Death Cap

by Cecil Cavender

We resumed our seats after two of the most unbearable minutes of both our lives, during which the amateur psychologist temporarily became the amateur general practitioner and deduced that I was suffering from cancer, syphilis, and thrush. I had initially assumed that I was quite healthy in that area and, despite a degree of scepticism surrounding his medical capabilities, I left the bathroom feeling considerably worse than when I went in. I tried to console myself with the thought that I had at least deprived him of his chance to sneak into the kitchen and tamper with my dinner. However, the absence of any other feeble explanation to excuse himself from the table led me to think that it must have all been pre-arranged after all, and he was only looking for a chance to double-check that his nefarious plans were being properly carried out.

  I noticed that Vivian was still looking quite uncomfortable, though whether this was due to concern for the welfare of his plot or because he had just had to diagnose my genitals I wasn’t sure. He had washed his hands unusually thoroughly before leaving the bathroom, but I knew that my penis was like my washbasin: pristine and alpine fresh. His level of scrubbing was uncalled for and frankly quite rude, with me right there. Unless, as I suspected, it was necessitated by the fact that he had been handling toxic fungi not hours before. My deduction almost undoubtedly being correct, it was confirmed to me that the Death Cap was indeed already in place, and my annihilation mere moments away. It was little wonder he looked nervous…

  He didn’t take long to start talking about the Mafia again, this time the hilarity of Joe Bonano’s surname, and he was beginning to sound a bit like the Godfather, so I tuned out to deliberate for a while on just why he was trying to kill me. We had had no major altercations recently. In fact the only offence I could possibly have caused, what with my self-imposed exile, was by my refusal of his chanterelles. Hardly a reason to kill though – even through my cascade of tears I couldn’t fail to notice Vivian’s grimace on trying them himself. They were clearly hideous and my crippling fear of mushrooms was not to blame for that.

  Then perhaps it was some nuance of my character. Perhaps my predilection for female deodorant or hardcore acid jazz had finally become too much to bear and he had taken it upon himself to rid the world of me for good. But Vivian was not by nature an easily riled man, quite content to provide his own earplugs or compliment my signature floral aroma.

  No. As I watched him prattling on from across fifteen inches of tabletop, I was struck by the bone-chilling realisation that I could not hope to understand this, because this was not about me. It was about him. Everything suddenly became clear to me. After delving so long into the criminal mindset, he had finally delved too deep and had taken it upon himself to join the ranks of those felonious masterminds he purported to know so much about. I had evidently been selected as his startup project, probably because he thought our charade of a friendship offered him some emotional alibi and the mushrooms provided a perfect outlet for his psychotic creativity. And once I was out of the way there would undoubtedly be others, more unwitting innocents, and he’d likely kill them in the same pattern so as to gain recognition from the police. Mushrooms would probably make an appearance. Then, because he was a drama queen, he would write to the papers with an anonymous poison pen letter and sign it with the alias he hoped they would refer to him by, probably Angel of Death Caps or something shit, and then he’d spend the next week hunched over the Times to see if they’d taken him on…

  Of course he hadn’t reckoned on me seeing through his facade. And having armed myself with the knowledge I could better do battle and, God willing, survive the ordeal.

  But any notion of survival withered and died when, as Orpheus gazing through the gates of Hades, I saw the door to the kitchen swing open. There appeared two plates, steaming, borne to the table by greasy hands flecked with gravy spatters and burns and a palpable sense of doom. My legs seized and bowels inexorably shrivelled like a sultana, leaving me bursting for a wee but unable to do anything about it. They were set upon the surface like the black square upon the judge’s head. Vivian gave a ‘thank you’ and a smile, no doubt relieved by the timely delivery of the weapon to its guiltless victim.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said, turning the treacherous smile to me. ‘Your time has come.’

  ‘Time?’ I felt my eyes widen at his blatant prophesying. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Time to conquer your fear,’ he said, smiling as I imagine Cassius did to Caesar. He took up a knife and prodded at one of the offending items. Et tu, Vivian…

  There they were. Pale and deadly and attempting to mask their deceit by cowering in the shadow of a steak. I could scarcely fix my gaze upon them, so terrified was I of the poisons hid therein…

  I sensed myself becoming Shakespearian and sought to ready myself for battle in the vein of Richard III. Unfortunately I couldn’t remember any of the lines so I decided to focus instead on controlling my palpitating heart and reinflating my bladder.

  ‘Are you alright?’ Vivian said, noting my rigidity and sallowness.

  ‘No,’ I said. Ordinarily I wouldn’t dream of leaving halfway through a meal, but this wasn’t ordinary and I had to get out, etiquette be damned. ‘I don’t think I locked my car. I must go home.’ So I rose from my seat and attempted to make good on my claim, but before I could begin racing for the door, Vivian had grasped me by the arm and returned me to a sitting position.

  ‘You can stop that right now. You’re going to sit there, and you’re going to eat those mushrooms. I’m not shelling out for that soup if you’re just going to cop out now.’

  ‘But the car,’ I said, wondering why I was again in a chair when I should by rights at least be at the car park. ‘It’s a BMW, Vivian. I’ve already had one stolen; I couldn’t bear to lose another.’

  He gave a somewhat relenting nod. ‘Yes, I can imagine it was awful.’ He couldn’t possibly imagine. He owns a Montego, which haven’t been in production since the nineties and were hardly at the forefront of automotive engineering then. ‘But we’re here to help you and we’re not leaving until we do. No, stay in your seat.’

  The prospect of escape seemed to be waning as rapidly as the inevitability of death waxed. I looked to the mushrooms. There were a good number of them, a haul big enough to kill a fair few men, I should think. Vivian wasn’t taking any chances here. I would likely be dead before I even got to try the steak.

  ‘Are we going to be having puddings?’ I asked, wondering how long he had allotted before he expected me to start writhing on the carpet.

  ‘I thought you didn’t want a pudding.’

  ‘I might change my mind. I haven’t seen the dessert menu yet.’

  ‘We’ll see how you feel after the mushrooms.’

  And there was my answer. See how you feel. I was never to be given the chance to see the dessert menu. The covetous loon wasn’t even going to fork out for a final gateau.

  ‘I want to pick a pudding before I eat the mushrooms,’ I said. If I could get him to agree to buy me a pudding it would class as a verbal contract and he might be less inclined to see me dead. But he wouldn’t play.

  ‘Stop being ridiculous.’

  I wasn’t ready to stop being ridiculous but before I could continue to be, Vivian had taken the liberty of leaning over and stabbing one of my Death Caps with a fork.

  ‘Here we go. First one.’ He was trying to look encouraging, or at the very least not murderous, and it wasn’t working. ‘They’re fine, these ones; you can get them in Waitrose. You can get them in M&S.’ As though pulling the middle class mushroom card would sway me. You could probably get them in Asda too. ‘Now open wide,’ he said. ‘Here comes the aeroplane.’

  But I was determined that this aeroplane would never reach its destination. Far better for all concerned if it were to vanish over the sea. I knocked it out of his hand and it went clattering earthwards.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he said, sending in a rescue mission.
The only damage it had taken was a bit of lint to the wing. ‘You’ll get gravy on me.’

  For a moment I thought he was going to go for it again with the same mushroom on the same plane, that he actually had the audacity not just to feed me poison, but poison that had been on the floor. A moment later, however, he had wrapped the cargo up in a napkin and selected a new haul. I didn’t want to continue knocking forks onto the floor and I was disinclined to call the Russians to come and shoot it down, so I settled for closing my mouth.

  ‘Now come on,’ he said, offering it out. ‘Just one piece, and you’re there.’

  There? Where? Hell? I tried to ask him if his notion of there constituted a religious idea of the afterlife or just rotting in a box, but his hand was again speeding towards my lips and I was forced to remain mute. He momentarily refused to accept that I was not going to consume the proffered goods, and attempted to prod at my lips with the fork, which succeeded only in giving the lower one an extremely minor graze that was painless, but that I was nonetheless displeased to receive, and I made myself clear with a significant downward shift of my eyebrows. The fork was lowered.

  ‘Your behaviour is beginning to grate on me,’ he said. I didn’t trust him not to lob the mushroom into my mouth were I to try a reply, so I merely shook my head.

  ‘I’m buying you dinner,’ he said. ‘The least you could do is have a go. I’m starting to feel like you’re not putting any effort into this at all.’

  I’m buying you dinner. Is that how he was trying to excuse this? As though one distinctly average meal in a nil-star sub-par restaurant was going to cripple his finances and leave him destitute? With me out of the way he was going to save a fortune in birthday presents; this was an investment if anything. Well. Maybe not a fortune. I had been anticipating another one of his signed books for my next celebration, as though his signature made it somehow more special when I could just as easily copy it off one of the number of cheques he had given me over the years which were all bouncier than a beach ball on a trampoline…

  ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’

  He was clearly expecting a reply and I could only be rude for so long, so I put a hand over my mouth as a precaution while I answered.

  ‘I’ll have one,’ I said eventually. ‘But only if you have one first.’

  I commended myself on my genius. There was no way he could make me eat it if he refused to do so himself, which he would, unless he was so set on killing me that he would sacrifice his own life to see it done; that he would turn this into a kamikaze mission.

  He was eyeing me with distrust.

  ‘Why?’ he said.

  ‘I want you to check they’re ok.’

  ‘They’re fine.’

  ‘Have one from my plate.’

  ‘They’re fine.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  He looked like he was eating his chanterelles again. The mouth was firmly turned down and a look of slight disgust working its way to the eyes.

  ‘We did this with the soup. We’re not doing it with this too.’

  ‘Have one.’

  ‘You’re not going to get over this if I have to be your personal taster every time you eat.

  I wasn’t going to get over anything if I was dead by the digestif.

  ‘Have one of my mushrooms, Vivian.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Eat it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re trying to kill me.’

  ‘Goddammit, man!’ he shrieked, suddenly springing to his pins and gripping a fistful of fungi with a bare claw. ‘That’s it! You’re doing this now or you’re fucking paying for it!’

  And before I could so much as scream for my life, he had torn away my protective hand and wrenched my jaw open into a terrible rictus, before forcing his poison in with a mad brutality that I had hitherto suspected but never had the misfortune to witness.

  I tried to shout but could only choke, and the world swam before my eyes as he held his hand clamped over my mouth with no window for air. This was it. I was going to die, here, and nobody was going to come to my aid to stop this lunatic poking Death Caps into my nervous system. At this rate I wasn’t even going to experience the poison; I was going to asphyxiate on this badly cushioned faux oak chair with fingers over my face that stank of cheap cigarettes and bad car and ballsack…

  And then, as soon as it had begun, it was over. The hand was loosed, oxygen returned to my lungs, and my surroundings came back into focus. But as my senses were restored, so too was the dreaded realisation: the Death Caps were gone. Not, as I prayed, ejected in chunks from my nose with the force of a canon, but rather creeping at this second into my liver and kidneys, where I could already feel its terrible toxin beginning to take hold.

  Vivian’s face appeared in front of mine, flushed and victorious. ‘Did it,’ he said, watching with intent as though to check I wasn’t about to regurgitate anything out of my ears. ‘Done it.’

  I was doomed.

  ‘No!’ I wailed, attempting to push him away as reality set in. But the poison had sapped me of my energy and all I managed was a gentle pat. ‘For the love of God, no…’

  Vivian’s face was set as he resumed his seat opposite. Perhaps it was naïve of me but I had expected at least some show of emotion, even if it were only a slight regret at never being able to foist another copy of his book off onto me. But his expression was stony.

  ‘It had to be done,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t go on living like this. I had to. It’s for the best.’

  ‘For the best?’ I would have laughed if the poison hadn’t picked that moment to spread to my brain, causing my head to droop. Cranium was nearly introduced to tabletop. ‘I had so much left to do…’

  My life flashed before my eyes but he insisted on talking over it.

  ‘Do stop crying. You’re making a show of yourself.’

  ‘I want to make a show of myself. I’ll never be able to make a show of myself again…’ It was invading my lungs now, and breathing was becoming limited. The air grew thin and my poor, ravaged innards struggled to support me.

  ‘I can’t breathe,’ I said, attempting to clamber out of my seat to seek aid but merely sprawling across the plate instead. ‘My lungs. I’m dying.’

  ‘Sit up and take some deep breaths.’

  ‘I would take some breaths if I could breathe, Vivian. My muscles are going.’

  ‘Calm down.’

  ‘Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like me to calm right down to my grave.’

  ‘You’re not making any sense. You need to relax.’

  I drew in a long, awful breath that I recognised as a death rattle. I had never heard one before, and now I had and it was to be one of the last things I ever heard in my life.

  ‘I really think you need to sit up. Calm down. You’re just having a panic attack.’

  A panic attack.

  A panic attack.

  A Panic. Attack.

  He had just made me choose between suffocation and irreparable liver damage, and he had the audacity to sit there and tell me I was having a panic attack? My body was shutting down organ by organ and my heart incapable and my lungs inconsolable and he thought it was acceptable to accuse me of just having a panic attack? How dare he? How dare he think that just because he had sold a couple of copies of Criminal Mindsets that that gave him the right to lounge there with his steak and his smirk and tell me I was having a panic attack, when I knew full well that his mum had bought ten copies and I had bought two even though I knew he would give me one for Christmas. How dare he? And so, summoning the last of my strength before my body gave out and death could overtake me, I hauled up my head to tell him directly:

  ‘Vivian. You aren’t a psychologist.’

  But I never heard a response. I felt my forehead make contact with steak and knew it was the end. There were hands on my shoulders and I sought to shake them off.

/>   ‘No!’ I tried to scream. ‘Murder! Murder!’ A voice I recognised was telling me to calm down but there were others too now, asking what’s happening and what’s wrong and is he ok, and I was trying to tell them no but rational thought was dying and throat drying and Vivian was lying and asking them to leave…

  ‘He’s just a bit upset.’

  ‘Help!’ I cried. ‘Somebody! Police! He’s killed me!’

  The Death Cap was taking my vision now, tuning out from life and into the white noise of expiration, and my heart was thudding out its last, futile beats. I felt myself falling sideways, propped up only by unknown hands that took my pulse and wiped the steak juice from my brow.

  ‘His heart’s pounding.’

  ‘He’s having a panic attack.’

  ‘Why is he wearing a latex glove?’

  ‘Murder!’ I tried to shriek, but it was coming out with the quality of a crow, croaky and quiet and nigh-on indecipherable.

  ‘What’s he saying?’

  ‘Murmur?’

  ‘Girder?’

  ‘Murder! Murder, murder! It’s murder, why aren’t you stopping him?’

  ‘Ssh, ssh…’

  But the police weren’t coming, and the hands were dragging me to my grave, and Vivian was still at large, as the Death Cap took its final hold and dragged me off the ends of the earth…