Read Shriek: An Afterword for Free Online Page A

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.”
    I sat upright in my chair. Next time? He stood there, across the room from me, dressed in the rags of his picked-apart clothes, surrounded by the wreckage of fungal life, and he might as well have been halfway across the city. I didn’t understand him. I probably never would. {I didn’t need you to understand what I myself saw but dimly. I wanted you to see —and you saw more than most, even then. Mary saw it all, by the end, and she stitched her eyes shut, stopped up her ears, taped her mouth.}
    “Yes, well, Duncan, it’s been a long night,” I started to say, but then his eyes rolled up in their sockets and he fell to the soft floor, dead asleep. I had to drag him to the couch.
    There he remained for two days. I took time off from my job at an art gallery to watch over him. I went out only for food and to buy him new clothes. He slept peacefully, except for five or six times when he slipped into a nightmare that made him twitch, convulse, cry out in a strange language that sounded like birdsong. I remember staring down at his pale face and thinking that he resembled in texture and in color nothing more or less than a mushroom.

    Duncan had no believable explanation for his enfeebled state when he finally awoke on the third morning. As I fed him toast and marmalade at the kitchen table, I tried to get some sense of what he might have endured in the six months since I had last seen him. Although I had swept away the remains of the mushrooms, their presence haunted us.
    Elusiveness, vagueness, as if a counterpoint to the terrible precision of his writing, had apparently become Duncan’s watchwords. I had never known him to be talkative, but after that morning, his terseness began to take on the inventiveness of an art form. I had to pull information out of him. {I was trying to protect you. Clearly, you still don’t believe that, but I will give you this: you’re right that I should have found a way to tell you.}
    “Where have you been?” I asked him.
    He shrugged, pulled the blanket closer around him. “Here and there. Mostly there, ” and he giggled, only trailing off when he realized he had lapsed into hysteria.
    “Was it because of the Truffidian ban?” I asked.
    He shook his head. “No, no, no. That silliness?” He raised his head to stare at me. His gaze was dark and humorless. “No. Not because of the ban. They never published my picture in the newspapers and broadsheets. No Truffidian outside of Morrow knows what I look like. No, not the ban. I was doing research for my next few books.” He rolled his eyes. “This will probably all go to waste.”
    “Did you only go out at night?” I asked. “You’re as pale as I’ve ever seen you.”
    He would not meet my gaze. He wrenched himself out of the chair and walked to the window, hands in his pockets. “It was a kind of night,” he said.
    “Why can’t you just tell me?”
    He grinned. “If you must know, I’ve been with Red Martigan and Aquelus, Manzikert and Samuel Tonsure.” A thin smile, staring out the window at some unnamable something.
    A string of names almost as impenetrable as Sabon’s necklace of human beads, but I did recognize the names Manzikert I and Tonsure. I knew Duncan had continued to study Tonsure’s journal.
    “I found,” Duncan said in a monotone, as if in a trance, “something in Tonsure’s journal that others did not, because they were not looking for it….”
    Here I mix my memories of the conversation with a transcript of the account found in my brother’s journal, which I am lucky enough to have in a trunk by my side along with several other things of Duncan’s. {It’s something of a shock to find you rifling through my papers and notebooks. Usually, it takes a person years to develop the nerve to attempt outright