8

The Hastings Branch of the International Socialist League was called to order. It consisted of three people. Comrade Henderson was in the chair. Comrade Snell was taking minutes. And Comrade Blakey made up the rest of the branch. Under other circumstances the branch would have been bigger. But considering the particular and peculiar situation, three was a pretty good turn-­out.

“Comrades,” said Geoffrey Henderson, his shadow jumping about on the sandstone wall as the candle flickered. “We have a crisis.”

All three of them were well aware of the crisis but as usual Geoffrey was intent on going through the formalities. Sheena Blakey listened with only a fraction of her attention, partly because she knew what he was going to say and partly because she was wondering which one of her two Comrades was going to want to demonstrate his solidarity to her that night.

The previous night she’d been obliged to accommodate both of them. After arguing over whose turn it was with her they’d had a vote to suspend the normal rota system temporarily. Sheena had lost by two votes to one. She had a strong suspicion there’d be a similar vote tonight.

She was beginning to wish she’d never come down with them into the caves, but it had seemed a good idea at the time. At first, when the news of the fungus had reached Hastings, most people had seen it as a problem for London alone. Despite the warnings on TV and radio, and the local government’s attempts to take preparatory action, it seemed like one of those things that would simply go away or never affect Hastings. But then things changed.

She wasn’t quite sure when, but suddenly people began panicking. All but the most elderly or stubborn inhabitants tried to get out of town, with or without their belongings. But there was nowhere to go. It was the same everywhere. The people in the other towns and villages—nearby St. Leonards, Bexhill, Bulverhythe, and Crowhurst—were panicking too. There were fights, riots, and general chaos throughout the area.

Oh, some people tried to leave in fishing boats and anything else they could get their hands on, either paying the high prices the fishermen set or resorting to violence to hijack the craft. But it wasn’t long before the French navy put a stop to that. Word soon got back that the Frogs were sinking every boat that went beyond the three-­mile limit. And without even giving any of them a chance to turn back.

It was then that Geoff came up with his plan. It was blindingly simple. They would go and live in the caves.

Under the West Cliff were four caves, partly carved from the sandstone by prehistoric streams but mostly by man for commercial reasons; sand for glass and holes for tourists.

No sand had been removed for glass-­making for over a hundred years, and there were certainly no tourists around at the moment, so Geoff’s scheme was for the Hastings Branch of the ISL to retreat into the caves with plenty of supplies and wait there until the fungus problem was over. He thought of it as a scourge sent to scour Britain clean of Toryism. After it had done that it would, like the Biblical flood, disappear and the ISL would surface to take charge of the new world.

In the event only two members of the ISL had been smart enough to follow Geoff into the caves. The other four had decided to take their chances above ground. Smart? Sheena was having her doubts if that was the right word. Perhaps the other four were the smart ones.

Before retreating underground they had, on Geoff’s orders, broken into a supermarket and taken lots of canned food, candles, and dozens of bottles of spring water. They’d also broken into a camping store and stolen sleeping bags, a kerosene stove, and some gas lamps.

At the caves they made some effort to barricade the entrance, then settled down to life below the surface. For the first few days Sheena found it fun. A bit of an adventure. But then boredom quickly set in. They couldn’t get a peep out of the radio they’d brought with them, and the books that Geoff had insisted on selecting on their behalf were either by or about Karl Marx.

Not that much reading would have been possible even if she had had a more appetising range of books; the electric lights had gone out by the end of the first week and then they’d used up all the gas for the lamps. Now they were reduced to the dim light of the candles, and their supply of those was fast dwindling too.

Geoff and Horace kept themselves occupied by discussing Marxist theory and taking turns in her sleeping bag. At first so much sex had been a mild novelty for her but the novelty had soon palled and now she was fed up with being continually screwed by two incompetents. Her big hope was that they’d get bored with heterosexual sex and start screwing each other.

However she couldn’t deny that Geoff’s idea had worked. They made regular checks of the caves but there was no evidence of any fungus. Geoff had reasoned that the fungus wouldn’t “bother”—he almost endowed it with sentience when he spoke about it—to go underground. Nothing to eat and too cold for it, he insisted. It probably didn’t like sandstone, Sheena decided. She didn’t like it much herself.

But now the crisis had arisen. They were running short of water as well as candles. They had planned to drink the water from the cave’s public toilets, but an investigation had shown that the water now entering the cisterns was a very strange color. The bottled water they had left would last three people only a couple of more days. They had no option but to make a journey to the surface.

The meeting had been called to decide who should go. Sheena knew it wouldn’t be Geoff. Most likely it would be her, but if Geoff decided he didn’t want to risk losing the only woman in the group then Horace would be the unlucky one. Poor Horace. Horace Snell. What a name for a 25-­year-­old Marxist revolutionary. But it suited him. He was a Horace.

Sheena’s main worry was that Geoff might miss arguing Marxist theory with Horace more than he’d miss sex with her. After all, the former occupied him for hours at a time while the latter took him two minutes, at best. Prerevolutionary ejaculation, she called it—although not to his face.

It was time to vote.

The result was as she feared. She lost two to one.

They both stared at her expectantly. “Well, off you go, Sheena,” said Geoff. “If you go now you can be back by nightfall.”

She came to a decision. “Up yours, Geoff,” she said calmly. “I’m not going anywhere.”

They both looked profoundly shocked. “But we’ve had a vote,” protested Horace. “You have to go.”

“I’m not going and you can’t make me so that’s that.”

They tried to argue with her for several minutes but all she did was shake her head and repeat that she wasn’t going anywhere.

Finally Geoff said to her sorrowfully, “I’m very, very disappointed in you, Sheena. You’re not just letting us down, you’re letting down the whole of the International Socialist League.”

“Screw the International Socialist League. I’ve decided to become an anarchist.”

Geoff stiffened. He said sternly, “Sheena, you leave me no choice but to expel you from the Hastings Branch of the League. Take your things and leave immediately.”

“Expel until you’re blue in the face, Geoff. I’m not leaving the cave.”

He sighed and turned to Snell. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go instead, Horace.”

“Me?” It was almost a yelp.

“Well, I certainly can’t go. As League coordinator for the entire Hastings area I’m far too important to the Cause to be put at risk.”

Snell obviously wanted to discuss this further. Indeed he looked as if he would like to have discussed it at great length, but instead he reluctantly got to his feet, picked up one of the remaining candle stubs, and made his way slowly out of the cave. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he told them, hopefully.

He was some way from the entrance to the caves when the candle went out. He couldn’t see a thing but he was confident he knew where he was. Just before the light had gone he’d seen the big fissure where the tiny ends of beech tree roots had found their way some sixty feet underground.

He walked on, hand brushing lightly against the slightly crumbly cave wall. Suddenly something touched his face—something wet and cold. Slimy. He reached up to brush it away.

The next thing he knew his wrist had been seized in some kind of loop that tightened painfully and, at the same time, started to pull his hand up toward the ceiling.

With a panicky yell he grabbed at the thing with his other hand with the aim of wrenching himself free. He found himself holding something the thickness of a strand of macaroni. A snake, he wondered as he pulled on it as hard as he could. But whatever it was didn’t give way. Instead he continued to be hauled inexorably upward.

He screamed as he felt another loop tighten around the bicep of his other arm. A third loop snaked around his right forearm.

Screaming and kicking, he was pulled upward until he could no longer touch the ground with his feet.

He screamed even louder as something sharp began to bore itself into the side of his stomach. After that came an explosion of intolerable agony.

A short time later he was dead.

In the bottom cave Geoff and Sheena heard his screams. When they’d started Geoff had looked fearfully at Sheena and said, “Jesus, Sheen, you’d better go see what’s happening . . .”

“Me. No way. You go. You’re the man.”

“That’s a pretty reactionary, not to mention sexist, thing to say!”

She simply shrugged.

The screams changed pitch. It no longer sounded like Horace, but some animal being burnt alive.

“Look, how about we both go?” cried Geoff, his eyes bulging with alarm.

She thought it over and nodded. “But only if you take the lead,” she said firmly.

The screaming had ceased by the time they started to move. They progressed warily through the series of caves, Geoff stopping several times when his flickering candle produced menacing, shadowy shapes ahead of them. He was holding the nearest thing to a weapon they had—a small axe. Sheena stayed well behind him despite his requests for her to close the gap between them.

Finally they reached Horace.

He dangled from the ceiling of the cave where it was split by the fissure. He was held in a network of glistening white strands that reminded Sheena of thick spaghetti or macaroni. Several of them had formed tight loops around his body. Others appeared to be growing into it.

He was almost unrecognizable. He was grotesquely bloated as if he’d been pumped up with air. His thin face had gone perfectly round and his fingers were like bunches of white carrots.

“Jesus, what are those things?” gasped Geoff, moving closer. “What happened to him?”

Sheena looked up and saw that the “spaghetti” extended down from the ends of the beech tree roots. “Don’t go near him,” she warned Geoff.

“Shit, we can’t leave him hanging there like that. I’m going to cut him down.” He walked up to Horace’s suspended body and raised the axe.

“Geoff!” she yelled.

But it was too late. The white strands, which had been perfectly motionless, suddenly sprang into life as Geoff neared them. Before he could react a white loop had appeared round his hand holding the axe. He tried to jerk free but other loops snared his left arm.

“Sheena, help me!”

But she could only stand there and watch as the white strands wrapped themselves around him in increasing numbers, their loops constricting his limbs.

She didn’t know it but she was watching a mutated form of arthrobotrys oligospora in action. One of the carnivorous fungi, it had been previously restricted to microscopic size in the soil where it fed on small worms called nematodes. It trapped the worms within the ringed snares strung along its adhesive network of hyphae and then used a penetration knob to enter their bodies, pump toxin into them, and spread out a cluster of special feeding hyphae that grew out along the length of the worms’ bodies. These hyphae would liquefy the worms’ tissues and absorb the digested food until only the skins remained.

This is what had happened to Horace Snell, and was in the process of happening to Geoffrey Henderson . . .

The mutated arthrobotrys oligospora penetrated his writhing body in several places with the sharp pegs on the ends of its hyphae and then began to inject a toxin to incapacitate him. As the toxin was pure ammonia Geoff’s discomfort was acute.

Sheena waited until Geoff was silent and his body had begun to swell. Then she turned and headed back toward the end cave.

Once there she stretched out on her sleeping bag and put her hands behind her head. “Peace at last,” she murmured.