Shriek: An Afterword (3 page)

Four years later, we moved from Stockton to Ambergris, there to live with our mother’s side of the family in a rheumy old mansion with a flooded basement. Set against the banks of the River Moth, remote from much of Ambergris, the place could hardly be called an improvement over the house we had grown up in, but it was less expensive, and our mother had come to realize that with her husband dead nothing much remained to keep her in Stockton. Thus, we shared space with an ever-changing mob of aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, and friends of the family. {Although, over the years, this cacophony of distant relations reduced itself to just our mother, which is probably how she would have preferred it from the beginning.}

We came to Ambergris across the thick sprawl of the muddy River Moth, by ferry. I remember that during the journey I noticed Duncan had a piece of paper in his shirt pocket. When I asked him what it was, he pulled it out and showed it to me. He had kept the letter from the Kalif to our father; as far as I know, he has it still, tattered and brittle. {I do have it—or the remains of it, anyhow. I don’t dare open it anymore, for fear it will turn to dust.}

“I don’t want to forget,” he said, with a look that dared me to doubt his loyalty to our father.

I said nothing, but the thought occurred to me that although we might be traveling to a new place, we were still bringing the past with us.

Not that Ambergris didn’t have a rich past of its own—just that we knew much less about it. We knew only that Ambergris played host to some of the world’s greatest artists; that it was home to the mysterious gray caps; that a merchant clan, Hoegbotton & Sons, had wrested control of the city from a long line of kings; that the Kalif and his great Western Empire had thrice tried to invade Ambergris; that, once upon a time, some centuries ago, a catastrophe called the Silence had taken place there; and that the annual Festival of the Freshwater Squid often erupted into violence, an edgy lawlessness that some said was connected to the gray caps. The gray caps, we learned from helpful relatives seeking to reassure us, had long since retreated to the underground caverns and catacombs of Ambergris, first driven there by the founder of the city, a whaler despot named Manzikert I. Manzikert I had razed the gray caps’ city of Cinsorium, massacred as many of them as he could, and built Ambergris on the smoldering ruins. {It all sounded incredibly exciting and exotic to us at that age, rather than horrifying.}

Of artists, we found ample evidence as soon as we arrived—huge murals painted onto the sides of storehouses—and also of the Hoegbotton clan, since we had to pay their tariffs to leave the docks and enter the city proper.

As for the gray caps, as our relatives had promised, we discovered scant initial trace of this “old, short, indigenous race,” as the guidebooks called them. They were rarely seen aboveground during the day, although they could be glimpsed in back alleys and graveyards at dusk and during the night. We knew only what we had gleaned from Mom’s rare but unsettling bedtime stories about the “mushroom dwellers of Ambergris,” and a brief description from a book for children that had delighted and unnerved us simultaneously:

Of the Silence, we had heard even less—a whisper among the adults, a sense that we should not ask about it. Even in Stockton, so far from what had happened—separated by both time and geography—there seemed to be a fear that, somehow, the event might be resurrected by the most casual of comments. No, I discovered Silence much later—only learned during my brief attendance at the Hoegbotton School for Advanced Studies, for example, that the annotations in Ambergrisian history books {A.S. and B.S.} stood for After Silence and Before Silence. Of Samuel Tonsure’s journal, so inextricably linked to the Silence, I heard not even a whisper until Duncan educated me. {I may have given you the most personalized and eccentric education on the Silence in the history of Ambergris!}

We did not learn much about any of this from Mom. For a good portion of our youth in Ambergris, rare was the day that she rose before noon. Sometimes we barely saw her. She had so many rooms to hide in in that house. Her internal clock, her rhythms, became nocturnal and erratic. She continued to paint, but sometimes we would return home to find that instead of a canvas she had painted the wall of an unused room in a welter of dissonant colors. Until the basement began to flood with river water every time it rained, she loved to sit down there in the damp and read by an old oil lamp we’d brought with us from Morrow, an heirloom dating back to the time of the pirate whalers. {When she was there, Janice and I would sometimes join her. We’d pull up chairs and listen to the whispering gasp of the river water as it tried to get in through the floorboards, and we’d read our books or do our homework. Mom rarely said anything, but there was something about being together in the same room that felt comfortable. I think she enjoyed it, too, but I don’t know for sure.}

I do remember that in our mother’s absence one of my aunts tried to help orient us to the city, telling us, “There’s a Religious Quarter, a Merchant Quarter, and an old Bureaucratic Quarter, and then there are places you don’t go no matter what. Stay out of them.” Faced with such vague warnings, we had to discover Ambergris in those early days by exploring for ourselves or asking our classmates.

The move to Ambergris changed my relationship with Duncan. Before the move, Duncan had been the annoying shadow, the imitator who always had to do what I was already doing. When I started a rock collection at the age of eight, inspired by the exposed granite on the hillside near our house in Stockton, Duncan started one, too, even though he didn’t understand why. No matter how I shooed him away, Duncan had to follow me up the hill. A cautious distance away from my irritated mumblings, he would squat in his wobbly way and run his hand through the pebbles, looking for the shiniest ones. Over time, he would squinch closer and closer, waddling like a duck, until before I knew it we were looking for stones together and my collection became our collection.

When I became entranced by the children’s stories of mammalogist Roger Mandible, Duncan not only stole the books from my room but colored in them and scrawled his name, handwriting as neat as a drunken sailor’s, across many of the pages.

By the time I’d reached the age of fourteen or fifteen, I’d realized he copied me because he loved me and looked up to me. {I didn’t look up to you for long—you stopped growing after you turned fourteen, I believe.}

But by then the death of our father and the move to Ambergris had transformed me into something more than Duncan’s sister. There was something in the connection Dad and Mom had that had energized them both—that had made them both more than they had been alone. Because without Dad, Mom lost, or forgot, how to take care of us. I’m certain if Mom had died instead that Dad would have behaved the same way. He was no more practical than our mother. He was as apt to fall over and stub a toe putting on his pajamas as she was to cut herself chopping up carrots. They shared a general absentmindedness that Duncan and I, looking back on those years as adults, found endearing. Dad searching for the newspaper he held in the crook of his arm. Mom looking for the earrings she’d just put back in the jewelry case. Somehow, together, though, they muddled through and managed to disguise their individual incompetence at the job of parenting.

With Dad dead and the move to Ambergris having unmoored Mom from any last vestiges of parental regard, I became Duncan’s mother in many ways. I made sure he got up in time for school. I made him breakfast. I helped him with his homework. I made sure he got to bed on time. He stopped copying me and started obeying me. {…Although with a smoldering disrespect for authority as embodied by my suddenly strict sister. But I’m lying. I welcomed it. I needed some structure. I needed someone to tell me what to do back then. I was still just a child. And a frequently scared one, despite all of my explorations. To take the lead while exploring seemed natural; to take the lead in everyday life was monstrously difficult.} Gone was the admiration, perhaps, but so too the corrosive disease of competition. At least, back then.

Somehow, despite our rough knowledge and this change in our roles, we managed to fit in, to get along, to come to feel part of Ambergris with greater ease than might have been expected. Much of it had to do with our attitude, I think. Duncan and I should have been upset about leaving our old school and friends behind, but we weren’t. Not really. In a sense, it came as a great relief to escape the pity and concern others showed us, which trapped us in an image of ourselves as victims. Freedom from that meant, in a way, freedom from the moment of our father’s death. This made up for the other dislocations.

{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.}

But as fascinated as Duncan would become with Ambergris, he went elsewhere for his education. At our mother’s insistence, in one of her few direct acts of parenting. Duncan received his advanced degrees in history from the Institute of Religiosity in Morrow {or as historians often call it, “that other city by the River Moth,” a good hundred miles from Ambergris}, his emphasis on the many masters of the arts who had been born or made their fortune in Ambergris, as well as on the Court of the Kalif—for he saw in these two geographical extremes a way to let his interests sprawl across both poles of the world. He could not study the artists of Ambergris without studying the very anatomy of the city—from culture to politics, from economics to mammalogy. And because Ambergris spread tentacles as long and wide as those of the oldest of the giant freshwater squid, this meant he must study Morrow, the Aan, and all of the South. Study of the Kalif, which I always felt was a secondary concern for him, meant mapping out all of the West, the North. {Early on, I had no idea what constituted a “secondary concern.” Anything and everything could have been useful. The important thing was to accumulate information, to let it all but overwhelm me.}

In that Duncan was never what I would call religious, I believe that this monumental scope represented his attempt to re-place himself within the world, to discover his center, lost when our father died, or to build himself a new center through accumulation of knowledge. In a sense, History was
always
personal to Duncan, even if he could not always express that fact.

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. He memorized his favorite books:
The Refraction of Light in a Prison, The Journal of Samuel Tonsure, The Hoegbotton Chronicles, Aria: The Biography of Voss Bender.
Years later, he would delight me, no matter how odd the circumstances of our meetings, with dramatic readings, in the imagined pitch and tone of the authors, him still so passionate in his love of the words that I would forever find my own enthusiasm inadequate.

In short, Duncan became overzealous. Obsessed. Driven. All of those {double-edged} {s}words. He did not allow for his own human weakness, or his need to feel connected to the world through his flesh, through interactions with other human beings. Better, I am sure he felt, to become the dead hand of the past, to become its instrument.

Duncan did not make friends. He did not have a woman friend. When I visited him, during breaks in my own art studies at the Trillian Academy, at his rooms at the Institute, he could not introduce me to a single soul other than his instructors. Duncan must have appeared to be among the most pious of all the pious monks created by History. {I
had
friends. Your infrequent trips to visit meant your idea of my life in that place was as narrow as that sliver of emerald light in the Spore that you keep going on about. I needed to converse with people to test out my theories, to gauge dissent and to begin to realize what ideas, when expressed to others in the light of day, evaporated into the air.}