No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories Read Free

guttering and the drainage. Get rid of the water spillage, then deal with the rot. If a place is dry and airy, it’s OK. Damp and musty spells danger!”
    I nodded. “Thanks, I will tell him.”
    “Want to see something?” said Garth. “I’ll show you what old Merulius can do. See here, these old paving flags? See if you can lever one up a bit.” I found a piece of rusting iron stave and dragged it out of the ground where it supported a rotting fence, then forced the sharp end into a crack between the overgrown flags. And while I worked to loosen the paving stone, old Garth stood watching and carried on talking.
    “Actually, there’s a story attached, if you care to hear it,” he said. “Probably all coincidental or circumstantial, or some other big word like that—but queer the way it came about all the same.”
    He was losing me again. I paused in my leveling to look bemused (and maybe to wonder what on Earth I was doing here), then grunted, and sweated, gave one more heave, and flipped the flag over onto its back. Underneath was hard-packed sand. I looked at it, shrugged, looked at Garth.
    He nodded in that way of his, grinned, said: “Look. Now tell me what you make of this!”
    He got down on one knee, scooped a little of the sand away. Just under the surface his hands met some soft obstruction. Garth wrinkled his nose and grimaced, got his face down close to the earth, blew until his weakened lungs started him coughing. Then he sat back and rested. Where he’d scraped and blown the sand away, I made out what appeared to be a grey fibrous mass running at right angles right under the pathway. It was maybe six inches thick, looked like tightly packed cotton wool. It might easily have been glass fiber lagging for some pipe or other, and I said as much.
    “But it isn’t,” Garth contradicted me. “It’s a root, a feeler, a tentacle. It’s old man cancer himself—timber cancer—on the move and looking for a new victim. Oh, you won’t see him moving,” that strange look was back on his face, “or at least you shouldn’t—but he’s at it anyway. He finished those houses there,” he nodded at the derelicts stepping down toward the new cliffs, “and now he’s gone into this one on the left here. Another couple of summers like this ’un and he’ll be through the entire row to my place. Except maybe I’ll burn him out first.”
    “You mean this stuff—this fiber—is dry rot?” I said. I stuck my hand into the stuff and tore a clump out. It made a soft tearing sound, like damp chipboard, except it was dry as old paper. “How do you mean, you’ll ‘burn him out’?”
    “I mean like I say,” said Garth. “I’ll search out and dig up all these threads—mycelium, they’re called—and set fire to ’em. They smoulder right through to a fine white ash. And God—it stinks ! Then I’ll look for the fruiting bodies, and—”
    “The what?” His words had conjured up something vaguely obscene in my mind. “Fruiting bodies?”
    “Lord, yes!” he said. “You want to see? Just follow me.”
    Leaving the path, he stepped over a low brick wall to struggle through the undergrowth of the garden on our left. Taking care not to get tangled up in the brambles, I followed him. The house seemed pretty much intact, but a bay window in the ground floor had been broken and all the glass tapped out of the frame. “My winter preparations,” Garth explained. “I burn wood, see? So before winter comes, I get into a house like this one, rip out all the wooden fixings and break ’em down ready for burning. The wood just stays where I stack it, all prepared and waiting for the bad weather to come in. I knocked this window out last week, but I’ve not been inside yet. I could smell it, see?” He tapped his nose. “And I didn’t much care for all those spores on my lungs.”
    He stepped up on a pile of bricks, got one leg over the sill, and stuck his head inside. Then, turning his head in all