“How much farther? Where are we going?” Mary asked, her voice flat and dull.
“Not much farther,” I told her, heartsick at how every step seemed to make her more distant, even though we walked shoulder-to-shoulder. “We’re going somewhere we can be safe.” As safe as we could be anywhere, at least.
The fungi on my body had come alive the farther down we traveled. They pulled at my coat, they curled across my chest. They knew they were home. They wanted to return, but I wouldn’t let them. If they returned, I would never leave.
At the same time, I could hear Mary next to me, her every sound magnified by my heightened senses. Her breath, the nervous movement of her hands, the tread of her shoes.
“I don’t know why this is necessary,” she said at one point, the fear gnawing at her face in the green light.
“We have to,” I said. “If we’d stayed aboveground, we might be dead by now.” The dim dumb hum and throb of explosives somewhere over our heads punctuated my point. The emptiness of the tunnel just confirmed it.
And yet we were not alone. Mary just couldn’t see them, floating in the air around us, as oblivious to us as Mary was to them, conforming to their own rituals and needs. I still didn’t know what they were, nor could I even describe the shape of them. Perhaps they were red-tinged megaspores, diaphanous, translucent. Perhaps they were some other organism altogether. I’d learned long ago not to wince when I walked through one.
“You trust me, don’t you?” I asked her while all around us the tendrils swayed, and the green was not one green but a thousand shades of it, and the intensity of the voices in my ears made me want to shout to be heard, although I knew no one could hear them but me. The blind voices of the fungi, calling out. So beautiful. So unbearable.
“I don’t know if this is about trust,” she replied. “This isn’t real, Duncan. I don’t accept that this is real. You’ve fed me a pill. I’m having visions.” It was odd to see her, usually so strong, so weak when out of her element.
I ignored her. The fungi were like pale hands beneath our tread. I had to carry her for a while. “We’re almost there,” I said.
“Almost where?” she asked, trembling in my arms. “Almost dead?”
What can I tell you about our escape to the Truffidian Cathedral? What, I wonder, will put it all in the proper perspective? I hardly know where to begin, but, then, that’s not unusual. There’s no balance between measured prose and raw experience that does not end in mediocrity or a slow burn into oblivion.
It happened like this: Sybel and I left the shelter of the roof and began to make our way through back streets and alleys to the Truffidian Cathedral. It was the only landmark I could think of that might be safe.
“What if the cathedral’s been overrun?” Sybel asked.
“Then we go somewhere else,” I said. “But we have to try.”
Sybel knew as well as I did that we couldn’t sit still—we couldn’t stay on that roof and wonder what might be coming over the ledge next.
The world we found ourselves in was silent. In some places the lamps were on, and in others they were not. Where they were on, they illuminated everything in purples or greens. The purple and the green both came from spores. The spores were heavy in the air; so as not to breathe them, we tore strips from our clothing and put them over our mouths and noses.
Was it effective? I’m still alive today, but at the time I could not get over the uncomfortable feeling that I was breathing in thousands of tiny lives, that I was one step away from becoming Duncan.
I said that the world was silent. Do you understand what I mean by that? I mean that there was no sound anywhere in the city. The spores clotted the air, muffled noises, sucked the sound out of the world. We lived in silence. It was like a Presence, and it was watchful. As we sidled along a wall, keeping to the shadows for long moments, I felt that each spore was a tiny eye, and that each eye was reporting back to an unseen master. A heaviness grew in my lungs that I’ve never felt since. The air was trying to suck words as yet unspoken out of me, and snuff them, stillborn.
Silence and haze. The purple and green of the spores made the air heavy, made it hard to see more than two feet in front of us. It was a kind of fog, through which we could just make out the distant flames that signified the destruction of the Kalif’s army.
But I don’t mean to suggest that this silent haze was empty. It wasn’t. As we picked our way through streets turned foreign, unrecognizable, hints of movement suggested themselves, almost out of view, always on the periphery. We did not turn to look at whatever walked there, for fear this would make it too real. That which watched there ignored us, went on past—saving energy for other, more important missions, no doubt. But this made it no less frightening.
Nor did it blunt the effect of the human catastrophe that came out of the haze and lingered for far too long in our vision. Some lampposts played host to bodies swinging from ropes, heads lolling, tongues distended, skin pulled back in caricatures of smiles. Other bodies crowded the street, stumbled over in the dark. Pieces of people that appeared to be carefully cut apart, not the victims of mortar fire, but in precise stacks: legs, arms, torsos. The moon overhead like the knuckle of a fist pressed against a dirty window.
And always the motion, so unnerving that at one point I fired into the dark, screamed into the shadows, “Come out! Come out, you bastards!”
Sybel didn’t even try to stop me. He just stared ahead and kept walking. His gaze was haunted, his face vacant. Not all fears are the same. I met mine on the roof; Sybel met his on the streets.
We reached the outskirts of the Religious Quarter by taking two steps forward, a step sideways, a step back, two forward, always almost seeing the vague delineation of ghosts, flitting and circling.
The Religious Quarter rose out of the mire of night as an outline of domes and steeples, highlighted by the flames that lay miles behind them. In that light, it looked unearthly, bizarre, not of Ambergris. Still, we entered it, in the hopes that that way lay safety. We allowed ourselves to come under the influence of those spires, those outcroppings of alcoves, all silent, all dead, not a priest in sight. {Probably cowering in their basements for all the good it would do them.}
We were on a street called Bannerville. I remember that. The streetlamps there were bare of the terrible burden of death. Some of them worked. Glowed green. At the end of Bannerville, we’d turn to the right and we’d be a block away from the Truffidian Cathedral.