Spores

by Ike Hamill

  Marie didn’t leave. She sat on the saddle of the snowmobile and started it up, so the seat warmer would kick in. It took a few minutes, but that’s where she was sitting when Tyler and Nelson finally crested the ridge.

  * * * * * * *

  (Night)

  The sun hadn’t even set when Marie started to yawn. The day had sapped every ounce of energy from her. After coming back to the cabin and eating a bunch of crackers slathered with peanut butter, she wanted nothing more than to stretch out for a long nap.

  “I’ll be upstairs,” she said. “Wake me up when you guys are ready to go back out.”

  Tyler nodded and waved.

  Nelson and Tyler were being creepy. They had barely talked since the return from the forest, but more than once Marie had caught the two exchanging nods or raised eyebrows. When she had left them alone, they had talked about something. It was probably a coup of some sort over the travel arrangements. Perhaps they were conspiring against her because she wasn’t an academic. Marie was developing a contempt for people who spent their lives researching nonsense. As best that she could remember, she hadn’t expressed any of her contempt out loud, but she might have muttered a thing or two. It wouldn’t surprise her to find out that Nelson and Tyler had been talking behind her back.

  Her room was too hot. Tyler had packed a ton of wood into the stove again and the logs had practically liquified down into hot lava. All that heat wafted up the stairs and collected in her room. Still, she left the door open a few inches. If one of them started up the stairs, she wanted to hear them coming. It was paranoia—pure paranoia—but Marie liked to indulge her instincts when they struck her.

  She stretched out on her back and looked up at the ceiling.

  The heat was almost suffocating. It was thick and dry, stuffing her lungs with cotton. Normally, she stayed away from the heat, but this almost felt nice. She was wrapped in a cocoon of warmth. Marie closed her eyes and smiled. When the agent on the phone had booked the cabin, he said, “There’s a cord of seasoned wood on the porch. It’s the only heat for the place, so knock yourself out.” The agent was going to regret that when they went to restock the place. The way that Tyler had been feeding logs to the stove, there wouldn’t be anything left but bark by the end of the week.

  “Like this place is going to run out of wood,” Marie whispered to herself.

  She hadn’t seen any stumps around though. The people who put the wood on the porch might have brought it in from the outside. It was possible that the Russians had been the last to cut down a tree on this patch of land. Marie almost laughed aloud. Nelson’s story was a fairy tale—it had to be. He had probably made it up on the spot. There had been no mention of it in the proposal.

  Marie rolled to her side, trying to get comfortable. Now that she was upstairs and lying down, she didn’t feel nearly as tired as she had downstairs sitting in a chair. It was her curse. She loved a good nap, but they were elusive. If she didn’t give into the feeling immediately when it struck her, the drowsiness would evaporate.

  Images of English loggers, cut in half by giant saws, flashed in her head. She pictured them as old woodcut prints. Men with exaggerated, screaming features, cleaved into halves. Her imagination was revving up her heart. Marie forced herself to picture the solid, burly Russians, who came in to take over the job. She pictured them in fur hats with barrel chests, defying nature with a swinging axe. Those men would have laughed at the idea of a spirit that enchanted the forest. But, according to Nelson, they hadn’t laughed. They had given the thing a name and come to an uneasy truce with the malevolent force. If men like that could be forced to bargain, what hope did a few weak-kneed scientists have?

  “It’s a fairy tale,” Marie whispered. She took a deep breath and felt her drowsiness wash back in. Marie let her head clear out and the thoughts fade away to distant chatter. She surrendered to sleep.

  * * * * * * *

  (Awoken)

  As far as she knew, it wasn’t a particular sound that had woken her up. She could sense the person climbing the stairs and held perfectly still. Marie took inventory of her body and figured out that she was facing the wall. The man coming up the stairs would push through the door that was at her feet. Holding perfectly still, she waited for the creak of the hinges.

  Marie felt her pulse quicken. She was flooded with adrenaline. Her body was telling her to jump up and run. There were English loggers at her door, waiting with crosscut saws to separate her into halves. With a horrible flash, Marie realized something—when the English loggers had cut apart their crew, they hadn’t cut them through the stomach, leaving torso on one side and legs on the other. No, she could picture it clearly. They had started between the legs and divided each other symmetrically, bisecting up through the head.

  “Marie?” a voice whispered.

  She nearly screamed.

  “Marie? Are you ready?”

  She opened her mouth to answer, but she couldn’t find her voice. The hot air had dried out her mouth and sinuses. Sitting up and swinging her feet to the floor, she blinked at the door. There was no light in her room except for the flickering orange light coming from the other side of her door.

  The person, it must have been Tyler, rapped lightly on the door.

  “Are you up?”

  “Yeah,” she managed to say. “Be right down.”

  With the sound of footsteps on the stairs, the light disappeared. Marie found her shoes in the dark.

  Down in the living room, Nelson was wrestling himself into a full snowsuit. The puffy blue overalls had straps that went around the bottom of his feet and it zipped all the way up to his neck. When Nelson tried to pull the overalls up over his shoulders, the straps kept snapping off his feet, letting the pants ride up his calves.

  “What?” Nelson asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just… you kinda look like a six year old waiting for the school bus.”

  “We have a lot to do tonight, it’s going to be cold out there, and I don’t want to have to fumble around with a jacket.”

  “I used to have one just like that,” Tyler said as he bent to lace up his boots. When he looked up, Marie saw a devilish expression on his face that she had never seen before. For the first time, she felt like she was seeing Tyler’s real personality shine through his features.

  “I mean,” Tyler continued, “mine had my gloves safety-pinned to the cuffs by my mom, and it had a picture of Spiderman on the back, but aside from that, my snowsuit looked just like yours.”

  Nelson’s nostrils flared. He might have accepted this ribbing from Marie, but to hear it from Tyler infuriated him.

  “Hunters wear these,” Nelson said. “All the time. This is professional outdoor gear.”

  “Do they come in adult sizes?” Marie asked.

  Tyler turned away quickly to conceal his laugh. At that moment, it felt like there was as much heat coming from Nelson’s fury as was coming from the wood stove.

  “I’m going to go start up the snowmobiles,” Marie said. She fled before she could laugh in Nelson’s face. She snickered as she descended the stairs outside and walked down the path to where they had left the snowmobiles. Behind her, the cabin was a little oasis of warm light in the woods. A few isolated snowflakes were falling. The night was still and perfectly quiet. Out here in the peaceful silence, it was impossible for her to believe that anything bad had ever happened in these woods. This was a place of calm beauty. The fear she had felt earlier vanished. Those violent images that had infected her brain were silly—she understood that now.

  Marie started one snowmobile and the other. She wanted to let them warm up—both the engines and the seats—before they started their trip. It took a second, but she found the switch for the headlights, too. When they flooded the night with their cold light, It only made the woods more beautiful. The lights chased away the shadows and gave the trees and snow a flat look, like a black and white photograph. Marie turned to go back to the cabin. Nelson was prob
ably still pouting, and would probably refuse to help with the equipment. It would be up to her and Tyler to load up the trailer with the gear.

  She paused before she reached the porch stairs. In the dusting of fresh snow, she saw footprints that weren’t her own. The headlights from the snowmobile revealed that the footprints went all the way to the rental vehicle. They had brought everything inside when they arrived, and she had the keys to the vehicle. She couldn’t imagine why one of the others had felt the need to go out to…

  “Marie?” Tyler asked from the doorway, interrupting her thought. “Can you give me a hand with this?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  * * * * * * *

  (Readings)

  After everything was set up, there was actually little for Marie to do. She stood for several minutes, bouncing from one leg to the other while she tried to stay warm. Out there in the dark, it was like a different world. Without the sun, and without moving around, it felt about a million degrees colder. She saw that Tyler was hugging himself to stave off shivering as well. The only person who didn’t seem miserable was Nelson. Hunched over his dials, picking up data from the sensor array, he seemed perfectly happy in his absurd snowsuit.

  Marie turned her headlamp over to Tyler.

  “Do we really need the masks if we’re wearing these scarves?” she asked. She didn’t like the warm, moist feeling of the mask against her face. Over the top of the mask, she had wrapped her long scarf twice. It seemed like overkill.

  “Doesn’t hurt,” Tyler said with a shrug.

  Nelson was only a couple of paces away, but concentrating on his instruments, he might as well have been in a different world. He didn’t seem bothered at all by Marie’s conversation with Tyler.

  “I still don’t understand what we’re trying to protect the area from. Other hunters come through here all the time, right? I mean, that’s the whole point of that cabin we’re renting. Usually, they pack a bunch of dirty hunters in there and I’m sure that they tromp all over these woods without any masks on.”

  “They haven’t been where we’ve been though,” Tyler said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about where we’ve been over the past few months. We’ve been to every major fungal organism in the US. We’ve probably breathed in a wider variety of spores than anyone else in the world. If any of those were in our lungs, we wouldn’t want to introduce them into this environment. It’s like the way that they sterilize a probe before they send it to Mars. They don’t think that it would make a difference, but it’s bad to assume.”

  “But we didn’t wear masks at any of the other sites. Why didn’t we have masks down in Florida? We don’t care about contaminating Florida?”

  “This site is different,” Tyler said.

  “Why?” Marie asked.

  He didn’t get a chance to answer.

  “Okay,” Nelson said, over his shoulder. “I’m going to need to run the communication stressors in succession. Can you guys get out to your positions now?”

  The snotty way he said it suggested that he was asking them for the third time to finally do their jobs. In reality, he had demanded that they stay out of the sensor grid until he got everything calibrated. Everything with Nelson was a surprise emergency. It wouldn’t do any good to give him a piece of her mind. She reminded herself that this was the last trip. Soon, she would never have to see him again. Her small act of defiance was aiming her headlamp directly at his eyes for a few seconds. He squinted and looked away.

  Marie followed Tyler and they walked out into the grid of sensors.

  They kept to one of the in-between paths. They weren’t on the shuffling tracks that Marie had left when she placed the devices, they were walking down the trail that Tyler had made when he came back to the starting point. They couldn’t afford to accidentally step on one of the sensors, requiring it to be recalibrated.

  “How are we going to find these things?” Marie asked.

  “Huh?” Tyler asked. He half turned as he trudged through the snow. His foot must have caught on a hidden root or rock. He stumbled forward for a couple of paces and then caught himself again.

  “It’s snowing again. All these sensors are going to get covered up. How are we going to recover them this time?”

  “This is the last experiment. Maybe we don’t have to recover them.”

  Marie frowned, giving him a skeptical look that he couldn’t possibly see. With her scarf and goggles, and the bright light affixed to her head, Tyler probably couldn’t see anything of Marie at all.

  “There’s no way that Nelson is going to leave behind all of his precious devices. I think he cares more about those than he does us,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Tyler said. The way he agreed, it was clear that he didn’t take it as a joke at all. That was a little depressing.

  “See you on the other side,” Marie said. She took a right to find her position. Tyler went to the left. When she found the corner and turned, Nelson was a tiny dot of light through the trees. He had turned off his headlamp so he could focus on his device. At the other far corner, Tyler wasn’t even visible. There was a halo around a couple of trees. He had to be back there somewhere. Marie glanced behind herself and then wished she hadn’t. Behind her, the woods were a black hole, waiting to suck her in. It was pure emptiness at her back, like she was standing at the edge of the known universe, and nothing but madness and oblivion lay behind her.

  Marie shivered inside her coat and hunched her shoulders. Her hand brushed against the thing in her pocket and she suddenly remembered her duty. Tugging off her gloves, she adjusted her light and got the device ready. For this part of the experiment, she would be playing the part of a pig. She managed to get her finger poised over the button just before Nelson said, “Position one, start first behavior.”

  Marie clicked on the device and guttural grunts came from the speaker. Back in the cabin, when Nelson had demonstrated the test, the pig noises had seemed playful and silly. Out here in the dark, isolated in her patch of snow, Marie didn’t like the sound of the pig’s grunts coming from the device. It was an ancient, evil language that the pigs spoke. She could only guess at the murderous thoughts that were being expressed by those animal sounds. Marie glanced into the void again and instantly knew that it was a mistake. With her light pointed downwards, oblivion was even deeper. The darkness was creeping up on her in response to the pig sounds.

  She almost forgot the second part of the experiment.

  While the pig sounds played, Marie scraped her foot against the ground, clearing a patch of snow and then kicking up a bit of the frozen dirt below her. The action was supposed to mimic how a pig would snuffle through the forest, looking for fungi to uproot and eat.

  When Nelson had explained this experiment, Tyler had appeared confused. “I don’t understand this experiment. Swine aren’t native to North America. Why would local fungi have a defense?”

  Nelson had answered with his typical smug look on his face. “This is an Old World fungus and pigs are an Old World animal. We’re testing to see if our species has retained or can be trained on stimuli it has not encountered in over a century. The response will tell us if the behavior is ingrained or adapted.”

  Marie’s objection had been much more practical, in her opinion. “Have you ever been near a real pig?”

  Nelson frowned. “Of course.”

  “This doesn’t sound like one,” Marie had said, pointing to the device emitting the pig noises. “They have deep, barrel chests and the sound they make is like muffled thunder. You feel the grunt under your skin if you’re close enough. That tiny speaker can’t hope to reproduce that kind of bass.”

  “This isn’t the first experiment, Marie, but thank you for your input. We’re reproducing experiments that were conducted in Italy, France, Argentina, and China. We’re using the same device and audio samples that the previous experiments used, and it generates the same frequencies that caused a response in those cases.
This experiment may not yield results, but it won’t be because of the technology involved. We’re simulating an attack on a hibernating fungus and seeing if our specimen has the same…”

  “Okay, fine,” Marie had said.

  If she was honest with herself, she had probably just been trying to find a way out of doing the experiment. Now, standing in the cold and shuffling her feet to simulate a rooting pig, she wished that she had tried harder to get Nelson to call off the nighttime expedition. With a glance through the trees, she saw that Tyler was playing pig as well. Slowly, they worked their way down the perimeter of the patch of sensors. It took almost an hour for the two of them to make their way back to Nelson’s position. Marie’s recording ended first. She put the device back in her pocket and danced up and down from one foot to the other. Despite her boots, shuffling through the snow and kicking at frozen dirt had numbed her toes.

  Marie exhaled with relief when Tyler’s recording finished and he put his device away.

  “Can you finish that up at the cabin, Nelson? I’m perilously close to frostbite here,” Marie said.

  Tyler nodded but didn’t say anything.

  It was several seconds before Nelson even looked up from his readings.

  “Sorry?”

  “Let’s go,” she said. “Finish your sleuthing back where we have a fire.”

  “Hopefully, the fire is still going,” Tyler added quietly.

  “No,” Nelson said. “We actually got some encouraging data. We’re going to have to run the experiments again in forty-five minutes if we want to match the…”

  “I thought this was one and done tonight,” Marie said. She felt like she had just run a marathon only to be told that she was going to have run all the way back to the starting point to where she had parked the car.