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  Duke pushed the lever. The detonator clicked and the red, throbbing glow inside the car winked out of existence like a distant light at sea.

  Reality twirled away with a dull roar and a spray of colours like sunset and drowning. Legs screamed and someone let the stars down from the sky.

  The galaxies slowed their manic race and Duke focused on just a single swirl of gaseous light below him. It felt nice to float there and watch it unfold. But the light grew brighter and the galaxy-dream receded. Maribel leaned in close, her face a rising moon.

  “You awake?”

  Duke felt a relief as vast as the limitless universe. It was damn good to be alive, even if the world made no sense.

  He sat up, savouring each bruise and creak of his bones. They lay in the fungal scrub, a few feet from where the dynamite had blown the car off the track at a right angle. The Van Schijn car was crushed square in the middle, the centre compressed to a knot no larger than a fist. The green clouds had moved on and pure, clean starlight lit the toadstool-studded plain. Shiloh stood nearby, whickering softly.

  “Nothing of Karlowe left to collect on the reward,” Maribel said.

  “Hey, we got you,” Duke replied.

  Legs lay facedown beside Duke, smelling of dead prairie dogs and burning hair. But his tentacles twitched and roiled as they always did. A man who had his friends would be all right. Duke carefully patted the ground near his partner.

  “Rise and shine, McGraw. Got some riding to do.”

  Duke stood up, recovering his pistols. Maribel rose, wiping dead worms from her chin. Beyond the mountains, the rim of the sky paled with the first blush of morning.

  “What are we going to do with you, ‘Bel?”

  “A three-way split?” she suggested.

  She earned it, Legs mumbled, waking. Can’t leave her here for the L&W big bugs to find.

  “They’ll come looking, though, that’s for sure,” Duke said.

  Mad as spinal wasps, Legs agreed with a delicate whiff of tainted water and sickroom.

  While her boys debated, Maribel de Miedo stroked Shiloh’s flank. Duke’s professors back in Zohar City might have a cure for her, but she doubted it. Still, she reckoned she had a little time left; she might raise some hell with Duke and Legs again. The nightmare snorted with pleasure.

  “Ready, girl?” she whispered to Shiloh. Duke Winchester wasn’t the only one who knew how to ride her. She was a good quarter mile away before the outlaw and the beyonder noticed she was gone. She smiled as their bewildered shouts echoed across the plain. Maybe she’d even let them catch up.

  Maribel rode out under the fading starlight and south to Zohar City, dreaming of distant stars.

  THE PILGRIMS OF PARTHEN

  By Kristopher Reisz

  Kris Reisz lives in Alabama. Along with a handful of short stories, he’s published two novels. One, Unleashed, is about werewolves who worship a fungal god or rot and ruin.

  I KNEW MACY WAS leaving, even though she wouldn’t say it. She hadn’t grown up here, just come up for school then stayed for me. But she’d graduated a year ago and still couldn’t find a graphic design job. She had to borrow money from her mom to mail resumes to Boston and New York. Somebody would snap her up soon; her ideas and art were too striking to ignore.

  When she headed somewhere new, she wouldn’t want me tagging along. Why should she? I hadn’t had steady work since the Cherokee Bluff subdivision had gone bankrupt. At first, she had been supportive, but, as summer wore on, she didn’t talk much and never smiled. Her mind seemed a million miles away, already in Boston or New York. She’d stay up late, watching TV, so she didn’t have to come to bed until I’d already fallen asleep.

  Once, I built up the courage to ask her straight-out if she was leaving. Macy couldn’t answer. She said, “I just want what’s best for both of us. I’ll always care for you, Austin. You know that.”

  I knew it. But I also knew she had bigger dreams than I could offer her. Macy was leaving and I couldn’t blame her.

  In wilting August, I bumped into Everest, a 400-pound drywall man who’d worked on Cherokee Bluff, too. Neither of us had heard anything about the back pay we were still owed. After Childress Development went bankrupt, nobody could reach Mr. Childress, just his shitheel lawyer and the lawyer never said anything.

  Everest’s eyes crinkled, asking me to let him know if I heard about any jobs. “It doesn’t have to be drywall; I’ll do whatever. Concrete, electrical work, whatever. And if your uncle needs another set of hands, I’m his guy. Tell him, okay? He knows I do good work.”

  I promised to talk to Uncle Chuck. Everest had kids. If anything, he was in worse shape than me. As he walked away, I pulled the last ten out of my wallet. “Oh, hey, remember that time you got lunch and I didn’t have any cash? I can finally pay you back.”

  Everest shook his head. “Naw, brother. You keep it, okay?”

  But I pressed the folded bill into his hand. “It’s your money. I owe you.”

  It was a lie — we both knew it — but lies make things easier sometimes. Everest gave me a bear hug then leaned down to whisper, “Listen. If you really need some money, you know parthen? That mushroom the news keeps talking about? It’s growing everywhere in the Cherokee Bluff houses. The shit’s going for thirty dollars a button right now. It’s risky, but you gotta do what you gotta do.”

  Stories about parthen had filled the news for months, usually with scowling congressmen and scramble-faced DEA agents. It was a hallucinogenic mushroom. Users dreamed of a city — always the same city — an alien ruin on the shores of a dying sea. Doctors didn’t know what to make of it.

  I was too chicken-shit to sling drugs, but I indulged occasionally. The news called parthen an epidemic threatening America’s youth, but the news was always finding something to threaten America’s youth with. Last summer, it’d been Haitian gangs and shark attacks.

  When I got home, Macy sat at the computer, printing out more resumes to send to graphic design firms and textbook publishers. I made some soup, sat on the couch to eat and tried to think of something to say to make Macy smile. I told her about the parthen.

  “Seriously?” She twisted up the side of her mouth. “You thinking about … trying it?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Mr. Childress still owes me back pay. Least he can do is give us a fun Saturday night, right? I mean, if you want to try it.”

  Macy glanced at the computer screen and stack of envelopes. “Yeah,” she nodded. “That prick owes us a Saturday night. Let’s call it karma.” She grinned, making my heart trill.

  Saturday, we headed out with a crowbar and bolt-cutters on the floorboard. The subdivision’s LOTS STILL AVAILABLE sign was knocked into the mud. The roads were paved, but there were no streetlights. Stakes and guide-strings showed where flagstone paths and a community duck pond would have gone. Between lots filled with hip-high weeds and pallets of bricks, half-built houses sat abandoned with their silver insulation exposed. When the headlights touched them, they glowed with a luminous fragility, like foetuses in jars.

  “Whoa, hey, somebody’s here.” Macy pointed toward a light in the window of one of the houses. It winked off almost as soon as she spoke.

  A red F-250 was mostly hidden behind the house. It looked like Everest’s truck. Poor guy must have been squatting in one of the empty houses. It explained how he knew about the parthen being here. “I think it’s fine,” I said. “Let’s just try the houses on the other end.”

  The first neo-colonial we broke into had six inches of water standing in the basement. I slogged through, swinging my flashlight beam into the corners and between the joists. I found them on the wall below the laundry room hookups: a column of leathery, shelf-like mushrooms clinging to the mortar. They were the yellowish-white of bad teeth. Peeling them off the wall felt strangely cathartic, like peeling dead skin off your fingertips.

  Back at the apartment, surrounded by the scraps and stubs of Macy’s art supplies, we ate the parthe
n, one button apiece, then lay on the bed holding each other. The mushroom worked quickly, eager to welcome us. By the time I had swallowed the last bite, my skin tingled. Scientists said parthen created the illusion of kinesthesia, the sensation of moving, even as we lay still. Macy and I laughed, our faces buffeted by a wind that wasn’t quite there. Momentum squeezed our stomachs and the blood drained from our limbs and faces. My fingers woven with hers, we hurtled forward so fast I blacked out.

  When I jerked to, I lay in the sand on the edge of a dying sea.

  The glaring sun ate up a quarter of the sky. The ocean had pulled back, leaving a dry plain of cracked mud stretching to the horizon. Salt and clay lingered on the air. Beside us rose a freestanding arch of smooth stone. Macy reached toward it.

  More arches snaked between the dunes, leading to a city of pearlescent domes. It looked magnificent and heartbreaking in that dead, still place. There were people making their way toward it like pilgrims. They were all naked, and innocent and beautiful in their nakedness.

  The city pulled at me and Macy both. We passed beneath the second, third, fourth arch, all mottled brownbluegreen. Each arch had a slightly different shape; each shape echoed the one before it.

  A man touched my shoulder. “You can’t reach the city going that fast. We can only reach it by going slow.”

  I didn’t know what he meant. I wasn’t sure if he was real or a hallucination. Smiling vaguely, I kept hiking across the hot sands. A few minutes later, something soft pressed against my ear. I turned and it was my pillow. I was back in the apartment. Macy sat propped on an elbow, staring around.

  “Arches,” I said and Macy turned, noticing me. I swallowed to moisten my throat. “In the middle of nothing — like a desert — there were arches leading to a big city.”

  Macy nodded. “Like Shinto gates, almost. But they were stone. I felt one. It had tiny fossilized creatures in it. I felt it, Austin. I could feel the texture of the …. ” She squeezed my arm then pulled away. She jumped up then sat back on the edge of the bed. “That was another world. A whole other world.”

  Pulling off my t-shirt, I mopped the sweat off my neck. “You really think so? I mean, it’s not just some hallucination?”

  “It can’t be. We saw the same thing. I felt the stone. It has to be real. A real alien planet.” Leaning back against my chest, she wrapped my arms around herself like she used to. “We have to go back. You have more parthen, right?”

  The mushroom’s name came from a biological word, “parthenogenetic”, meaning “virgin birth”. Parthen reproduced asexually, so every fruiting body was a clone to every other, a precise genetic melody played over and over. The first troops had appeared along the shores of Lake Michigan and marched steadily southward through the Rust Belt. Drug task forces tried all sorts of different fungicides, but nothing could stop it. It liked pine barrens, abandoned husks of homes and shuttered factories where the soil should have been too sick for anything to grow.

  The city became known as “Parthen”, too. She was a virgin, a pristine place aching to be taken. We couldn’t reach her, though.

  There were 36 arches leading to the city. The second time we took the mushrooms, we awoke under the lowest arch, just like before. Together, we set out for the city. The drug’s effect only lasted an hour or two and we weren’t even halfway there when we tumbled back to Earth. The next time, I flat-out ran until my lungs burned like the sun-scorched sand. I got close enough to see there was nothing between the domes except dunes crowned with tough, tall grass and a wide ramp leading below one of the domes. The city was underground. But I still couldn’t reach it. I collapsed and landed back in the apartment, panting for breath.

  “Can’t. We can’t make it.” My body shook from the drugs or exhaustion. “It’s too far.”

  Macy chuckled and kissed me. “There’s a secret. Some of the other pilgrims told me. Parthen can’t be conquered. You have to love her. She can only be taken through love.”

  “Huh? What?”

  “I’ll show you; don’t worry. But we need more mushrooms.”

  The city ached to be taken, but only by those who loved her. Pilgrims didn’t always wake up at the lowest arch. You could arrive at any point you’d already been to, as long as you visualised that place while the drug flung you between the stars. You had to imagine every detail of it, though — the shape of the gate, the fall of the shadows, every detail from every angle. You had to love the place.

  Macy was better at seeing than I was, better at being aware. Sometimes, she took my hand and ran my fingers across the spiral-shelled fossils or the subtle fracture of colours in the stone. I thought, This is why she’s an artist. This is how she sees our world all the time.

  It worked. We awoke at the second arch, then the fourth, then the seventh. There was never any breeze. The raging red sun always hung in the same position in the sky, like we were traveling through an instant frozen in time. On Earth, websites cropped up to share stories about Parthen. On the biggest, The Elsewhere, people wrote long treatises on astral travel, Eden and Shambhala. But really, nobody knew where Parthen was, or how we reached it. And mainly, we just had to know what lay within.

  Sometimes, Macy pushed ahead before I was able to. She always helped me, though. On Earth, she’d whisper in my ear, “Remember the dune beside the arch? Remember how the sand falls down around your foot when you step?” Without Macy, I would have still been stuck at the lowest arch.

  The day we reached the 31st arch, we dropped back to Earth and Macy had a message on her phone. It was one of the design firms, wanting to set up an interview. I felt the old terror that she would leave, but Macy erased the message and said, “Where would I go? I’ve got Parthen and you. What else could I want?”

  I needed Macy to help me visualise my way to the city and she needed me to harvest the mushroom from Cherokee Bluff. As long as I could offer her Parthen, she would stay.

  Two days later, walking hand-in-hand, we entered the closest dome. Macy gasped as the space opened before us. The Parthenians had lived underground in vast, upside-down ziggurats. Terraced levels ringed a huge atrium, an inverted mountain of light and cool air. There were workshops and living spaces but also aqueducts and broad open arenas.

  The dome protected the subterranean village from the wind scouring the surface and the worst of the sun’s heat, but it let in enough light to see and to grow crops. The lowest terraces were now-fallow fields.

  All through fall, we explored the ziggurat. There was enough wonder there to keep Macy happy for a lifetime. So much better at visualising through the city, Macy continually pushed ahead of me; she couldn’t help it. It was okay. On Earth, she filled sketchbooks with landmarks to help me catch up. She stopped filling out resumes and Parthen became our life. We discovered an avenue of bare-limbed trees. There, the light fell through the branches like fine lace onto Macy’s cheeks and arms, making the tiny hairs on the back of her neck burn like filaments. It became my favourite place in two worlds.

  More squatters had moved into the half-finished houses at Cherokee Bluff. I was wading through a basement when two scarecrow-thin punks appeared in the doorway above me holding pipes. Thank God Everest showed up and told them I was a friend. After that, I always brought snacks for their kids — Oreos, Twinkies — to trade for the parthen. They were okay, really. All of them were pilgrims and told me about new places to look for in the faraway city.

  Following clues the squatters gave us, we found the barrel-vaulted tunnel leading to a second ziggurat, then a third. Macy posted some of her drawings on The Elsewhere and became sort of famous. Place names also emerged from The Elsewhere community — The Summer Ziggurat, the clover-shaped Four-Hearted Ziggurat, The Canal of Lethe, The Courthouse. The last was a palisade in The Summer Ziggurat surrounded by 81 columns. Eighty-one columns, four hearts, thirty-six arches — the Parthenians liked cube roots, but nobody knew why. Besides documenting what they’d left behind, discussions took place over the Internet on exactl
y who the Parthenians had been.

  There were no images anywhere in the city. The Parthenians might have been blind; they only needed sunlight for their crops. Even without pictures, though, it was clear the Parthenians had been far from human. There were no stairs, only ramps. There were no beds or clothes and all tools had stubby handles. They’d been vegetarians — or, at least, nobody had found any animal bones or slaughterhouses.

  Squiggling patterns of different metals were hammered into stone walls in some places. One theory was that they were some sort of tactile language. Maybe the Parthenians could feel the difference between the different types of metal, even detect their unique chemical signatures. However, if it was a language, nobody had been able to decipher it.

  The Parthenians’ principle science had been chemistry — workshops and multi-level laboratories were everywhere. And instead of being built of mortared stone like most places, they were always carved from the bedrock. One night, we went looking for the passage connecting The Summer Ziggurat to the one called “Whoville”. I got separated from Macy again and spent the time exploring a workshop filled with elaborate glassware and braziers. Standing amid jars of clumped powders and oily liquids, I thought maybe the Parthenians had mastered alchemy instead of chemistry, some blend of science and magic that couldn’t exist on our world.

  When I slipped back to Earth, Macy was crying softly. “How can they all be gone? They must have been beautiful, peaceful people. How could they all just vanish?”

  I held her, thinking about the workroom. After a long time, I said, “Maybe they knew they were dying out and made parthen so they’d be remembered. They created a drug that lets other people visit their home, sent it to Earth, somehow. So, when we explore the city, we’re not just doing it for us. We’re doing it for them, too.”

  Macy wiped her eyes. “You think, maybe, they wanted to inspire us? Maybe they wanted to show us what we could become.”