I wouldn’t go down there if I were you, I can practically hear Silas whisper.
When you build a house, you begin with a grave. You dig a hole in the ground. Then the footings are formed and poured. The concrete foundation is cured. But it remains a grave, with or without a body, empty and waiting to accept. What do I expect to find down here? I’m not sure. I know I’m supposed to be here. Something is tugging me downstairs.
I take in the space—concrete walls, cold concrete floor. The only light comes from a ground-level hopper window, hinged at the bottom and open at the top for ventilation. The sun casts a tight rectangular beam across the floor, filled with swirling motes of dust. Not dust—something thicker, more granular. I taste cinnamon when I inhale. Spores. The air is thick with them. My eyes adjust to the dark and I see clusters drifting everywhere, forming constellations.
Exposed electrical wiring reaches out from the walls in coiled bouquets. This is where the washer-dryer unit would’ve gone. I spot several empty bags of topsoil, along with a rusted tin of paint thinner. Empty cans of spray paint, fluorescent pink and black. There’s a milk crate full of cell phones. I consider fishing through them to find mine so I can call home, just to tell my mom I’m alive, I’m okay, but my family wants nothing to do with me now.
Besides…I’m too transfixed by the planters.
In the center of the basement are three freestanding raised garden beds. The wooden frames are six feet long and about a foot high. They’re filled to the brim with thick, fertile earth, rich with peat moss and all kinds of nutrients to get your new garden growing.
The rent-a-cop’s body rests in the closest planter.
I don’t believe—can’t fathom—what I’m seeing. It can’t be…It just can’t.
But it’s true. He’s resting within a fresh garden bed, stripped of his uniform so the soil surrounds the surface of his blue-tinged skin. His paunch rises up from the dirt like a hairy bubble about to pop. His head sinks back in the earth, eyes covered in grit. The earth slips past his lips, filling his hollowed-out mouth. He’s up to his teeth in topsoil.
An outcropping of infinitesimal tumors spread along his stomach, threatening to burst at any moment. If I just pretend he’s drifting along the surface of a pond—warm, soothing even, I can somehow navigate the absolute insanity of what I’m seeing. I don’t want to believe this, any of this, is possible. But it is. Silas—with Tobias—planted this man’s body in the basement.
How else would they grow their supply?
Silas said he wanted to give me my own home. My body was meant to be moved to another house on the block. How long before my ghost would’ve been planted in its basement?
Amara’s body rests in the second garden bed. No. Please, not Amara. Her jaw has locked open to allow the fibrous stalk that was once her tongue to branch out and blossom. The fleshy veil lifts a few inches above her nose, its cap a blushing umbrella. A button peers out from her left nostril. More morels are about to sprout. It won’t be long before her face is gone altogether, replaced by a fresh bed of fruiting bodies.
“Amara…”
This is your fault, I say to myself. All your fault.
“I’m so sorry…”
Amara blinks. Her eyes remain cognizant while the rest of her ruptures. I don’t know how she can hear me, her ear canals clotted with yeasty cysts, but somehow she does. Both lobes are like honeycombed morchellas, spongy and yellow. They curl toward me.
A scream escapes from my mouth as I fall onto the floor. I scramble backward, unable to look away from Amara’s planter, until I strike the garden bed directly behind me.
She’s alive, I think. Amara’s still alive! She came here to rescue me from this house, and this is what happened to her. This is my fault. All my fault. If I’d just taken her hand—
Something shifts at my shoulder.
I spin around, facing the edge of the third garden bed. This planter has been hidden in the far corner of the basement, pressed against the wall, where there’s less light.
A fermented bouquet of mildew and stale sweat reaches into my nose. The curdled milk stench is at its strongest back here. The soil itself, from what I can see in the darkness, is an explosion of mycelium. An entire fungal colony sprawls out before me. And it’s moving.
Silas.
The entirety of his flesh has erupted in mushroom caps. His skin ripples with pinheads. White buttons branch out from his fingertips. Patches of puffballs crop up from the crevices in his flesh, around his armpits and groin. Jelly ears fan out from his temples.
It can’t be him. There’s nothing left to recognize…But it’s him. Of course it’s him. This mass of branching hyphae was once Silas’s body. He has been down here this whole time. I was supposed to plant his ghost, but it was Tobias who planted his body. Just like a seed, he told us. You can plant a ghost in any empty vessel, letting your ghost grow.
Silas found a mushroom. Sarcophyllum, was what Tobias called it. As in sarcophilous. Fond of flesh. Silas performed a particular ritual and started this supernatural sequence, as if it were all some sort of psychedelic self-fulfilling prophesy. I see it now. The only way to grow more Ghost is to farm it from the corpses of its own addicts. It needs flesh. It’s the life cycle of a fungus that feeds on its users: you die so that it can live. Once you start taking Ghost—Have I been taking the drug or is the drug taking me?—it changes you. We’ve all become fruiting bodies for more of the mushroom. Vessels, that’s all we are. Receptacles. It needs our flesh to flourish. To proliferate.
That’s how our ghost story spreads. That’s how addictive this drug is. The mushroom consumes you from the inside out, your body a breeding ground for the next batch and you don’t even care.
A gentle scraping sound of something soft—fleshy—fills the basement.
Silas’s body slowly pulls free from its garden bed. Topsoil topples off his ruptured body as he sits upright. I’m hallucinating, I think. None of this is real, this can’t be happening…
Silas is dead. It’s not him. Not Silas. Not anymore.
Silas makes a sound. He wants to say something, but it’s no longer his voice. No longer his mouth. His lips have fissured into gills. His cheeks mottle into yellow angel wings. The tip of his nose cauliflowers, the skin slowly boiling over. Threads of flesh lift into the air, a fungal colony of tawny-capped toadstools rising up from his exposed rib cage. The stems along his throat oscillate with every exhale, bending with what passes as breath.
All he wants is to flourish. Take root.
“Silas?”
The mushrooms along his body respond to the sound of his name. The toadstools find me first, turning toward me as if they have their own autonomous life independent of their host. The caps open and close, several dozen umbrellas vacillating—their colors pulsing in a dizzying, almost hypnotizing, rhythm. I don’t want to look but I can’t turn away, drawn in by the colors, all the stunning colors flexing along his body. His hulking frame rises up from the garden bed, onto his feet, mold-ridden muscles stretching. Soil cascades off his shoulders, spilling over.
“Silas,” I say again, my voice firmer this time. “Can you hear me?”
I crawl away from the planter as Silas places one foot on the floor, then the other. I know it’s not him. Not anymore. Just fungal flesh. Mold. And yet…maybe he’s still there, somewhere.
He’s in me. I’m the one haunted by him.
His body takes another awkward step forward. I stop crawling backward so Silas can catch up. He lumbers closer until his flourishing frame looms over me on the floor. I hear a leathery flex in his flesh as he leans forward, drawing near, the fetid smell of mildew drifting.
“I’m letting you go,” I say.
Silas brings his hand down to my face and cups my jaw. The mushroom caps along his palms brush against my chin and I can feel them flexing and tensing, puckering up to me.