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. Five reluctant tombstones. Five millstones round my brother’s neck. Five brilliant bursts of quicksilver communication. Five leather-clad companions for Duncan that no one can ever take away. {Five progressively grandiose statements that stick in my craw.}
We fly this way because we must fly this way. I did not see much of Duncan during those ten years. The morning after my conversation with him, he borrowed money from me against expected book royalties and left my apartment. He rented a small one-bedroom at the east end of Albumuth Boulevard in one of the several buildings owned by the legendary Dame Truff. Did he delight in living so close to the Religious Quarter, to know that he, the blasphemer, slept within a few blocks of the Antechamber’s quarters in the Truffidian Cathedral? I don’t know. I never asked him. {I delighted in the dual sensations of normalcy and danger, something you, Janice, always craved, but was new for me. To wake up every morning and make eggs and bacon with the full knowledge that my dull routine might be swiftly shattered by the appearance of the Antechamber’s goons.}
While Duncan published, I perished half a dozen times. I shed careers like snakeskins, molting toward a future I always insisted was the goal, not merely an inevitable destination. Painter, sculptor, teacher, gallery assistant, gallery owner, journalist, tour guide, always seeking a necklace quite as bright, quite as fake, as Mary Sabon’s. I never finished anything, from the great sprawling canvases I filled with images of a city I didn’t understand, to filling the great sprawling spaces in my gallery. I’ve never lacked energy or drive, only that fundamental secret all good art has and all bad art lacks: a healthy imagination. Which, as I look back, is intensely ironic, considering how much imagination it took to get to this moment with my sanity intact, typing up an afterword that, no matter how sincere, will no doubt be as prone to accusations of pretense and bombast as any of my prior works.
I did my best to keep in contact with Duncan, although without much enthusiasm or vigor. The long trek to his loft apartment from mine often ended in disappointment; he was rarely home. Sometimes, curious, I would sneak up to the door and listen carefully before knocking; I would look through the keyhole, but it revealed only darkness.
My reward for spying usually took the form of a rather echoing silence. But more than once I imagined I heard someone or something scuttling across the floor, accompanied by a dull hiss and moan that made me stand up abruptly, the hairs rising on my arms. My tremulous knock upon the door in such circumstances—whether Duncan Transformed or Duncan with Familiars, I wanted no part of that sound—was usually enough to reestablish silence on the other side. And if it wasn’t, my retreat back into the street usually changed from walk to run. {I heard you sometimes, although I was usually engrossed in my work and thought it best that you not enter. Ironically enough, a couple of times, I thought you were them, graycapped sister.}
I imagine I looked rather pathetic in front of his apartment—this thin, small woman crouched against a splintery door, eagerly straining for any aural news of the interior. I remember the accursed doorknob well—I hit my head on it at least a dozen times.
Thwarted, I gained any news of Duncan from rare interviews in the newspapers, which usually focused on writing technique or opinions on current events. For some reason, people are under the deluded impression that a historian—blessed with hindsight—can somehow illuminate the present and the future. Duncan knew nothing about the present and the future. {I knew nothing about the present and the immediate past. I would argue, however, that I began to glean an inkling of the future.}
The biographical notes on the dust jackets of his books were no help—they crackled with a terseness akin to fear: “Duncan Shriek lives in Ambergris. He is working on another book.” Even by investigating the spaces between the words, those areas where silence might reveal a clue, could anyone ever “get to know” the author from such a truncated paragraph? More importantly, no one would ever want to know the author from such a paragraph.
Only in the fifth book did more information leak through, almost by accident, like a water stain on a ceiling: “Shriek intends to write a sequel to his bestselling tome, Cinsorium.”
By then, Duncan’s luck had run out, and all because of a single book we must circle back to, a delighted Sabon as raptor swooping down to observe over our feathered shoulder—Mary’s presence doubling, trebling, the scope of the disaster, because it was she who turned Duncan into fodder for her own…what shall we call it? Words fail/cannot express/are not nearly enough. {Triumph. Unqualified. You must give her that. Bewitching eyes and the pen of a poet.}
Gliding, wheeling, we circle back through the windstream and let the titles fall in reverse order so that we might approach the source by a series of echoes or ripples: Vagaries of Circumstance and Fate Amongst the Clans of the Aan; Mapping the Beast: Interrogatories Between the Moth and Those Who Travel Its Waters; Stretcher Jones: Last Hope of the West; Language Barriers Between the Aan and the Saphant Empire. And the first book, sprawling out below us in all of its baroque immensity: Cinsorium: Dispelling the Myth of the Gray Caps. This maddening book, composed of lies and half-truths, glitters beneath us in all of its slivers and broken pieces, baubles fit for our true crow-self.
What is it about even half of the truth that can tear at the fabric of the world? Was it fear? Guilt? The same combination of emotions that flickered through my thoughts as I extinguished the welter of mushrooms from Duncan’s poor pale body?
I don’t mean to speak in riddles. I don’t mean to fly too high above the subject, but sometimes you have no choice. Still, let me land our weary crow and just tell the story….
Perhaps Duncan should have realized what he had done after Frankwrithe & Lewden’s reaction to the manuscript. {I realized it when I read over the first draft and saw the thousand red wounds of revision marks left by my second editor—lacerations explaining in their cruel tongue that this book would either behave itself or not be a book at all.}