Ulic discovered a wall cabinet full of bottles and glasses. Doggins’ eyes gleamed as he examined a bottle of amber liquid.
“Scotch whisky. It’s an old drink like wine. I once found a bottle in a sunken wreck.” He peeled off the leadfoil from the neck, removed the cork and sniffed it. Then, to their alarm, he raised it to his lips. All watched with concern, expecting him to collapse or spit it out; instead, he grunted with approval, and took a longer drink. He handed the bottle to Niall. “Try it.”
Niall found the taste startling and disagreeable, completely unlike the golden liquid he had shared with Odina on the ship. But a few minutes later he realised that the effect was much the same: the soothing, glowing sensation, and the expanding euphoria. As he watched the others pouring the fiery liquid into glasses, he experienced a flood of emotion that startled him. It was as if they were participating in some religious ceremony, or some ritual of blood-brotherhood. It lasted only for a few moments, but during that time achieved a remarkable intensity. For the first time in his life, Niall was overwhelmed by a feeling of love for his fellow men, and for the human race as a species. These young men whose names he scarcely knew — Ulic, Milo, Yorg, Crispin, Hastur, Renfred, Kosmin — had suddenly become as dear to him as his own mother or brother.
As the heat of the oil lamps and of their bodies gradually increased the temperature, the room became pleasantly warm. It was then that they all became aware of an unpleasant smell: that of decaying meat. Niall, who had smelt it before, realised after a moment that it came from the body that lay stretched out in the corner. The face had turned purple, and the ankles and wrists were beginning to swell. The scratch on the underside of the forearm had become a gaping black wound, and this seemed to be the source of most of the stench. Cyprian’s body was dragged into the kitchen and left under a table. As an afterthought, Niall covered it over with the plastic tablecloth. As a mark of respect, Milo insisted on leaving one of the lamps burning on a chair beside the body. Cyprian had been his cousin.
Suddenly, they were all tired. Niall tried to look through the books in the bookcase but his eyes refused to focus. It had been twenty-four hours since he had last slept. He settled into an armchair, pulled a blanket around his shoulders, and surrendered to the fatigue. The voices around him seemed to be filtered through some dense, stifling medium, yet they still aroused a sense of warmth and kinship. This feeling of contentment carried him like a wave into a dreamless sleep.
He woke up with a curious sense of discomfort, as if something sticky was pressed against his face. As he raised his hands to try and push it away, it seemed to dissolve. The room was now illuminated by a single lamp, and everyone was asleep. For a moment the silence worried him; then he realised that the wind had dropped and the rain was no longer beating on the windows. In the next armchair, Doggins was snoring softly. At his feet, a black haired youth named Kosmin was sleeping on his back, his mouth wide open. He seemed to be having some kind of nightmare and kept gasping uncomfortably.
Then Niall became aware of the sound. It was very soft and difficult to define: a bubbling, liquid noise, with an element like the rustling of dry leaves. For some reason, Niall associated it with the suffocating sensation that had awakened him. At first it seemed to be coming from the other side of the front door, and he imagined it to be connected with rainwater; then he became aware that it was coming from the kitchen. When he tried to move, a pain shot through his skull and he realised that he had fallen asleep with the thought mirror turned inward. He reached inside his shirt and turned it over; the sense of relief was instantaneous.
He stood up cautiously, allowing the blanket to drop to the floor, and took the lamp from the table; then, stepping over recumbent forms, he made his way to the kitchen.
What he saw made him gasp and take a step backward. The space underneath the table seemed to be a seething mass of grey slime, heaving like the scum on top of a bubbling cauldron. When he stooped and held the lamp closer, he realised what had happened. A squid fungus had made its way through a hole in the ceiling, and was now consuming the corpse. Niall picked up a broom that was lying on the floor, and poked the bubbling mass; it ignored him.
A voice whispered: “What is it?” Doggins had been awakened by his movements. When he saw the fungus, he recoiled with disgust. After watching it for a few moments, he shrugged. “Oh well, perhaps it’s the best thing that could happen.”
“Is there any way of killing it?”
“Fire or the blaster. Otherwise it’s almost impossible.”
“What would happen if you cut it in half?”
“Nothing much.” Doggins produced the broken knife, and slashed at a writhing grey tentacle. It fell to the floor, where it wriggled like a worm. Niall watched with horrified astonishment as the main body of the fungus seemed to spread sideways like a viscous liquid, while at the same time, the writhing fragment moved towards the fungus. They joined, and the fragment was absorbed by invisible mouths.
“Are they dangerous ?”
“Only if you can’t get away. Otherwise they move too slowly to do much harm.”
“But what do they feed on most of the time?”
“No one’s sure. They seem to be able to live for years without food.” Doggins yawned and went back to his chair.
For anotner five minutes, Niall continued to watch the fungus with a mixture of fascination and disgust. It was diffusing a smell of rotting vegetation, and its thousand tiny mouths made a continuous liquid noise as it devoured the body. A trail of slime, running from the hole in the ceiling and down the kitchen wall, revealed that the creature had the ability to cling to smooth surfaces. It seemed to eat at an extraordinary speed; through the heaving slime, the outline of Cyprian’s body had already ceased to be distinguishable.
As disgust gave way to curiosity, he deliberately focused the process of inner-contraction until his inner being was as still as water on a windless day. For a moment, he shared the predatory consciousness of the fungus, its total absorption in the process of digestion, and was interested to realise that the creature was aware of his presence. It could sense him as a diffused mass of life-force, a potential meal and a potential danger. But while it was eating, Niall was unimportant. Then his awareness slipped beyond the low-grade consciousness of the fungus, and once more became aware of the rippling, pulsating energy that seemed to spread through the earth like wavelets on a pond. Suddenly, he knew beyond all shadow of doubt that the life of the squid fungus was in some way dependent upon this energy source. It was difficult to grasp the precise nature of this dependence. At first he was tempted to believe that the fungus had no life of its own, but received life direct from the energy-pulse; but this was obviously absurd. A more accurate way of putting it might have been to say that the fungus was “subsidised” by the energy-pulse as a tree is subsidised by the living soil. This would explain how the fungus could live in empty buildings for years without dying of starvation. . .
Niall’s hair prickled, and a feeling of excitement drenched him as if someone had emptied a bucket of icy water over his head. The insight that surged through his mind was vague and half-formed, yet he felt it to be of tremendous significance. Not a tree, but a plant. . . This creature was a kind of mobile plant. It was now feeding on this corpse exactly as the roots of a plant feed on decaying organisms in the soil. But the energy-pulse was trying to raise this mass of fungoid vegetation to a higher level; it was trying to turn it into a kind of animal. This was part of the insight that filled Niall with such excitement. It was the recognition that although this creature possessed no intelligence, it was nevertheless being driven and controlled by a force that possessed intelligence. This recognition filled him with a feeling of delight mixed with vague alarm, but also with a consuming curiosity to understand more about the mysterious pulse. Could it, for example, sense his own presence?
He went back into the other room, stepping carefully across recumbent bodies. “Could I borrow your blaster?”