The Mycelium

I followed Valdomir through camp. 

Darkly clothed, hooded gypsies encircled each fire. Wordless, they held up their hands to leaping flames that snapped raggedly in the wind. These wordless folk weren’t burning wood, peat, or coal. No, this was crackling flesh, sizzling animal fat. Soot poured from each fire pot to form a low-lying pall of eye-stinging fog.

Valdomir loomed just ahead in the night, shifting about in unnatural jerks and flickers of movement. I guided on fleeting glints in the folds of his oiled cape. Now and then, he turned his head halfway ‘round. The heavy brow ridge, the inscrutable black obsidian eyes – huge and glistening. 

Now and again, I felt the weighted pouch in my pocket, just to make sure it hadn’t vanished. The velvet sack was filled with all the gold and silver I possessed.

At last, well beyond the fires, we reached the old woman’s tent, its walls so thickly layered with skins that no light shone through. I’d expected guards here, ‘round the Witch’s lone outpost, but… no one.

“They fear the Witch,” Valdomir had explained earlier.

As he reached to knock, I felt her presence. No – I wasn’t a true medium – that’s why I was here, after all. But I did harbor a shard of the sixth sense, enough to feel her presence radiate from the tent in waves. Anger. Cunning. An emotional pit yawning to swallow anyone who crossed her.

I was here for that rarest of treasures. Or that rarest of curses. 

A Mycelium. A small one, nurtured for years after it emerged from its egg sac, fed by the Witch on the fear and grief of its hapless victims.

Inside the tent, the Witch never uttered a word. Invisible but for the mound of dark cloths concealing her. Unseen, that is, until a gray, twisted claw of a hand, flickering in lamp light, revealed itself and snatched the precious pouch from my hand. Next came a rasping hiss of a chuckle, as her hand appeared again, this time holding a small cube-shaped wooden box by an iron handle.

I jumped, startled, when the creature scrabbled and shifted about inside the box. This was no time for cowardice, so I steeled myself and gripped the handle, my gloved fingers brushing the witch’s hand during the exchange.

The Mycelium was my last chance at survival in a crowded London. One teeming with the forlorn, the grieving. The still-living, breathing casualties of the Great War.

Should I open the box and look inside? Make sure I wasn’t buying some gaunt, starving field mouse? No – I could feel it, reaching out, suckling on my fear through the air between us. An odd sensation, to be sure. Terrifying, really – the thought of such a creature living, growing beneath the floorboards of my flat. But the more terrified I became, the more quickly came my relief, as the emotion drained away to nothing…

----

I waited anxiously through day after day of cloudy, rainy weather, until the light of sunrise finally blazed through the window and fell across my chamber floor. It was time. The wood box beside me, I pried up a warped floorboard. The exposed black slit emitted a cold, musty reek – an ideal home for the beast. The Mycelium feared light, and would seek refuge in the nearest shadows beneath the boards.

This was my do-or-die moment. I lowered the small box into the opening and pulled a lever behind the handle, causing a flap on the front of the box to swing open, driven by the strength of the creature inside.

It sounded like some heavy, fast -moving spider, as it leapt free and vanished into darkness beneath the floor. I caught the briefest glimpse of its gray, hairy abdomen. The thing gave off a loamy, earthy aroma which faded quickly in the draft.

Tossing the now-empty box across the room, I slammed the floorboard back into place. Several dozen swings of a hammer later, the floor was sealed. Then I stood, breathing hard, and dragged the heavy, round séance table to the center of the room. Soon, all would be ready…

----

It was a cold, blustery night. The shutters – I always left them unfastened to flap in the wind for effect – creaked and slammed the outside wall, over and over, as gusts swirled down the alleyway.

I sat at the polished table, my little fingers on each hand touching those of my neighbors on either side. Mrs. Galloway sat on my right, her spinster sister Miss Smith to my left. They were here to contact Ned Galloway, slain at the age of seventeen during the Somme offensive. Five others – three women and two men, here to contact their own sons – completed the circle. In all, we would contact four spirits this evening, all of whom met untimely ends in the war.

Drummond and Carstairs, my assistants, were ready for me to start. Drummond was out of view. He would pretend to be a spirit, knocking on walls when I demanded proof of their ethereal presence in the room. Carstairs, meanwhile, hovered near the cold, ash-filled hearth, ready to fan chilly drafts and project ghostly voices to forlorn loved ones.

I extinguished the candle at table center, then lowered my head to its hard, polished surface. Only a single oil lamp, halfway across the room, provided illumination. My breathing slowed, then gained a raspy hiss as I feigned entering a trance. That’s when I popped the milk white cups over my eyes, so that when I lifted my gaze, guests gasped at eyes that seemed to have rolled back into my head. The cups stung my corneas, but their dramatic effect was more than worth my discomfort.

“Ned Galloway,” I said, my tone plaintive but expectant as I drew out the last syllable. “You died a horrible death on the bloody Somme. Now, your beloved mother and aunt fear for your safety, your happiness in whatever afterlife awaits us all. Speak to them now, Ned Galloway. Please – we entreat you – give us a sign!”

Drummond rapped hard from behind the wall to strike fear into everyone. However, just as quickly as the two women cried out in fright, they calmed again, their distress falling away like water to the floor, pooling on the wood until finding the narrow slits between the boards.

There lay the true power of this séance – the Mycelium – feeding, gaining power from fright, from grief. 

Carstairs, clothed and hooded in black for invisibility, crept about on felt slippers, whispering, as if he were Ned, and professed undying love for his family. Tears flowed freely from the two women’s eyes, yet, minutes later, beyond their comprehension, they felt lighter, relieved of grief they’d held on to for years.

The rest of the evening proceeded similarly, and, as my séance guests departed into the cold night, they were quite generous – adding far more money than we had originally agreed upon. I watched them climb into carriages as the moon arced overhead. Their moods were shockingly jovial, brought on by a lifting of the crushing weight of grief from their shoulders.

Later, as the three of us sat together and counted our earnings, we realized that a new day had dawned. Tonight, we’d seen proof that the Mycelium was worth more than its weight in gold. With its ability to drain away fear and sadness, we were going to become famous throughout London. And make a mint along the way…

----

A heavy snow fell on London as Drummond, Carstairs and I sat in the drawing room of my new brownstone – in Mayfair, no less – to discuss a looming crisis we could no longer avoid. Before us, beyond the spacious, mullioned windows, pedestrians and horses struggled through deepening snow, while behind us, my butler stood at attention, a large fire crackling in the hearth to warm our backs.

“Has it been growing all this time, beneath the floor?” Drummond said while swirling warmed brandy in his snifter.

“I’ve no idea,” I said. “I’ve neither seen nor heard it since it scurried off seven months ago.”

“But the creature has obviously gained power,” Carstairs added. “That’s plainly evident in what we’ve heard – of Londoners feeling emotionally lighter merely by walking near the building, and at street level!”

“And that worries me,” I said. “We need the séance, itself, to be the sole framework in which these emotional effects occur. Why pay for our services if they can just sit outside the flat and feel their worries spontaneously drain away?”

“We’ve talked before about the musty odor,” Drummond added. “Like wood mushrooms. It pervades the flat more with each passing week. I take this is a sign that the Mycelium is growing. If that’s true, how could we risk moving it? We’d have to capture the bloody thing! Can it do us physical harm? And which of us would dare try?”

Then I broke the news – that I had purchased, with cash, a small but elegant home in Hampstead, to serve as the new location of what we now termed our grand seances. We could patrol the spacious grounds around the house to ward off gawkers, and only those at the séance would reap the Mycelium’s emotional benefits. They would be the wealthiest of patrons, and our fame would spread throughout all of Europe.

“Dear God, man!” Carstairs said with a grin. “That’s brilliant! And thank you – for incurring such expense for our collective benefit!”

We clinked glasses and drank deeply of our good fortune. Now and then, I felt pricked, in my left shoulder – that’s where Bartle the butler hovered – at what he must think of us and our dreadful deceptions. Still, I paid him quite handsomely for his discretion.

“Then we must move the Mycelium,” Carstairs said, meeting each of our eyes in turn. 

We agreed that we would have to take on the frightening task the following day. We’d do it on our own, clandestinely, to avoid blowing our cover.

----

We met in the flat. I was the last to arrive. During the journey here, I’d been a bucket of bolts, my heart racing, sweat pouring from my skin, which chilled me to the bone in this London weather. But as I stepped into the building, all fear drained from me, and I found my comrades sitting on the anteroom sofa in a similarly calm mood.

“To think,” Carstairs quipped, “We’ve come to apprehend and move the Mycelium, and it’s agreeing to the task by calming our nerves. I take that as solid evidence that the creature approves of our plan. After all, the Mycelium will gain ever more power at the new house in Hampstead!”

All three of us chuckled in approval, and we got to work in the early morning light – prying up floorboards to take a look at what lay beneath. I think we each expected the Mycelium, however large or strange it was, to be at the ready. Though Drummond had brought along a four-foot crate to hold the thing, none of us knew if it would be large enough to hold the creature. No matter – we could always come back with a larger box after sunset.

But as I freed the first two floorboards near the center of the séance room, a quick blaze of terror shot through my body. The entire space below was filled with a pulsating, wet mass of rippled, gray flesh that bristled with stiff hairs and positively reeked of mushrooms. Then the fear drained, and I felt calm enough to lower my hand and stroke the thing.

Carstairs and Drummond found the same wherever they pulled off a board – in the floor, in all of the walls. The Mycelium had feasted so gluttonously on fear and grief as to swell into an amorphous, stationary mass that seemed to fill every gap in the woodwork.

“How can we possibly hope to move it to the new house?” I shouted, initially in fear, but then, repeated several times with a kind of giddy laughter.

Then the Mycelium flexed its muscles, and swelled up from the beneath the floor and behind the walls. Floorboards snapped free, nails popping from their holes and tinkling metallically to the floor. Each of us soon slipped into or onto the undulating, throbbing, gray mass of the Mycelium. We laughed and laughed, and the need to move the creature faded from our minds.

Even as we sank into its spongy texture, our nostrils burning with spores that took to the air, we tossed jokes among ourselves. As the clammy flesh folded and wrapped across our faces and we sank deep into its being, joy and relief coursed through every fiber of our beings…