BECCA LEADS ME through what feels like an endless sequence of corridors before we find the room she’s looking for. The smell reaches me first. Decay and rot, but not the unpleasant, sour stink of putrefying flesh. It’s earthy. Wood and leaves collapsing into soil; wet, dark places traced over with the delicate script of beetle tracks and lacy roots. The smell does not belong to these walls, but it seeps from behind a door like any other. The door hangs open a crack. Something has been stuffed into the frame to keep it from closing.
“Good,” Becca whispers. She braces the fingertips of one hand against the door. “The house tries to shut it. Move it. When it can. I try to keep track of it.” She pushes the door open lightly. It swings inward with a not-quite silence like a bow settling against the strings of a violin. The body lies in the middle of the floor.
I met Zachary once, and I have looked at his picture a hundred times and more, but still I wouldn’t recognize him if I didn’t know he died here. All that is left of his face is one eye, a bare inch of cheekbone, a stretch of brow I could cover with one cupped hand. The rest is covered in roots, thin milk-white things that weave a net over him. A quintet of bell-capped mushrooms grow elegantly from the roof of his mouth. Thick, flat plates of fungus sprout in layers like ridges down his neck, shoulder, ribs. His torso is a constellation of tiny white mushrooms, flecked here and there at the extremities—hips, collarbone— but clustering closer and closer together, framing the wound that lays him open above the navel.
From the body, the roots and fungi spread and splay, spilling to the walls, up them. A chandelier of gilled mushrooms and twining stalks hangs above us—off-white, bone-white, shot through with veins of scarlet and blue.
You would think my shock would be used up by now, but I stand with my knuckles crushing my lips to my teeth, holding back a moan. “How long?” I ask. I feel like I am dredging my voice up my throat. “How long has he been—”
“Dead?” she asks. “A while. It was early. I don’t think we were in here more than a day or two. She said that it was the spider. It killed him. But . . .”
“Who?” I ask. “Who else was here?”
“Grace,” she says. She worries at her bottom lip with her teeth. “We met her here, in the house. She was the last survivor in her group. She couldn’t get out of the mansion on her own. The only exit is through the darkness. She said she’d help us, but then . . .”
She steps across the floor. Practiced steps on the tips of her toes, picking her way between the roots. She bends at the waist, hair falling in front of her face. One fingertip touches the belled cap of a mushroom, and the net of roots seizes, a ripple of movement that turns into a rustle that turns into a whisper, emanating from the fungal growths themselves.
When it fades, I find my teeth clenched, anger in me like a lash of thorns. I take out my phone. I’ve kept it off. No point draining the battery. Now I turn it on as Becca watches me, head cocked.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“Recording it. So there’s proof,” I say.
“Proof?” She makes an odd gesture, her hand turning over, thumb pressing to middle finger. “For—for when we get back.”
“Exactly,” I say.
“You think we’re going to get back,” she says. Like she hasn’t considered it. Not really.
“Of course,” I say. “That’s why we came. To find you. And get home. Don’t you—you were talking about getting out. I thought . . .”
“Out of this house,” she says. “I don’t know. I guess I haven’t thought about what comes after that for a long time. It’s easier not to. Safer. And all of that . . . Home? The world we came from? It feels less real than this place. It was easier, knowing that I would always be here.”
“But if you were always going to be stuck here, why stay alive?” I ask. “Why survive so long?”
She laughs. Quiet, like everything she does now, a flat spiral of sound. “Because I wanted to outlive that bitch,” she says, and that hard glint in her eye is the first I’ve really seen of my sister since I found her. “Make the recording. People should know. Whatever happens.”