by Orrin Grey
Except, it wasn’t, isn’t, goodbye this time around. It was hello, baby. The living and the dead and those in between all merged. Separation no longer exists. Gives the old phrase “stuck on you” an entirely fresh definition. May as well resign myself to my new niche on the food chain. I got the feeling nothing is going to change until Nemesis swings by again.
Contrary to Mama’s predictions, I didn’t die in a hail of bullets.
My wife, I forget her name, slept with an English teacher at her school and decided he was an upgrade. She patted me on the hand and said, Sayonara, sucker, or words to that effect. I left my happy suburban home and wandered the world for a while. It didn’t cure my ills.
I read about this poor bastard over in Germany. He was so depressed that he answered a personal ad from a psycho killer who was looking for a willing victim. The depressed guy went to the psycho’s apartment and played the role of sacrificial lamb. A few glasses of burgundy laced with sedatives and Depressed Dude was unconscious. The psycho cut his guest’s throat and cooked the muscle of his shoulder for supper. Yeah, there was some sick, insane shit for you. But, but … in the end, I sort of got where the depressed guy was coming from. The urge to self-annihilate occasionally overwhelms the best of us. Exhibit A: the atom bomb. Exhibit B: love.
Dad and Mom had moved on to greener pastures when I was still a teenager. Upon my return as a middle-aged wreck, I discovered our homestead in the mountains had fallen to ruin. Roof caved in, yard overgrown. Nobody went up there into our private valley. It surprised me how easy Gamma’s death hollow was to find and how little it had changed relative to the obliteration of Dad’s handiwork and the nearly-erased trails that led there.
My God, my God, the bones, or some bones, remained in a calcified pile, webbed in a strange skein of blue and yellow that clung to everything, dripped from the branches of the trees. Those mushrooms were bigger than ever — cyclopean giants the girth of my torso that oozed dark sap. Thousands of insects and birds and squirrels were embedded in the webbing, the stalks of the towering fungi. Mummified, slightly shriveled.
The horror I felt was surpassed by a crushing sense of inevitability, of rightness. I hadn’t come home with the conscious intent of suicide, so I hadn’t brought a proper tool. No gun, no knife, no rope. When I tore a spruce branch from its trunk and rammed the jagged tip through my chest, I was very much taken by surprise. I collapsed into the bed of slime and muck, and waited for the agony to be replaced by the smooth, eggshell perfection of the void of death.
The creeping appetite of that wilderness grave subsumed me over a span of decades. I remember every moment. Although, I am frequently confused. Instead of skewering myself with a homemade spear, I am staring down the barrel of my father’s rifle and into his cold, dead eyes as he squeezes the trigger.
If visitors should arrive here from some distant constellation, they will find this a quiet, peaceful place. Nothing stirs except the water and the wind, the fronds and the blades and the stems of the plants and the fungi that cover everything from sea to scummy sea, from polar cap to polar cap. If the visitors are smart — and, surely, to travel so far from home, they will be quite advanced — their equipment will safeguard them from spores and pollen and the crawling molds that have become ubiquitous. However, I doubt such visitors will ever become aware of me trapped in eternal amber, peeping at them from every keyhole, from every nightmare version of a sundew, a redcap, a pitcher plant. I doubt they will detect that the hiss of the grass, the drip-drop of sap, are the outward expressions of my cries of lament. They will gather their samples and mine their data, and leave, never guessing they’ve trod, not a graveyard, but Sheol itself. I will watch them depart and I will not twitch, no matter my anguish. I am in hell.
And by I, I mean we.
CORDYCEPS ZOMBII
By Ann K. Schwader
Ann K. Schwader is a Wyoming native exiled to suburban Colorado, USA. She is the author of Twisted in Dream (Hippocampus Press, 2011), Bram Stoker Award finalist Wild Hunt of the Stars (Sam’s Dot, 2010) and four other collections of speculative poetry. Find out more from her LiveJournal ( http://ankh-hpl.livejournal.com/ ) or at http://home. earthlink.net/~schwader/.
They glittered mystery in the desert night,
those sparks from space we came to know as spores,
but saw at first by childhood’s light: each mind
its own myth-maker. So contagion spread
as evils always have, without intent
beyond some impulse to perfect one’s life.
Humanity’s quixotic quest for life
outside our homeworld orbit stopped that night,
successfully. Forever. By intent
or otherwise, our fate lay with those spores,
drawn deeper with each sleeping breath to spread
their threads of hunger & ensnare the mind.
Why did the notion never come to mind
that loneliness was safer? Surely, life
elsewhere might have its own agenda, spread
itself upon the star-winds until night
exploded with new constellations: spores
enough for legions linked by one intent.
Unceasing motion seemed the sole intent
sustaining the infested. Maimed in mind,
they roved as little more than meat for spores
of future generations. Aping life
no longer theirs, these shamblers by night
soon burst with fruiting death as terror spread.
From continent to continent the spread
accelerated, fuelled by good intent
turned tragic as a shotgun in the night
unthinkingly deployed. Each spattered mind
released in turn its epitaph to life
as we once lived it, innocent of spores.
Adrift in this necropolis where spores
abandoned us at last, survivors spread
a thousand warning satellites for life
that might approach our planet. Yet, intent
undoes us still: each thread-infested mind
cries out in siren welcome to the night.
So life perfects its own malign intent
until the stars are merely spores that spread
in mindless currents to the curve of night.
A BRIEF LIST OF FUNGAL FICTION
WHILE WORKING ON THIS anthology we asked readers of Innsmouth Free Press to send us examples of fungi in all types of media. The result is this list, where we present some samples of fungal manifestations. It is not intended as an exhaustive compilation, but it may serve as a lead into other mushroom wonderlands.
Stories
• “The Voice in the Night,” William Hope Hodgson (Blue Book Magazine, 1907)
• “Fungus Isle,” Philip M. Fisher (Argosy All-Story Weekly, 1923)
• “The Whisperer in Darkness,” H. P. Lovecraft (Weird Tales, 1931)
• “Spheres of Hell” (aka “The Puff-Ball Menace”), John Wyndham (Wonder Stories, 1933)
• “The Shunned House,” H. P. Lovecraft (Weird Tales, 1937)
• “Come Into My Cellar” (aka “Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!”), Ray Bradbury (Galaxy Magazine, 1962)
• “Gray Matter,” Stephen King (Cavalier, 1973)
• “A Cabin in the Woods,” John Coyne (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, 1976)
• “Fruiting Bodies,” Brian Lumley (Weird Tales, 1988)
• “The All-Consuming,” Lucius Shepard & Robert Frazier (Playboy, 1990)
• “Growing Things,” T. E. D. Klein (999: New Stories of Horror & Suspense, 1999)
• “Leng,” Marc Laidlaw (Lovecraft Unbound, 2009)
• “The Black Mould,” Mark Samuels (The Man Who Collected Machen & Other Stories, 2010)
Novels
• The Boats of the “Glen-Carrig,” William Hope Hodgson (1907)
• Saint Peter’s Snow, Leo Perutz (1933)
• The Wonderful Fl
ight to the Mushroom Planet, Eleanor Cameron (1954)
• A Scent of New-Mown Hay, John Blackburn (1958)
• The Hendon Fungus, Richard Parker (1968)
• The Fungus, Harry Adam Knight (1985)
• Love and War (a Doctor Who tie-in novel), Paul Cornell (1992)
• Shriek: An Afterword, Jeff VanderMeer (2006)
• Finch, Jeff VanderMeer (2009)
• Spore, John Skipp & Cody Goodfellow (2011)
Movies
• The Unknown Terror, Dir. Charles Marquis Warren (1957)
• Matango, Dir. Ishiro Honda (1963)
• Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Dir. Hayao Miyazaki (1984)
• Shrooms, Dir. Paddy Breathnach (2007)
• The Whisperer in Darkness, Dir. Sean Branney (2011)
Television
• “The Voice in the Night,” Dir. Arthur Hiller (Suspicion, 1958)
• “Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!” Dir. David Brandes (The Ray Bradbury Theater, 1989)
• “Field Trip,” Dir. Kim Manners (The X-Files, 1999)
• “Episode #3.5,” Dir. Mark Everest (Primeval, 2009)
• “Alone in the World,” Dir. Miguel Sapochnik (Fringe, 2011)
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Orrin Grey writes stories of the supernatural and macabre, which have appeared in a number of Innsmouth Free Press anthologies, as well as other venues like Bound for Evil and Delicate Toxins. His first collection, Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings, is due out from Evileye Books in 2012. His fascination with monsters and fungus, and fungus monsters, is longstanding and shows no sign of waning any time soon.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s stories have appeared in Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing, The Book of Cthulhu, Bull Spec and a number of other publications. In 2011, Silvia won the Carter V. Cooper Memorial Prize sponsored by Gloria Vanderbilt and Exile Quarterly. Silvia was also a finalist for that year’s Manchester Fiction Prize. She has co-edited the anthologies Historical Lovecraft, Candle in the Attic Window and Future Lovecraft. Her first collection, Shedding Her Own Skin, is due out in 2013.