The Mammoth Book of Terror Read Online Free

right – one of a pair still standing, while a third slumped on the raw edge of oblivion – had decayed almost to the
point where it was collapsing inwards. Brambles luxuriated everywhere in its garden, completely enclosing it. The roof sagged and a chimney threatened to topple, making the whole structure seem
highly suspect and more than a little dangerous.
    “Partly subsidence, because of the undercutting action of the sea,” Garth explained, “but mainly the rot. There was a lot of wood in these places, but it’s all being
eaten away. I made myself a living, barely, out of the old bricks and timber in Easingham, but now I have to be careful. Doesn’t do to sell stuff with the rot in it.”
    “The rot?”
    He paused for breath, leaned a hand on one hip, nodded and frowned. “Dry rot,” he said. “Or Merulius lacrymans as they call it in the books. It’s been bad these
last three years. Very bad! But when the last of these old houses are gone, and what’s left of the timber yard, then it’ll be gone, too.”
    “It?” We were getting back to single-word questions again. “The dry rot, you mean? I’m afraid I don’t know very much about it.”
    “Places on the coast are prone to it,” he told me. “Whitby, Scarborough, places like that. All the damp sea spray and the bad plumbing, the rains that come in and the
inadequate drainage. That’s how it starts. It’s a fungus, needs a lot of moisture – to get started, anyway. You don’t know much about it? Heck, I used to think I knew quite a bit about it, but now I’m not so sure!”
    By then I’d remembered something. “A friend of mine in London did mention to me how he was having to have his flat treated for it,” I said, a little lamely. “Expensive,
apparently.”
    Garth nodded, straightened up. “Hard to kill,” he said. “And when it’s active, moves like the plague! It’s active here, now! Too late for Easingham, and who gives a
damn anyway? But you tell that friend of yours to sort out his exterior maintenance first: the guttering and the drainage. Get rid of the water spillage, then deal with the rot. If a place is dry
and airy, it’s OK Damp and musty spells danger!”
    I nodded. “Thanks, I will tell him.”
    “Want to see something?” said Garth. “I’ll show you what old merulius can do. See here, these old paving flags? See if you can lever one up a bit.” I found a
piece of rusting iron stave and dragged it out of the ground where it supported a rotting fence, then forced the sharp end into a crack between the overgrown flags. And while I worked to loosen the
paving stone, old Garth stood watching and carried on talking.
    “Actually, there’s a story attached, if you care to hear it,” he said. “Probably all coincidental or circumstantial, or some other big word like that – but queer
the way it came about all the same.”
    He was losing me again. I paused in my levering to look bemused (and maybe to wonder what on earth I was doing here), then grunted, and sweated, gave one more heave and flipped the flag over on
to its back. Underneath was hard-packed sand. I looked at it, shrugged, looked at Garth.
    He nodded in that way of his, grinned, said: “Look. Now tell me what you make of this!”
    He got down on one knee, scooped a little of the sand away. Just under the surface his hands met some soft obstruction. Garth wrinkled his nose and grimaced, got his face down close to the
earth, blew until his weakened lungs started him coughing. Then he sat back and rested. Where he’d scraped and blown the sand away, I made out what appeared to be a grey fibrous mass running
at right angles right under the pathway. It was maybe six inches thick, looked like tightly packed cotton wool. It might easily have been glass fibre lagging for some pipe or other, and I said as
much.
    “But it isn’t,” Garth contradicted me. “It’s a root, a feeler, a tentacle. It’s old man cancer himself – timber cancer – on