But he understood. “Yes,” he said, everything inside him beginning to take flight. “It’s… it’s very good.”
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.