by Wilbanks, David T. ; Norris, Gregory L. ; Thomas, Ryan C. ; Chandler, Randy
Or when it rained ashes.
The silence didn’t strike her immediately; Sunny was halfway down the stairs, aware of the gritty crunch beneath her sneakers, when the absence of almost every other natural sound save for the drip-plunk of occasional raindrops sent a chill tumbling down her spine. Where were the squawking birds, the chattering squirrels and chipmunks?
The mist draped over the island was dense enough to obscure the canopy of the tallest pine branches overhead, creating an ashy gray filter everywhere she turned. But that impression wasn’t entirely illusion. Gray liquid dripped down trunks and ran over the ground. The dusty smell she’d noted earlier hung in the humidity and jagged on the nose. Something had come down in the rain.
The storm had laid waste to her clematis and Shasta daisies, leaving shredded blossoms and droopy stalks reminiscent of the palm trees seen in old nuclear test newsreel footage. The decimated gardens added another layer to the sinking feeling in her stomach. For the rest of the summer, the place was going to look like a bombed-out atoll even if she hired a landscaper to patch the place up with annuals.
She walked down to the dock slowly, careful of her steps. Sunny had traveled the short distance of the country path a hundred or more times with confidence, but now she moved as though she were navigating a nightmare, afraid that something might jump out at any second from a shadowy corner. Nothing did, but at the dock she had the overwhelming urge to get in the boat, start the motor, and zip across Foster’s Pond, which sat under a moody curtain of mist too thick to see through to the opposite shore.
Rainwater pooled on the boat’s plastic cover. The puddles sat gray and clotting.
Just get in there, start the motor, and go . . .
Sunny tipped a glance toward the house. Her purse, her things, even the sanity she’d come here to reclaim were back there. Ashes?
She chuckled out loud, shook her head, and aimed both middle fingers at the swirling mists.
“Eat this, Bustamante,” she shouted.
The mist bounced her voice back at her.
“Ashes? It’s fucking pollen.”
Sunny swaggered back to the house, no longer afraid of apparitions. It was time to utilize her overactive imagination in healthier ways.
A wedge of lemon floated in a tall, sweating glass filled with ice and bubbly seltzer, a tiny slice of sunshine on the end table. The air conditioner pumped cool, dry gusts through the room. The silence no longer seemed ominous; in fact, she welcomed it. Seated on the sofa with her feet tucked beneath her and the laptop balanced on an accent pillow, Sunny’s fingers flew across the keys.
Darkness fell outside. And then, inside as well, as the lights and the air conditioning and every other electrical appliance shorted out. Only the laptop’s screen provided any illumination.
Sunny froze. The silence in the absence of all background white noise crawled across her skin. The nothingness fluttered at her ears. The house, which had always been Sunny’s place to escape to when the pressures of life in the spotlight grew overwhelming, went from being her sanctuary to a shadowy no-man’s land.
A crackle of what she wrongly assumed was lightning sparked outside the house. Moving on memory, Sunny ascended the stairs to the second level. Peering through the dirty bathroom window, she waited. The spark lit again, somewhere in the distance. She tracked it mentally through the mist, to the dark waters of the pond’s surface.
“The power cable,” Sunny gasped, hating the sound of her voice in the strangulating silence.
The power line leading from the shore to the island had been severed. It was the only explanation. The convenient excuse about tree pollen wasn’t so easy to believe in the darkness, which grew steamier by the second.
Drenched in sweat, she sat and waited for the dawn. The last time she glanced at her watch, she saw that it was just after three in the morning. Sunny dozed off. The next glance was after five. A murky gray light oozed through the fogged-over window panes. It was time to return home to air conditioning, noise, and Joseph.
She grabbed her purse and the tote containing her laptop and the first chapter of Sunny Weathers, the working title of her new autobiography, and headed out the door. The eerie silence again challenged her, the absence of birdsong so obvious that her arms broke in gooseflesh halfway down the stairs. But that oddity was soon trumped when, as her free hand glided down the rail, it collided with a soft, spongy object attached to the side. Sunny recoiled as the unmistakable smell hit her nose. Congealed gray glop hung off her fingers, the putrefying remains of a mushroom.
Eyes wide, she glanced around the house. They were growing everywhere, gray-skinned and gilled, clamped to the outside of the house, pushing up through the rain-soaked layers of pine needles carpeting the ground, stuck onto the trunks of trees. Mushrooms, a plague of mushrooms, everywhere she turned, all the way down to the dock, where Sunny’s rising panic was long last given substance.
The boat was gone.
Eyes still wide and blinking only when they started burning, she caught sight of the boat, her Grandpa Wally’s old boat, submerged about twenty feet away from shore. The tie down lay in ragged pieces and had been cut.
Silence.
Sunny paced the deck. If she’d had a cigarette available, she would have smoked it down to the filter. Ditto on a funny cigarette, or something bigger. Though she and Joseph had promoted healthy living, he did enjoy the occasional cigar with the guys at the sports network, usually on Super Bowl Sundays and throughout March Madness and the World Series Fall Classic.
Fucking mushrooms, everywhere.
The dregs of the gritty gray ash staining her once-pristine, white Adirondack chairs crawled with dark nubs. Mist lay just as thickly over the treetops, filtering out most of the daylight. The sun could barely be detected, a vague platinum glow.
A musty odor, rotten at the edges, hung around the house. The boat was gone. She could try swimming the distance. Seven years of working out at the YUM! private gym had put her in excellent shape, even factoring in the knife wound.
Except that someone or thing had cut the mooring line and sunk the boat, she was convinced. And she started to suspect the same of the power cable between the island and shore. She was started to suspect and imagine a lot of things.
“Mushrooms,” she whispered.
Sunny walked back into the house and set down her bags. The musty mushroom fetor followed. Whatever comfort and coolness the central air had provided was completely gone. The inside of the cottage felt just as swampy now, and the pretty furniture and watercolor artwork took on a used, dilapidated appearance. The place no longer felt cozy; it had an atmosphere of danger and felt like a trap, a well-laid one.
Drawing in a deep breath, Sunny moved into the kitchen. She opened the fridge, which discharged an agonal puff of barely-chilled air. She grabbed a bottle of seltzer and chugged. The scintillating rush of bubbles down her throat helped her to think. She could swim the distance, she was sure of it. Foster’s Pond and the surrounding shore were home to garden snakes, not cottonmouths or water moccasins. And while snapping turtles did lurk in the thickets and swampy region west of her, she’d never seen anything bigger than a sun turtle between the cottage and boathouse.
A deep croak shuddered through the house.
In the absence of other sounds, this one was loud enough to almost hurt Sunny’s ears. She waiting, listening to the counterpoint of tiny, hissing bubbles in the plastic bottle.
Croak.
Her eyes shot toward the closed door to the left of her top-of-the-line propane-fired oven. The sound originated from behind the door as well as underfoot. It had come from the cellar. The rank mushroom smell down there was even more pronounced.
An unpleasant drip-drip issued up from the darkness. Sunny aimed the flashlight ahead of her, aware of the shake in her hand and the jiggling beam, but was powerless to still it. She reached the bottom of the stairs and tilted the beam around the cellar.
Water lay across the bare ceme
nt floor, another sign that decay was being forced upon the property because, before this weekend, the foundation had been declared sound and free of cracks. She did-n’t store much of anything down there, just paint cans and brushes, so she knew that the misshapen lump in the darkest, wettest corner was a new addition to the cellar landscape.
Eyes wide, a snippet of a prayer on her lips, Sunny cocked the flashlight toward the horror, which quivered, jellyfish-like. The beam touched upon a pallid blob, far too big to be what it appeared, and yet here it was, growing in her cellar.
The giant mushroom reacted to the beam, flinching. A loud croak shuddered through the air, no longer muffled by the house’s floorboards. It twitched, shook. The prayer on Sunny’s lips degenerated into a rosary of expletives. Up close, the sound reminded her of Rona Bustamante’s riding crop from the audition video.
The horror turned, and the pair of black markings she hadn’t dared believe were eyes zeroed in on her. Sunny screamed and ran, and Rona Bustamante’s threat to take vengeance even if it meant from beyond the grave rose fresh in her thoughts.
The thing in the cellar, the giant mushroom, it even looked strangely human around the edges.
Sunny tore out of the house. She made it to the bottom of the stairs without tripping, only to launch face-first when her right foot hit a patch of muddy earth. Her chin struck hard enough to shatter teeth. A taste she equated with sucking on pennies ignited across her tongue.
She picked herself up, aware of the hellish ache along the back of her jaw that hadn’t been there before, the reawakened pain in her breast, and the gray mud splattered across her shirt and jeans, though these things barely registered. There was something growing in the darkness of the cellar. It had come down in the rain, born of ashes and spores, and she knew it was going to look like Rona Bustamante when it was ripe.
She reached the dock, dug in her heels, hesitated. The image of the drowned motorboat loomed before her, doubly sinister now that she possessed the horrifying knowledge of what was happening on the island. Beyond that grim marker, curtains of mist cut off her view of the shore. But the shore was still there. So was her car.
The car keys were back in the cottage, in her purse. Fuck ’em, she thought. All she needed to do was reach the far side. The rest didn’t matter. She’d knock on doors and scream down help in the neighborhood of new homes built atop the bruised earth that used to be her family’s farm. The least those yuppy fucks owed her was the courtesy of a call to 911.
A shadow darted through the platinum-colored water. Sunny tracked it, lost it. A trick of the light, from not blinking? Boat sunk, power line cut.
Every instinct told her not to do it save the one that screamed the loudest, the one reminding her that Rona Bustamante was coming back from the dead, reincarnated as fungus in Sunny’s cellar. She dove.
The world went blurry. Pond water slick with algae smooched her face, her ears. Sunny broke the surface and paddled, doing an impressive job of the strokes and kicks, her Inner Bitch agreed. Within the first few seconds, her imagination drifted back to the nonexistent cottonmouths and the snapping turtles that existed, though not likely around her island. It wandered into territory populated by moray eels, which most certainly didn’t live here, and sharks, and then the Inner Bitch clamped down on that kind of nonsense.
Sunny reached the capsized boat. The shore was a long way off, but she knew she could make it despite the foul pond water crawling over her skin and the phantom chill crawling around inside her.
She reached out, swept back the water, putting more and more distance between her and the island. On one of those forward grabs, something latched onto her hand and deftly sliced off one of Sunny’s fingers.
She staggered ashore, hoarse from screaming, but still screaming anyway. Sunny hauled herself onto the dock, cradling a hand soaked in fresh blood. She held it up, just to be sure. He right pinky finger was gone from the first knuckle up, spitting blood, and showing no sign of stopping.
“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod,” she wailed.
The swim back to shore had probably taken less than a minute, but had felt like hours. Whatever had latched onto her hand had gotten a few decent swipes at her feet on the return swim, too. The sole of her right sneaker lay open in a jagged cut, looking like a person with pinking sheers and superhuman lower arm strength had taken a slice at it. There was a good-sized tear in her jeans below a knee that hadn’t been there earlier. Inner Bitch wondered if she’d sustained the rip in her earlier tumble until she saw that wound, too, was weeping blood.
She was bleeding enough to die if she didn’t find a way to stop it. Dry tears stung at Sunny’s eyes. If she wanted to live, and she did, she had to return to the house. She saw very clearly what she needed to do.
Standing, she crossed the dock and picked up the woodland path, no longer looking as quaint as bulbous gray mushrooms rose out of the ground along both sides. Water splashed. Sunny revolved and saw what had attacked her. She should have known. Like the mushrooms, it all made twisted sense.
The crab—or a creature that resembled one—skittered out of the turgid water. The image kept her from passing out, and though the amputated finger throbbed worse than the knife wound, worse than anything, the urge to swoon vanished. She wobbled on shaky legs, but Sunny was, Inner Bitch reminded, still standing.
Gray-shelled, with legs and claws a sickly shade of yellow, it was as big as a cat. Another scrambled out after the first, and two more in addition to that. Sunny stopped counting after seven, turned, and fast-walked back in the direction of the cottage. Clicks and scrambling sounds rose out of the woods, and she realized there were quite a few more than seven coming at her.
She made it up the stairs and into the cottage, her formerly-beautiful little island retreat, which now smelled hot and rancid, of rotted crab and mushrooms just like Rona Bustamante’s apartment in Lovell Green. Into the kitchen, toward the stove. Her beautiful propane-fired gas stove, one of the few functioning modern conveniences now that the power had been cut off. Cut off, like . . .
There were few things Sunny Weir hadn’t cooked in her years as a celebrity chef, the everyday and the exotic. Basic comfort food turned up a notch as well as the kind of rare, luxurious ingredients most of the human race’s palate would never experience, like black Périgord truffles and edible gold. But she had never cooked with this one particular meat before, and now her life depended upon it.
Sunny switched on the closest burner. Blue flames tipped in orange and yellow tongues sprang forth. Grinding her teeth, she aimed the gushing stump of her missing finger into the fire. Stopping her bleeding was her only goal. Right before the wall of pain crashed into her and she collapsed, Sunny caught the smell of roasting meat, her meat, and in a strange way, it didn’t smell half bad.
“ . . . tastes like chicken,” said a woman’s voice.
Sunny stirred. The voice wasn’t hers or I.B.’s. She explained it away as a hallucination and picked herself off the kitchen floor, careful of her right hand, which sang in exquisite agony. The wound hacked into the back of her leg was bitching now, too. Strangely, the one in her chest itched. She pegged that away as confused nerves. The tit-shanking had, until this morning, been her body’s only squeaky wheel, and she’d rightfully given it her full attention. Now that so many parts of her had been sliced and diced, it was impossible to listen to all of them equally.
The aroma of charred meat lingered. The reality of what had been done to her and in turn what she’d been forced to do to herself rolled over her, nauseating in its ugliness. A part of her body was gone forever, a piece of her that she had taken for granted for most of her life. A finger she used when she dressed and undressed, when she bathed and tidied up during other personal moments; a finger she’d used to bring pleasure to herself and to Joseph. More, one she called upon when she cooked in front of the camera. She could still fulfill her judging duties on Slice and Dice, but how would a missing finger impact Sunny’s Side Up?
Go
ing on automatic, she staggered up the stairs to the bathroom and turned on the cold water. Without electricity to run the well pump, a weakening stream trickled out. Curiously, getting her hand under the water took more effort than thrusting it into the flames. For the first time, she saw the result of the crab’s handiwork, and hers.
A blackened stump, puckered around what she assumed to be bone, met her eyes. The water hit it like acid. But the bleeding had stopped. For a second, so did the pain. The itching at her chest sprang to the front of the unpleasant sensations line. Using her good hand, Sunny lifted her shirt. The tiniest of mushrooms had sprouted along her scar. She flicked them off and dug at the raised zipper of flesh with her nails until that, too, bled.
Somewhere in the cottage, a woman laughed. Sunny ceased scratching and shuddered.
“My Nona Bustamante was a hell of a cook. Better than you, you stupid twat,” said Rona Bustamante.
Sunny glanced toward the cellar door, where another croak sounded.
“She had recipes for wondrous things, and not only food. One time, she followed a recipe and the boy I liked who didn’t like me took a nasty spin on his motorcycle, right into a brick wall. It was beautiful to behold. So red, those bricks were, even days later, after the ants were done taking their fill . . .”
Sunny tracked the voice to the tote bag containing her laptop. She crept over and fumbled the case open. Rona Bustamante’s face dominated an open video file’s window. Her old apartment in Lovell Green was visible behind her. It all looked exactly as it had in the bitch’s audition tape, only this version apparently came interactive.
“Aah, there you are.”
Sunny set the laptop on the nearest counter.
“I thought I heard you tromping around up there, and screaming. Fucking racket, girlfriend. I assume you’ve met my little friends.”
Sunny shot a look out the closest window. Beyond the gritty residue on the outside of the pane, she saw half a dozen gray-shelled monstrosities clicking their jaundiced legs at the base of the deck stairs. The troops had massed, keeping her trapped inside, trapped until the thing in the cellar was ripe enough to detach from its stem and come thumping up the stairs to finish the job.