Nightcrawlers

44

Kenney stumbled into an immense grotto that was like a great tube made of fungus. The water was patched with iridescent mold that shimmered brightly in hues of purple and indigo. It was a living tunnel of pink fungus, orange and yellow mounded growths, and bright red posts that grew up out of the water like deep sea smoker vents.

They were everywhere.

And they were moving.

The fungus draped from the ceiling and grew in sheer nets and fine filaments that flashed colors like fiber-optic displays. Ropes and cables of it connected everything together in an intricate spiderweb mesh. He moved past things like immense nodding mushrooms whose caps were shiny and ruby-red above and bubblegum pink below. His flashlight beam was filled with multicolored spores that he breathed in and attached themselves to him, making him feel queasy and weak, then exhilarated and dreamy.

This is it, he told himself. You have reached the epicenter. This is the womb of creation, the birth chamber; ground zero of this immense fungus-thing that has been gestating beneath the ground for centuries.

As he passed through rising yellow grasses that were like spines, soft as pillow down, it all made no sense to him.

Why was this allowed?

Why wasn’t he barred from this place?

Why wasn’t he attacked or at least pushed back from this fragile wonderland ecosystem of birth? Why was he allowed to wander blindly here?

Because the thing wants you here. It wants you to see and feel its true nature.

That made no sense, yet it made all the sense in the world.

The growths he saw everywhere with such wild, rich, yet ordered profusion were all dripping with nectar that became a mist in the air that he breathed in and made him feel giddy. He could feel it on his face and in his hair, in his mouth and down his throat. Its taste was much like wine—sweet, fizzing, sour, its bouquet a rapture to the taste buds.

You’re stoned. You’re fucking stoned.

And that, he figured, was the key to it all, the very basis. No wonder those people of Clavitt Fields could not give up their wicked ways and blasphemies (as their contemporaries viewed it). They were addicted to the psychotropic secretions of the fungus. They were wasted on the shit. Even though contact with the subterranean fungi physically mutated them, making them more like funguses and slime molds than human beings, they still could not live without the tripping, hallucinogenic ecstasies of it.

It was addiction.

It was nothing more than fucking addiction.

There was no witch cult in Clavitt Fields, just a bunch of deluded proto-hippy ‘shroom heads tripping their fucking minds out. Turn on, tune in, drop out, man. Dig it, baby!

He giggled as he imagined those staid, buttoned-up puritan types tripping their fucking brains out. God, what a revelation it must have been! What a freedom from the chains and bondage of their religion and repressive lives it must have offered! The fungus must have come down in that piece of star (as Elena Blasden called it) and then began to grow in the hollows beneath Clavitt Fields and what was now Bellac Road. It must have made contact with the townspeople and its chemical attraction could not be denied. For once tasted, it would have to be tasted again even if it meant you would become a crawling mutant horror.

Yes, that’s exactly how it was.

The fungus had called him here because it wanted to teach him the true history of this region.

Kenney didn’t really want it… but, then again, he really had no choice in the matter. The consciousness of the mother organism was a colossal thing that crushed him. He became a receiver.

He saw Clavitt Fields as it was in the 17th century.

He saw Preacher Clavitt show up. He was some kind of fanatical zealot who practiced an extreme form of the puritan faith. It was he and his congregation that originally began building the town, but as blood calls to blood, soon enough dozens of families traveled west to join them. By the time of the War of Independence there were several hundred people in the village. But even then it was a bad place. Stories made the rounds of things heard calling from the dark woods, strange sounds echoing up from the well Elena Blasden had mentioned. Clavitt’s people were a fearful lot who did not dare venture out after dark and looked to the Bible for strength against the unknown. Clavitt himself called the area a “blighted, pestilential run of haunted forest and dark, brooding hollows that must be purified by the hand of the lord.”

Then Corben arrived.

He went by no other name and was considered a sage of sorts, though local gossip had it he was a warlock that escaped persecution in Europe. He took control of the village from the old, infirm Clavitt. He was a learned man, well-versed in herb lore and folk remedy. Straight away, he began curing the sick and making fertile the fields. He fashioned talismans and amulets, good-luck charms and love philters for the heartbroken. And slowly, inexorably, he began to wean the townsfolk away from Christianity and into some older, pagan religion. A religion where ancient deities were worshipped in shadowy glens, where animal sacrifice was offered to ensure the harvest, where maidens adorned in flower petals were given bodily in orgiastic rites.

Those were the tales that the locals fervently believed.

The truth was that Corben was something of a 17th century-Timothy Leary, a hallucinogen guru that had studied widely in the Orient. His cures and potions often contained trace amounts of psilocybin, which created feelings of euphoria, good fortune, and geniality among their users… and sometimes, unreasoning terror.

Somewhere during this period, the acid guru made contact with the mother organism and began to actively cultivate her spores, which created mild to extreme hallucinogenic effects. It wasn’t long before the entire town was involved and slave to her… and happily so.

Clavitt Fields became increasingly isolated. There was a great deal of speculation by outsiders concerning interbreeding and resultant insanity, physical and mental aberrations. Soon enough, none of the local villagers would go anywhere near Clavitt Fields. They spoke of witchcraft and Satanism, the black mass and human sacrifice. Even the unspeakable acts of cannibalism and necrophilia were mentioned, that some dark cult worshiped hideous gods in moon-washed groves and gave their firstborn to slake the appetites of these creatures. Outsiders were frightened and many had seen the evidence of witching: failed crops, diseased livestock, and unnatural births among their own numbers. But these things were the result of contact with the mother organism and nothing else. All of the above was nothing but superstitious fantasy and old wives’ tales.

The inhabitants of Clavitt Fields were more than happy to stay on their own lands. They disassociated themselves from the outside world because they had all, in their own way, achieved a higher state of consciousness via the fungus.

But that was hardly acceptable to the town fathers of Trowden, who saw iniquity breeding on their doorstep. Three trusted and honorable men were given the task of making a pilgrimage to the shunned and evil hamlet of Clavitt Fields. No townsmen of Trowden had visited those redoubtable environs in some time. It was a sinister, witch-haunted borough, after all.

The three men were Dr. Blair, Mr. Bowden, and Mr. Peel.

Their mission was not of a military order, though they carried muskets and Bowden sported a brace of pistols and an old naval cutlass sharpened to lethal perfection. Their mission was simply recognizance. Regardless, they expected trouble of the most “vile awfulness” as Peel put it. The most foul sort of tales were told of that accursed village, of course, things concerning obscene rites held upon May-Eve and Candlemas, and their judgment was more than a little clouded.

It was near to twilight when they picketed their horses in a thicket a few leagues from the village—this was Bowden’s idea being a former cavalry officer. And it made good sense to the others, the rationale being that in the case of quick retreat their mares would stand ready.

Although evidently an agricultural community of sorts, they saw that the fields of Clavitt were mostly uncultivated and overgrown with briars, wild grasses, uprisings of creepers and an unwholesome umbrage that seemed to quiver though there was no discernable breeze. It was said that here were to be found splendid fields of buckwheat, rye, and Indian corn, but they saw only bramble thickets and alder bushes, and no livestock—nary a pig or guinea fowl or plow horse.

Clavitt Fields clung to a series of blighted hills that rose and fell and twisted like the convolutions of a serpent. It was hard for Blair and the others to believe it had stood less than a century, for what they beheld was a seemingly ancient, depraved uprising of rotting half-timbered houses and clustered tall buildings crouching beneath dark gabled roofs. They jutted from hilltop and dell, a crowded see-saw maze that leaned out over the cobbled and brickwork streets as if they would fall at any moment. So congested were these eldritch dwellings, Blair later noted, that the sullen windows of those above looked out over the crowded rooftops of those below. Had you but fallen from one of those high, sagging porches you would’ve landed on the neighbor’s roof and rolled out into the narrow, claustrophobic streets.

In Kenney’s mind, he could hear a voice speaking. It was clear and concise and he knew it was the voice of Dr. Blair reading from his own journals nearly two centuries before:

“How can I ever adequately convey how it felt walking into that shunned, godless village? Beneath those gnarled, twisted locust trees and misshapen elms? Would I say that the air was leaden, heavy even, thick as curdled cream and such as easy to breathe? Would I describe to you that high, noisome stink of dampness and putrefaction that seemed to visibly ooze from root cellars and gutters? Yes, perhaps, for such is true. Those high houses leered with grim secrets, shuttered and sunless, lathed in a breathing, sinister penumbra that set my flesh to crawling. As we walked those deserted, suffocating streets and weedy passages, we could hear sounds coming from behind warped doorways and planked windows. And, God, what sounds! Bleatings and snorting and gruntings akin to hogs rooting at a trough, but all with a weird, demented near-human timbre to them. We wondered silently what abominations, what verminous hybrids could utter such sounds. We could feel eyes upon us and smell ghastly, fetid odors emanating from shadowy doorways. Never was I—and am not now—one given to supernatural elucidation, but I swear as God is my witness, that there hung a malignant pall over that accursed town, a noxious ether of spiritual contamination that made me shiver, made something in me beg to cry out! Yes, had it not been for my two stalwart and robust companions, I would have fled that decadent, hellish place and lost myself most surely in those clutching black woods and lunatic verdure.”

That was what the rambling voice of Dr. Blair said in a suitably dramatic and wordy fashion.

Before long, the villagers of Clavitt Fields began to show themselves.

Blair’s voice droned on: “And what a debased, perverted assemblage of flesh they indeed were! Good Lord! A subhuman drollery! Wizened, skeletal things with peeling faces and deranged anatomies. Some hunchbacked, others missing limbs, still others—it seemed—with too many. Their eyes (and understand that some had none to speak of, merely fleshy depressions where eyes would sit in sane physiognomies) were glazed and sightless, while others sported orbs that were nearly luminous, the color of glaring autumn moons. Dressed in rags and nursing tumorous growths and leprous contusions, they shambled from the shadows to look at us. To gawk and leer.

“And laugh! For they were all laughing at us! A hideous conglomeration of morbid human mushrooms!

“And one man with colorless hair the texture of straw slid forward and fixed us with a single saffron eye set in an exaggerated face of humps and ridges. ‘Ye came, did ye? We knewed ye would!’ he said, that cyclopean face swimming close to my own. ‘Wait until sunset, he say’d! They’ll come through the weald, he say’d! They’ll be afeared of that which they find and what find them, he say’d! By my troth, he say’d, liken it to worse things! And here ye are, kind gentry, and welcome one and all! Good morrow to ye!’

“At which point—I can barely write of it, my hands tremble so—he opened his ragged, mildew-patched waistcoat and exposed the flesh of his chest, which was set with pustules, tumorlike bulbs, and what appeared to be juicy pink toadstools growing in noxious, fertile clusters! They pulsed with life! Then… yes, I must write of it… he plucked one free by its stem and offered it to us.

“‘Have a taste, would you, governor? Have a wee taste and a prosperous journey, eh?’

“He staggered away, giggling, chewing on the thing he offered me, which I swear cried out as he bit into it. A dozen others followed him—a congregation of deformed, diseased, inbred mongrels laughing at some joke we dared not know. Some howled at the stars poking out above and others gibbered and still others wept and gnawed at their own fingers.

“These, then, were the children of Corben, the demonic savior of this degenerated and stigmatical flock.

“Despite my revulsion, being a medical man I began to put questions to the afflicted concerning the nature of their abnormalities and morbid afflictions, but I received naught, only laughter and bestial sounds in reply. Some pointed to the earth, others to the sky, and one woman who lacked a mouth of all things, gestured madly towards the moon, which was then beginning to arise over the latticed tree tops and was the color of fresh blood. A child pointed to a foreboding tangle of shadows that coiled in the alleyway between two crumbling buildings. She could not stop giggling.

“We continued on, undaunted. The villagers left us alone. They were—despite their numerous physical and mental derangements—a cheerful assemblage. Laughing and dancing and jumping for what seemed great joy. But joy of what?

“The town was a knotted profusion of cul-de-sacs and dead-end crevices pressed between high houses and tall, stone buildings with black, mullioned windows when there were any at all. It was an easy enough place to lose oneself. Particularly for me since I had never once walked—nor wanted to—those crumbling brick streets. I fear that the unwholesome tales whispered about that town were more than enough to keep me at arm’s length, though I had resided in Trowden some two-and-seven years.

“Anon, we found what Silas Bowden assured us had once been a most prosperous tavern. We pushed through the rotting door and into the shadowy, umbered interior. Inside, the air was black and greasy, smudged with unpleasant odors as of tombs and crematoriums. An awful, vaporous reek of decay and slime and depravity. I found it necessary to suck air through staunchly clenched teeth. A few withered and unappetizing specimens of the village waited at dusty tables or beneath the sullen, flickering glare of a whale-oil lamp. A man was crouched in the corner near the hearth. He held his face in his hands, continually moaning as if in some dire pain or suffering some irreparable loss. But as I watched him, by God, I saw… I swear I saw… something white and wet wriggling beneath those fingers. A barmaid turned and looked upon us, immediately secreting a hand into her besoiled apron—a hand that was gray and bloated as of a fungi. And of the others? Their faces were hideous things, lumpy and leprous, distortions nature had never intended in her wisdom. It was as if their faces were composed of bread dough, warm and pliable, elastic even, that had been stretched and pulled in the most repulsive fashion so that eyes were pushed up into the vicinity of foreheads and the corners of those horrid, gashed mouths often were slit into the cheekbones themselves.

“’Good sir,’ Silas Bowden put to that thing behind the bartop. ‘We seek an audience with Master Corben. Could you be good enough—’

“‘Up those stairs yonder,’ was all he would say.

“And up those stairs we went, our hearts heavy and our minds verging on madness. A black, reeking slime slicked the corridor above and it seemed that the woodwork had gone soft with some morbid decay. We knocked at the door at the end and… God, can I continue? Do I dare scrawl what it was that answered our beckoning? Do I describe that face that sent us fleeing? That livid creeping mask, bloated and eyeless, a festering contusion wherein crawled worming things and dripped with a gray, stinking slime? Or those fingers like viscid toadstools that reached out to us? Or that creeping fungous jelly that purported to be the body of a man?

“Forspent and affrightened, we fled and ashamed I am not to admit of this. That town… that man… God in heaven, how can any of this be? From whence comes this witchery?”

Then the voice faded and Kenney stood there in that lush garden of growing things, the womb of the mother organism… and giggled. He ran his hands up and down mushroomlike stalks, fondling sacs and breathing bags of tissue web.

When Dr. Blair and company made their report to the town fathers of Trowden, the general consensus was that a curse had fallen over the region, that soon the pestilence of Clavitt Fields would contaminate Trowden, too.

The evidence continued to mount, the fathers said.

Clegg the blacksmith and his wife—after a delectable mushroom pie—were roasting apples in the hearth with their fine, fat children when the apples began to sizzle and became tiny human heads with nightmarish faces that screamed and chanted. Livestock had been found in the fields—gutted, half-eaten, dismembered. Three children had disappeared… though, true, one was later found gleefully running along the top of the town wall. Several maidens were found dancing naked in the turnip fields and Farmer Crogan, him of sober habits, spent an entire afternoon counting windowpanes in apparent dementia. Crops were failing. Wells were corrupt—the water had gone to a red, shivering jelly (Preacher Tagley said the jelly whispered obscene things if one were to but listen). And the maiden Korth… dear Christ, it was said she lay with a boy from Clavitt Fields and the midwife Rogers had a seizure at the sight of the creature that fell from the girl’s womb—an undulating thing like a human maggot.

“A pox on us all,” said Dr. Blair. “Dear God, a pox on us all.”

Something had to be done.

Incited by Pastor VanDeeden, a band of militiamen and privateers led by Silas Bowden assaulted the village of Clavitt Fields. In broad daylight they assembled. Two cannons were borrowed from nearby Fort McKinnis. And soon enough the quiet, sullen byways of the accursed village were resounding with the reports of musketry and the booming of cannons. Houses were set afire. Buildings came down as cannonballs blew their walls to rubble. And everywhere, a deadly, hungering conflagration of flames and smoke and screeching, inhuman forms that went down under barrages of musket balls. Things howled and mewled behind those shuttered windows and white, pustulant hands clawed from cellar doorways. The town was raided, ravaged, and razed. When they left, all that stood was a skeleton of what had brooded there before—chimneys and walls and foundations, smoldering timbers and sagging rooftops.

This was what the mother organism wanted Kenney to know so that he would understand. Much of it—particularly Dr. Blair’s report—was very subjective in nature. And as to how much was true and how much was the raving of men under the influence of hallucinogenic compounds, it was up to Kenney to decide.

There was no fucking witchcraft or dark gods worshiped at pagan altars in moonlit glens. That was all mad bullshit. The only thing out on Bellac Road was some kind of massive alien fungus that perpetuated itself by addicting other life forms to its hallucinogenic properties and then, and then—

And then Kenney didn’t know. That was the secret the mother organism would not share with him and not because she was some scheming, conspiratorial thing, but because she truly thought—and her thinking was more along the lines of chemical transmission—it was obvious. In the final analysis, she was as fucking wrecked as her worshipers.

This was food for thought and he figured there was something there, something pertinent, but he was in no shape to partake of it because he was tripping himself.

I just wanna go roamin’ in the gloamin’with a bonnie mushroom at my side.

He started to giggle and things around him started getting very funny—darkly, macabrely funny. Inside his head, it was loud and surreal and out of focus. He was a teenager again, getting stoned and reading H.P. Lovecraft, zoning out on cosmic horror and banned books and rotting little New England towns and the things that crawled in them… except that now he understood the nature of Yog Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath and even old Azazoth himself. Just subjective impressions and mushroom dreams of otherworldly things as seen by minds absolutely blown on hallucinogens.

Even old Abdul Alhazred was probably nothing but a buttonhead.

He watched the mutants… maybe they’d always been there or maybe they just arrived. They passed by, completely oblivious to his presence. They had been killers before, savages that attacked without mercy… but that was only because they were defending what was theirs, the last shreds of human aggression and xenophobia expressing itself with tribal violence. Something that was amplified by the properties of the fungus. They were tripping themselves into an insane battle rage like Norse berserkers gobbling up fly-agaric before going into combat.

Now, completely under the influence of the mother organism, they were docile. Not warriors but farmers. They carried sacks of human and animal remains and dumped them into the slimy water where they would continue to break down into rotting organic matter. It was like fertilizer for the mother. Once they had done this, they ate her mushroomy growths.

They weren’t ghouls and they had never been ghouls.

The dead were for her. She fed off the rich nutrients of decomposition and they fed off her. In the end, they were nothing but servitors, caretakers and farmers. They took care of the mother organism and she took care of them.

Kenney knew the bones they’d found in the field that started this whole mess hadn’t been buried from above, but pushed up from below.

Things began to blur and lose consistency.

The fungus and its weird growths around him filled the grotto in vibrant, chromatic colors that made him cry out in pure rapture as he tripped among slender blossoms, pulsating seed pods, tuberous roots, and radiant membranes that became faces that laughed at him. The world was a whirling cosmos and he was drunk on it, stumbling deeper and deeper into the womb of life until—

Until he saw something that turned his joy into palpable fear that was a green river of plasma he drowned in.

Toadstools.

He was in a chamber of toadstools.

At least, that’s what they seemed to be. They grew in wild abundance all around him, pink and translucent, not toadstools at all but fruiting bodies swollen with spores. It had taken the mother organism several centuries to come out of her semi-dormancy and to flower into full, fertile health, but her life cycle was very, very long. Now she was ready to spread her bounty onto the world of men.

Suddenly, Kenney felt the rage the mutants must have felt.

He saw a world of pulpous, inhuman servants tending to the needs of the mother organism. That was her plan. It was simple, natural, and nonviolent. And to her it was perfection. She could not understand why anyone wouldn’t want to be part of her. All life existed to be part of her.

She was not arrogant.

She was not domineering.

She was no monstrous alien invader.

Her ways were subtle. Once you smelled her perfume and touched her, you were smitten as any man was with a beautiful woman. She would let you touch her, teasing you with her fragrance and texture and perfect lines. Then you would want to kiss her and taste her and she would allow it. By then you were addicted to what she offered and there was no going back. Then you would enter her and she would absorb you, only to process you out as one of the mutants.

Then your life was cultivation.

Keeping her fertilized, adored, and well-stroked. Your reward was the pipe dreams she offered, the multidimensional trips through time and space. In the end, she was vain as any beautiful narcissistic woman who worshiped her own image in the mirror.

Bitch. Evil, inflated, egotistical bitch. You seduce us and addict us and make us into worker ants. That’s why you came here. That was your agenda—to be what nature intended you to be, a planetary life form, a single vegetative entity.

It was all true and he knew it.

Yes, but a happy one. A happy, productive entity, she said in his head… though there didn’t seem to be anything like a voice, just images and vibrations.

He stared out across the acres of her fruiting bodies. There were thousands and thousands and thousands of them.

He wanted to tear them up by the roots and squash them, charge through there with a scythe and reap them all, destroy them before they destroyed all that he knew… and yet part of him wanted to wear garlands of them and sing their praises to the world of stupid animals.

Feed your head, she told him.

In the end, he sat there chewing on a small mushroom and enjoying its taste, considering things like destiny and spatial perception and how this reality was like a film that could be peeled free when you achieved 100% consciousness through the offices of the mother organism.

Sneaky, underhanded bitch, his last shred of free will thought. You picked the right race, that’s for sure. Nobody falls prey to addiction like we do and nobody enjoys getting trashed more than human beings.

As she showed him alien vistas and networks of fluttering chromatic colors that he could smell and let him peek through long-shut doors of ultimate perception, he was reduced to some spastic delirium. It felt like his eyeballs were sweating, then bulging with hydrostatic pressure. His heart was not just racing, it had grown legs and it was kicking its way out of his chest. His skin was bubbling cheese, his mind a simmering broth, a sweet mushroom stew. When he cried out, his voice came not from his mouth but cycling out of the top of his head, leaving purple ripples in the air that refused to dissipate. When he reached out and touched them with fingers like spoons, they rang out like tuning forks.

Dream with me, she said in his head with a voice that was like the fluttering of a dozen butterfly wings. There is a quiet path through the woods. Let me show you the way into the light…

“Hee, hee,” he giggled, swallowing the last bit of mushroom. “Lead on, fair lady…”