It is one of the only times I can recall the full attention of my father upon me. Five years later, he would die. Eight years later, my mother would bring us to Ambergris and the house by the River Moth. Twenty years later, Duncan would feel the first twinge of the fungal colonization occurring within him. Twenty-five years after our long-ago vacation, I would try to kill myself. Thirty years later and the War of the Houses would almost kill us all.

How can such a pleasurable memory as a childhood vacation coexist comfortably with memories of the war? How can the world contain such extremes? I thought about such things as I lay among the bodies in the Truffidian Cathedral. Each question begat another question, so that soon the questions seemed to contain their own answers.

I lay there for a very long time, gazing at nothing and no one while the gray caps rummaged all around me, each syllable of their clicking speech a knife slid between my shoulder blades. I do not know what they were looking for, nor whether they found it. I could hear them rolling bodies over, rifling through the pockets of the dead. Once, a clawing hand brushed against the side of my face. I could feel someone or something looking at me; I refused to look back. I could feel the breath of one of them upon me, smell the spurling tangle of scents that clung to them like their skin: must and mold and funk and dust and a trace of some spice.

And then, finally, the stained glass above me refracted the light of the sun, and it was dawn, and the gray caps were gone, and I was still alive, surrounded by hundreds of the dead, the blood upon them dark and caked.

Stiffly, like an old woman, I propped myself up, struggled to raise myself onto my foot, stared around me at the carnage.

The dead did not look peaceful. The dead did not look planned or purposeful, or at rest, or any other combination of words that might signify comfort or the rule of law. Legs and arms lay at unnatural angles, torn or contorted or dislocated from torsos. Mouths were caught in extremes of pain and fear and surprise. Dried blood and gathering flies. Skin a pale yellow tinged with blue. Great wounds, like vast claws, had cut into chests leaving dull red furrows. A row of heads disembodied. After a while, I had to stop looking. I had to stop myself from looking.

I wish I could have told you they looked beautiful.

That is when I resolved I would never become one of them. I had to find a way out. (Even if it meant typing up an afterword in bad light, on a limited budget, for a potential readership of thousands or none?)