No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories Read Free Page A

directions, he systematically sniffed the air. Finally he seemed satisfied and disappeared inside. I followed him. “Spores?” I said. “What sort of spores?”
    He looked at me, wiped his hand along the window ledge, held it up so that I could see the red dust accumulated on his fingers and palm. “ These spores,” he said. “Dry-rot spores, of course! Haven’t you been listening?”
    “I have been listening, yes,” I answered sharply. “But I ask you: spores, mycelium, fruiting bodies? I mean, I thought dry rot was just, well, rotting wood!”
    “It’s a fungus,” he told me, a little impatiently. “Like a mushroom, and it spreads in much the same way. Except it’s destructive, and once it gets started it’s bloody hard to stop!”
    “And you, an ex-coal miner,” I stared at him in the gloom of the house we’d invaded, “you’re an expert on it, right? How come, Garth?”
    Again there was that troubled expression on his face, and in the dim interior of the house he didn’t try too hard to mask it. Maybe it had something to do with that story he’d promised to tell me, but doubtless he’d be as circuitous about that as he seemed to be about everything else. “Because I’ve read it up in books, that’s how,” he finally broke into my thoughts. “To occupy my time. When it first started to spread out of the old timber yard, I looked it up. It’s—” He gave a sort of grimace. “—it’s interesting , that’s all.”
    By now I was wishing I was on my way again. But by that I mustn’t be misunderstood: I’m an able-bodied man and I wasn’t afraid of anything—and certainly not of Garth himself, who was just a lonely, canny old-timer—but all of this really was getting to be a waste of my time. I had just made my mind up to go back out through the window when he caught my arm.
    “Oh, yes !” he said. “This place is really ripe with it! Can’t you smell it? Even with the window bust wide open like this, and the place nicely dried out in the summer heat, still it’s stinking the place out. Now just you come over here and you’ll see what you’ll see.”
    Despite myself, I was interested. And indeed I could smell…something. A cloying mustiness? A mushroomy taint? But not the nutty smell of fresh field mushrooms. More a sort of vile stagnation. Something dead might smell like this, long after the actual corruption has ceased…
    Our eyes had grown somewhat accustomed to the gloom. We looked about the room. “Careful how you go,” said Garth. “See the spores there? Try not to stir them up too much. They’re worse than snuff, believe me!” He was right: the red dust lay fairly thick on just about everything. By “everything” I mean a few old sticks of furniture, the worn carpet under our feet, the skirting-board, and various shelves and ledges. Whichever family had moved out of here, they hadn’t left a deal of stuff behind them.
    The skirting was of the heavy, old-fashioned variety: an inch and a half thick, nine inches deep, with a fancy moulding along the top edge; they hadn’t spared the wood in those days. Garth peered suspiciously at the skirting-board, followed it away from the bay window, and paused every pace to scrape the toe of his boot down its face. And eventually when he did this—suddenly the board crumbled to dust under the pressure of his toe!
    It was literally as dramatic as that: the white paint cracked away and the timber underneath fell into a heap of black, smoking dust. Another pace and Garth kicked again, with the same result. He quickly exposed a ten-foot length of naked wall, on which even the plaster was loose and flaky, and showed me where strands of the cotton-wool mycelium had come up between the brickwork and the plaster from below. “It sucks the cellulose right out of wood,” he said. “Gets right into brickwork, too. Now look here,” and he pointed at the old carpet under his feet. The threadbare weave showed a sort of raised floral