The Mammoth Book of Terror Read Online Free Page B

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