2

Everything smelled of country.

Dermot Biggs breathed deeply of the warm night air and was happy. He and Sally and their three children, Sarah, Robert and Finnegan, were all thoroughly enjoying their fortnight’s camping holiday. It was proving to be the success he’d hoped for but hadn’t really thought possible. The usual constant bickering between the kids had stopped and the slight sexual distance he’d felt from Sally in recent months had been bridged, not once but several times.

The weather in Yorkshire had been marvelous the whole time, the car hadn’t misbehaved at all, and to top it off the old farmer on whose property they were camping turned out to be the producer of a home-­made beer that was one of the best things Dermot had ever tasted, as well as having the kick of Kenny Dalg­lish. Every time Dermot visited the farm to pick up their daily supply of eggs and fresh milk he also came away with a quart of the old man’s brew.

He was carrying a quart of it now as he headed across the fields to the clump of trees beside the small river where they were camped. He was a pleasant old fellow for a farmer, Dermot reflected, though he did tend to ramble a bit at times. Like tonight when they’d been sitting in his kitchen sampling a couple of pints of a new batch. He’d been going on about something he’d heard on the radio—or wireless, as he called it—concerning some plague that was supposed to have broken out in London. Dermot couldn’t make head nor tail of what he said and guessed he was exaggerating wildly. Pity one of the kids had dropped and broken their own radio last week, but he was sure that whatever it was could wait until they got back—perish the thought—to Liverpool the next Monday.

Besides, who gave a damn about London? When did anyone in London last give a damn about what went on north of Watford? It was practically a separate country.

Dermot’s good mood persisted even when he stepped in some cow dung. He muttered, “Oh bugger,” to himself and then chuckled when he switched on his flashlight to confirm that he had indeed walked into the grandfather of all cow­pats. A fresh one too.

He wiped his right shoe on the grass to clean off the dung then continued to weave his tipsy way towards the camp site.

He didn’t know it, and wouldn’t have cared less if he did, but smears of excreta remained in the chunky patterns on the sole of his shoe. He also didn’t know that the smears contained spores from the coprophilous fungus living in the intestine of the cow that had produced the dung.

None of this would have mattered but for the fact that the field had received an invisible shower of microscopic fungus particles carried all the way from London by the prevailing winds. The particles had first been swept very high into the sky and would have continued on over the Irish Sea if a westerly cross current hadn’t caused them to be deposited onto this particular part of Yorkshire.

And as Dermot walked across the field a few of the particles were picked up by the smears of cow dung on his shoe. Each particle contained Jane Wilson’s still-­active enzyme, and when one of them came into contact with a coprophilous spore, something began to happen.

The lights were out in both the tents. Dermot had expected to find Sally still engrossed in her paperback—some epic fantasy about an adventurous leper or something. She and her silly sci-­fi books, but it was because she was so hooked on the damn thing that she didn’t mind him going off to get plastered with the old farmer.

He headed for the children’s tent and almost tripped over a tent rope. Regaining his balance he said “Shhhs!” to himself and then poked his head, unsteadily, into the tent. They were all fast asleep but he kept watching them for awhile longer to make sure. They were crafty little devils.

Satisfied that they weren’t faking he went to his own tent. Sally was asleep too so he undressed as quietly as he could. All went well until he tried to remove his trousers and tripped over. He flopped heavily onto Sally.

“Wa? Uh?” she said.

“It’s only me. Sorry, possum. I’m a bit sloshed.”

She muttered something he couldn’t decipher and unzippered the sleeping bag a part of the way to make room for him. He crawled in, with difficulty. She was naked and felt warm. There was the slight slickness to her body that fresh perspiration gives. It felt very good, and he began to get hard.

He caressed her smooth skin and she reacted swiftly with the responses of a sexually aroused but still half-­awake woman. They made love with all the pleasure of their early days together.

Later, as they slept, a thick, orange growth slowly formed outside the tent. It was looking for food, having already depleted the organic detritus in the soil.

It quickly detected the presence of a large supply of warm food nearby. Its thin hyphae, which would have been almost invisible in daylight, spread out over the ground toward the heat source. They moved swiftly, covering over 12 inches every minute. They entered the tent and spread across the grass towards the ground sheet and the end of the sleeping bag. During their love-­making Dermot and his wife had emerged from the bag and were now sleeping on top of it. The tips of the hyphae touched their damp feet and began to feed on the dead outer layer of the epidermis.

As they grew further up the sleeping couple’s legs the hyphae sensed a food that was more natural to the coprophilous fungus. They grew faster and were soon probing the warm crevices and orifices that were particularly moist and nourishing.

They entered Dermot and Sally almost simultaneously.

All the sleeping couple felt was a dim sense of increased warmth. They both relaxed into it, and their dreams were plea­sant. At one point Sally became half-­awake and stroked Dermot’s chest. His skin seemed to have a thick, furry texture to it but she knew that was only because of the strangeness that sleep gives to the senses. It felt wonderful, she decided, as she sank back into deep sleep again.

In the other tent the children were being similarly invaded by the fungus and entering into the same peaceful state of union with it. The mutating coprophilous was making the necessary changes to its hosts so that it could exist in a symbiotic relationship with them without causing their destruction.

When the Biggs family awoke the next morning and saw what they had become, there was no adverse reaction—some brief moments of bewilderment but that was all. Then they began their new life, no longer needful of tents, books or clothes. From now on the fungus would take care of all their wants.

They wandered out into the meadow and got down on all fours. The grass tasted especially good at this time of the year.