The Mammoth Book of Terror Read Online Free Page A

the move and looking
for a new victim. Oh, you won’t see him moving,” that strange look was back on his face, “or at least you shouldn’t – but he’s at it anyway. He finished those
houses there,” he nodded at the derelicts stepping down towards the new cliffs, “and now he’s gone into this one on the left here. Another couple of summers like this ‘un
and he’ll be through the entire row to my place. Except maybe I’ll burn him out first.”
    “You mean this stuff – this fibre – is dry rot?” I said. I stuck my hand into the stuff and tore a clump out. It made a soft tearing sound, like damp chipboard, except it
was dry as old paper. “How do you mean, you’ll ‘burn him out?’”
    “I mean like I say,” said Garth. “I’ll search out and dig up all these threads – mycelium, they’re called – and set fire to ’em. They smoulder
right through to a fine white ash. And God – it stinks ! Then I’ll look for the fruiting bodies, and –”
    “The what?” His words had conjured up something vaguely obscene in my mind. “Fruiting bodies?”
    “Lord, yes!” he said. “You want to see? Just follow me.”
    Leaving the path, he stepped over a low brick wall to struggle through the undergrowth of the garden on our left. Taking care not to get tangled up in the brambles, I followed him. The house
seemed pretty much intact, but a bay window on the ground floor had been broken and all the glass tapped out of the frame. “My winter preparations,” Garth explained. “I burn wood,
see? So before winter comes, I get into a house like this one, rip out all the wooden fixings and break ‘em down ready for burning. The wood just stays where I stack it, all prepared and
waiting for the bad weather to come in. I knocked this window out last week, but I’ve not been inside yet. I could smell it, see?” He tapped his nose. “And I didn’t much
care for all those spores on my lungs.”
    He stepped up on a pile of bricks, got one leg over the sill and stuck his head inside. Then, turning his head in all directions, he systematically sniffed the air. Finally he seemed satisfied
and disappeared inside. I followed him. “Spores?” I said. “What sort of spores?”
    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!