He looked at me, wiped his hand along the window ledge, held it up so that I could see the red dust accumulated on his fingers and palm. “These spores,” he said. “Dry rot spores, of course! Haven’t you been listening?”
“I have been listening, yes,” I answered sharply. “But I ask you: spores, mycelium, fruiting bodies? I mean, I thought dry rot was just, well, rotting wood!”
“It’s a fungus,” he told me, a little impatiently. “Like a mushroom, and it spreads in much the same way. Except it’s destructive, and once it gets started it’s bloody hard to stop!”
“And you, an ex-coalminer,” I started at him in the gloom of the house we’d invaded, “you’re an expert on it, right? How come, Garth?”
Again there was that troubled expression on his face, and in the dim interior of the house he didn’t try too hard to mask it. Maybe it had something to do with that story he’d promised to tell me, but doubtless he’d be as circuitous about that as he seemed to be about everything else. “Because I’ve read it up in books, that’s how,” he finally broke into my thoughts. “To occupy my time. When it first started to spread out of the old timber yard, I looked it up. It’s –” He gave a sort of grimace. “– it’s interesting, that’s all.”
By now I was wishing I was on my way again. But by that I mustn’t be misunderstood: I’m an able-bodied man and I wasn’t afraid of anything – and certainly not of Garth himself, who was just a lonely, canny old-timer – but all of this really was getting to be a waste of my time. I had just made my mind up to go back out through the window when he caught my arm.
“Oh, yes!” he said. “This place is really ripe with it! Can’tyou smell it? Even with the window bust wide open like this, and the place nicely dried out in the summer heat, still it’s stinking the place out. Now just you come over here and you’ll see what you’ll see.”
Despite myself, I was interested. And indeed I could smell . . . something. A cloying mustiness? A mushroomy taint? But not the nutty smell of fresh field mushrooms. More a sort of vile stagnation. Something dead might smell like this, long after the actual corruption has ceased . . .
Our eyes had grown somewhat accustomed to the gloom. We looked about the room. “Careful how you go,” said Garth. “See the spores there? Try not to stir them up too much. They’re worse than snuff, believe me!” He was right: the red dust lay fairly thick on just about everything. By “everything” I mean a few old sticks of furniture, the worn carpet under our feet, the skirting-board and various shelves and ledges. Whichever family had moved out of here, they hadn’t left a deal of stuff behind them.
The skirting was of the heavy, old-fashioned variety: an inch and a half thick, nine inches deep, with a fancy moulding along the top edge; they hadn’t spared the wood in those days. Garth peered suspiciously at the skirting-board, followed it away from the bay window and paused every pace to scrape the toe of his boot down its face. And eventually when he did this – suddenly the board crumbled to dust under the pressure of his toe!
It was literally as dramatic as that: the white paint cracked away and the timber underneath fell into a heap of black, smoking dust. Another pace and Garth kicked again, with the same result. He quickly exposed a ten-foot length of naked wall, on which even the plaster was loose and flaky, and showed me where strands of the cottonwool mycelium had come up between the brick-work and the plaster from below. “It sucks the cellulose right out of wood,” he said. “Gets right into brickwork, too. Now look here,” and he pointed at the old carpet under his feet. The threadbare weave showed a sort of raised floral blossom or stain, like a blotch or blister, spreading outward away from the wall.
Garth got down on his hands and knees. “Just look at this,” he said. He tore up the carpet and carefully laid it back. Underneath, the floorboards were warped, dark-stained, shrivelled so as to leave wide gaps between them. And up through the gaps came those white, etiolated threads, spreading themselves along the underside of the carpet.
I wrinkled my nose in disgust. “It’s like a disease,” I said.
“It is a disease!” he corrected me. “It’s a cancer, and houses die of it!” Then he inhaled noisily, pulled a face of his own, said: “Here. Right here.” He pointed at the warped, rotting floorboards. “The very heart of it. Give me a hand.” He got his fingers down between a pair of boards and gave a tug, and itwas at once apparent that he wouldn’t be needing any help from me. What had once been a stout wooden floorboard a full inch thick was now brittle as dry bark. It cracked upwards, flew apart, revealed the dark cavities between the floor joists. Garth tossed bits of crumbling wood aside, tore up more boards; and at last “the very heart of it” lay open to our inspection.
“There!” said Garth with a sort of grim satisfaction. He stood back and wiped his hands down his trousers. “Now that is what you call a fruiting body!”
It was roughly the size of a football, if not exactly that shape. Suspended between two joists in a cradle of fibres, and adhering to one of the joists as if partly flattened to it, the thing might have been a great, too-ripe tomato. It was bright yellow at its centre, banded in various shades of yellow from the middle out. It looked freakishly weird, like a bad joke: this lump of . . . of stuff – never a mushroom – just nestling there between the joists.
Garth touched my arm and I jumped a foot. He said: “You want to know where all the moisture goes – out of this wood, I mean? Well, just touch it.”
“Touch . . . that?”
“Heck it can’t bite you! It’s just a fungus.”
“All the same, I’d rather not,” I told him.
He took up a piece of floorboard and prodded the thing – and it squelched. The splintered point of the wood sank into it like jelly. Its heart was mainly liquid, porous as a sponge. “Like a huge egg yolk, isn’t it?” he said, his voice very quiet. He was plainly fascinated.
Suddenly I felt nauseous. The heat, the oppressive closeness of the room, the spore-laden air. I stepped dizzily backwards and stumbled against an old armchair. The rot had been there, too, for the chair just fragmented into a dozen pieces that puffed red dust all over the place. My foot sank right down through the carpet and mushy boards into darkness and stench – and in another moment I’d panicked.
Somehow I tumbled myself back out through the window, and ended up on my back in the brambles. Then Garth was standing over me, shaking his head and tut-tutting. “Told you not to stir up the dust,” he said. “It chokes your air and stifles you. Worse than being down a pit. Are you all right?”
My heart stopped hammering and I was, of course, all right. I got up. “A touch of claustrophobia,” I told him. “I suffer from it at times. Anyway, I think I’ve taken up enough of your time, Garth. I should be getting on my way.”
“What?” he protested. “A lovely day like this and you want to be driving off somewhere? And besides, there were things I wanted to tell you, and others I’d ask you – and we haven’t been down to Lily-Anne’s grave.” He looked disappointed. “Anyway, you shouldn’t be driving if you’re feeling all shaken up . . .”
He was right about that part of it, anyway: I did feel shaky, not to mention foolish! And perhaps more importantly, I was still very much aware of the old man’s loneliness. What if it was my mother who’d died, and my father had been left on his own up in Durham? “Very well,” I said, at the same time damning myself for a weak fool, “let’s go and see Lily-Anne’s grave.”