Shriek: An Afterword Read online

  “Someone, then,” I said. “So tell me—why are we so different? I also believe in something or someone I cannot see. It just happens to live underground.” I said it casually, and it came out like a joke, but my breath quickened, and I think that on some level, I really wanted a profound answer. I wanted an answer of some kind, at least—one that would help me understand why I could not stop pursuing my mystery.

  “There’s a difference,” Bonmot said, although I’ve wondered ever since how he could know such a thing, without having seen what I’ve seen, down there.

  “What is the difference?”

  “Your unseen world only exists inside your head,” he said, in as gentle a way as he could—he even reached out across the table with his huge hands, as if, for a second, he meant to console me. “My unseen world, however, is the truth. It is truth that convinces and the divine that gives the gift of true faith.”

  I’ve always had a problem with Truth and those who espouse Truth, no matter how much I might love and respect them. Faith, on the other hand, has never been an issue for me. But, I said, because I could: “I thought it might be a question of scale. Of the number of souls infected with the delusion.”

  Bonmot wasn’t smiling anymore. “No, it’s not a matter of scale.”

  {But of course it was a question of scale. That’s why I failed. You must infect the minds of hundreds of thousands to get anything done, to make an impact. You can’t live out your days presenting your theories to a hundred souls at a meeting of a discredited historical society. It doesn’t make a difference.}

  “What, then?”

  Bonmot said, “I told you already. But you aren’t ready to listen. You have to know the truth—have something worth believing in. Over time. Over centuries. Something so important people are willing to form their whole lives around it. To live, and, yes, die for it. And that means it must be much bigger than anything imaginable. ‘Silence with regard to You is praise,’” he quoted. “‘The sum total of what we know of You is that we do not know You.’”

  I leaned closer, across the table. “What if you could know, though? Would that diminish it? If you could see what I have seen. I think it might change your mind.” {And, toward the end, didn’t he change? And didn’t I wish then that I’d never tried to see him uncertain.}

  “‘The angels of darkness, whose names I do not know,’” Bonmot said. “You must take care to resist the false light.”

  “The false light.” I shivered. Samuel Tonsure had written that once in his journal. But Tonsure hadn’t known about the Machine, about the door. There was, I had become convinced, a real door, not just an illusion or a delusion or a mirror. A door. And here Bonmot was talking about not letting in a false light. For a moment, just a moment, I asked myself if he might have some insight into the same truth I sought. {After all, Bonmot often professed to be an expert on Zamilon, a place I had become convinced held, in some time period, the answer to the mystery of the Machine. But the tough old bastard never imparted what he knew, no matter how I tried to pry that knowledge from him. And then it was too late.}

  I pulled away, sat up straight on the bench, felt the lacquered rough-smoothness of its grain against my palms. Felt the sun against my face. Felt the breeze. Wondered at how I could get so lost in a conversation that I forgot the world around me.

  I started again. I don’t know why I tried. Bonmot couldn’t convince me and I couldn’t convince him. “It is that important to me, Bonmot. It’s a religion to me.”

  “I’ve no doubt of your sincerity,” Bonmot said. “I’m just not sure what you want from me.”

  “To say my theories are not incompatible with your beliefs,” I said.

  “But your theories are impossible. Nor are they truly relevant to the larger world.”

  This made me angry for an instant. “Relevant? Relevant. How about this—our future survival in Ambergris. A second Silence. Is that relevant enough for you?”

  Bonmot sighed. It was like stone or solid earth sighing. “That’s what Truffidianism is all about, my friend. Exactly that—you should read our texts more closely in future. ‘The same fate is in store for everyone, pure and impure, righteous and wicked, the good and the sinners.’”

  “‘No one makes it out,’ as Tonsure once wrote,” I said. “But what if that fate is coming sooner to all of us than it should?”

  Bonmot shrugged. “I don’t believe in what you believe.”

  But I knew that, faced with the reality of it, he would not be so calm or accepting. I knew that the reality of what might one day happen would trump the imaginations of even those who had the capacity to believe in an all-powerful being that had never once manifested in the flesh to Bonmot or, to the best of my knowledge, anyone else.

  {I once had a conversation about Faith and Truth with Sybel while waiting for him to relinquish a tincture. “What’s the attraction of Truffidianism? Of a single Truth, Sybel?” I asked. “It’s simple,” he replied. “You don’t have to search anymore. You can just be.” “So can a tree, Sybel,” I said, which was probably the wrong thing to say.}

  Conversations like this one usually ended amicably on both sides—for Duncan because he found much about Truffidianism compelling {that may be wish fulfillment on your part, Janice} and for Bonmot because he had been too flawed in his past to judge the disbelief of others too harshly. And still they went back and forth, sometimes comically.

  Duncan: “I’ve seen a kind of a god. It lives underground.”

  Bonmot: “The Silence was more about sin than mushrooms.”

  Duncan: “But rats, Bonmot? Why do you have to worship rats?”

  Bonmot: “The ways of God are mysterious, Duncan. And, besides, you are coming perilously close to blasphemy…only some of us worship rats. I do not worship rats.”

  Duncan: “Rats, Bonmot? Rats?”

  We talked about serious subjects, yes, but we also told dirty jokes and teased each other mercilessly. I shared wicked stories about the outrageous behavior of my artists, while Bonmot shared tales from his days at the religious academy in Morrow. {My personal favorites concerned the exploits of the head instructor, Cadimon Signal.} Rarely were our conversations revelatory. That’s not the point. These were people I loved and came to love. For me, some months, it saved me to be in such company. It took me out of the self-destructive spiral of my own thoughts in a way that even Sybel couldn’t. For Bonmot, I think our lunches allowed him to relax in a way he had not relaxed since he entered the priesthood. {And I had fun, too. But, really, Janice, you make it all sound so perfect. It was fun, but it wasn’t perfect.}

  I should have been envious of the way Duncan and Bonmot talked, but the truth is, it made me happy for them both: the hulking giant and my relatively “dainty” brother. When I approached them with my sandwiches, I often felt guilty for taking them from their collective world of words and ideas, twinned heads turning to look up at me, bewildered—who was this intruder?—followed by recognition and a gracious acceptance into their company. {This is a subtle piece of misdirection that allows you to keep your own emotional intimacy with Bonmot secret, I think. As I had Lacond later, so you had Bonmot, in a way I didn’t. I was often the intruder, Janice. You two took so easily to one another it was remarkable. But if you don’t want to share such details here, I won’t make you.}

  I still remember how Bonmot’s generous drum of a laugh, deep and clear, often drew disapproving looks from the students studying nearby. And yet even then, during what I considered retreats from the exhausting carnality of my “normal” life, Mary Sabon was with us, folded into the pages of the grade book Duncan kept with him. There never really is a finite beginning, is there? No real starting point to anything. Beginnings are continually beginning. Time is just a joke played by watchmakers to turn a profit. Through memory, Time becomes conjoined so that I see Mary as a physical presence at those lunches, leaning against Duncan, trying to get his attention.

  She is everywhere now. I am, almost literally,
nowhere.

  5

  Can a childhood memory be misconstrued as starting over? I don’t think so. Not if I tell it this way:

  The forests outside Stockton remain as real to me as the humid, fungi-laden streets of Ambergris, maybe more so. The dark leaves, the mottled trunks, the deep green shadows reflected on the windows of our house, as of some preternatural presence. All sorts of trees grew in Stockton, but the difference between the staid oaks that lined our street and the misshapen, twisted, coiled welter of tree limbs in the forest seemed profound. It both reassured us and menaced us in our youth: limitless adventure, fear of the unknown.

  Our house lay on the forest’s edge. The trees stretched on for hundreds of miles, over hills and curving down through valleys. Various were the forest’s names, from the Western Forest to the Forest of Owls to Farely’s Forest, after the man who had first explored the area. Stockton had been nestled comfortably on its eastern flank for centuries, feeding off of the timber, the sap, the animals that took shelter there.

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

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

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

  Duncan peered into the forest’s depths.

  “We need to go farther,” he said.

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

  “How much farther?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Well…,” I said, about to give Duncan my next objection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  It sounded like something Dad would have said, not a nine-year-old kid.

  “We’re already lost, Duncan. We have to go back.”

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

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

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

  “There’s something ahead of us,” he repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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