I became convinced that the journal formed a puzzle, written in a kind of code, the code weakened, diluted, only hinted at, by the uniform color of the ink in the copies, the dull sterility of set type.

A quote from a book Duncan had found helpful called A Refraction of Light in a Prison had an uneasy resonance with the desert fortifications from Shriek’s memory bulb:

Where the eastern approaches of the Kalif’s empire fade into the mountains no man can conquer, the ruined fortress of Zamilon keeps watch over time and the stars. Within the fortress … Truffidian monks guard the last true page of Tonsure’s famous journal.

Could Zamilon be the place he had seen in the memory bulb vision?

He read, too, about Duncan’s own explorations underground, following in Tonsure’s footsteps:

I could disguise myself from the gray caps, but not from their servants—the spores, the parasites, the tiny mushroom caps, fungi, and lichen. They found me and infiltrated me—I could feel their tendrils, their fleshy-dry-cold-warm pseudopods and cilia and strands slowly sliding up my skin, like a hundred tiny hands. They tried to remake me in their image.

Like Wyte. A few pages later, a section Janice had taken from Duncan’s journal. About doors. About a door. A kind of recognition from deep within that stirred him to read carefully.

A machine. A glass. A mirror … But it hasn’t worked right since they built it. A part, a mechanism, a balance—something they don’t quite understand … Ghosts of images cloud the surface of the machine and are wiped clean as if by a careless, a meticulous, an impatient painter. A great windswept desert, sluggish with the weight of its own dunes. An ocean, waveless, the tension of its surface broken only by the shadow of clouds above, the water such a perfect blue-green that it hurts your eyes … Places that if they exist in this world you have never seen, or heard mention of their existence. Ever … After several days, your vision strays and unfocuses and you blink slowly, attention drawn to a door … The distance between you and the door is infinite. The distance between you and the door is so minute you could reach out and touch it.

Skipped a few pages. Found a section where Janice related a conversation with her brother.

Duncan: The door in the Machine never fully opens.

Janice: What would happen if it did?

Duncan: They would be free.

Janice: Who?

Duncan: The gray caps.

Janice: Free of what?

Duncan: They are trying to get somewhere else—but they can’t. It doesn’t work. With all they can do, with all they are, they still cannot make their mirror, their glass, work properly.

And, then, on the Silence: