Jeff Jacobson - Growth

She thought back to the Einhorns. Thought about how Ingrid had disappeared. Wondered if that had been her fingers crawling out of the septic tank. Thought about the curtains drawn tight in the Johnsons’ bedroom. Cochran had said something about the fungus, that maybe it didn’t like the light. She thought back to last summer, when her and Kevin had replaced the kitchen floor and how they found mold when they peeled up the cheap vinyl tiles.

Maybe she couldn’t find Mrs. Kobritz because she had crawled off somewhere to hide from the light. The thought chilled her, despite the summer afternoon heat.

She crossed the street and knew Purcell was watching. His patience would only last so long, and since he didn’t give a damn about the town, it was only a matter of time before he rounded up his sons and went back home across the river.

The old brick building had been City Hall for decades until they moved their offices into a more modern building north of town. Various wings and additions had been built over the years until it was now the sprawling home of Parker’s Mill’s library. It was closed today, of course. Sandy cupped her hands and peered through the glass doors but couldn’t see anyone inside.

She thought of the Einhorn basement and went along the front wall, peering down into the window wells. It was too dark to see anything. She knew they didn’t let the general public down there; the basement was used mostly as a storage area for the newspaper collection and old equipment like mimeograph machines and the retired card catalog system. The library had transferred everything over to a computerized system that linked up with the rest of the public libraries in the state a few years ago, but the head librarian didn’t have the heart to throw all the cards out.

The third window was simply gone, leaving nothing but a few shards of glass glinting in the gravel at the bottom of the window well. She leaned the shotgun against the building and pulled out her flashlight. She got on her knees and bent over, shining the light into the basement. Cool, air-conditioned air brushed against her fingers and face.

She couldn’t see anything beyond dusty bookshelves and a stack of broken chairs. She gave a whistle and waved Purcell over. Charlie followed. “I got an idea that if they got a lungful of those spores, they might try to get out of the sun. Find someplace dark and cool.”

Sandy lowered herself into the four-foot window well and pushed her feet through the window. She slid her butt off the window frame, rolled her hips over, and rested on her stomach. That way, she could lower herself into the basement, going slow, until her boots touched the floor. The waffle treads made crunching sounds on all the broken glass. Purcell handed the shotgun down to her, stock first.

The library basement was quiet enough she could hear the rumble of the air conditioner out back. She kept the shotgun in her right hand and swept the flashlight beam around with her left. Drops of blood speckled the glass shards scattered across the cement floor.

Purcell stuck his head into the window. Upside down, he asked, “Anything?”

Sandy shook her head and moved deeper into the gloom, past the chairs and through a narrow corridor flanked by empty bookshelves. She thought she heard something and whipped the light back around at the window. Purcell was gone; he’d sat back upright. But she didn’t think it had been him anyway.

It seemed like it had come from deeper in the library.

The sound came again, under the air-conditioning, something soft that rose and fell, fading in and out. It reminded her of waves somehow, the way a boat’s wake will send small waves out to the riverbank. It sounded almost like someone struggling to breathe, but there would only be a singular rising and falling. This sounded like… a crowd, all whispering, spreading ugly gossip.

She crept forward until she came upon a large conference table that had been pushed against the wall. Stacks of boxes covered the top. Shadows cloaked the bottom. Sandy brought the flashlight up.

The first thing she saw was a single, overturned flip-flop. Then a bare foot. A plump ankle. A woman’s leg. There was a thin patch of soft hair up near the back of the knee, where the woman had missed a spot shaving.

The light traveled up the leg and revealed a mass of bodies clustered under the conference table. Arms, legs, heads stuck out in random directions. There was no sense of order, no modesty, no indication that there was any cooperation between anyone. It looked as though they had all somehow decided this was a good spot and had wedged their way into the group somehow. Everyone, children, women, men, they were stacked under there like flexible firewood, squeezing into any available space.

Sandy thought that all this weight pressing down on the people on the bottom was the cause of the labored breathing. She got closer and saw that she was wrong.

Things were growing out of their mouths. The gray tips looked like narrow mushrooms. As she played the flashlight over the living tangle of flesh, she saw that the mushrooms weren’t only growing out of their mouths. Gray tendrils had also sprouted from nostrils and ears. Some were even peeking out from the waistbands of jeans, or emerging from the darkness where the shorts and dresses had been pulled tight across flabby thighs.

Worse yet, they were starting to grow into the nearby orifices of anyone lying nearby. An especially thick cluster was inching steadily out of a toddler’s sugar-crusted mouth and nose and growing into an old man’s ear. Not that Sandy could see them growing or getting bigger. Not really. But if she looked away and came back, the tendrils had stretched. It was like staring at a clock. The minute hand won’t move if you’re watching, but if you look away for a minute and go back, you’ll notice it was progressing after all.

Sandy figured this was how the mound of limbs in the Johnson bedroom had started. She wondered how long it had taken the mound to reach that stage. A day or two at the most. This mass was bigger, with maybe twenty or thirty people jammed together under the long table.

She got closer. She didn’t want to touch anyone, but she had to know. Had to know if her son was under there. She kept the flashlight moving, searching for any sign, one of his shoes, a wrinkled twist of his shirt, a glimpse of his hair. Shit . She’d been so preoccupied this morning she couldn’t even remember what color shirt he’d been wearing. She wondered if she would recognize his hand, his fingers.

Someone gasped behind her and she dropped the flashlight and whirled around and almost fired the shotgun into Charlie’s chest.

“The fuck is that?” he wanted to know.

Sandy let her breath out in one long shaky whistle. She picked up the flashlight and backed away. “It’s the spores. It’s what they do.”

Charlie squinted behind the bug-like goggle eyes of his mask. “Fuck me sideways.”

“In a day or two, this will somehow produce more spores, I think.”

“I think we oughta burn ’em.”

Sandy didn’t have anything to say to that. The thought of trying to save these people was laughable, only it was the kind of laughing that once you started, you couldn’t stop until you were whooping and sucking in great gusts of air and somewhere along the way, the laughter skidded into a series of wavering screams.

She spent another few minutes trying to see if she could spot any sign of Kevin in the mass. Every time she moved the light and then brought it back, the tendrils had grown. She got close to the wall and knew there were at least fifteen bodies under the table that she couldn’t see. She flicked the light back at Charlie. “Help me slide the table out. Just a little.”