by Orrin Grey
The back lawn was just as overgrown as the front. I stood in the tall grass and took a few deep breaths of the night air. Except it wasn’t really night anymore. The sky in the east was a pale violet colour.
I looked over my shoulder and saw Julie standing in the kitchen doorway. It occurred to me that I could have simply closed the back door and trapped her in the house. It didn’t appear as if those infected by the fungus had the mental capacity to do much more than walk around and throw up the stuff.
Now I had to deal with Julie. If I didn’t, she’d keep spreading the fungus until the police or the Paranormal Intelligence Agency stopped her. And knowing the PIA, stopping her would probably mean killing her.
I needed to figure out a way to immobilise her until I could contact the authorities.
I raised my hands like a boxer as she shuffled toward me. My gaze happened to drift down and I noticed a dark stain on my right hand. I looked more closely at it and saw a smudge of blue fuzz across my knuckles. At first, I didn’t know where it had come from, then I remembered punching the workman. Right in his fungus-covered face.
I brushed my knuckles against my jeans, but the fungus wouldn’t come off. I tried clawing at it with my other hand, but it was stuck firmly to my skin. I started to panic and raised my hand to my mouth, intending to chew the stuff off. I stopped myself at the last moment. There were already a few small dabs of blue fuzz under the nails of my left hand.
I was so absorbed by my hands — and images of myself strapped to an examination table in a PIA lab — that I had forgotten all about Julie. At least, until I felt her hands close around my throat and start choking me.
I was about to push her away when Jerry suddenly slammed into her from the side and they both went rolling across the ground. I lost sight of them in the tall grass. Then Julie rose up, her hair dishevelled and one of her jacket sleeves ripped at the shoulder. She recovered much faster than the workmen and I wondered if that was because her infection was more recent. I pictured the blue fungus spreading through her body, slowing her down as it filled her up, until she couldn’t move at all. I didn’t know if that was how it actually worked, but if the stuff on my own hands was any indication, I was going to find out soon enough.
Julie fell upon Jerry where he lay groaning in the tall grass. I was rushing over to help him when Julie’s mouth fell open and a torrent of blue sludge came pouring out. It splattered all over Jerry’s face, coating it. The sun was coming up and I saw it more clearly than I wanted to. Jerry’s groans of pain turned to moans of disgust.
I grabbed Julie around the waist and flung her away. Then I pulled Jerry to his feet. He wiped madly at the wet clots of fungus on his face. Some of it came off, but most of it didn’t.
“Felix!” he said in a high, panicky voice. “I can’t see! It’s in my eyes! It’s in my fucking eyes!”
He started to claw at them, but I pulled his arms down and pinioned them to his sides. “Don’t, Jerry. It’s no use. You can’t get it off.”
Jerry let out a miserable moan. His body shuddered in my grip and his legs folded beneath him. I lowered him carefully to the ground and left him there while I went back to the house for the tire iron.
I was so angry at that point I didn’t care if I seriously hurt Julie Spiro knocking her out, as long as I knew she wouldn’t hurt anyone else the way she had hurt Jerry. This had to stop here.
When I came back out, Julie was struggling to her feet. She wasn’t as nimble as she’d been only a few moments ago. The fungus was spreading fast. The stuff on my knuckles now covered my entire hand. It was the same hand holding the tire iron, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when I pulled back to swing it at Julie, it suddenly froze in mid-air.
Julie stared at me with her blank eyes, then she stepped past me and headed for Jerry. I wasn’t a threat, anymore. I was a part of the fungus family. I tried to bring the tire iron down on the back of her head, but the orders from my brain were no longer reaching my hand.
Jerry’s eyes were covered in fungus, so he couldn’t see Julie stalking toward him. I opened my mouth, hoping my voice wasn’t as useless as my hand.
“Jerry!” I screamed. “She’s coming for you! Run!”
If Jerry heard me, he gave no indication. The fungus on his face was spreading rapidly; it looked like he was wearing a fuzzy blue helmet.
This was it, then. Felix Renn, supernatural detective, taken down, not by a vampire or a werewolf, but by some blue fungus. I was glad no one was here to see this.
I took a step toward Julie, mostly to see if I could. There was resistance, but I still managed to do it. I took another step, but when I tried for a third, my leg wouldn’t respond. My thoughts were starting to feel distant.
I looked over my shoulder — I still had enough control over my body to do that much — and wondered how long it would take for someone to find us. Would we still be here, or would we be out spreading this blue plague to all points of the compass?
It was a terrible thought, but the fungus didn’t let me dwell on it. My mind continued to drift like dandelion fluff on a strong breeze. I closed my eyes and tried to hold onto the last thing I had seen: the sun just starting to rise over the distant trees.
Then I felt something. A tingling along my right arm. I opened my eyes just in time to see my fingers suddenly spring open. The tire iron fell out of my hand and landed on my foot. A bolt of pain went racing up my leg. I jumped up and down on my other foot and realised I had regained control of my body.
I looked at my right hand. The blue fungus was still there, but it no longer had that fuzzy, slightly moist look. It was brittle like dried mud, and when I brushed my hand against my jeans it came off just as easily.
I was trying to figure out what had brought this on when I heard someone being noisily sick. I looked over and saw Julie Spiro down on her hands and knees, throwing up thick, ropy strands of the blue fungus. It didn’t have the same syrupy consistency as the stuff the workmen had hucked up. As I watched, I could actually see it fade and turn as brittle as the stuff on my hand.
Jerry was pulling patches of the dried fungus off his face. He looked up at me as I came over.
“Felix.” His voice was low and shaky. “I thought ….”
I nodded. “It’s okay, Jer. So did I.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t think this stuff likes the sun.” I looked over at the house. “I guess that’s why it never spread beyond the Black Lands. It hung around long enough to infect whoever happened to be in the house, then, once the sun came up, it was like it was never here.”
Jerry looked over at Julie. She was lying on her back and groaning like someone with a monumental hangover.
“Is she going to be okay?”
“Probably,” I said. “But we’ll need to get her checked out. We’ll all need to be checked out.”
Jerry suddenly snapped his fingers and blurted, “Vampire moss.”
“What?”
“That’s what I’m gonna call this stuff in my next book.”
That was typical. Jerry was thinking about book titles, while I was thinking about what would have happened if this had been November instead of June, when the sun didn’t rise for another hour.
“That’s great, Jer. Now do you think you could help me get the workmen out of the house so we can show them the light, too?”
Jerry grinned. “Show them the light? That’s not bad, Felix. Can I use that in the book?”
“Sure.”
“By the way, you owe me breakfast.”
“What?”
“You bet me this would turn out to be nothing. Body-snatching fungus equals breakfast on you.” Jerry rubbed his hands together. “A new book, a free meal and a damsel in distress saved by Yours Truly. The day’s barely begun and it’s already shaping up to be a good one.”
“What do you mean you saved her? I’m the one that got us out of the house.”
“Yes, but if I hadn’t called you, y
ou’d be at home asleep right now and there’d be four infected people out spreading blue fungus — excuse me, vampire moss — across Central Ontario.”
“How does that add up to you being the hero?”
Jerry glanced over at Julie. “Come on,” he whispered. “I need this one. You’re supposed to be my wingman, Goose.”
I shook my head. “Welcome back to the human race, Jerry. We’re glad to have you.”
GAMMA
By Laird Barron
Laird Barron is the author of several books, including The Imago Sequence, Occultation and The Croning. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. An expatriate Alaskan, Barron currently resides in Upstate New York.
MY DAD SHOT A horse when I was a boy. The horse, a young sorrel mare named Gamma, slipped and fell while fording a creek way up in the Talkeetna Mountains. Dad had packed her saddle too heavily with supplies. I knew the load was too much when he was piling it on, as if we were heading for fucking Mt. Denali, but I was a coward and didn’t say anything, not a damned thing. Dad scared me. He had to cut the straps off with a Barlow knife as the mare thrashed in the frigid water, and sprayed them in mud and twigs and piss.
Come on, girl, he’d muttered through his teeth as she fought. My god, she fought. Come on, baby. You’re okay, you’re all right. He danced at the end of the halter lead, a goddamned acrobat dodging those flying hooves. A bearded ballerina in a drover’s hat and cowboy boots, shotgun slapping against his back as he leaped and capered. His antics were so hilarious that I laughed through the tears.
Gamma scrambled to her feet again, but, after that, she was never quite right, never quite the same. As summer wore on toward autumn, her health declined and she became sickly and weak. Her left eye went milky and her bones jutted. She stopped swishing the flies with her tail when they gathered in clusters upon her haunches. She stood in place for hours, muzzle in the mud.
One morning, Dad shrugged on his jacket and took down the big lever action rifle. He went into the barn and looped a rope around Gamma’s neck and led her down the trail to a secluded spot and blew her brains out. I heard the shot, muffled through the log walls, from my bunk. He walked back into our homely cabin and put the carbine in its rack above the dining table. He sat without speaking at the table, waiting for his breakfast.
Mom poured him a cup of coffee and fried some of her world-famous pancakes. With blueberries she’d stashed in the root cellar. Fresh fruit was a cause for celebration at the ol’ homestead, let me tell you. I recall being so grateful that I licked my plate clean. Like a dog.
If Flatworm B eats Flatworm A, Flatworm B will inherit everything Flatworm A knew. Even Snopes is on the fence when it comes to debunking this theory. But look. When I speak of when, I mean now. There has always been and will only ever be the now. After the rats and the cockroaches succumb, there’s another order in the wings. Of course, eventually, there won’t be any carbon-based life on Terra, even the teeny fibroid shit that exists inside volcanic vents at the bottom of the sea.
Meanwhile. It’s not just the flatworms; it’s everything. Gimme a tomahawk, hell, a flat rock, and I’ll show you.
About one hundred and eighty-thousand years ago, a hominid slunk into a cave and murdered its brother with a spear of spruce wood, fire-hardened at the tip. The death scream echoed from the cave mouth and the birds in the trees began to chatter.
For reasons unknown, the murderer elected to remain in the darkness. Carrion eaters stayed away. Everything that walked or crawled stayed away. A vast and fecund mushroom bed existed within the depths, a portion extending unto the surface world in the manner of a gray tongue drooling from a slack jaw. In the hooting, glottal proto-language of the hominids, the cave was referred to as a cursed place. Eventually, an earthquake happened and the mountainside closed in on itself.
Thank you, great worm that encircles all creation.
I eat pancakes, drive a Toyota, go hiking along nature trails. Camping at night in the wild, doing for pleasure what my ancestors did from necessity, I tell myself that stars are clouds of flaming gas, not the eyes of the old gods peeping through a black tapestry.
I tell myself a lot of shit.
I met Erin while attending college at the University of Washington. She worked part-time at the Saturn Theater. Blonde, blue-eyed Norwegian honey with dazzling white teeth and a penchant for Catholic-school-girl skirts. She smiled at me a couple of times as I shuffled past the ticket booth and, eventually, I worked up the nerve to ask her out. We fucked on the third date and the next morning went to breakfast at that little greasy spoon that used to be on the corner of 4th and Payne. Ruby’s Grille and Disco. The disco bit was just pre-hipster humour.
We ordered blueberry pancakes with blueberry syrup, if I recall correctly. The café became a weekly hangout. After we got hitched and moved to Olympia, I still took Erin there every spring, on the anniversary of our first date.
A couple of years ago, I read in the paper that the frumpy, dumpy teen waitress who served us in the old days got murdered. An exchange student who came in for hash and coffee each and every goddamned morning developed an unrequited crush on her. The guy was a math whiz from Vietnam. His family pawned their souls to ship him stateside for a shot at the major leagues. He tracked the waitress to her house and chloroformed her when she answered the door. Supposedly, her choking to death was an accident. The guy decided not to face the music and snuffed himself in the back of the patrol car with a baggie of chemicals he’d stashed in his sock.
Ruby’s went under with the recession, so I didn’t have to make an excuse to Erin why we went elsewhere to celebrate our happy day.
Gamma died in a hollow. Scraggly spruce trees laced in black moss tangled together like teeth, marshy ground, stagnant water. A breeding pit for mosquitoes and gnats. Winter had come and gone. The birds and the flies and the worms had come and gone. All that remained of her were bones encrusted with verdigris mold sunk in the muck of a mushroom bed. Some of the mushrooms billowed as tall as my thigh.
Not sure what drew me there months after Dad killed her. I remember sitting in the shadows of the trees, as summer sweltered the mountainside, and I remember the hum of a light aircraft traversing the eastern sky. I remember thinking Gamma’s skull was an abandoned palace of the ants, a museum of toadstools. I hadn’t read any Baudelaire, but, wow, fuck, it would’ve resonated, would’ve blown apart my brain, just like Gamma.
What I couldn’t grasp, or didn’t want to, was that there were too many bones in that pile. The moss and the fungus obscured the mess, but, down deep, I knew the shape was wrong, knew I’d stumbled upon a dreadful secret, and I decided to play dumb.
The moss rippled and the ferns shushed with a passing breeze that warbled, flute-like, through Gamma’s eye sockets, while the gray and black and yellow-capped mushrooms dripped and oozed. The mushrooms whispered to me.
Fact or fiction: In 1951 the CIA secretly poisoned a village in France with a hallucinogenic fungus. The Company was interested in studying the effects of pharmacological mind control in the field. Some villagers died; others were sent to asylums due to lunacy. A royal fustercluck, as my grandma would’ve said.
Fiction. The CIA had its hands full developing a smallpox delivery mechanism at the time. Yes, mind control and pharmacology were the original hot topics down at R&D, as the MKULTRA project testifies. Yes, there was a fungus involved and, yes, numerous villagers went berserk. However, it was simply a batch of bad bread that gummed the works. The baker’s snot-nosed assistant fell asleep at the wheel, as it were. Blame him. Not the CIA and certainly not H.P’s bat-winged pals from icy Yuggoth. Pay no attention to rumours about them. No government has ever made contact with an alien species, much less colluded with it regarding human experiments. It was the baker’s apprentice in the mill with a sack of moldy flour.
Moving along, moving along.
For a while among certain fringe circles, the Cordyceps discovery got scientists’ hearts all flutter
y. “The zombie fungus,” some called it. It hailed from before the days of the trilobite. Method of proliferation was to zap various insect species with spores, ants being the most infamous example until late in the 21st century, when a rather horrible discovery was made at a monastery in northern Italy. Anyway, the lunatic fringe suggested doomsday might come in the form of a sporulating organism awakened from hibernation, or worse, adapted by one pharmaceutical company or another for military or private sector application.
The nutters were wrong about poor, innocent Cordyceps, but they had basically the right idea.
Lake Vostok was the epicenter of the latest and greatest extinction event to visit the planet. You know, the lake far beneath Antarctic ice sheets at the quaintly dubbed “Pole of Cold”, where the Soviets built a station, back when there were real live Soviets. Vostok Station. The Soviets stuck it out there and, after they left, the Russians got ambitious and started digging and digging. No money for bread, no money for car fuel, but plenty of rubles for military adventures and boondoggle science projects that included digging.
Into the ice.
That ice is thousands of years old near the surface and it just gets older until you reach bottom and there’s a big, prehistoric lake teeming with … life. What kind of life? Oh, don’t be coy, motherfucker. You know what kind.
The ha-ha part is, that “hypothetical” rogue star would’ve done the job down the road when it kicked loose that planet-killer asteroid and sent her tumbling our way. Every twenty-six million years. Look at the Yucatan; look at the Grande Coupre. Just look. Every twenty six-million years. Like a clock. Goodbye, lizards great and small; goodbye fish; goodbye, you little troublemaking primates. Goodbye.