Highlights from Shriek - An Afterword by Jeff Vandermeer Last read on April 27, 2023
Highlights from this book
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Having begun this account as an afterword, ended it as a dirge, and made of it a fevered family chronicle in the middle, all I can say now, as the time to write comes to an end, is that I did the best I could, and am gone. Nothing in this city we call Ambergris lasts for long.
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It was Duncan who took the letter from Dad’s hand and, after the doctor had goneand the mortician had removed the body, sat down at the kitchen table to read it. First, he read it to himself. Then, he read it to us, Mom staring vacant-eyed from the living room couch, not hearing a word of it. The letter confused Duncan in ways that did not occur to my mother, to me. It bent the surface of his world and let in a black vein of the irrational, the illogical, the nonsensical. To me, my father was dead, and it didn’t matter how or why, because he was dead regardless. But to Duncan, it made all the difference. Safely anchored in place and family, he had been a madly fearless child—an explorer of tunnels and dank, dark places. He had never encountered the brutal dislocation of chance and irony. Until now. (Did it make a difference? I don’t know. My resolve has always seemed something fiercely internal.)
For our father, Jonathan Shriek, minor historian, had died in the grasp of a great and terrible joy. The letter, which bore the seal of the Kalif himself, congratulated him “for having won that most Magnificent Award, the Laskian Historical Prize,” for a paper published in the Ambergrisian Historical Society Newsletter. The letter asked my father to accept an all-expenses-paid trip to the Court of the Kalif, and there study books unread for five centuries, including the holiest-of-holies, The Journal of Samuel Tonsure.
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Fifty mushroom dwellers now spilled out from the alcove gateway, macabre in their very peacefulness and the even hum-thrum of their breath: stunted in growth, wrapped in robes the pale gray-green of a frog’s underbelly, their heads hidden by wide-brimmed gray felt hats that, like the hooded tops of their namesakes, covered them to the neck. Their necks were the only exposed part of them—incredibly long, pale necks; at rest, they did indeed resemble mushrooms.
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(Dare I deprive the reader of that first glimpse of Ambergris? That first teasing glimpse during the carriage ride from the docks? That glimpse, and then the sprawl of Albumuth Boulevard, half staid brick, half lacquered timber? The dirt of it, the stench of it, half perfume, half ribald rot. And another smell underneath it—the tantalizing scent of fungi, of fruiting bodies, of spores entangled with dust and air, spiraling down like snow. The cries of vendors, the cries of the newly robbed, or the newly robed. The first contact of shoe on street out of the carriage—the resounding solidity of that ground, and the humming vibration of coiled energy beneath the pavement, conveyed up through shoe into foot, and through foot into the rest of a body suddenly energized and woken up. The sudden hint of heat to the air—the possibilities!—and, peeking from the storm drains, from the alleyways, the enticing, lingering darkness that spoke of tunnels and sudden exploration. One cannot mention our move to Ambergris without setting that scene, surely! That boulevard became our touchstone, in those early years, as it had to countless people before us. It was how you traveled into Ambergris, and it was how they carried you out when you finally left.)
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To say Duncan studied hard would be to understate the ardor of his quest for knowledge. He devoured texts as he devoured food, to savor after it had been swallowed whole. In short, Duncan became overzealous. Obsessed. Driven. All of those (double-edged) (s)words.
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Duncan reintroduced himself to me six months later with a knock on my door late one night in the spring. The prudent Ambergrisian does not eagerly open doors at night.
I locked the door behind him and turned to greet him, but any words I might have spoken died in my throat. For he held his overcoat open like the wings of some great bird, and what I saw I could not at first believe. Just brightly colored vest and pants, I thought, but protruding, like barnacles on a ship’s hull. How unlike my brother to wear anything that outlandish. I took a step closer...
“That’s right,” Duncan said, “step closer and really see .”
He tossed his hat onto a chair. He had shaved off his hair, and his scalp was stippled and layered in a hundred shades of blue, yellow, green, orange.
“Mushrooms. Hundreds of mushrooms. I had to wear the overcoat and hat or every casual tourist on Albumuth Boulevard would have stared at me.” He looked down at his body. “Look how they glow. What a shame to be rid of them.” He saw me staring unabashedly. “Stare all you like, Janice. I’m a dazzling butterfly, not a moth … well, for another hour or two.” (A butterfly could not compare. I was magnificent. Every part of my body was receiving. I could “hear” things through my body, feel them, that no human short of Samuel Tonsure could understand.) He did not lie. From the collar of his shirt to the tips of his shoes, Duncan was covered in mushrooms and other fungi, in such a riot and welter and rash of colors that I was speechless. I walked up to him to examine him more closely. His eyelashes and eyebrows were lightly dusted with purple spores. The fungi had needled his head, burrowed into the skin, forming whorls of brightness that hummed with fecundity. I took his right hand in mine, examined the palm, the fingers. The palms had a vaguely greenish hue to them. The half-moons of his fingernails had turned a luminous purple. His skin was rubbery, as if unreal. Looking up into his eyes, I saw that the spark there came from pale red ringing the pupil. Suddenly, I was afraid. (To be honest, to dull the pain a bit, I’d had a few drinks at a tavern before stumbling to your door. That might have contributed to the condition of my eyes.) “Don’t be,” he said. “Don’t be afraid,” scaring me even more. “It’s a function of diet. It’s a function of disguise. I haven’t changed. I’m still your brother. You are still my sister. All of this will wash away. It’s just the layers added to me the past three months. I need help scraping them off.”
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I had opened a window to get the smell of mushrooms out and now, by the wet, glistening outdoor lamps, I could see the beginning of a vast, almost invisible spore migration from the broken remains at our feet, from the burgundy bell-shaped fungi, from the inverted wineglasses, from the yellow-green nodules. Like ghosts, like spirits, a million tiny bodies in a thousand intricate shapes, like terrestrial jellyfish—oh what am I trying to say so badly except that they were gorgeous, as they fled out the window to be taken by the wind. In the faint light. Soundlessly. Like souls.
“Look,” I said, pointing to the spores.
“I know,” my brother said. “I know, Janice.”
Such regret in that voice, mixed with a last, lingering joy.
“I’m less than I was, but I’ve captured it all here.” He tapped his head, which still bore the scars of its invaders in the vague echo of color, in the scrubbed redness of it.
“The spores are part of the record. They will float back to where I’ve been, navigating by wind and rain and by ways we cannot imagine, and they will report to the gray caps. Who I was. Where I was. What I did. It will make it all the more dangerous next time.”
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“Where the eastern approaches of the Kalif’s empire fade into the mountains no man can conquer, the ruined fortress of Zamilon keeps watch over time and the stars. Within the fortress, humbled by the holes in its ancient walls, Truffidian monks guard the last true page of Tonsure’s famous journal.”
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As the fire behind them began to die, Gaudy smiled and broke the silence. He spoke in a “perfectly calm voice, level and smooth. He stared at the fireplace as he spoke, and steepled his fingers, elbows on the desk. He appeared not to draw a single extra breath.”
He said: “You need not sit and thus defile my perfectly good chair because it will take no time at all to say what needs to be said to you. Once I have said what I am going to say to you, I would like you to leave immediately and never return. You are no longer welcome here and never will be welcome again. Your manuscript has performed the useful function of warming us, a function a thousand times more beneficial than anything it might have hoped to accomplish as a series of letters strung together into words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. The fire has purified it, in much the same manner as I would like at this moment—and will desire at all moments in the future—to purify you, were it not outside of the legal, if not moral, boundaries placed upon us by the law and society in general. By this time it ought to be clear to you, Mr. Shriek, that we do not intend to buy the rights to your ‘book’—and I use the word ‘book’ in its loosest possible sense—nor to its ashes, although I would sooner buy the rights to its ashes than to its unblemished pages.
As I would have hoped you had guessed by now, although you have not yet left this office never to return, we do not like your new book very much. In fact, to say I do not like your book would be like calling a mighty tree a seedling. I loathe your book, Mr. Shriek, and yet the word ‘loathe’ cannot convey in even a thousandth part the full depths of my hatred for this book, and by extension, you. But perhaps I should be more specific. Maybe specifics will allow you to overcome this current, potentially fatal, inertia—tied no doubt to the aforementioned shock—that stops you from leaving this office. Look—the last scrap of your manuscript has become a flake of ash floating above the fireplace. What a shame. Perhaps you would like an urn to collect the ashes of your dead newborn? Well, you can’t have one, because not only do we not have an urn, but even if we did, we would not allow you to use it for the transport of the ashes, if only from the fear that you might find some way to reconstruct the book from them—and yes, we do know it is likely you have a copy of the manuscript, but we will feel a certain warmth in our hearts if by burning this copy we can at least slow down your reckless and obstinate attempt to publish this cretinous piece of excrement. Returning to the specifics of our argument against this document: your insipid stupidity is evident from the first word of the first sentence of the first paragraph of your acknowledgments page, ‘The,’ and from there the sense of simple-minded, pitiable absence of thought pervades all of the first paragraph until, by the roaring crescendo of imbecility leading up to the last word of the first paragraph, ‘again,’ any possible authority the reader might have granted the author has been completely undermined by your inability to in any way convey even an unoriginal thought. And yet in comparison to the dull-witted pedantry of the second paragraph, the first paragraph positively shines with genius and degenerate brilliance. Perhaps at this point in our little chat, I should repeat that I don’t very much like this book.”
Gaudy then rose and shouted, “YOU HAVE BEEN MEDDLING IN THINGS YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT! DO YOU THINK YOU CAN POKE AROUND DOWN THERE TO YOUR HEART’S CONTENT AND NOT SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES?! YOU ARE A COMPLETE AND UTTER MORON! IF YOU EVER COME BACK TO MORROW, I’LL HAVE YOU GUTTED AND YOUR ORGANS THROWN TO THE DOGS! DO. YOU. UNDERSTAND. ME??!”
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The past isn’t a slab of stone; it’s fragmented and porous.
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Writing a book and going underground are so similar. That fear of the unknown never really goes away. But, after a while, it becomes a perverse comfort.
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I drifted and drifted, often so in trance that I did not have a single conscious thought for hours. I was a pair of eyes reporting to a brain that had ceased to police, to analyze, the incoming images. It all went through me and past, to some place other. In a way, it was a kind of release. Now, it makes me wonder if I had learned what it feels like to be a tree, or even, strike me dead, a gray cap. But, that cannot be so—the gray caps are always in motion, always thinking. You can see it in their eyes.
Once, as I stood in one of my motionless trances, a gray cap approached me. What did he do? Nothing. He sat in front of me and stared up at me for hours, for days. His eyes reflected the darkness. His eyes had a quality that held all of me entirely, held me against my will. Mary holds me, but not against my will—her eyes and my will are in accord. Her eyes: green, green, green. Greener than Ambergris. Greener than the greenest moss by a trickling stream.
After a time, I realized the gray cap had gone, but it took me weeks to return to the surface of my thoughts, and months to find the real surface, and with it the light. The light! A weak trickle of late afternoon gloom, presage of sunset, and yet it pierced my vision. I could not open my eyes until after dusk, fumbling my way along the Moth riverbank like some pathetic mole. The light burned into my closed eyelids. It seemed to crack my skin. It tried to kill me and birth me simultaneously. I lay gasping in the mud, writhing, afraid I would burn up.
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I took a long sip from the canteen at this point, if only to assuage Duncan’s remembered heat. The starfish now served as an exotic, glowing ear, eclipsing flesh and blood. It hummed a little as it worked. A smell like fresh-cut orange surrounded it.
I offered Duncan the canteen. He used the opportunity to pour more water on his pet. I was about to prod him to continue when he pulled the starfish from his ear, sat up, and said, looking down at the compass as it sucked on his fingers, “Do you know the first sentences of the Truffidian Bible?”
“No,” I said. “Do you?” Our parents had treated religion like a door behind which stood an endless abyss: better not to believe at all, the abyss revealed, than have it be closed over, falsified, prettied up. (And yet, there is something in my skin now, after all these years, that hums of the world in a way that predicts the infinite.)
“Yes, I do know them. Would you like to hear them?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No. Those words are ‘The world is broken. God is in exile.’ Followed shortly thereafter by ‘In the first part of creation, God made light and made vessels for thelight. The vessels were too fragile: they broke, and from the broken vessels of thesupernal lights, the material world was created.’”
Something very much like a void opened up inside me. A chill brought gooseflesh to my skin. Each word from my mouth sounded heavier than it should have: “And what does the creation of the world have to do with the gray caps?” He put a finger to his lips. His face in the sour light gave off a faint glow, pale relative to the illumination of the starfish. His skin winked from behind the mushroom dust. He looked so old. Why should he look so old? What did he know?
He said: “A machine. A glass. A mirror. A broken machine. A cracked glass. A shattered mirror.”
I remember now the way he used the phrases at his disposal. Clean, fine cuts. Great, slashing cuts. Fractures in the word and the world.
A machine. A glass. A mirror. Duncan’s journal, with the advantage of distance, described his discovery much more gracefully … But it doesn’t work right. It hasn’t worked right since they built it. A part, a mechanism, a balance—something they don’t quite understand. How can I call it strictly a machine? It is as much organic as metallic, housed in a cavern larger than three Truffidian Cathedrals. You feel it and hear it before you see it: a throbbly hum, a grindful pulse, a sorrowful bellow. The passageways rumble and crackle with the force of it. A hot wind flares out before it. The only entrance leads, after much hard work, to the back of the machine, where you can see its inner workings. You are struck by the fact of its awful carnality, for they feed it lives as well as fuel. Flesh and metal bond, married by spores, joined by a latticework of polyps and filaments and lazy strands. Wisps and converted moonlight. Sparks and gears. The whole is at first obscured by its own detail, by those elements at eye level: a row of white sluglike bodies curled within the cogs and gears, eyes shut, apparently asleep. Wrinkled and luminous. Lacking all but the most rudimentary stubs of limbs. But with faces identical to those of the gray caps. You cannot help but look closer. You cannot help but notice two things: that they dream, twitching reflexively in their repose, eyelids flickering with subconscious thought, and that they are not truly curled within the machine—they are curled into the machine, meshed with it at a hundred points of contact. The blue-red veins in their arms flow into milk-white fingers, and at the border between skin and air, transformed from vein into silvery wire. Tendrils of wire meet tendrils of flesh, broken up by sections of sharp wheels, clotted with scraps of flesh, and whining almost soundlessly as they whir in the darkness.
As you stare at the nearest white wrinkled body, you begin to smell the thickness of oil and blood mixed together. As the taste bites into your mouth, you take a step back, and suddenly you feel as if you are falling, the sense of vertigo so intense your arms flail out though you stand on solid ground. Because you realize it isn’t one pale dreamer, or even a row of them, or even five rows of five hundred, but more than five thousand rows of five thousand milk-white dreamers, running on into the distance—as far as you care to see—millions of them, caught and transfixed in the back of the machine. And they are all dreaming and all their eyelids flicker in unison, and all their blood flows into all the wires while a hundred thousand sharpened wheels spin soundlessly.
The hum you hear, that low hum you hear, does not come from the machinery. It does not come from the wheels, the cogs, the wires. The hum emanates from the white bodies. They are humming in their sleep, a slow, even hum as peaceful as they are not—how can I write this, how? except to keep writing and when I’ve stopped never look at this again—while the machine itself is silent.
The rows blur as you tilt your head to look up, not because the rows are too far away, but because your eyes and your brain have decided that this is too much, this is too much to take in without going mad, that you do not want to comprehend this crushing immensity of vision, that if comprehended completely, it will haunt not just your nightmares for the rest of your life—it will form a permanent overlay upon your waking sight, and you will stumble through your days like a blind man, the ghost-vision in your head stronger than reality.
So you return to details—the details right in front of you. The latticework of wires and tubes, where you see a thrush has been placed, intertwined, its broken wings flapping painfully. There, a dragonfly, already dead, brittle and glassy. Bits and pieces of flesh still writhing with the memory of interconnection. Skulls. Yellowing bones. Glossy black vines. Pieces of earth. And holding it all together, like glue, dull red fungus.
But now the detail becomes too detailed, and again your eyes blur, and you decide maybe movement will save you—that perhaps if you move to the other side of the machine, you will find something different, something that does not call out remorselessly for your surrender. Because if you stand there for another minute, you will enmesh yourself in the machine. You will climb up into the flesh and metal. You will curl up to something pale and sticky and embrace it. You will relax your body into the space allowed it, your legs released from you in a spray of blood and wire, you smiling as it happens, your eyes already dulled, and dreaming some communal dream, your tongue the tongue of the machine, your mouth humming in another language, your arms weighed down with tendrils of metal, your torso split in half to let out the things that must be let out.
For a long time, you stand on the fissure between sweet acceptance of dissolution and the responsibility of movement, the enticing smell of decay, the ultimate inertia, reaching out to you … but, eventually, you move away, with an audible shudder that shakes your bones, almost pulls you apart.
As you hobble around to the side of the machine, you feel the million eyes of the crumpled, huddled white shapes snap open, for a single second drawn out of their dreams of you.
There is no history, no present. There are only the sides of the machine. Slick memory of metal, mad with its own brightness, mad with the memory of what it contains. You cling to those sides for support, but make your way past them as quickly as possible. The sides are like the middle of a book—necessary, but quickly read through to get to the end.
Already, you try in vain to forget the beginning.
The front of the machine has a comforting translucent or reflective quality. You will never be able to decide which quality it possesses, although you stand there staring at it for days, ensnared by your own foolish hope for something to negate the horrible negation of the machine’s innards. Ghosts of images cloud the surface of the machine and are wiped clean as if by a careless, a meticulous, an impatient painter. A great windswept desert, sluggish with the weight of its own dunes. An ocean, waveless, the tension of its surface broken only by the shadow of clouds above, the water such a perfect blue-green that it hurts your eyes. A mountain range at sunset, distant, ruined towers propped up by the foothills at its flanks. Always flickering into perfection and back into oblivion. Places that if they exist in this world you have never seen, or heard mention of their existence. Ever.
You slide into the calm of these scenes, although you cannot forget the white shapes behind the machine, the eyelids that flicker as these images flicker. Only the machine knows, and the machine is damaged. Its thoughts are damaged. Your thoughts are damaged: they run liquid-slow through your brain, even though you wish they would stop.
After several days, your vision strays and unfocuses and you blink slowly, attention drawn to a door at the very bottom of the mirror. The door is as big as the machine. The door is as small as your fingernail. The distance between you and the door is infinite. The distance between you and the door is so minute you could reach out and touch it. The door is translucent—the images that flow across the screen sweep across the door as well, so that it is only by the barely perceived hairline fracture of its outline that it can be distinguished beneath the desert, ocean, mountains, that glide across its surface. The door is a mirror, too, you realize, and after so long of not focusing on anything, letting images run through you, you find yourself concentrating on the door and the door alone. In many ways, it is an ordinary door, almost a nonexistent door. And yet, staring at it, a wave of fear passes over you. A fear so blinding it paralyzes you. It holds you in place. You can feel the pressure of all that meat, all that flesh, all the metal inside the machine amassed behind that door. It is an unbearable weight at your throat. You are buried in it, in a small box, under an eternity of rock and earth. The worms are singing to you through the rubble. The worms know your name. You cannot think. Your head is full of blood. You dare not breathe.
There is something behind the door.
There is something behind the door.
There is something behind the door.
The door begins to open inward, and something fluid and slow, no longer dreaming, begins to come out from inside, lurching around the edge of the door. You begin to run—to run as far from that place as you possibly can, screaming until your throat fills with the blood in your head, your head now an empty globe while the rest of you drowns in blood. And still it makes no difference, because you are back in that place with the slugs and the skulls and the pale dreamers and the machine that doesn’t work that doesn’t work that doesn’t work thatdoesn’twork hat doesnwor atdoeswor doeswor doewor dowordoor...
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“You learned it wrong,” he told me. “That’s not what happened. It didn’t happen like that. I’ve seen so many things, and I’ve thought a lot about what I’ve seen. They disappeared without a single drop of blood left behind. Not a fragment of bone. No. They weren’t killed. At least not directly. Try to imagine a different answer: a sudden miscalculation, a botched experiment, a flaw in the machine. All of those people. All twenty-five thousand of them. The men, the women, the children—they didn’t die. They were moved. The door opened in a way the gray caps didn’t expect, couldn’t expect, and all those people—they were moved by mistake. The machine took them to someplace else. And, yes, maybe they died, and maybe they died horribly—but my point is, it was all an accident. A mistake. A terrible, pointless blunder.”
He was breathing heavily. Sweat glistened on his arms, where before the black dust had suppressed it.
“That’s crazy,” I said. “That’s the craziest thing I have ever heard in my life. They’ve killed thousands of people. They’ve done terrible things. And you have the nerve to make apologies for them?!”
“Would it be easier to accept that they don’t give a damn about us one way or the other if we hadn’t massacred them to build this city? What I think is crazy is that we try to pretend they are just like us. If we had massacred most of the citizens of Morrow, we would expect them to seek revenge. That would be natural, understandable, even acceptable. But what about a people that, when you slaughter hundreds of them, doesn’t even really notice? That doesn’t acknowledge the event? We can’t accept that reaction. That would be incomprehensible. So we tack the idea of ‘revenge’ onto the Silence so we can sleep better at night—because we think, we actually have the nerve to think, that we understand these creatures that live beneath us. And if we think we understand them, if we believe they are like us in their motivations, then we don’t fear them quite as much. If we meet one in an alley, we believe we can talk to it, reason with it, communicate with it. Or if we see one dozing beneath a red flag on the street during the day, we overlook it, we make it part of the scenery, no less colorful or benign than a newly ordained Truffidian priest prancing down Albumuth Boulevard in full regalia.”
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“I did bring a gray cap,” he said. “Several, in fact. Although not by choice. Take a good look through the doorway, out the front window, to the left. I doubt they would corroborate anything, though. I think they’d like to see me dead.” “Don’t joke.”
“I’m not. Take a look.”
Reluctantly, I raised myself, my left leg asleep—even less impressed by Duncan’s story, apparently, than I was. I peered around the doorway. Sheathed like swords by the fading light, more sharp shadow than dream, three gray caps stood staring in through the window. They stood so still the cobblestones of the street behind them seemed more alive. The whites of their eyes gleamed like wet paint. They stared at and through me. As if I meant nothing to them. The sight of them sent a convulsive shudder through me. I ducked back, beside Duncan.
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Every human being is a puppet on strings, but the puppet half controls the strings, and the strings do not ascend to some anonymous Maker, but are glistening golden strands that connect one puppet to another. Each strand is sensitive to the vibrations of every other strand. Every vibration sings in not only the puppet’s heart, but in the hearts of many other puppets, so that if you listen carefully, you can hear a low hum as of many hearts singing together … When a strand snaps, when it breaks for love, or lack of love, or from hatred, or from pain … every other connected strand feels it, and every other connected heart feels it—and since every strand and every heart are, in theory, connected, even if at their most distant limits, this means the effect is universal. All through the darkness where shining strings are the only light, a woundedness occurs. And this hurt affects each strand and each puppet in a different way, because we are all puppets on strings and we all hurt and are hurt. And all the strings shimmer on regardless, and all of our actions, no matter how small, have consequences to other puppets … After we are dead, gone to join the darkness between the lines of light, the strands we leave behind still quiver their lost messages into the hearts of those other puppets we met along the way, on our journey from light into not-light. These lost strands are the memories we leave behind … Magnify this effect by 25,000 souls and perhaps you can see why I cannot so lightly dismiss what you call a mistake. Each extinguished life leaves a hole in many other lives—a series of small extinguishments that can never be completely forgotten or survived. Each survivor carries a little of that void within them.
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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.
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No, my plan concerned additional research. With plucking the half-formed thoughts like plums. With growing another thirty or forty brains and limbs each semester, to become this multi-spined creature that might, in its flailing, lurching way, accomplish more than a single, if singular, scholar, ever could.
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Even the flies have eyes, Janice. Eyes for them. There is no corner of this city they cannot see in some form. But it’s too much information. They cannot review it all at once. I imagine them down there, in the fungal light, reviewing intelligence gathered a decade ago—awash in information, none of it useful to them because it overwhelms them. And yet—why? Why attempt to gather it?
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What strange creatures we are, I thought as I stood there. We live, we love, we die with such random joy and grief, excitement and boredom, each mind as individual as a fingerprint, and just as enigmatic. We make up stories to understand ourselves and tell ourselves that they are true, when in fact they only represent an individual impression of one individual fingerprint, no matter how universal we attempt to make them.
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“Give back to this earth this good man, O Lord,” he said, much to the grumbling dismay of several Manziists present, who missed their traditional rat-festooned funeral ceremony. “Give back to this good man the earth, O Lord,” he said again, like a man who, having missed his memorized mark, has to start over in the correct order. “And let you, O Lord, serve as a light to him, for we are imperfect vessels and we platitude simile extended metaphor with barely any pauses followed by more repetition. Period. Comma. Stop. Start. Here I go again about God and the dirt and wait: another platitude, quote from the Truffidian Bible everyone’s heard a thousand times before, and even though I once actually knew Bonmot when I was a junior priest, not a single personal anecdote about the man because the scandal of his long-ago departure as Antechamber might somehow still cling to me like a fetid stench. Amen.”
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What is it about distance—physical distance—that allows us to create such false portraits, such disguises, for those we love, that we can so easily discard them in memory, make for them a mask that allows us to keep them at a distance even when so close?
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Before my “accident,” I had lived almost exclusively within the secret history of the city—a history of moments, not events, a history that vanished as it came and lived on only in the shudder of remembered ecstasy. This secret history descends (transcends) through the bedrooms of a hundred thousand houses, in the dark, through the tips of our fingers as we learn that our bodies have a thousand eyes to feel with, a thousand ways to learn the true meaning of touch. From foreplay to orgasm, from first touch to last, everything we know is in our skins—this secret history that so few people will be part of. We don’t talk about this history, although it made us and will make us and is the only way to get as close as we can to each other: an urgent coupling to close the space, to experience a pleasure that—excuse me as I stumble into this rapturous gutter (can we stop you?)—is on one level being filled or filling, but is also so much more.
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Then, suddenly, I could feel the spores infiltrating my head, my limbs—they clambered over my sinuses, got between me and my own skin. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. The spores began to seethe across my eyes, bringing a stinging green veil over my sight. I did the only thing I could do, the thing I have learned to do, still the hardest thing. I relaxed my arms, my legs, my neck, my head, so that I entrusted my balance to the fungi … and damned if I didn’t stay up. Damned if I didn’t continue to live, although I felt like I was drowning. I sweated from every pore. I felt nauseous, disoriented, dizzy. I felt as if the gray caps were searching for me across a vast distance—I could feel their gaze upon me, like a black cloud, a storm of eyes … and still the tendrils spread across my vision, blinding me … and then, as soon as they had finished their march from east and west, meeting somewhere around the bridge of my twitching nose, all of the discomfort faded and I could … breathe again. Not only could I breathe, but I was flying, soaring, my body as light as a single spore, and yet so powerful that I felt as if I could hold up the entire Academy with one hand. A fierce joy leaked into me, sped from my feet to my waist to my arms, my head. I could not have been happier had I been the sun, shining down on everyone from on high. And in that happiness, I did not even really exist, except as a connection, a bridge, an archway, linked with a hundred thousand other archways that extended up and down my body in a perfect crisscrossing pattern of completeness. And I cannot help feeling, even as the spores just as suddenly relinquished their hold and left me gasping and white, that what radiated into me was a thank-you from the thousands that comprise the invisible community that has become my body.
-
At the time, none of us thought much about these changes. Ambergris, for all its history, its secrets, its allure, had always been dirty, sickly, on the verge of crumbling back into itself—battered, babbling, incoherent in its design and intent. We all thought that, ultimately, the molt wouldn’t take, and the reptile that was the city would sink back into the mud a little, its skin ever more mottled from the experience.
-
Our dad loved historians, of course, but he had always hated journalists. He considered them the juvenile, larval stage of the historian, and as with certain reptilian or insect species that eat their own young, he believed they should be done away with for society’s greater good. I remember he used to call journalists “Historians without the wisdom of perspective.”
-
“At the heart of the city lies not a courtyard or a building or a statue, but an event: the Festival of the Freshwater Squid. It is an overlay of this event that populates the city with an alternative history, one that, if we could only understand its ebb and flow, the necessity of violence to it, would also allow us to understand Ambergris.”
-
Something scratched at the outside of the door. A slow, tentative sound. It could have been anything. It could have been the wind. But the breath died in my throat. I realized every nerve in my skin had come alive in warning. I shut my eyes for a long time, as if willing the sound to go away. But it did not. It became louder, gained in confidence, precision. Scrabbling. At the door. At the window. I heard it sniffing the air. Reading our scent. I shivered, caught in the grip of nightmare. If we hadn’t boarded up the window, it would have been looking in at us at that very moment.
Sybel moaned, took me by the arm. “Janice, I think we have to leave.”
I held the gun tight, so tight my knuckles ached. “But where can we run to, Sybel? And how do we get out of here? I don’t think it’s possible now.”
“Do you think you could slide out of the bathroom window?” Sybel asked.
A knock at the door before I could reply—but not at the height I’d expected; lower, much lower.
I stifled a scream. “It’s too close. It can hear us right now. It can hear us talking. It knows what we’re going to do.” I held the gun like a club. I was no use to anyone. The fear had gotten too far into me. This wasn’t like trying to kill myself. I could face the fear of that now, but not this fear—this was too different, too unfamiliar.
Sybel grabbed me by the shoulders, whispered in my ear, “Either we go through the bathroom window or we’re dead. It’s going to come in here and kill us.” “Yes, but Sybel,” I whispered back, “what if there’s already one at the bathroom window, too? What if they’re already back there?”
Sybel shrugged. There was an odd, fatalistic light in his eyes. “Then it doesn’t matter. We’re dead. I’ll go first. If they get to me, go back into the apartment and lock yourself in the bedroom, and hope dawn comes soon.”
The thing at the door knocked again. Then it spoke.
In a horrible, moist parody of a human voice, it said, “I have something. For you. You will. Like it.”
Was this the first time in Ambergris’s history that a gray cap or a creature sent by the gray caps had spoken to a resident of the city? Most assuredly not—history is littered with the remains of those who have had such conversations; at least a dozen, two dozen. And yet, that night more than one hundred people reported having such contacts. What did it mean? At the time, no meaning would have penetrated my fear. (Mostly meant what a clever mimic, a parrot, means: nothing. A lure. Bait. A tripwire. A distraction. Delivered by their drones. Now I wonder if this was another harbinger of the Shift.)
We made our way to the back of the apartment, to the bathroom. I helped Sybel clamber up to the window. Behind us, the creature with the wet voice was banging on the door like a drunk and making a low gurgling laugh. “Let me in!” it said. “Let me in! I have something for you.”
The creature began to pound on the front door. It began to laugh—great, rippling waves of laughter. Perhaps it was calling to others of its kind. (It was gathering its strength—it had nothing but a collective consciousness; it was but the sum of its spores.)
I stood on the toilet seat and pulled myself up to the window ledge by pushing off against the wall with my left foot. A narrow ledge, a narrow window.
The banging behind me had become splintering.
Sybel offered his hand and pulled me through.
The splintering had become a rending. The door would be broken down within the minute.
Behind us, a muted roar. A shriek. Something I’d never heard before, something I never want to hear again. (No matter where you are now, I’m afraid you’ll be hearing it again. What we all heard in that moment of the war was the first groaning, rust-and-flesh-choked stirrings of the Machine. It fed off of that energy. It needed it. Forever after, my finely tuned senses could hear that hum, that vibration, in the ground. It terrified me.)
-
I was babbling by then. Praying to Truff, to Bonmot, to anyone I could think of. Even now, in this afterword, with the hole in the ground behind me, my typewriter slowly turning into fungal mush, I am babbling, thinking of that moment.
We waited. We almost waited too long. Its smell came closer, came closer. It jumped onto the roof—we could hear it leap to clear the gap with an effortless stride, heard its claws scrabble to find purchase on our side. It couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away.
“What do we do Sybel what do we do?” I kept saying, over and over again.
“Be calm and quiet, Janice,” he said. “Just be calm. When I say, stand up and fire at it.”
We almost waited too long. We thought it was farther away. But then it began to run at us. It had played its game of Stalk as long as it wanted to—now it meant to finish us. It was talking as it ran at us: “I have something for you something for you something for you you will like it you will like it you will like it,” like the chant of some senile priest counting beads cross-legged in the Religious Quarter.
That’s when we rose, in our fear. We rose up, and we emptied our pistols into it. It was dark as the night and yet transparent—you could see the stars through it when it got close. It was thick. It was thin. It had claws. It had fangs like polished steel. It had eyes so human and yet so various that the gaze paralyzed me. It was indescribable.
Even now, trying to visualize it, I want to vomit. I want to unthink it. Our shots went right through it. It veered to the left, misjudged the distance, and struck the wall in front of us, reared up again. We shot it again—tore great holes in its fungal skull, its impossible body. It roared, spit a stream of dark liquid, and tried to come up over the wall at us. Sybel stuck the muzzle of his pistol under its soft-rigid chin and pulled the trigger. The recoil sent the creature screaming and stumbling to the edge of the roof, and then over—falling. Still talking. Still telling us it had something for us that we’d like.
We stood there, numb, for a moment. Some things cannot be described. Some things can only be experienced.
-
I said that the world was silent. Do you understand what I mean by that? I mean that there was no sound anywhere in the city. The spores clotted the air, muffled noises, sucked the sound out of the world. We lived in silence. It was like a Presence, and it was watchful. As we sidled along a wall, keeping to the shadows for long moments, I felt that each spore was a tiny eye, and that each eye was reporting back to an unseen master. A heaviness grew in my lungs that I’ve never felt since. The air was trying to suck words as yet unspoken out of me, and snuff them, stillborn.
-
I met Duncan at the Spore again, in this room. As I approached the door, the flickering light within played a trick. I thought I saw his shadow, impossibly vast, curled around the edges, snap into a more human shape. A gurgle and whine that coalesced into a human voice.
-
The imprint shone as red as her hair, as flushed as the gasp from the necklace of flesh. It lit up her face in a way that made her look honest again. It spread across her cheek, down her neck, swirled between the tops of her breasts, and disappeared beneath her gown. If the world is a just place, that mark will never leave her skin, but remain as a pulsing reminder that, at some point in the past, she hurt someone so badly that she wound up hurting herself as well.
“Once upon a time,” I said, “no one knew your name. Someday no one will again.”