Shriek: an afterword
Yüklə 0,84 Mb.
|
|
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, by contrast, 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 even greater emotional intimacy with Bonmot secret, I think. As I had, later, Lacond, 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 student examination grade book Duncan kept with him. There is 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. V. Can a childhood memory be misconstrued as starting over? I don’t think so. Not inif 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 sense of deep green shadows reflected on the windows of our house, as of a 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. Even though Stockton was marginally to the south of Ambergris—across the River Moth from it—Stockton was much more temperate because of the forest. It never got as sweltering as Ambergris. 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 thin little kid, small for his age, his shocking blonde hair beginning to turn brown. His bright blue 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. (Camouflage or comfort—I don’t remember.) “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 gathered 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 golden sunlight in the gloom was like finding gold, but those patches only accentuated the surrounding darkness all the more. 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 and over 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, or even just 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, and as I type these words I wonder now if the underground is anything like deep forest, because I became accustomed to the deep forest that day. (It’s more intense underground, Janice, because you can’t match what you’re seeing to anything you’ve experienced before.) “Trust me,” Duncan said, and grinned. He headed off again, at such a speed that I again 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 he 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, through bramble and brush, over half-rotted tree branches, 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, I think. 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 loamy earth. Duncan stopped. I was so used to hurrying to keep up that I almost bumped into him. “There,” he said, pointing, a smile creasing his face. And I gasped, for there, just ahead of us, stood a statue. Made of solid gray stone, fissured, splashed with light, overgrown with an emerald-and-crimson lichen, the idol had a face with large, wide eyes, a tiny nose, and a solemn mouth. The statue could not have been taller than three or four feet. We walked closer, in an effortless glide, so enraptured by this vision that we forgot the ache in our legs. Iridescent beetles had woven themselves into the lichen beads of its smile, some flying around the object, effortless on tiny wings, heavy bodies drooping below the wings. Other insects had hidden in the fissures of the stone. What looked like a wren’s nest decorated part of the top of the head. A whole miniature world had grown up around it. It was clearly the work of one of the native tribes that had fled into the interior when our ancestors had built Stockton and claimed the land around it. This much I knew from school. “How?” I asked in amazement. “How did you know this was here, Duncan?” Duncan smiled as he turned to me. “I didn’t. I just knew there had to be something, and if we kept looking long enough, we’d find it.” At the time, while we stood there and drank in the odd beauty of the statue, and even as Duncan unerringly found our way home, and even after Mom and Dad, waiting in the backyard as the sun disappeared over the tree line, expressed their anger and disappointment at our “irresponsibility”—especially mine—I never once thought about whether Duncan might be crazy rather than lucky, touched rather than decisive. I just followed him. (Janice, I lied to you, just a little. It’s true I didn’t know exactly where to find the statue, but I had already heard about from one of the older students at our school. He’d given me enough information for me to get a fairly good idea of where to go. So it wasn’t preternatural on my part—it was based on a shred, a scrap, of information, as are all of my wanderings.) Just as Duncan pushed me and himself farther than was sane that day, so too Duncan pushed Blythe Academy. It was not just the impending matter of Mary Sabon—it was the clandestine way in which he used the Academy to further Duncan’s primary lifelong interest: the gray caps and their plans. I’ve no inkling about Duncan’s ability to teach (thanks a lot). I never sat in on his classes. I never even asked him much about the teaching. I was too busy. But I do know he discovered that he enjoyed “drawing back the veil of incomprehension” as he once put it (jokingly). Just the act of lecturing exercised intellectual muscles long dormant—and exorcised the demons of self-censorship, for he could speak unfiltered by fear of a reading public. (Not to worry—I never had a real reading public, or I’d have continued to find publication somewhere. But, yes, I was fearful that I might one day develop one. Just imagine—someone actually reading those thick slabs of paper I spent years putting together.) He could entertain and educate while introducing his charges to elements of the mysterious he hoped might one day blossom into a questioning nature and a thirst for knowledge (and all too successful I was!). But was it all innocent education? Was there, perhaps, something else beneath it? An examination of his lesson plans reveals a pattern not unlike the pattern formed by the poly-glut documents, maps, illustrations, and portraits that had once lined Duncan’s room at the Religious Academy. (I never told you, but I received word only a year ago that, at Cadimon Signal’s request, the entire display had been lovingly preserved under glass, framed, and spirited away to some dark, vile basement in Zamilon for a prolonged period of zealot-driven dissection. What they hope to find amongst my droppings, I don’t know, but the thought of their clammy hands and ratty eyes pawing through my former wall adornments is a bit much.) While Duncan could not, and would not, divulge the essence of his underground journeys, he taught a stunningly diverse series of texts, centered around The Journal of Samuel Tonsure—ostensibly for the review of early Truffidian twaffle, pamp, and circumglance—and including a number of subsidiary elements, such as Truffidian folklore, study of the mushroom dwellers, and direct scrutiny of transcripts of conversations between Truffidian priests around the time of Tonsure’s adventures. Related social, economic, religious, cultural, psychological, geographic, and confessional texts were also assigned to the students, supposedly to recreate a complete context for the formation of the early Truffidian church. I have, in this trunk of Duncan’s papers that I have half-dragged, half had dragged for me, to this location, some of his lesson plans. For example: SPRING SEMESTER Primary Texts
Areas of Study
Alas, Duncan either did not preserve his accompanying private notes or did not include them with these plans. However, after a careful review of all of the lesson plans—most too tedious to replicate here—I believe Duncan had more on his mind than teaching students. I believe he sought independent verification of his own findings. He thought that, subjected to the same stimuli, his students—maybe just one or two, but that would be enough—would one day vindicate him of historical heresy. How ironic, then, that his efforts would instead lead one of his students to convict him of historical heresy. (Janice, enough! You had ample opportunity to ask me about any and all of this, and would have received a more honest answer than the one generated by your suppositions. We may be siblings, but you cannot see into or through my mind. You have gotten it half-right—which means you have gotten it all wrong. I did seek to educate my students first and foremost. This did require a varied and wide approach, primarily because few existing texts interwove the complexity of historical issues with a thorough cross-disciplinary approach. Why do you think I had to create that “document” on my wall back at the Institute in the first place? So I taught them, and taught them well. The subtext of my teaching—yes, there was a subtext, I admit it—had nothing to do with hoping my students would replicate my work. The only true way any of them could replicate my work would be to follow me underground, and, as you well know, I made that mistake only once. (No. What you fail to see are the truly diabolical intentions behind my approach. You underestimate me. Validation? Hardly. Three hundred students could validate my findings and still not a soul would believe them, or me. 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. Each text I made them read, every essay question answered, every research paper written, corresponded to a section of grid in the incomplete map of my knowledge. They taught me in many cases. They didn’t have the scars I had, or the foreknowledge; they were unblinkered, unfettered by my peculiar brand of orthodoxy. I used to watch them, heads bowed, heavy with knowledge, working on the latest test, each swirling loop of letter from their pens on paper signifying a kind of progress—this permutation, that permutation, forever tried, discarded, yielding nothing, and yet valuable for that fact alone. Discount this, and you can begin testing that. Sabon was part of it at first, certainly—she bought into it, sheand may even have understood what I was doing. (When one puzzle piece—and a semester of thirty students might fill in a single puzzle piece, at best—had been locked into position, we would move on to the next. A careful observer might have noticed that my curriculum began to resemble cheese cloth. Much of it was useless, much of it redundant, much of it insanely boring and obscured by lazy or talentless students. But they did receive a relatively full education from me. And keep in mind that I was not their only teacher. (In time, the game did outgrow its old boundaries. At every opportunity, I would murmur in the ears of my fellow instructors like an echo of their own desires: hints of scholarship and glory if they only turned their attention to this or that ignored corner of history. “I wonder if anyone has ever compared the version of Nysman’s report on the Silence stored at Nicea with the versioncopy stored at Zamilon. I am told they diverge in ways that speak to issues of authenticity in Samuel Tonsure’s journal.” Casually, off-the-cuff, as if it fell outside my area of expertise, but should be pursued by someone, with great rewards for any enterprising scholar. In all of this, Bonmot was an interesting factor. He guessed what I was up to rather early on, I think, but never did anything to stop me. Raised an eyebrow, gave me a penetrating stare, but that was it. (And so, by the fourth year of my employment at Blythe Academy, I had built my own machine, fully as terrible and far-reaching as the Machine I had encountered underground. You understand now, I hope? I had managed to subvert and divert the resources of an entire institution of higher learning to the contemplation of a single question with many branches. The diagram I drew of this question was based only on Tonsure’s account and inexplicably resembled the gray caps’ most recurrent symbol, which had been drawn on walls, on cobblestones, but never explicated.  LIZ--see explanation, starting with "And I didn't try to explain it, either"-didn't show up as mark up for some reason... Question is whether it adds anything or not. -->
(The diagram did not so much forward my quest asAnd I didn't try to explain it, either. I just used it to try to help me see the relationships between various people and concepts in a new way. Manzikert I had triggered the Silence, I felt sure, with his actions in founding Ambergris. Samuel Tonsure had somehow catalogued and explained the gray caps during his captivity underground. Aquelus, a later ruler of Ambergris, had suffered Manzikert's same fate, but survived to return aboveground. As Zamilon held some answer, so too did Alfar, the ruined tower to which Aquelus' wife had retired prior to the Silence, thus ensuring her survival. And then there were the Silence and the Machine. How did they connected? And how did it all tie back in to the gray caps? These were the perhaps unanswerable questions I struggled with, and the structure through which I examined them. It was arbitrary, I know, but it helped me focus. Yüklə 0,84 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|