This entry about a defective “machine” built by the gray caps is the strangest part of my brother’s journal. By far. In its pure physicality I sense a level of discomfort rare for Duncan. As if, from fretful tossing and turning, he woke, reached for pen and notepad from the nightstand, and wrote down his first impressions of a fading nightmare. He appears at first anxious to record the experience, and then less so, the use of second person intended to place the burden of memory on the reader, to purge the images from his head. (It is more that I could not find words to accurately convey what I saw, and so I tried to describe how I felt instead—in a sense presaging Ambergrisians’ reaction to the recent Shift.)

If Duncan had, in the gallery that afternoon, told me about the machine with the calm madness of that journal entry, a silence would have settled over us. Our conversation would have faded away into a nothingness made alive and aware by his words. Thankfully, Duncan told his story with less than brutal lucidity. He used stilted words in rows of sentences crippled by fits and starts—a vagabond, poorly rehearsed circus of words that could not be taken seriously. He focused on the front of the machine with its marvelous visions of far-distant places. He dismissed the back of the machine with a single sentence. Somehow, I could not reconcile his vision with my memory of the spores floating out of my apartment window.

Even so, an element of unreality entered the gallery following his revelation. I remember staring at him and thinking that his face could not be composed of flesh and blood, not with those words coming from his mouth. The light now hid his features, but his hands, lit by the starfish, glowed white.

“The door in the machine never fully opens,” Duncan said in a distant tone.

“What would happen if it did?”

“They would be free…”

“Who?” I asked, although I knew the answer.

“The gray caps.”

“Free of what?”

Pale hands, darkened face, gray speech. “I think they care nothing for us one way or the other, Janice. They have only one purpose now. The same purpose they’ve had for centuries.”

“In your unconfirmed opinion, brother,” I said, and shivered at the way the mushroom dust on his face still glittered darkly.

“What do you know about the Silence?”

“The gray caps killed everyone in the city,” I said.

He shook his head. Forgetting the starfish in his hands, he stood abruptly. The starfish fell to the floor and began to curl and uncurl in a reflexive imitation of pain. Now Duncan was stooped over me. Now he was crouched beside me. If there were ever a secret he truly wanted to tell me, this was the secret. This was the cause of it. We had returned to the last survivor of his sixth book, alive amid all of the suicides: the truth. As my brother saw it.