Spores

by Ike Hamill

  Marie took her time getting settled. There was a ritual behind the way that she laid out her travel alarm and toiletries. On the lower bunkbed, she put out the clothes she would sleep in, and then what she would wear the following day. This was her temporary home. When she left, she closed the door to keep the room cool. She always slept better in the cold.

  Tyler and Nelson were down in the big room, puzzling over the stove.

  “More wood,” Nelson said, holding his hand a foot over the stove, feeling for the heat.

  “It’s already packed, and it’s blazing,” Tyler said.

  “Then better wood. This isn’t enough heat.”

  Marie didn’t engage in their discussion. She simply moved around the men and closed the damper on the chimney and then the air vent on the stove. The iron began to tick as the draw slowed and the heat started to bake off the metal.

  “Less air,” she said.

  Nelson folded his arms. Tyler blushed and went to the cabinets.

  “There’s a shoveled path over to the outhouse,” Marie said. “I assume you guys have seen it. There’s a hand pump for water that’s supposed to be tested and potable.”

  “We should filter it anyway,” Nelson said.

  Marie nodded.

  “They’ve stocked us with dry goods and canned food. There’s supposed to be an icebox around here somewhere.”

  “It’s here,” Tyler said. He bent over behind an island of cabinets. “It’s in the floor. There’s a compartment.”

  “Good,” Marie said. “That’s the tour, then. It’s primitive, but it will be the lap of luxury compared to tenting in the snow.”

  “We’ll see,” Nelson said.

  She stared at him, trying to guess what he meant.

  “What does that mean?” Tyler asked, taking the bait.

  “This whole study is contingent,” Nelson said. “I knew about the possibility of snow, and I wanted this study to be conducted in the cold, but if we find the organism dormant then there isn’t going to be much point in camping out in the snow, trying to make it jump through hoops. There is some amount of uncertainty to this part of the study.”

  “You never said that,” Marie said.

  “Which part?” Nelson asked. “You’ll have to be more specific if you want me…”

  Marie raised her voice a little louder than she expected to. She couldn’t conceal her anger.

  “You never said that we might not be able to complete the study. Who is afraid to finish now? You give me all that shit on the drive over here because I wanted to be cautious and it turns out that you don’t even think that we’re going to be able to get the data that we need? What kind of bullshit is that?”

  “Stop,” Tyler said.

  Marie ignored him.

  “There was nothing in the proposal about the possibility that the organism would be dormant when we got out here. We could have done this study a month ago and shifted around the Florida stuff,” Marie said.

  “Stop,” Tyler said.

  “You just didn’t read it carefully enough. Look in the last paragraph of the description for this venue and you will clearly see that…”

  “Bullshit!” Marie yelled. She was fully out of control now and the worst part was that she didn’t care. She wanted to yell and scream. She had half a mind to start throwing things. Even better—she would take the keys and leave Nelson and Tyler behind. She didn’t have to be here. This undertaking was out of the goodness of her own heart.

  “Stop it!” Tyler screamed.

  They both stopped and looked at him. There hadn’t been a trace of a stammer in his scream and there was none in his voice when he continued.

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass about either one of your silly reasons to want to cancel this expedition. We’re here now. We’re going to collect data, and we’re going to go home, and I’m going to get a full co-author credit. This work is important and it’s bigger than either one of you.”

  Nelson gave the kid a sad smile and shook his head.

  “It’s not though,” Nelson said. “Tyler, research is just research. It’s not going to save the world. It’s not even going to save your academic career.”

  “Shut up!” Tyler screamed again. He covered his eyes.

  Marie felt bad for him because it was clear that Tyler already knew the truth but hadn’t yet let himself realize it.

  “He’s right,” Marie said. Nelson nodded. “No, not you—him.”

  She pointed to Tyler.

  “We’re going to finish this research even if there’s no data to collect. Actually, I guess you’re both right. We’re going to finish and it probably doesn’t matter. I’ll be upstairs. I’m getting you both up at six so we can go over how to operate the snowmobiles. Good night.”

  Chapter Ten - Site

  (Research)

  MARIE LED THE WAY. With her breaking trail, it was easier for Nelson behind her. Besides, it gave her the opportunity to gun the engine every now and then and spray Nelson with fresh powder. Whenever she did, she heard him release the throttle for a moment, so she knew that it was getting on his nerves. When they reached the ridge, Marie turned her snowmobile around in a big loop so she could run their trail backwards.

  “Okay,” she said over her shoulder after she killed the engine. “You can let go now.”

  Tyler was still clinging to her back.

  “Oh,” he said. He was petrified of riding on the snowmobile. Marie had planned to ride alone, trailing the toboggan behind her with the gear, but Nelson had been unable to maneuver with the kid clutching to his back.

  “Watch out for…” she started to say. She was too late. Tyler disappeared up to his waist in the powder. “Drifts,” she finished. “There was only a foot of snow, but this light stuff tends to accumulate in drifts.”

  Tyler was trying to climb back aboard the snowmobile.

  Marie laughed at him and pointed him towards the rocks up ahead. There, the wind had stripped the snow down to a dusting. Tyler began to wade through and found a path that wasn’t so deep. Marie dropped into his footprints and followed. Nelson had parked his snowmobile right next to the ridge. He was using a pair of binoculars to scout.

  “We’re in the right place,” Nelson said. “I can see a few symbiotic species on the hardwoods.”

  “Where?” Marie asked.

  Nelson handed over the binoculars and pointed.

  “Do you see those shelf mushrooms on those maples. Scan down the trunk and look near the base.”

  “I don’t see anything except snow.”

  “Some of that white isn’t snow. There’s a white fungus on the north side of the bark.”

  “Oh,” Marie said. She handed the binoculars to Tyler.

  The young man took a quick look before handing them back to Nelson. Tyler was more interested in the terrain right around them.

  “I think we can hike down to that creek. The snow doesn’t look deep through there.”

  “Wait!” Nelson said before Tyler could start exploring. “You need one of these.”

  He unzipped his jacket to reach an interior pocket.

  Marie was surprised by what he pulled out. Nelson handed one to her and she held it by the elastic strap.

  “A surgical mask? What do you think we’re going to catch?”

  “They’re not for us,” Nelson said.

  “So I should put it on the tree?” Marie asked, laughing.

  “He means they’re not for our protection,” Tyler said. “It’s for the fungus, right? You don’t want us to infect the fungus?”

  “Exactly,” Nelson said. For once, he didn’t insult Tyler for volunteering a guess.

  “What we would infect the fungus with?” Marie asked.

  Nelson put on his mask and turned to look at her. With a stare that suggested amused contempt, he said, “Just put on the mask.”

  Marie sighed and shook her head. It was still morning and Nelson was already registering a nine on her annoyance scale. It was going to
be an excruciating day.

  * * * * * * *

  (Background)

  For this experiment, their grid was much smaller. Nelson and Tyler were close enough together that, even with their masks on, they were able to hold a conversation. Marie considered asking Nelson to shut the hell up. Her job was to brush away the snow, stab a spike into the frozen ground, and then activate each device. His story was distracting. It wasn’t such a bad thing though. Once he got into the story, the distraction became welcome.

  “As far as we know, the first natives in this area refused to settle this patch of land between the two lakes,” Nelson said. “It wasn’t just the freakish snowfall events, but they also thought this area was where spirits rested.”

  “It was a burial ground?” Tyler asked.

  “No, they would never have committed their own dead to this land. They thought it was the resting place of future spirits. Saying, ‘future spirits,’ is a bit of a misnomer. There’s not a good translation for the word in any modern language. Their word is something like Chibaiozon, and it represents a cluster of knowledge that will eventually be obvious, but now only exists as a footprint in sand. If that knowledge were personified, its footprint would be seen as Chibaiozon.”

  Marie reached Tyler’s position and it was time to turn around. Before she did, she nodded to Tyler. They often commiserated with a glance when Nelson was in the middle of one of his lectures. Tyler barely met her eyes though, he was caught up in the narrative.

  “Then, the Russian loggers came in. Where other missions had failed, they came in strong and confident to take down the tall, old-growth trees for shipbuilding. Those timbers were worth the risk. They could drag them to Lake Awasos with their Ardennes stallions, float them across, and then it was another short drag to the river. Nobody had successfully floated big logs down the length of the river, but the Russians were confident. They came to call this place Otabsen.”

  “What does that mean?” Tyler asked.

  “I believe it’s a couple of words shoved together and chopped off. It may mean, ‘As From Absinthe.’ The Russians thought that the air here was giving them hallucinations like they would get from a wormwood drink. They survived it, unlike the English before them. Those original English crews went crazy and cut each other in half with giant, two-man crosscut saws.”

  “What?” Marie asked, straightening up.

  She was close enough to see the twinkle in Nelson’s eyes. He was enjoying spinning this yarn, probably hoping to scare Tyler into insomnia for the rest of their stay.

  “The whole English crew was sawn in half, like an enormous magic trick gone wrong. The last two men battled with axes until their injuries caused them both to collapse from blood loss. One man was revived when the traveling preacher came to check in on the expedition. He reports that the man’s final words were, ‘We’re all together again. We know everything when we’re together.’”

  “Wow,” Tyler said.

  Marie shook her head as she brushed snow from the next collection point. For a fraction of a second, under a thin film of snow, she saw a skull looking up at her with empty eye sockets from the frozen ground. “Damn it,” she whispered under her breath. She was angry at herself for letting Nelson’s stupid story infiltrate her brain.

  “But the Russians weren’t afraid to come in and tackle the job that the Englishmen had botched. With the first trees that they cut down, they made a couple of long sleds and loaded what was left of all the English corpses. You see, the preacher had run, fearing a band of murderers still on the loose, and nobody had returned to recover the bodies before the Russian loggers arrived. They said that most of the bodies were nothing but bone by the time they arrived, even though less than a year had elapsed.”

  “They left the bodies out here for a year?” Tyler asked.

  “Just ignore him, Tyler,” Marie said.

  Tyler didn’t ignore him and Nelson kept talking, even while they shifted their line down to the next row.

  “The lead man in charge of the Russian crew had a theory. He wasn’t a superstitious man, but he surmised that maybe the approach of the English loggers had led to their doom. The English would come into a forest like this one, and they would take every single large tree. The pine and oak were used for shipbuilding. Cedar trees were turned into shingles. Hemlock was harvested for tanning, and spruce and fir were used for paper pulp. When they were done, a patch of woods like this would be bald. The Russians in this crew were different. They only targeted the tallest pine trees and they ignored everything else unless it got in the way of their hauling. The man in charge figured that if they didn’t disturb the forest too much, it wouldn’t feel the need to disturb them.”

  “So they blamed the woods on what happened to the Englishmen?” Marie asked. Before she finished the question, she was already mad at herself for giving Nelson’s story validity by asking it.

  “Precisely,” Nelson said. “They said that they reached an agreement with Otabsen—only the pines and they could keep their sanity. But there was a rumor around that some of the men had violated the agreement. Those men were punished with a temporary madness. Driven crazy by Otabsen, they would disfigure themselves, but never so badly that they were permanently disabled. The most common injury was a form of ritual branding. The men would take hot steel and use it to burn shapes into their skin. When they were caught, they denied any memory of the deed. Even when they were witnessed making the self-inflicted wounds, they refused to believe it.”

  Nelson stopped.

  For a moment, Marie was irritated. A story that convoluted required an ending. She bent to dig another hole in the snow. Sometimes, the place where the sensor needed to go was nothing but rock. In those cases, she had to search for the nearest patch of dirt, expanding her snow hole. Every time she did that, she always managed to get snow into the cuff of her glove. The skin on her wrist was starting to feel numb where the cuff was damp. To distract herself, and get resolution to the story, she thought about telling Nelson to continue. It was better that he didn’t finish it—somehow the absurd story was becoming more and more believable and it was starting to creep her out. It was probably because of the way it felt like the woods were watching them. She found the edge of the rock and pushed her sensor into the hard ground. When she did, a little jolt ran up through her fingers, like an electric shock.

  “But the Russian’s made it out?” Tyler asked.

  “They did. All but one. When the last logs were being pulled out, the leader of the crew stayed behind. He said he had to settle the debt. The whole time that his crew teetered on the edge of sanity, disfiguring themselves with hot steel, he had kept his mouth shut. Now that his men and horses were out of the forest, he stood in the middle of their harvesting patch. It must have been right around here. They say that the summer had been so dry that the Russians didn’t even dare to light a pipe in the forest. They kept all of their fire right at the edge of the lake, so any stray sparks could easily be doused. That last day, the leader stood tall and lit a match. He cursed Otabsen and told the forest that man would always conquer and then he lit a match. He dropped it in a pile of dry tinder and watched as the fire grew.”

  “What happened?” Tyler asked, looking around as if the flames might still be burning.

  “They never saw him again. They say that the forest took him, just as he took the forest. This whole patch between the two lakes burned, at least that’s how the stories go. Personally, I believe that there must have been at least one area that didn’t get scorched. That’s where Otabsen, or the Chibaiozon, if you prefer, hibernated. It waited there and then restored itself as the forest came back. It never forgot the natives, the English, or the Russians. The only reason that it doesn’t bother the hunters who come through occasionally, or us for that matter, is because we don’t bother it.”

  Marie pushed her last sensor into the ground. This time, she didn’t feel a shock. She blamed the incident on a random nerve firing. Her back ached from all t
he bending and stretching from the last few months. Instead of taking care of herself, she had been engaged in the same, repetitive motions. They were taking a toll.

  “Okay,” she said. “Are we done here?”

  “Until tonight,” Nelson said. “We need to let these things collect baseline readings during the day and then we have to return after dark so we can run some experiments.”

  Marie and Tyler both nodded. They were slogging through the snow around the grid of sensors, heading back towards the snowmobiles. Nelson stayed where he was, staring at the grid they had made in the forest. Marie figured that he was imagining himself to be a conquering Russian logger, overseeing his domain.

  “Let’s go,” she said. Nelson didn’t move. Marie turned to Tyler. “We’re on our own snowmobile anyway, let him take his time.” She started climbing the slope back up to the ridge.

  “We shouldn’t split up,” Tyler called to her. “Nelson? You coming.”

  Marie left the two of them behind as she climbed. At the top, she was panting through her mask. It felt damp against her face. Marie paused before trudging over to the snowmobile. She leaned out to look down at Nelson and Tyler below. Marie was about to call down to them—to warn Tyler that she was going to leave without him—when she saw something odd. Both men had pulled down their masks. Nelson leaned close to Tyler and said something to him. An instant later, they both turned and looked up at her.

  Marie was so startled that she stumbled back from the hill. She went right to the snowmobile and considered getting out of there. Nelson had been terrible at driving with Tyler riding behind him, but they would figure it out. By the time they got back, she could have the fire in the stove going again and the cabin would be back on its way to being cozy again. It was just the story freaking her out. Putting a cause to her anxiety helped her calm down a bit. The idea was silly. Actually, it was a little irritating. Nelson had told that story, like some campfire ghost story, just to get under their skin. It was truly irritating that the story had actually worked.