Shriek An Afterword

The war had been jarring, numbing, senseless. In its aftermath, the balance of power remained much as it had before all the bloodshed. The Hoegbottons controlled Ambergris and F&L controlled Morrow and Sophia’s Island but lacked the military and political will to enforce their ridiculous tariffs. The Kalif’s mauled troops retreated across the River Moth even as their merchants advanced to secure deals with the Hoegbottons to rebuild the city and import new products. (Oddly enough, the Kalif’s troops could be said to have ultimately achieved their goal, if not in the preferred way. For, after all, hadn’t they liberated the citizens of Ambergris from chaos and tyranny through their sacrifice?)

After the war, Ambergris forgot the real enemy – Hoegbotton & Sons still railed against Frankwrithe & Lewden or the Kalif, but provided no warning against the gray caps. People gratefully went along with this mass denial. Wasn’t it easier to blame F&L than an amorphous, faceless enemy that hid underground and attacked seemingly at random? (To be fair, the still unknown way in which F&L had acquired fungal weapons confused the issue – F&L did look like the sole instigator. After all, didn’t the gray caps periodically erupt from their hidey-holes during the Festival anyway?)

The terrible, cold beauty of the truth appealed to no one. Every few weeks, for several years, one or two, or three or four, people were killed by a leftover fungal bomb, or a new one planted by someone – the gray caps or F&L, I assume, but who could tell the difference? H&S did nothing to prevent this, and tried hard to stop Lacond from reporting it. We were a city and a people unable to face our coming annihilation, incensed over an enemy that posed not a quarter of the threat. In a way, we lived in a fairytale, convinced that someone else’s actions or inactions might save us. As day after day passed without Ambergris being invaded, we flinched less and less, let down our guard. No one was going to destroy the city – only rumours could do that, the thinking went, only idle talk. If only we pretended otherwise, the enemy could not creep out at night and make us all disappear. Permanence had become a thing of the past.

(I didn’t think much had changed, but if it had, it had changed for the reason most eloquently put by the historian Edgar Rybern: namely, that barbaric institutions and individuals can benefit society, while ‘civilization’ can, in its most benign forms, prove barbaric. This led me to two conclusions germane to the war. First, that the very act of F&L coming into contact with the gray caps and then into contact with H&S had irrevocably changed all three parties, that, stated goals aside, all three of these institutions have been thrown off kilter by the war. Now, whether they realize it or not, each new decision pulls them slightly further away from their original purpose. What effect this would have over a hundred or two hundred years, I could not tell.)

For Duncan, personally, the end of the war meant two things: that Lacond was available to help him limp back into a shadow career in print – it became apparent at war’s end that Lacond could only keep one of us on, and, even if I had wanted to stay, it wasn’t going to be me – and that Mary’s patience with him was almost at an end.

The slow withdrawal, the retreat from love, went on at the same time Lacond began recruiting Duncan for his eccentric obsessions. (No more eccentric than my own obsessions, Janice. Lacond and I understood each other in a way that made me no longer feel quite so alone.)

How did Mary withdraw? Let me count the ways. She no longer tolerated my brother’s erratic schedule. She no longer found his eccentricities endearing. She no longer found his fungal diseases tragic, his endurance of them brave. (I’m not sure she ever felt that way about my fungal diseases. It was more that she put up with their side effects to be with me.) The small apartment they shared became claustrophobic. Duncan’s journal skirts the reason behind the feelings:

I cannot find my inspiration in this place – I have to go down to the Spore or Lacond’s apartment to write, or I just stare at the page. I don’t know why my apartment has become so stifling, but it has. There’s nothing in it to spur me on to create. Except Mary, of course.

But Mary spent more and more time with friends. Sometimes she even stayed at her parents’ house. Duncan had no chance, no choice. How could he? He didn’t have the experience to combat it, to see the signs. To Duncan, sadly enough, the only way to get her back was to keep showing her the truth, even though it was clear to anyone with any sense that he’d need to start lying to her if he wanted to keep her. (A cynical view that would only serve as a short-term solution. And I was neither so naïve nor Mary so experienced as you make out.) Every time he showed her the truth, she pushed him further away. Duncan wrote in his journal:

I feel as if I am living by myself again. She isn’t really here any more. She’s a husk or a shell. Her eyes are dull. Her hair is dull. Her words are weighted and slow. She doesn’t listen to me. I am killing her.

But the truth also meant accepting that the day-to-day domesticity didn’t suit him either, especially for long periods of time. I will spare you the contrast between the journal entries that detail with a silly kind of joy the beauty of her snores early in their relationship and the dull snarl of his comments on those self-same snores near the end. Or take this terse entry only a month before disaster: ‘another night of odd smells’. Sometimes he would be almost apologetic: ‘She could easily have complained about the frequency with which I spored. Or how I tracked in strange green mud from time to time. But she didn’t.’

Even then, I think he wanted to stay with her. I don’t believe he ever understood that he might actually lose her. (I couldn’t, back then, imagine a tolerable moment without her – and, in all honesty, tolerable moments since I lost her have been fewer and less intense.) After all, he’d never been through a break-up before – unlike me, who had been through dozens. I had become an expert on broken relationships. It had become ritualized with me, each battle with its own histories, its own decorum and its own rules of disengagement.

Duncan and Mary managed to stay together in their little apartment for a few more months, but like the starfish that rapidly became brittle, their love had died long before they acknowledged the fact. The bond between them had broken, snapped, and although Duncan was still in love with her – even though I don’t know if he liked her any more – she was not in love with him. Their situation frayed, unravelled. They had screaming arguments, tearful reunions. Duncan would seek refuge at my apartment, only to go back, over my objections.

I feel as if she is made of clay or wood or stone. There is no longer any of the lovely fluidity that made me lust for her, although I lust for her still. I keep thinking that it will just take time – that, in time, she will reconcile herself to that night and to what she saw. That she will understand the strange beauty of it. That her understanding of it will lead her to an understanding of me. Until then, she complains about the amount of time I spend away from her, with Lacond and ‘that stupid society’ as she calls it, and then, when I do spend time with her, she complains that I smother her. She cringes in distaste when my fungal disease flares up. I must keep myself wrapped in a bathrobe, away from her critical eye, when I feel it coming on. I cannot relax around her. My love for her is making me old. I keep thinking back to that night. The rush of joy I felt because she would finally see what I had seen, that we could share it. And I wonder how I could have been so naïve.

Duncan never thought of disavowing his findings, of putting the underground behind him, denying what he had found. He was, however, capable of self-blame:

How could I expect her to believe what I myself scarcely comprehended at times? Sometimes I wish I had been able to find another way. Sometimes I wish I could undo it all, start over. But I don’t think she will let me.

Soon, they barely talked to one another . . . then, one day, he came home from Lacond’s offices and she was gone. He thought that she had just stepped out for a moment, until he found the note. He left it with his other notes. It is right here beside my festering typewriter. It reads:

My Love:

I do love you, but I am not in love with you any more. You want me to see things that aren’t there. You want me not only to see the impossible – you want me to think it beautiful, a revelation. That night was a terrifying experience for me, Duncan. And with your insistence that I believe, you have begun to frighten me.

There’s no way to rescue us. I can’t keep living with you. I hope that in time we can become friends, but for now we must be apart. Besides, we both have books to write, and neither of us can be creative in this situation.

Do you know how hard it is for me to leave not only my lover but my teacher? But I have no choice.

Thank you for everything you have taught me, everything you have shown me about history and about the world. I’ll never forget that.

I’ll end here, for now, because, as you know, too many words can be a trap.

Love,

Mary

P.S. I’m leaving you the apartment until you can find your own place.

The difference between what we need and what we want can be an abyss. For example, I want more light in this accursed room, but I need lunch because my stomach is grumbling. Duncan would always want Mary, but did he need her? In a way, he didn’t. In a way, like the writer who pursues his art above all else, Duncan did not need anything other than access to the underground. (You make me out to be a theorem in search of expression, rather than a human being.)

Next to Mary’s note is a letter she wrote to a friend. I don’t know how Duncan came by it. I don’t like to guess in this instance. (It was a low point for me, intercepting her mail. It was a brief insanity, a madness created by love. I only did it once or twice. I’m still ashamed of it.) The letter explains the situation much more baldly, and must have driven Duncan a little crazy when he read it.

Duncan has become ever more himself. I left him because I couldn’t take it any more – ravings about the gray caps. Everything is focused on the gray caps. Even if he did love me, I’d never be more than ancillary to those damn gray caps. It didn’t help that my parents hated him for, as they saw it, spoiling the innocence of their little girl. And because he was impossible to live with, and because he was like a child – he always wanted to be in love, and when he wasn’t in love with me, he was in love with his studies. He wore me out. He was so intense. How can anyone be so intense all the time? I couldn’t breathe, or think. And his opinions on my research! Always picking at it, always so sure he was right and I was wrong. I don’t think that I would ever be more than a student in his eyes, so I had to get away from him. Yes, I loved him, but, sometimes, as I am discovering, you need more than love.

(A mental shudder. A sudden moment of self-awareness – was I like that? Yes, I probably was. But I don’t know if Mary ever understood the great strain I was under, how what I sought was of the utmost importance. That it meant nothing more or less than discovering the fate of everyone who lives in this city, perhaps in the world. And still. And yet. I knew she had taken something from me, that I had been valuable to her. I had given nearly as much as I had taken. I’d been her mentor and she’d been my student, no matter what grief I had caused her. I took some small comfort from that.)

And that was the end of it. Or so I thought. For although Mary was free of Duncan, Duncan would never really be free of her, or her flesh necklace.

AS DUNCAN’S romantic fortunes waned, his fortunes as a historian waxed again: a flowering in miniature, given the heights he had ascended to in his youth. Although those who did speak a kind of truth about the gray caps and Ambergris’s past were condemned to the fringes, they did have their own organization: the Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society. Most of Duncan’s postwar hopes of self-expression reached fruition through AFTOIS.

AFTOIS had once again become Lacond’s passion – and in its limited way, it flourished for a time after the war – so that the Broadsheet, which paid the rent, often suffered from his neglect. (Indeed. It never quite failed when he was in charge, but some years after I took over production of the Broadsheet, I would have to put it out of its financial misery, much to the delight of our many enemies.)

‘The important thing,’ Lacond said to me once, ‘is that we get the truth out in some form, that we document what is happening. So that at the very least, there will be a record that someone knew about it.’

This struck me as an absurd statement. ‘Why?’ I replied. ‘So that when the abyss opens up you can stand on the edge and shout down, “I told you so!”?’

When I told Bonmot about this exchange, he said, ‘Yes, but without Lacond, how much more mischief would Duncan get into?’

A good point, I had to admit. Because Lacond spent much of his time in those years after the war making Duncan his second-in-command. Without Lacond, the loss of Mary might have hit Duncan harder than it did. (How much harder could it have hit me? I hardly left my apartment for months. Lacond had to drag me out of my bed to get me to work for him. For years afterwards, I would feel this hollow space in my stomach, in my lungs. Sometimes, I would think of her and I couldn’t breathe.)

LACOND HAD A perverse effect on Duncan. Lacond made Duncan want something he thought he had given up on long ago: the restoration of a measure of legitimacy. (I might have reconciled myself to living without respect, but that didn’t mean I didn’t fight hard against it. Years would pass between a chance at even the most minor legitimate publication opportunity, but I never gave up.) Lacond kept telling Duncan that if he published enough essays in the AFTOIS newsletter, he would eventually get noticed again.

‘Enough essays in a marginal journal read by a couple of thousand fellow crackpots?’ I said to Duncan when he told me. ‘A path to greater glory? I don’t think so, Duncan. I really don’t. You should attempt another book – you might find a publisher.’

Duncan shook his head. ‘Not now, not yet. I can’t even think about a book – my thoughts are too fragmented. But essays – yes, I could do essays. And Lacond might be right, you never know.’

Sometimes I read through the letters I kept from my glory days, when readers could acquire my books easily and in quantity. There were people back then who understood me, who realized I told the truth. I can’t imagine that all of them have died in the twenty years since, or that there aren’t new readers who might appreciate my books. I just need to find a way to reach them again. And if I can reach them, perhaps I can reach Mary again. It’s easy for Mary to dismiss Lacond, or AFTOIS, but it might alter her perception of me if . . . but it is too much to hope for, to think about.

(I did believe this then, perhaps naïvely, but over time my emphasis would shift. I no longer thought books would be my salvation. I no longer thought in terms of publication, really, but more in terms of accumulating knowledge and making as much of it public as the public could stand.)

Didn’t Duncan see that Lacond had been trying for years – decades – with less success than my brother? Not any more than he saw that, for all the time he spent in the shadow of the huge oak tree outside her parents’ house hoping to catch a glimpse of her, Mary was travelling a very different path. How could someone so smart be so foolish? But Duncan persisted. (I had no choice. I thought Mary and I could eventually be friends. I justified my hauntings of her by telling myself that I was watching over her, protecting her. The truth? My heart, caught between hope and pain, could not bear never seeing her, even if seeing her meant only the slightest glimpse of her through a window – a silhouette that, for many months, could still transfix me.)

Bonmot used to say that ‘The limits of our imagination are the limits of our free will.’ Duncan could not imagine a life that did not include Mary and the gray caps. I sometimes wonder how different it would have been if he could have wrenched himself free of Ambergris and set sail for the Southern Isles, lost himself in the waves and the wind, adopted a different obsession.

(Janice – all obsessions are the same. They vary little in the essential details. You refuse to believe that my search for knowledge wasn’t so much personal, wasn’t so much for myself, but out of a fear for the future of our city. I pursued Mary out of a fear for the future of Duncan Shriek. There wasn’t much holding me to the city besides Mary, to be honest. As I continued to change, I needed to make up reasons why I shouldn’t just venture underground and stay there. I could have planted myself in a dark, moist corner of the gray caps’ world and taken root. I could have allowed the fungi to colonize me, taken in the breath of their sleep and woken in a thousand years to a far different fate. So was it love after a certain point in time? Probably not. It was probably just a grasping for some kind of normal life. Can you blame me?)

If only Duncan could have apologized to Bonmot in a way that Bonmot would have accepted. But he wouldn’t. I think Bonmot was more fragile in his faith than he let on – I think he believed that if he let Duncan back into his life, it would affect his character, would erode his integrity. Duncan could have used Bonmot for balance during those times. He could have used someone other than a sister with one foot who had nightmares about being buried alive in a pile of corpses. Because Lacond really did have him convinced – they’d go to those lunatic meetings of their lunatic society, and Duncan would think that because three hundred people showed up and listened to him he was making progress. (Lacond was enough for me. Lacond never made me feel as if I were damaged or deranged, the way Bonmot could even during the best of our conversations. There’s a whiff of righteousness in the most humble servant of God that is a terrible, terrible thing. But Lacond taught me confidence and endurance. Every year of his adult life, he had written down his bizarre, unpopular theories and, through his society, made them available to the public. And every year, most people rejected his work, or feigned indifference, or found his theories an unkind reflection or comment on the man himself. Yet he never stopped, never gave up. It’s more than I could have done.)

I went to an AFTOIS meeting. That was enough for me – one glance at the agenda handed out by a portly woman with a purple scarf wound endlessly around her neck, looking as though a purple constrictor had a choke-hold on her – one glance convinced me I would not be coming back:

The Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society

WEEKLY MEETING No. 231

— As Presided Over by Society President James Lacond

— Minutes Taken by Linda Pitginkel

— Incidental Music Provided by ‘George the Flautist’

— Refreshments Baked by Lara Maleon

ORDER OF EVENTS

(1) Recital of the Society Motto: ‘In pursuit of truth, for the truth, by the truth. Against inertia, against ease, against the false.’

(2) Introduction of Speakers (James Lacond)

(3) Rebecca Flange reads an excerpt from her book The Crimes of Tonsure: The Role of Poison

(4) ‘What Is the Truth – How Shall We Approach it and its Importance to our Understanding of the Gray Caps’ – speech by Sarah Potent

(5) ‘Channelling the Dead – its Impact on our Understanding of the Gray Caps’ – speech by Roger Seabold

(6) ‘I Am the True Descendent of Samuel Tonsure’ – speech by James ‘Tonsure’ Williams

(7) ‘Evidence for the Existence of City-Sized Fungus’ – speech by Frederick Madnok (as read by Harry Flack in Mr Madnok’s absence)

I think the agenda alone should give some insight into the kinds of buffoons with whom Duncan had aligned himself. He had gone from writing legitimate books to writing legitimate articles to teaching at a legitimate school to scandal and heartbreak, and now lived a sad existence at the very fringe of his chosen field.

(Again, unfair. I appreciate your protectiveness, but the truth is often so strange that one cannot, at the outset, discard even the most ridiculous of theories, the silliest of suppositions. Remember how I let my students do my research for me? This was a similar situation – I was always searching for the sliver of truth in the outlandishness presented at those meetings. Even the most absurd theory might have in its core details, its foundation, some hint of information about the gray caps, something to be salvaged or redirected. I attended those meetings for that reason, not because I believed everything I heard, or even wanted to be associated with all of them. But who else, Janice, would publish my ‘crackpot theories’? No one after the war except, ultimately, Sirin. And even he didn’t do it properly, as you – my benign, self-chosen executioner – well know.)

Certainly, I was used to dealing with strange people – I’ve never met an artist who wasn’t, at some level, a deeply strange or estranged person. But this was different. These were people on the edge of the edge of sanity. Oddities. Carpenters who, in their spare time, developed paranoid theories about House Hoegbotton that grew to full fruition in the dark, glistening spaces of their imaginations. Stay-at-home wives who, bored, had bought into the more lurid broadsheet headlines. Self-hating bank clerks making a pittance who had curdled inside and defended the gray caps because they would have cheered if the gray caps had risen up and taken over the city. People who believed they were the reincarnation of historical figures like Tonsure. And, on the fringes of those fringes, homeless people who used the meetings to take shelter. The mentally challenged who had been discharged from the now-destroyed Voss Bender Memorial Mental Hospital. I even thought I spied a gray shape that resembled my former fellow inmate Edward at one point, although when I looked again, he was gone.

How the spittle flew during the meeting I observed! The sour taste of vitriol! The sad, lonely, pathetic, nervous, neurotic, psychotic, exposed underbelly of the city.

‘In the vast, empty spaces beneath the city, this huge fungus has taken over and means to envelop us in its clammy grasp.’

And Duncan wanted to become their leader: the Lord of the Disinclined. Disinclined to work. Disinclined to hold a job. The Disenchanted who had never been enchanting, except, perhaps, as children. No wonder Mary hated that group. I hated that group. We could have taken an oath of solidarity on that much, at least. (And yet, they, and I, are much closer to the truth than those who scoffed at our organization, regardless of the sometimes illegitimate evidence provided at those meetings. I sense a certain amount of snobbery in your remarks, Janice, as if the only people worth a damn are artists or writers or playwrights – but look back on your own description of the New Art and the New Artists. Were they really any different, except that the results of their obsessions and imagination were more forcefully inflicted upon the world? Sometimes a theory or idea is as strangely beautiful as that expressed by any painting, even when it’s articulated by those who are not articulate.

(Let me tell you what I saw that day, at that meeting. I saw a woman trying to come to terms with the death of her sister by inexplicable means. She did so by taking what facts she knew about Samuel Tonsure and bending them to a theory that attempted to reconcile the irreconcilable. In that forced assimilation of fact and fancy, Janice, there might have been a fragment of truth, even if only a psychological truth. Perhaps by seeing Tonsure in a different light than I, she advanced my understanding of him one tiny increment.

(Sara Potent’s diatribe about the truth, taking as her basis Stretcher Jones’s rebellion against the Kalif and expanding it to include many of the unanswered questions about Ambergris’s past – wasn’t she, in disguised form, asking the same questions we all have asked from time to time? Does she deserve vilification for trying to think her way through all of this?

(Could you have missed the beauty of Frederick Madnok’s theory that Ambergris is ‘shadowed’ from below by a giant fungus, wide as the city and deep as the city is tall, through which catacomb the tunnels of the gray caps? Could you not see the utter precision and craftsmanship of his many diagrams? The humour of the labelling – a sense of humour that tells the reader that Madnok knows how outlandish his theory may sound.

(There is an art, Janice, to being an outsider, a skill to being a good crackpot. Some people decide to become writers of fiction and this is considered a legitimate endeavour. Others decide to make their expressions of the imagination more personal. I, for one, gained more from that meeting than from any novel I have ever read!)

But the fact is, Duncan didn’t see them as they really were, only as he wanted them to be: a society of visionaries, of dreamers, revolutionaries. Apparently so enthralled by them that he lost his wits for a time, Duncan became anti-social and avoided me. (Who could blame me, considering your attitude then? So similar to your attitude towards Mary. Oh, the irony, considering her attitude towards AFTOIS.) As these crackpots began to take up more and more of his time, he began to forget to bathe. He didn’t change his clothes for weeks on end. He babbled to himself. (I missed Mary terribly. I missed her so much, Janice. I don’t know if you can conceive of how much I missed her.)

Worst of all, Duncan assumed more and more responsibility for the AFTOIS newsletter as Lacond became sicker, meaning that Duncan wrote less as his increased editorial duties ate up his time.

Like Lacond, Duncan did not censor theories in conflict with his own. Duncan believed, given the inability of most ‘experts’ to absorb the truth about the gray caps, that all theories should be given an airing, regardless of their validity. He thought this would make minds receptive to the unusual and improbable, ‘Softening resistance,’ as he used to mutter, ‘to reality. A kind of general insurrection against the complacent surface of things.’ (For all the good it did me.)

To this end, the journal, which he edited more and more ‘in the name of’ the still-living Lacond – even writing essays under Lacond’s name – became even more outlandish, and thus ever more dismissed, unread by a populace living in denial. (But some of these theories were beautiful and elegant, no matter how wrong-headed. For example, ‘morelmancy’ – divination of the future from mushrooms . . . or, as you called it, much to my amusement, ‘a flowering of spores, long dormant, a colourful array – of insanity’. Not everything beautiful has to be true to have value, you know.)

At least Duncan had seen the truth, or a kind of truth, first hand. All of the rest of these people sitting in their glorified clubhouse listening to why intelligent mushrooms were going to rise to the surface one day and kill everyone – and, in some cases, why they were going to enjoy the experience – these people hadn’t seen the truth. They just didn’t know any better – they were guessing. They were lonely and screaming out for company, or for something to keep out the darkness. Even a crackpot theory is better than no theory at all. Than nobody. Than an abyss.

Like the hole that lies behind me, leading Truff knows where. (Truff may not know where it leads, having more important things on His mind, but you and I both know it leads into the underground. Let me evoke Truff in a more appropriate context: for Truff’s sake, stop being so melodramatic!)

WHAT WERE MARY and I doing while Duncan decided to go slumming? I’m so glad you asked. Mary was establishing the beginnings of her brilliant career, which would eventually result in the creation of her stunning flesh necklace. Meanwhile, I climbed further down the ladder of success. I said goodbye to my gallery one murky spring day.

I stood there alone on the street, and Sybel said, ‘It had a good run. You accomplished a lot. You shouldn’t be too sad. How much longer could it hold together anyway?’

I turned to look at him and he was gone, of course. I had to collect my thoughts for a moment after that. Then I walked away without looking back, for fear of bursting into tears.

ESCAPE, ESCAPING, escaped. I’d done it. I was no longer in even the most remote danger of being considered a success. I would have to begin again, in a city I did not entirely trust to help me. I loitered in the same circles, lounged in the same antechambers of vice on occasion, but it was only pretence – a kind of fading afterglow that did not warm the face.

I threw myself on Sirin’s mercy once more. Sirin had taken up his long-ago position at Hoegbotton, with nary a whiff of rumour as to what skullduggery he had involved himself in while he was gone. (I don’t know what he knew about the Hoegbottons to provide him with such protection, but it must have gone beyond mere evidence of embezzlement, adultery, or vice.)

But while Mary received from Sirin first-class treatment in the form of her first book contract, I got a job as a tour guide to Ambergris, my ‘office’ on the first floor of the newly rebuilt H&S headquarters building. Although we rarely saw each other, Sirin and his rosewood desk lay directly above me. Sometimes I would look up at the ceiling tiles and imagine I saw butterflies fluttering out from between the cracks. There were days, I admit, when I seethed, ground my teeth, floated silent curses towards that ceiling. (The worst admission of all, I suppose, is that I introduced Sirin to Mary a few weeks before the war. It was largely on my recommendation that Sirin, upon his return, enquired of Mary as to the possibility of a book. I didn’t tell you for the obvious reasons.)

To be fair, without my gallery and the tattered, faded cloak of respectability it had conveyed, I could no longer command a prestige position – and Sirin had found younger, cheaper writers for the article assignments that had once gone to Duncan and me. So, five days a week a trickle of tourists would find their way to my office and sign up for such ridiculous tours as ‘Gray Cap Haunts and Habitat’ – which consisted of showing them where various famous people had been ‘disappeared’ or killed by the gray caps, then descending into the basement of the newly rebuilt Borges Bookstore, a place in which no gray cap had ever been seen. Another favourite tour was the dusk-to-midnight ‘Haunted Ambergris’ expedition, to which I had to bring a measure of acting skills I did not possess, and a ream of notes to read from, since the stories all blended together otherwise. (I imagine I might have been good at this kind of work if you’d ever given me an invite.)

But the worst tour, over time, was ‘Literary Highlights of Ambergris’, since, as Sabon’s popularity grew, I would be forced to take them past whatever expensive hovel she was currently renting, where they would gawk and circle, certain they would soon catch a glimpse of the author peering out from behind a curtain.

‘This is the home of the controversial and talented Mary Sabon,’ began the official spiel I was made to mutter and cough to tourists who may or may not have cared very much.

‘It is in this house that Sabon wrote much of her book, More Banal Banalities, which disproved many of the more paranoid theories about the gray caps.’ And so on and so forth.

Sometimes, Sybel stared out at me from a nearby tree, sporting a not-unsympathetic smirk on his face and dressed in his most familiar outfit: the woodland greens and browns of his youth.

‘Gently, Janice,’ he would soothe. ‘It’s not so bad. It could be worse. I know all about worse.’

‘Worse? How much worse could it get?’ I would ask him, but by then he was already a mote of dust at the corner of my eye, and me confusing myself and tourists alike by having spoken aloud.

The more I reflect back on it, Sybel had it right: I was, considering the condition of my foot, lucky. My status as Old Relic counterbalanced the crippling whorls of my wooden toes and the grain of my soles, I could diverge from the script to tell visitors stories about the places we visited with a knack for detail and intrigue and personal panache that few other guides could match. I truly had been there when that happened, or this, or this. To pay for my past crimes against public decency, against modesty, I would even sometimes have to guide people to the site of my poor gutted gallery, there to recite a history of it and the fabled New Art. (Do you really believe that Sirin didn’t experience a shiver of perverse satisfaction from forcing you to go back there? I’m sure he did; how could he not?)

I didn’t mind the job too much in those early years, if I’m to be truthful, especially when I didn’t have to do the ‘Haunted Ambergris’ tour, and before I had to stand outside Mary’s home like a fool. At least part of the time a horse and buggy would be employed so I didn’t have to drag my leg around. And business gradually became more robust: the cessation of hostilities soon brought a new wave of the curious – not curious enough to venture over for the Festival, but curious enough to explore during the daylight of other seasons.

Besides, I often contrived to arrive at the Blythe Academy right before lunch, so I could allow those bright-eyed travellers from Morrow or Stockton or Nicea to wander as they would, within reason, while I sat down for a sandwich with Bonmot. At a stone bench. Under the fabled but now considerably more wizened willow trees.

‘I’m not a comedian or a juggler, Bonmot. I don’t have to entertain. I just have to lead them around to interesting places.’

‘You are such a kind tour guide,’ Bonmot would say, trying not to laugh. ‘To teach them the responsibility of finding their own entertainment.’

I wish I could say my lunches with Bonmot felt the same as before, but they did not. Yes, a similar sense of contentment, of ease, lingered over those conversations, but it became a more fleeting thing; it did not last as long or affect me as powerfully. Our discussions had limits; we had acquired scars. Bonmot never discussed Duncan, and I, not wishing to give up even the faded pleasure of those lunches, never pressed the point.

‘You’re hesitant sometimes now,’ I said to him once, during an uncomfortable silence. ‘You halt on the verge of saying things.’

Bonmot nodded. ‘You’re right. I halt because I am not certain any more. The things I thought I knew do not always seem right when I say them, so I say them first in my head, and then speak. Otherwise, it’s as if I were mouthing sawdust. And I miss people who have died, and sometimes when I speak, I see them, because this priest or that priest who has passed on taught me the truism I was about to say.’ He stared at me with a knowing sadness. ‘I liked it better when I knew everything.’

A barking laugh. And an echo from Sybel, standing in the willow tree, whispering to me: ‘I liked it better when I knew nothing.’

For my part, I found it odd to sit there watching the current crop of fresh-faced students make their way across the courtyard – lithe, flushed with success, seemingly innocent – and know that it was just a few years ago that Mary and Duncan and Bonmot had played out their appointed roles of lust, love, secrecy, and discovery. The war lay like an insurmountable black wall between then and now.

I SHOULD HAVE mentioned before that the beads of Mary’s flesh necklace actually did have faces and names. As I stood at the base of the stairs, the scarlet imprint of my hand still warm on Mary’s face, about to respond to her hateful words, I remember turning away from her for a moment to stare at them. Let me identify them for you as they come into focus in my memory, that you may know them if you see them: John Batte, Vice-Royal under Bonmot, rose to the post of Royal following Bonmot’s death, and was a staunch supporter of Sabon’s work, even going so far as to allow her access to previously closed Truffidian archives. Sarah Cryller, currently the Ambassador to Ambergris from the House of Frankwrithe & Lewden, is a newly risen star still bright-burning who at one time hoped Sabon might defect to her publishing company. The oft-mentioned Merrimount provided Sabon’s ‘in’ to the creative community at large and appeared at many of her book-release parties. Jessica Hoegbotton, scion of the House of Hoegbotton, main liaison between the public and Sabon’s words, is the one who laughed loudest at Mary’s joke about Duncan. Daniel Griswald, Antechamber of the Truffidian Church, has teeth that glint like fangs when he grins, which is more often than a stone gargoyle, and, in his infinite wisdom, failed to ban any of Sabon’s books, instead embracing them and recommending them to his congregation. And, finally, Mathew Daffed, one of Duncan’s colleagues at Blythe Academy, is now among his most outspoken critics.

And others, still others, whose faces blur even as I conjure up their names. Why did I invite them? Because I had to – Lake demanded it. Even as I condemned them with my gaze. I found that I was surprised – surprised that they should have so disliked my brother, surprised at the fear rising from their faces like steam. (Some of them have been scoundrels at times, but most of the rest of them have caused me no harm, even as they continue to send Mary to her triumph.)

‘Mary has sold her second book,’ Bonmot told me one fall, the willow trees impervious to the change of seasons even as across the street oaks became an indignant red and orange, and then bald, and a strange whisper of flame spread through the city.

It was almost unbearable to receive such information second hand, when every day I could hear the creak and shift of timber above me as Sirin walked between his desk and his precious butterflies. (Worse, worse – I found she had taken up with another man, her own age, the son of her father’s best friend, someone she had known for years. Someone comfortable. Someone safe. Someone with ‘III’ in his name. I could tolerate the books, because I knew they contained a little piece of me in them, but I could not tolerate that relationship.)

‘Yes. It’s called The Inflammation of the Aan Tribal War. I’ve had a look at it, and it’s excellent. Very well researched. She’s a credit to the school.’

As Duncan was not, went the tired old, silent old refrain. (Bonmot never forgave me, not even at the end. I couldn’t understand that. I’d have forgiven him had our situations been reversed, but, then, I am not a priest. I did see him sometimes, in the last few years before he passed on. When I took walks in Trillian Park, I would discover him sitting on a bench as I turned a corner. He would look up and our eyes would meet before he could turn away. Those few times, I would see a peace within him that faded as he recognized me. I wouldn’t stop to talk – it was too painful, too maddening, to understand that he could not move past my lapse of judgment. Later, back in my apartment overlooking Voss Bender Square, I would sit on my balcony drinking wine, analysing the moment in the park, searching my memory of our brief encounter for some hint of recognition on his part that did not include bitterness or rancour. Sometimes I convinced myself, sometimes I did not.)

Bonmot – to his credit, or perhaps not to his credit – never realized that I might prefer not to hear such details, such confirmation of Mary’s success. Later, when he better understood the humiliation of having to stand outside her various residences and tell tourists about her, Bonmot stopped telling me. He must have realized by then that her ascent was self-evident.

‘That’s nice,’ I mumbled. ‘I am sure it is a very interesting book she has written.’ Through a mouthful of my chicken sandwich, looking out of the corner of my eye for my bumbling tourist charges, to make sure they had not got into too much trouble.

We studied Truffidian religious texts at lunch sometimes as well. I found them soothing. My God, keep my tongue from evil, my lips from lies. Help me ignore those who slander me. Although I could no longer bring myself to attend services in the newly renovated Truffidian Cathedral or any other enclosed space, I took some measure of comfort from the hymns and sayings. Guardian of happiness, in whose presence despair flees, with Your great compassion grant me the ability to welcome what may come with calm and grace, to experience happiness and joy. When I read them aloud before sleep, the nightmarish images would recede, the red mist of Sybel’s death dissipate. May You find delight in the words of my mouth and in the emotions of my heart. The sensation, when I went to bed, of lying down amongst a row of corpses would lessen, become tolerable. The wise must die, even as the foolish and senseless, leaving their possessions to others.

‘I do,’ I said, before I could think about it. If I’d thought about it, I would have said no.

‘Why?’ he asked, no reproach in his voice, just a genuine curiosity. He had hinted more than once that he could find me a comparable job with the church, but turning my religion into a daily chore, complete with choir, didn’t interest me.

‘Why?’ Why did I like working as a tour guide? In those early years: ‘Because I get to be outside a lot. I get to see the city afresh, from the perspective of those unfamiliar with her.’

Because it took me away from Duncan’s world. Because it allowed me to relive, in daydream reveries, my past successes week after week. Because I met interesting people, some of them men, though I had learned to be more discerning than in the past. Because those whom I guided saw me not as a failure but as part of the heritage, the history, of Ambergris. And there was something to be said for not trying quite so hard. I arrived in the same place, I had begun to notice, regardless of the amount of effort.

BUT I COULD NEVER truly escape Duncan, just as Duncan could not escape himself. And ultimately I wouldn’t have wanted to. Except for my father’s writings, Duncan is my only link to my father. Duncan is still here, I hope, in the flesh, while Dad speaks to me in shards of meaning gleaned from the fragments Duncan kept of his journals, his scribblings and essays. All of it is work-related; Dad appears never to have written anything that was not related to work, or, at least, such writings weren’t found when Mom catalogued his things.

I’ve gone through all of it twice before lugging it here along with anything else I wanted to salvage from Duncan’s apartment. Most of Dad’s papers are so dry, so dusty, that I’ve begun to understand that he lived in his own little specialized world. His work galvanized and, perhaps, electrified other historians with its sense of rarefied knowledge, but there’s nothing for the rest of us to hold on to. Sometimes I think Duncan took it upon himself to ‘translate’ our dad’s work into a form that might be palatable to the public. (I thought maybe he knew, maybe something in the papers would solve my mysteries. It never did.) Sometimes I think that Duncan would have been better off becoming a plumber, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a merchant, a missionary.

Nothing of our personal history made it into Dad’s work, even though that history had some relevance. Some said, not without a hint of mockery, that you could trace our family’s history on my mother’s side all the way back to the founding of Ambergris by John Manzikert – that one of the anonymous, unremarked-upon members of the ship’s crew, George Bliss, had been our distant great-to-the-umpteenth-power grandfather. Over the years, among our shadow relatives – aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins – ‘shadow’ because they lived in far-off cities like Nicea and we saw them rarely – an entire mythology had grown up around Bliss. Stories of Bliss fighting off gray caps, of his friendship with Samuel Tonsure before Tonsure disappeared, vague references to the underground – all apocryphal, of course. (Apocryphal? Maybe, but I enjoyed those stories growing up. They reaffirmed my birthright to crawl around in dimly lit places.)

Dad used to joke that he had married Mom as part of his research into the history of the city.

‘Your mother, children,’ he said once, ‘figures prominently in my current research. She’s fodder for my essays. Certain experiments, certain experiments cannot be conducted without her – or, if conducted, do not’ – and he stared pointedly at Mom and then back at us – ‘yield the same results.’

Sometimes when he said this, he would hold her close from behind, nuzzle her neck. Mom would give a sly, quick smile then, before pretending to be offended as she pulled away from him, and I remember that smile, because it gave me the first clue that there might be an adult world existing above or on top of the one in which we dwelt as children.

Mom had a problem laughing at herself; she never knew if people were laughing with her or at her, so she never fully gave herself up to it with other people – Dad was the only one who could make her laugh in a way that seemed effortless rather than forced.

As for whether first-generation Ambergrisian blood flows through our veins, I don’t know, but I think our dad believed it did. (And if it didn’t before, Janice, the city probably flows through my veins now, in altered form, whether I want it to or not. An entire world flows through my veins these days.)

WHILE UPSTAIRS Sirin worked on making Mary the flavour of the decade and downstairs I laboured at scraping out a living, Duncan fleshed out his theories and his articles, which would one day culminate, or dissolve, in his Early History of Ambergris tour guide book. (Or at least culminate in the unexpurgated version that has still never seen print.)

In those days, sentences crawled out of Duncan’s skin, paragraphs exhaled with each breath. On a winter’s morning, you could almost see them forming in the white smoke of his speech. (For all the good it did me – most of the sentences and paragraphs didn’t coalesce into longer works, or if they did, I sacrificed them to the AFTOIS newsletter.)

Sometimes I thought the Spore of the Gray Cap made him prolific – that in a space neither above nor below ground, he felt in the most perfect balance – and thus balanced, ballasted, he could write without self-consciousness. Certainly, the owner loved his presence – ‘fringe’ or not, they’d never had a historian use their tavern as a work space. Of course, Duncan brought more business with him than I ever did, in the form of his fellow crackpots. Lacond even indulged for a time, before his illness made that impossible.

Should the historian’s personal life happen to coincide in some way with the history he has chosen to write about – if the personal history ‘doubles’ the public history – then an alchemy occurs whereby the historian, in a sense, becomes the history. That is, once rendered in all the signs and symbols at the historian’s command, the history he has written becomes, for him, the story of his own life. This fact may not be obvious to the reader except in flashes and flickers of reflected thought, where the passion of the historian for the story peers out, naked, from the page. There, for a flicker of a moment, we find the historian exposed, if only the world decides to correctly interpret the clues. (I didn’t write this. I was quoting another historian. I can’t even remember which one.)

In expressing this theory – a theory that calls for the historian to internalize a selected portion of history as part of his or her life; or, more specifically, to map historical events to personal events – Duncan was deeply influenced by the work of the idiosyncratic Nicean philosopher-historian Edgar Rybern. Rybern believed that the personal politics of each individual distorts their view of history. As Rybern wrote in his book Approaches to History (a book Sabon violently disapproved of, even during her days at the Academy):

Such a person never merely traces the outline of the past. Texts do not sit side by side on the shelf, but intermingle, entering into conflict and confluence with one another until the probable emerges from the impossible. Reduced to rubble, such sources provide the raw building material for a theory of greater import and durability. However, the story that emerges from this process does not interest such a historian. The tale told is mere preamble to explanation, preamble to a more personal theory. In such a process, the chronology and lineage of the acts depicted in the narrative depend on the prejudices and experiences of the individual’s psyche, and the subconscious impulses embedded therein.

Based on Rybern’s musings, Duncan began to ask himself – in countless articles published in the hapless AFTOIS newsletter, and in countless conversations with Lacond – ‘Why not consciously distort history by focusing on those portions and patterns that have the most relevance or resonance to one’s own life?’

Such a slant would, presumably, intensify the empathy that the historian has to those particular historical events. For example, I, as a historian, would be most at home describing the history of various mental wards and the effects on the psyche of mass slaughter witnessed up close.

If every individual mind can be said to exist within a lively morass of prejudice and subjectivity, then the pursuit of the objective becomes a futile, laughable goal – in effect, a lie; especially in a field such as history, where every day, every hour, every minute, the historian becomes more distant from the core occurrences under observation. (A simplification, true, but essentially accurate. Not that it matters to anyone. History is about to catch up with us, and what I’ve really learned is that anything connected to the printed page becomes a kind of tombstone, marking the death of the past.)

Lacond, for all of his faults, understood this about Duncan. (After all, he, like me, had been underground at least once or twice, and came away from it having paid a physical price.) In one issue of the newsletter, Lacond wrote:

When Duncan Shriek writes about the Silence – as he has been known to do within these very pages – he quite literally, in my opinion, writes also of his personal silences over the years, the way in which he has been silenced – by others, by his own mistakes – and all the similar silences, suffered by us all. In a sense, he has made Ambergris’s history personal. He may be too good a historian to invade his text, but certain parallels emerge again and again – even to Tonsure’s descent into silence and despair and subsequent re-emergence in the form of a book being especially prevalent.

Those experts who bothered to refute Duncan’s theories – mostly Sabon – pointed to the dangers of the personal history approach. Sabon wrote an essay for the H&S collection Impersonal Perspectives: Objectivity in Ambergrisian History (which probably sold about five copies):

The irrefutable fissure in any theory of ‘personal history’ lies in the impulse to find a plateau far above sheer fact, to reveal a lesson or universal ‘truth’ that can be mapped to an individual life and intertwined with a complicated intellectual disdain: contempt for accuracy, rejection of contradictory evidence, confusion of conjecture with truth, resistance to correction.

Sabon had a point, of sorts. Not that Duncan’s theories were flawed – no one ever dared to test their veracity through underground research. But when Duncan began, a few years later, to write his Early History, he looked to what he was writing for some indication of how to live his life, so that instead of finding what in history could become personal, he let the personal become history. (You might be right, but the reading public never had a chance to discover the truth or falsehood of it, either in the book or in reality.)

Unfortunately, in my opinion, the parallels that Duncan sought did not always exist. As I told him once, ‘Nothing in your studies will ever explain the death of our father.’ I don’t think he believed me. He would have believed me even less if I had told him Bonmot and Truffidianism might be able to help him with that mystery. (Of all your incarnations, your transformation to the cause of organized religion baffled me the most. I certainly didn’t begrudge you your conversion, though – all I envied was the time you spent with Bonmot.)

I’VE FINALLY FOUND something personal of Dad’s in amongst all the dry discourse – tucked away inside a box inside another box. A canvas sculpture of a mushroom, about twelve inches tall. Part of his personal history, you might call it, and the symbol of a rare hiccup in the respect my parents showed each other.

That respect manifested itself in the way our father avoided invading Mom’s space. Our parents were as separate and yet together as any two people could be, and I’ve often thought that when Dad died, the reason it took Mom so long to create again is that Dad created the space for her to be able to make her art.

Dad did not enter some rooms of our house in Stockton – in particular, Mom’s studio. There, she would relax and sketch, paint, or even work on sculptures, her studio window providing a magnificent view of the forest. She knew that Dad would never enter, not even for a quick visit or to remind her of some dinner party they had to attend, not even when she was out of the house. And she did the same for him – his office formed a country forbidden to all of us.

Some days, they would be in their separate spaces and the house would seem quiet, but Duncan and I could sense a kind of tingle or hum in the silence, a potent energy. Because we knew that, in their separate spaces, in their own different yet specific ways, both our parents were creating. That feeling of applied industry, of work, permeated our awareness in those years before Dad’s death.

Which is not to say that our parents didn’t take joy in their creations, or want to share them. But there was a space to work and a space to share their work. The living room served as that latter area. If either wanted to share, in the flush of post-inspiration, out the pages or painting would come to the living room. On that neutral ground, they would present their findings and receive their praise. Dad would read from the loose-leaf pages crumpled in his hand while Mom would murmur, ‘Lovely. Inspired. Very original.’ Or Mom would unveil a sketch or study or painting and discuss the spark that made it coalesce into being, while Dad would say, ‘Wonderful use of colour. I love the way you’ve drawn that figure. Beautiful.’ (Such compliments would be tenfold in intensity, Janice, should you or I share our early experiments. I can still remember how much praise they lavished on you for your first paintings. They loved your work unconditionally.)

In that separate space and that shared space, I think I can see the secret of their happiness. Each could feel the other’s presence in their separate spaces as powerfully as in their shared space.

But the living room also served as a place to seek assistance. If stuck, if faced with conundrum or puzzle, dead words or dead paint, one would stomp out into that middle ground and, by certain signals, make it clear the other was needed to brainstorm possible solutions.

On our Dad’s part, the signal involved much crinkling of papers and long, deep sighs (I perfected my own sigh listening to his), perhaps even an artificial propensity to make noise by banging into furniture. On Mom’s part it was more direct, because to get to the living room she had to pass Dad’s office. A quick slap of the palm against his door on the way to common ground usually got his attention.

What always surprised me is how quickly the other parent would halt in his or her own labours and come out to the living room. Sometimes it was just to listen to the other vent, sometimes to offer practical suggestions.

Only once, to my knowledge, did one or the other cross a boundary. Our Dad one day decided to try his hand at sculpture, but not just any sculpture. He wanted to use wire and canvas, to combine sculpture and painting, in a sense. I could see from the expression on Mom’s face what she thought of this idea, but she loaned him the supplies and for a week he worked on his own New Art. You could hear him bumping into things in his office, cursing sometimes, coming out to beg more supplies from Mom. Duncan and I both expected great things. (Or, at least, something. Or, as Janice put it at the time, some thing.)

Finally, Dad had finished, and we all gathered in the living room for the unveiling. The sculpture stood on a table near the couch, covered by a bed sheet. Mom stood to the side, arms crossed, while Dad explained the concept.

‘I wanted to reveal the true shape of everyday things. This is the first of a series of studies that combine painting and sculpture into a new hybrid,’ he said.

With those words, he pulled the sheet away, to reveal . . . a canvas mushroom, wires under the canvas giving it a shape.

Only Duncan had the decency to walk up to our Dad and tell him how much he liked it.

I DON’T THINK I was fated to be granted the kind of connection our parents often had, and I don’t know if I learned enough from our parents’ example. The dynamic changed too much after Dad’s death, and our careers took us too far apart to allow it, but I imagine this connection, this understanding, is something that Mary and Duncan shared before they grew apart. (All too briefly, I’m afraid. Some months it was there, some months it wasn’t. You need to know a person for a long time to develop that kind of trust. We didn’t have enough time.)

‘NATIVISM,’ Duncan said to me once, ‘is like a prolonged case of mass suicide.’

I mention this because History and my reincarnation as a tour guide continued to intersect in a number of ways against my wishes. For example, evincing a cruel kindness, Sirin managed to finagle a non-paying position on the toothless horror that is the Ambergris Tourism Board, in a nod to my past status as an ‘iconic figure in society in general, etc., etc.’, as one of the other board members greeted me before slumping back into a kind of half-drool, half-reverie that looked quite pleasant.

I joined the board at the perfect time: it seemed to be trying to make itself obsolete. The first day I reported for service, the board decided to mount a rather muddled campaign to discourage tourism in the city because, as one gout-ridden veteran of many a real or imaginary war put it, ‘These fools. Must protect them. Too many deaths. At Festival time. Darlings deserve better.’ I almost pointed out that fewer tourists meant more of a chance, statistically, that local residents would be the targets of violence or ‘odd events’, as the broadsheets now sometimes termed encounters involving gray caps. But I kept my mouth shut. After all, it was only my first day on the job, and I wasn’t yet sure I wanted to burn any bridges. (If you’d taken your duties more seriously, perhaps some of AFTOIS’ positions would have received a sympathetic hearing from those old bastards. As it was, I can’t recall you doing anything at the public meetings of the board but take up space.)

As a result, for two years, in the months leading up to the Festival, the board paid for posters to be put up that depicted dead dogs in a variety of unkind and teeth-grimacing positions, complete with titles such as DEAD DOGS. DEAD TOURISTS. IT’S ALL THE SAME TO US. STAY OUT OF AMBERGRIS AROUND FESTIVAL TIME.

The posters appeared to result in insulted – but not fatally insulted – tourists, if the large number of people letting me lead them around the city and babble about dead people and old buildings was any indication. I certainly didn’t mind this change, but, posters or no, a more profound and negative transformation had begun to overtake Ambergris. The invisible yet necessary buffer between the professional and the personal slowly eroded, and for this I blame Nativism.

I’m sure that blaming Nativism for anything will be seen as blasphemy by many readers, but then you’ve made it this far – you can’t give up now. So, if you haven’t become irrevocably jaded, perhaps even revolted (or revolting), by the preceding pages, I dare say you’ll hardly even twitch when I say: I blame Nativism. Not the specific form of insanity displayed by Sabon’s father – not that brand of Nativism. No, I refer to the form that Duncan called ‘the final outcome of the war’: an attempt to become blind, deaf, and dumb as a most peculiar and pathetic method of semi-survival. (It allowed people to function in their day-to-day lives, rather than boarded up, gibbering in fear, in their homes. I’ll give it that much.)

As Sabon’s kind of Nativism spread throughout the southern cities by way of her books and essays, it infected the tourists who subjected themselves to my tours. Over time, I no longer needed Bonmot to give me updates on Mary’s progress. Instead, her flock of black crows feasting on the carcasses of Duncan’s investigations would be clearly seen in the eyes of the visitors I guided from one banal site to another.

I can’t say I minded these intrusions into rote routine at first. As I told Sybel when he accompanied me on these jaunts – and he was always there in some form – each recital of the same information became more stale than the last, until I was like some crippled, half-senile goat or sheep, chewing and re-chewing the same yellowing stalks of grass. It was a relief when the replies to my jaded bleatings began to change from polite nods or the obvious questions or the occasional attempt at wit, to observations such as ‘Mary Sabon wrote about this place in her book on Nativism. You should mention that next time.’ ‘What a good suggestion!’ I would reply. ‘I’ll be sure to do that,’ and try to carry on as if nothing offensive had been said, if they would let me.

Wish fulfilment also expressed itself: ‘Do you think we might see Sabon on this tour?’

To which I would reply in a clipped but neutral tone, ‘Not on this tour.’ Not even if we stood for a week in the shade of the large oak tree outside her ancestral home.

Even more jarring, though, were the questions out of nowhere – broadsides I was in no position to absorb, meant to torment me – that opened a door where no door should exist.

Most of the time, my interrogator exuded a naïve good humour as natural as sweat when asking the question – wanted only to know that I was not just an expert but intimately involved with the information I imparted, whether we stood inside the old post office or outside of some tavern with ‘Spore’ in the title.

I had no problem providing graceful answers in such cases, although each time it did surprise me, and more than surprise me, it changed the world so that I saw my brother’s influence in everything.

‘Nativists are like Manziists or Menites or any other religion,’ Duncan said once. ‘Just as righteous, just as right.’ No wonder their questions changed my world view.

As Nativism conquered the city and the entire South, I found the door to my misery widening and darkening, so that a belligerent quality entered the voices of those asking the questions.

One particularly gruelling and hot summer afternoon a few years before the Shift began in earnest, I heard the words, ‘Are you Duncan’s sister?’ delivered in a tone somewhere between fervent eagerness and bloodlust.

My surroundings, which had faded to the usual blur – my mouth spewing a stream of familiar words while my mind went elsewhere – came back into sharp focus.

The tour group and I stood in the middle of Voss Bender Memorial Square, in front of a fountain depicting Banker Trillian’s victory over the rival banker-warriors of Nicea. Around the square stood the ancient buildings that had once served as Trillian’s headquarters. In between, a pleasing and aromatic mixture of green-and-red blossoms signalled not only the arrival of the summer’s wildflowers but House Hoegbotton’s crass attempt to memorialize the struggle that followed Voss Bender’s death. I had set the tour group loose on the square for a few minutes, and they currently wandered here and there, staring at everything with a freshness I could not understand.

I faced my interrogator, who doubled in an instant. A woman had spoken, but her husband stood beside her, just as resolute and nervous. Both of them had reached the far end of their fifties, the woman gray-haired and stuffed into a formless flowerprint dress, matched to white stockings and blocky wooden shoes.

‘I can’t say I much cared for the mad glint in her eyes, or the thick red smile she gave me,’ I told Duncan later, relaxing in his apartment.

In fact, I looked at her as if she were a huge mushroom that had erupted up through the courtyard tiles.

‘That was no mad glint,’ Duncan replied. ‘That was the spark of righteous purpose.’

Her husband, stocky muscle half-turned to fat, wore spectacles and, bizarrely, the kind of trousers and tunic that had gone out of style long before Old Fart had capitulated to New Fart – close to the kind of museum pieces I spoke about during the tour.

Helpfully, their jaunty name tags, affixed to the continents of their chests, disclosed not only names but locations. Mortar and Pestle, as I came to think of them, hailed from my birthplace of Stockton. Somehow, this did not reassure me.

‘Are you Duncan’s sister?’ Pestle asked again. This time it felt as if she’d poked me in the ribs with her finger.

Mortar remained impassive while Pestle gave me a blank look, as if she hadn’t expected a question in return.

‘We’d have a message for him if you were his sister,’ Mortar said in a gravelly baritone, shifting uneasily. I could tell that this conversation hadn’t been his idea, but that he’d decided to make the best of it.

‘Really? You’d do that?’ I said. It wasn’t really a question, and I’d like to report that I delivered those words with the appropriate amount of withering scorn, but that’s not true. I was truly caught wrong-footed by the idea that two tourists could walk up to me and presume in such a way.

Mortar balanced on one leg for a second while Pestle hesitated; she definitely hated being asked questions.

‘And what would the message be?’ I asked her. I shouldn’t have bothered. I could have ignored her. I could have moved on to the next part of the tour.

Pestle frowned and her face achieved a certain narrow intensity. ‘Why, I’d ask you to tell him that he’s wrong and that the Nativists are right.’

‘And that he should stop trying to scare people with his theories,’ Mortar added.

Mortar and Pestle stood there, waiting for my response while the sun baked us all. My gaze fled to two swallows chasing insects through the searing blue sky, and I wondered how it had come to this. Had I misjudged how far I had fallen, and was falling still? Where will it end? Can it end? Should it end? My fingers are green with spores. That cannot be a good sign.

I COULD HAVE told old Mortar and Pestle – for whom I now feel a mounting affection where no such affection should exist – that Duncan was closer than they might have thought, and perhaps they would like to meet him. But I don’t think they really would have wanted to meet him. That the person they had pictured in their minds actually existed would probably have confounded them. Unlike Nativism, which existed precisely so people could avoid being confounded.

Nativism, to my mind, had become the next ‘phenomenon’, like the New Art before it, except in a different discipline. You didn’t have to paint anything or enjoy art to join it. You didn’t have to react or interpret or express yourself. Nothing so active. You just had to believe in a theory and mindlessly recite it to others with any minor variations you might have added to it in the meantime. (Not much different from the chants some of the imprisoned Truffidian monks used to drive the fear from their hearts.)

Nativism would become so popular that not long after Mortar, Pestle, and I had our enlightening conversation in Bender Square, the Ambergris Tourism Board, against my sole and emphatic ‘No – hell, no,’ vote, added a Nativism tour to my busy schedule.

What did this new tour consist of? Our standard ‘Gray Cap Oddities’ tour combined with a few extras, like a view of Sabon’s family home, Blythe Academy, and some carefully selected and cultivated fungus-infested walls – ‘Ooh, very pretty, very awe-inspiring,’ most tourists would coo – and a lot of extra propaganda that made my teeth hurt. I never thought that I would ever be required to repeat the name ‘Sabon’ so many times to so many strangers.

‘AM I DUNCAN’S SISTER?’ I finally replied. ‘Yes, I am. Do you know him?’

‘They didn’t even know you, Duncan,’ I told him later. ‘Hadn’t met you even once. And yet it was as if they thought they did know you – personally.’

‘Oh, I see. I thought, perhaps, given your use of his first name, that you were old friends of his.’

‘The price of reflected fame, I guess,’ Duncan said, staring out of the window into the courtyard. ‘It’s enough to have read about you.’

At least I got the courtesy of an embarrassed look from old Mortar. Pretty Pestle, though, went right on pounding away.

EVENTUALLY, I MANAGED to rescue myself from the Nativism tour, but it took almost a year. People liked the irony of a Shriek, any Shriek, narrating that tour – at least the ones who had read Mary’s book, and too many of them had read Mary’s book. (Even me. I’m surprised you make no mention of the time I took your Nativism tour. I’ve never seen anyone have to hold in so much irritation for such a long time. I only did it because for a time I contemplated joining the fray. If they wanted to use my life for their mass hallucinations, then I should at least have made a little extra money off it. Can you imagine the furore if Duncan Shriek had become a tour guide?)

Cinsorium: Rethinking the Myth of the Gray Caps was a book we needed during those reactionary rebuilding years as much as we’d needed Sabon’s pig cartel book a few years before. It was the book that made the rift between Duncan and Mary permanent. As Duncan wrote in his journal after reading it, ‘For the first time, my body understands what my mind accepted long before: Mary is never coming back to me.’

In her book, Sabon alternately refuted Duncan’s theories about the gray caps and cribbed from them – as if she had ground Duncan’s ideas down to specks of glitter and then used them to decorate her own creations. (Perhaps it wouldn’t have hurt so much if I hadn’t given her a copy of my own Cinsorium when we were at Blythe, inscribed with ‘My dearest Mary – here’s the heart of me. Treat it gently. Love, Duncan.’ She couldn’t have treated my Cinsorium more ruthlessly in her Cinsorium if she’d honed the book’s boards to a fatal sharpness and then stabbed me with them repeatedly. I can forgive her for most things, but not that.)

‘So that is the message you would like me to relay to Duncan?’ I asked Pestle, to make sure.

A triumphant look from Pestle. ‘Yes, thanks. That would be wonderful. But we have more to tell him.’

AS EVERYONE KNOWS, Nativism consists of two major ideas, but most people do not realize that only one of them is unique. The other has been around for centuries. Sabon’s innovation consisted of how she put the two together and then slapped her father’s crowd-pleasing title of ‘Nativism’ on top of it all like the final slice of bread on a particularly messy sandwich.

What was the first part of this magnificent theory? To start with, Sabon floated the thought – I can’t even credit it with the term ‘idea’ – that the gray caps were the degenerate descendants of a local tribe similar to the Dogghe or the Nimblytod (without asking either tribe how they felt about being lumped in with the gray caps, and without consulting their extensive oral histories), but a tribe that had been colonized and then subjugated by several variations of fungus found in both above- and below-ground Ambergris. She claimed that the mighty city that had existed before Manzikert I razed it had housed a Saphant-type civilization pre-dating the gray caps. She even went so far as to suggest that the gray caps had been a servant class to this hypothetical other race. (I found it highly ironic, given the particulars of the fate of my books at the hands of reviewers, that by postulating this ‘other race’ and leaving that question as the book’s central mystery, she so captured readers’ imaginations that no thought to cry out, ‘Where’s the proof?’)

Pestle said, ‘Tell Duncan that he doesn’t need to worry about the gray caps.’

Duncan did a rather unconvincing imitation of a shuffling gray cap. If I hadn’t seen him do it before, I wouldn’t have known what he was trying to do.

‘Also tell him,’ Mortar added, without a hint of threat, ‘that he might want to go into another line of work.’

‘Ho ho! Haven’t you said the same to me sometimes, Janice? So how can you complain.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to M & P, remembering a valuable bit of advice from Sybel about how it’s never too late to correct your course, so long as you’ve not yet run aground. (Because Sybel was such an expert on sailing metaphors.) ‘I’m sorry, but I was joking. I’m not really Duncan’s sister. I just like to claim I am sometimes, you know, because it makes things more interesting. My apologies.’

I turned to the rest of the tourists, who had re-grouped in front of me and had become a little too interested in my conversation with M & P.

‘Now, as we continue, notice the tell-tale Trillian period details in the building across the square – in particular the fluted archways, the broad columns, the fine filigree. Also note—’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Mortar said, with the kind of earnest emphasis that can be interpreted as sternly polite or quietly angry, depending on your inclination.

Not for the first time, I remember thinking that perhaps it was time to change careers again.

THE SECOND PART of Nativism reflected an odd prejudice that Duncan had tried to refute in his own book: most historians (and lay people) thought of and wrote about the gray caps as if they represented a natural phenomenon, as immutable, faceless, and unpredictable as the weather, and, therefore, best understood in the aggregate, like the change of seasons or a bad thunderstorm. (Would that the Nativists had treated the gray caps like weather and tried to divine, from certain signs – a lowering of the temperature, a particular type of cloud, a strange hot wind – what the gray caps had planned for us.)

Looking back at all Ambergris’s many historical accounts, the answers to three basic yet profound questions are always missing: (1) in the absence of a strong central government, how does Ambergris manage to avoid fragmentation into separate, tiny city states? (2) What cause could there possibly be for the fluctuating levels of violence and personal property damage experienced during the Festival? (3) Given the presence of members of over one hundred contradictory religions and cults in the city, what stops occurrences of holy war?

For Duncan, the answers always returned to the gray caps, who, by use of hidden influence (the first physical manifestation being Frankwrithe & Lewden’s use of fungal weapons) and a multitude of carefully engineered ‘spore solutions’, kept the population balanced between anarchy and control. To Duncan, this meant that it served the gray caps’ interests for Ambergris to lurch ever forward, never truly disintegrating or cohering, but instead always on the edge, teetering.

However, Mary and her Nativists refused to believe in conscious gray-cap machinations. In an article for Ambergris Today, Mary wrote:

Time and again, apologists blame the gray caps for our own follies and misdeeds. Such a position abrogates personal responsibility and is as irresponsible as those religions that attribute deeds to the sun, moon, or sea. We are, ultimately, responsible for our own actions, our own history, and our own happiness. I do not refute any claim that the gray caps are vile and degenerate creatures, or that they have influenced our city in a negative way. But they have not done so with intent. Their story is not that of an over-arching conspiracy, of careful control over centuries, but instead the pitiful tale of a subjugated race that acts with the same instinct and lack of planning as any of the lower animals. For us to confer intent upon them – or to seek intent from them – turns us into victims, unable to fashion our own destinies. I reject such crackpot ideology.

Mary mercilessly picked away at any attempt to prove that the gray caps had exhibited conscious thought or causality, no matter how minor. For example, in a letter to the editor for a broadsheet, Duncan wrote about what appeared to him to be a side effect of the gray caps’ efforts. (I did not. I considered these effects to be as intentional as all of the overt harm done to us by the gray caps.)

The very spores that keep the population in thrall also undertake many beneficial tasks. For example, Ambergris has stayed relatively disease-free, throughout its history, with no documented plague as has occurred in Stockton and Morrow. Whether intentional or not, these benefits should not be overlooked.

Mary skewered this idea, writing in a subsequent issue, ‘Does the absence of disease lead one to the immediate conclusion that some force other than common sense and handwashing is protecting us?’ (I am ashamed to admit that her letter to the editor, in response to my own, sent a little thrill down my spine. I know she wasn’t responding to me personally, but it was still direct communication of a kind.)

‘IT ALL SOUNDED so logical in her book,’ Duncan complained to me as we looked down at Voss Bender Square from his apartment window. Below us, M & P and the rest of the tourists were milling about, not sure what to do. ‘It doesn’t matter that her proof is as insubstantial as mine.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but can’t you provide proof, Duncan? Can’t you do something?’

‘How? With another article for AFTOIS? All the mentions in the world in Mary’s books do me no good. I’m offered a few interview opportunities, but only if I play the role of clown or eccentric. Anything I said to them would be tainted and instantly discounted. Better not to speak at all.’

‘You’re right. I wasn’t joking,’ I said. ‘Duncan is my brother. So I’ll let him know what you said next time I see him. Now can we—’

‘And give him this letter,’ Pestle said, pulling a sealed envelope out of her pocket and handing it to me.

I took it from her as if she had given me a dead fish. What further surprises could the day hold? How patient should I be? It was difficult not to see them, on some level, as Sabon’s personal emissaries, sent to torment me.

‘And give him your letter,’ I continued, lying. I threw it away, unread, at the first opportunity. ‘But I have a favour to ask in return. I need you to relay a message for me.’

THE MAIN APPEAL of Nativism to Ambergrisians was that it freed them from any responsibility to think about or do anything about the gray caps, while reassuring them that this was the most responsible thing they could do. And, in my opinion – I can already hear the howls of outrage, but I am unmoved – it absolved Ambergrisians from any guilt over the massacre perpetrated by Manzikert I.

‘Not to mention that it saved them from having to worry about another Silence,’ Duncan said. M & P had disappeared from view. The square below was relatively quiet.

Perhaps the speed with which House Hoegbotton and House Frankwrithe & Lewden embraced Nativism proves Duncan’s theory. What better way for the gray caps to protect themselves? (I think this enters the far reaches of that land known as the Paranoid Conspiracy Theory, Janice.) Meanwhile, those of us not as devoted to blind ideology have had to suffer through the Nativists’ huge rallies, their righteous speeches, their letter-writing campaigns when anything the least bit threatening to their world view has the audacity to step out into the light. I would imagine that even Sabon never realized that Nativism would become so popular, or that it would drive her book sales for so long. (Although, you must admit, the mechanics of the Shift have put a stop to her momentum.)

I had personal reasons for rejecting Sabon’s theory. Sometimes, during my tours of duty, I would see Sybel standing in the nearest available tree behind some mob listening to a Nativist speaker. He’d look back at me and shake his head, sadness in his eyes. After all, he’d been killed by a very specific deployment of the gray caps’ weapons. I’d lost a foot. It was hard to blame either outcome, ultimately, on the random, with the unexplainable. At least, I refused to do so.

‘Easy,’ I said. ‘It’s for Mary Sabon. She is, after all, the leader of you Nativist types.’

Mortar had already begun shaking his head, about to protest that they didn’t know Mary, that they’d only read her books, but I waved these objections aside, pulled them both close.

Before the war, before Sybel’s death, before I became a gallery owner, this is what I would have said to them, in a whisper or a roar: ‘First, let me point out that if you don’t deliver this message for me, I will have Duncan bring the gray caps down upon you like a plague so you can see for yourself just how motivated the gray caps are. So I suggest that as soon as I stop talking, you start searching for Sabon. I want you to tell Mary to stop misleading sycophantic morons like yourselves. To stop making it seem like everything in our lives is under our control, to stop undermining everything my brother has ever worked towards. To stop killing him by degrees, in public. To stop wasting your time and his time with these ridiculous theories of hers that only apply to her personal demons. To stop to stop to stop to stop to stop.’

But I didn’t say that. I was Janice Shriek, former society figure, and I’ll be damned if I let any two-bit tourists just off the slow boat from Stockton get under my skin.

WHAT DROVE MARY to the cruelty of showing her ‘affection’ for Duncan as mentor by tearing down all he had built up – and doing so after he had already become comfortable as a ghost – I do not know. Perhaps it was not just her fear. Perhaps it was out of envy. Perhaps it was to show she could do it all better.

The practical effect of Sabon’s resurrection of the discussions initiated by Duncan was that Frankwrithe & Lewden bought the rights to his books from Hoegbotton & Sons – and proceeded to publish them in a badly edited, hideously expensive, horribly abridged omnibus entitled Cinsorium & Other Historical Fables (Dad would have punned it as Sinsore-ium & Other Hysterical Foibles), an edition intended solely for the library market so that scholars could peruse it as part of their primary text exploration of Sabon’s books. The rights Duncan had sold to Hoegbotton were all-encompassing and he could do nothing but accept a trickle of royalties from publication of the omnibus. He could not stop the butchery of his original texts. (Nor could I afford to object anyway, my income having dropped off precipitously since AFTOIS could not sustain me by itself.)

The omnibus received scant attention from reviewers – it was considered a historical curiosity, reflecting the ‘hysteria and ignorance of a less enlightened time’, as one of the few notices put it – meaning that kind readers like Mortar and Pestle only encountered Shriek through Sabon’s filter. One hates to think of Duncan struggling to express himself while F&L and his beloved Mary struggle to snuff him out, but that’s exactly what was happening.

Despite Sirin’s assertions from time to time – rebutted by Lacond at many a furious AFTOIS meeting where, according to Duncan, the issue came up continually – that Sabon meant no harm by her actions – perhaps even the opposite – and that neither did Hoegbotton in selling the rights to Frankwrithe & Lewden, I’m certain she resurrected him merely to more effectively destroy him. Whether she meant to or not. Nativism as it turned out, was an excellent description for Mary’s own actions.

What made me most angry, though, is that Duncan didn’t even seem to mind, as if accepting her right to take advantage of him. (I couldn’t hate her for it. And even as the sight of butchered chapters and paragraphs cut me to the quick, part of me thrilled to see any of my words back in print, in any form.)

NO, WHAT I SAID to Mortar and Pestle with sincerity and with hope, as I handed them my cheat sheets for the rest of the tour, was simply, ‘If you do ever see Mary, tell her that Duncan sends his love.’ It’s a pity I couldn’t maintain my composure later, on a certain marble staircase, but I’ve never claimed to be consistent.

Then I put my arms around Mortar and Pestle and turned all three of us to face the tour group.

‘I’m afraid there’s been a change of plan. These two fine upstanding citizens from Stockton will be leading the rest of the tour. Enjoy!’

I left them without regret, Mortar and Pestle speechless, and climbed the steps to Duncan’s apartment overlooking Voss Bender Memorial Square, where we talked for quite some time, while below, through the open window, we witnessed the slow disintegration of the tour group.

The Ambergris Tourism Board – caught between their dead-dog slogans and their sense of profit, between my protestations of being ‘confused’ as to the message we were trying to convey and their certainty that I’d known exactly what I was doing – contemplated firing me, but couldn’t quite summon the nerve.

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