Light in the Dark

By sacredlilac

"I don't knows why you insists on growing that way. It doesn't helps either of us, you know." Parlay ran a knobbly finger over the top seam between the door and wall, where the fungi had reached down in the night to bind the wood shut. He creased his brow at the pale brown threads of new growth which contrasted sharply with the midnight blue wash he'd applied over the ceiling.

"You know I hate cutting you, House, but I've got to get out. I'm too dang old to climb outta the window, anymore. I barely opens the windows, anyways. Why don't you ever seals them shut?"

His eyes traced the wooden doorframe that the mushroom wall had been trained to grow around. He'd spent the better part of a week getting the curve on the two pieces of wood that met in the middle to perfectly echo the shape of the night lily. He was glad that he'd be long dead before the wood was consumed.

He gave his version of a chuckle. Maybe if he'd made it a mushroom cap his house would stop trying to close him inside.

"This hurts me more than it hurts you, I thinks." Parlay glanced around the room, skipping his gaze from one softly glowing sconce to the next. He'd arrayed them across the walls in a triangle of his favourite constellations: Castor, Pollux and Orion.

He would swear on the Sacred Luna that the mushroom house responded to him in its own way. Like how it randomly grew over the door. Whatever happened, whatever was said, the mycelium network united each individual mushroom into one large organism that meant near-instantaneous communication throughout the structure.

He addressed the sconces full of phosphoshrooms. "None 'o you better be upset when I brings in something better, neither. You knows my eyes been getting weaker an' weaker every year. But I'll make sure to gets you somewhere good."

He caressed the wall gently. "You all been so good to me all these years. Don't none o' you have to worry about me abandonings you or lettings someone else get their grubby fingers on you. I grews you all from a little spore.' Parlay sniffed and stroked the bumpy surface again. "You's the children I ain't never had. And when I dies, you cans have all o' me. I'll lays down right here, and you cans grow all over me and have me forever."

A tickle started deep in his throat. Parlay gripped the door jamb to keep himself upright as it turned into a hacking cough. He cleared his throat again and again, pushing the glob of phlegm his lungs had forced out higher and higher. Sweat beaded his brow. He shakily pushed himself to standing and spat it across the room into the recess he'd carved for just that purpose.

He gasped in a breath. "I'll probably be dead sooner than later from all the damn smoke in the air anyway." He wiped his forehead and started on his familiar diatribe as he made his preparations to go outside, tightening knots on his clothes and foraging bag against the wind and fixing his mask to his face.

"Why'd Great-Grandpappy decides to stay on this side of the godforsaken planet anyway? All these years after the war, the sun still barely gets through the clouds. Can't takes a deep breath outside without a proper mask or you ends up dead real quick. What a great place to stay and raise a family!"

Parlay sighed and his eyes strayed to the dark brown lines that were all that remained to mark the original wooden bones of the structure. They were slightly blurred at the edges since the wood had almost been completely consumed over the near-century since his Great-Grandpappy had originally started this home. The fungi didn't need the wood anymore to cling to. They held each other up.

With mortality rates still skyhigh from Black Lung all those years ago, his great-grandpappy had started mushroom houses for each one of his children as well as ones for the grandchildren he knew he'd probably never see.

Could Great-Grandpappy have guessed the houses would survive for his great-grandchildren to live in? Did he have any idea the fungi acted as a kind of air filter, or was it just the scientist in him that made him build the structures as a kind of experiment? Perhaps he was just tired of hunkering down in some dingy cave and wanted soil under his feet again.

He'd never say it for fear of offending his house, but he wished Great-Grandpappy would have engineered them to grow a more pleasing dark colour than their original tan.

Parlay'd long ago accepted he'd never know, but it gave him endless mental-cud to chew on while he tended his own mushroom fields and carried out his own experiments.

Great-Grandpappy had changed life for everyone on this side of the planet when he'd gotten the first fungi house made. He didn't begrudge the few people he'd caught snooping around his house, examining how it was made. He'd even answer a question or two if they caught him on a good day.

But Great-Grandpappy had made sure people didn't trying taking the houses for themselves though. He'd staked intruder's head's on pikes all around their place as warning.

Those were the lucky ones.

All these years later, the few people Parlay ran into still gave him a wide berth due to the stories he knew for a fact were true about how Great-Grandpappy bound people and shut them, alive, into wall crevices until they died, so he could see how the fungi would use the food.

Parlay didn't have one of those houses, but his sister, Preti, did. The ghosties never bothered her, but Parlay couldn't stand the screaming.

"Hey House, mebbe I should stop at Preti's on the way to tend your little brothers and sisters. Been a long time since I visited anyone, and I'd better make sure my last sister is still alive and kickin'or if she's become shroom food. So's come on, let's gets you lifted up, House. I needs to get out."

As he talked, Parlay slid his long, dirty thumbnail under the threads across the top of the door. The majority gave way easily, allowing him to carefully fold them back into the tangled mass of the wall. A few stubborn tendrils would've give though. He winced and apologised when he had to slice through them.

"Oh, now, House, I gots to get out to tend to your brethren. It pains me to hurt you. If this tweren't so important, I'd stay with you. But yer brothers and sisters are all growed up now. I wants to be bringing one of them home today to meet you. It's time to bring the experimenting home."

Checking his mask was securely over his face, Parlay opened the door and shuffled outside as quickly as he was able. He collected his oak staff from beside the door and turned to face the world.

He eyeballed the swirling yellow air, thick with blowing sand, that by nightfall would surely have him in fits of coughing so bad he might retch. It was the kind of day he'd normally turn around and go back inside.

The wind immediately lifted his foraging bag and long cloak, pulling his body forward. Walking would be difficult, but not impossible. "It be a bad day for flyin' around. Birdies'll all be snug in their nests."

He glanced back at the door, but the urge to go see the mushrooms rose up in him so strongly he knew it must be inspired by the Sacred. There was no sheltering indoors for him today.

Parlay grunted and tapped the wall, coated black with over a century of pollution and smoke, gently with his stick. 'Methinks you were telling me this ain't a good day to go trekking. I bets the storm'll be blowed out in an hour, though. Sees you soon, House. I'll be back before you knows it. Don't go sealing the door to keeps me out. Okay, House?"

He could never be sure, but he thought the dim fungi in the window sconces flickered brightly for just a second. Aye, he'd put money on any bet before Luna that his house communicated with him.

Branches of the shade-loving trees and twisted, spiny bushes that somehow managed to grow in the near-constant twilight conditions pulled at his clothing as he struggled up and down the hills following a faint animal trail towards the grove where his newest children grew.

Normally he'd have transplanted them closer to home, but he'd never seen this species of fungi before and needed to observe them. What conditions had brought about this particular mutation? Were they conditions that could be replicated, or some random combination Luna would keep to herself?

He chuckled and lowered his mask to hawk up and spit out a gob of phlegm. "Guess Great-Grandpappy's genes are still running strong in us."

His sister Preti had quite the hand at cross-breeding species successfully. She'd only showed him because he'd stumbled across her experiments by accident when he'd opened the door to a shed she'd grown attached to the back of her house when he'd stopped by for a rare visit, but she wasn't home.

When she didn't answer the front door, and peeking in her windows showed the place empty, he'd gone around back looking for her...and was faced with a door he didn't know existed. Only one thing to do when faced with such a door.

Preti had been right mad, too. Her eyes got all wild and, for a moment, he was worried she'd shut him up in the wall like Great-Grandpappy.

She hadn't made anything different than he had already, but she did have a few new techniques that he gleaned from her notes before she'd interrupted him - more like near killed him when she'd hit him over the head with her walking stick.

The next time he snuck by when she wasn't home, she'd somehow managed to train a poisoning ivy over the door. Her secrets weren't worth tangling with that. How she'd managed to get it to grow without offing herself was a mystery all in one he'd like to solve.

As a boy, he'd once come across someone who'd fallen into a poisoning ivy. The vines had wrapped around the woman tightly. Pus-filled bubbles swelled up wherever it had touched her flesh. Her face hadn't been marked, though. The grimace of pain and horror frozen there made him feel squeamish.

Grandpappy had surmised the acidic secretions in the leaves were probably born from the pollution in the air. It would slowly liquefy the flesh, allowing the nutrition to be absorbed.

From the fern flowers and foraged food strewn near the woman's fallen basket, Parlay guessed she hadn't noticed the poisoning ivy among the large, leafy ferns and dropped the container when the vines grabbed her.

"Waste nothing!" his mother was always saying. So, he'd collected everything, eating his fill before taking the remains home.

Not able to get through Preti's poisoning ivy trap, he'd looked through the windows, but couldn't see a door inside leading to the shed either. How was she getting in and out of the room? She'd devised a way to bar the main door, and he was years out from being able to climb in windows, so there was no way he'd gain entry to investigate without her there, although she seldom let him in even when she was.

The thing about Preti was her obsession with keeping notes. That's what kept him checking in on her. One day he'd find her dead, and then he could finally figure out how she was getting in and out of that room and what was so important to keep him out of it - and how she'd trained that damn plant.

Probably some kind of affinity since her name meant 'ivy' in old Lunar.

"Please, help me!" The weak call made Parlay halt.

The nearest person to him - Preti - lived miles away, and besides, this voice belonged to a man.

None of the other settlers ever came round his part. Too scared of the old stories and Parlay's threats to anyone he saw. When he was younger and felt the need, he knew where to go to get company. Otherwise, everybody just left everybody alone to do their own thing, as it should be.

"Help!" came the call again.

Parlay squinted through the gloom. As he'd predicted, the wind had died down, so he could pinpoint where the sound came from. It was easy to see off to the side a clear trail where someone had trampled the grasses and snapped off branches in their haste to pass.

Rounding a thicket of pawpaw trees, he knew it wasn't haste. It was stupidity.

The face of a youngish man, too clean and tanned to be from this side of the planet, was floating on the surface of a quickiesand pool. His panicked eyes seized on Parlay. "Help!" the man cried out.

"A Solie!" Parlay exclaimed. "It's been nigh on thirty years since I've seens one of your kind on our side o' the planet. What you wants? You already gots the best o' what we have." He prodded the ground around him with his staff to find out where the danger started.

"Please! I don't want to die!" the man sobbed.

"Tells me why you are here, then." Parlay's heart raced at the thought someone had seen his new mushrooms. They were something the Solarpunk side of the planet would be interested in, along with his own. He cursed himself for not just transplanting the crop, but he'd wanted to figure out if there was something special about that soil first. When the man didn't respond, Parlay shook his staff and shouted, "Tells me!"

"I was running away! My parents wanted me to get married, and I didn't want to. So, I ran. I decided to fly through the LunarPunk half to get to a different part of the SolarPunk settlement before contacting them." The man gasped, more from the poor air quality than his predicament.

The movement made the man sink a little more, and his eyes widened in fear. He had mere minutes before his whole face would be submerged. "The wind was too much for my craft. I had to set down and wait out the storm. I just wanted to look around a bit first. I've never been allowed to explore anywhere over here."

Parlay's throat closed. He looked to where his children grew a mere kilometre away. The mask was suffocating him. He clawed it off his face in order to breath. "Where dids you land?"

The man moved his head infinitesimally and sank a bit more. "Please," he pleaded.

"Was it over there?" Parlay shouted angrily and thrust his finger towards the grove.

The man wheeled his eyes in the opposite direction. "That way. Please, I don't want to die like this."

Parlay grunted. "There are far worse ways on this planet-side. You're lucky it was the quickiesand. Can you flies your ship home?"

"Yes," the man replied. Fat tears fell from his eyes. They rolled down the few millimetres it took to reach the deceptively-solid surface and sat for a second before melting away.

Parlay sucked on his gums, making a snick noise. "I throws you a vine, you don't go following me. You finds your way back to your own kind."

One thing they had a lot of was chokevine. It wasn't dangerous and covered the ground everywhere. Among its many uses, it was good for eating which meant no one had to go far to forage for food.

Its roots were also very, very strong.

"I'm sorry about this, chokie, but this here fool needs your help." Parlay found the nearest root stem and followed the vine out a foot before pulling up hard. With a popping sound, the tendrils released the ground they'd been gripping spraying the air with a scattering of decaying leaves, moss, and mushrooms.

With a practiced hand, Parlay tossed the vine out to the man. "You grips that and pulls yourself out. Then you gets out of here. Go back home."

He frowned at the man's bare face. If the quicksand hadn't gotten him, the poor air quality sure would have soon.

Years later he would still ask himself why he'd done what he'd done.

He dug into his bag and pulled out the spare mask he kept for when a storm brewed up while he was out and he needed the extra coverage.

He lay it on the ground and pointed. "You puts that on when you gets out. Cain't survive here without a mask."

The man's hand popped above the surface and gripped the vine.

Parlay turned and started to walk away as quickly as his crooked legs allowed.

"Wait!" the man called.

Over his shoulder Parlay called back, "No! Gets gone and don't follows me!"

It took him a good half hour to reach the grove. By the time he arrived, he was limping heavily. His heaving breath had drenched the inside of his mask with moisture. He regretted giving the man his extra one.

He stopped and put his hands on his knees for a moment before carefully lowering himself to the ground and elbowing through the small break in the hedge made by some animal that must have nested here.

Relief flooded him to see the same glow at the end of the short tunnel of branches that had encouraged him on when he first chased a toad in for his supper pot weeks ago. It got brighter and brighter the farther he wiggled through.

"Oh, my sweet babies," he cheered when he saw the tiny patch of mushrooms clustered together in the middle of the circle. They glowed brighter than any phosphoshrooms he'd ever seen. So bright that just one of them would light up his whole one-room house. He'd never be left squinting in the dim again.

He smiled up at the thick hedge that kept their light contained. "Sacred Luna, thank you for leading an old man to your earthen bounty."

He reached for his staff to help him stand up. "My stick!" He twisted back the way he came. From the darkness, his stick emerged, apparently having followed him of its own accord to give him a sharp poke in the thigh.

"Ow!!!"

"I brought you your stick," came the stranger's voice.

"What??!! I tolds you to leave. Ow! Be careful!" The stick poked him again, uncomfortably close to his nether regions.

Parlay grunted as he pulled himself into the tiny space, curling his legs forward out of the tunnel. He winced as his joints protested over the need to move in ways he hadn't needed to in years, but he couldn't risk the mushrooms.

"Hey, scooch out, I'm coming in. What's that light? You got a big bunch of phosphoshrooms in there, old man?" The stick jiggled and moved a half foot into the circle.

Parlay screamed, "No! No! You can't! Gets away! Why didn't you just goes like I said!"

He grabbed at the stick and pulled. If he could get it, he could clobber the man as soon as his head appeared. For a second, he thought he would win, but the man at the other end wrestled it back with a sharp yank.

"No!" Parlay cried out in despair when the staff disappeared back into the tunnel.

He wiggled to get himself into a position where he could kick the man. He grabbed at the hedge to hoist himself upright, but the branches were too small to hold his weight and broke.

"Gah!" he cried out as a sharp pain lanced through his hip when he fell back to the earth.

"Oh, sweet, sacred Sol! What glorious kind of light giving device have you led me to?"

"No..." Defeat pierced Parlay's voice more deeply than the pain radiating from his bones as he watched the stranger's sandy head emerge from the tunnel. His eyes opened in wonder.

"It's no device, you idiot. Can't you sees they're fungi?" There was no point hiding anything now. "Careful! You'll crushes them, you oaf!"

The man had narrowly missed smashing the whole lot when his elbow slipped from under him as he pulled his sand-covered shoulders out of the tunnel into the tiny clearing, leaving his legs down the tunnel. The stranger craned his neck to look up and around at the almost perfect circle the hedge formed.

"How did you find this place? How did these hedges grow like this? And these mushrooms! What light!" With a gentle finger, the stranger reached out and stroked the nearest glowing cap. "Everyone will go mad for these."

"No! They're mine, Solie! I founds them! Ahhh!" Parlay gasped and grabbed at his hip when his body swayed forward when he leaned to push the man's hand off.

"Yours?" The man cocked his head to the side as he regarded Parlay for several long seconds. The confusion was slow and surely pushed out by steely anger that made Parlay flinch. He repeated in accusation, "Yours?"

The man's lip curled back in a sneer. "You would keep this for yourself? This is the most important discovery our entire planet has had in centuries, one of these could light up an entire room instead of needing numerous phosphoshrooms or bioluminscent plants, and you would keep this to yourself?"

Parlay flinched from the acid the man's voice spat at him.

How could Parlay explain that it wasn't that he didn't care about other people, he had rescued this stranger from the quickiesand after all, but that he didn't care about people at the same time? He liked it when people just kept themselves to themselves and let others get on with living instead of getting mixed up in each other's lives.

As the thoughts swirled in his mind, Parlay kept his eyes on the small branches that littered the ground from where he'd accidentally broken them off. He was no match for this much younger man, and the secret was out now. If there was only some way to kill the man before he told anyone else...

His head snapped up a sudden change in the light. Only one mushroom remained in the circle and five stems!

He turned to the tunnel in time to see the man's cupped hand, covered by a shockingly white handkerchief that had the five mushroom caps carefully laid atop it, disappearing down into the foliage.

"I'll leave your stick outside for you," the man's voice sounded muffled by the narrow space he was in.

Parlay gently probed his hip joint and moved it to test the mobility. Badly bruised, but not broken at least.

If it was broken, he'd probably have to eat his house until it healed enough for him to limp around - if he could have gotten home by himself, that was. He sighed and thanked the sacred Luna. He wasn't a dead man walking, or even a dead man crawling. He snorted at his own jest.

Maybe one of the other Lunar's would wander by and condescend to give him a hand home.

From outside the hedge the stranger called, "Good luck, old man. And thank you again for saving my life! The whole planet will be in your debt!"

"In my debt! Ha! Better just to be left alone." Parlay groaned deeply when he moved slightly. "Better to just rely on yourself," he muttered and began the painful, laborious process of getting himself turned around to the tunnel, careful of his remaining mushroom.