Mycelium Eyes
A Short Story for Dual Prompts
This is a bit of a strange one. I had an idea in mind that ended up coinciding perfectly with two different prompts given this week: Meg’s Milk & Honey Horror Challenge - the prompt was ecological horror and, more specifically, “you thought the season was changing, but it’s the world that’s rotting” - and Wendy Cockcroft’s 30 Days of Fright challenge - for which the prompt was “frightening fungus”. Enjoy <3
Musical Pairing: Mycelium Eyes by Sub Urban
Mira was already changing.
The trailer was overgrown with the bloated white fungus. It crawled up the thin plates of the walls and wrapped around the door handle. No matter how he tried to exterminate it, there was no method. It only grew and grew and grew. A pale, shining white, like a spider’s belly.
He sat on the wooden steps of the trailer, heavy with the stench of mold.
Mira was still asleep. He dreaded waking her, though he knew he would have to eventually. The mold was already in her system. It coated her skin like tufts of cotton. It clumped in her curls and grew between her eyelashes.
Her eyes had grown colorless. Like she was blind to the world, or asleep within herself.
He stared at the fungus blossoming at his feet. A perfect, pale parasite.
He stood, kicked at the nature-damned mushrooms, and stifled a barrage of curses. They had mutated, grown unkillable. Infected half the fucking world before anyone had even noticed, and another quarter while scientists and doctors scrambled for an impossible cure. And if they hadn’t been able to find one then, really, what chance did he have?
He choked on a laugh.
The trees rustled. He pivoted, scrambling for the knives at his belt.
There, in the shadows of the trees, stood a figure. Swaying. Shaded, with the exception of its white, glowing eyes. That alien mycelium hue.
He knew the figure wouldn’t leave the shadows. Couldn’t. And a part of him that had grown as rotten and twisted as the world around him wanted to slice it to ribbons where it stood. Better, to lure it into the weak lantern of the sun, where it would burn alive. But another part of him thought of Mira. Of what she would become. What she was already becoming.
He left the infected figure in the shade and stepped back into the creaking trailer. Its possessed gaze seemed to bore through the thin walls into the damp darkness beyond, where Mira lay on the bed they had once shared, her cheeks shrouded in white filaments, her lips leaking white sap.
He bit the inside of his cheek. Hard. Then, he lowered himself onto her bed and brushed away the pale fungus with the back of his hand.
“Mira?”
Her eyes opened, white as mushrooms. They stared through him. Her hands were damp and limp in his.
He brushed back her curls, fingering the knots. “How are you feeling, Mira? Any better?”
Her lips parted, but she did not speak.
“I’m going to find a cure. I promised, remember?”
Nothing.
He squeezed her hands. Dropped them. “I’ll be back.”
The tears burned, bright and hard, as he shut the door behind him. The figure was still there, staring and swaying.
He slid a knife out of his belt. Stalked towards the figure and felt a grim satisfaction when its swaying grew quicker, more erratic. Frantic. The knife flashed in his hand and descended into the shadows. When he yanked it out of the figure’s throat, it was coated in slick, pale blood. He looked into the wound he had made and saw nothing but thick, white filaments, like branches, filling the hollow within.
He left the mutated man in the shadows, to bleed pus.
The world had been rotting for long before the mold, the fungus, began to grow at impossible rates. Long before it took hold of infrastructure and climbed through the vents and rooted itself into people. Took over their systems. All because of a mutation caused by humanity itself, and its toxic pollution.
He remembered what their town had become, afterwards. A husk covered in white mushrooms and smears of mold.
People, what was left of them, crawled on mutated limbs and stared at the world with alien eyes. They opened their mouths and spilled out mold rather than screams. Their blood was white. Sticky. And those were only the ones in the earlier stages of the disease. Left alone for long enough, the fungus shrouded them like a cocoon. Like a coffin.
Humanity and its society fell in just thirteen days.
He remembered the first life he had taken. A child. A little girl who he found hiding under his bed. Her eyes were the white of spider silk, shining. Patches of mold grew on her cheeks. She had folded her limbs at strange, crouched angles; folded herself beneath his mattress.
He never did figure out how she’d gotten there. He hadn’t wanted to kill her. He told himself he’d had no choice.
When he tried to drag her out from under the bed, she grew frenzied, bashing her small fists against the floor, the mattress, his arms. She bit him when he managed to yank one thin arm out from the shadows. Her small, sharp teeth sank into his arm with ease. When he yanked again, cursing, her arm came out of its socket with a wet pop. She didn’t seem to notice.
When he was able to drag her out, she was in such a silent frenzy, nails and teeth threatening to infect him, that he brought the nearest thing he could find down against her temple. She fell suddenly, eerily still. Her pale eyes, still open, watched him. Where her arm had popped out of its socket, the mold had grown layered, as though bandaging the wound.
He left her there. He had his own wound to tend to. Where her teeth had marked him, the sticky, white filaments had already attached themselves to his skin and were burying further towards bone.
He locked himself in the bathroom. It took him three hours and a needle to dislodge all the buried filaments. He nearly tore his arm to shreds in the process.
When Mira found him crouched in the bathroom, face and neck glistening with sweat, his blood slickening the floor tiles, he told her they had to leave the town, before the mold infected them, too. They were safer away from people. She was the one who had suggested the trailer, though he never liked how far into the forest it was. Where the damp darkness grew like a disease. She reminded him it was familiar territory, the same trailer they had spent so many summers in. She promised him it would only be for a night, before they would find somewhere safer. She hid the single white filament that had wrapped itself around her ring finger, the hours she spent in the bathroom, that white fungus dripping from her lips as her stomach tried to heave it out.
He still wondered why she hadn’t told him. It didn’t matter, though. What mattered was finding a cure.
He searched the forest for hours each day, uncertain of what exactly he was searching for. People, maybe, or a bunker of some sort. Supplies. He never found anything. They were secreted away in the middle of nowhere. He wondered sometimes, darkly, if Mira had brought them there to die.
Three days after Mira became bedridden, he found a tree in the forest that looked like their trailer. Overridden with white mushrooms. They tripped up its trunk like a strange stairwell. The leaves glowed white.
He hadn’t heard birdsong in weeks, not since the infection had begun to spread, but here, the birds shrilled into the silence. Their feathers leaden down by tufts of white.
He left the tree, wondering how anything could help Mira if nature itself had surrendered to the parasite.
Mira grasped his hand in her own damp, cold ones. When she spoke, he startled. Her voice was strange, raspy against the hollows of his ears.
“It’s calling to me. I can hear its voice in my dreams, in my head. It sings against my ribs. It’s already taken over so many. They whisper through my spine.” She giggled. Mold clung to her teeth. “The whole world is connected now. You wouldn’t believe it. How alone we were, before. How out of touch with nature. Now, the birds sing through me. The trees rustle against my brain. The mold grows through my bones. Open your eyes.” Her hand floated to his cheek. Her own eyes glowed. “Only then will you see how the world is thriving now.”
He blinked back hot tears. He was suddenly angry. “Open my eyes? You’re delirious, Mira. This stupid disease is killing you. It’s a curse, not a blessing.”
He slapped her hand away. Her words faltered. He was glad for it, despite the twinge of guilt that was there and gone.
He stood. He needed air; fresh, clean, cool air, not the damp, dank stench that clouded the trailer like its own sickness. Mira’s hand fell back to the mattress. But she didn’t close her eyes, even as he moved to the door. She watched him. And, by the time he left, she had begun to whisper under her breath. One phrase, again and again.
We are nothing but the roots of a sprawling system.
Her hand had left its mark. He stared at his reflection in the black pond, at the white that stood stark against his cheek.
He yanked out a tuft of the mold. A handful. It stuck to his cheek, stubbornly. It was already worming its way into his system.
He found a sharp rock against the shore of the pond. He barely felt the pain as he dug it into the skin, uprooting the disease that was threatening to grow there. The blood was slick against his fingers. His cheeks were wet with tears of anger.
If Mira wanted to surrender, that was her choice. But it wouldn’t be his.
“The world deserves this,” Mira whispered.
He sat on a frail wooden chair, legs straddling the seat, arms crossed over its back. He made certain to sit at a distance. His cheek still throbbed from where he had dug out the spores.
“Don’t you see? We spent so long fighting against nature when we should have been embracing it. Like it is embracing us now. This is a second chance.”
Mira shivered. Spores fluttered around her like dust, drifting to the floor. Her eyes folded shut.
He started. “Mira?”
When they opened again, Mira swung the blankets off her and stood. He looked at her legs. They were bony, nothing more than skin plastered together with thick layers of mold. She hadn’t eaten in days, he realized. She couldn’t have still been alive if it wasn’t for the very disease that was killing her.
But was it killing her?
The mold had eaten away her clothing, leaving her naked, except for its white fabric. It threaded over her ribs, through her ribs, and spiraled around her hips. It clung to her neck and breasts. He hardly recognized her anymore. She wasn’t– she couldn’t still be human.
She extended a graceful hand. “Come. You will see.”
With shaking fingers, he took it. And watched as the fungus wrapped around his palm and threaded their fingers together. He couldn’t bring himself to unspool it.
The tears fractured his vision into puddles of muddy green and brown as he followed Mira out of the trailer and into the shadowy forest. The evening cast waning shadows across the forest floor, setting the white mushrooms that had begun sprouting from the tree trunks aglow. The air smelled damp and earthy.
“Our old world was a parasite,” Mira told him, as they wound through white-streaked trees and crushed pale leaves below their feet. “It fed on everything, gorging itself until there was nothing left. You think this is a parasite. A sickness. But it’s our salvation. As long as we keep our humanity, we will continue to be this world’s ruination. Our own ruination.”
He wanted to say that she sounded irrational, delusional. Riddled with sickness. But how could he contradict her? He thought of the greed that had birthed the toxin, the fungus, in the first place. He thought of the little girl under his bed, of the figure swaying in the shade. Of the dozens he had killed just to bring them to this forest. He had done it because they were no longer human, in his eyes, but what did that make him?
Inhumane… or irrevocably human.
“Look,” Mira told him, and he did.
They had reached the tree with its spooling mushrooms, standing taller and grander than all the rest. It was wreathed in white filaments that draped from its leaves like cobwebs. And, at its roots, he saw…
“We are nothing but the roots of a sprawling system,” Mira said.
The bodies were fractured, broken open in places where the fungus filled them with thick white branches that replaced what had once been organs and bones and veins. They seeped into the forest floor, as though molten. But they were alive, he realized, with a sickly jolt. Their pale eyes watched them, bright and conscious. Their fingers reached out, webbed and damp.
He realized too late. The fungus was spreading across his arms, sprawling over skin and digging into bone. Crawling up his neck and jaw, worming its way into the wound in his cheek.
“Don’t fight it,” Mira said.
He said, “Stop it.”
But she tilted her head up and brought her lips to his. Where they touched, the fungus blossomed. It dampened his cheeks, mingling with his tears. It threaded through the cavity of his chest, until he no longer knew what he felt. Love, sorrow, hatred, fear. All the things that made him human. But were they really so important?
As the fungus seeped into his skin, Mira led them to the tree’s base. They lay against the wet roots, arms and legs and bodies intertwined. Eternal lovers.
He finally saw, through infected, mycelium eyes. He finally understood.
And he embraced nature, as it embraced him.
This was really tender and beautiful but also absolutely horrible. I loved it.
The visuals this conjures are crazy. Super well written