The Fruiting Body

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. When John Wilson spotted the tiny dancing flame from his own window, the sight punched him in the gut. The bowl he had been washing slipped out of his hands, and shattered on the shabby linoleum tile. John barely noticed. His eyes were fixed to that cold flare that pierced through the darkness, and into his brain. His mouth fell slack and a thin line of drool spilled from his bottom lip.

“Come, John”, the light whispered.

It was back.

When he first laid eyes on the cabin two years ago, John had been living in the woods for a little less than a year. He was never much of a people fan to begin with, and when the small town he was born in started growing into a bustling suburb, he felt suffocated. As if the townhouses and sky rises and condos were all snaking around him, constricting him like a boa. He had to get out.

He had never married, and the only family he had was his nephew, Andrew. He was amiable enough, but deep down, John knew there wasn’t really a relationship between them. Except for the one that family obligation demanded - a phone call here, and invitation to dinner there. It didn’t bother John much. He liked solitude.

Andrew gave only mild protest to the idea of his elderly uncle moving out of town to live in isolation.

“What if you fall or something”, Andrew had asked on the phone. “What if there are, like, animals?”

“Well”, John grumbled, “I figure, we’re all animals. At least out there I’ll be on top of the food chain.”

John knew there was nothing to worry about. He was only moving only a couple miles into the woods at the outskirts of town, where wealthy investors had neglected to develop. There, his only neighbors would be the trees and the creatures that lived among them. No fancy coffee shops, no strip malls, no high rise apartment buildings. Simple. Just the way John liked it.

Until the humid summer morning when he looked out his kitchen widow and saw the cabin. It hadn’t been there the night before. John felt the outrage bubbling up, about to explode. Someone had built their cabin barely one hundred feet from his own, and they seemed to have done it overnight. Those SOBs don’t waste a minute, John seethed, as he went to write a complaint letter to the city.

After shoving the letter into his mailbox, he decided to get a closer look at his new neighbor. He marched to the cabin, ready to give anyone inside a piece of his mind. As he got within fifteen feet, he noticed that the cabin, although newly built, looked old, older than his own cabin, like it had been abandoned long before he was even born. But how could that be?

John abruptly stopped his indignant marching and eyed the structure warily. His eyes moved from the warped front stairs, to the flaking paint, to the window, frosted with a thin layer of grime. This wasn’t one of those fancy new starter homes that were popping up in town.

He suddenly felt a desperate, animalistic urge to run. Just go home, close the curtains and hide. He took a step forward. That’s when the smell hit him. Apple pie, like his mother would make. John would come in from working on his father’s pig farm and pull a chilled slice of the pie from the fridge, eating it with his hands and washing it down with a glass of ice cold milk. He was certain there was nothing better on the whole wide earth.

His mother had died in a car accident when he was in high school, fifty-five years ago. But the smell of pie, the buttery crust, the spice of the cinnamon and nutmeg…It was as if his mother were in that kitchen right then, pulling it fresh from the oven. The house stood dark and silent in front of him. He took another few steps forward.

The smell of the pie got stronger, but now there was something else. Underneath the sugar and spice, was the smell of decaying flesh that had been left bloating in the sun. It was a meaty smell that wasn’t unlike the smell of his father’s pig farm, just after a slaughter.

He stopped again.

“John”, a voice whispered. It sounded like it was coming from inside his own head. “Come in, John.” It sounded neither male nor female, young nor old. It was the voice of an evil idea.

He whirled around to see if the owner of the voice was standing behind him. There was no one. He turned back to the cabin to find that the old battered door had opened slightly. A giddy, wormy chuckle floated out of the darkened entrance. John ran.

As a man of 70, John wasn’t as fast as he used to be. But adrenaline carried him from the cabin to his front door in under twenty seconds. He slammed the door behind him hard enough to make his thin glass window panes rattle. Cold sweat beaded on his brow. He wiped it away with a shaking, liver-spotted hand. He didn’t know what exactly he was running from, but he knew that he had just narrowly escaped.

Later that evening, John sat by the fireplace laughing to himself. What kind of fool is scared of an empty cabin, he thought. Getting a little old to believe in ghosts and ghouls, Johnny. He lifted himself from his chair and went to get another look. He shuffled to the kitchen and looked out.

The cabin looked back.

That’s ridiculous. A cabin can’t look at you. Somehow, though, he still felt as if he was being watched. Like if he made any sudden movement, it would pounce on him like a jungle predator.

“Johnnnn”, it hissed. He snapped the curtains shut and called Andrew.

“So the cabin just appeared…”, Andrew said with growing concern in his voice. “And it called your name?”

“Yeah, like they wanted me to come in.” John replied, his voice shaking a little.

“How would they even know your name if they just showed up yesterday?”

The doubt in Andrew’s voice was loud and clear. John could guess what he was thinking. Something along the lines of “he’s lost his marbles.”

“I think they’re trying to scare me, trying to run me off so they can take my land and put another one of those damn coffee shops over it.” John was shouting now. “They’re going to have to take it from my cold, dead body!”

Andrew was silent for a moment. “Maybe you should move back to town. Closer to people who can help you with whatever you’re going through.”

“I’m not insane and I’m not senile”, John said through his teeth.

“I didn’t say you were, but - “

John cut him off. “You know what, thanks anyway. I’ll handle it myself.” He hung up before Andrew could say anything else.

After that, John made his best effort to pretend the cabin didn’t exist. He kept his back to it while working in the yard and getting the mail. These dirtbags, whoever they were, weren’t going to scare him off that easily. But he did stop sitting out on his porch at night, and even though the nights were still suffocatingly hot, he kept his windows closed. Still, when the night was especially quiet, the voice seemed to leak through the walls and into his bedroom.

He didn’t sleep much that summer.

But, as the days got shorter, the cabin’s looming presence seemed to weaken. John felt like he could finally relax a little. When the first snow fell, it was as if the eyes that watched him so intently had closed, at least for a while. He didn’t hear the voice anymore, except in his dreams. He wondered if whatever spirit of demon or monster that was inside had left.

Or maybe it’s hibernating, John thought one night, as he peered through his frosted kitchen window. He shook the thought away. He told himself it was all nonsense. But deep down, he hoped for a long, long winter.

His wish didn’t come true. Winter came and went just like every other year. Flowers bloomed, birds sang, and the ground thawed. Everything was returning to life. John’s uneasiness returned with it.

On the first night of summer, John lay in bed, nowhere near sleep. The voice called to him. He could hear it even with his windows shut and the curtains drawn.

“Johnnnn,” it rasped.

John clutched his pillow and squeezed his eyes shut. This wasn’t happening. It was all just a horrible dream.

“Come innnn,” the voice beckoned. It was a sickeningly sweet voice, like rancid honey.

He shut his eyes tighter. “No,” he gasped.

Suddenly, he could hear faint music. He sat up straight in bed and leaned his body towards the sound. It had the rhythm of all the rock he listened to as a young man - Beatles, the Stones, Three Dog Night. But it wasn’t quite any of those bands. It wasn’t even quite a song. More like the parroting of a song by an animal that has learned to imitate music, but doesn’t understand it.

John went to his kitchen window and looked out. The cabin looked different. Newer somehow, more inviting. It was also closer than he remembered. The pit forming in his stomach was overshadowed by his curiosity.

The music grew louder, and John swore he could hear laughter. If he didn’t know any better, he would have said his new neighbor was having a party.

John stepped out onto his porch and he caught the sweet scent of marijuana on the breeze. He looked toward the cabin. It was dark and motionless. But still, he felt pulled toward the smells and sounds. He felt a warm pleasantness growing in his chest. He walked off his porch, towards the cabin. With each step the smells and sensations became stronger. It smelled like whipped cream, and fresh cut grass. Like wrapping paper and the back of Linda Terreli’s volvo. It smelled like sex. It smelled like love.

John’s eyes rolled into the back of his head. Any moment he would be home. There would be pleasure, there would be laughter, there would be all the ecstasy life had to offer, there would be -

Before John realized, his foot was on the front step of the cabin. The door swung open and a wall of putrid air smacked him in the face. He turned to run but his foot was caught on something. He looked down to see thousands of thin, vein-like tendrils crawling up his leg. They looked as if they were growing out of the porch itself. Each was coated in a layer of shiny, translucent slime that started to burn through his pajama pants.

John screamed as the thing’s acid began to liquify the skin on his leg. The tendrils poked and prodded around the burned, open flesh, as if looking for an entrance. John pulled his leg as hard as he could and the thing tore down his leg like hot knives. Once John was free, the thing shriveled back down into the porch. He looked down to see dozens of thin, ropey gashes covering his calf. He limped back home as fast as he could.

Once John was safe inside, he examined his leg more closely. The wounds were much deeper than he first thought, at least half an inch. He was certain if he had not reacted as quickly as he did, that thing would have taken his entire leg. And probably a lot more than that. He sat in front of the door, unable to bring himself to go back out into the dark. He needed medical attention badly, but it was still a couple hours until sunrise. After about twenty minutes of trying to convince himself to just run to his truck and go, John nodded off.

Later that morning, he sat on an ER exam table, waiting for someone to tell him what the hell was going on. His wounds were already starting to fester and decay. He had only slept an hour past sunrise, but his leg looked like it had been left rotting for days. A nurse had already come in to take a sample of the foul liquid that was weeping from his calf. He couldn’t help but notice the way her brows were deeply furrowed above her protective mask, and how her eyes widened in confused fear. This did little to comfort John about his situation.

Twenty minutes later, the privacy curtain was ripped open and a young doctor stood before John, smiling through a clear plastic face covering.

“Mr. Wilson”, she began. “I’m Dr. Eldridge. How are you feeling?”

John glanced down at his leg and back up to the doctor’s chipper face with a raised eyebrow. “I’ve been better”, he said flatly.

She nodded and her smile dropped a little. She looked at her clipboard. “Yes, I understand you were scratched by an animal of some kind and the wounds have become infected.”

“Not an animal,” John shot back. “It was a plant or something, the thing bit me...it attacked me!”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Wilson, but I don’t know of any plants that attack people. Flies maybe, but not people.” She chuckled. John stared at her.

She looked down at John’s injured leg and cleared her throat “Wounds like this can easily become infected if left untreated. Scratching with unwashed hands or unsanitary -”

John cut her off. “This happened this morning! I wasn’t scratching with unwashed anything!” John could feel his face turning red. The doctor took a step back.

“I’m just trying to help you, Mr. Wilson.” She said firmly.

John took a deep breath. He didn’t want anyone else thinking he was a crazy old loon, the way Andrew, and now, Dr. Eldridge clearly did.

“Fine, so what are you gonna do about my leg?” He sighed.

“I’m putting you on a cycle of very strong antibiotics to combat the infection, which you must take every day for two weeks, that’s non-negotiable. We’re also going to stitch up and bandage your wounds to protect them from any outside bacteria. Your leg should be good as new in about a month.” The doctor paused, and the smile returned to her face.

“And what about the thing that attacked me?” he asked.

“Well…I suggest you stay away from it. Or call a botanist”, she chuckled. John knew she was kidding, but her mock advice gave him an idea.

An hour later, with a bandaged leg and a new bottle of pills in hand, he drove to the nearest book store. After Looking around awhile, he settled on a book entitled “The Fabulous World of Flora & Fungi.” It was over 1,200 pages long, and John figured an answer had to be on at least one of them.

He rushed home and took the book inside, making sure to bolt his front door. He sat down in his chair by the fireplace and flipped through the pages, searching for anything that seemed similar to his attacker. He was just starting a chapter on pitcher plants, when he began to doze off. It had been a long day, and John wasn’t sleeping that much lately. He nodded off. The next thing he heard was a knock at his door.

John started awake with a violent jerk. Lightning bolts of pain shot down his neck and back as he tried to bring his muscles back to life. He looked at the time to see it was 8:27 am. He had slept in his chair all night. The knock came again, louder this time. John froze as his mind raced.

“Mr. Wilson? Are you home?”, a muffled voice called from behind the door. John lifted himself gingerly from his chair and limped to open the door. On the other side was a young man in a radioactive yellow reflective vest.

“What do you want?” John barked.

The man took a step back and cleared his throat. “Uh, yeah, you sent a complaint about a cabin that was near your property. I was sent by the city to check out the situation. Name’s Zach.” He pointed to the name tag on his vest.

“I sent that letter over a year ago!” John shouted.

“Yeah, well, you know how things are with the local government. I’ve had this pothole in front of my street for 8 months, been calling just about every week. Nothin’.”

John stared blankly.

“Uh, anyway, turns out the city has no record of this cabin being here. They sent me to take a look. Probably want the owners to cough up some property tax, ya know?” He chuckled.

John shook his head frantically. “Listen Zach, I don’t know what is over there, but I wouldn’t go if I were you. Something’s very wrong with that place.” John lifted his wounded leg to draw Zach’s attention to it.

Zach winced. “Oof, that looks nasty. You fall or something? My grandma fell recently. Broke her hip. It was awful.”

“It attacked me”, John continued. “There was -“

Zach interrupted. “Well, look, if you got injured on that property, I gotta go do an inspection. If someone did a shoddy job building that thing, a lot more people could get hurt.”

“Wait, listen to me.” John was beginning to explain when he heard his phone buzzing on the kitchen counter. He put his hands up in a “stop” gesture.

“Please, just wait here,” John pleaded, and went into the kitchen.

The caller I.D. showed a number John didn’t recognize. He answered anyway. “Who is this?” he asked. A chipper voice replied.

“Hello, this is Dr. Eldridge, from the Greenville Medical Center. Am I speaking with John Wilson?”

“Speaking.” John answered uneasily.

“Yes, I’m calling because we ran some tests on the sample we took from your leg wound.” Her voice was less chipper now.

“Ok, and…” John urged.

She continued. “Well, at first we were looking for the usual suspects of infection. You know, staph, MRSA, that kind of thing.”

“Yeah!” John blurted, impatiently.

“Well, when we looked at your sample, we noticed a significant amount of spores.”

“Wha-”, John began. A bright yellow flash entered his peripheral vision. He twisted around to face the kitchen window. He saw Zach’s neon safety vest heading towards the cabin.

Dr. Eldridge continued. “I would like you to come back and -”

John did not hear her. Zach was almost to the cabin’s front step. John dropped the phone and ran outside. He only got ten feet from his porch when he saw Zach at the door of the cabin reaching for the knob.

“No!” He yelled, but it was too late.

John stood frozen in horror as millions of thin, veiny appendages spewed from the cabin’s walls and floors. They writhed and slithered, latching onto Zach’s arms and legs. He shrieked like a rodent caught in a trap as the thing’s tendrils spread to his torso. He fell to his knees and more flew up to cover his head and face. Pieces of his flesh began to slough off and hit the porch like gelatin. It was dissolving him...digesting him.

Zach's screams stopped and he fell forward. The thing continued to writhe and squirm all over his body until he was completely devoured. The feeding frenzy took less than two minutes. After the thing was satisfied, it slithed back into the walls and floors where it had come from. Only a small piece of Zach’s reflective vest remained. John stared at it, his face a pale mask of terror.

After a moment, he snapped out of it, and rushed back home to call the police. He snatched his phone from the kitchen floor and started to dial 911, when he paused.

What if they didn’t believe him? What if they just hauled him off to the loony bin? Or worse, what if they blamed him for the city man’s death. John would be rotting in prison while that thing was free to keep killing. He put the phone down to think. He remembered what the doctor was saying to him on the phone before he ran outside.

Spores. John thought.

He’d first heard the word years ago back when he still lived in town. His previous house had a basement that was prone to flooding. Which made it a perfect breeding ground for black mold. He remembered the exterminator assuring him that he could get rid of all of it in a jiffy. “Down to the very last spore.”

But ordinary black mold was nothing compared to the thing that had eaten the city man. John grabbed his copy of “The Fabulous World of Flora and Fungi” and flipped to the index. The word spores took him to the fungi section where he found a chapter called “Carnivorous Fungi & Their Hunting Habits.” John kept reading.

Over 300 species of fungi get their nutrition through predation or parasitism. These fungi have fascinating mechanisms which some of them adopt for capturing their prey. They are found across the world in mosses, soil, dung, and decomposing wood and leaves. There are at least three ways predatory fungi hunt: (1) forming trapping structures; (2) infecting prey as spores and (3) infecting females, eggs or larvae as parasites. There is a complex chemical ‘dialogue’ between the fungal predator and its prey. The chemical presence of prey is what triggers trap formation. The mycelium of many species can produce powerful chemical attractants to their prey. Some of these chemicals are strong enough to alter the prey’s cognitive abilities, causing the prey to act against its own survival instincts…

John thought about the voice that seemed to be wired directly into his brain, the delicious smells and sounds that seemed so real, the irresistible pull the cabin had on him. It wasn’t some real estate investor trying to scare him off. It was trying to bait him. It was trying to do to him what it did to Zach.

“It’s a boobytrap.” John said out loud to his empty kitchen.

He snapped the book shut and ran out the door. He jumped into his truck and drove to the closest hardware store. It didn’t take him long to find what he needed. The cashier had raised his eyebrows a bit when he saw John checking out with ten industrial sized containers of fungicide, but she said nothing.

John didn’t park his truck in his driveway when he got home like usual. Instead he pulled it as close to the cabin as he could, without getting within the thing’s reach. He put the truck in park and got to work unloading the containers of fungicide. The cabin was eerily quiet.

“Guess you're pretty content after your meal.” He hissed at the cabin. “Eat this.”

He opened the first container and kicked it over to let the poison glug onto the cabin's front steps. The reaction was instant. The steps began to bubble and foam, until they seemed to melt into a puddle of tar colored liquid.

John repeated this process all around the foundations of the cabin until it was nothing but a pool of black, stinking sludge. Then John climbed back into the front seat of his truck and watched the puddle intently. He sat there until nightfall, only going back home when he was sure the cabin was really dead.

That night ,for the first time in over a year, John went into a peaceful, dreamless sleep.

Summer faded into fall and fall slipped away into winter. John fell back into his comfortable routine, pushing the cabin and the voice out of his mind. He no longer heard his name called from the woods late at night, and when he looked out his kitchen window, nothing looked back at him. He began to feel like a man again, instead of prey.

By the time summer rolled around once more, the memories of the cabin had faded to dull haze. He felt lighter, like he was finally home. One evening, John called his nephew to invite him over for dinner.

“You know I’m creeped out by those woods. But I’ll come for you.”

John could hear Andrew smiling on the other end, which made him smile in return.

"Well, I appreciate it. Hope you like franks and beans, that’s all we eat out here in the wilderness.” John chuckled.

“Can’t wait,” said Andrew.

It would be the last thing he ever said to his uncle.

John hung up the phone and went to the sink to wash up his dinner dishes. As he was scrubbing and humming to himself, he heard it.

“Johnnn”, the voice croaked. He snapped his head up to look out the window. There it was. The cabin, looking exactly the way it did before he gave it a fungicide bath. Except now, there was a small flame burning in the window. His eyes were glued to it.

He dropped the dish he was washing and his mouth fell slack. He let out a pathetic moan. The bright white light filled his vision and there were no more thoughts. There was only a singular, mindless desire. The light. The light. The light.

“Come John.” The light whispered.

He did.

A few days later, Andrew came for dinner. He knocked on his uncle’s door with one hand and held a store bought apple pie in the other. No one answered his first knock so he tried again, louder this time.

“Uncle John?” He called. “Are you home, I’m here for dinner!”

Silence.

Andrew started to get worried. He began pounding on the door, hoping his Uncle had just fallen asleep and couldn’t hear him. Finally, he threw his meaty shoulder against the thin wood. It flew open with a loud crack.

Andrew stepped inside the silent house. “Uncle Johnnnn!” He called.

He walked into the kitchen and saw the broken bowl in pieces on the floor. Andrew’s blood ran cold. He ran into the living room and found nothing but his uncle’s favorite chair by the fireplace and shabby sofa in the corner.

On a small table next to the chair was John’s copy of “The Fabulous World of Flora and Fungi.” Andrew picked it up and leafed through it. He stopped on the section for carnivorous fungi, noticing that his uncle had underlined several passages. Not sure what to make of this, he continued scanning the book. He paused briefly on a sentence just a few pages before his uncle's annotations.

A fungal mycelium is a webbed netword of threadlike filaments called hyphae, which produce the fruiting body. The fruiting body is the part of the fungi we can see above the ground, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. The bulk of the mycelium is, in fact, underground and can spread far and wide. One of the largest fungi was discovered in Montana and covers over 2,300 acres…

Andrew closed the book and threw it back on the table. He pulled out his phone and dialed 911. He paced around his uncle’s small house as he spoke with the operator.

“We were supposed to have dinner together, and now he’s missing.” He explained frantically.

“Don’t worry sir, we’ll file a missing person’s report and send some detectives out to the house. In the meantime, does he have any neighbors? Maybe they’ve seen or heard from him recently.”

Andrew looked out the kitchen window and saw three other cabins in a cluster near his uncle’s property.

Andrew stared at them intently. “Yeah, he’s got neighbors.”