Fungi

by Orrin Grey

  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 that 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. They spilled across his belly and out onto 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 grey 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.

  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 he 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.

  GOATSBRIDE

  By Richard Gavi
n

  Richard Gavin has authored four acclaimed collections of eldritch horror fiction: Charnel Wine (Rainfall Books, 2004), Omens (Mythos Books, 2007), The Darkly Splendid Realm (Dark Regions Press, 2009) and At Fear’s Altar (Hippocampus Press, 2012). He has also published non-fiction writings on the macabre and the esoteric. Richard lives in Ontario, Canada with his beloved wife and their brood. Visit him online at www.richardgavin.net.

  MARIETTA CAME TO THE Fallows to wait once more for the ghostlights. And, although they would manifest for her that day, she had no inkling that this would be the last time she would see them.

  Her pilgrimage unfurled under the blaze of mid-afternoon. The ghostlights appeared in their customary manner, boiling up out of the aether itself. Tiny splatters of luxuriously-coloured light, their centres the purple-black of heart’s blood, their edges wreathed in a gaudy gleam of chartreuse. They were suspended in midair like Yuletide baubles hung with spider’s skeins.

  The uncomfortably cold, soaked earth of the Fallows began to climb up around the holey leather that covered Marietta’s feet as she stood stone-still in the field, gazing. Although only her lungs and eyelids were moving, and, even then, scarcely, Marietta nonetheless felt as though she were cart-wheeling forward, spinning through the borderless country inside herself.

  After so many visitations, she was well accustomed to such sensations, but thrilled to them all the same. She pressed her eyelids closed, watching the paler suggestions of the ghostlights cascading through the fleshly veils of her eyelids.

  She was straining to hear the sound of his leap, or his terrible bellow that had long ago inspired all the local shepherds to usher their flocks elsewhere. (Marietta was, to the best of her knowledge, the only one who still visited the Fallows.)

  But these heralds of his arrival did not come.

  Opening her eyes, she was puzzled by the grim vacancy of both the field and the woods that framed it.

  All at once, the landscape felt altered. Even the ghostlights shifted their pattern. They began to manically twirl and flex.

  Then they began to drift, leaving thin trails of putrid fog in their wake.

  Marietta followed them to the far end of the field.

  The ghostlights seemed to swarm together to create a kind of constellation. The atmosphere thickened with a rare new gravity, which pulled Marietta’s gaze to a mud patch that stretched drably beneath the brightly churning orbs.

  The ground here drooped in a lazy slope; forging a ditch that distinguished the Fallows from the copse that grew dense and wild alongside it.

  There, heaped upon the dirt like a flung bale of hay, was a nightmare in flesh and fur. Marietta’s senses were so offended by the sight that she reflexively turned away, counting off enough heartbeats to melt the phantasm back into nothing more than the twisted boughs that had been made to breathe only by her own imagination.

  But, when Marietta opened her eyes, she discovered that her attempt to banish it had been in vain.

  The leaping one was still lying broken in the mud. The shock of discovery tainted the atmosphere with a numbness as cold and grey as a stone marker.

  Talons of sorrow pushed deeply, deeply into Marietta until, punctured, she could only collapse at the side of her great love.

  The crooked one’s jaws were moving, but no sound escaped his mouth. When Marietta’s sobs softened at last, the only noise she could discern was the delicate plash of ichor against stone.

  She could but watch as the vital fluid emptied itself from the various wounds that brightened the leathery skin of his trunk, mottled the blackish wool on the wayward contours of his grand legs. Emerging from the tangles of fur was his great livid serpent of muscle, its skin the hue of an overripe plum. Marietta found herself staring at it in a shameful-yet-unbreakable trance. As this snake flexed, the black pit of its eye widened, releasing a reedy sine, a sound not unlike a song. The vivid ichor even spilled from this throbbing hole, mingling with the oh-so-mortal drabness of the earth.

  Marietta believed that the thing was beseeching her with its unworldly eyes. Their irises were the blue of a frozen sea; their pupils vertical slitlike things, cauldron-black and omniscient. A filmy membrane winked across them in rapid sweeps, pushing the grit and sludge to the rim of the reddened sockets.

  She wanted so much to question him, to learn what had happened and how. But Marietta knew that, although her lover’s plump tongue had many uses, speech was not among them.

  Had the others found him? Had they traced him to the great ruddy cave where he slumbered and then beaten him, cut him with blades, pierced him with arrows?

  The grove suddenly dimmed. At first Marietta, wondered if time had disappeared (hours always melted much more swiftly when she was with him), but she realised that the darkening was the result of the ghostlights winking out in tedious succession.

  Now their colours existed only in the vital ichor that bled out of the dying god and seeped into the earth around his gnarled hands and the scuffed lustre of his cloven feet.

  New forms began to halo the failing old one: flies who had come not to crown him, but to sup on the outpouring streams of his lifeblood. Marietta swatted away as many as she could, but, soon, they were legion. They swarmed in swiftly. After lapping up the vivid ichor, the bugs came away intoxicated. Their flight paths were visibly meandering, their pace logy. Never had they suckled a blood so rarefied.

  Marietta traced her hand along the sharply jutting bone structure of his face. Through the filthy moss of his beard, a deep, silent oval of agony widened.

  I’ll come back, Marietta sent to him. I’ll come back with help or with wine, or a song. I’ll come back with something to cure you. They’ll come looking for me if I don’t get back to the village, but I will come back to you. Please stay with me. Please.

  The girl knew no sleep that night. When, upon sunrise, she returned to the Fallows, she discovered that even the gory remnant of her great love had vanished.

  She shirked her chores in order to spend the lion’s share of the day scouring the meadows and the dim groves and the shadow-moistened caves. In her pouch she had a small ration of wine and some salt to titillate a waning palate. But he was nowhere to be found.

  Even the lurid pond of his blood had been subsumed by the soil.

  Marietta lowered herself onto the site of his expiration, too gutted to even weep.

  The invasion commenced the very next morning. Great ships appeared, carrying people with ghost-pale flesh and a faith that was alien to these ancient woods.

  The imprint-free villages of pitched canvas were razed, as swiftly as fired bullets, as inexorably as the descending blade. What swelled in their stead were structures forged from gutted forests. The ruddy contours of his great organic temple were smothered by chapels of chastity, of symmetry. His sighs and shrieks were bridled by a faith that wrestled to keep all ecstasies infuriatingly aloof until after one’s flesh had turned respectably cold.

  The Fallows were upturned and transmuted into a golden carpet of wheat. Harvests sprouted and were soon sown as the interlopers put down deeper roots.

  Marietta lingered, not for family ties, but to keep vigil in the place that had been his, been theirs.

  She earned her keep by carrying out the meagre toils of one of the prominent families in the village. She slept on a cot in the barn and prepared their meals to their unique specifications. She scrubbed the smoothed wood of their floors and washed their dishes of clay. When their stiff clothing looked too lived-in, Marietta mended them with a silver needle and thread.

  But, at night, when the austere ones were slumbering, she would bear a lantern back to the former Fallows and would call his name into the darkness.

  Did these people even know the name of the one who had called these rustic hills his own? Had they any hint of the forces that churned beneath their pathways and their churches and their snug homes?

  Surely, some among them would ache for it, could they but discover the Source ….

/>   Marietta wished and, ultimately, the ghostlights returned … but in a changed state.

  In the early harvest of the year, during one of Marietta’s rare afternoon visits to her paramour’s landmark, she discovered that the ghostlights were now colouring the wheat itself.

  It had been a rainy season and the crops that had sprouted were not golden, but whitish and blotchy with a peculiar fungus: blue and green and flecked with a black that made Marietta think of the vault that held the stars; the darkness that had been the nativity of her great love, whose birth had heralded the primal dawn. And now his sovereign blood was flowering once more, chthonic and musty and raw.

  The people were so desperate to maintain their comfort that they chanced the possibility of toxicity rather than deny themselves a bountiful table.

  They cut the grotesque shoots and ground them. Though the resultant grist was pasty and smelled of unturned roots, they baked it into their loaves, which were devoured with thanksgiving to their Maker. Such were the gifts bestowed to the true.

  Fittingly, it was a young woman who first felt the ichor burning within her. She would awaken with strange stories of nocturnal flights through eerie woodlands and of the touch of an inhuman lover.

  Marietta would often comfort the daughter, encouraging her to keep such fancies to herself, to rest, and to, of course, eat heartily of the bread and wheat gruel she prepared for the girl daily.

  The keepers of the stringent faith soon learned of similar night-rides from other girls in the village. Superstition grew rampant as reports of a great horned form emerging from the woods to hold congress caused great alarm, then persecution, and finally executions.

  Twenty girls found death at the end of a rope. Men of reason pleaded with the authorities that the true problem was a blend of superstition, adolescent fancy and a tainted crop from the previous autumn. Ergot was the name some gave it: a strange mould that had infected the girls with sickness, with vivid nightmares.