Content Notice:
This story contains sexually suggestive content.
Of late, Clay’s chosen route had become routine: off the bus, down the next side street, through the creekside park and its modest playground, across the footbridge that crossed the culvert, right onto Coalhatch Street, and five doors along to Mildew Manor. So many times throughout the month of July he’d followed this path to meet Brodie, and even when working behind the bar at Gin’s the Tonic, he was mentally retracing his steps to relive what went down once her bedroom door closed behind them. But today he paused on the footbridge, ignoring the gentle drizzle of rain that wounded the creekwater below like soft bullets, and stared down the length of the culvert. Whatever lay at the end of it could not have felt any more distant than Brodie did now.
He’d always known what they had was a casual fling and nothing more, but her silence stung. Was he so easy to cast aside without so much as a fond farewell? He deserved that closure, and Brodie’s refusal to give it made him maudlin, a feeling intensified by his hangover from last night’s post-work drinks. So here he was, making this trek one last time, set on hearing the words straight from lips that had wetly promised so much to his willing body.
Clay had met Brodie and her posse at a spoken-word gig—he’d been performing in the tiny dive bar and they’d stumbled in out of pure curiosity. She’d been impressed enough by his recital to let him buy her a beer, and whilst matching sups and stares, he’d taken stock of her: a uni student of nineteen or twenty who saw the world as an oyster ripe for the shucking, a woman who dressed in flouncy blouses and floral-print skirts and large glasses as if cosplaying as a dowdy librarian, possibly ironically since the look only emphasised the sensuality of her heavy bust and wicked tongue. Even after she invited him back to her rundown suburban sharehouse—welcome to Mildew Manor!—he was wondering whether she found him anything more than an amusement until she dragged him into her bedroom and laid the question to rest, and more besides.
Strange to think that had been just five weeks ago. Clay leaned on the footbridge’s barrier, surrounded by all the sounds of the world and hearing none of them, cocooned in the silence that had eaten up his last seven days. Brodie hadn’t invited him over in that time, hadn’t replied to his messages for almost as long, and he knew that coming over unasked was overstepping the boundaries she’d set. He watched the lifeblood of the creek rush along the catchment, swollen by winter rains, and mused that water might be directed or dammed but ultimately could not be stopped—water was wild, with all the will of a woman. Not a bad line. Maybe he could use it.
You know, Clay, Brodie’s housemate Walt had once said, she’s only sleeping with you because she fancies the idea of someone writing a poem about her. Walt was one of those gay men whose fickle charm and outrageous wit allowed him to get away with being a raging prick, but a truth cruelly deployed was a truth nonetheless. Clay found he didn’t much care anyway and was happy to go with the flow, as poets do—as he had three weeks back when Walt and Brodie insisted upon a trip into the hills to pick magic mushrooms.
That had been a strange trip, in more ways than one. Clay had found himself packed into a car with Brodie, Walt, their housemate Jessamine, her boyfriend Phong, and a pressganged driver called Bill who clearly had history with Brodie. Whilst only seven years older, Clay had felt out of touch with their banter and uncomfortable with Bill’s obvious resentment of him. Things had been better once they’d parked and tramped into the bush to hunt for fungi, not least because he split off with Brodie and soon found himself pressed up against a tree with his pants around his knees and her hot mouth working him to a swift and exciting climax. Clay found he didn’t mind Bill’s attitude so much after that, and he’d happily pitched in to pick the little brown caps that were pointed out to him. He’d even followed Brodie’s lead and washed off a couple with bottled water to ingest at once.
Looking down at the rushing catchment now, he felt as though he’d never come down from the ensuing trip. He could’ve watched the water run for hours, might well have done if not for the light rain pasting his hair to his skull and the goal of closure looming ahead. Clay sighed, his eyes tracing the territory below him: the channel of the culvert, six feet wide and wild with motion; the forty-five-degree angle of the walls that sloped up for ten feet on either side, stained with fading graffiti and patches of lichen; the haphazard row of backyard fences that ran along the crest of cement, no two alike. His gaze caught on a snarl of deadwood, just as a mass of floating rubbish and leaves had, and then stayed there as the water eddied around it. The longer he stared, the more he was convinced that some of those limbs belonged to something other than a tree.
The morass snapped into sharp focus: a corpse lay sprawled along the wall of the culvert, snagged just above the surface in this random blockade. Water and rot had darkened its hide, which might have been grey in the sun, and its tail had hooked the open mouth of a discarded chip packet. Its ears splayed akimbo on a burst head that seemed to stare up the culvert wall to the yards beyond, and its gaze left a slick trail that looked like—
Clay was jolted back into his memories of the picking trip. As the afternoon sun had faded into the dim winter sky, the five of them had regrouped in a clearing to take stock of the day’s work. Walt and Brodie were happily delirious with the effects of the shrooms by then, and Clay, his head humming with hallucinogenic electricity, had watched as they tumbled laughing onto a log to count their haul. Walt put his hands down onto the damp wood and then yelped, leaping to his feet and wiping his palms of the legs of his jeans: it’s all fucking mouldy! Brodie had risen to brush at the seat of her skirt in disgust. Clay saw that the log formed the lowest part of what looked like a rotten cairn, a jumbled pile of tree-limbs liberally coated in cadmium-green mould with highlights of black and chartreuse, and his benignly poisoned brain had lent it the form of a natural throne.
He and Bill had laughed, drawn together for once by amusement, until Walt had taken offence to the wild’s slick, wet touch. He took a run-up and kicked the sodden log as hard as he could, tearing it free from the mass and sending it flying into the bush in two pieces. Whilst he hopped on his other foot and swore, as Brodie rolled about on the grass in a fit of hilarity, Clay had felt a twinge of disquiet at the sacrilege. They were intruders here, had no right to inflict themselves upon this untouched environment. Numbed and muted by the fungal high, he said nothing as Brodie joined in the assault, her kicks dislodging logs and tearing smooth sheets of mould away in clumps until the formation had fallen in on itself, desecrated and defeated.
He hadn’t joined in the spirited conversation on the way back to Bill’s car, distracted by a sense that they had offended something vast and pitiless. The fading light had lent him an uneasy awareness of his surroundings, so that he was sure he heard something following them through the trees. There’d been nothing in sight whenever he’d looked back, but as they piled into the car parked on the dirt track that had led them here, he’d spotted a watchful figure amongst the trunks—a witness from the wilderness. Just a kangaroo, he’d told himself, and not a very imposing one at that. The patches on its grey fur might have been a sickly shade of green or merely shadows from the dim sun’s dappling. Still, it watched them depart with a solemnity he might not have imagined, and he thought he saw one paw rising to point after them as they tore away down the track. Marking them.
Staring down at the tangle of branches and debris now, Clay was sure the body caught up in it was that of a grey kangaroo. Its empty eyes stared up the slope of the culvert wall, following a dark, ragged trail of mould that ran in a direct line to the top and met with the mouth of a domestic drainage pipe that dribbled excess water. Perhaps its constant spillage on the cement had been enough to cultivate the growth, but he couldn’t help believing the stain had edged up rather than down. The pipe poked through a ragged wooden fence five houses down from the footbridge.
That number clicked in Clay’s head.
Five doors down.
The sharehouse.
It might have meant nothing, but he thrust himself away from the bridge’s rail and hurried across to the far bank. Pushing away distracting thoughts—was this concern just an excuse for his jealous trespasses? Was he the new Bill now?—he turned right onto Coalhatch Street and strode five doors along until he stood at the mouth of Mildew Manor.
The place had been built perhaps sixty years ago, and surely the only thing saving it from demolition and a more lucrative replacement was that its decrepitude and accordingly low rent ensured the minimal investment quietly repaid itself—easy money for a lazy landlord. Clay headed up the path to the front door, the porch boards creaking below him as he reached for the handle. The place was locked, which was unusual in itself; Brodie and Walt liked to treat life as one long party and usually kept an open house. Something felt off about the door handle, though, and Clay gave it an experimental shove. The lock tore free of its mounting with the ease of wet cardboard and the door yawned open on a broken jaw.
The smell of putrefaction punched him hard enough to knock him back a step. He moaned a sound of revulsion and held his nose, peered down the shadowy hall. The place reeked of disuse and decay, as though it had been left to rot for years. Had a burst pipe soaked the house’s wooden boards with dirty water the occupants had been too slack to mop up? Clay’s mind flashed to the runoff pipe at the edge of the culvert, to the green-black mould streaking up the wall into its open mouth, and he shuddered with a sense of deep wrongness. But what could he do? Call the cops and say the place smelled a bit sodden? It was shared by university students—alarms would only go off if it wasn’t redolent of unwashed clothes, reheated pizza, and staling bodily fluids.
Breathing through his mouth, Clay stepped into the hallway. No sounds greeted his entry, a worrying sign, and the space was darker than he remembered, as though all the curtains had been drawn. The carpet was oddly spongy under his shoes, and he ducked to touch it. Dry, but it still felt like walking on a membrane, and he didn’t appreciate the sensation.
No-one replied to his calls. No-one’s phone played annoying video reels or sent Post Malone tracks to the booming Bluetooth speakers. He headed to the communal lounge, where at least two of the tenants could usually be found, and saw the ragged couches were empty; the TV was off, the bong on the coffee table cold and ashen.
Clay’s bad feeling intensified, and he kicked himself for not recognising the signs sooner. Last time he’d been over, the mood had been less low-key than somnolent. Walt had been red-eyed and monosyllabic, shuffling about like a man who’d had his heart broken—that table-turn might have explained his uncharacteristic behaviour. Brodie had done little but lie on her bed sniffing and complaining of hay fever, for once disinterested in sex, livening only when brushing away his wandering hands. He asked if they’d been out the night before, thinking this could be a harsh chemical comedown, and she’d just laughed as though such things never happened. Hadn’t there been a rank undercurrent to the air even then? He remembered wincing as he’d used their bathroom, which was always in need of a thorough clean but had started to smell of clogged drains. Okay, so the plumbing had gotten worse, and the tenants had found other places to hang out to avoid the clammy atmosphere. That sounded good, didn’t it? Convincing?
Clay proceeded down the hall, and the carpet seemed to squish beneath his feet. Walt’s door was closed, so he ignored it; studious Jessamine’s was always shut to the world outside coursework, opening only to admit Phong. But Brodie’s door at the end of the hall was also closed, and that usually meant one of two things: she was sleeping or fucking. He paused outside and leaned his head against the cool, damp wood. No incriminating sounds from inside, not that he could have blamed her—the rules had always been clear—and Clay found that he would’ve preferred moans of lust. This still silence was so unusual for the sharehouse that it intimated much worse things afoot than his casual lover dismissing him in favour of another.
Clay knocked, expecting no response and receiving none. Then he turned the handle and opened the door on a staggering sight.
Everything he knew was still there and in its right place, so far as he could tell—the dresser with its oval mirror, the chair forever draped with once-worn clothes that could be tossed on another time or two before washing, the double bed directly across from the door—but he could only assume that because he could still make out their distinctive shapes under the smooth canopy of cadmium-green mould that coated the entire room. This vivid and unbroken epidermis with highlights of black and chartreuse lay at least an inch thick over everything in sight, rising halfway up the walls before it petered out into a speckling of spores—the “ironic” BTS poster Brodie liked to throw pens at when she was pissed off had half-disappeared beneath the growth, the K-poppers drowning in fungal waves, and the window by her bed had been occluded enough that looking in from outside would be like peering into an algae-clotted fishtank.
Brodie had been sleeping when the mould crept across the counterpane to claim her. Clay knew this because he recognised her left-side curl as the position she usually assumed in slumber. Her features were a bas-relief in sickly grass-green, but anyone who knew her would have recognised this cytoplasmic caricature at once. He perceived an awful poetry in this verdant vision, sex sculpted in sporous sponge, and gagged. Brodie didn’t seem to have struggled as the sheet of mould grew over her, and he hoped everything had been quick and painless, as simple as falling asleep and never waking.
It occurred to him that he should do something—gasp, scream, tear wildly at the implacable fungus—but he remained frozen in the doorway, his lungs and lips locked. He distantly understood this to be the safest option because he wasn’t breathing in the spores he’d disturbed, and besides, what good could any of that do poor Brodie now? The proud libertine was gone, forever young, purified and exfoliated by a fungal face mask. Clay thought for a moment there might be tears, but it was just an itch in his eyes. The infestation, no doubt—he remembered how Brodie and Walt and, presumably, the unseen Jessamine had rubbed at their faces and sneezed and felt fatigued the last time he’d visited.
Clay retreated into the corridor, still holding his breath. He thought to check on the others, but there hardly seemed any point. Their doors were closed and their rooms silent, and he already knew what he would see if he intruded: rolling meadows of mould that coated everything in sight, casting sad and sick impressions of Walt and Jessamine upon their own beds where they had collapsed into unconsciousness to await their slow, choking ends. He understood now why the carpet felt spongy beneath his shoes—the mould had grown up the culvert wall, through the overflow pipe, and then under the floor coverings as it spread throughout the house. Strange that it had only burst out into the open in the bedrooms, though. Like this was a targeted attack on the occupants.
Clay thought of the cairn, of the etiolated kangaroo he’d seen in the woods and perhaps in the culvert outside, and knew his instinct was correct. And if that were the case… was Bill’s home also invaded? When he got back to his flat, should Clay check for intrusions under his own carpets? He’d been offended by the vandalism in the bush, but he hadn’t spoken out against it, nor intervened to stop it. Was that unease enough to save him? Or was nature, so brutally neutral in the treatment of its subjects, yet set on repaying him for his presence that dim winter afternoon?
He turned and crept across the hidden hide of vengeful slime, acutely aware that Mildew Manor was alive and awake all around him. If he made it to the door; if his own floors were firm and dry—if he woke at all tomorrow morning—then he might just have his answer.
Matthew R. Davis
Matthew R. Davis is a Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author and musician from Adelaide, South Australia, with around one hundred short stories and six books published to date. He's won two Australasian Shadows Awards and has been shortlisted for many others. His latest book is The Cure On Track: Every Album, Every Song (Sonicbond Publishing), with a collection of horror stories, Songs of Shadow, Words of Woe, and an Australian indie film tie-in, Ribspreader: The Novelisation and the Screenplay (with Dick Dale) due later in 2025. He shares his life with the award-winning artist Meg Wright, aka Red Wallflower. Find out more at matthewrdavisfiction.