Follow the red. There, before me, appeared a red path composed of tiny writhing tendrils. If I took off the glasses—could I take off the glasses?—I knew I wouldn’t see the path, wouldn’t see the fungus. Did I want to try to rip off the glasses and leave Duncan to his own devices? For a moment I hesitated, and then I followed the red path through the transformed city.
My self dissolved into … something else. How do I describe? How do I begin? Where do I begin? (Oh for Truff’s sake, Janice! Start at the beginning. Proceed to the middle. Finish with the end. Muddle through.) The city darkened to black, with people like quicksilver flashes against that background, each composed of a thousand brushstrokes of individual whorls of activity. The red path erasing itself behind me, urging me on by erasing itself more quickly if I slowed.
Perhaps I should start with color. Perhaps I should try to paint it for you. The way an artist layers paints, these glasses layered information. Or, as an artist layers paints to reveal, to accentuate, some facet, some theme, some previously unknown truth, so these glasses revealed a different city, a city which the gray caps had returned to, recolonized, without our knowledge. (Never left, Janice, dear sister. They never left. The glasses didn’t reveal what was hidden. They merely showed what had always been there throughout the centuries.)
Everything had become a negative of itself so that the fog snuck in like coal smoke and the dark, hard brick of buildings became as light, as insubstantially white, as glass. Burned into this real world, the world by which we are assured of our own foundations, our own existence—by which I mean our bedrock; assuming, of course, that the world interpreted by our senses has any objective reality—burned into it, I tell you, were all the signs and symbols of the gray caps.
Superimposed. A nice word, but not the one I’m searching for, because this might imply some ethereal, unreal attribute for something that was all too unbearably real.
What I am trying to say is that the real world, the world I had known for over fifty years, no longer held true when confronted by this other world that existed on top of it and yet also within it.
But what, really, did I see as I walked that red carpet toward the Spore of the Gray Cap? I saw a phosphorescent cloud of green spores dancing in the midst of the fog, the glistening, swooping fullness of them almost that of a single, sentient entity. I saw a wall of brick covered—clotted?—with insect-harsh letters and symbols, in a welter of colors so diverse it destroyed the imagination. I saw long, centipedal creatures rippling and undulating, blending into the translucence of the brick. I saw stretching out before me, threading its way through a street littered with clumps of glowing yellow, blue, green spores, a continuing trail of red splotches, etched into the street as if by a painter.
As if in a dream, I followed the path. I had no choice.
The trick was not to flinch at the suddenly mobile, unlikely things that might sputter and lunge into the corner of your vision. The trick was to imagine it was all a dream, to lie to yourself as much as possible. Sometimes I felt as if the skin of the city had been torn away to reveal another place—a parallel world that shared only a few points of similarity with ours.
(Ah, well, perhaps no one could have done it justice, or injustice. How to describe something not so much seen as observed through some sixth sense, some place between eye and brain that should not exist. Some who see it for the first time go mad. A monk living in the fortress at Zamilon saw it and jumped from the fortress walls. It didn’t drive Tonsure mad only because so many other revelations overwhelmed his senses. You did well, sister. Very well. Better than Mary.)
* * *
Duncan waited for me in this very room. He sat on a chair near the hole in the ground, table in front of him. He couldn’t be seen from the doorway. I sat down in the chair opposite him. With the glasses on, the entirety of the room shone in shades of violet and gold; things floated in the air, things like clear jellyfish.
With the glasses on, Duncan’s body was transformed. Fungus moved across the outlines of his bones, reshaping him, slowly, patiently. Or was it fungus? I caught a glimpse of brown-gold cilia, of protrusions eerily reminiscent of a giant starfish. He smelled of stagnant wine left out overnight. He smelled of sewers scoured clean with an essence of honeysuckle and sandalwood, with the sewer smell still lingering in the background. Rotting flesh. Cinnamon. Blended into a smell, a vibration, never intended for a human nose.
* * *
“Can I take the glasses off now?” I asked Duncan. I didn’t like seeing him this way.
“Don’t you wonder?” he said, his voice throaty, harsh. “Don’t you wonder what you’re looking at? I would if I were you.”
Something about the way he held his head—his head an oval of incandescent light, his neck a slab of mottled darkness—made me think he was drunk.
“Are you all right?” I asked him. Something told me to run away from him, to get away, to wrench the glasses from my head. (Those were good instincts.)
“I said—don’t you wonder?” he replied, and smashed his fist down against the table. Orange spores rippled from his fist and across the whorled grain of the table. For an instant, it looked as though the table had burst into flames. Then it dissipated and the orange evaporated into nothing.
“Yes—I wonder. I wonder about the way you look. I wonder why you chose this way to bring me here. But I asked—are you all right?”
A rough laugh. “Have I ever been all right? In your experience.”
“Yes. I’ve even seen you laugh on occasion.”
Duncan held out one hand and I could see that it was engulfed by the pointed translucent pseudopod of some creature.
“Remember your letter?”
“Which one?” I asked. There had been so many letters. Letters litter the floor of this place even now.
“Golden strands of connections. No one is alone. Everything is joined. When someone dies, there is a keening across the lines. Something of that nature.”
He was definitely drunk, or not himself. (Oh, I was myself—the self I’d been suppressing for years.)
“I remember,” I said. “What does it have to do with this, now?”
Duncan laughed. “Everything! Because you were more right than you knew. What you are looking at, my dear sister, is the starfish I showed you so many years ago. It never died—it just shed its skeleton and its corporeal presence: Skeletonless and invisible, it has expanded to encompass my body. It feeds off of my disease.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
“In the gray caps’ world nothing ever really dies—it just transforms. To other flesh. Other spirit. Other vessels. Look at it from their perspective and it’s quite beautiful. It flenses me of disease, but at a cost. It brings me closer and closer to the world you see through those glasses.”
You’ll doubt me now, dear reader, even if you didn’t already, even though this is all true. I doubt myself. I doubt the evidence of my eyes. Doubt was a great friend to my father. To Jonathan Shriek, it was the Great Ally. “Doubt,” he would say, raising a finger, “is what will see you through. It is a great truth.” Dad doubted every word he’d ever written. He told me so once, in the living room, at the end of a long, exhausting day. Every word. I thought he was joking, but now I can see that he wasn’t.