He woke up on something like a toadstool. His gas mask was gone. So were his boots.
It took a groggy moment for him to realize this. He was busy trying to reconcile the dreams he’d just had with his very dream-like surroundings and didn’t think he was doing it all that well.
The waking scene was lit by a menagerie of luminous fungoids.
Some were capped like round-headed mushrooms. These were embellished with spots, striated lines or cankerous bumps. Others were tall and bulbous, chaotically honeycombed, like morels. Others were unevenly rimmed cups, like failed pottery. One was oblong, riven with vulva-like folds. It was a meaty, wheel-of-cheese sort of orange.
The fungoids glowed hypnagogically, across a ridiculous spectrum of colours. He wondered if this had any pattern. He thought it must. It felt nuanced, how their colours shifted. They were immersed in water, which doubled their effect in drunken-looking reflections.
The fungous dome he sat on glowed violet and had yellow spots. It was his island in a lagoon of mushrooms. Bounding all this were featureless, prehistoric-looking pillars. These were tall as trees, fluorescing pale green—beginning to turn yellow, he thought. Beyond their conical tips, slick cavern walls segued into seemingly perpetual dark, which he thought he’d fallen out of.
Or maybe he just dreamed it.
In a luxuriant mood he stretched out his feet, feeling the spongy, forgiving surface.
But he kept looking up into the dark. It told him he was in a crevasse many kilometres deep. That he’d never climb out. That he was trapped.
He started to hyperventilate.
It was at that moment he noticed he didn’t have on a breathing mask. So how was he still breathing?
He found the mask. It wasn’t far from one of his discarded boots. But he didn’t put it on. The atmosphere felt completely breathable, even pleasantly fragrant.
Plumes of coloured light caught particles vaguely troubling the air. Some of them tickled his nostrils. The air otherwise felt fine.
He thought he still must be forgetting something. Oh, yes. Some creature fell into here with him. It was just a larva at first, but then it changed.
There it was, floating nearby: pale-bodied, flaccid like a downed parachute.
It seemed to find its surroundings restful. It looked to be basking in the warmth of some little spring that sent up ecstatic bubbles, underlit with aquamarine. The bubbles rose to where they popped or vanished to nothing in the dark.
Its tentacles were sprawled across light-giving neighbours, which looked undisturbed. It seemed collegial with them, almost familial.
All at once, small bulbous eruptions distended its centre, like dough suddenly rising. This effect spread until the creature became like a mushroom itself, with a rounded cap and gills fanning out underneath. A little top-heavy for its stem, it tipped over slightly. It glowed a bit—modestly, as if preparing to speak with the others.
The transformation made him despondent. He felt set apart from the sessile fraternity around him. Miserably, he gazed at his toes. Even those felt foreign: skinny and overlong, wriggling in the viscous water. Their reflections tapered off through shifting reds, yellows and purples, disturbed by placid waves.
Here and there spun little whirlpools—pulled down, he thought, by cavities underneath. He enjoyed those. At the centre of each whorl of colours sat an oily pearl of black. He felt if he touched any of these, he’d be pulled in, stretched like taffy by their implacable force.
He wanted badly to touch them—all of them at once. He could do this, he thought, if he reached out with all his tentacles. Some little voice told him he had no tentacles, and that there was reason to think his identity must be slipping. He brushed away this concern and reached for the little spirals—all of them at once.
They pulled him into so many places.
— He was a young boy, pretending his small fingers could do magical things. The thought of their fantastical powers made it impossible to sleep.
Nerves and chemicals cause the penis muscles in purchase cialis http://cute-n-tiny.com/tag/steve-irwin/ men and it calls for the implantation of tiny radioactive “seed” pellets directly into the diseased prostate.
— He was a youth, strangely alone in the heart of a city that was deserted when it should be crowded. He felt elated when the sky opened up and grabbed him. It was like being sucked through a straw.
— He floated through the deeps of space, naked and helpless, hating the cold starlight.
— He was a woman with an umbrella, exasperated by the petulant dandy who was, unfortunately, her double. There were things she had to tell him, but she felt too annoyed. When he was swallowed by a rift in space she regretted this.
— An old man, surrounded by fabulous machines: all which he’d built and none of which fascinated him anymore. He wanted his life to reverse, to live it all backwards. But he’d forgotten which way backwards was. He missed the simplicity of directions. Like up and down. Like falling.
— It felt it was falling. Always, it was falling. It was born falling. It wanted to drink the wind.
— To them, falling was like floating. They felt like a multitude of small clouds. A diffusion of spores seeking contact with tissue.
— Fungoids communing. Their mycelia, tendrils beneath them, all touched. Contact made them the same. Their quiet minds saw no difference between digestion and love.
He was sitting on a toadstool, watching the alien that was recently a huge grub and was now a great leaning mushroom. It flashed benignly, like the ones around it. But he saw no pattern now: just lights.
He felt spent and thirsty. Thoughts, like tracers of dreams, slipped away. He struggled to keep them, but he had a headache.
He groaned.
“What—what just happened?”
“Your filtration mask was removed,” said the nano-computer. “You breathed the spores, which are intoxicants. I synthesized a counter-agent. Why did you remove your filtration mask?”
It sounded scolding.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. My head hurts. It’s spinning. Wait—why is it spinning?”
The dark pill in the centre of one whirlpool grew larger as it spun faster. Sadly, this wasn’t hallucination.
Right before the Worm took him, he said, “I was starting to like this place.”
~
He lay on the rocky canyon floor. It was covered in red dust.
He noticed a naked female foot.
Against better judgment, he looked up.
(Next: Fire Folk of Flagrantia)
