Fantastic Metropolis

Important: The novel excerpted here is a work in progress. As such, the text in these pages is still subject to editing and rewriting, and may even be omitted from the finished novel. Please bear this in mind when reading the excerpt, and do not quote any part of it in reviews without first checking against a published copy.

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My new novel is set in the fantastical city of Ambergris, the same setting as City of Saints & Madmen. In it, Janice Shriek tells the odd story of her brother Duncan Shriek, and his quest for the truth about the indigenous, subterranean-dwelling gray caps. In this scene, Duncan has just returned to Ambergris after a six-month disappearance. I’ll leave it to you to guess what the parenthetical asides are all about.

—Jeff VanderMeer

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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? Is this pamphlet a history essay or something else? (Perhaps we are too close to the story.)

Regardless, 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 which he held closed with both hands. 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 bat, and what I saw I could not at first believe. Just brightly-colored vest and pants I thought, but protruding, like barnacles on a ship’s hull. I took a step closer…

“That’s right,” Duncan said, “step closer and really see.” He tossed his hat onto a chair. He had shaved off his hair and his scalp was stippled and layered in a hundred shades of blue, yellow, green, orange. “Mushrooms. Hundreds of mushrooms. Your eyes do not lie, sister. I had to wear the overcoat and hat or every casual tourist on Albumuth Boulevard would have stared at me.” He looked down at his body. “Look how they glow! What a pity to be rid of them, and yet I must.” He saw me staring unabashedly. “Stare all you like, Janice. I’m a dazzling butterfly, not a moth… well, for another hour or two at least.”

He did not lie. From the collar of his shirt to the tips of his shoes, Duncan was covered in mushrooms and other fungus in a riot and welter and rash of colors so varied that they expanded the spectrum of perceivable hues. I walked up to him, still speechless. His eyelashes and eyebrows were lightly dusted with purple spores. The fungus had needled his head, burrowed into the skin, forming whorls of brightness that hummed with fecundity. I took his right hand in mine, examined the palm, the fingers. The palms had a vaguely greenish hue to them. The half-moons of finger nails had turned a luminous purple. His flesh had a rubbery feel, as if it not completely real. Looking up into his eyes, I saw that the spark there came from a pale red ringing the pupil. Suddenly, I was afraid.

“Don’t be,” he said, “don’t be afraid,” scaring me even more. “It’s a function of diet. It’s a function of disguise. I haven’t changed. I’m still your brother. You are still my sister. All of this will wash away, I’ll have a good meal or two and all of this will fade. It’s just the layers added to me the past three months. I just need help scraping them off.”

I laughed. “You look like some kind of clown… some kind of mushroom clown.”

He took off his overcoat, let it fall to the floor. “I accept your ridicule. One must when one looks ridiculous.”

“But where have you been? How did… this happen?” I asked.

He put a finger to his lips. “I’ll answer your questions if you’ll help me first—get rid of this second skin. It itches. And it’s dying.”

So I helped him. It was not as simple as having him step out of his clothes because the mushrooms had eaten through his clothes and attached themselves to his poor pale skin. A madness of mushrooms, mottling his skin—no uniform shape or variety or size. Some pulsed a strobing pink-blue. Others radiated a dull, deep burgundy. A few hung from his waist like upside down wine glasses, translucent and hollow, the space inside filled with clusters of tiny button-shaped green-gold nodules that disintegrated at the slightest touch. Textures from rough to smooth to rippled to grainy to slick. Smells—the smells all ran together into an earthy, vaguely minty, but not unpleasant tang. The mushrooms even made noises if you listened carefully enough—a soft pough as they released spores, an intermittent whine when left alone, a pop as they became ghosts through my rough relocations.

“Remember BDD when you three had to wash all that oil and mud off of me?” he said as we both worked with scrubbing implements and towels in the bathroom. Of course I did. Duncan, his usual mad, exploring BDD self had managed to get stuck in a sewer pipe under our block and we had to pull him out after a frantic half-hour searching for the source of his pathetic, echoing voice. Then me, mom, and dad spent another three hours forcing the black-gray sludge off of him, finally standing back to observe the miracle we had wrought: a perfectly white Duncan, “probably as clean as he’s ever been,” as dad observed. Did he ever tell you these things, Mary, while the lights flickered outside his apartment’s windows?

BDD (Before Dad Died—that’s important). A grim little acronym meant to help us remember when we had been a happy family. If we had arguments or bouts of depression that threatened to get out of control, one of us would remind the others that we had all behaved differently BDD. We held BDD time in our minds as a sanctuary whenever our anger, our loss, became too great. ADD, Duncan became withdrawn, no longer explored his environment, but instead explored the inside of his own head.

Duncan’s remark made me laugh, and the task at hand no longer seemed so strange. I was just helping clean Duncan up after another BDD exploration mishap, while Duncan looked on half in relief, half in dismay, as the badges of his newly-gained experience fell away, revealed as transitory.

Me, I felt as if I were destroying a vast city, a community of souls. On one level I lived with the vague sense of guilt every Ambergrisian feels who can trace their family’s history back to the founding of Ambergris. For us, a mushroom signifies the genocide practiced by our forefathers, but also the Silence and our own corresponding loss. Can anyone not from Ambergris understand the fear, loss, guilt each of us feels when we eradicate mushrooms from the outsides of our apartments, houses, public buildings? The exact amount of each emotion in the pressure of my finger and thumb as I pulled them from their suction cup grip on Duncan’s skin.

It took five hours, until my fingertips were red and my back ached terribly. Duncan looked not only exhausted but diminished by the ordeal. We had moved back to the livingroom, and there we sat, surrounded by the remains of a thousand mushrooms. It could have been a typical family scene—the aftermath of a hair cut—except that Duncan had left something more profound behind than just his hair. Already the red brightness had begun to fade from his eyes, his hands less rubbery, the half-moons of his fingernails light purple.

I had opened a window to get the smell of mushrooms out and now, by the wet, glistening outside lamps, I could see the beginning of a great, almost invisible, translucent migration—from the broken remains at our feet, from the burgundy bell-shaped fungus, from the inverted wine glasses, from the yellow-green nodules. Like ghosts, like spirits, a million tiny fruiting bodies—motes in the eye of God—in a thousand intricate shapes, like terrestial jellyfish oh what am I trying to say so badly except that they were beautiful, gorgeous, as they fled out the window, to be taken by the wind. In the faint light. Soundlessly. Like souls. (There’s no way I can capture it for you, Mary, no matter how hard I have tried, and maybe that is where the failure occurred. Not all experiences are universal, even if you’re in the same room when something miraculous occurred. Mary, couldn’t you have taken it on faith?)

In that instant, almost in tears from the combination of exhaustion, beauty, and fear of the unknown, I think I caught a glimpse of what Duncan saw. Of what had created the ecstasy I had seen in him when he had stumbled into my apartment five hours before. A hundred, a thousand years, before.

“Look…,” I said, pointing to the spores.

“I know,” my brother said. “I know, Janice.” Such regret in that voice, mixed with a last lingering joy. “I’m less than I was, but I’ve captured it all here.” He tapped his head, which still bore the scars of its invaders in the echo of color, in the scrubbed redness of it. “And the spores are part of the record. They will float back to where I’ve been, navigating by wind and rain and by ways we cannot even conceive of, and they will report to the gray caps, in their fragmented way. Who I was. Where I was. What I did. It will make it all the more dangerous next time.”

I sat upright in my chair. I looked across the room at him, dressed now in the rags of his picked-apart clothes, between us the wreckage of fungal life, and I realized I didn’t understand him. That I probably couldn’t ever understand him fully without going where he had gone.

“Yes, well, Duncan, it’s been a long night,” I started to say, upon which his eyes rolled up in their sockets and he fell to the soft floor, dead asleep. I had to drag his thrush-like frame to the couch. There he remained for two days, sleeping. I sent a message to my employer (an art gallery) that I was sick, went out only for food and to buy him some new clothes, and I watched over him while he slept. He slept peacefully, except for five or six times when he slipped into a nightmare that made him twitch, convulse, cry out in a strange language that sounded like birdsong. I remember staring down at his pale, pale face and thinking that he resembled in texture and in color nothing more or less than a mushroom.