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

blossom or stain, like a blotch or blister, spreading outward away from the wall.
    Garth got down on his hands and knees. “Just look at this,” he said. He tore up the carpet and carefully laid it back. Underneath, the floorboards were warped, dark stained, shriveled so as to leave wide gaps between them. And up through the gaps came those white, etiolated threads, spreading themselves along the underside of the carpet.
    I wrinkled my nose in disgust. “It’s like a disease,” I said.
    “It is a disease!” he corrected me. “It’s a cancer, and houses die of it!” Then he inhaled noisily, pulled a face of his own, and said: “Here. Right here.” He pointed at the warped, rotting floorboards. “The very heart of it. Give me a hand.” He got his fingers down between a pair of boards and gave a tug, and it was at once apparent that he wouldn’t be needing any help from me. What had once been a stout wooden floorboard a full inch thick was now brittle as dry bark. It cracked upward, flew apart, revealed the dark cavities between the floor joists. Garth tossed bits of crumbling wood aside, tore up more boards; and at last “the very heart of it” lay open to our inspection.
    “There!” said Garth with a sort of grim satisfaction. He stood back and wiped his hands down his trousers. “Now that is what you call a fruiting body!”
    It was roughly the size of a football, if not exactly that shape. Suspended between two joists in a cradle of fibers, and adhering to one of the joists as if partly flattened to it, the thing might have been a great, too-ripe tomato. It was bright yellow at its center, banded in various shades of yellow from the middle out. It looked freakishly weird, like a bad joke: this lump of…of stuff —never a mushroom—just nestling there between the joists.
    Garth touched my arm and I jumped a foot. He said: “You want to know where all the moisture goes—out of this wood, I mean? Well, just touch it.”
    “Touch…that?”
    “Heck, it can’t bite you! It’s just a fungus.”
    “All the same, I’d rather not,” I told him.
    He took up a piece of floorboard and prodded the thing—and it squelched. The splintered point of the wood sank into it like jelly. Its heart was mainly liquid, porous as a sponge. “Like a huge egg yolk, isn’t it?” he said, his voice very quiet. He was plainly fascinated.
    Suddenly I felt nauseous. The heat, the oppressive closeness of the room, the spore-laden air. I stepped dizzily backward and stumbled against an old armchair. The rot had been there, too, for the chair just fragmented into a dozen pieces that puffed red dust all over the place. My foot sank right down through the carpet and mushy boards into darkness and stench—and in another moment I’d panicked.
    Somehow I tumbled myself back out through the window and ended up on my back in the brambles. Then Garth was standing over me, shaking his head and tut-tutting. “Told you not to stir up the dust,” he said. “It chokes your air and stifles you. Worse than being down a pit. Are you all right?”
    My heart stopped hammering and I was, of course, all right. I got up. “A touch of claustrophobia,” I told him. “I suffer from it at times. Anyway, I think I’ve taken up enough of your time, Garth. I should be getting on my way.”
    “What?” he protested. “A lovely day like this and you want to be driving off somewhere? And besides, there were things I wanted to tell you, and others I’d ask you—and we haven’t been down to Lily-Anne’s grave.” He looked disappointed. “Anyway, you shouldn’t be driving if you’re feeling all shaken up…”
    He was right about that part of it, anyway: I did feel shaky, not to mention foolish! And perhaps more importantly, I was still very much aware of the old man’s loneliness. What if it was my mother who’d died, and my father had been left on his own up in Durham? “Very well,” I said, at the same time damning myself for a weak