El Sombra

by Al Ewing

  His prescient sense burning like a blowtorch flame, Ulysses darted glances around the subterranean chamber. His eyes fully adjusted to the change in light levels, Ulysses could see his surroundings quite clearly now. On either side of both he and Petunia stood the stacks of mushroom beds. Swollen fungal shapes emerged from rich compost, their flesh pallid and grey-green: the colour of rotting human flesh. The fungi were at varying stages of development, the very newest growths nothing more than bulbous white heads pushing up from beneath the dark soil. But there were other trays next to these that contained much more advanced growths. Where Ulysses would have expected to see fat stems topped by dark-gilled heads, these fruiting bodies were vaguely humanoid in shape. And they just kept increasing in size, from one stack to the next.

  Beyond the planting trays a host of figures were moving towards Ulysses and Petunia, tightening the noose around them. There were both men and women, dressed in all manner of garb, from that of high class ladies and gentlemen to the practical overalls of lowly gardeners. But there were other things shuffling between them, like ill-formed clay figures with clumsy limbs and thick-trunked bodies, hairless and with only the merest suggestion of features, like folds of flesh in their blank faces.

  Petunia gasped, eyes wide in horror as she caught sight of another of the assembled throng: "Uncle? But - no - it can't be!"

  "Oh, but it can," Mandrake stated bluntly.

  There he stood, renowned botanist and outspoken critic of the Empire, Auberon Chase, as large as life when the last time Ulysses had seen him he had been very much dead.

  "Keep back!" Ulysses warned the advancing mob. They moved as one. Director Hargreaves was closest. "I told you to keep back!" the dandy bellowed in both fear and rage. Hargreaves reached for him. Ulysses swung his rapier blade, savagely bringing it down on the Director's arm. The keen edge cut into the exposed flesh and sliced through it cleanly.

  The Director made a curious keening sound, looking in appalled horror at where the limb had been severed below the elbow. Petunia's scream was more full-bodied. Ulysses was shocked himself. He had not intended to slice the man's arm off. The severed limb lay on the concrete floor, still holding the sheath of his cane. No blood pumped from either the wound or the stump of the arm. In fact, where Ulysses' blade had cut through the flesh it appeared dense and grey, like the meat of a fungus.

  "What the hell's going on here?" Ulysses cried, pulling Petunia close to him, ready to ward off any other further attacks.

  "Revolution, Mr Quicksilver. A change to the world order." The advancing crowd of people and fungoid things halted in their advance.

  "But... why? How?" Ulysses' mind was racing as he tried to see a way out. Where was Nimrod? If only Ulysses could keep this Mandrake talking, perhaps they might yet get out of this situation alive.

  "You have the arrogance to ask why?" Mandrake railed. "Or is it sheer bloody-minded ignorance? Are you not aware of what the rapacious society we live in has done to this planet? We are the custodians of Mother Earth and yet all mankind does to her is rape and pillage from the very thing that he should be striving to protect. This is called the Great Steam Age by some but such power and progress comes at too high a price. Irreparable deforestation is taking place on a global scale causing untold environmental damage. The Amazon rainforest is being depleted on a daily basis, all to feed the hungers of the infernal machines Magna Britannia is so beholden to. Policy must be changed. Attitudes must be changed.

  "Untold thousands of species have been destroyed, thanks to the thoughtless harvesting of the rainforests for fuel. Thousands of cures for all manner of diseases have quite possibly been lost. Plants were among the first living organisms to rise to prevalence on this planet and practically all other forms of life owe their existence to them. Plants were once the dominant kingdom on Earth and they shall inherit this world again!"

  "But what do you hope to achieve here that will make any difference?" Ulysses challenged.

  "Replication and replacement."

  "So you keep saying, but what do you mean?" Petunia shrieked, her desperation at her own plight vying with her desperation to understand.

  "Let us show you." The throng began to advance again. Ulysses swept around him with his blade but there were too many. Feeling a hand on his shoulder, he turned and looked into the amorphous face of one of the fungoid creatures. The fungus-being's mouth opened and it exhaled a cloud of spores into Ulysses' face. He stumbled back, coughing, but the plant-thing maintained its hold on him.

  He felt woozy, drowsy, and inclined not to fight back. The rapier fell from his open fingers. Cold, damp, probing digits sought out bare flesh, enclosing his left hand in their succulent grasp. Petunia's screams became muffled and then turned to a hacking cough. Ulysses suddenly felt so tired; he just wanted to sleep.

  But somewhere, deep inside himself, Ulysses Quicksilver the hero, the struggler against adversity, the champion of Magna Britannia, could sense what was happening and fought to be free. With his right hand he fumbled inside a jacket pocket. Fingers closed around the small inhaler pump that had been Dr Methuselah's gift to him. Fighting to keep his eyes open, Ulysses put the pump to his mouth and inhaled deeply - once, twice, three times.

  His head already beginning to clear, airways free of the soporific spores, Ulysses shook the stupor from himself and looked into a face that was re-moulding itself into a visage that was looking more and more like his own by the second. At the same time, the bulk of the fungoid creature was changing, becoming leaner and growing in height to match his own.

  Ulysses took the inhaler from his lips and sprayed it into the face of the creature. The fungus-Ulysses recoiled, wailing in pain, parts of its altering face dissolving on coming into contact with the fungicidal-spray as if eaten away by acid.

  Petunia was limp in the grasp of another of the shapeless plant-men, which with every passing moment was becoming more and more like her in form and appearance. Ulysses pushed away from his own squealing attacker and sprayed the second metamorphosing creature, with the same consequences. As the shrieking fungus dropped Petunia, Ulysses put the inhaler to her slack mouth and let her inhale the antidote. Dr Methuselah had done his job well, creating a means by which to fight the necrotising spores of the fungal infection.

  Having swept up his sword-cane, with one arm around Petunia to support her, Ulysses seized the initiative and advanced. Their attackers now found themselves under attack as Ulysses strode towards them, spraying the last of the pump's dose into the throng.

  Men and women fell back, giving voice to the same unearthly screams as the fungoid things, suffering the same injuries as the two that had tried to assume the forms of Ulysses and Petunia.

  Then they were past the throng, an iron door in front of them. Ulysses pulled it open and threw the two of them through. Up a steel spiral staircase and they found themselves inside the Amaranth House, what little starlight that penetrated the smog layer of London setting the myriad glass panes glittering in the reflected light of the distant city.

  The two escapees staggered and stumbled along the set cobble paths between the planting beds, lungs heaving, the debilitating effects of the spores still lingering within their overwrought respiratory systems.

  They were no longer alone either. The recovered throng emerged from the subterranean level of the glasshouse and poured after them, moving as one body again. It would be only a matter of moments before they caught up. And then the doors to the Amaranth House were before them and harsh, white light blazed into the building.

  Ulysses threw the two of them bodily aside, tumbling into a bed of cacti, uncaring of the pricks of the spines as, engine roaring throatily, the tanker truck smashed through the glass doors and into the Amaranth House. Razor sharp glass shards chopped through leaves and lanced into the mud of the planting beds. Dark liquid fountained from the ruptured drum of the tanker and rained down on everyone and everything inside the glasshouse.

  Creatures screamed as the fungici
dal agents of the weedkiller broke down their mushroom bodies. The seemingly human men and women suffered the same fate, their true fungal forms dissolving into a grey sludge. The battered door of the driver's cab creaked open and Ulysses' loyal manservant jumped down from the vehicle.

  "Just in the nick of time, eh, Nimrod?" Ulysses said, managing a wry smile despite being drenched in stinking fungicide and feeling drained from the effects of the fungus-thing's attentions.

  "It would appear so, sir," Nimrod agreed. "Now, might I suggest that we make our getaway post-haste?"

  "Indeed! I couldn't agree more."

  Nimrod assisting Petunia in as gentlemanly a manner as possible, Ulysses picked himself up out of the cactus patch.

  "Not so fast!"

  Ulysses' flopped back into the prickly plants as his feet were pulled out from under him. Twisting round he looked into the manic face of the Assistant Director. Mandrake looked back at him with only one eye, the other dissolving along with the spoiled half of his face that had been splashed with the potent weed killer. "What have you done?"

  "Hah! I knew it! You're one of them!" Ulysses exclaimed.

  "I was the first," Mandrake snarled through liquefying lips. "The first of many."

  The mimicking fungoid creature began to claw its way up Ulysses' legs, but he kicked out, freeing himself from the clutches of the bizarre plant-human hybrid.

  "That may well be the case," Ulysses replied, "but whatever you are, you're still dead!"

  In a flash the rapier blade was out of its sheath. Ulysses thrust, the slower Mandrake caught with his guard down. Mandrake gasped and staggered backwards. Ulysses' blade came free of the body, the fungus flesh leaving a milky residue on its surface.

  Ulysses, Nimrod and Petunia watched as whatever it was that had passed for Assistant Director Mandrake stumbled backwards over the guard wire surrounding the recently re-planted Patagonian Mantrap and toppled into the gaping maw of the incongruously named Audrey.

  "Now," said Ulysses, suddenly overwhelmed with exhaustion. "Let's get out of here."

  IX - Bad Seed

  "It was him, wasn't it?" Petunia said, gazing into the middle distance.

  "Don't think on it anymore, my dear," Ulysses said, hugging the shocked young woman around the shoulders. "It's over now. He's gone."

  The three of them were sitting on the neatly tended lawn outside the Amaranth House. With the Mandrake-thing's demise, the last of the fungus-creatures had fallen too. It had been as if the plant-men mimics were all part of one gestalt consciousness: with the first destroyed, the repository of that consciousness went too.

  "But it was his body that was washed up at Southwark, wasn't it?"

  "Yes. I rather think it was. But, like I say he's gone. It's over."

  "One of those... things... took his place. But how did he end up in the Thames? When they tried to take me I just wanted to sleep."

  Ulysses took a deep breath, gazing to the horizon, the sky purpling with pre-dawn light. "I suppose the original Mandrake managed to fight off the effects at first, at least long enough to get away. He must have fled and then fallen into the river as he tried to escape, but the spores overcame him in the end. And it was exposure to those same spores that eventually did for Old Samson and Nancy the street-walker."

  "While the mimic-Mandrake continued his work under the Amaranth House. But why?"

  "In preparation." It was Nimrod who spoke. "Today is the nineteenth."

  "The day of the official opening," Ulysses expanded, bringing Petunia up to speed, "of the Amaranth House. The great and the good will be here in a matter of hours - politicians, industrialists, foreign ambassadors -"

  "And Mandrake's fungi would have been ready to greet them... Become them."

  "Indeed."

  "But where did they come from?" Petunia asked. "I've never seen their like before."

  "I rather suspect they were grown, genetically-modified in a lab somewhere." Ulysses gave Nimrod a look heavy with meaning. "Could this be connected to Professor Galapagos' work? Could someone be selling his secrets on?"

  "It doesn't bear thinking about," Nimrod said darkly.

  "So what happens now?" Petunia asked, all emotion drained from her by her recent experiences.

  "Now? We wait for my old friend Inspector Allardyce, unfortunately. The Met can take it over from here."

  The three survivors fell into stupefied silence again. From their roosts in the arboretum the birds began to greet the coming dawn with their massed singing. Faintly at first, distance muffling the sound, so that it was almost melodic, another voice joined the dawn chorus: a claxon wail. As it came closer, the siren became more strident.

  Ulysses looked at Nimrod, bemusement written large across his features. "Who called the fire brigade?"

  "So, doctor, explain to me again how the hybrid takes on the form of its victim," the visitor asked as they walked the length of the dungeon sub-level. Illumination was kept low in this place, but there was enough light for the visitor to gain at least a passing impression of the things kept behind steel bars and reinforced glass.

  Something amphibian croaked, huddled in a gloomy corner of its damp cell. In another a droid - constructed after the neo-industrialist fashion - stood motionless, only the faintly pulsing glow of its eye-lamps indicating that there was any artificial life remaining within its metal body. In the next, a red-haired simian, as tall as a man, snorted and howled, gnawing at its own wrist and the manacle attached to it.

  "Well, sir, it would appear that once fully mature the hybrid possesses a basic sentience. However, once introduced to its subject it assimilates characteristics of that subject, in terms of intellect and purpose as well as physical make-up, somehow assimilating and replicating all of this from the target's DNA."

  "Fascinating," the visitor pronounced in his rich baritone.

  "In order to subdue a subject, and make it susceptible to replication, the fungus produces modified spores. The spores themselves are highly toxic, as well as having potent narcotic qualities. Exposure to them ultimately results in death, a symbiotic sub-species of necrotising fungus breaking down the host body. I suppose the original reason for this development was to provide the hybrids with nutrient-rich compost. But, even away from its hybrid parent, this symbiotic fungus continues to reproduce itself by sporing."

  "As we saw for ourselves in Southwark."

  "Yes, sir," the lab-coated scientist confirmed.

  They passed another cell, and the small terrier contained within growled at their passing.

  "The dog's still alive, I see," the visitor commented.

  "We're continuing to monitor it, sir, and considering a more thorough examination by means of a live dissection."

  "Excellent. And here they are."

  The two men stopped in front of the last cell, the visitor peering into the gloom. Inside the maximum-security containment unit was nothing more innocuous than a stack of planting trays, small white bulbs poking through the thick mushroom compost.

  "Do you have a name for them yet?"

  "Well, sir, they've been classified as a plant-human hybrid. As well as the human-animal element and the obvious fungal components, we have identified another half dozen plant species used in their bio-engineering."

  "Yes, doctor, but do they have a name? Something like this needs a catchy name, don't you think?"

  "Well, the team and I have been referring to them as mandrakes, sir."

  "I like it. Mandrakes," the visitor mused, the moniker lingering on his tongue. "Yes, why not? And it's amazing isn't it," he went on, pointing at something else, almost missed at first, rooted in the muck and slime at the back of the cell. "That one looks just like him."

  The partially altered thing stared back at them, silent and motionless, pearlescent eyes glowing green in the semi-dark.

  THE END

  Don't miss the further adventures of Ulysses Quicksilver in Pax Britannia: Leviathan Rising by Jonathan Green.

 

 

  Al Ewing, El Sombra