Free Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer Page B

I couldn’t. Wouldn’t. I wrote and wrote. I wrote with the energy of ten men each evening. All texts I consulted interlocked under my dexterous manipulations. It all made such perfect sense…and then I began to panic. Each word, I realized, had been leading me further and further away from the central mystery. Every sentence left a false trail. Every paragraph formed another wall between me and my thesis. Soon, I stopped writing. It had all been going so well. How could it get so bad so quickly?
    “I soon found out. I backtracked through the abyss of words, searching for a flaw, a fissure, a crack in the foundation. Perhaps some paragraph had turned traitor and would reveal itself. Only it wasn’t a paragraph. It was a single word, five pages from the end of my silly scribblings, in a sentence of no particular importance. Just a single word. I know the sentence by heart, because I’ve repeated it to myself over and over again. It’s all that’s left of my book. Do you want to hear it?”
    “Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t sure. I was still searching for the canteen under all the canvases.
    “Here it is: ‘But surely, if Tonsure had not known the truth then, he knew it after traveling underground.’ The word was ‘truth,’ and I could not get past the truth. The truth stank of the underground, buried under dead leaves and hidden in cold, dry, dark caverns. The truth had little to do with the surface of things.
    “From that word, in that context, on that page, written in my nearly illegible hand, my masterwork, my beautiful, marvelous book unraveled syllable by syllable. I began by crossing out words that did not belong in the sentence. Then I began to delete words by rules as illegitimate and illogical as the gray caps themselves. Until after a week, I woke up one morning, determined to continue my surgical editing of the manuscript—only to find that not even the original sentence had been spared: all that remained of my once-proud manuscript was that single word: ‘truth.’ And, truth, my dear sister, was not a big enough word to constitute an entire book—at least not to me.” {Or my publishers, come to think of it. If there had been any publishers.}
    I had found the canteen. I came back into the room and handed it to him. “You should drink some. Rinse out the lie you’ve just told.”
    He snorted, took the canteen, raised it to his lips, and, drinking from it, kissed it as seriously as he would a lover.
    “Perhaps it is in part a metaphor,” he said, “but it is still, ironically enough, the truth.”
    “Don’t speak in metaphors, then. How do you tell truth from lies otherwise?”
    “I want to be taken literally.”
    “You mean literarily, Duncan. Except you’ve already been taken literarily—they’ve all ravished you and gone on to the next victim.”
    “Literally.”
    “Is that why you brought this horrible rolled up ball of an animal with you?”
    “No. I forgot I had it. Now that I’ve brought it here, I can’t let it die.” {Actually, Janice, I did bring it with me on purpose. I had just forgotten the purpose.}
    He sidled over to the golden ball of flesh, poured water into his hand.
    He looked up at me, the expression on his face taking me back to all of his foolish explorations as a child. “Watch now! Watch carefully!”
    Slowly, he poured water over the golden ball. After a moment the gold color blushed into a haze of purple-yellow-blue-green, which then returned to gold, but a more vibrant shade of gold that flashed in the dim light. Duncan poured more water over the creature. It seemed to crack apart, fissures erupting across its skin at regular intervals. But no—it was merely opening up, each of its four legs unfurling from the top of the ball, to settle upside down on the floor. Immediately, it leapt up, spun, and landed, cilia down, revealed as a kind of phosphorescent starfish.
    Duncan dribbled still more water over it. Each of its four arms shone a different