Shriek: An Afterword Read Online Free PDF

of an entry from this era, we find the words “Is this how Dad felt?” Remembering the fate of our father, dead at the zenith of his happiness, Duncan truly believed he too would die if he partook of too much joy—if not by heart attack, then by some other means. {Your theory may be correct on a subconscious level, but on the conscious level, I was merely obsessed and somewhat paranoid. Obsessed with the possibilities of the next book. Paranoid about how people would continue to receive my studies. Worried about how I would do on my own, so to speak, without Dad’s research notes to prop me up.}
    Of course, I did not understand this until much later. At the time, I believed his shyness had led him to squander perhaps his only opportunity to take up a permanent place in the public imagination. On this, I turned out to be wrong. Debate raged on for a while regardless, perhaps fed by Duncan’s very absence.
    Then, to compound the communal mystification, Duncan disappeared from sight—much as he would several decades later in the week before Martin Lake’s party. His rooms in Morrow {which the Institute had let me keep for a year following graduation} were untouched—not a sock taken, not a diagram removed from the walls…. Duncan simply wasn’t there.
    I walked around those rooms with the school’s dean, and it struck me as I stared at the crowded walls that Duncan’s physical presence or absence meant nothing. Everything that comprised his being had been tacked or glued or stabbed to those walls, an elaborate mosaic of obsession.
    Clearly, the school understood this aspect of Duncan, for they made a museum out of the rooms, which then became the physical location for discussions of Duncan’s work. Much later, the “museum” became a storehouse, crumbled over time into a boarded-up mess, and then a broken-down safety hazard; such is the staying power of fame. {I never expected it would last as long as it did, to be honest.}
    As we walked together, the Dean made sympathetic sounds, expressed the hope that Duncan would “soon return to his home.” But I knew better. Duncan had emerged from his cocoon. The wallpaper of plans, photographs, diagrams was just the husk of his leaving, the remains of his other self. Duncan had begun to metamorphose into something else entirely.
    That is, assuming he was still alive—and without the evidence of a dead body, I preferred to believe he was. {I was. As you know. Such melodrama!}

    Now I should start again. Now I should skip six months of worry. Now I should tell you how I came to see Duncan again. This is such a difficult Afterword to write. Sometimes I am at a loss as to what to put in and what to leave out. Sometimes I do not know what is appropriate for an Afterword, and what is not. Is this an Afterword or an afterwards? Should I massage the truth? Should I maintain an even tone? Should I divide it all into neat, easily digestible chapters? Should I lie? {Dad, in his notes on writing: “A historian is half confidence artist and half stolid purveyor of dates and dramatic re-creations.”}

    Duncan reintroduced himself to me six months later with a knock on my door late one night in the spring. The prudent Ambergrisian does not eagerly open doors at night.
    I called out, “Who is it?” and received, in such a jubilant tone that I could not at first place the voice, the response, “Your brother, Duncan!” Shocked, relieved, perplexed, I opened the door to a pale, worn, yet strangely bulky brother wrapped in an old gray overcoat that he held closed with both hands. Comically enough, a sailor’s hat covered his head. His face was flushed, his eyes too bright as he staggered past me, pieces of debris falling from him onto the floor of my living room.
    I locked the door behind him and turned to greet him, but any words I might have spoken died in my throat. For he held his overcoat open like the wings of some great bird, and what I saw I could not at first believe. Just