Paul McEuen - Spiral

“It’s hollow,” she said. She knelt down and aimed the flashlight inside. The core of the trunk was completely gone. Diffuse light filtered partly down the hollow horizontal shaft, but the trunk bent and the deepest reaches were hidden in darkness. She felt her way along the soft, wet, decaying wood.

“Ahh!” she yelped, and whipped her hand out.

“What?”

“Something moved in there.”

“What?”

“I think it was a worm or a bug or something.” She put her arm back in, shoulder pressed hard against the opening. “Nothing.”

Jake read the next lines.

“Wait,” she said. “I think I get it now.”

“What?”

“How much do you know about the kingdoms of life?”

“There are six, right? Plants, animals, bacteria, fungi. And the other ones.”

“Archaea and protists. Now. Look what Liam said. A marriage of royals. Different kingdoms. I think he meant a lichen. A lichen is a symbiote, part fungus and part algae. The fungus gives the algae water and minerals, like a gardener. The algae, in turn, produce food for the fungus by photosynthesis. A symbiotic relationship between different kingdoms .”

Jake finally got it. “A marriage of royals.”

Maggie nodded.

Jake shook his head. “You’re telling me Liam wanted you to look for a lichen ?”

“I think so.”

ONCE THEY HAD THE IDEA, IT TOOK LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES to find it. Maggie squatted before a collection of rocks arranged in a loose pile. She lifted one off the top and showed it to Jake: a mottled, crusty growth on the rocks, like old paint, some patches reddish and the others yellow. Separating them was a twisted pattern of cracks, like dried mud.

“It’s two species of crustose lichen,” Maggie said. “When they meet, they put out chemicals that repel each other, form a kind of barrier. The black sections are the no-man’s-land. They both agree to stay off each other’s turf. They’re intertwined but two distinct organisms.”

She picked up the lichen-covered stones until she found a square metal box below.

She stood, the object cradled in her hands. Jake held the flashlight on it. It was a rusted lunchbox, Scooby-Doo on the outside.

Tears came to her eyes. “I haven’t seen this in years.”

“It was yours?”

Maggie nodded. “Pop-pop bought it for me when I was maybe six.”

Maggie unfastened the latches, her fingers trembling.

Inside was a plastic Baggie containing something hard and disk-shaped. She stood, holding it in her palm gently. She could make out three luminescent smears on the disk, each a different color. “Turn off the flashlight,” she said.

“Wow,” he said. “It’s glowing.”

The glowing slowly pulsed, brightening and fading, almost like breathing.

She carefully opened the Baggie. Inside was a round piece of wood. On it were three patches of fuzzy fungal growth, like mold on bread, except that each was glowing a different color, one red, one green, one yellow. Three distinct patterns. A yellow mushroom. A green arrowhead. And a red spider-creature that looked, Maggie realized, like a MicroCrawler.

Maggie understood.

The symbols for her. Dylan.

And Jake.

She looked to Jake. Tears welled up in her eyes.

The three symbols pulsed with life.

“Jake?”

“I don’t understand. The colors.”

“Green fluorescent protein. It’s a gene extracted from a jellyfish. The red is…” She stopped, too choked up to speak. She turned to Jake, then looked back down at the three symbols. Her tears were flowing now, buds of rain sliding down her cheeks.

She looked again at the piece of wood. “Why?” she said, her voice cracking. She started to quiver, as if the pent-up grief was about to burst through her skin. “This is all you left us, Pop-pop? You shove a few genes in a fungus, make it glow? Why?”

“I’m sorry, Maggie.”

She looked out at the woods as though Liam was there, waiting. “This is your goodbye? This is it? This is all you have to say?”

TISH PAIGE WAS PASSED-OUT TIRED. THE ER HAD BEEN RELATIVELY quiet, but she’d been on duty for twelve hours straight. And before that, a marathon clubbing stretch followed by maybe the best sex she’d ever had. A speed-freak boyfriend was proving to be hard on her. If he wasn’t so damned cute, she’d toss him out. She’d get off shift, he’d be at her flat, one day naked, the next day dressed to the nines, but always with an agenda that would sweep her away from all the blood and broken needles. Didn’t matter the time—she typically dragged in around two a.m.—because as far as she could tell, he never slept. She was beginning to think that was what he saw in her—the odd hours of an ER resident. Someone to be up with him while the rest of the world slept.

“Dr. Paige? We got an odd one.”

She pulled herself to her feet, entered the staging area. The patient on the gurney was an Asian male, strapped down at the waist. An intern named Kaster was working him over.

“What is going on with him?”

“We don’t know exactly yet. A woman dumped him off in Times Square. Had him in the trunk. He was screaming in the ambulance, so they sedated him. Said it took their entire stock.”

Paige looked him over. Japanese , she thought. His right hand was bandaged, bloody.

“What’s the deal there?”

“Missing his middle finger. Recent. Last forty-eight hours. Someone cut it off, then crudely cauterized it.”

She scrunched her nose. A strong odor, like urine, was in the air. “You smell that?”

“Yeah. He stinks. It’s coming off him. Like it’s in his sweat.”

“Vitals?”

“Reasonable, except his temperature. It’s low—96.5. Don’t know why. We’ve started standard toxicology tests, but nothing definite yet. I’m betting it’s one of the new designer drugs gone bad. Whatever it was, it packed a punch. Look at this.”

Intern Kaster pulled open the gown, revealing the strange symbols on the man’s chest, some kind of Chinese lettering. What looked like a lowercase t , followed by three horizontal dashes, then a single dash.

Kaster pointed. “See the crusts of blood around the wound? Dried. It’s been there for a while. You think he carved it himself?”

“No,” said Paige. “The cuts are remarkably clean. Someone took some care here. He looks way too messed up to do that. You know what it means?”

“We got Yasuki, the X-ray tech, up here. He said the first part is a number—731. The second line is Mandarin for Devil. ”

Paige frowned. “You said a woman dropped him off. Maybe some kind of S-and-M thing?”

“If so, count me out.”

She started a physical investigation of the man. Young, fit. No needle tracks. None of the loose skin or bruises she normally found on a drug addict, even functioning ones. Paige nervously tapped a fingernail against her front tooth.

She wasn’t sure what, but something about all this struck a chord. Especially the number. She looked at Kaster. “Google 731. ”