Note: I wrote it in 1997 when I was living in south Austin, and it’s a south Austin kind of tale about bad neighbors, roommates and a giant mushroom. 

Like many stories, “This Thing of Darkness” contains elements that are based on true occurences. In this case, the more fantastic elements are the ones I didn’t make up. Everything about the fungus is true.

This Thing of Darkness

“Arrrarh frigggin’ piece a damn…” Marty trailed off, forgetting English and staring blankly at the empty beer can in his thick hand. Breakfast beer.

Candi, full of impatience pleaded, “Jesus, I just need the car jumped.” They stared at one another for a long time. Marty scrunched his face into a snarl, slowly shaking his head.

“Well? Gonna just stand there,” Candi asked as if speaking to a dim-witted child.

Marty erupted, crushing the can in his hand, “Dammit why can’t…ahhh, I-jus’ wanna sleep in one time.” He threw the can on the ground.

Walt glanced over from across the driveway, eyebrows rising. Candi and Marty momentarily stopped harassing one another and stared at him as if to say, mind your own damn business. Walt looked away and turned as Candi hissed something unintelligible at Marty. Walt picked up the old battered garden hoe lying nearby and stared at a crack in the carport. Marty and Candi resumed arguing, unsuccessfully attempting to hide their dispute from Walt.

Walt gripped the hoe and lifted it high above his head, braced himself and brought it down with a crash into the oily fungus oozing out of the crack in the carport floor. Marty and Candi continued bitching at one another behind his back. Walt ignored them. Candi suddenly screamed a bitter obscenity at Marty. A car door opened and Marty roared as it slammed shut again. Candi sped out of the driveway and down the street in her red Iroc-Z, bass thumping from within. Marty growled like an animal as he lumbered back into his house.

Walt smashed the hoe once again into the fungus. No wonder the skinny dude moved out of there, he thought. Chunks of gray fungus broke off and flew against the door each time the hoe came down. Beneath the skin, the wounded fungus was a reddish brown color resembling wet rust. Walt jammed the hoe into the crack and using his foot managed to pry out another large piece of the thing. Two jagged wounds now cleaved the mysterious organism growing up from the depths of the crack in the carport. It was nearly a foot long, but god only knew how deep beneath the house it ran. Walt spat on it and walked inside.

He rummaged under the sink, amongst bottles of half empty cleaning supplies, reaching all the way in and straining a bit until his fingers finally found the right bottle. He pulled it out and shook it, half a bottle’s worth of acetone sloshed around inside. He could hear his roommate, Hal, pacing around in his room, mumbling to his cat about needing to find a job. Walt walked back outside, grabbing a book of matches on his way out.

He stood over the fungus once again and poured most of the bottle of acetone onto its wounds which hissed and bubbled, reacting violently to the harsh chemical. Walt smiled and picked up the hoe, malevolently piercing and cutting the fungus, forcing the acetone to seep into the thing. Chunks of the mushroom broke loose as Walt pried and tore. Finally, Walt stopped to rest. Sweating under the hot sun, he leaned against his hoe like Farmer Brown after a long day in the fields. Walt struck a match and slowly placed it next to the mauled fungus. Whoosh. A small, almost imperceptible, blue fireball engulfed the grotesque thing and licked along the concrete. He watched, nearly smiling, as the hot invisible flames melted it. Finally, the acetone burned away and the flames disappeared. Walt held his hand over the fungus-no heat. He stared at the charred, partially melted, oozing red wounds and the pitiful remains of the fungus, which only that morning had been over an inch tall and several wide.

Walt leaned the hoe against the house and walked inside. The floors in the old house slanted at a slight grade towards the back of the house where Hal squatted in his underwear at the end of the hall. Walt walked toward the downhill side of the house. “Lookit this one,” Hal called as Walt approached.

Walt stopped at the edge of the hallway. The linoleum covering on the floor had buckled in several places like miniature mountain ranges. Hal was peering at one of the ridges, running his finger along the brittle, cracked tiles. He looked up at Walt. “This one here yesterday?”

Walt shook his head.

“It looks like…like, I dunno, the Himalayas in here,” Hal decided as he looked at all the other ridges in the floor.

“Some fightin’ again next door,” Walt said.

Hal looked at him in disgust and shook his head, “Great.”

Walt nodded.

* * *

That evening, Walt pulled into the carport, returning from work. Hal was sitting over the fungus, sipping a beer. Walt got out of the car, joining Hal in the sickly pool of light cast by the yellow bulb in the porch light. Hal took a swig of beer. He looked up at Walt, “now whaddya say ya did?” Hal’s slurred speech sounded as if he had spent his day drinking.

Walt looked down at the fungus. The wounds were gone. The thing wasn’t nearly as large as it had been that morning, but the wounds were definitely gone. Once again the thing looked like a series of lumps of cement-colored tar, oozing out of the crack. Walt shook his head in frustrated disbelief.

“Whatever doesn’t, um, kill it makes it stronger, y’know,” Hal said.

“It’s a little darker than it was…” Walt trailed off.

The door to the house next door flew open and immediately slammed shut. Candi stormed out, walking fast towards her car that was parked on the street. A second later Marty followed, also slamming the door as hard as he could.

“Waaait uuup,” he growled.

Candi spun, yelling, “Damn you. Damn You.”

Marty caught her up and grabbed her arm, spinning her around. Candi closed her eyes to avoid Marty’s angry stare.

Walt and Hal slid into the shadows between Walt’s car and the house to watch the impending row without being discovered.

Marty mumbled indistinctly. Only a few words could be made out, “…Beerstain… stop in the… so ifn… damn… between the…”

Candi yelled, “See. See? Shit.” She brushed Marty’s hand off her arm and turned, again hurrying toward her car. Marty hurled a beer bottle into the street with all his strength. The bottle smashed on the asphalt, glass shards everywhere, tinkling up and down the street like a choir of angry little bells.

Hal and Walt looked at one another, trying to turn invisible lest they be noticed.

Marty grabbed Candi and slammed her against her car with a dull thud. She struggled uselessly to break free of his meaty grip. He seemed to be lecturing her as he waved his finger in her face. Hal and Walt only heard a drunken indecipherable monotone mumbling punctuated by Candi’s occasional sobs. Eventually Marty stopped talking and Candi stopped crying. She wiped her eyes and followed him back into their house.

Walt mumbled, “damn.”

Hal shook his head. “Makes no sense,” he said almost to himself.

Walt snorted and stood up; he walked back into the pool of light that seemed to be spotlighting the fungus.

“Was the light directly on it last night?”

Hal considered a moment then shook his head. “Must’ve got bumped.”

Walt looked up at the roof of the house, comparing its angle to that of the magnolia tree growing next to the side of the house. “I think the house shifted again,” Walt said.

Hal and Walt stared down at the fungus slowly, invisibly growing out of the crack.

* * *

The next morning, Walt worked on the fungus with a red Swiss Army knife. He sliced layer upon layer off, digging deeper into the rust colored interior. Marty and Candi fought next door, but now they were inside. Walt could hear shouting and bumping. No words. He dug deeper and deeper into the fungus, the giant, stinking thing that was probably pushing their old brick house off the hill and probably would no matter what he or Hal did to it.

Walt sprinkled some fungicidal foot powder over the fungus making it look like a snow-capped mountain. After admiring it he stabbed the mushroom with the knife, working the pleasant scented powder into the wounded meat of the thing. He’d heard of that forty-five mile underground mushroom they’d found up in Michigan and he’d be god damned if he didn’t have one right here under his house in central Texas.

Walt took a break from murdering the fungus to look up at the sky. No clouds, just hot, hot, white summer sky.

A gunshot reverberated through the stillness of the otherwise quiet day.

Walt leapt to his feet, looking around. The knife fell into the fungus, blade sinking into the soft wounded pulp only slightly before falling over and hitting the ground with a soft crack which sounded loud in Walt’s hyperattuned ears.

No cars on the road, no one about. No gunmen or deranged psychos to be seen. Walt glanced behind the house, at the apartment complex at the bottom of the hill. His gaze slowly shifted to Marty and Candi’s house. A shiver crept down his spine, causing the hairs on his neck to stand up like the hackles of an agitated cat. He darted behind his car and looked over the hood at his neighbors’ home. No wonder the freakin’ skinny dude moved out. The house sat there silently baking in the heat. Walt watched to see if anyone would emerge. A brown bird landed on Candi’s car.

Slowly Walt stood up. Still no sound from the house. Without taking his eyes off Marty and Candi’s place, Walt picked up the old hoe and clutching it in both hands like a rifle marched to their front door. He pressed his ear against the blue wood. The sounds had ceased. Taking a deep breath, he tried the knob. It turned and the door opened. Walt carefully stepped inside.

The house was brightly lit, the windows open. From the back of the house he heard a soft moaning, a woman crying. Clutching the hoe tighter he stalked back to the master bedroom. The moaning grew louder until Marty’s drunken laughter drowned it out. Walt threw the door open brandishing the hoe over his head and stared in horror.

Candi, who was completely naked, straddled Marty, who was also naked. Candi stopped in mid-thrust, staring at Walt who foolishly still held the hoe above his head like a weapon. She made no move to cover herself. Marty looked at Walt and growled. Keying in on Walt’s embarrassment, Candi shook her long black hair off her shoulders as if to reveal herself more fully.

“What are you doing in here,” Candi asked in the same condescending tone that she often used to address Marty.

Walt lowered the hoe, trying to look away, at anything save his naked neighbors. His eyes fell on a pair of boxer shorts lying on the floor, amongst the other clothes which had obviously been hurriedly removed. “I, uh, I heard you fighting and…,” Walt trailed off, embarrassed. The boxers had Smurfs on them.

Marty shook with jolly, drunken laughter. Large veins stood out beneath his crew cut hair. “We ain’t fightin’ now.”

Walt nodded. Marty winked at Candi, who was smiling down at him.

“You came to rescue me?” Candi stared in amazement at Walt, who still couldn’t bear to look up. She shook her head and looked down at Marty.

Marty laughed again and gripped Candi’s thighs as he squirmed beneath her, not wanting to stop for any interruption.

Walt finally managed to say, “Sorry. I thought I heard a - a gunshot.” His face reddened. He swallowed. He noticed a bra flung against the window.

“Jackass,” Candi exclaimed. “Who are you? The police? Yeah we fight, but get over it, that’s us.” She looked down at Marty and began grinding on him. Marty moaned.

Walt turned and hurried out the door trying to shut the sounds of their increasing passion from his mind. Walt all but ran from the house and bolted towards his own place dropping the hoe outside the front door. Stupid, stupid, stupid, he chastised himself. He walked in and closed the door. Slammed the door. Locked the door. Hal’s cat meowed.

Then it meowed again, this time much longer as if it might be hurt.

“Nemesis?” Walt called to the cat.

Walt looked down the hallway; the cat walked out of Hal’s room and darted under the couch. Walt bent down and looked at Nemesis hiding under the couch. Nemesis hissed and his fur stood on end. Walt stood up and looked around.

He walked into Hal’s room, calling his name. No answer. Walt turned on the light. Hal lay sprawled across the floor, a pistol in his hand. Bits of Hal’s head and brain were splattered across the wall like a Jackson Pollack painting. Walt slowly sank to his knees and threw up. All Walt could think was that Hal never even liked guns. He wrote protest letters to the NRA, for crying out loud. Of course, Hal didn’t have any opinions anymore. Not about the NRA or anything else.

He stood and ran to the front door, fumbling to open the lock and finally throwing the door open. He clutched his head and sat down violently on the concrete. His feet kicked the Swiss Army knife that clattered across the cement. He looked at the fungus growing out of the crack in the carport.

The wounds from earlier had healed themselves already. The house seemed to lean a bit more dangerously over the edge of the hill.

©1997

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