Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer Read Free Book Online Page A

one thought. It ran through my mind over and over, like a challenge, like a curse: Did I have the courage to act on what Tonsure had given me? Could I live with not acting on that knowledge?
    I found out that my courage outweighed my fear. Perhaps because I could not let Tonsure’s supreme act of communication go to waste. The thought of him reaching out from beyond his own death only to be thwarted by my cowardice…it was too much to bear. More’s the pity.
    So I found my way down among them and back again without being disfigured or murdered. It was easy in a way. With Tonsure as my guide, I could not miss this sign here, that symbol there, until even the vaguest scratch in muddied rock, the slightest change in temperature or fruiting bodies alerted me to the next section of the path. It was a strange, dark place, and I was afraid, but I was not alone. I had Tonsure with me.
    Do I understand most of what I saw down there? No. Does the memory of seeing things I do not understand help me, do me any good at all? No. For one thing, who would believe me? They would say I am having visions. I’m not sure I believe it all myself. Thus, I have become no better off than Samuel Tonsure, except that I may move above- and belowground at will.
    When Duncan related portions of this to me in person, he ended with the lines, “And now you will have to believe me when I say that I cannot tell you anything else, and that it will do no good to press me for information or ask more questions. This is for your own protection as much as anything else. Please trust me on this, Janice.”
    Such a sense of finality informed his words that it never occurred to me to probe further. I just nodded, thinking about the mushroom spores floating out the window three nights before, from a room that now seemed so gray and empty. I was still trying to absorb that image. Unhappily, Duncan’s journal entries are no more revealing than our conversations {You didn’t think I’d leave both of my journals aboveground, did you?}, but at the time, I was secretly glad he didn’t tell me more—his experience was so remote from mine that the simplest word sounded as if spoken in another language.
    “I’m just glad you’re safe again, and home,” I said.
    “Safe?” he said with a bitter little laugh. “Safe? Look at my hands.” He held them out for my inspection. The half-moons of his fingernails shone a faint green. Along the outer edge of both hands a trail of thin, fern-like fungi followed a rough line down to the wrists. Perhaps, in certain types of light, it might be mistaken for hair.
    “That will go away in time,” I told him.
    “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. I think I’ve been branded. I think I will always have these marks, no matter how they manifest themselves.”
    Duncan was right, although the manifestations would not always be fungal: for decades, he would carry everywhere a reproduction of Tonsure’s journal, the pages more worn with each passing year, until finally I began to feel that the diary of the madman had become Duncan’s own. And he would add more marks to the book, nearly silent scars that would leave their own strange language on his skin. Unspoken. Unwritten. But there.
    Until only in the dim green light of the Spore would he feel truly comfortable aboveground.

2
    Can I start again? Will you let me start again? Do you trust me to? Perhaps not. Perhaps all I can do is soar over. Perhaps we’ll fly as the crow flies—on night wings, wind rattling the delicate bones of the rib cage, cold singeing feathers, gaze scouring the ground below us. The landscape will seem clear but distant, remote yet comprehensible. We will fly for ten years straight, through cold and rain and the occasional indignant sparrow certain we’ve come to raid the nest. Ten years shall we fly across before we begin our slow, circling descent to the cause of Duncan’s calamity. Those ten years brought five black books flapping their pages.