by T. A. Pratt
Floating along above it, matching velocity, yes.
Well? What’s the situation?
Er, Chum said, You’re in the back of an old truck. There is a man in a motorcycle helmet sitting on a box beside you. There is a woman driving the truck, also wearing a motorcycle helmet.
All things she knew already, except for the helmets, which was odd.
Where are we?
A... forest? I don’t know. I’m not a global positioning system.
Which direction did we go from Portland? North, south, or east?
Why not west—oh, the ocean. Yes. You went south-east, easily a few hundred miles.
Oh, hell. Marla did know one person in the Pacific Northwest, only it wasn’t a person, exactly, and they’d never met in the flesh. Or the fruiting body, in the case of the other party. “You idiots work for the Mycelium, right?” she said aloud.
The truck swerved. “She’s awake!” the guy in the truck shouted, which was time he should have spent hitting her on the head with a brick or something, because she rolled and lashed out in the direction of his voice, the side of her hand colliding with some part of his anatomy that cracked in a satisfying way. She rolled the other way, snatching the hood off her head and flinging it in the direction of the kidnapper, then ended up on hands and knees, head up, to take in the situation.
The kidnapper’s visor had been up on his helmet, so instead of hitting hard plastic, her strike had smashed his nose, and he was bleeding nicely. The driver was shouting stuff, but Marla didn’t pay attention, just crouched and watched. The kidnapper stood up, bracing one hand on the roof of the cab, about to launch himself at her, but instead she propelled herself, pushing hard with her legs, and shoulder checked him hard on an upward trajectory.
He tipped over backward and fell out of the truck. Still had the helmet on, so he probably hadn’t broken his head in. Oh well. Couldn’t have everything. The driver stopped the truck, pulling off to the shoulder—they were on some deserted-ass blacktop road between endless rows of pine trees—and Marla scrambled on top of the cab. When the driver got out, Marla dropped on her from above, pinning her to the ground. A little shifting, and she got her knees planted squarely between the woman’s shoulder blades, and a hand pressing down on the back of her helmet, keeping her head in the dirt. “Hi,” Marla said. “We haven’t met, but I think I know a friend of yours. Bulliard?” Bulliard was a shambling, ill-tempered sorcerer, devoted to the vast, sentient fungus known as the Mycelium, who lived beneath the trees of the Pacific Northwest and controlled followers through gifts of fungal magic and threats of poison and mind-control; its creatures considered it a god.
“Bulliard is resting,” the woman said. “A new chief acolyte took his place, and he recruited us to join him.” Her voice hitched in a sob. “Now we’ve failed, and we’ll be turned into mulch.”
“Death on first fuck-up is a pretty hardcore management style. Respect.” Marla looked around, and spotted Chum, floating a few yards away. “Chum, go take a look at the other acolyte, see if he’s dead or whatever.”
The skull drifted away down the road.
“Who are you talking to?” the woman asked.
“Invisible guy. Skull. Thing. Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to confess your failure and die, you know. You can just take off. I assume you have a motorcycle somewhere. You could hop on that and ride off on your own and never look back.” That sounded pretty nice. Maybe Marla should get a motorcycle.
“I can’t just—look. Take off my helmet. You’ll see.”
“Okay. No wriggling or trying to lash out or I’ll have to do bad things to you, and I’m trying to do less of that.” She reached down and carefully pulled the helmet off.
Then she said, “Oh.” The back of the woman’s head was covered in fungal growths, slimy ribbons of dark green and fuzzy hyphae in a lighter shade. “The Mycelium has roots in your brain, huh?”
“It gives us power, but we can’t escape. We’re part of the Mycelium now.”
“Gross.” Marla frisked the woman, taking away a nice hunting knife, then said, “Stay facedown or I’ll stab you in the neck.” She quickly went to the truckbed, found some rope, and bound the woman—who was apparently resigned to her fate—in a hogtie. Chum floated back to her. “The other one has a broken leg, but he is dragging himself into the forest.”
“Probably not a super big threat, then,” Marla said. She nudged the woman in the side with her boot. “How many other acolytes are there?”
“Just the high priest.”
“Is that still Bulliard?” She’d contended with him before—a giant of a man hairy with moss, with the manners of a rabid pig.
She shuddered. “Bulliard has been sunk in visions for over two years now. Mushrooms grow on his body. The Mycelium says he may wake again, someday, when he is needed.”
“Who’s the new middle manager then?” Marla said.
“He is called the Messenger.”
“Why? Because he carries the Mycelium’s message out into the world?”
“No. He just used to be a motorcycle courier, and the Mycelium is bad at remembering human names. It remembered yours, though.”
“I make an impression. Where’s home base? Maybe you won’t be doomed. I’m going to deliver myself to the Mycelium. Could be close enough.”
“There’s a GPS in the truck. The destination is already keyed in. The map doesn’t show roads in places where there are actually dirt tracks. You might get lost.”
Marla manhandled the bound woman into the back of the truck, glad the kidnapper was petite. “Let this be a lesson to you,” Marla said. “Always tie up your kidnap victims.” She slammed the back gate and got into the cab of the truck and fired it up. “Ride shotgun, Chum?”
“This is very exciting,” Chum said, floating into the window to hover beside her. “It’s so much fun. I’ve never had such an adventure.”
“Weren’t you literally born yesterday?”
“I was!” Chum said cheerfully.
“Give it time,” Marla said, and put the truck in gear.
The sun wasn’t that low in the sky, but they were deep under the trees by the time the moving blip of the truck connected with the arbitrary-seeming dot on the map, and it seemed very dusk-liked. Marla parked the truck on a spot where the ground was rutted with tire tracks already. “Chum, go scout around.”
The skull obediently floated out the window and into the trees—then came zipping back less than a minute later. “There is a man there, sitting on a rock. He is naked but entirely covered in moss and lichen. He said, ‘Hello, demon,’ when I floated near him and so I ran away. Flew away. Is the Mycelium a god?”
“It sure thinks it is. It’s ancient, anyway, and powerful. Its spores can grant hallucinations, visions, euphoria, berserker strength, freedom from pain... but it can also poison you, make you vomit, drive you made, control your brain. Probably looks enough like a god if you squint that you can’t tell the difference. Plenty of mushrooms create psychedelic states, and psychics use them sometimes to perceive the imperceptible—I’m not surprised the priest can see through your invisibility, or that our arrival was expected. The Mycelium probably has spores in the brains of every bird and fluffy woodland creature for miles around.”
Marla got out of the truck, considered taking hold of the tire iron, and thought better of it. Smashing up the Mycelium’s minions was a good way to spread spores everywhere and get infected herself. “I’m here!” she shouted. “I brought back one of your kidnappers. The other one’s in the forest somewhere.”
A figure emerged from the trees: a young man, trim and dark-haired, wearing what might have once been motorcycle leathers, but were now fuzzed over with moss and lichen. “Marla Mason. I did some work for you, once upon a time.”
Marla squinted. “Oh, right, I remember. You used to run errands with sorcerers, then you got mixed up with Bulliard. Decided to join the cult?”
“I was compelled to join, with mus
hrooms infiltrating my nervous system, but it’s not a bad life.” He shrugged. “I get to be super high a lot. Bulliard was hard to work with, but he’s been put away in storage, like toxic waste should be, so workplace morale has improved. Work-life balance isn’t great, but I’m doing what I can there. You met a couple of my colleagues, who are also my friends. I brought a couple of my buddies from my old weekend motorcycle club into the gill.” He paused. “That was a joke. Like ‘into the fold,’ but instead of fold, it’s gill, the folds under a mushroom cap.”
“The expression ‘brought into the fold’ doesn’t refer to that kind of fold, you moron,” Marla said. “It’s a fold like a flock of sheep. Can you hurry up and be a conduit or whatever? While we’re sharing old expressions, ‘I came to talk to the organ grinder, not the monkey.’”
The courier scowled and opened his mouth, doubtless to make what he assumed would be a witty rejoinder, but then his eyes went blank and his face slack. He spoke, in a deeper voice now, slobber running down his chin all the while. “You stand in the midst of the Mycelium. I am the white rot, the father of foxfire, the mother of will o’ the wisps. I have destroyed—
“I know your curriculum vitae. You’re the vast interconnected underground roots of the honey mushrooms that are strangling this forest to death.” She kicked at the base of a tree coated with what looked like white slime—the white rot, a nasty forest pathogen. “You’re one of the largest organisms on Earth, maybe the largest, scientists think, though they don’t know about the parasitic giant making its slow way north under the Andes, or the Waking Gyre at the bottom of the Tonga Trench. Still, you’re very big, and for some reason sapient, and for some other reason you know a lot of magic, and for still some other reason you like to play at being a god.”
“I am the god of this forest.” The voice wasn’t boastful, merely matter-of-fact, but that might just reflect the Mycelium’s fundamental alienation from human speech patterns.
“Consider me impressed. Why did you kidnap me, Mycelium?”
“You appeared within my sphere of influence, by means I could not detect.” The drool running down the courier’s chin was really starting to gross her out. “You have a reputation for bringing destruction where you go, for betraying gods, for killing what you perceive to be monsters. I happened to have agents in the city, gathering supplies for a ritual—the sort of happy accident that happens often, when you are a god. I wished to determine your intentions, and so I bid them bring you to me.”
“Huh.” Marla leaned back against the hood of the truck and glanced at Chum. “This weird fungal abomination might be a help to us. You have eyes all over Oregon, right?”
“Wherever the wind carries the spores my servants cultivate, I have spies. The rats, the crows, the—”
“Sure, standard verminous dark lord protocols, got it. Okay. I’m not here for you, Magic Mushroom. I’ve come looking for a demon. Seen anyone who meets that description?”
“There is a demon hovering beside you.”
“Not Chum. He’s a pet. I’m looking for a predator.”
“I am not a pet.” Chum was quietly outraged. “I am a guide. A psychopomp. A factotum, at most.”
“I too have slaves,” the Mycelium said.
“Chum isn’t a slave. He’s a royal subject.” Marla considered. “Let’s not get into the sematic weeds here. I’m looking for a scary demon, named Gorgo.”
The biker in the back of the pickup said “Gorgo?”
“I know,” Marla said. “I didn’t come up with it.”
“If I do have information about other... incursions... why should I help you?” the Mycelium said.
“I guess altruism is out?”
“I am, in essence, an eight-thousand-year-old parasitic growth. I take what I want. My willingness to even discuss trade is a new development.”
“Understood. How about threats?” Marla drew herself up. “I am the queen of the underworld. I am the burner of fields, the rot on the vine, the bringer of winter. I am the bride of Death.” She glanced at Chum. “Some fanfare, maybe?”
“She really is,” the skull said, almost apologetically. “Sort of. I mean, basically, when she’s at home, and in the fullness of her power, and....” Marla glared, and the skull flared briefly with bright red light, and intoned, “Bow before her majesty,” but it was too little, too late.
“I can’t bow,” the Mycelium said. “I’m forty thousand tons of fungus. Nor would I bow anyway. You are a formidable sorcerer, Marla Mason, but I can sense divinity, and you are mortal, albeit it wrapped tightly round with potent protective spells, which is why you aren’t already bound in service to me.”
That was something—her better self hadn’t sent her up here defenseless, but she would have enjoyed some offensive capabilities.
“I can tell you are under the protection of a god, though,” the Mycelium said. “Perhaps if your patron promised to do me a favor—”
“No.” Marla ground out the syllable between clenched teeth. She didn’t need anyone’s protection. “You already told me you can’t touch me. How about I burn your forest to the ground, and then dig up the ashes and douse them in gasoline and burn them? You couldn’t do anything to stop me.”
“You are proof against my magic, yes, but not against simple violence. My acolytes—”
“I broke your acolytes already. They didn’t even drug me succesfully—I’m immune, so don’t go thinking you’ll spray psychedelic spores in my face, that shit won’t work either. I let them kidnap me so I could beat the ass of whoever sent them for me.
Turns out you’ve got forty-thousand pounds of ass to kick. That’s fine. I’m patient. I’m thorough. I’m a completist.” She grinned, and even if the Mycelim was a plant with a mind, without the deeply ingrained primate facial recognition protocols that humans had, she had no doubt he could tell it was a nasty smile. “You’ve heard of me. Do you doubt I’ll do what I say? Even if it takes weeks, months, years? I’ll dig up every fucking shred of you and sterilize the soil, I will use chemicals and I will use magic, I will make it my mission.”
“That response seems disproportionate.”
“Think about what you know what me. Don’t ask yourself if it’s disproportionate. Don’t ask yourself if it’s logical. Ask yourself if it’s something I might do.”
The courier’s head went slack for a moment, bobbing down, chin resting on chest, then snapped back up. “If I tell you where this demon Gorgo is, will you go away, and never come back?”
“Never come back to a rotting wet forest I had to be abducted to in the first place?” Marla said. “I think we can work something out.”
Marla took the truck—it ran on some horrible fungal bio-diesel, apparently, and the high priest fueled it up personally—and drove the dirt roads with Chum bobbing in the passenger seat. “Would you have really done all that?” the skull said. “Dug up the fungus, burned the entire forest, if the Mycelium hadn’t helped you?”
“Ugh, no. It’s like a million acres out here. That would have taken forever, and I hate the woods.” She shuddered.
“Oh, my, that’s a relief. You sounded so firm, so absolute—”
“I would have asked Death to snap his fingers and kill the Mycelium for me. I hate asking for help, but he tells me that marriage is about helping each other, and for something like this, I can swallow my pride.”
“By something like this, you mean....”
“An injury to my pride,” Marla said. “The Mycelium wasn’t taking me seriously. I can’t have that.”
“I feel there is a contradiction there, somewhere,” the skull said.
“Don’t worry about it. You were born, like, yesterday. You can’t be expected to comprehend the complexities of the human mind yet.” She yawned. Should have taken a longer nap in the truck. “Rogue River is like a seven-hour drive, maybe more if the roads are shitty. How are you planning to keep me awake?”
“I know a lot of old English folk songs,” Chum said.
“I have no idea why, but there seems to be quite a catalog in my mind, and I suspect I have an excellent singing voice.”
Marla didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “Maybe let’s just each sit with our thoughts.”
English folk songs. Her better self was a real asshole.
Marla slapped her cheeks and muttered a little wakefulness charm. Once upon a time she’d been able to go two or three days without sleeping with only minor loss of function, but she wasn’t as young as she used to be.
She slid out of the truck and took a look at downtown Rogue River. It was a cute town, that much was apparent—the bridge over the eponymous river was cute, the shops were cute, the signage was cute. Small-town tourist in the rural Oregonian mode, probably living off the scraps from nearby Ashland, which brought in theater lovers in droves for their Shakespeare festival. “Well, this place isn’t that big,” Marla said. “We could just wander around until you start glowing blue, chum. But I’m already bored here, so let’s do a divination.”
Marla had foraged and extorted a few useful items from the Mycelium’s high priest, and she opened up the plastic bag she’d put her ritual materials in. A knife, with a worn grip and a stubby blade; a few packets of salt from a past fast-food meal she’d found on the floorboards of the truck; a fragment of petrified wood smaller than her thumb; and finally, a few fat, squirming wood grubs that made her shudder just to look at them. Marla found an alley behind a restaurant that wasn’t open yet and crouched in the darkness by a trash bin: that felt more like home than a shiny happy tourist street. She sprinkled a circle with the salt, and placed the petrified wood in the center, then cut the ball of her thumb, daubed drops of blood on her eyelids and her earlobes, and finally smeared the wood with her blood. She set her intention, concentrating hard. After that, it was just down to killing the grubs, which she did as quickly as possible, and with as little contact.
The blood on the stone fluoresced, and her eyelids and earlobes warmed up. She looked around, and off to the northeast, saw a bright yellow glow, like a bonfire, shining and visible through the trees and walls between them. She cocked her head, and listened, and shuddered. A woman was crying, begging, and then a man’s voice joined in, hoarse, also pleading, and then another woman, higher pitched, shrieking that it hurt, she couldn’t stand it, please, make it stop, she’d do anything.