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The mushroom’s gills were the deep-red color of severed muscle, the almost-violet shade that contrasts so dreadfully with the pale pink of viscera. I had seen it any number of times in dead deer and dying soldiers, but it startled me to see it here.
It was not a promising sight. It was an old gloomy manor house in the old gloomy style, a stone monstrosity that the richest man in Europe would be hard-pressed to keep up.
“Professionally, I am an illustrator,” she said crisply. “But the study of fungi has intrigued me all my life.”
So many unusual forms! I have found boletes that previously were unknown outside of Italy, and one Amanita that appears to be entirely new.
am delighted by obscure passions, no matter how unusual.
lesser spirit might have been embarrassed to have blurted her passions aloud in such a fashion, but clearly Miss Potter was beyond such weaknesses—or perhaps she simply assumed that anyone would recognize the importance of leaving one’s mark in the annals of mycology.
It’s cold and poor and if you don’t die from falling in a hole or starving to death, a wolf eats you.
“You know how bad news grows in villages. Sneeze at noon and by sundown the gravedigger will be taking your measurements.”
(Look, if you don’t make a fool of yourself over animals, at least in private, you aren’t to be trusted. That was one of my father’s maxims, and it’s never failed me yet.)
Ground like that saved my life multiple times in the war, but I am still not fond of it. It always seems to be hiding things.
Very few ancient crypts have plump shepherdesses and gamboling sheep on the walls. I consider this an oversight.
am never sure what to think of Americans. Their brashness can be charming, but just when I decide that I rather like them, I meet one that I wish would go back to America, and then perhaps keep going off the far edge, into the sea.)
I offered Denton my hand, because Americans will shake hands with the table if you don’t stop them.
In some ways, it is rather refreshing to be treated in the same way as a fungus,
I did not know how to deal with this sort of death, the one that comes slow and inevitable and does not let go. I am a soldier, I deal in cannonballs and rifle shots.
They ask questions, but what they really want to know is what’s in your pants and, by extension, who’s in your bed.
Sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is insulting or just an American.
I’d been tired of it a decade ago. Now I’d moved to some other state entirely. Transcendent exhaustion, perhaps. Which
I’m good with a bonesaw and I’ll pour brandy down your throat and over your stump, but disorders of the nerves are beyond me.”
Catalepsy. Anemia. “You should leave here,” I said abruptly. “This place can’t be healthy.
“Well, I am a superstitious soul,” said Angus, “and I know there is. It ain’t canny. The sort of place you find devils dancing on the moors.”
“There aren’t any moors. There’s a sort of heath and a tarn and a mad Englishwoman painting mushrooms.”
“They say mushrooms spring up where the Devil walks,” said Angus sourly. “And where fairies dance.”
We walk constantly in a cloud of their spores, breathing them in. They inhabit the air, the water, the earth, even our very bodies.”
Our civilization is built on the back of yeasts.”
It’s less galling to be mistaken for a man than a woman, for some reason. Probably because no one tries to kiss your hand or bar you from the Royal Mycology Society.
“The hares around the lake aren’t canny.”
Please, God, let there not be a rabies outbreak up here, on top of everything else.
There are people who sleep with a loaded gun under their pillow and I’ve nothing much to say about that, except that I would not choose to share a bed with them.
I have, as I have told you, reader, the psychic sensitivities of mud.
“It is God’s hands, not mine. Perhaps not even His.”
staggering backward and throwing his sleeve across his face as if struck by acid. I enjoyed it enormously.
March hares are all mad, of course, but it wasn’t March and their madness tends to be much more active—leaping and boxing and bounding in all directions.
Not that the ghastly lake ever seemed to ripple when I watched. I looked up, away from the water, hoping to find an anchor in the familiar constellations. There were no stars.
But in this dark, miserable lake, in this grim, blighted land, it was just one more unpleasantness.
I wondered if I could convince myself it had been a dream. This place breeds nightmares.
(A Frenchwoman once told me that I had no poetry in my soul. I recited a dirty limerick to her, and she threw a lemon at my head. Paris is a marvelous city.)
“The Englishwoman that’s been roaming around painting mushrooms thinks there’s some kind of algae in the water.”
Any damn thing could grow in that lake, and it wouldn’t surprise me.”
turned again, and the original three hares were now four, as if another had sprung up from the ground like a mushroom.
But something was still very, very wrong.
stood so long that the candle dripped wax past the guard and spilled onto my hand.
It is very unpleasant to sit down to a meal when you are trying to determine which one of your breakfast companions is a murderer.
Lieutenant, I have come to think of you as a sensible person, but there is something quite unsavory about all this.”
Unsavory seemed like such a dire understatement that I gave a bark of laughter.
“Saprophytic fungi—ah, that is to say, those that feed upon decaying organic matter—are exceedingly common.
“The fungus grew in greatest concentration at the top of the spinal column,”
“It had completely wrapped the vertebrae there and intruded into the skull.”
If it comes in contact with the water supply, it could infect anyone who drinks the water.” Angus’s mustache sagged. So did the rest of him. “Miss Potter,” he said quietly, “it’s in the lake already.
The waters themselves seemed to pulse like a heartbeat, but far more rapidly than any human heart. I wondered how it compared to a hare’s heartbeat, and then I looked around.
