When I found the manuscript, it lay in a disorganized mess of pages beside her typewriter. The typewriter had become clogged with a green lichen or fungus; the entire shell overtaken by the spread of this loamy green substance. If I had arrived only a day later, the manuscript also might have succumbed to this same affliction.
I examined the pages briefly—long enough, however, to ascertain who had written the text and to note the comments added by Duncan, whose handwriting and attitude are familiar to me from our association over the years.
Beyond the desk, on the floor near the wall, a series of loose boards partially covered up a hole that led down into the ground. Once I saw the hole, I left quickly, pausing only to gather up the manuscript pages.
After I returned to my office with the manuscript and read through it, I was baffled as to what to do next. While many of the sections dealing with Ambergris’s recent history had a general ring of truth to them, these were inextricably interwoven with sections that contained the most outrageous accusations and assertions. What was true and what false, I might never know.
Neither could I corroborate any statements made about Janice’s family—despite the mention of family papers and Duncan’s journal in the manuscript, no such documents had been in evidence at the Spore of the Gray Cap. Worst of all, the manuscript did such a disservice to the reputation and character of my author Mary Sabon that from a purely professional point of view I was disinclined to attempt publication. However, paramount above all other concerns, I sincerely believed that Duncan or Janice would walk into my offices at any moment to reclaim the manuscript. So, for several years, I held on to it. I could not bring myself to destroy it. Nor could I bring myself to let the public have its way with the account.
However, it gradually became clear that Janice and Duncan had disappeared, possibly forever. Oddly enough, the owner of the Spore still swears that Janice never left his establishment on the day she would have finished her account—that she simply disappeared from the room, presumably through the hole in the floor. Similarly, the owner claims he never saw Duncan during the time Duncan must have been adding his comments to the manuscript.
That Duncan had been missing for several weeks before Martin Lake’s party is supported only by the unsubstantiated statements in Janice’s manuscript. As he was unemployed at the time of his supposed disappearance, no one, not even members of AFTOIS, noticed his absence. Still, it is true that he has not been seen in Ambergris since commenting on Janice’s manuscript. It has been almost four years.
As for Janice, not much more is known about her whereabouts. The current rumor is that a person fitting her description fell (or was pushed—we will never know) into the path of a motored vehicle on the same day Janice seems to have finished her account. Supposedly, a wooden foot was found near the scene, but the body was too badly mangled to be identifiable.
Figure 1: Janice Shriek’s typewriter. As the reader can see from this photo, the typewriter keys had been infiltrated by mushrooms. Many of the keys were brittle and fell off within weeks of taking the machine out of its room at the Spore of the Gray Cap. The typewriter disintegrated entirely within five months.
Figure 2: A reproduction of a sample page from Janice Shriek’s manuscript. Despite Duncan’s admonishment about the unimportance of Janice’s description of a transformed Ambergris, I did not delete the text as he requested; nor did I delete anything in the manuscript that Duncan edited out. After careful consideration, I did, however, delete a half-dozen paragraph-length oddities that bore no discernible relation to the rest of the text, since I felt that these digressions would distract from the text more than they added to it. The careful reader will note that the page reproduced above contains one of these deleted segments.
* * *
Once it was clear the Shrieks would not be coming back, I pulled out the manuscript again and reread it. In the three years that had passed, many strange things had happened in the city, so that even the most bizarre parts of the account no longer seemed quite so ridiculous. But there was still the issue of its portrayal of Mary. I decided to show Mary the manuscript and let her decide its fate. It may seem that I abrogated my responsibility in doing so, but I felt I had no choice.
To my surprise, Mary told me Hoegbotton & Sons should publish it. She was quite adamant about it, and further instructed me not to delete or soften any references to her, regardless of how unflattering. She became very emotional on this point, and I had the impression she wished I had shown her the manuscript the day I had found it.
Obeying Mary’s wishes, I did not make many edits of substance in preparing Janice’s account for publication. I did, in some instances, smooth out the text—for example, fixing the grammatical errors in those sections written in exceptional haste. Likewise, I corrected all spelling errors. Where Janice had alternate versions of a page or scene—which occurred with some frequency—I chose the more polished of the two. I also untangled Janice’s handwritten corrections from Duncan’s comments, deciding that placing the latter in parentheses and removing parentheses from Janice’s text was the most elegant solution to a potentially wearisome problem. Where she spent too long on a subject, or lost focus completely, I did excise text, but the entirety of these deletions constitutes only five or six paragraphs in total. I may have erred too far on the side of preservation in this case—some of the discussion of Duncan’s theories strikes me as tedious—but better tedium than claims I was overzealous in my editing duties.
I also deleted Duncan’s final comment on Janice’s manuscript, which he wrote on the page following her last chapter. I did this not because I wanted to, but because I had to. The comment was illegible. I had several handwriting experts examine the sentence. None could come to any agreement as to how it might have read. The most coherent interpretation? “Confluence of light between towers and being there at the right time leapt forward.” I include the phrase here despite my best instincts to do otherwise. My sole addition to the text consisted of fleshing out one or two scenes where Janice’s descriptive powers deserted her, but only in cases where I had been privy to the same information.
A further complication concerned the fungal contamination of the pages, coupled with the haphazard way in which the pages had been stacked on the table at the Spore. On some pages, the words were barely legible, and many pages or sections were out of order, several lacking the page numbers that might have allowed me to easily sequence them. I erred on the side of chronological order—even though Janice did not always adhere to such an order—but it is possible I made a few errors in my sequencing.
Therefore, I have clearly made editorial decisions with regard to Janice’s manuscript which some may consider to be too invasive, no matter how slight. But what is not true, despite the rumors, is that An Afterword to the Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris represents an elaborate deception on my part. Not only is the manuscript genuine (see the reproduction of a sample page herein), but I had nothing to do with writing it. Nor is Hoegbotton & Sons only publishing it now due to the sharp upturn in sales of Duncan’s books.1
* * *
I have no doubt that the publication of this book will generate fierce discussion about the merits of Nativism, about the aims of the gray caps, and about the nature of the Shift that has increasingly disrupted life in Ambergris. Some will feel that Duncan is about to be vindicated in the most dramatic of ways.