“’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—