This is just the beginning. And so it was. But the beginning of what? The beginning of the end, really. The one time Janice Shriek’s life significantly impacted Duncan Shriek’s life. I became addicted to hallucinogenic mushrooms. Little purple mushrooms with red-tinged gills. So tiny. So cute. They magnified the minute and humbled the magnificent, and I couldn’t get enough of them. I’d have a meeting with Sirin while on them and watch as his head became bigger and bigger, eclipsing his body. I would eat one while in the middle of another all-night drunken escapade and suddenly the noise and confusion around me would: stop. I would see the glittering detail of a streetlamp light shining off of the water in the gutter, and that sudden moment would become as large as the world. A comfort, really. A solace. (A plague. A way for you to escape the world.)

Sybel called them Tonsure’s Folly, and I can’t really complain, because I asked him to get them for me. And I can’t even blame the mushrooms for everything that happened next. I was wandering further and further from the golden threads of my note to Duncan. I was becoming more and more unhappy, even though I was filling myself with so many substances and preying off enough new people, new experiences, that my distress was for the longest time just an echo of an ache in my belly. (No, you can’t blame the mushrooms. But those mushrooms, over time, make the user more and more depressed. And you were already in a fragile state. I’m afraid I’d lost the thread of your life, caught up in my own problems, or I would have insisted that Sybel intervene.)

The parties I still remember with fondness, although the only one I’ve really come close to describing happened ages afterward—the Martin Lake party I was asked to help organize recently. The first party I’d been to for years, and haunted by the ghosts of other, grander parties. These ghosts lingered long enough to laugh at the staid properness of Janice Shriek in her old (c)age. No guests rolling naked over the carpet. No fruit served from the delicious concavities of the lithe bodies of young men and women. Not even the simple pleasures to be found in bowls of mushroom drugs. Just guests, music, light dancing, and lighter punch, not even spiked. Oh, what humiliation!

“Do you think she can see us from in there?”

“Naw—she’s busy.”

“She’s deep in thought, she is—but what could she be thinking about, do you think?”

“About the next word she puts her hard finger to.”

Distractions abound. Sometimes they become part of the story. Anyway: