Duncan devoted one dark, ripe little corner to the “changing facade of Ambergris,” as he called it. At first, this corner consisted only of overlapping street plans, as if he were building an image of the city from its bones. The stark white paper, the midnight black veins of ink, contrasted sharply with everything else in his rooms. The maps were so densely clustered and layered that the overall effect reminded me of a diagram of the human body. Or, perhaps more metaphorically accurate, like a concentrated forest of intertwining vines {recalling the forests of my youth in Stockton}, through which no one could possibly travel, even armed with a machete. {My first great accomplishment—a way of cross-referencing dozens and dozens of seemingly unrelated phenomena so that, in a certain light, in a certain darkness, I could begin to see the patterns, the connections. Later, I would use this same technique, on a vastly different scale, at the Blythe Academy.}
With each visit, I noticed that the forest had grown—from a dark stain, to a presence that variously resembled in shape a mushroom, a manta ray, and then some horribly exotic insect that might kill you with a single sting. Gradually, in an inexorable invasion through both time and space, Ambergris came to dominate his rooms, and then layer itself to a thickness greater than the walls, or so it often seemed, sitting in my chair, looking over a manuscript.
The stain had become the wallpaper, and the last remnants of non-Ambergris materials had become the stain. Looking back on those earliest diagrams and montages on his walls, could he have guessed how far they would lead him? How far he would travel, and at what price? {Underneath, any astute observer could have found a wealth, a riot, of new information. You had only to peel away a corner and there, revealed, the secret obsession: the ghosts of the Silence, the gray caps, and much else. “I’m going underground,” it all said. For those who could read it.}
“Your wall has changed. Has it changed your focus?” I asked him once.
“Perhaps,” he replied, “but it still doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t make sense?” I asked.
“They’re the only ones who could have done it. But why? And how?”
I looked at him in confusion.
“The Silence,” Duncan said, and a shiver, a resonance, passed through me. The Silence and the gray caps.
More than two hundred years before, twenty-five thousand people had disappeared from the city, almost the entire population, while many thousands had been away, sailing down the River Moth to join in the annual hunt for fish and freshwater squid. The fishermen, including the city’s ruler, had returned to find Ambergris deserted. To this day, no one knows what happened to those twenty-five thousand souls, but for any inhabitant of Ambergris, the rumor soon seeps through—in the mottling of fungi on a window, in the dripping of green water, in the little red flags they use as their calling cards—that the gray caps were responsible. Because, after all, we had slaughtered so many of them and driven the rest underground. Surely this was their revenge?
I had only learned about the Silence the semester before; it was frightening how adults could keep the details of certain events from their children. It came as a revelation to me and my classmates, although it is hard to describe how deeply it affected us.
“It keeps coming back to the Silence,” Duncan said. “My studies, Dad’s studies. And Samuel Tonsure’s journal.”
Tonsure, Duncan had told me, was one of those who pursued the gray caps underground during the massacre that had preceded the founding of Ambergris. He had never returned to the surface, but his journal, a curious piece of work that purported to describe the gray caps’ underground kingdoms, had been found some seventy-five years later, and subsequently pored over by historians for any information it might impart on the Silence or any other topic related to the gray caps. They were studying it still, Duncan included.
“You’re not Dad, Duncan,” I said. “You could study something else.”
Even then, before he was employed by James Lacond, before he met Mary, I sensed the danger there for Duncan. Even then, I knew somehow that Duncan was in peril. {We’re all in peril from something. I count myself lucky not to have succumbed to the usual perils, like addiction to mushrooms or alcohol.}
But Duncan just stared at me as if I were stupid and said, “There’s nothing else to study, Janice. Nothing important.”
I remember the inevitable progression of the images on his walls with the clarity of dream. However, beyond the few words reproduced above, our conversations have faded into the oblivion of memory.
Duncan emerged from those rooms with a degree and good prospects {an exaggeration; I perhaps had the prospect of a brief flash of fame, followed by an urgent need to make a living in a profession other than the one I had chosen as my passion}, but even then he was different from the other students. I watched his professors circle him at the various graduation parties. They treated him with a certain worried detachment, perhaps even fearfully, as if he had grown into something they could no longer easily define. As if they dared not develop any emotional attachment to this particular student. {Mom, who had continued to recede into her memories, did not come up for the ceremony—and we rarely went to see her, now that we were grown.}
Later, Duncan told me that he had never known solitude, never known loneliness, as he did in those few hours after graduation when he walked like a leper through gilded rooms tabled with appetizers and peppered with conversations meant for everyone but him. The tall towers of senior professors glided silent and watchful, the antithesis of Mary Sabon and her quivering, eager necklace of flesh. {Everyone feels isolated at those types of events, no matter how good the party, or how scintillating the conversation, because you’re about to be expelled into the world, out from your own little piece of it.}
Yet out of his zeal, his loneliness, his passion that had literally crawled up the walls of his rooms, Duncan had already created something that might take the place of the silence or at least provide an answer to it. He had written a book entitled On the Refraction of Light in a Prison.
Despite countless exams, essays, and oral presentations, Duncan had found the time to write a groundbreaking tome that analyzed the mystical text The Refraction of Light in a Prison {written by the imprisoned Monks of Truff from their high tower in the Court of the Kalif}. It will not surprise anyone that this was one of the subjects our father had meant to tackle prior to his sudden death. {How could I not tackle it before going on? It was like completing my father’s life in some small part. I remember looking at the finished book, with the inscription, “To my father, Jonathan Shriek,” and thinking that I had resurrected him for a time, that he was alive again in my book. When I sent the book to our mother, she broke from her usual stoic silence to write me a long letter relating stories about Dad she had never felt comfortable telling me before.}