Fungi Read online

  “The time of cultivation is at an end. The time is nigh to dance and dream. Come join me if you like.”

  I watched him walk out of the house, followed by his black beast. After a moment, I pushed out of my chair so as to join him. I felt a sudden dizziness and experienced an eccentric display of fuzzy black-and-white spots before my eyes that I could actually feel in my brain. Although I had stopped eating my pie, the taste of its contents stayed with me and intensified. I stepped outside and glanced at heaven, but my eyesight was blurry so that the stars in their black blanket of night resembled the dizziness that had produced the optical display of black-and-white spots that I had experienced. I caressed my forehead with a cool hand and saw where my brother had entered the woods by way of a single pathway. I staggered after him, entered the woodland and walked beneath the still moonlit trees. The woodland was a place where its dendroid inhabitants did not crowd each other and thus, the display of lunar light seeped through. I walked until I came upon Demetrios, who moved in dance around a small circle of mushrooms and dug into his wounded hand with a sharp twig, opening again the arcane symbol that he had carved there. His crimson liquid caught a reflection of moonlight as it seeped from him and dripped onto the bed of mushrooms. He laughed in a peculiar fashion, as he dropped his hand to his beast and I did not watch as the animal lapped at the symbolic scar.

  I watched that bed of fungi move as something beneath it began to rise; as I watched, I felt that I had indeed been intoxicated by the contents of the pie that I had consumed and which I could still taste, intensely, in my imagination. I gazed at the queer erection that pushed out so as to mock its aborescent neighbors and I barely recognised it as my brother’s artistic work — for the sculpture had transformed into a living entity. I was captivated by its bleached flesh, the folds of eerie growth that were its attire. Strangest of all was the creature’s cone-like head, which opened at the top and from which a series of vines protruded that ended in pale poisonous-looking pods. I considered the miasma that seeped upward from the opening of the dome, coils of mist that wore faint phosphorescence. The web-like growth of my brother’s original sculpture, that had formed a kind of veil, was gone, replaced by a fungal mask that aped a woman’s countenance. Demetrios approached his sentient creation and bowed to it, offering it his wounded hand, to which the thing lowered its dome so that the pale pods could fasten to the bloodstained insignia and suck nourishment. Unable to resist the nightmarish scene, I stepped nearer to my brother, stopping only when the creature moved its funnel-like dome so that its sparkling mist shot toward my eyes. Oh, how hot that mist was as it sank into my eyes and found my brain, which it tickled with provocative memory of the mushrooms I had devoured in my pie. Ah, how my brother’s beast howled at the dead moon as its form extended, transforming into a tall, lean man of dead-black colouration that raised one hand so as to make enigmatic motions to the moon. It turned, this creature, its hound-like countenance to me and offered me its embrace, but I had no desire to slink into a realm of proffered extinction. Turning away from the black man, I watched as my brother reached for his creation’s anemic mask and removed it. I watched as he pressed that fungal mask against his face and I shouted as the mask took on a semblance of my brother’s feverish visage. Something in the sight of that mushroom mask filled me with an almost ribald craving, a ravenous appetite. I called his name, and Demetrios unwound from his creation’s embrace and floated to me. Tilting to him, I touched my lips to his dreamy face and then I kissed him with my length of tongue. As I tasted my brother, I sensed the shadow of his creation behind me as Demetrios and I were enveloped in the thickening poisonous mist that disintegrated reality and ushered us into a dominion of rich enthralling dream. Laughing coyly, Demetrios floated from me so as to dance with his transformed beast in sallow moonlight. Turning, I faced the feminine form, the faceless thing that filled my soul with uncanny hunger. Opening my jaws, I clamped my teeth to where the thing ought to have worn a face. My feast was an eternal dream.

  KUM, RAÚL (THE UNKNOWN TERROR)

  By Steve Berman

  Steve Berman thinks that mushrooms look fascinating but has no urge to taste any. He is disappointed that Suillus bovinus is the Jersey Cow mushroom because he thinks New Jersey should be represented by a more fearsome fungus. He has sold around a hundred articles, essays and short stories and been a finalist numerous times for the Lambda Literary Award. He hopes to finish the Guide to Lost Gay Cinematic Characters before the end of 2013.

  KUM, RAÚL (THE UNKNOWN TERROR) — B. 1925, D. 1957

  NONE OF THE INHABITANTS of Tzapotl, a small village in the jungles of southern Mexico, would have any knowledge of English if not for two Americans: Robert Hayward Barlow and Gerald Ramsey. The first was a distinguished anthropologist who would one day chair the department at the Metropolitan College in Mexico City, the second a scientist disgraced after poisoning several female students with a meal of Boletus satanas.

  Barlow came to Tzapotl in late 1946 on sabbatical to study the local legend of the Cueva Muerte, a cave where the villagers held an annual human sacrifice so as to hear the whispers of their ancestors. Though fluent in both Tzeltal and Tzotzil Mayan, so he had no trouble with the Tzapotl dialect, Barlow taught the villagers some English during the months he stayed in Tzapotl. His favourite among the locals was Raúl Kum. Barlow’s tutelage drifted from the casual into the romantic when Kum expressed interest in a book that Barlow had brought with him, El baile de los cuarenta y uno, which covered a 1901 homosexual scandal. The affair between the two men ended once Barlow, along with Kum and another native guide, began spelunking the actual cave. The three discovered a pale froth clinging and dripping down the dank walls of the cave. This was an unknown fungal species with hyphae filaments that aggressively attached to parasitoid flesh. Barlow and Kum barely escaped with their lives and the third man perished, as portions of his body were rapidly consumed and replaced by the fungus. Barlow found the experience too reminiscent of the weird fiction of his friend and first crush, the author Howard Phillips Lovecraft (See Lovecraft’s 1927 short story, “The Colour Out of Space”) and he suffered a nervous breakdown, fleeing Tzapotl and the jungle for the sanctuary of a Mexico City hospital. Abandoned and fearful of the horrors of Cueva Muerte, Kum became withdrawn and despondent.

  His wont for exposing students to dangerous fungi had Ramsey banned by the Mycological Society of America and the man became convinced that some of the MSA members had hired assassins to rid the world of his genius, so he fled south into Mexico, where he could disappear. While visiting a small bordello, Ramsey happened upon a discarded issue of Cuentos Misteriosos, a pulp magazine that contained a 1947 story written by Barlow while he recuperated with barbiturates in a sanitarium. “Podredumbre innoble” mentioned both Cueva Muerte and nearby Tzapotl. Ramsey ignored the whore, took the magazine, and ventured into the jungle. He arrived at the village and impressed the natives with his limited knowledge of anatomy and biology. They valued his healing skills, which became the means for him to extort his way into becoming a despot. Villagers began sacrificing to Ramsey and not Cueva Muerte. Thus, he obtained victims for his experiments with the fungal samples he carefully culled from the cave walls. Kum grew fearful of Ramsey’s control over the village and his tampering with the fungus.

  Fearful that his homosexual liaisons would become known to the university board, Barlow committed suicide in the first days of 1951. “Podredumbre innoble” was discovered by Donald Wandrei, translated into English as “Ignoble Rot”, and published in Memories of Leng and Other Pieces (Arkham House, 1955). Wandrei gave a copy of that volume to his personal friend, Charles Gray, an explorer and connoisseur of the uncanny who scavenged La Proveedora and came close to discovering the Inca Ice Maiden nearly a half-century before Johan Reinhard. Gray became obsessed with finding this cave. He spent much time in southern Mexico searching for Tzapotl and, in June of 1957, reached the village. Ramsey resented the man’s intrusion and attempted to poison hi
m with fungal-contaminated canned fruit, but Gray, who suffered from fructose malabsorption, discarded the offering once he left Ramsey’s villa.

  Kum warned him not to venture down into Cueva Muerte, but Gray ignored him. By this time, Ramsey’s experiments had created a number of semi-ambulatory corpses thoroughly tainted and motivated by the fungus to spread and infect any animal or unfortunate they encountered. Ramsey confined these shambling monstrosities to the cave for further study. Gray became one more victim. When the explorer did not return home at the time expected, his sister, Gina, convinced her wealthy husband, Dan Matthews, to mount an expedition to find her brother. Matthews followed Gray’s route but found hostile natives refusing him entry into Tzapotl. However, before he turned back, Kum approached him and promised to explain what had happened to Gray, on the condition that he be first flown to the United States — Kum wanted nothing more than to reach American soil, defect and start a new life far from Tzapotl.

  Kum claimed that Gray had perished from a tropical disease, then suggested it was a spelunking mishap, leaving both Gina and her husband to suspect there was more to the story. Matthews organised a new expedition and forced Kum to accompany him back to Mexico. Once Kum stepped foot back in his old village, the locals, under orders from Ramsey, captured him. Ramsey tried, but failed, to discourage the rest of the expedition from setting foot in the cave. Matthews did not fare better than his brother-in-law, but one man, hired help, escaped.

  While prisoner at the insane mycologist’s villa, Kum discovered explosives — Ramsey’s contingency for enforcing his dominion over Tzapotl. Kum hoped to use the dynamite to murder Ramsey, but succeeded only in damaging the fuses before being discovered. Ramsey had Kum’s tongue cut out for being a traitor and then had him thrown into the cave. His death was not in vain, though, because Ramsey used the dynamite to silence Gina and the other survivor of the expedition in the only tunnel linking the cave to the surface. The explosive detonation occurred early enough to prevent the mycologist’s escape and sealed off Cueva Muerte, preserving the world from a terrible contagion.

  — From the pages of The Guide to Lost Gay Cinematic Characters, Vol. 3: Films of the Fantastic and Feared.

  CORPSE MOUTH AND SPORE NOSE

  By Jeff VanderMeer

  Jeff VanderMeer is a two time winner of the World Fantasy Award whose stories have been published by Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Conjunctions, Arc, Black Clock and several year’s best anthologies. Recent books include the Nebula finalist novel Finch (2009) and the short story collection The Third Bear (2010). His The Steampunk Bible was featured on the CBS Morning Show and has been named a finalist for the Hugo Award for best related book. He also recently co-edited the mega-anthology The Weird compendium with his wife Ann. A co-founder of Shared Worlds, a teen SF/F writing camp, VanderMeer has been a guest speaker at the Library of Congress and MIT, among others. He writes book reviews for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post. VanderMeer’s latest novel, just completed, is Annihilation.

  NEAR DAWN, THE DETECTIVE pulled himself, sodden and dripping, from the River Moth. Dry land felt hard and unyielding. His muscles ached. The water had made him wrinkled and old. The stench of mud and silt clung to him. All around him, light strained to break through the darkness, found fault lines and pierced the black with threads of grey and orange. To the west, from between the twinned towers the grey caps had erected when they had reconquered the city, the sky shone an unsettling shade of blue. Strange birds flew there, winking out when they reached the boundary formed by the towers.

  The detective lay against the smooth stones of the jetty and realised he had never been so tired in all his life. He would have fallen asleep right there, but it did not feel safe. With a lurch and a groan, the detective stood, stretched his legs, took off his trench coat and tried to wring the water from it. After a while, he gave up. Suddenly aware that the grey caps could already be coming for him, alerted by microscopic fungal cameras, he spun around, stared inland.

  No one walked the narrow streets ahead of him. No sound broke through the crazy and up-ended buildings. A mist coated the spaces between dwellings. Everything was fuzzy, indistinct. A chill seeped through the detective’s wet clothing and into his skin. In the half-light, Ambergris did not appear to be a city but, instead, a blank slate waiting for his imagination to transform it, to recreate it.

  Out of the mist, as the mist withdrew and circled back like some solemn, autumnal tide, a great head loomed suddenly: a product of his dreams, the unexpected prow of a ship. But no, only a statue, when finally revealed, and the detective exhaled the breath he had held. His legs shook, for the mist’s withdrawal had resembled the advance of some death-pale giant.

  He recognised the features now. Who would not? Voss Bender had been dead five hundred years, but no one who had ever heard his music played could forget that face. The statue’s features suffered from fissures, pocks from bullet holes, infiltrations of mold and the spurious introduction of a large purple mushroom upon its head. Yet, even this did not detract from the grace of the rendering. Even the sliver of stone missing from its left eyebrow only served to make the statue appear more imperious.

  Now the detective heard the sound of breathing. A quiet sound, neither laboured nor erratic. At first, the detective fancied the sound came from the statue itself, but, after listening carefully, discarded this theory. In truth, he could not tell where it came from. Perhaps Ambergris itself breathed, the breezes and updrafts that drove the mist before them the even, comfortable breath of stone.

  Automatically, the detective followed the gaze of Voss Bender’s statue: down and to the left. It was an old habit of his — he always must know where people were looking, for fear they stared at something more interesting, more profound, more alive ….

  And so, he came upon a most remarkable signpost, shaded by the largest mushroom he had ever seen.

  It stood taller than a palm tree, its trunk of lacy white flesh six feet in circumference. Its half-moon hood was stained purple and blue, with yellow streaks. The fragile grid work underneath the hood, from which the inevitable spores would one day float forth, had a lacquered, unreal appearance. Root-like tendrils gripped the pavement, cracked and speared it.

  As the detective walked toward the signpost and the mushroom, the breathing sound became louder. Could it emanate from the mushroom itself? Could the mushroom be breathing?

  The signpost rose almost to his height of six feet. It had originally been composed of a grey stone, but a viscous white substance had gradually seduced the cracks and other imperfections until now the detective could hardly read the words. The sign did not include the name of the city, but simply a giant “A”. Beneath the A, in letters sick with flourishes, a short inscription:

  Holy city, majestic, banish your fears.

  Arise, emerge from your sleeping years.

  Too long have you dwelt in the valley of tears.

  We shall restore you with mercy and grace.

  Many elements of this inscription disturbed the detective, but certainly no more so than the quiet breathing. First, he wondered who had written the words. Second, he could not connect the words to Ambergris. Third, he had no clue who “We” were or how “We” would restore the city with mercy and grace.

  The detective left off such questions in favour of solving the more perplexing problem of the breather. He took out his gun, then stood motionless for a long moment, listening.

  Finally, he decided the sound must be coming from behind the mushroom. Nimbly, he walked around the mushroom’s left flank, disgusted by the stickiness under his feet.

  On the opposite side, he discovered a tendril that was not a tendril. And a statue that was not a statue. Such conclusions would have been neat, safe, rational. Unfortunately, the mystery to the breathing, the detective now knew, had no rational solution. A man lay beneath the mushroom. If he had not seen that the feet merged with the root-tendril, the detective might have thought th
e man was just taking a nap.

  The man’s paleness astounded the detective — he glowed in the shadowy dawn light. His head had been stripped of all hair, including eyebrows, and so had the rest of his body. His eyes were closed. His genitals had been replaced by some frozen-blue bulb of a fungus. Tiny tentacles had sprouted from his fingernails and now searched the earth around them restlessly. From the sudden, fibrous hardness around the man’s kneecaps, the detective could tell that the man became mushroom much farther up the leg than the foot, but, despite this intrusion, this invasion, he saw by the gently-rising chest and, yes, the quiet, steady breathing, that the man was alive.

  The detective stood over the sleeping man, this living corpse, his gun hanging from the end of his arm, dangling from one finger. He had come to Ambergris to solve a case, the Case, and he had come to Ambergris to find a missing person. But not this person. And not this mystery. He began to see, with a frisson of dread, that to solve the Case, he might have to solve a dozen other cases before it. Or else they might conspire to obscure the True Case. The True Crime.

  He considered the man’s face. The thickness of the white mask reminded him of rubber. Everywhere, any delicacies of cheekbone, of nose, of ear, had given way to an over-ripe fullness. The breath issued from the slightest gap between the thick lips. The bulbous eyelids fluttered, the eyelashes miniatures of the tentacles that had colonised the man’s fingers.

  Against his own better judgment, the detective knelt beside the man. He had room for neither disgust nor fascination within him. He was simply tired and eager to explode this lesser mystery by any means possible. He tapped the side of the man’s head with his gun. No response. He tapped again — harder.