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…”
45
In a lonely, weathered farmhouse on Bellac Road, Elena Blasden was dying and in her mind she could see the faces of her children and hear their singing voices and it was a melody that would carry her higher up into the fields of the Lord. She was not frightened. At the edge of death, there is no fear. Emotions and fears and anxieties that keep the human animal chained to the bedrock of its insecurities are cast off. As the eyes close, an inner eye opens briefly that sees all and understands and looks forward but never back. So Elena did not fear death because she saw the reality of it now in her dimming mind, which was rooted to her fading body like a dead oak to soil leeched of nutrients.
She saw death not as a horrid Grim Reaper cutout taped to a Halloween window, but as a bandage that covers the wound that is known as life. The dying do not fear and the dead do not bleed.
Death had been coming for many hours now and as darkness took Bellac Road, holding it tightly and grimly in its fist as it always had, she remained slouched in her old rocker by the window, watching through eyes bleary with the years as the sun set for a final time in her life. It was beautiful and nothing could take its image from her.
Her bones were like a precarious structure of straw that held her together in one piece but would not hold her much longer. But by then, the true weight of Elena Blasden would be long gone and she looked forward to the journey.
She heard a fumbling at the back door.
Was it them? Had the ones from below come for their feeding on this night when she could no longer offer them anything?
The idea that they might come in and feed on her made a girlish laughter erupt somewhere in her head. Me? Me! Ha, a bag of withered sticks and threadbare jerky tough as pine bark! Let them come! Let them go away with indigestion and loose teeth! The laughter echoed into nothingness and she remembered her girlhood and the precious, lost days of youth. She remembered what her mother had given birth to and how Midwife Sterns took it away into the night to be planted like a fat seed in Ezren’s Field. This was all she could think of.
The door?
Yes, it creaked open and hesitant footfalls came into the house along with a smell of dying things thrown up on dark beaches. Shuffle-shuffle-shuffle, came the feet and she sensed rather than saw a crooked figure in the doorway. It breathed hard and things dropped from it.
She felt no fear of it.
“You’ve come then?” she said in a dry, cracking voice. “Is… is that you, Edwin? Is that you, Eddie?”
The footfalls came closer and a shadow fell over her.
“Eddie,” she said. “My dear brother… I’m so… tired… I’m so very tired…”
The figure scooped her up in its arms very gently and not without love, clutching her as she closed her eyes and vanished in the dreams of childhood that claimed her in her final moments.
The figure held her like a precious antiquity and took her away, down into the darkness where there was no pain and there was no fear.
46
They stood around the cistern staring down into the vaporous blackness.
They paced and muttered and swore and shook their heads.
Hyder stood there, staring, staring, watching the men around him out of the corners of his eyes, men who couldn’t seem to stand still or didn’t know what to do with their hands or where to focus their eyes.