Fungi

by Orrin Grey

  Joachim didn’t say anything for a long time. His mother finally huffed and said, “What?”

  “If I do this for you, mama,” Joachim asked, “will you die?”

  His mother sputtered and gasped. “Die! Are you trying to send me to an early grave?”

  “No, no … it’s just so —”

  “Go!”

  Joachim went. It was easy enough to climb the scaffolding with the log and then climb back down into the construction site proper. The security guard was an old friend from high school. Joachim showed him the log and told him about the garden and his mother.

  “There ain’t no bomb in that log, is there?” the guard asked.

  “You can check it out if you want,” Joachim said, presenting the log, his arms outstretched.

  “Just tell me,” the guard said, his own palms up.

  “Mama had another one of these that she planted in the old garden.”

  “Aw, I guess it’s fine, then. Ain’t like I’ll have a job once this place is done.”

  Joachim picked his way through the site till he found what appeared to be the frame for the air shaft. Avenue D was gentrifying, sure, but, in Manhattan, even the gentry are crammed into tiny apartments. Even tenement apartments must, by law, have a window that faces open air, thus shafts. When he was a kid, Joachim was even jealous of friends who had shaft windows. They threw paper airplanes across the gap at one another and got to watch the shadowplay fuck shows parents and fags put on behind the cheap, landlord-issued blinds. Burying the log in the dirt under a waxing crescent moon, he was glad he didn’t have one now. And the years flew by.

  Joachim’s mother didn’t die. Joachim stayed with her. He finished his criminology degree at John Jay then started working for the city, crunching numbers to make the cops look good. The garden was a distant memory. The Voice article tacked up on corkboard in his room turned yellow, then brown. The rent slowly climbed to more than $600 a month, which was still a steal. He forgot all about the log. Girls came and went.

  Then a folder landed on his desk at work. And another one. Lots of 911 calls to the apartment building next door to his own building. The system flags that kind of thing — it usually means that someone’s dealing drugs out of an apartment, or domestic problems, or a cranky old person needs company and likes excitement. But these reports were different. Random. Public masturbation in the hallways and on the stairs — only unusual, really, because the perps were women the same age as Joachim’s mother. And self-mutilation. One man gouged out his own right eye and tried to replace it with a bright-blue robin’s egg. He had another on his coffee table and another big spoon, too, but the cops broke down the door and stopped him. A neighbour had reported the screaming. According to the 911 transcript, the caller had said, “You pigs gotta hear this shit,” and apparently held the phone up to the door. All strange stuff and Joachim was amazed that he hadn’t heard any neighbourhood gossip about it. But the residents of the new building did keep to themselves. Joachim and his friends were the undesirables, the poor people who shopped at the corner market instead of Whole Foods, who drank water from the taps as though the municipal government could be trusted. Who were home by 10 pm, even if it was just to get together and dance on the rooftops. The closest anyone in the new building had come to dancing on the roof was falling down the shaft with a bedsheet parachute tied to her wrists.

  “Ah, yes, the shaft,” Joachim said to himself.

  The building was much harder to get into now. He knew no tenants and nobody responded when he rang the bell. There was video security — the tenants could see who was calling. Not like in Joachim’s building, with its primitive buzzer system. The few people who entered or exited were quick to close the door behind him and glared at Joachim for loitering. His city ID meant nothing. Some snotnose from NYU even made a crack about “late-night emergency chi-square tests.”

  There were still garden supplies in the basement of Joachim’s building. He grabbed some bungee cords and a ladder, and went from his roof to the roof of the new building pretty easily. There was just a one-story difference. The plan was to lower his smartphone, in camcorder mode, down the shaft, but he didn’t need to. Its walls were covered with mold all the way down to the bottom. None of the windows were open, but the air smelled like the inside of a sock. He got down onto his belly and reached into the shaft to scrape some of the gunk off the brick with a drugstore club card. He knew a guy in the city’s police lab. But first, he’d ask Mama.

  She smiled when she saw the stuff and told him to sit by her. “On your very knees,” she said. She pointed to a brazier among the statuettes and candles on her crowded bureau and Joachim brought it to her. She fished an old Key Food matchbook out of it, then scraped the mold into it and lit it afire. She spoke words older than Spanish as the smoke filled the room, and something wonderful happened to Joachim. It was like a story he had read once. About a guy in a basement who saw something that let him see everything: “the multitudes of America … a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid … a splintered labyrinth (it was London),” but what Joachim saw was not even of this Earth. It was a deeper thing, and wiser, and it wished him and his mother both well. There was a path like a labyrinth, like a silvery cobweb, like a long tunnel that bored down through the middle of it all, to another better place. One day, Joachim would be able to follow it like he could still follow the faded green-painted footprints on the streets outside to the step of his home. He’d like to take that long walk into the starry starry night one day, he thought.

  Hours later, when Joachim’s mouth could work again, and when he was sure that his mother was still alive, he asked her, “The log?”

  “Yes, of course. It’s hard to grow that mold in a climate like this, but when you put your mind to it, you can do it. It’s so beautiful. That’s why I wanted it in the garden. To feed the people the same wisdom, to teach them the words I know to say when the fire burns and the mold enters the breath. Words I’ll teach you.”

  “But what about the second log? The one you made me plant next door in the shaft?”

  “Without the words,” his mother said. “Something different happens.” And then she smiled and slept.

  GO HOME AGAIN

  By Simon Strantzas

  Simon Strantzas is the critically acclaimed author of Nightingale Songs, Cold to the Touch and Beneath the Surface — three collections of the strange and supernatural from Dark Regions Press. His award-nominated fiction has appeared previously in the Mammoth Book of Best New Horror series, Postscripts and Cemetery Dance. He still lives in Toronto, Canada, with his ever-patient wife and an unyielding hunger for the flesh of the living.

  SHE REMEMBERED SO LITTLE of her father, but what she did was vivid, crystalised in the fractures of her psyche. His sour breath, his distended gorge rising and falling as he stared at her, licking his razor lips. If she closed her eyes, she could almost hear his slurred voice bellowing at her cowering mother. The phantoms of his presence surrounded her. She knew this was so because every part of her wanted to break down into sobs. But she would not offer even his memory that satisfaction. In hindsight, she could remember his withering face, his jaundiced skin, his waning strength, but none of these things struck her as abnormal. She was blind to the truth and perhaps always had been. Even when her father disappeared for good, she did not question it. Ives knew nothing more of life than that, believed the world was one way and no other. Even if she could not express the thought, she understood that nothing was permanent, that everything in the world tended toward chaos. It was the reason fathers died and black mould infected the only tangible proof they had ever existed at all.

  Afterward, once bruises healed and wounds scarred, once Ives was old enough to understand, her mother told tales of her husband, of his generosity, of the feats he had accomplished before his death, but Ives understood those notions could not be reconciled with the shade that haunted her memory — the man who had glared at her between crib slats, the man
whose skin seeped terminal foulness. They were the true memories, and Ives would be the keeper of them if her mother could not.

  The return to the house had been slowed only by Ives’s reluctance and a basement window swollen shut. So many years spent fleeing only to return and find nothing had changed. Nothing beyond the creep of fungus across the walls. Ives shined her flashlight as she carefully trod, part of her scouring the rubble for any mark of her late father’s passing, but she found none. Instead, only gravity’s constant desire to unmake them.

  The noxious mould had spread across vacant rooms, swirling around broken fixtures and outlets. It was a bizarre pattern, one she very nearly understood and yet one that remained frustratingly beyond. Part of her longed to touch the spreading cancer, as though that would somehow reveal what had been so deceptively hidden, but she resisted. It was a trap: Touching the growth offered no reward she might want. And yet, again, the longing was there, like the ache to leap from the edge of a bottomless gorge, or to thrust a hand deep into the flames of a fire — that urge to experience death, even while running fleet-footed from it.

  The floating spores were so thick in the air that Ives could barely breathe. They coated her mouth, slipped down into her lungs — the mere thought scratching her throat, wanting her to cough. Instead, she bit down and stifled the sensation before she inadvertently launched more spores into the air. Her eyes filled with tears, tears for no one but her, for nothing but what life had brought her on a platter and tried to convince her was fruit. But she was no fool; if it were, it would not be so terribly bitter.

  Anchorless, her pale mother floundered. With no forethought, she moved them from Montreal to Ottawa, where she believed a new beginning awaited. But her anxieties made the trip along with them and those few places where she found employment were impossible to maintain. Ives had no better luck entering school mid-stream — her English was poor and their living arrangements were far too mercurial for any allowances to be made. Instead, she remained with her mother and feigned happiness in hopes it would inspire the same. But her mother was not her. She was not strong and she could do little to keep food on their table, or a roof over their heads. Ives was barely nine by the time she was sleeping in a parked car with her mother, and nowhere near ten when her mother left to get food and never returned. Ives waited patiently in the car for days, staring at the buildings along the street. It was between their brick she saw the first sign of her life’s infection, a small vein of darkness that broke through the mortar like a snake from its skin.

  The house fared worse. No one had stepped foot within its skewed walls since Ives and her mother had left in tears. What once was solid became less so — a phantasm fading from notice, invisible to the world around it. Ives, too, nearly passed it on her approach, the overgrown landscape obscuring the drive, and it was only the tug of memories unburied that caused her to slow enough to spot it.

  Artwork from Ives’s young hands remained affixed to the broken refrigerator, but what shapes she once drew had become a mystery. Lines, spirals, blobs, each so carefully delineated, some arcane pattern whose purpose had been long forgotten. A sorrowful atmosphere pervaded. Within it, a faded table and set of chairs materialised, as though from Ives’s half-remembered past. She ran her finger across the surface and left marks in the dust like scars, but the colours beneath were no less muted. She shined her flashlight on the kitchen wall where the black mould expanded outward like a web, spiralling from the cracks and into others, glistening in the harsh light.

  Ives imagined the tumours had been black and tuberous, poison growing inside her father, and her mother’s loathing for life could have been little different. Both stole everything Ives had and abandoned her with no hope of survival. But she did survive. The abandoned car was her shelter, her home, and though she knew somewhere deep inside that her mother would never return, she continued to wait. Even when she was discovered by a parking officer, even when she was taken back to the station by child service workers, she silently waited. It was only after she was given a room with other children, asked to sleep and eat and wait with boys and girls whose parents had lost them, that she saw the dark entirety of her life in full relief. She was nothing like those children. She remained alone in her cot, staring at the corners of the walls, no longer waiting for something she finally understood would never come.

  What she would not reveal was what she witnessed while inside that locked automobile, waiting for her mother to bring her food. People of different shapes and ages walked by, most ignoring the old car, some peering in the windows. For these, she did as her mother instructed and hid beneath a blanket, remaining perfectly still until she was sure they had gone, and then waiting a time longer. There was more outside the car to worry over, more than scarred men and staggering, hard-faced women. There was a presence in the cold, peering from the darkened alleys and discarded refuse, spying from between bricks and mortar. It wanted her, wanted her as she had never been wanted before. Had she known where to go, she might have run and not looked back.

  Dim salvation came in the guise of an aunt she never knew existed, summoned from Sherbrooke by the call of the police. Ives was collected into open arms and taken away, back to that small town to be given the sort of life she never thought possible. There, she was safe, impossibly loved by a woman who had given up on a child of her own, and yet Ives still could not scrape her soul of the crooked house’s stain. She lay awake at night in her soft, painted room, wondering whether it was back there that everything had begun to go wrong, if it was there that her infinite choices had been constricted, leaving her but one foul path to travel. One path that led back to a single devastating place.

  Was that decaying house any different than her? Sickness grew along its foundations, ate away its support, spread in ever-widening circles so as to consume everything around it. Fingers of mould reached out like shadows across the walls, the ceilings, the floors. She could see them quiver in the beam of her flashlight, struggling to be cloaked once again so they would be free to move, to touch, to explore. If she closed her eyes, she could imagine them wrapping around her throat, trying to choke the last dregs of life from her battered body.

  She stood at the foot of the uneven stairs to the second floor and felt awash in evocations of childhood more vivid than any before. The flashlight’s small circle climbed the treads before her. Ives found herself surprised it did not light the face of her own younger version, perched on the stair halfway between floors with stuffed toy in hand, staring up at what loomed at the summit. A cold chill ran along Ives’s legs, the spectre of something behind her, but the flashlight found nothing — no haunting spirits of the past, no memories made flesh. Instead, there was an empty sitting room, the plaster of its walls crumbling with neglect.

  Three bedrooms with open doors waited at the top of the stairs, but she had no desire to enter any of them. The air smelled of stale earth and she wondered if she had not erred in returning to the house. What hid in the corners of that forgotten hallway? Were they mere shadows or masses of that black mould, expanding from the bubbling walls as though it were more than simply a fungus, as though it were something from beyond trying to force its way through? Part of her sought an explanation that would bring some modicum of sense to all she had experienced, but inside her head was another voice, wiser and unfamiliar, that wanted her to leave the house and never look back. It was that voice she almost obeyed.

  But one door, one room, would not be dismissed. She could feel a force within it drawing her, wordlessly promising the answers she had so long sought. The air had so congealed with dust and spores, as dense and sickening as honey, that she had to push her way slowly through it. With each step forward, her hesitation increased. Every fibre of her being warned her, but she continued, despite knowing she would find nothing to bandage her suffering wounds. Closure was a lie the world wanted to believe. But there could be no closure, no ending. There were no circles, only lines, each with a beginning and an end. And th
ere was nothing between.

  As though Ives’s vision had once been fogged, suddenly the shape at the centre of the room snapped into focus, though Ives did not believe it was possible. It was a crib, her crib — she would forever recognize those slats — but its once-protective shape had been corrupted by teeming black mould. Ives shined her flashlight and saw the mould had spread everywhere, across every wall, every surface, strains of it in a Fibonacci spiral, each tendril recursively spiralling until every surface was inhabited. The black mould pulsed underneath her flashlight like veins of a body, pumping dark ichor throughout. When she traced them back, each strand clearly originated from a single place, one colourless position in the middle of the room. The place where Ives’s blackened crib stood.

  She could not resist coughing any longer, the dense air accreting in her lungs, and the echo that reflected did not sound proper. It was as though it emerged from another, one who both mocked Ives while striving to become her. Colder, deeper, it lacked any of the nuances of human speech. It was alien. When she turned around once more to point her flashlight beam at what stood behind her, what she found was not merely spore-filled air but something far worse.

  It was a shape, darker than the shadows around it. It had no face, no real head of any kind beyond a formless lump. There were no eyes, but it saw her nonetheless. She knew it saw her, for it choreographed its movements with hers. The thing stood nearly her height, was wider than her by half. Where might have hung arms instead grew a bundle of long tendrils, each pulsing and stretching into the black course that erupted from the crib. The surface of the shapes bubbled like molten rock, cauliflower protuberances covering its body. It was not human, but it wanted to be. Wanted to grow legs and arms and a face. Wanted to look her in the eye for some unfathomable purpose. The smell was utterly repulsive, but it was that odour that clarified its origins, led Ives to understand what it was that slouched toward her, waiting to be born. Holes pockmarked its body, visible only in the light’s reflection off its glazed surface, and those openings shrank with each advancing step, its strength growing. Terror strangled the words in Ives’s throat, but her fractured mind finally put the pieces together. Despite her horrible choking fear, she managed to scream aloud, “Daddy! No!”