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.