Fungi Read online

  FUNGI

  edited by

  Orrin Grey and Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  Published by Innsmouth Free Press

  FUNGI © 2012 Innsmouth Free Press

  All individual contributions copyright by their respective authors.

  “Spore Nose and Corpse Mouth” by Jeff VanderMeer

  originally appeared in Secret Life, 2004.

  “Wild Mushrooms” by Jane Hertenstein originally appeared in

  Rosebud, 2008. All other works are original to this anthology.

  ISBN: 978-0-9916759-1-3 (hardcover)

  ISBN: 978-0-9916759-3-7 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-0-9916759-4-4 (e-book)

  Edited by: Orrin Grey and Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  Cover illustration: Oliver Wetter

  Interior illustrations: Bernie Gonzalez

  Cover and interior design: Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  Reproduction or utilization of this work in any form is

  forbidden without permission from the copyright holder.

  Published by Innsmouth Free Press, December 2012

  Visit www.innsmouthfreepress.com

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Hyphae

  By John Langan

  The White Hands

  By Lavie Tidhar

  His Sweet Truffle of a Girl

  By Camille Alexa

  Last Bloom on the Sage

  By Andrew Penn Romine

  The Pilgrims of Parthen

  By Kristopher Reisz

  Midnight Mushrumps

  By W.H. Pugmire

  Kum, Raúl (The Unknown Terror)

  By Steve Berman

  Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose

  By Jeff VanderMeer

  Goatsbride

  By Richard Gavin

  Tubby McMungus, Fat From Fungus

  By Molly Tanzer and Jesse Bullington

  Wild Mushrooms

  By Jane Hertenstein

  Our Stories Will Live Forever

  By Paul Tremblay

  Where Dead Men Go to Dream

  By A.C. Wise

  Dust From a Dark Flower

  By Daniel Mills

  A Monster in the Midst

  By Julio Toro San Martin

  The Pearl in the Oyster and the Oyster under Glass

  By Lisa M. Bradley

  Letters to a Fungus

  By Polenth Blake

  The Shaft Through The Middle of It All

  By Nick Mamatas

  Go Home Again

  By Simon Strantzas

  First They Came for the Pigs

  By Chadwick Ginther

  Out of the Blue

  By Ian Rogers

  Gamma

  By Laird Barron

  Cordyceps zombii

  By Ann K. Schwader

  A Brief List of Fungal Fiction

  About the Editors

  INTRODUCTION

  IT ALL STARTED WITH a voice in the night …

  The question, of course, is always, “Why do a fungus anthology?” And the shortest answer is probably that nobody had ever done one, at least not that we were aware of. There’s a small but persistent fungal thread that runs, mycelium-like, through the history of weird fiction. It’s a thread that’s firmly rooted in the decaying hulks and weed-choked seas of William Hope Hodgson’s nautical horror stories, especially “The Voice in the Night,” which may be the tale of fungal terror. It has produced a rich crop of fruiting bodies through the years, from authors like Lovecraft, Bradbury, King, and Lumley, as well as the writers whose work appears in this anthology.

  We found early on that we shared a fascination with fungi in general, and weird fungal fiction in particular, when discussing an unusual 1963 Japanese film adaptation of “The Voice in the Night” from Godzilla director Ishiro Honda, best known as Matango, but also called variously Attack of the Mushroom People and Fungus of Terror. One of us was terrified by the film, the other delighted, and we figured that was an appropriate combination for assembling an anthology of fungal stories.

  More closely related to animals than plants, but fundamentally different from both, the members of the kingdom fungi are a diverse and mysterious lot. While putting together this anthology we ran into several fungal stories including: a recently discovered fungus in the Amazon rainforest that can break down the common plastic polyurethane, a study detailing how the evolution of a fungus known as “white rot” may have ended a 60-million-year-long period responsible for coal deposition, and a company in New England that is creating biodegradable packaging material out of mushrooms. In short, our fungal friends can be the source of many wonders … or terrors, as evidenced by the sight of “zombified” ants under the thrall of a strange parasite.

  With so many possibilities to draw from, we knew that we needed something more robust than just a series of pastiches. We wanted to go beyond body horror and Hodgson-esque mushroom people to explore the range of possibilities offered by fungal fiction. Our authors have flung their spores far and wide, and within these pages you’ll find all kinds of fungus, playing all kinds of roles, in all kinds of stories running the gamut from horror to dark fantasy. The result is an anthology with mushroom submarines, fungal invasions, mind-altering mushrooms, alien fungi — and yes, some mushroom monsters.

  HYPHAE

  By John Langan

  John Langan’s most recent collection, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, will be published by Hippocampus Press in early 2013. His previous books include a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade 2009), and collection, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime 2008). With Paul Tremblay, he has co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (Prime 2011). His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and in anthologies including Blood and Other Cravings (Tor 2011), Ghosts by Gaslight (Harper Collins 2011) and Supernatural Noir (Dark Horse 2011). He teaches courses in Creative Writing and the Gothic at SUNY New Paltz. He lives in upstate New York with his family.

  THE HOUSE WAS IN worse shape than he’d anticipated, the roof warped, the siding faded, the window frames clearly rotten. The yard was a mess, too, grass grown hay-high and yellowed, the ornamental bushes either gone or overgrown. The driveway had never been the best — his father had refused to blacktop it, insisting it was perfectly passable — and the rain and snow of the last fifteen years had only deepened its ruts. The bottom of his Subaru scraped an exposed rock and James winced.

  Who knew if his key would fit the front lock anymore? He rolled to where he remembered the driveway ending and shut off the engine. His father had not taken his mother’s departure especially well; it would not be a surprise for him to have swapped out the locks. James stepped out of the car. If he couldn’t enter the house, then that was his obligation fulfilled, right? He could imagine what his sister, housebound following her C-Section, would say to that.

  His key slid home easily; the lock released without struggle. With a sigh, he pushed open the front door.

  The smell that rushed out made him step back.

  “God ….”

  It was the rotten milk-and-mold stench of strong cheese left to liquefy in the sun. He leaned towards it, recoiled, tried again.

  “Dad?”

  The smell flooded his sinuses. He breathed through his mouth.

  “Hello? Dad? It’s James.” Your gay son, he almost added, but decided to forego the hostilities for the moment. Was his father even here? Cupping his hand over the lower half of his face, he entered the house.

  He expected to find the living room littered with months of dirty dishes, the putrefying remains of half-eaten meals the source of the odour his hand did nothing to shield him from. It was clean, as were the dining room and
the kitchen, his father’s room and the bathroom. His and Patricia’s old rooms had been repurposed to TV room and sewing room, respectively, but neither held anything worse than mild clutter.

  “Dad?”

  He opened the refrigerator. Except for the water jug, it was empty, as were the oven, the toaster oven and the microwave. Did he need any more proof that his father was not here — had been gone, from the looks of it, for some time? But, but … he ducked his head into the bathroom. His father’s toiletries were ranged around the sink. Not out of the question for him to have purchased new ones, of course, if it weren’t out of keeping with a lifetime’s parsimony. A rummage through the closet in his father’s room revealed no gaps in its shirts, slacks and jackets, no ties missing from his accumulated father’s day and birthday presents — which appeared to lend weight to his father having stayed put.

  “In a house with no food,” he said, returning to the kitchen. The basement door was closed, but he supposed he should check downstairs, too. His father’s workbench was there, behind the furnace, the home to a collection of power tools that had frightened James when he was younger, in no small part due to the lurid cautions his father had given him about each one. This’ll slice your hand clean off. This’ll burn the eyes out of your head. This’ll take the flesh from your arm before you know what’s happened. Strange to think James had wound up living with a carpenter.

  At the basement door, he paused. Downstairs had been his father’s retreat. After a bad day at IBM or especially after an argument with James’ mother, he would throw open the door, tromp down the stairs and clatter about his workbench. Sometimes, James would hear the power tools screaming, smell sawdust burning, as his father threw himself into one project or another, cutting wood for the new mailbox he was always on the verge of building, or fashioning a new trellis for the front porch. He had spent ever more time down there in the couple of years prior to James’ departure for Cornell and, from what Patricia had told him, before their mother had walked out, he had practically been living in the basement.

  The conflict that had come to define his parents’ marriage had had a single subject: his father’s health, specifically, the horrible state of his feet. It was beyond funny; it was absurd to think that such a topic could have undone 25 years together, but, in all fairness to his mother, there had been something seriously wrong with his father’s feet. The toenails had been thick, jaundice-yellow, like bits of horn sprouting from the ends of his toes. The toes, the sides of his feet, had been fish-belly pale, the heels gray and traversed by cracks from which thin, almost ghostly fibers projected. Nor had their appearance been the worst of it: Their smell, an odour of stale sweat mixed with the muddy reek of mildew, had made sitting next to him when his feet were uncovered an act of endurance. Mention the condition of his feet to him and he would flare with anger. James had not understood how the man who insisted on taking him to the doctor for the slightest sniffle could not tend to a part of himself so obviously unwell, and the sight of his father’s bare feet had stirred in him an obscure shame. As he had grown older, adolescence had curdled his shame to contempt, as it had dawned on him that his father was afraid of what a visit to the doctor would tell him about his feet. In the last few years, contempt had mellowed to something like pity, though it was difficult not to feel a modicum of anger at his father’s inertia.

  He opened the basement door and was pushed back several steps by the fresh wave of reek that rushed over him. Gagging, his eyes watering, he threw his hand back over his mouth, his nose. “Jesus,” he said, coughing. This was too much. He stumbled into the dining room, to the back door. He fumbled with the locks and flung the door wide, pushing the screen door out of the way and stepping onto the back porch and fresh air.

  Wiping his eyes, his nose, he crossed to the other side of the porch. The smell clung to him. He inhaled deeply. Something caught in his throat and bent him double, coughing. He straightened, only for a second round of coughing to convulse him. His mouth filled with phlegm. He spat and what spattered on the porch was grey. “Shit.” He remained hunched over until his lungs had calmed. His chest felt bruised, his throat raw. He stood, gingerly, and something in the tall grass behind the porch drew his notice.

  It was a car, his father’s car, the same red Saturn he’d been driving when James had left for college. Descending the porch’s steps, James approached the car. The thick layer of pollen lying yellow on it, obscuring its windows, testified to its having been parked here for some time. James felt a momentary surge of panic that his father might be seated in the car, dead of a heart attack or stroke. Heart pounding, he opened the driver’s side door, bracing for the sight of his father’s desiccated corpse. The car was empty. He sagged against it.

  He dug his cell phone out of his jeans, flipped it open. No bars. He held it up, rotating slowly. Nothing. Terrific. Was the phone in the house still working? And what was he planning on saying to his sister if he reached her? “Dad isn’t here and there’s a weird smell coming from the basement”? He folded the phone and returned it to his pocket.

  Maybe his shirt … he unbuttoned, untucked and removed it, then folded it into a rough scarf that he tied over his nose and mouth. Already, the faint odor of rotten milk and mold had attached to the fabric. It was bearable. James climbed to the porch and returned inside.

  At least the basement light was working. He descended the stairs slowly, on the lookout for … what? Whatever was producing that smell. He’d never dealt with black mold; maybe that was the culprit. The odour pressed on his improvised mask. He concentrated on breathing through his mouth.

  At the foot of the stairs, the water heater stood in its recess, closeted from the rest of the basement by a dark-brown door whose upper half was laddered with slats that allowed him to see the off-white cylinder and not much else. As a child, James had felt a prickle of unease at the base of his neck every time he’d passed in front of that door. Perhaps due to the design of the slats, each of which was set at a 45 degree tilt, light didn’t reach very far into the alcove, leaving the walls of the recess invisible and giving the impression that the water heater stood at the near end of a large, dark space. When he was 14, he’d helped his father replace the tank and, although the closet had been well-lit by a pair of worklights his father had hung on the walls, James still had judged it unusually spacious for its purpose.

  He was almost past the recess when his eye caught something through the slats, a wooden pole resting on the water heater. He slid his fingers under the lowest slat and eased to door open. It was the handle of a shovel, its blade rusted except for the edge, which was bright from use. On the floor beside it, a pickaxe had fallen over. The points of its head shone. Bracing his hands on either side of the doorway, James leaned into the alcove.

  To his left, a sizable hole had been chopped into the wall. Three feet wide by four and a half, maybe five feet high, its margin ragged, it appeared to extend into the earth behind the wall. James released the doorway and stepped around the water heater, in front of the hole. It was too dark for him to see into. He fished his cell from his jeans, unfolded it and turned the screen toward the blackness. Its pale light revealed a rough, narrow tunnel receding to an uncertain destination.

  “Dad?”

  Was that a reply? He called to his father a second time, stood listening for a response. None came. Holding his cell out before him, he ducked his head and advanced into the tunnel. It was a bit of a tight fit — his father was smaller than James by a good six inches and thirty pounds — but passable. The floor slanted down, while the walls curved gradually to the left. He looked over his shoulder. Already, the water heater was almost out of view. The passage appeared to have been hacked out of solid rock. He didn’t know what type lay beneath the house, but his father had cut his way through it.

  Where had he been going? Had he been building some kind of underground shelter? From what? His father had always been a man to follow his own impulses, to a fault and to extremes. Of
course, there was the example of his feet, which James’ mother had told him had become infected from something he’d picked up while on a business trip to Paris. A French colleague had taken him on a tour of the catacombs, during which he’d stepped into a deep puddle of foul water. His socks and shoes had been soaked. Who knew what had been swimming around in there and decided to hitch a ride on his father’s skin. No doubt a treatment for Athlete’s foot would have taken care of it, but the most his father would do for his feet was soak them in a basin of warm water. James could remember the expression on his father’s face as he lowered his feet into their bath, agony that dissolved into something like pleasure.

  Beyond his feet, and what he called his thriftiness and James his stinginess, there was his father’s refusal to leave this house, despite what must have been a decade-and-a-half campaign by James’ mother to have them move. While James and Patricia had lived at home, their mother had argued that the house was too small, the school district substandard. After they’d left, she had insisted that the house was too much trouble to maintain, its location too remote. No matter her line of attack, his father’s defense had been the same: This was their home, the emphasis he placed on the word substituting for hours of reasoning. From his mother, James knew that his father’s early life had been rootless. Only son of a master sergeant in the Army, James’ father and his mother had moved from New Jersey to what was then West Germany, from West Germany to Washington State, from Washington State to Kansas, from Kansas to Japan, from Japan to New York, where his grandfather had been killed in a car accident when James’s father was thirteen. Afterwards, James’s father and his mother had continued to wander, living with this relative or that until James’s grandmother fell out with them and they went in search of a new place to stay. Even knowing the little he did about his father’s early life — because the man refused to discuss it in any detail with him — James could appreciate what must have been a profound longing, a need, to have a home of his own. To insist on remaining in that spot at the expense of your marriage, however, went beyond need to pathology, a layman’s diagnosis that appeared confirmed by the tunnel down which James was moving.