared, frozen. I really think she thought we were both about to die. Thankfully, I was more or less human right then, or she would have been out of her mind with terror. When you can’t count on your lover to stay in one consistent shape . . .

We beat the F&L thugs to the entrance by a few minutes – we could hear their cries and catcalls, the swish of their torches, smell the bittersweet decay that coated anyone who handled fungal weapons for too long – but they passed us by as we descended ever deeper into the hole, down a ladder.

‘Where are we going?’ Mary asked me. I don’t know if she really wanted an answer or not. She smelled like fear, her perfume gone sour.

‘Keep following me,’ I told her. To her, it was dark as we came to the end of the ladder and into a tunnel, but my eyes were different than they had been. I could see things she couldn’t. I could see markers in the tunnel. I could see colours spiralling out of the dark. I held her hand – cold, and clutching my hand like a hawk clutches a mouse – as we walked through the passageway. It was wet now – we were wading through thick, shallow water, the tunnel beginning to slope downward, so we had to be careful not to slip. Through the darkness, I could see the sightless eyes of certain mushrooms, the fiery green of creeping mosses. We could hear dim, dumb shudders above from some kind of bombing: I remember being, insanely enough, happy to hear that sound. Surely it would make Mary realize we could not have stayed above ground?

Of course, as a corrective counterbalance, the smell coming from below us was rank, stifling. And, then, as if to undo all my reassurances, there came the sound of scuttling, of scattering. That’s when I think her spirit really broke and she began to panic. She pulled away from me, to turn back, to run. I held onto her wrist, would not let go. I had to put my hand over her mouth to stop her screaming.

‘We’re lost, my love, if you make a sound,’ I said. ‘We’re dead. You understand?’ She nodded, and I took my hand from her mouth. Her eyes in the dim light were white and wide.

The sounds came from below us, moving fast. Something wanted out. Something wanted to reach the surface. It wasn’t my place to stop it even if I could, which I couldn’t. There was no time to do anything but what I did: I pulled Mary inside my greatcoat and pushed her into the side of the passage-way, my coat covering both of us, and the coat itself covered with the protective spores. They had begun to take root and form fruiting bodies. I had to hope it would be enough.

The scuttling sound and the smell became more intense. I could tell Mary was still stifling her screams. She was shaking, her body tight against mine. Nothing at Blythe Academy, or in her relatively short life so far, had prepared her for anything like this moment.

Then they were all around us – gray caps, racing up the tunnel, speaking in clicks and whistles. One even brushed against my coat, but they were in such a hurry that they did not stop, and before long there was silence again, save for the echo of their progress to the surface. Something was going to happen tonight; my instincts had been right. It would be much safer below ground than above, because tonight even the gray caps would be on the surface. I shuddered, pulled Mary closer.

‘Can you go on?’ I asked her.

‘I think so,’ she said, her voice calmer than before.

I’ve often wondered since if that was the point – if it was in that tunnel, as the gray caps passed by, that she made her decision. If she had decided then that she refused to believe any of it, no matter what she saw. If she was going to disown me, discredit me because of that moment. Or this moment. Or the moment after that. I’ll never be sure, but I do wonder. For me, though, the moment was a sweet one: to smell her hair, to feel her next to me, to know we were both still alive, and together.

Meanwhile, in the darkness caused by the boarded-up window, Sybel and I awaited our own fate. We had no recourse to the underground, no thought that it might be safer there than where we were.

Sometimes we heard strange sounds that could not have been real – gurglings and shouts and screams, but oddly twisted, as if distant or distorted. At other times, it sounded as if soldiers fought with swords on the street below. The sound of leafy vines growing and intertwining at great speed. The sound of buildings collapsing – a dull, muted roar, then the sweet exhausted sigh of wood or stone hitting the ground. A smell, sharp yet musty, began to enter the apartment.

‘We should leave,’ he said. ‘We should get out of the apartment. Find a high place.’

Sybel smiled and gave me an odd look. ‘The Borges Bookstore was the safest place to be, and they burned it down.’

Something began to scratch at the outside of the door. A slow, tentative sound. It could have been anything. It could have been the wind. But the breath died in my throat. I realized every nerve in my skin had come alive in warning. I shut my eyes for a long time, as if willing the sound to go away. But it did not. It became louder, gained in confidence, precision. Scrabbling. At the door. At the window. I heard it sniffing the air. Reading our scent. I shivered, caught in the grip of nightmare. If we hadn’t boarded up the window, it would have been looking in at us at that very moment.

I held the gun tight, so tight my knuckles ached. ‘But where can we run to, Sybel? And how do we get out of here? I don’t think it’s possible now.’

A knock at the door before I could reply – but not at the height I’d expected; lower, much lower.

I stifled a scream. ‘It’s too close. It can hear us right now. It can hear us talking. It knows what we’re going to do.’ I held the gun like a club. I was no use to anyone. The fear had got too far into me. This wasn’t like trying to kill myself. I could face the fear of that now, but not this fear – this was too different, too unfamiliar.

Sybel grabbed me by the shoulders, whispered in my ear, ‘Either we go through the bathroom window or we’re dead. It’s going to come in here and kill us.’

‘Yes, but Sybel,’ I whispered back, ‘what if there’s already one at the bathroom window, too? What if they’re already back there?’

Sybel shrugged. There was an odd, fatalistic light in his eyes. ‘Then it doesn’t matter. We’re dead. I’ll go first. If they get to me, go back into the apartment and lock yourself in the bedroom, and hope dawn comes soon.’

I hugged him. I’ve never been more terrified than at that moment – not even now, writing this account. I don’t know what came over me. I’d seen the horrors of war, become clinical and precise in the cataloguing of them, but somehow this was more personal.

In a horrible, moist parody of a human voice, it said, ‘I have something. For you. You will. Like it.’

Was this the first time in Ambergris’s history that a gray cap or a creature sent by the gray caps had spoken to a resident of the city? Most assuredly not – history is littered with the remains of those who have had such conversations; at least a dozen, two dozen. And yet, that night more than one hundred people reported having such contacts. What did it mean? At the time, no meaning could have penetrated my fear. (Mostly meant what a clever mimic, a parrot, means: nothing. A lure. Bait. A tripwire. A distraction. Delivered by their drones. Now I wonder if this was another harbinger of the Shift.)

WE MADE OUR WAY to the back of the apartment, to the bathroom. I helped Sybel clamber up to the window. Behind us, the creature with the wet voice was banging on the door like a drunk and making a low gurgling laugh. ‘Let me in!’ it said. ‘Let me in! I have something for you.’

Fresh air entered the apartment. Fresh air, the distant sounds of battle, the roar of flames in the middle distance, over the silhouette of rooftops, but nothing else.

The creature began to pound on the front door. It began to laugh – great, rippling waves of laughter. Perhaps it was calling to others of its kind. (It was gathering its strength – it had nothing but a collective consciousness; it was but the sum of its spores.)

I stood on the toilet seat and pulled myself up to the window ledge by pushing off against the wall with my left foot. A narrow ledge, a narrow window.

The splintering had become a rending. The door would be broken down within the minute.

Sybel shut the window behind us. The night was glistening with stars masked by patches of fog; there was a chill to the air. The fires on the edges of the city raged on.

Shivering, pistol stuck through my belt, knives in my pockets, as much a hazard to myself as to others, I stumbled out onto the second-floor roof. There wasn’t much room. I had to engage in a close shuffling dance with Sybel so we could both leave the storm drain for the roof proper.

Behind us, a muted roar. A shriek. Something I’d never heard before, something I never want to hear again. (No matter where you are, now, I’m afraid you’ll be hearing it again. What we all heard in that moment of the war was the first groaning, rust-and-flesh-choked stirrings of the Machine. It fed off that energy. It needed it. Forever after, my finely tuned senses could hear that hum, that vibration, in the ground. It terrified me.)

How do you control your fear at a time like that? I couldn’t. I could barely stop from wetting myself. Bombs are different. Reporting is different. This time, I couldn’t get outside myself. I couldn’t get outside.

‘What now, Sybel?’ I asked. I was breathing hard. I think I might have been whimpering.

Looking at him, I saw a sudden confidence that I had not seen before. As a Nimblytod, high places were his birthright, no matter how long he had lived in the city.

So we went higher, following the curve of the roof to a point where we could pull ourselves up to the next level and the next, until we were on a real roof – a slanted, tiled affair a block away from my apartment. We couldn’t see over the other side of it, and we didn’t want to. On that side lay an unimpeded view of the street – and whatever had come through the door to my apartment.

We tried to be quiet, but the creature somewhere below had already heard us. Was tracking us.

‘It’s at the bathroom window. It’s coming out onto the rain gutter,’ he said. He looked to our right. Three feet separated us from the flat roof of the next building. It was higher, but we could see the edge of a wall in the middle of that roof.

He went first, so he could help me if I didn’t quite make it. A smooth, graceful run; the leap, up into the night; and then on all fours on the other side. I tossed my gun and knives over to him. I could hear scuttling sounds behind me. There was a smell now, like rotted flesh, but mixed with a fungal sweetness.

I ran toward the gap as fast as I could and jumped, the ground spinning below me, the flames to the west a kaleidoscope; came down heavily on the other side.

Sybel helped me up and we ran for the wall. Once behind it, out of sight if not out of smell, Sybel handed back my pistol and knives.

We could already hear it sniffing our scent from the other roof. We could sense its enjoyment. The sound of that thing slowly coming towards us will never leave me.

I was babbling by then. Praying to Truff, to Bonmot, to anyone I could think of. Even now, in this afterword, with the hole in the ground behind me, my typewriter slowly turning into fungal mush, I am babbling, thinking of that moment.

We waited. We almost waited too long. Its smell came closer, came closer. It jumped onto the roof – we could hear it leap to clear the gap with an effortless stride, heard its claws scrabble to find purchase on our side. It couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away.

‘Be calm and quiet, Janice,’ he said. ‘Just be calm. When I say, stand up and fire at it.’

I looked up at the few stars through the moonlight, the clouds and the smoke that had begun to move in over the city. It was a cool night. I could feel the rough chill of the stone wall against my back. The seconds seemed to stretch on for a very long time. I had time to think about my gallery, to wonder if it would still be standing in the morning. I had time to think about Duncan and Mary, and to ask myself if I had been too harsh, if it had ever been my place to disapprove. I experienced a twinge of regret – that I had never married, never had children, never lived a ‘normal’ life.

We almost waited too long. We thought it was further away. But then it began to run at us. It had played its game of stalk as long as it wanted – now it meant to finish us. It was talking as it ran at us: ‘I have something for you something for you something for you you will like it you will like it you will like it,’ like the chant of some senile priest counting beads cross-legged in the Religious Quarter.

That’s when we rose, in our fear. We rose up, and we emptied our pistols into it. It was dark as the night and yet transparent – you could see the stars through it when it got close. It was thick. It was thin. It had claws. It had fangs like polished steel. It had eyes so human and yet so various that the gaze paralysed me. It was indescribable. Even now, trying to visualize it, I want to vomit. I want to unthink it.

Our shots went right through it. It veered to the left, misjudged the distance, and struck the wall in front of us, reared up again. We shot it again – tore great holes in its fungal skull, its impossible body. It roared, spit a stream of dark liquid, and tried to come up over the wall at us. Sybel stuck the muzzle of his pistol under its soft-rigid chin and pulled the trigger. The recoil sent the creature screaming and stumbling to the edge of the roof, and then over – falling. Still talking. Still telling us it had something for us that we’d like.

We stood there, numb, for a moment. Some things cannot be described. Some things can only be experienced.

Gone was the fear. I couldn’t feel it any more. I just couldn’t. I had no room for it; it had no room for me. It had other places to go, other people to visit.

‘Come on,’ I said to Sybel. ‘We have to get off this roof. There might be others. They will have heard. We’ll seek refuge in the Religious Quarter. It might still be safe there.’

And how did that feel, you may ask. It was terrible, I tell you. Terrible. It was an experience to inoculate you against horror forever.

So down we went, ever down, until the tunnel levelled off and an odd green phosphorescence that even Mary could see began to rise from the walls, the ground. Now we walked across a thick green carpet of blindly grasping tendrils. Soft and silent, so that our every sound was sucked into that which we trod upon. Ahead, we could see nothing but the continual worm hole of the tunnel, with no possible deviation, no other possibility.

‘How much further? Where are we going?’ Mary asked, her voice flat and dull.

‘Not much further,’ I told her, heartsick at how every step seemed to make her more distant, even though we walked shoulder-to-shoulder. ‘We’re going somewhere we can be safe.’ As safe as we could be anywhere, at least.

The fungus on my body had come alive the further down we travelled. It pulled at my coat, it curled across my chest. It knew it was home. It wanted to return, but I wouldn’t let it. If it returned, I would never leave.

At the same time, I could hear Mary next to me, her every sound magnified by my heightened senses. Her breath, the nervous movement of her hands, the tread of her shoes.

‘I don’t know why this is necessary,’ she said at one point, the fear gnawing at her face in the green light.

‘We have to,’ I said. ‘If we’d stayed above ground, we might be dead by now.’ The dim dumb hum and throb of explosives somewhere over our heads punctuated my point. The emptiness of the tunnel just confirmed it.

And yet we were not alone. Mary just couldn’t see them, floating in the air around us, as oblivious to us as Mary was to them, conforming to their own rituals and needs. I still didn’t know what they were, nor could I even describe the shape of them. Perhaps they were red-tinged mega-spores, diaphanous, translucent. Perhaps they were some other organism altogether. I’d learned long ago not to wince when I walked through one; luckily, as I’ve said, Mary couldn’t even see them.

‘You trust me, don’t you?’ I asked her while all around us the tendrils swayed, and the green was not one green but a thousand shades of it, and the intensity of the voices in my ears made me want to shout to be heard, although I knew no one could hear them but me. The blind voices of the fungi, calling out. So beautiful. So unbearable.

‘I don’t know if this is about trust,’ she replied. ‘This isn’t real, Duncan. I don’t accept that this is real. You’ve fed me a pill. I’m having visions.’ It was odd to see her, usually so strong, so weak when out of her element.

I ignored her. The fungi were like pale hands beneath our tread. I had to carry her for a while. ‘We’re almost there,’ I said.

‘Almost where?’ she asked, trembling in my arms. ‘Almost dead?’

What can I tell you about our escape to the Truffidian Cathedral? What, I wonder, will put it all in the proper perspective? I hardly know where to begin, but, then, that’s not unusual. There’s no balance between measured prose and raw experience that does not end in mediocrity or a slow burn into oblivion.

It happened like this: Sybel and I left the shelter of the roof and began to make our way through back streets and alleys to the Truffidian Cathedral. It was the only landmark I could think of that might be safe.

Sybel knew as well as I did that we couldn’t sit still – we couldn’t stay on that roof and wonder what might be coming over the ledge next.

The world we found ourselves in was silent. In some places the lamps were on, and in others they were not. Where they were on, they illuminated everything in purples or greens. The purple and the green both came from spores. The spores were heavy in the air; so as not to breathe them, we tore strips from our clothing and put them over our mouths and noses.

Was it effective? I’m still alive today, but at the time I could not get over the uncomfortable feeling that I was breathing in thousands of tiny lives, that I was one step away from becoming Duncan.

I said that the world was silent. Do you understand what I mean by that? I mean that there was no sound anywhere in the city. The spores clotted the air, muffled noises, sucked the sound out of the world. We lived in silence. It was like a Presence, and it was watchful. As we sidled along a wall, keeping to the shadows for long moments, I felt that each spore was a tiny eye, and that each eye was reporting back to an unseen master. A heaviness grew in my lungs that I’ve never felt since. The air was trying to suck words as yet unspoken out of me, and snuff them, stillborn.

Silence and haze. The purple and green of the spores made the air heavy, made it hard to see more than two feet in front of us. It was a kind of fog, through which we could just make out the distant flames that signified the destruction of the Kalif’s army.

But I don’t mean to suggest that this silent haze was empty. It wasn’t. As we picked our way through streets turned foreign, unrecognizable, hints of movement suggested themselves almost out of view, always on the periphery. We did not turn to look at whatever walked there, for fear this would make it too real. That which watched there ignored us, went on past – saving their energy for other, more important missions, no doubt. But this made it no less frightening.

Nor did it blunt the effect of the human catastrophe that came out of the haze and lingered for far too long in our vision. Some lamp posts played host to bodies swinging from ropes, heads lolling, tongues distended, skin pulled back in caricatures of smiles. Other bodies crowded the street, stumbled over in the dark. Pieces of people that appeared to be carefully cut apart, not the victims of mortar fire, but in precise stacks: legs, arms, torsos. The moon overhead was like the knuckle of a fist pressed against a dirty window.

And always the motion, so unnerving that at one point I fired into the dark, screamed into the shadows, ‘Come out! Come out, you bastards!’

Sybel didn’t even try to stop me. He just stared ahead and kept walking. His gaze was haunted, his face vacant. Not all fears are the same. I met mine on the roof; Sybel met his on the streets.

We reached the outskirts of the Religious Quarter by taking two steps forward, a step sideways, a step back, two forward, always almost seeing the vague delineation of ghosts, flitting and circling.

The Religious Quarter rose out of the mire of night as an outline of domes and steeples, highlighted by the flames that lay miles behind them. In that light, it looked unearthly, bizarre, not of Ambergris. Still, we entered it, in the hopes that that way lay safety. We allowed ourselves to come under the influence of those spires, those outcroppings of alcoves, all silent, all dead, not a priest in sight. (Probably cowering in their basements for all the good it would do them.)

We were on a street called Bannerville. I remember that. The street lamps there were bare of the terrible burden of death. Some of them worked. Glowed green. At the end of Bannerville, we’d turn to the right and we’d be a block away from the Truffidian Cathedral.

A strange surge of joy or recognition overtook us, all out of proportion to our reality. We began to run, to laugh, abandoning our shuffle through the shadows; with safety so close, it was agony to walk slowly. The worst seemed past. It really did. I was already thinking about what I’d say to Bonmot. I was already thinking about that, Truff help me.

Sybel had stopped holding my hand. He was a little behind me at this point. We were almost at the end of Bannerville, not more than twenty feet from safety. Overhead, a street lamp flickered free of the green glow that pervaded the rest of the city.

We were both about to turn the corner. I could hear Sybel’s heavy breathing as he ran. Then I heard an unfamiliar sound – a sound trapped between a gasp and a moan – and when I turned to look back at Sybel, all I could see was a mist of blood, floating out in streamers. I stopped running and stared. I couldn’t breathe for a second. Nothing of him was left – not even his shoes. Nothing at all. His dissolution was complete. Utter. There was such a final and terrible beauty to it that I thought it must be an absurd magic trick, a horrible joke. But it wasn’t, and the laughter caught in my throat, became a sob. Sybel had died, almost in front of my eyes, less than a block from the cathedral. A moment later, I realized it must have been one of F&L’s fungal mines, but for an instant it seemed more deadly, more immediate – something personal.

When I tried to move – away from the blood mist? towards it? – I put pressure down on my right foot, felt a shock of pain, and fell to the ground. That’s when I realized that the mine had also erased my right foot, shoe and all. There was just a stump. Nothing else. I lay on the ground, panting, and watched blood dribble out of the part that wasn’t cauterized. The silence had been transformed into a pounding of blood in my ears, a slow, aching pulse. It reminded me of the blood I’d let spurt from my wrists, and for a moment I was content to watch it leak out of me – all of this liquid that constituted me at a level more basic than brain or mind, soul or spirit. I almost let it happen. I almost decided to lie back and let it happen.

But then I thought of poor Sybel and something changed inside me. We had come so far. We had almost made it. I started to shout or scream then, but not words, nothing as coherent as words.

I took the strip of cloth from around my mouth and made a crude tourniquet to stop the bleeding. Around me, the blood mist that had been Sybel writhed in strands of gorgeous crimson, already dissipating.

I got up, gritted my teeth. I began to hop around the corner, towards safety. I don’t know how long it took, or even what was happening around me – all I could focus on was the sound of my remaining shoe against gravel as I hopped, pain in my left leg from balancing the weight of my entire body. At some point I fell and could not get back up. I remember crawling until I reached the great doors of the Truffidian Cathedral, rising long enough to shove those doors open, pushing my way inside, and then falling to the floor.

Everyone inside the Cathedral was dead. I lay where I had fallen, next to a corpse. We stared at each other, eye to eye, and it took me a while to realize that somewhere in the background, near the altar, something was moving.

Once we reached our destination, I set Mary down. We stood in a large, circular cavern. Green lichens coated the floor. The walls reflected red-and-green spores floating through the gold-gray light. I had made a throne of mushrooms for her, lavender and silver. I had sent into the air perpetually twirling strands of emerald fungi, like shiny paper. I had carved a table to appear from the ground, and upon it set a cup of pure cold water from an aquifer. And beside it, three mushrooms – orange, blue, and purple – that would not only feed her but leave her feeling strong and calm.

I had spent a long time preparing for that moment. And yet, I must admit, not everything in that cavern lay under my control. How could it? Something was laughing in a corner, at a pitch no ordinary human ear could hear. Something non-human. It almost sounded like human speech. Things crept and crawled through the murk. A smell like rotted mango permeated the cavern. But, still, this was as safe a place as you could find below ground. It was my laboratory, my refuge. I knew everything here, including the thing that laughed. I knew them all on the most basic of levels. I relaxed as Mary wrapped her arms around me. I thought she would appreciate all that I had given her. But she wouldn’t talk to me, and she refused to look around. I couldn’t talk to her, either. Instead, I turned away so she wouldn’t see the veins of emerald creeping up my face.

They stayed for hours in that secluded cavern, sitting or standing. They spoke, if at all, in whispers, and sometimes not even whispers because some new threat would approach every few minutes requiring utter silence.

‘I was happy,’ Duncan wrote in his journal. ‘I thought we were reaching a new closeness, one beyond words. That the extremity of our situation would make us as one. Instead, we were growing further apart with each passing minute. Now, I am confused by my happiness that night. Was I blind?’ (Was there a moment when I switched from the epiphany of discovery to the weight of discovery? I don’t know, except that one day I realized that knowledge – especially secret knowledge – had become a burden.)

MARY’S ASSAULT began from that moment, from the moment when her mind refused to accept what she had seen, for she maintained her distance all the way back up to the surface the next morning.

From that moment, it was only a matter of time until the flesh necklace, until I would confront her at the base of the stairs. It smouldered in her face, in her eyes, as indelible as the mottling of fungus on Duncan’s body. All her scholarship, all her will, would be focused on making what she had seen as unreal, as distant, as possible. Who could blame her? I could, and did, even if Duncan lacked the nerve. It was a failure – a failure of love and of imagination.

While they waited underground, I lay on the cathedral floor, gray caps walking among the bodies, me dead and yet not dead, seeing yet sightless, staring up at a ceiling that depicted the glory of the Truffidian cosmos. It almost might have been a premonition of Sabon’s flesh necklace. It too was incongruous to its surroundings. It too was dead and yet not dead, blind yet had eyes. But mostly I had not a thought in my head as I tried to survive by playing dead next to such a weight of bodies. I had no room for grief at that moment. I had no time for tears. In that moment, I began to relax. I began to give up my self. I had no choice. I had nowhere to hide, nothing to hide with.

That is the night I stopped being a reporter and became something else entirely.

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