Mushroom Deathsuit

Although Ian Crawley was a scientific man, he stood in the doorway and looked upon the cursed thing across the room and felt nothing but abhorrence for it. Even though the mechanics of fact governed his mind, Crawley gazed upon the abomination with the hateful vehemence common to the religious ilk. Despite his atheism, he considered the thing on the other side of the room to be unholy.

How could he not? The thing that lingered in the shadow of the drawn curtains was a perversion of his intentions. It was the spawn of the dark twin to his plans. Yet, the most bitter defeat was to witness the years of meticulous design undone by primordial tenacity. The delicate orchestration of molecules scattered by wilful evolution. All the tinkering, once thought exclusive to the divine, brought to ruin. Structures broken. Theories blasted to oblivion. Science flayed, disemboweled and fed to chaos. Nature turned. Twisted. Unforgiving. Spiteful.

To account for the anomalies responsible for the birth of such an insipid creature was a feat worthy of madness. From the outset, he knew such an endeavour would be demanding. Utterly complex in its ambition, and even though he held all confidence in his machinations, there still remained the chance that genetic anarchy would cast its cruel, meddling hand. In his pursuit of understanding failure, Crawley had unraveled each layer of organic reaction, simulated the culmination of proteins and reimagined the convergence of binding fluids and yet, despite his efforts, the investigation had granted no illumination or revelation. No reason uncovered, or explanation unearthed. Instead, all he found was the remains of his formidable intellect, fatigued and tormented. And in that dismay, Crawley found the acceptance of his wife’s transformation, from woman to horror, as simple as comprehending the existence of a river mouth. The mere consequence of countless, unnoticeable and unremarkable conditions conspiring toward the same conclusion.

The mushroom death suit was supposed to save, not corrupt. The applications of his botanical sciences underwent several trials. The test specimens offered encouraging results. Successful outcomes, even, and yet something had gone wrong. Perhaps, in his desperation he had missed an important transcendence between beast and human. The spore colonies seemed to take to the rats easily enough. In a matter of weeks, the spores blossomed into thin stems crowned with translucent caps. Cognitive ability doubled. Mobility improved. In all aspects of the experiment’s criteria, the mycelia suits achieved. They slowed the advance of disease.

So, it was with hope that the mycelia suit was applied. At first, the signs of adoption were promising. The spore colonies - nurtured to maturity on her dead skin and harvested hair - flourished as they took to the contours of her meagre frame. As spores devoured cancer stems rose and translucent caps beckoned, and like a tide of resurrection the suit crept over her body. Life returned to the sullen gullies of bone and the shadow of the waif fell away to honour what his memories could only wish to behold. For a time, her laughter returned. The ragged gleam in her eye, that furious reflection of lightning which made her beauty terrifying, simmered for a brief spell and her humanity surged. They enjoyed those long winter days spent in the cold sun, and wrapped in wonder and hope, they would talk as if such days would be evermore.

That was when the death suit brought her humanity back. That was before it consumed her being. For once the cancer was gone, the colonies of mushrooms delved deep for greater bounties. At first, the shift in the mycelia went unnoticed. The towers of stems diminished and the caps faded, and bolstered by his observations Crawley believed the suit to be running its course. With the extinction of its diet, so would come its on annihilation. Yet, beyond the perception of his eyes, the mycelia continued to flourish. Beneath the skin, vast networks of fungal veins permeated the flesh, annexed organs and unified colonies of mycelia via usurped nerves. An empire of blossomed and rose from the skin of his wife like great mounds. Foothills of bulbous caps rolled across the arms and legs, and about the torso, immense cornucopias - tributes to the abundance of riches below - towered to form distended limbs of breathing gills and discoloured flesh.

The woman vanished. And so did the waif. A tide of alabaster milk washed away the glimmer in her eyes, and in its churning wake a curdled film took root. Where once there was lightning, now only the stare of the undead remains. The endless gaze of otherworldly prescience. Where once there was hope, there is the fetid trumpets of mycelia. Where once there was a woman, there is something else. A mushroom death suit, locked away in a room. Left to germinate. Left to ruin. And yet sometimes, Ian Crawley stands by the door, and watches as the wind stirs the curtains around the mound of earth and organ. And sometimes, he still catches a glimpse of that ragged beauty in his wife’s eyes.