Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer Read Free Book Online

an illiterate local judge, I was robbed within minutes of leaving the accursed town. I survived a mudslide and a hailstorm. My feet became thick, insensate slabs. My senses sharpened, until I could hear the stirrings of a fly on a branch a hundred feet away. In short, in every way I became more attuned to the details of my own survival.
    Nor were the monks of Zamilon more understanding than the elements of nature or the vagaries of village dwellers. It took an entire week to convince the monks that the rag-clad, unshaven, stinking stranger before them was a serious scholar. I stood in front of Zamilon’s hundred-foot gates, upon the huge path cut out of the side of the mountain, the massive stone sculptures from some forgotten demonology leering at me from either side, and listened while the monks dumped down upon me, like boiling oil, the most obscure religious questions ever shouted from atop a battlement.
    However, eventually they relented—whether because of my seriousness or the seriousness of my stench, which was off-putting to other pilgrims, I do not know. But when I was finally allowed to examine the page from Tonsure’s journal, all my suffering seemed distant and unimportant. It was as I had suspected: the original pages, the supposed idiosyncrasies found upon them, created a pattern intended as a map for anyone lucky enough to decipher it. I only had access to one page—and would never see the rest, imprisoned as it was by the Kalif along with the authors of The Refraction of Light in a Prison —but that was enough to parse a fragmented meaning of the whole.
    I wrote down my findings—and, indeed, a first account of my journey—on a dozen sheets of paper, forced myself to memorize the evidence before I left Zamilon, and then burned my original scribblings. The knowledge seemed too precious and too personal to commit permanently to paper. It frightened me. With what I had learned, I could now, if I dared, if I desired, access the gray caps’ underground kingdom…and survive.
    I thought about at least two things on my long journey to Ambergris from Zamilon. {I had no intention of returning to Morrow.} First, to what extent had Tonsure corrupted his own journal in order to transmit this secret code—or had he corrupted it at all? In other words, did the coherent elements of the journal accurately reflect events and Tonsure’s opinions of those events, or had he, to create a book that was also a map, sacrificed reality on the altar of symbolism?
    Further, I was now convinced that Tonsure had written the entire journal after he followed Manzikert I belowground. He had encrypted it in the hope that even if he never made it back to the surface, the gray caps might preserve the journal, not realizing it posed a threat to their secrets. This revelation, if supportable, would change the entire nature of discourse surrounding the journal, render obsolete a hundred scholarly essays, and not a few whole books besides. The battered journal returned to the surface by the gray caps had not been the half-coherent ramblings of a mind slowly going insane, but a calculated risk taken by a man all too aware of his predicament.
    What followed from this conclusion is simply this: Another, earlier version of the journal must have, at one point, existed, whether a polished product or a loose collection of notes. And from this earlier version, Tonsure had created a facsimile that contained the map, the schematic, for navigation of the gray caps’ underground strongholds. Something even the gray caps had not been able to decipher. Something that would be Tonsure’s secret and his alone.
    Second, and most important, my head was filled with the grandeur of Tonsure’s design, the genius of it, which I had seen but a fragment of and which our father had glimpsed only in the potential for research revealed by the letter that had killed him.
    When I finally made my way back to Ambergris and strode down Albumuth Boulevard, I had only