by Orrin Grey
“Sure.” I kissed her. Our lips were chapped, a side effect of the parthen. “They had faith that we could become as amazing as them, someday.”
Things were falling apart on Earth. The country’s hairline cracks were widening. Politicians used reports of parthen — of the wonderful, strange city it revealed — to keep people frightened and stupid. They checked for parthen at the airport now and Congress rammed through a law that said you could go to jail just for having spores on your clothes. Local police tore down buildings where parthen had been discovered and filled basements with concrete. Macy and I watched the state attorney general defend the government’s right to flatten homes. She declared, “People pretend this drug is harmless, but it’s not. We have reports of users leaving their jobs, their families, just vanishing. We’re raising a generation that does nothing but dream of an imaginary city.”
Except Parthen wasn’t imaginary, no matter how much they insisted it was. And the pilgrims weren’t dreaming, anymore; we were waking up. We felt like pioneers from back before the country was sucked dry and flattened out, back when it was wild and green and full of possibility.
By February, the pilgrims had discovered eight ziggurats, forming a ring. There had to be a ninth — the Parthenites did everything in square roots. Finally, a regular on The Elsewhere posted directions to the ninth ziggurat. It wasn’t in the centre of the ring like everyone had assumed. Instead, it jutted off the Birdsong Ziggurat like a spur.
After the directions, the poster wrote, “There are permanent bridges between our world and Parthen. You can find them from the last ziggurat.”
“Permanent?” Macy asked, reading over my shoulder.
“That’s what he says.” I skimmed the replies following the main post. Most were asking if it was for real. The original poster never answered back. “It might be a joke.”
“But what if it’s not?” Macy squeezed my arm. “What if we could live in Parthen forever?”
What if we could start over? What if we could start a new society full of wonder and love and community, finally out from under the shitheel lawyers and fear-merchant politicians? That idea drew pilgrims like sugar drew ants. Before long, people started leaving. They reached the last ziggurat and learned some secret. When they returned to Earth, they would get in their car or on a plane and head … somewhere. They never came back.
Macy and I worked our way toward the Birdsong Ziggurat and then, hopefully, the last ziggurat beyond it. Macy raced ahead like always. She loved Parthen more than she loved me, but at least she kept drawing landmarks to help me follow. After she reached the Birdsong Ziggurat, she showed me pictures of the great arcade circling the fields, its support beams twirled like confectionery. “And there’s really water, Austin. I haven’t seen it, yet, but I could hear a stream running. It’s really faint, almost like I was imagining it.”
Looking at her drawings, I begged Macy not to leave without me. Macy smiled and promised she would wait. At that moment, she probably meant it.
I tried to catch up, but I couldn’t. A week later, I returned from Parthen as wine-red sunset flooded the apartment windows. Macy was stuffing clothes into a duffel bag. I knew what it meant.
“Macy, don’t go.”
She smiled at me, picked up her sketchbook from the nightstand. “You’ll be okay. I’ve drawn every place you need to find. You’ll —”
“No.” I pushed the sketchbook away. “Just tell me how to get to Parthen permanently. Macy, talk to me, please.”
“I can’t explain it exactly. You have to talk to the Parthenites.”
I stared at her stunned. “Wh-what?”
Macy grinned. “They’re not dead. They’re waiting in the last ziggurat. They’ll show you what to do.”
She left. I rushed downstairs after her, but she was already in her car, pulling out of the parking lot.
I couldn’t lose Macy. I wouldn’t be left behind on this miserable world with its bottom rotted out. Grabbing my stuff, I drove out to Cherokee Bluff. There were kids yelling, fighting each other across the rolls of dead turf, but I didn’t see Everest or any other adults. I went through four houses, harvesting as much parthen as I could before the authorities discovered this place and tore it down. Without streetlights, the night was as thick as ink. In the darkness, a kid wailed, “But where’s Momma? Where is she?”
At the apartment, Macy’s phone was ringing. It was her mom, so I let it ring. It wouldn’t be long until people came looking for her, asking questions I couldn’t answer. They’d call the cops, then the cops would find parthen spores everywhere. There was really only one direction I could run.
Lying down, clutching Macy’s notebook, I ate the parthen raw. The tough flesh would sour my stomach, but I didn’t care. Sweat beaded down from my forehead like mushroom caps as I felt myself lifted off the Earth and sped toward Parthen.
It was hard to not push forward too fast, to memorise every sight intimately before moving on. It took days to reach the Songbird Ziggurat. In between times, I hid in the apartment, eating noodles and drinking water, letting my flesh sag off my bones. The withering of my body made my soul riper, nearly ready to pluck.
I knew what to listen for in the Songbird Ziggurat, but I still didn’t quite believe it. The chitter of running water filled the great space. It was the only water anybody had found in Parthen. The thin stream tumbled into a natural chasm, an underground lake that had been here ages before the Parthenites carved the ziggurat around it.
The stream ran along the floor of a long tunnel flanked by stalactites and stalagmites. Standing at the mouth, I smelled a damp, fleshy smell. Not just stone and dry earth, but the smell of something alive.
People pushed past me to enter the tunnel and I followed. Clusters of shiny dark globes hung on the ceiling between the stalactites. One swayed softly, but I couldn’t feel the wind moving it.
The last ziggurat might have been the first one the Parthenites inhabited. Unlike the others, it seemed mostly natural — a great sinkhole covered with a moon-pale dome. More of the globe clusters sat in niches and clung to walls. The air was damp and purple moss grew on the stones. But it didn’t feel alien or exotic; it felt like home. I realised that — somehow — I had been yearning for this place long before parthen let me glimpse it. The mushroom had simply awakened an ache that had grown numb.
But where were the Parthenians? Where was the bridge between this world and ours? I started climbing up the stony slope to look around.
Below, a trembling voice said, “Hel … ello. My name is Jake. Do you understand?” I looked down. A man who had entered the last ziggurat ahead of me was talking to one of the globe clusters as it oozed toward him. The clusters were alive, the Parthenians! They were an evolved fungus. It’s why they lived underground, away from their sun’s terrible heat.
Jake touched the Parthenian’s slick flesh. One of its globes stretched into a flat-tipped tentacle. It felt his fingers, his arm, finally caressing his jaw. Laughing, Jake said, “You understand? Jake. My name is Ja —”
A dozen more tentacles bound Jake’s limbs. They squeezed his torso and head. He twisted back — fingers dug into fungal flesh — but the Parthenian enveloped him. I screamed in Jake’s place. Turning to help, I saw the other Parthenians sliding behind me, tentacles reaching out.
I didn’t dare touch them. I tried dodging between them, but the tentacles sensed me. I backed up to the slope edge and was working up the courage to jump when the tentacle caught my thigh.
The thing wrapped around my face, pushing into my mind like a tongue forced into my mouth. Suddenly, I occupied two bodies. I was in my body and I was in the Parthenian’s, chemical-sensing pits along its tendrils tasting my own sour hormones.
I knew its history. I knew about the dying world and brilliant alchemist who created the mushroom. How dwindling resources were spent sending clouds of spores to drift through space. It took centuries. The spores must have fallen on countless dead worlds before reaching Earth.
We had given up hope. Less than six thousand five hundred and sixty-one of us were still alive, huddled in the last ziggurat. But finally, the humans had come and we could escape. We could follow their astral projections back to their bodies waiting on Earth, a planet that wasn’t dried out and used up.
The Parthenian slurped my mind down like an oyster, trapping me in its own blind, deaf body. I tried to shriek, curse, cry, but was bound in silence.
I’ve been here for weeks, or maybe just days. I can’t imagine what’s happening on Earth.
Crawling along the rocks, absorbing moss as nourishment, I sometimes brush against another human trapped in a Parthenian body. We huddle together, but we cannot speak. We can only trade chemical signals of fear and regret. I think most have gone mad. I force myself to stay sane for Macy. The thing that had kissed me goodbye wasn’t her, just a Parthenite wearing her skin. So, I grope through the last ziggurat, searching for Macy, praying that if I do find her, I’ll know it’s her.
MIDNIGHT MUSHRUMPS
By W.H. Pugmire
Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire has been writing Lovecraftian weird fiction since 1972, when he was serving as a Mormon missionary in Ireland. His Lovecraftian obsession remains intense as he staggers toward senility. His most recent sale is to S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings III, with a story written in collaboration with Jessica Amanda Salmonson. His books include The Fungal Stain and Other Dreams, Encounters with Enoch Coffin (with Jeffrey Thomas) and Uncommon Places. His best book, Some Unknown Gulf of Night, was entirely inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s monstrous growth, Fungi from Yuggoth.
I.
HE DRIFTED, HIS SHADOW and he, beneath an arsenic moon, and as he lifted his eyes to the lunar sphere, its chalky beams fell like sediments of chilly gleam onto his face. He could feel that erosion of radiance crawl across his visage until they reached his eyes, into which they sank so as to find the brain within his skull. Thus, he beheld the frigid night in a different way and tasted its enchantment newly. He had never known starlight to be so intimate and coaxing, as if he could step from the solid ground and walk between the spaces of cold stars until he reached the moon, where he would dance upon its dust. Until such time, he would gambol beneath the satellite’s glowing husk and shut his eyes, and dream a sculptor’s dream. Thus, he capered along the desolate roadway of a forgotten town, past dwellings that sagged with age, not opening his eyes until he tripped over bricks that had fallen from some dislodged chimney. His fall was like some rude awakening and he clawed at earth as he lifted himself up on his knees. He glanced beside him and then his limbs crawled to the planks of wood that served as sidewalk, toward the crooked window that was illuminated by dancing light. The black beast watched him from that window, its wet tongue extended. Frowning, he crawled through the window, brushing against the beast as his eyes feasted on the moving flames within the hearth. The outside chill had not permeated the room and for that he was glad. Having no appetite, he did not look with longing at the aristocratic young woman who sat in her ratty armchair with a plate upon her lap, knife and fork in hand. He took in her lush red hair, her acidic-green skirt, her porcelain complexion. Her pale lips smiled, faintly, as she took the fireplace shovel and dug into a pile of ashes near the front of a hearth that was free of fire. He watched that shovel lift a pile of ashes and bring them before him. He did not move as the shovel turned so that the ashes fell upon the wooden floor. The lady patted the ashes with the shovel until they were a smooth flat surface.
“Write your name,” she commanded. He hesitated one moment, holding his hand over the ashes to sense if they were hot and then he placed one moving finger into their cool, fuliginous surface, watched in silence by his companion as her canine, still at the window, groaned. He wrote his name in the debris, as the woman stabbed at the thing on the plate with her fork and began to cut a tiny portion from it. Finally, she studied the name that had been etched into the ashes. “Well, Demetrios — what brings you to my haunt?”
“You do not exist for me,” he countered, “and, in truth, I think you are nothing but an imaginative artist’s dream, influenced by the ghastly light of the bloated moon; for the moon has planted strange passion in my aesthetic brain, and outré song in my poetic mouth, and I would warble of eccentric ecstasy to that globe of distant dust.”
Lightly, the lady laughed. “I have another idea. Come and take a bite of this. Come, Demetrios, creep closer and gaze onto my plate. You would think this was a deformed turnip, would you not, this pale thing that wears a fleshy tint? Why, it looks almost like an infant’s severed foot, doesn’t it? Rather wonderful, what strange fungi one may find sprouting in one’s garden. Come, partake of this little slice and then your lunar ecstasy will find its match in nebulous vision.”
He allowed her to place the fork into his mouth and his teeth clamped onto the thin slice of what at first was a tasteless morsel of rather spongy substance. He peered at the thing upon her plate as it began to blur and subtly curl. His senses had been affected by the soft fleshy slice that he chewed and he suspected that it was, in fact, a kind of deformed, hallucinatory mushroom that was beginning to taint his mental astuteness. He listened and imagined that he heard a rising wind and he sensed a rush of hot air that billowed to him from the hearth. Then the hearth melted from his view, as did his entire surroundings. The fellow shivered as he knelt upon a chilly patch of lonely land. The black beast, still some distance from him, regarded him with woeful eyes and then it crept forward as a particle of that on which he still feasted fell from out his mouth. The canine snout investigated the bit of mushroom and then its tongue lapped up the morsel as the man swallowed what had remained on his tongue. He watched as the beast’s dark eyes began to shimmer with queer sensation, and he shuddered as the hound raised its face to the bloated moon and bayed. And then he followed, on hands and knees, as the animal began to trot from him, toward a forest into which they wandered. He followed the beast through drear shadow formed by thick branches that assembled above them, until they came to the slight mound of earth.
He approached the beast as it rested its head upon the mound and groaned, waiting for the human to join it. Its cold nose nudged his hand, as he placed that member upon the mound, and together the two creatures began to dig into the raised earth, reaching deeply into the soil until he touched something smooth and cold. He struggled to lift the object from its filthy bed and, as he did so, a patch of moonlight pierced through the stitched branches and illuminated what he held. He considered the thing’s form and marveled that a growth of matter could so resemble a slumbering human infant. He saw the stunted pale limbs, the two arms and the suggestion of small legs, and he saw that one of the legs was missing a foot. How curious, that a stream of fog issued from where an infant might have worn a mouth. How peculiar, the way the fellow fancied that the object curled its form as it rested on the spread of his wide hands.
None of that mattered, however; for he was still dizzy with delight from the opium-like ecstasy that he had experienced from feasting on a sliver of pale fungus. And so, as the mist from the fungal mouth began to cloud over them, the gentleman held the mass of misshapen growth to his drooling companion, as the beast and he bent to the fleshy thing and began to consume it.
II
I CONSUMED MY MUSHROOM pie as Demetrios etched into the back of his hand with a carving knife. The black beast at his side licked at the blood that began to spill from the design that split my brother’s flesh. “What a curious word,” I said as I studied the letters cut into my brother’s hand.
“It’s the Polish word for mushroom or fungus and it’s small enough to fit precisely on the back of one’s hand.” Taking his dinner napkin, he placed it over the incised letters and stopped the final flow of crimson liquid. His black beast collapsed onto the floor and groaned.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that at the dinner table. I doubt that you have sterilised that blade. Your implement was far better employed during the time you created your curious thing. How queer o
f you, after having slaved on your outlandish creation, to have buried it in the earth before anyone has had the chance to admire it.”
The thing had been his most ambitious project, and he had spent weeks creating it. The bulk of the figure had been carved of balsa wood that he had imported from Brazil. The shape of the figure suggested that Demetrios had meant it to be feminine, but he had attired the four-foot figure oddly, so that that which covered it resembled shreds of growth rather than clothing. He failed to give the thing a face and attired its head with a most outlandish hat that resembled a fleshy cone opened at the top, with a growth of webbing that served as veil. Truly, it was a remarkable work of art. Thus, I was perplexed when, one moonlit midnight, he carried the object (it was quite lightweight) out of his studio and into the woodland, where I was astonished to see that this most delicate of artists had excavated a round hole that burrowed deeply into the earth. Into that filthy pit he had planted his creation, covering it with the pile of disrupted dirt that rose as a mound next to the hole.
“It is not an art project,” Demetrios spoke, awakening me from reverie. “It is ritualistic, something you refuse to understand.”
“Well, I hate to think of how it has been abused, dwelling in that deep pit for almost nine months, molested by worms or insects or heaven knows what. And now the raised circle of earth covering it has grown a bed of mushrooms — which I must confess you have prepared beautifully in this savory pie.”
“They have a richness in taste, don’t they? One could become quite addicted to such a flavour and dream about it beneath cold starlight. And the psychoactive properties of these particular mushrooms are able to usher the sensitive dreamer into a rare realm of wonder and psychological insight.”
“How clever of you to know that I would have an appetite at this late hour; why, it will soon be midnight. Why do you rise and move so restlessly?”