“The rot?”
He paused for breath, leaned a hand on one hip, nodded and frowned. “Dry rot,” he said. “Or Merulius lacrymans as they call it in the books. It’s been bad these last three years. Very bad! But when the last of these old houses are gone, and what’s left of the timber yard, then it’ll be gone, too.”
“It?” We were getting back to single-word questions again. “The dry rot, you mean? I’m afraid I don’t know very much about it.”
“Places on the coast are prone to it,” he told me. “Whitby, Scarborough, places like that. All the damp sea spray and the bad plumbing, the rains that come in and the inadequate drainage. That’s how it starts. It’s a fungus, needs a lot of moisture—to get started, anyway. You don’t know much about it? Heck, I used to think I knew quite a bit about it, but now I’m not so sure!”
By then I’d remembered something. “A friend of mine in London did mention to me how he was having to have his flat treated for it,” I said, a little lamely. “Expensive, apparently.”
Garth nodded, straightened up. “Hard to kill,” he said. “And when it’s active, moves like the plague! It’s active here, now! Too late for Easingham, and who gives a damn anyway? But you tell that friend of yours to sort out his exterior maintenance first: the guttering and the drainage. Get rid of the water spillage, then deal with the rot. If a place is dry and airy, it’s OK. Damp and musty spells danger!”
I nodded. “Thanks, I will tell him.”
“Want to see something?” said Garth. “I’ll show you what old Merulius can do. See here, these old paving flags? See if you can lever one up a bit.” I found a piece of rusting iron stave and dragged it out of the ground where it supported a rotting fence, then forced the sharp end into a crack between the overgrown flags. And while I worked to loosen the paving stone, old Garth stood watching and carried on talking.
“Actually, there’s a story attached, if you care to hear it,” he said. “Probably all coincidental or circumstantial, or some other big word like that—but queer the way it came about all the same.”
He was losing me again. I paused in my leveling to look bemused (and maybe to wonder what on Earth I was doing here), then grunted, and sweated, gave one more heave, and flipped the flag over onto its back. Underneath was hard-packed sand. I looked at it, shrugged, looked at Garth.
He nodded in that way of his, grinned, said: “Look. Now tell me what you make of this!”
He got down on one knee, scooped a little of the sand away. Just under the surface his hands met some soft obstruction. Garth wrinkled his nose and grimaced, got his face down close to the earth, blew until his weakened lungs started him coughing. Then he sat back and rested. Where he’d scraped and blown the sand away, I made out what appeared to be a grey fibrous mass running at right angles right under the pathway. It was maybe six inches thick, looked like tightly packed cotton wool. It might easily have been glass fiber lagging for some pipe or other, and I said as much.
“But it isn’t,” Garth contradicted me. “It’s a root, a feeler, a tentacle. It’s old man cancer himself—timber cancer—on the move and looking for a new victim. Oh, you won’t see him moving,” that strange look was back on his face, “or at least you shouldn’t—but he’s at it anyway. He finished those houses there,” he nodded at the derelicts stepping down toward the new cliffs, “and now he’s gone into this one on the left here. Another couple of summers like this ’un and he’ll be through the entire row to my place. Except maybe I’ll burn him out first.”
“You mean this stuff—this fiber—is dry rot?” I said. I stuck my hand into the stuff and tore a clump out. It made a soft tearing sound, like damp chipboard, except it was dry as old paper. “How do you mean, you’ll ‘burn him out’?”
“I mean like I say,” said Garth. “I’ll search out and dig up all these threads—mycelium, they’re called—and set fire to ’em. They smoulder right through to a fine white ash. And God—it stinks! Then I’ll look for the fruiting bodies, and—”
“The what?” His words had conjured up something vaguely obscene in my mind. “Fruiting bodies?”
“Lord, yes!” he said. “You want to see? Just follow me.”
Leaving the path, he stepped over a low brick wall to struggle through the undergrowth of the garden on our left. Taking care not to get tangled up in the brambles, I followed him. The house seemed pretty much intact, but a bay window in the ground floor had been broken and all the glass tapped out of the frame. “My winter preparations,” Garth explained. “I burn wood, see? So before winter comes, I get into a house like this one, rip out all the wooden fixings and break ’em down ready for burning. The wood just stays where I stack it, all prepared and waiting for the bad weather to come in. I knocked this window out last week, but I’ve not been inside yet. I could smell it, see?” He tapped his nose. “And I didn’t much care for all those spores on my lungs.”
He stepped up on a pile of bricks, got one leg over the sill, and stuck his head inside. Then, turning his head in all 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 skirti
ng-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 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 fool, “let’s go and see Lily-Anne’s grave.”
“Good!” Garth slapped my back. “And no more diversions—we go straight there.”
Following the paved path as before and climbing a gentle rise, we started walking. We angled a little inland from the unseen cliffs where the green, rolling fields came to an abrupt end and fell down into the sea; and as we went I gave a little thought to the chain of incidents in which I’d found myself involved through the last hour or so.
Now, I’d be a liar if I said that nothing had struck me as strange in Easingham, for quite a bit had. Not least the dry rot: its apparent profusion and migration through the place, and old Garth’s peculiar knowledge and understanding of the stuff. His—affinity?—with it. “You said there was a story attached,” I reminded him. “…To that horrible fungus, I mean.”
He looked at me sideways, and I sensed he was on the point of telling me something. But at that moment we crested the rise and the view just took my breath away. We could see for miles up and down the coast: to the slow, white breakers rolling in on some beach way to the north, and southward to a distance-misted seaside town that might even be Whitby. And we paused to fill our lungs with good air blowing fresh off the sea.
“There,” said Garth. “And how’s this for freedom? Just me and old Ben and the gulls for miles and miles, and I’m not so sure but that this is the way I like it. Now wasn’t it worth it to come up here? All this open space and the great curve of the horizon…” Then the look of satisfaction slipped from his face to be replaced by a more serious expression. “There’s old Easingham’s cemetery—what’s left of it.”
He pointed down toward the cliffs, where a badly weathered stone wall formed part of a square whose sides would have been maybe fifty yards long in the old days. But in those days there’d also been a stubby promontory and a church. Now only one wall, running parallel with the path, stood complete—beyond which two-thirds of the churchyard had been claimed by the sea. Its occupants, too, I supposed.
“See that half-timbered shack,” said Garth, pointing, “at this end of the cemetery? That’s what’s left of Johnson’s Mill. Johnson’s sawmill, that is. That shack used to be Old Man Johnson’s office. A long line of Johnsons ran a couple of farms that enclosed all the fields round here right down to the cliffs. Pasture, mostly, with lots of fine animals grazing right here. But as the fields got eaten away and the buildings themselves started to be threatened, that’s when half the Johnsons moved out and the rest bought a big house in the village. They gave up farming and started the mill, working timber for the local building trade…
“Folks round here said it was a sin, all that noise of sawing and planing, right next door to a churchyard. But…it was Old Man Johnson’s land after all. Well, the sawmill business kept going till a time some seven years ago, when a really bad blow took a huge bite right out of the bay one night. The seaward wall of the graveyard went, and half of the timber yard, too, and that closed old Johnson down. He sold what machinery he had left, plus a few stacks of good oak that hadn’t suffered, and moved out lock, stock, and barrel. Just as well, for the very next spring his big house and two others close to the edge of the cliffs got taken. The sea gets ’em all in the end.
“Before then, though—at a time when just about everybody else was moving out of Easingham—Lily-Anne and me had moved in! As I told you, we got our bungalow for a song, and of course we picked ourselves a house standing we
ll back from the brink. We were getting on a bit; another twenty years or so should see us out; after that the sea could do its worst. But…well, it didn’t quite work out that way.”
While he talked, Garth had led the way down across the open fields to the graveyard wall. The breeze was blustery here and fluttered his words back into my face:
“So you see, within just a couple of years of our settling here, the village was derelict, and all that remained of people was us and a handful of Johnsons still working the mill. Then Lily-Anne came down with something and died, and I had her put down in the ground here in Easingham—so’s I’d be near her, you know?
“That’s where the coincidences start to come in, for she went only a couple of months after the shipwreck. Now I don’t suppose you’d remember that; it wasn’t much, just an old Portuguese freighter that foundered in a storm. Lifeboats took the crew off, and she’d already unloaded her cargo somewhere up the coast, so the incident didn’t create much of a to-do in the newspapers. But she’d carried a fair bit of hardwood ballast, that old ship, and balks of the stuff would keep drifting ashore: great long twelve-by-twelves of it. Of course, Old Man Johnson wasn’t one to miss out on a bit of good timber like that, not when it was being washed up right on his doorstep, so to speak…
“Anyway, when Lily-Anne died I made the proper arrangements, and I went down to see old Johnson who told me he’d make me a coffin out of this Haitian hardwood.”
“Haitian?” Maybe my voice showed something of my surprise.
“That’s right,” said Garth, more slowly. He looked at me wonderingly. “Anything wrong with that?”
I shrugged, shook my head. “Rather romantic, I thought,” I said. “Timber from a tropical isle.”