Free Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer Page A

had gone deeper into the underground this time, but the research had gone badly. He kept interspersing his account with mutterings that he would “never do it again.” And, “If I stay on the surface, I’m safe. I should be safe.” At the time, I thought he meant staying physically aboveground, but now I’m not so sure. {Be sure.} I wonder if he also meant the surface of his mind. That if he could simply restrain himself from the divergent thinking, the untoward analysis, that had marked some of his previous books, he might once again be a published writer. {Who knows? I might have given up on myself if forced to listen to my own ravings. I might have even become a respectable citizen.}
    As he spoke, I realized I wasn’t ready for his revelations. I had made a mistake—I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. I needed distance from this shivering, shuddering wreck of a man. He clung to the edges of the smock I had given him like a corpse curling fingers around a coffin’s lining. The look on his face made me think of our father dying in the summer grass. It frightened me. I tried to put boundaries on the conversation.
    “What happened to the book you were working on?” I asked him.
    He grimaced, but the expression made him look more human, and his gaze turned inward, the horrors reflected there no longer trying to get out.
    “Stillborn,” he gasped, as if breaking to the surface after being held down in black water. He lurched to his feet, fell back down again. Every surface he touched became covered in fine black powder. “Stillborn,” he repeated. “Or I killed it. I don’t know which. Maybe I’m a murderer. I was…I was halfway through. On fire with ancient texts. Bloated with the knowledge in them. Didn’t think I needed firsthand experience to write the book. Such a web of words, Janice. I have never used so many words. I used so many there weren’t any left to write with. And yet, I still had this fear deep in my skull. I couldn’t get it out.” {I still can’t get it out of my head, sometimes. Writing a book and going underground are so similar. That fear of the unknown never really goes away. But, after a while, it becomes a perverse comfort.}
    He relinquished his grasp on the object in his hand, which I had almost forgotten.
    It rolled across the floor. We both stared at it, he as astonished as I. A honey-and-parchment-colored ball. Of flesh? Of tissue? Of stone?
    He looked up at me. “I remember now. It needs moisture. If it dries, it dies. Cracks form in its skin. It’s curled into a ball to preserve a pearl of moisture between its cilia.”
    “What is it?” I said, unable to keep the fear from my voice.
    He grinned in recognition of my tone. “Before Dad died,” he said, “you would have found this creature a wonderful mystery. You would have followed me out into the woods and we would have dug up fire-red salamanders just to see their eyes glow in the dark.”
    “No,” I said. “No. There was no time when I would have found this thing a wonderful mystery. Where did you find it?”
    His smirk, the way it ate up his face, the way it accentuated the suddenly taut bones in his neck, made the flesh around his mouth a vassal to his mirth, sickened me.
    “Where do you think it came from?”
    I ignored the question, turned away, said, “I have a canteen of water in the front, near my desk. But keep talking. Keep telling me about your book.”
    He frowned as I walked past him into the main room of the gallery. From behind me, his disembodied voice rose up, quavered, continued. A thrush caught in a hunter’s snare, flapping this way and that, ever more entangled and near its death. His smell had coated the entire gallery. In a sense, I was as close to him searching for the canteen as if I stood beside him. Beyond the gallery windows lay the real world, composed of unnaturally bright colors and shoppers walking briskly by.
    “So I never finished it, Janice. What do you think of that?