UPDATE: I forgot, blurbs are beginning to come in… “Jeff VanderMeer’s stunning Finch opens with a claustrophobic interrogation and with a reluctant detective forced to solve a double-murder. Finch quickly expands beyond genres and beyond the edges of Ambergris–its complex history, its many apocalypses–while remaining a deeply affecting and personal story. Told in a pitch-perfect voice and steeped in the unrelenting menace authentic to the best works of noir, Finch is a wonderful, sad, brutal, and beautiful book. A tour de force.”–Paul Tremblay, author of The Little Sleep

Long before I began to work seriously on Finch, my latest novel, I had fragments of something called, er, Fragments From a Drowned City, which was about a detective who comes to Ambergris seeking a girl apparently abducted and brought to the city. (I worked on it from 1999 to 2001.) It never really came together because I couldn’t at that time imagine the city of Ambergris with the subterranean gray caps in control. I also didn’t really know what happened to the detective. However, in reviewing all of my notes about Ambergris when beginning work on Finch, I realized that hidden in Fragments were many scenes and elements that belonged in the novel–just not in the same style or from the same perspective. In Finch, for example, I knew Finch’s partner, Wyte, had gone through the same experience ascribed to my nameless detective in Fragments. But that same experience needed to be rendered in a totally different way. So, here’s the more-or-less finished anecdote in Finch, followed after the cut by what appeared as “Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose” in my collection Secret Life. I make no claims for which is better, just which is better for Finch. In many ways, it is a complete transformation–an example of the intial spark of imagination leading nowhere, and then another spark coming along to reignite the original material and re-purpose it in a totally different way. The original, including other scenes that didn’t fit in Finch, now reads like Ambergris in an alternate universe. – Jeff

From Finch…

Wyte. The story.

He’d gone to investigate a death about a year ago. By himself. No one else in the station. The call sounded simple. A man found dead beneath a tree, beginning to smell. Could someone take a look? Most days, not worth bothering with. But it was a slow morning, and Wyte took the job seriously. The woman seemed upset, like it was personal.

The body was down near the bay. Beside a cracked stone sign that used to welcome visitors to Ambergris. Holy city, majestic, banish your fears. No one was around. Not the woman who had called it in. No one.

The man lay on his back. Connected to the “tree,” which was a huge mushroom. Connected by tendrils. The smell, vile. The man’s eyes open and flickering.

Wyte should have left. Wyte should have known better. But maybe Wyte was bored. Or wanted a change. Or just didn’t care. He hadn’t seen his kids since they’d been sent out of the city. He’d been fighting with his wife a lot.

He leaned over the body. Maybe he thought he saw something floating in those eyes. Something moving. Maybe movement meant life to him.

“Who knows? Just know that it’s a dumb move.”

A dumb move. That’s how the detectives said it during the retell. At their little refuge, not far from the station. Blakely had discovered the place. In front of what used to be the old Bureaucratic Quarter. It looks like a guard post. Nondescript. Gray stone. Surrounded by a thicket of half-walls, rubble hills, and stunted trees. With a moat that’s really just a pond that collects rainwater. From the inside, it’s clear the structure is the top of a bell tower pulled down and submerged when the gray caps Rose.

Always half out of their minds with whisky or homemade wine, or whatever. When they told the story. A dumb move. Like they were experts.

“Point is,” Albin would say, because Albin usually told the story, “he leaned over and the man’s head exploded into spores. And those spores got into Wyte’s head.”

White spores for Wyte. Through the nose. Through any exposed cuts. Through the ears. Through the eyes.

Although he fought it. Twisted furiously. Jumped up and down. Cursed like the end of the world. So at least he didn’t just stand there and let it happen.

“But by that time, it was too late. A few minutes later and he’s just somebody’s puppet.”

Wyte became someone else. The “dead” man. Someone who didn’t understand what had happened to him. Wyte ran down the street. Taken over. Screaming.

“Screaming a name over and over. ‘Otto! I’m Otto!’ because that was the dead man’s name. Wyte thought he was Otto.”

Or most of him did. Wyte, deep inside, still knew who he was, and that was worse.

Sometimes, out of a casual cruelty, a kind of boredom, one of the other detectives, usually Blakely, would call Wyte “Otto.” Until Finch makes him stop.

“Well, they found him a day later. Once they figured out who the dead body was. Cowering in a closet. Saying ‘Otto’ over and over again.”

In the dead man’s apartment.

“A caution to us all.”

Then they would clink glasses and bottles, congratulating themselves on being alive.

Truth was, they told the story less to humiliate Wyte than to keep reminding themselves not to take any chances. Ambergris Rules. No dumb moves.

Wyte got Otto out of his head. Eventually. Most of Otto. But not the fungus. That became worse. The gray caps couldn’t or wouldn’t help. Maybe they saw it as some kind of perverse improvement.

No one had ever found out who had lured Wyte there. Or why.

Finch knew they never would.

***

From Fragments…

Near dawn, the detective pulled himself sodden and dripping from the River Moth. Dry land felt hard and unyielding to him. His muscles ached. The water had made him wrinkled and old. The stench of mud and silt clung to him. All around him, light strained to break through the darkness, found fault lines, and pierced the black with threads of gray and orange. To the west, the sky shone an unsettling shade of blue.

The detective lay against the smooth stones of the jetty and realized he had never been so tired in all his life. He would have fallen asleep right there, but it did not feel safe. With a lurch and a groan, the detective stood, stretched his legs, took off his trench coat, and tried to wring the water from it. After awhile, he gave up. Suddenly aware that the gray caps could already be coming for him, alerted by microscopic fungal cameras, he spun around, stared inland.

No one walked the narrow streets ahead of him. No sound broke through the crazy and up-ended buildings. A list coated the spaces between dwellings. Everything was fuzzy, indistinct. A chill seeped through the detective’s wet clothing and into his skin. In the half-light, Ambergris did not appear to be a city but instead a blank slate waiting for his imagination to transform it, to recreate it.

Out of the mist, as the mist withdrew and circled back like some solemn, autumnal tide, a great head loomed suddenly: a product of his dreams, the unexpected prow of a ship. But no: only a statue when finally revealed, and the detective exhaled the breath he had held. His legs shook, for the mist’s withdrawal had resembled the advance of some death-pale giant.

He recognized the features now. Who would not? Voss Bender had been dead five hundred years, but no one who had ever heard his music played could forget that face. The statue’s features suffered from fissures, pocks from bullet holes, infiltrations of mold, and the spurious introduction of a large purple mushroom upon its head. Yet even this did not detract from the grace of the rendering. Even the sliver of stone missing from his left eyebrow only served to make the statue appear more imperious.

Now the detective heard the sound of breathing. A quiet sound, neither labored nor erratic. At first, the detective fancied the sound came from the statue itself, but after listening carefully discarded this theory. In truth, he could not tell where it came from. Perhaps Ambergris itself breathed, the breezes and updrafts that drove the mist before them the even, comfortable breath of stone.

Automatically, the detective followed the gaze of Voss Bender’s statue: down, and to the left. It was an old habit of his—he always must know where people were looking, for fear they stared at something more interesting, more profound, more alive…
And so he came upon a most remarkable signpost, shaded by the largest mushroom he had ever seen.

It stood taller than a palm tree, its trunk of lacy white flesh six feet in circumference. Its half-moon hood was stained purple and blue, with yellow streaks. The fragile grid work underneath the hood, from which the inevitable spores would one day float forth, had a lacquered, unreal appearance. Root-like tendrils gripped the pavement, cracked and speared it.

As the detective walked toward the signpost and the mushroom, the breathing sound became louder. Could it emanate from the mushroom itself? Could the mushroom be breathing?

The signpost rose almost to his height of six feet. It had originally been composed of a gray stone, but a viscous white substance had gradually seduced the cracks and other imperfections until now the detective could hardly read the words. The sign did not include the name of the city, but simply a giant “A”. Beneath the A, in letters sick with flourishes, a short inscription:

Holy city, majestic, banish your fears
Arise, emerge from your sleeping years.
Too long have you dwelt in the valley of tears.
We shall restore you with mercy and grace.

Many elements of this inscription disturbed the detective, but certainly no more so than the quiet breathing. First, he wondered who had written the words. Second, he could not connect the words to Ambergris. Third, he had no clue who “We” were or how “We” would restore the city with mercy and grace.

The detective left off such questions in favor of solving the more perplexing problem of the breather. He took out his gun, then stood motionless for a long moment, listening.

Finally, he decided the sound must be coming from behind the mushroom. Nimbly, he walked around the mushroom’s left flank, disgusted by the stickiness under his feet.

On the opposite side, he discovered a tendril that was not a tendril. And a statue that was not a statue. Such conclusions would have been neat, safe, rational. Unfortunately, the mystery to the breathing, the detective now knew, had no rational solution. A man lay beneath the mushroom. If he had not seen that the feet merged with the root-tendril, the detective might have thought the man was just taking a nap.

The man’s paleness astounded the detective—he glowed in the shadowy dawn light. His head had been stripped of all hair, including eyebrows, and so had the rest of his body. His eyes were closed. His genitals had been replaced by some frozen-blue bulb of a fungus. Tiny tentacles had sprouted from his fingernails and now searched the earth around them restlessly. From the sudden fibrous hardness around the man’s kneecaps, the detective could tell that the man became mushroom much farther up the leg than the foot, but despite this intrusion, this invasion, he saw by the gently-rising chest and, yes, the quiet, steady breathing, that the man was alive.

The detective stood over the sleeping man, this living corpse, his gun hanging from the end of his arm, dangling from one finger. He had come to Ambergris to solve a Case, the case, and he had come to Ambergris to find a missing person. But not this person. And not this mystery. He began to see, with a frisson of dread, that to solve the Case, he might have to solve a dozen other cases before it. Or else they might conspire to obscure the True Case. The True Crime.

He considered the man’s face. The thickness of the white mask reminded him of rubber. Everywhere, any delicacies of cheekbone, of nose, of ear, had given way to an over-ripe fullness. The breath issued from the slightest gap between the thick lips. The bulbous eyelids fluttered, the eyelashes miniatures of the tentacles that had colonized the man’s fingers.

Against his own better judgment, the detective knelt beside the man. He had room for neither disgust nor fascination within him. He was simply tired, and eager to explode this lesser mystery by any means possible. He tapped the side of the man’s head with his gun. No response. He tapped again—harder.

The man’s eyes shot open. The detective caught a swift glimpse of limitless black, across which tiny insects glided and fell, an entire world trapped on the surface of the man’s eyes. The detective rose with a cry of horror, stood back, gun aimed at the man.

The mushroom-man opened his mouth—and his mouth was filled with corpses. Not a tooth remained in that mouth, that it might be more thickly packed with corpses. Lean corpses. Fat corpses. Headless corpses. Corpses with gills. Corpses with wings. Corpses with single eyes. Corpses with multiple eyes. Corpses that mumbled through their dead mouths. Corpses that tried to dance in their stumbling decay. Grinning corpses. Weeping corpses. And all of them no taller than three inches high.

The man’s mouth continued to open long after it should have stopped, while the detective continued to stare at this mystery he was not sure he would ever fully understand. His finger tightened on the trigger, and he brought the gun up into his hand, where he held it so tight against his palm he burned the imprint of the grip into it.

The man began to cough up the corpses—they slid up out of his mouth at odd angles, all of them coated in mucus. The spilled across his belly and out into the ground. Hundreds of them. They reached the detective’s legs and he recoiled in disgust. And fear. But he couldn’t stop staring at the tiny corpses, so like naked dolls or children. And he couldn’t stop staring at the man’s mouth as it continued to expand. Or at the dead eyes brimming with life.

If not for the Case, the detective would have stood there for a long time. He might have let his trenchcoat fall softly to the ground. He might have taken off all of his clothes and laid down beside the mushroom-man. He might have waited for the tendrils to stealthily crawl and slide and coil across his arms and legs. He might have acquired tentacles and strange dreams to keep him from thinking about what he had become…but something in the awful complexity of the mushroom-man’s face made him think of Alison, the missing girl, and with that thought the mist began to clear, the morning light became brighter, and the trance broke. He bent low, next to the mushroom-man’s head.

“This isn’t right,” he said. “This isn’t right. There is no mystery here. You are as transparent as your skin. Your Case is as old as this city, and no older. The solution is simple. We both know this.”

The detective held the gun against the mushroom-man’s head, the mushroom-man’s gaze slowly drifted to the left, to take in the gun and the gun wielder.

Through the glut of corpses, the mushroom-man mouthed “No,” in as soft a whisper as its breath.

“I. Do. Not. Believe. In. You,” the detective said.

He stood. He aimed. He fired. The bullet entered the mushroom man’s head—which exploded into a hundred thousand snow-white spores that lifted themselves into the air like chained explorers suddenly set free. They floated down upon the hundreds of tiny corpses. They floated down upon the remains of the mushroom-man’s body. They floated down upon the detective, caught in the detective’s hair while he waved his hands to avoid them.

Not even the mushroom-man’s eyes remained—just his jutting torso, his spindly legs, the feet that were not really feet.

No one came running to investigate, despite the echoing recoil of the gunshot. No one came to arrest him. The looming mushroom did not rear back in pain. The spores rose, carried by the breeze, were destined to explore the city well in advance of the detective.

As for the detective, he just stood there, surrounded by the spores, and marveled at what he had wrought. He had killed a man who was not a man. Out of the shattered head had poured a hundred thousand lives, scattered by the explosion. How did one stick to just one case in this city?

Slowly, reluctantly, the detective put away his gun. The dawn had truly arrived, a second sun beginning to blaze in the space between the gray caps’ two towers. He could hear voices in the city behind him. The mist had begun to evaporate. He could see clearly now. He had a Case. He had a Client. His shoulders fell, his muscles untensed.

He breathed in deeply, through his nose…

A spore entered his nose.

He felt it wriggling in his nasal cavity. He sneezed, but the spore hooked itself into the soft flesh inside his left nostril. The pain made him jerk upright, and he howled in pain.

Abandoning all pretense, he drove his left index finger up into his nostril in search of the spore—only to be stung (he could only think of it as a bee sting) by the spore, which proceeded to advance up his nostril. The detective withdrew his finger. The tip was bleeding. In desperation, he put both hands up to the bridge of his nose, cursing as he tried to prevent the spore from going any further.

To no effect—except that now he felt the spore slide down into the back of his throat and begin to crawl back up into his mouth. He did a little jig of a dance as he tried to loop his tongue back over itself to deliver a knock-out blow.

The detective was still cursing, but the words came out all garbled and blubbering.

The spore, despite the best efforts of his tongue, stuck defiantly to the roof of his mouth. He began to feel as if he were suffocating. He again tried to dislodge the spore with his tongue. His tongue became numb, then a dead weight lolling in his mouth. He put three fingers of his left hand into his mouth, pushing aside his tongue, and tried to pull the spore out, but it began to burrow into his palate to get away from his hand. Hopping on one leg, the detective dropped his gun into his trenchcoat pocket. He dug into his mouth with as many fingers as he could fit. The burrowing sensation became more intense. His fingers, getting in each other’s way, caught at the tail-end of the spore. Pulled, but only succeeded in breaking off a tuft.

He withdrew his fingers, panicked. As if they had been waiting for the right time, another dozen milk-white spores floated into his mouth. He made a gurgling sound. He clutched his throat. It felt as if he were choking to death on feathers. He began to feel faint. He gargled.

Tried to scream. Fell to his knees. Beside the tiny corpses. There was a humming in his ears. He could sense a breath, like the breath of the world, and a tinny laughter. The spores were laughing at him. We shall restore you with mercy and grace…

Anger rose within him. As he continued to be deprived of oxygen, the sensation of mocking laughter from the spores intensified. He rose to one knee, tried to insist that he would not become a home for corpses. But all that came out was a whimper. He fell back against the ground.

For a moment—a horrible, gnawing millisecond—as the detective hunched over on his knees among the corpses, there was a great Nothing in his head. Not a thought. Not a memory or even Memory. There was only the relentless squirming of the spores as they raced through his body.

Then, like a King Squid exploding to the surface, the detective wrenched himself to his feet. He muttered to himself. He leaned over and swiped at his trenchcoat. Picked it up. He cocked his head like a monkey, looking around him. He licked his lips. He stared down at the shattered head, the corpse mouth that had once been him.

“Haw haw haw.” The great, looping syllables came out of the detective’s mouth as if he had always spoken that way. The detective’s body danced a thuggish dance around the husked out corpse. “Haw haw haw. Odessa Bliss! I. Am. Odessa. Bliss.” bellowed the detective. And scratched an armpit absentmindedly.

Then, with a frightening burst of speed, the detective’s hijacked body ran into the city of Ambergris, legs pumping, face contorted in an expression of sheer and unrelieved stupidity, sometimes abandoning the straight arrow of its lumbering path to jump for joy at freedom.
The detective no longer heard the giggling of the spores. The detective heard only the vacuous mumbles and half-formed thoughts of Odessa Bliss. The Case had been subsumed by this new situation. He had no case now. He did not even have his own mind. A phrase curled through his proto-thoughts like a length of razor sharp wire: “We shall restore you with mercy and grace…”

Soon he had a new perspective on everything.