“It’s like this, Gemma – at the end of the day, there’s simply no growth in botany.”
If anybody other than Doctor Randwick had uttered those lines, they would have seen the inherent humour in that statement. However, Randwick – head of the faculty and therefore, unfortunately, my boss – was as humourless as he was short and as short as he was dull.
“If you look up the word ‘uninteresting’ in a dictionary,” one of my colleagues had once remarked, “you’ll find a picture of Doctor Randwick”. I remember countering with the fact that I thought you would only find half a picture of the esteemed Doctor, the poor artist would have long since given up through boredom trying to accurately capture the tedious little man’s overly generic features.
The Doctor and I had never seen eye to eye, either literally or figuratively. He was one of those archaic dinosaurs of education, a man who felt – and made no secret of the fact – that he didn’t think science was any place for women. Even after all these years, the odious little turd still refused to call me by my title.
“What about our pharmaceutical contracts?”
“Our contact at Rejuvenon informed me last Friday that they won’t be renewing our contract. They’ve finally got wise to the fact that it’s a lot cheaper to outsource their plant research to a bunch of Guatemalan kids who live on the edge of the jungle, rather than go to the expense of shipping the plants over here.”
“But what about Grainger Biotech?”
He gave a snort of derision, shaking his head. Classic Randwick condescension. I considered whether it’d be better to stab him repeatedly in the eyes with my pencil, or simply to embed a weeding trowel in his forehead.
“Grainger? They’re tiny. Their yearly budget would barely stretch to cover a hydroponic lamp. Without big Pharma, we can’t justify the expense of four staff. We’re simply going to have to let you and Margaret go.”
I knew it. I fucking knew it. I’d been trying to rationalise my recent bouts of paranoia as being a side effect of my fondness for Class A hallucinogens, but it turns out it was entirely justified. Sometimes the bastards are out to get you.
“And meanwhile, Todd and Charles keep their jobs?”
“Doctors Hale and Brooker, yes. They’ll be back at the start of next term.”
I went to say something but thought better of it. I knew from experience that anything I said in anger would only give Doctor Randwick ammunition. I’d been unfortunate enough to overhear the triumvirate of twats once when they believed they were alone in the lab. Each of them was taking turns to do a poor falsetto sing-song impersonation of my voice and repeating some of the grievances I’d discussed with them previously. They were like the Three Stooges without the charm.
Like a cop handing in her badge and gun, I ripped my laboratory lanyard from my neck and threw it onto Randwick’s desk. We glared at each other for a few moments before I stormed over to the door in silence.
The locked door.
My dramatic exit was somewhat lessened by the fact I had to skulk back to his desk and gingerly retrieve my lanyard. My face reddened like an Amanita muscaria mushroom as I swiped the card hanging from it and left the room, trying to hold back the tears.
Randwick couldn’t resist a last parting shot as I walked out.
“Happy holidays, Gemma.”
###
I slammed the car door shut behind me and slumped deep into the leather seat, half willing myself to sink into it and be lost forever. Glancing around to check the carpark was empty, I released a primal scream which felt as though it had been building up within me for the better part of a decade. I followed that with a few satisfying minutes of hammering my fists across the steering wheel, pretending it was Randwick’s smug little face.
Aaaaand relax.
Sitting next to me in the passenger seat was the meagre pile of belongings I’d amassed during my thirteen years of botanical work. The box was mostly filled with research books, ones that I’d purchased with my own money, so was damned if they’d get to keep them – but there were a few personal trinkets scattered about. There was an assortment of pictures of my husband – some of just him, but most were of both of us.
I picked up the pile of photographs, subconsciously shuffling them into chronological sequence before I’d realised what I was doing. Looking at the first one, I thought how young we both were. It was a picture from the days before I’d even started working at the research centre, when there was still a noticeable light in my eyes. I flicked through the rest.
Rather than provoking whimsical nostalgia, they were a sobering slideshow of the aging process.
With each new photograph, and with every passing year, my posture visibly changed. I’d never really noticed it before, but I appeared shorter and more crouched in every one, as though the pressure of life was crushing me. Those weren’t wrinkles appearing on my face, but cracks – stress fissures from an unseen but ever-present burden.
Daniel, however, had barely changed. Oh, the odd grey hair had sprung into existence, elegantly seasoning that dark thick crop with salt and pepper, but he looked as carefree and as youthful as he ever had. In the early photographs, I looked like his wife, in the later pictures I looked more like an older sister. If I could picture the photographs to come, I could well see myself looking like his mother.
That was what was missing from the photographs, missing from our lives. Motherhood. In one of the pictures, those snapshots of our lives, a new life should have appeared. Cradled in our arms at first, then peering from the plush confines of a pram. Later, sitting on one of our shoulders. Forever growing older, taller. Our son, or our daughter.
Had we been trying for a child from the very first photograph, or did it just feel that way? The two of us had both been through so many inconclusive tests over those years. Daniel would head off to the clinic for the umpteenth time, quipping that he was “wanking for science,” but the joke was stale now and became less humorous with every mention.
Moreover, despite putting on a brave face and trying to sound genuinely excited when another childhood friend announced their pregnancy, the words were beginning to stick in my craw. The well-rehearsed congratulatory phrases were a hollow cover for laments that cursed our misfortune.
A plant’s primary botanical function is to reproduce. If unable to carry out that simplest, most ancient, and basic of biological roles, it renders its entire purpose moot. As time went on, I felt the same. Once, when we were both young, it had been a nagging doubt. Now, it was an emergency. There was a time limit.
A chipped mug sat at the bottom of the box, bearing a black and white cartoon of a partying mushroom exclaiming, “I’m a Fungi” in a hideous Comic Sans font. Daniel had given it to me as a gift on the evening of my first day in the lab. It had been irrecoverably tannin stained for so long it now served better as a penholder than a drinking vessel, but it conjured up memories of happier days. I went to pick it up but as I lifted it, the handle broke away. The earthenware crumbled away like fine powder in my hand. I dropped the handle into the box and drove home.
###
Daniel was laying back on the sofa as I walked in from the kitchen, his face illuminated by the screen of the mobile phone from which he could never drag himself away. Our evenings had long ago deteriorated into me trying and failing to make conversation as he eagerly replied to every bleep and ping from that bloody electronic ball and chain.
“Work,” was the one word reply I invariably got whenever I asked who was texting or emailing him. He made me feel like a mushroom myself, keeping me in the dark and feeding me nothing but shit.
“You never know, this might be the best thing that could have happened to us,” I said, standing in the doorway.
He looked up from his phone at me, an eyebrow raised. He looked more distracted than interested.
“Huh?”
“We always complained that maternity leave at the lab was rubbish. Now I can look for a job that doesn’t have a policy created for the dark ages. Ready for when, you know, the IVF works.”
“Cool. Yeah.”
His eyes went back to his phone.
I had to find another job right away – Daniel’s wage was reasonable, but wouldn’t cover the expensive In Vitro Fertilisation procedures for which we’d been forced to fork out.
“I’m going to work in the greenhouse for a little while. Give me a shout if you need me.”
“Uh-huh”
I knew that sound. That non-committal grunt that meant he either wasn’t listening or didn’t care. Fine. There was no point in trying to break an uncomfortable silence we both wanted.
###
Even though warm and humid, the air in the greenhouse was still less heavy and oppressive seeming than that of the house. I decided against listening to any music, content with the background noises of the greenhouse; the humming of hydroponic lamps, the gentle trickling of the water filtration system, and the buzzing of tiny insects.
I swear that on a quiet day, if you listen hard enough, you can hear the plants growing. They emit the faintest sound, a barely audible noise that resembles that of stretching rubber.
I checked in on each of the plants that occupied the containers lining each of the walls, coming to the Laughing Cap mushrooms last. Over the last couple of weeks, the Gymnopilus junonius had developed from a dull brown to a glorious orange, their dry and scaly surfaces pocked with the occasional blue bruise. A couple of the caps dominated the container they were in, so I plucked them out, taking great care not to disturb the rusty orange spores that dusted their rings. The water on the small camping stove was boiling up nicely as I dropped in chunks of the yellow-orange flesh, then eagerly watched them as they turned green in the blistering liquid. I had boiled up a larger quantity of water than I ordinarily would (purely because of the somewhat large size of the mushrooms), so I dropped in three teabags rather than two for good measure. Each vanished into the water, the tiny perforated bags spiralling down to their doom in the increasingly murky liquid.
Fifteen minutes later, I was leaning back in a deck chair, holding the mug of tea in both hands, and letting the steam from the brew moisturise every pore in my face. I closed my eyes and breathed it in deeply before taking a sip. Sometimes I would add honey to cover the distinctive fungal undertones, but not today.
A less experienced and more timid drug user would probably have considered the ingestion of this amount of the hallucinogen Psilocybin a little foolhardy, especially after the kind of day I’d had. However, as somewhat of a psychotropic connoisseur, I couldn’t see the problem. I’d spent so much of my working life looking over my shoulder that the worst a little drug-fuelled paranoia could do would be to add a little variety, and as for hallucinations? Today, I relished them.
Eventually, the plastic arms on the cheap deck chair began to undulate and shift, molten globules of wax-like material dripping off onto the floor. They hissed where they landed, the concrete floor dissolving at the touch. The glass panes in the walls, clearly not wishing to feel left out, started to do the same – each oozing slowly to the ground, pooling in large reflective puddles around me. Stars danced within each tiny lake.
I’d left the remnants of the “I’m a Fungi” mug teetering precariously on the corner of a shelf. I’d thrown away the handle, but couldn’t bear to part with the rest of it. Behind it, the Eastern Poison Ivy plant – Toxicodendron radicans – suddenly started to grow at a phenomenal rate. Bright green vines laden with almond-shaped leaves began to creep across the walls and carefully wrapped tightly around the mug before dragging it into the mass of vegetation. The cartoon of the partying mushroom opened its eyes in wide horror for one fleeting moment before it vanished within the green morass.
I closed my eyes, relaxing to the sound of my own heartbeat that now filled the room like the sound of tribal drums. It only seemed appropriate in the jungle in which I now found myself, the vines of ivy wrapping around my ankles and spiralling upwards. With my eyes still closed, I rode out the sensation, relaxing into it. The vines constricted around my wrists and then, ultimately, around my throat. I was not scared.
It was several hours later when I awoke from the trip into a world of darkness; Daniel having switched all the lights off around me. He tolerated this one vice, and we rarely spoke of it. In my stumbling to get out of the greenhouse, my foot connected with the remnants of the mug and inadvertently kicked it against the wall. It shattered as it connected, meeting the same fate as its decayed handle.
###
Despite sharing a bed, these days we only ever slept alone. I vaguely remembered hearing some murmurings from him as he left for work, but it was nearing lunchtime when I finally stirred from a sleep punctuated with the oddest dreams – most of them derived from the false memories caused by the previous evening’s heroic dose of psilocybin.
Even in that confused state, I knew that I wouldn’t last long if I allowed myself to sink into a drugged stupor every evening. Without the nine-to-five of my day job, I needed something to give my life some formal structure. Job-hunting could wait until after the weekend, but before then, I needed to do something.
Crap-filled corners of the house that had lain dormant since we moved in almost two decades ago, experienced the overdue fury of the vacuum cleaner. Surfaces almost inch-thick with twenty years-worth of dried skin and grease, were made to shine like a star gone Supernova.
The misnomered “Important Documents” folder whose primary role had been to prop a bedroom door was prised open. I half expected angry spirits to spring forth, a little like the end of Raiders of The Lost Ark.
Utility bills from companies that no longer existed were collected and shredded. When I was done I had enough confetti for one of those mass weddings that the Moonies throw every now and then.
One must never underestimate the doggedness of a cleaner, or their determination to bring light into every nook and crevasse. Like Bindweed – Convolvulus arvensis – they’ll get everywhere. Their uncaring tendrils reaching into places forbidden, inaccessible, or rarely visited.
What had at first appeared like just a pile of old jumpers and sweatshirts in the bottom of Daniel’s wardrobe were ideal candidates for the charity shop run I had planned.
I didnt expect the dull thud when I’d lifted them off the floor, as a cheap and ancient mobile bounced off the bedroom carpet.
It was a mobile from the days back before smartphones, when a single battery charge could last a whole week. From those halcyon days when people used cameras to take photographs, arrived at appointments on time, and still sent birthday cards to one another.
My astonishment at holding this ancient piece of technology faded as I explored further. The address book held just a single name and number, and the lengthy call history showed nothing but phone calls to and from this stranger “Andrea,” the owner of that unknown set of digits.
It was the text messages, though, that changed everything. With each one-hundred-and-sixty-character monochromatic missive, a controlled explosion ripped through the already frayed foundations of our marriage.
The blatant affair between the conspirators was bad enough, with Daniel saying romantic or sexual things in those messages that he hadn’t said to me in a decade. However, there were worse revelations to come. The fact that the two of them had openly mocked my desire for children, and, finally, the thermonuclear explosion that vaporized everything – Daniel had undergone a secret vasectomy some six years previous.
My legs buckled beneath me, as though somebody had just kicked me in the back of the knees. I fell to the carpet, crying. A message – jet-black against illuminated bright orange – stared at me from the phone that lay in front of me.
I can’t leave her, the stoic martyr bemoaned, I think she’d hurt herself.
“Close, but no cigar,” was the immediate thought that sprung to mind.
###
When Andrea opened the door to me, I remained silent. In all honesty, I was just interested to hear what she had to say. I knew damn well she’d recognise me because they’d slept in our bed and my accusing photo would have been staring down at her from the wall. I wonder if they’d turned it around as they fucked, or had simply left me hanging there as an impotent sentinel?
Ha, impotent. Poor choice of words.
It was as though the neurons in her brain couldn’t fire sufficiently to put words in her mouth. She was still standing there, her wide eyes gaping and wordless mouth flapping, when I leaned forward and pushed her.
I’d done it with rather more force than I’d anticipated, and the back of her head cracked noisily against her tacky marble telephone table. The abrupt streak of red suddenly looked out of place against the blue Stilton-like surface. I’d never hurt anybody in my life before – it had felt natural – easy, even. I was surprised that I felt more upset by the mess I’d made of the table than the mess I’d made of Andrea. I stepped inside and pulled the door closed behind me as I stared down at her twitching form.
I had prepared a deadly syringe of Water Hemlock root – Cicuta virosa – but now it looked like it might not be necessary. That was quite the pool of blood sprouting beneath her shaking head, an ever-growing Mandelbrot pattern of scarlet. One eye was glaring at me, the other was bloodshot, dislodged, and staring at the wall. For a moment, it looked as though I might need the syringe after all, but then the shaking stopped and she suddenly shouted “Five!” at a space behind me before falling still and silent.
Outside of aphids and the odd vine weevil, I’d never killed before. I was rather surprised at how easy it had been. I’d hoped that my final words on this Earth would be somewhat more profound. In fact, I was already planning them.
###
The Bee Orchid – Ophrys apifera – is a remarkable plant. Instead of doing the typical plant-like thing of hoping that a bee will just happen to pop by, the Bee Orchid is slightly more proactive. It grows a flower that looks (and smells) just like a female bee. Your friendly, short-sighted, neighbourhood bee drops in for a quick fumble, is coated in the flowers discharge, and flies off – pollenating all.
Matching her smell was easy enough – Andrea was a big fan of a brand of perfume that she had shipped in by the gallon. Seriously, there were industrial drums of the stuff on her bedroom shelves. Eau de Adulteress. It was overwhelming, tacky and cheap, much like the décor she’d filled her house with.
I found three sad looking emaciated moth orchids – Phalaenopsis – in her bedroom. Despite being low-maintenance house plants, they’d been neglected to such an extent that they were beyond saving. If I’d felt any guilt whatsoever over Andrea, every trace of it was evaporated as I consigned the emaciated husk of each plant to the bin.
Andrea’s looks were, as fate would have it, easy to match as well. She was a similar height and build to me, and even her hairstyle wasn’t that dissimilar to mine. In fact, I found it somewhat offensive and bewildering that Daniel chose to have an affair with somebody so strikingly alike.
I’d read enough of her SMS messages to know how to comfortably disguise myself as her. She had an endearing habit of attempting admirably long words that she couldn’t spell, and occasionally lapsed into text speech like a ten-year-old from a decade ago.
I thought a plaintive text message from the damsel in distress to Daniel would work. Some bullshit about how all the fuses had blown in the house and how he simply had to come straight from work. If he got there quickly enough, the fuses won’t be all that’d get blown that night… That last bit was a bit self-indulgent, but it amused me a little to know that I managed to message something far wittier than Andrea could ever have managed.
###
For a moment, it looked as though he wouldn’t bite, but then my phone bleeped into life with the usual text from him to say there was a problem at work he’d have to deal with and he would be late coming home. I thought back at how many of those I’d received over the years, never doubting his word for a moment. I imagined the maggot had it saved as a template. Then within seconds, the horny fucker had sent a text to Andrea’s phone saying he was on the way.
I knew from their lengthy communications that he’d had a key for some time, and that he would let himself in. He was calling Andrea’s name as he stepped into the darkened hallway (both body and blood-soaked rug long since removed). I coughed loudly, having never heard her voice so I could formulate a passable impersonation, and he stepped into the front room. All he’d have seen was my naked silhouette, highlighted from the streetlights through the curtains behind me.
Slowly approaching, he called out, “Rea, where do you keep your fuse box?” In that single query, there were as many words as he’d said to me in a week. The blue-tinged streetlight from behind me reflected well enough off his skin that there was no chance of me missing his head with the cricket bat. No great utterances from him as he went down, no random numbers inexplicably blurted out. Just a simple, heavy, inelegant thud.
###
Administration at the lab was, and always had been, terrible. Even though I’d lost a dozen access key-cards, they never changed a single code with any of the new cards they’d given me. My recent spate of tidiness had uncovered five of the buggers; each a little faded, scratched, and scarred, but guaranteed still to work.
Conveniently, the greenhouse was right in the centre of the doughnut of buildings that formed the Science Faculty. The poorly paid and demoralised caretaker never did anything more than a cursory scout around the circumference, so I knew we could remain completely undisturbed for weeks. I had plans.
#
Andrea was easy to drag in, a literal dead weight. Daniel showed brief signs of stirring as I accidentally knocked his head against the doorframe, but thankfully remained unconscious. I was slightly relieved; it was the first sign of movement he’d had since Andrea’s house, and I was worried for a while I’d inflicted more harm to him than I’d intended. It was important that he was alive for the next step.
I tipped my holdall out onto the greenhouse floor, a variety of sealed plastic tubs clattering out. The syringe case was at the very bottom, underneath several soil-filled containers.
I took a syringe from the case and held it up to the light, studying the contents: a viscous yellow-tinged liquid swimming with tiny fragments colliding against each other. I’d dabbled with a weaker cocktail of the fungi Panaelous cyanescens, Psilocybe azurescens, Pluteus cyanopus, and Mycena cyanorrhiza as a recreational drug in the past, but had never dared to risk a concentration such as this.
My first experience of it had made for one hell of a weekend. It provoked an overwhelming sense of euphoria coupled with a torpor that made movement difficult, if not possible. I felt so disassociated from my corporeal form that any form of physical activity felt utterly futile.
I prepared Daniel first, carefully setting up the large industrial nutrient drip with the equipment I’d borrowed from the medical labs. He was still unconscious, but shifted uncomfortably each time the scalpel dug into his skin to peel it back. I flinched every time his body jerked, but he remained thankfully comatose.
It was more difficult having to do it to myself. The hefty dose of regular Psilocybin masked some of the pain, but not all. Through my drug-addled senses, I couldn’t help think that my patches of skinless flesh looked like raw tuna steak. That thought made it slightly easier to push the spores and seeds into it.
Eventually, we were both ready. I had prepared the room by shovelling soil from the greenhouse trays into a corner and now sat down next to Daniel. A separate drip fed us both, and the banks of hydroponic lamps were set to full burst. I’d already checked and double-checked the automated sprinkler system and with a final injection of a particularly high dose of a special fungal cocktail I’d prepared, the process could begin.
I stared at the syringe in my hands, suddenly aware of the enormity of the situation. These motions were the last I would ever make, all going well.
Taking a deep breath, I plunged the needle-tip into my arm. It felt like liquid magma as it went in, a warmth flooded through my veins, soon to become roots and tributaries.
###
The alteration to my perception of time was not unexpected but was, as always, a delight to behold. In one moment, I could watch the flowers and fungus slowly grow, hours speeding by like minutes, and at other moments, the seconds crept at such a pace that I could observe the individual vibrations of the wings of a fly as it kept its tiny and fragile frame aloft.
I was so heavily drugged that I was unable to make the slightest of movements, even to crane my head, and I remained blissfully unaware of the passage of actual time. If I could have run the experiment again, I would have placed a digital clock with a calendar in my field of view. There wouldn’t be another opportunity.
The spray of water on my face with each cycle of the sprinklers woke me, reminding me where and who I was. If I closed my eyes, it sounded like rainfall.
I noted that physical movement was impossible now. As expected, the toxic cocktail had acted as a neuromuscular paralytic and had probably done irreparable damage to my nervous system.
I think it was on the third day that Daniel awoke, after what seemed like hours of blinking, followed by him slowly opening his eyes. How must I have looked to him then? I’d deliberately chosen different strains of fungi and plants for each of us. By the painful act of moving my eyes down, feeling like at least twenty minutes of hard work by my reckoning, I could see dull brown floret tips of fungal growths dotting both our forearms. His own peeled cheek had begun to blossom with the lemon yellow Leucocoprinus birnbaumii, their fungal hoods taking shape as they gained structural integrity.
I had carefully sat Andrea’s corpse between us, and scattered her body with water and a variety of mosses and fungi. Her open eyes were quite distracting, at the time forcing me to place a dampened cloth shroud over her face.
Daniel started making the most terrible noises at some stage. With hindsight, I would have removed his tongue or at least have used it as a handy source of moisture for some controlled fungal development. It seems so obvious now. He was still paralysed, but fully cognizant, and I must have looked quite the horror by then, forced, as he was, to stare at me.
He was quite beautiful with a dazzling display of mushrooms and toadstools erupting in vibrant clusters from the flesh on his chest, face, and arms, vivid with poisonous and exotic reds and yellows. The Colorado Blue Columbine flower- Aquilegia caerulea – had begun to emerge from his wounds, shrouded in dried and congealed red, making him more attractive in the act of dying than he’d been in years. His eyes were fixed open, the beginnings of a beautiful crop of brilliant white sunburst toadstools erupting from the corner of one.
###
Despite a yearning for self-destruction through drug abuse, none of my scientific knowledge had left me. In the end, my timing had been perfect. As the last of the drips drained, I could feel the plants and fungus within me. Some, as designed, had grown to face the sun whereas others had retreated, sinking deeper into me.
Daniel, Andrea, and I were all connected – tendrils of moss and patches of vegetation engulfed us and much of the floor around us. I could feel as somebody approached. The gentle vibration in a hundred stamen, the ripples across countless leaves. Daniel had passed on, the light vanishing from his eyes long before the fungal growth had hidden them. The final hiss that left his constricted throat was accompanied by the chorus of the gentle sound of the ventilation system.
It was Doctor Randwick who opened the door. I was filled with a sense of disappointment when I realised he wasn’t accompanied by Doctors Pace and Brooker, but it would still do. His expression was the same as the one Andrea gave me when she found me on her doorstep, but more exaggerated.
He staggered inside, horrified. The smell must have hit him first, one to which I’d grown used to. A beautiful fungus I had a soft spot for, and had grown on Andrea’s corpse, was the Stinkhorn – Phallaceae – and had a stench that resembled decomposing meat. Mind you, Andrea had been decomposing for some weeks now, so it’d probably be hard to tell the difference.
His foot brushed against what was left of Daniel, bursting a fragile membrane containing a billion eager spores. As the air filled with the seed of my husband, Randwick, his mouth agape with surprise, couldn’t help but breathe in huge mouthfuls of the stuff. He staggered towards the window, disrupting more spore containers in his clumsy stumbling. He threw open the window and clouds of spores were propelled out into the glorious sunshine.
It hurt to smile, but I forced one out with two words, just as the vines constricted around my heart and moss smothered my brain.
“Our children.”
[bctt tweet=”OCTOBER TERROR 2018 Short Story Award – Entry #60 ‘OUR ELEGANT DECAY’ by David Court – Enjoy all this terrific, disturbing material you have in your hands, lots of horror stories at your disposal for your dark delight and vote!” username=”theboldmom”]
On October 23rd we’ll close submissions and open a poll for the readers to choose their favourite one! You’ll have a week to make your choice and on October 31st we’ll announce the winner!!!
