I took another step closer, then turned to the glass and shouted: “Dr. Horosha!”

“Nearly ready!” he shouted back.

“Enough, Howle Genneth,” Dr. Skorbinka whispered. “Please.” He pressed his hands together in a prayer of his own.

“Mistelann, please, just breathe,” Brand said. “Think rationally about this.”

“You say you can’t shirk your responsibilities?” I added, “Well, we need your help, your expertise. No one is disposable, least of all you.”

The mycologist wheezed. He trembled and wept. He wheezed. “I can’t breathe, Dr. Howle.” He averted his eyes. “Please, let me go…”

Taking one more step forward, I put my hands on the man’s shoulders and looked him dead in the eyes.

“Absolutely not,” I said, and meant it. “There are too many people I’ve had to let go in my life. It’s a bitter liquor, and I never want to taste it again. Not if there’s something I can do about it.” I smirked. “You’ll have to shove it down my throat and force me to swallow.”

Dr. Skorbinka gulped. He sniffled and smacked his lips. His breathing had begun to calm.

“It’s only a little bit longer, then you’re done for the day,” I said. “Let’s take a look at that fetus, so that you can use that mycological mastery of yours to help us better understand this nightmare. Knowledge is the only way out.” I pressed down hard on his shoulders. “It won’t take long, and, when we’re done, I’ll even join you on your smoke break. You don’t need to be alone; we can talk.” I took my hands off him. “I’m a neuropsychiatrist, you know.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You smoke?”

I shook my head. “No, but that’s not the point. The point is—”

“—Ready!” Dr. Horosha said.

“Alright, let’s go,” I said, stepping away.

Dr. Skorbinka shot out his hand to grab me by the arm.

“Promise?” he said, softly. “You promise?”

I nodded.

“Genneth!” Brand eyed us warily, having already stepped back into the lab.

“We’re coming,” I said. “We’re coming!”

And we went in. Brand watched our every step.

“Mistelann,” he said, hesitantly, “are you…”

Dr. Skorbinka snorted as his expression settled back into its usual grave. “We have work to tend to, comrade.” He smiled, but I knew pain when I saw it, and no amount of smiling could ever cover that up.

Brand nodded. Sweat trickled down his brow, and not just because of the PPE.

Had my heart still beat, it surely would have been racing.

“After you, Dr. Skorbinka,” I said, waving the mycologist in through the transparent door, following right behind him. I turned to Brand and Dr. Horosha. The former stood by the large desk in the center of the room, his mote veil bound tightly to him, while the latter sat in a swivel chair. “So,” I asked, “what, exactly, have we been waiting for?”

Dr. Horosha spun a half turn in his chair. “See for yourself.” He rolled away from the desk with a push of his foot.

Cold and dead lay the fetus, in a shallow metal tray, dissected and open for viewing—the unwanted leftovers of a gruesome potluck.

I didn’t want it to be real.

The sight sent chills crawling up and down my spine.

It was a cross between a man, a snake, and a tadpole half-transformed. It belonged in an exhibit of cryptozoological hoaxes or a cabinet of curiosities, except the craftsmanship was too fine, stitched together by alien hands. Even without a picture of its final form in my mind, I could tell its transformation was shoddy and unfinished. About half of the mutant fetus’ human skin had been replaced by minutely scaled wyrm flesh identical to my own, save for its deep red hue. The wretched thing looked like a half-peeled orange, black-rotted and with a nipple missing. The most developed part of the transformee fetus’ body was its tail, which accounted for almost two-thirds of the infant’s prodigious length; the creature was at least four feet long. The tail had grown in length and girth along with the fetus’ neck and torso to the point that there was no distinction between the tail’s base and the fetus’ waist. Its tail, neck and torso were part of the same, smooth, serpentine axis that defined its transfigured form. The baby’s legs were afterthoughts, limp, bone-bereft struts dangling from either side of the tail at where the human waist should have been. There were no traces of any urogenital structures, and both anus and navel were totally absent.

“I have taken the liberty of preparing samples for viewing,” Dr. Horosha said. He gestured to the handful of microscopes set up on the edge of the table.

Dr. Skorbinka was transfixed by the fetus. A disconnected nod and wave of his hand were his only acknowledgements of Dr. Horosha’s words.

“Look at malformations of fetal head…” he muttered.

Angel…

The head was the worst part. The head was the heart of the nightmare. It put even the most macabre medical curiosities in the fifth floor’s museum to shame. Imagine a flower bud, having just begun to blossom, the emerging petals pushing through the available opening. Now make the bud’s green sepals the flesh of the infant’s face folding out and away, along with a dangling jawbone, embedded with half-formed teeth, and make the bulge of crimson petals a stalwart mass of outward-swelling tissue, shot through with numerous little holes, dusted with lime green spores whose scent stung your nostrils like sickly sweet chlorine, even through the protection of a face mask and visor.

“I had a feeling you would ask about that, Dr. Skobinkna,” Dr. Horosha said. He pointed at one of the microscopes. “I have prepared a biopsy for your perusal.”

The mycologist walked up to the microscope and stared, and I followed suit. The microscopes here were not the outdated light microscopes that I’d used in medical school. Those troublesome pieces of equipment were known to cause irritation and swelling in students’ faces whenever they’d spend too much time pressed up against the microscopes’ eye-pieces. The same could not be said of the beautiful little machines in front of us. These laboratory-grade microscopes were eye-friendly, painlessly displaying the views of their samples by way of the screens of the consoles embedded in the table—consoles to which the microscopes were wirelessly linked. For ardent traditionalists who simply could not do without the squinting and the bone-ache, and the nose rash, eye-pieces were still in the classical place, ready and waiting to be of service.

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The screen showed a hunk of crimson tissue covered in a dark forest. The “trees” were like balloon animals—tubes branching into clusters of stacked bubbles, forming a translucent canopy filled to the brim with green. As per the readout on the upper right corner of the console screen, the magnification setting wasn’t quite as high as what I’d seen yesterday when Brand and Mistelann had shown me samples of infected tissue, but I could see the dark, sub-cellular structures woven together in the walls of the fungal tree trunks.

“Conidiophores,” Dr. Skorbinka said, pointing at those same trunks. He then pointed at the strings of spore-filled bubbles that crowned them: “Conidia.”

He turned to Dr. Horosha. “These are from where, precisely?”

“The pits in the facial mass.”

Mistelann looked at me before turning back to the screen. “Fungi have… multifarious sexuality. Conidia house spores produced by mitosis. Spores are dispersed through air. This facilitates asexual reproduction.” He glanced at the thing in the tray, but only briefly, closing his eyes and turning away with a shudder. “Optimal hypothesis: facial deformity is nascent fruiting body. When fully changed, organism should be capable of spore dispersal, likely through exhalations.”

“I recommend comparing it to the slide in the microscope to your left,” Dr. Horosha said. “We took it from the mother.”

Unlike the previous sample, this one needed no explanation. It showed us the familiar sight of black filaments against the glass slide’s brightly lit backdrop.

Dr. Skorbinka stared at it wordlessly.

“Mistelann,” Brand said, taking notice of his colleague’s anxiety, “I’d like your opinion on this. It turns out there’s more to the fetus’ noggin than just holes and spores.”

Rolling his chair over to the dead fetus, Dr. Nowston grabbed a pair of forceps and then pulled apart an incision that had been made in the soft gaps between what looked like the remnants of the fetus’ skull, which studded the top of its head in between the horn-like growths, almost like a broken hard hat.

“Take a look at this,” Brand said. He then glanced at me. “You too, Genneth.”

He pried the cut open.

A viscous substance that I can only describe as liquid glitter oozed out from the gap between the necrotic dura mater and the gray matter deep beneath. The fluid glimmered brilliantly under the light overhead, like ocean waves beneath the sun.

I gasped. “What in the world…?”

“If pressed,” Brand said, “I’d call it a statocyst, though the term really doesn’t do it justice.”

“What is statocyst?” Mistelann asked, raising a perplexed eyebrow.

“A statocyst is a special type of cell found mostly in aquatic invertebrates,” Brand said, setting the forceps down on the metal tray. “In humans and other vertebrates, the analogous structures are the otoliths in the vestibular system. For mammals, those are the semicircular canals—part of the inner ear. But whether it’s a statocyst or an otolith, the operating principles and biological functionalities are the same. These structures contain small mineral concretions—usually calcium carbonate—called statoliths, and they’re free to move within the confines of the structure. When the organism turns on its side or face upside-down, gravity pulls on the statoliths, which then move sensory receptors which send signals to the critter’s brain, giving them their sense of balance,” Brand said. “Interestingly, squids and things also use them to hear.”

Now, while I didn’t know much about statoliths and squid hearing, I did know a thing or two about sensory receptors, and there was a big, fat hole in Brand’s reasoning. Of course, he was undoubtedly aware of this, and I’d be willing to bet he intentionally overlooked this point just to give me an in—because that’s what friends do. I smiled gently, really appreciating the gesture.

I cleared my throat. “Dr. Nowston, most sensory receptor apparatuses are quite small,” I said. “You’d need microscopes to see them. And this thing,” I looked back at the oozing glitter, “it’s huge.”

Brand nodded. “You’re absolutely right. I brought up statocyst because that was the closest biological analogue I could think of. Generally, large, fluid-filled sacs are either pathologies in their own right, or end up emptying themselves on a regular basis.” Brand tilted his head and crossed his leg. “Actually, there’s one other example I can think of: the cetacean melon.”

“Fruit in whale?” Mistelann said, furrowing his brow.

Brand smirked. “No no, the melon is a large, fluid-filled organ found in the heads of dolphins and whales which plays a crucial role in their echolocation. In echolocation, you shoot a sound-wave at an object and then determine its shape and location by examining the parts of the sound-wave that the object reflects back at you. The melon does to sound what a lens does to light: it focuses it, enabling the animal to shoot concentrated bursts of sound in the desired direction, though it may have other functions in addition to that—we’re not entirely sure. The reflected sounds are then picked up when they cause vibrations in the animal’s skull.” He tilted his head to the side. “Honestly, though, more than anything else, this thing reminds me of a console’s liquid-crystal display touchscreen. Now, if only I knew what an echolocation-style touchscreen was doing inside a mutant fetus’ skull.”

“What’s happened to the rest of the brain?” I asked.

“The thalamus has been replaced with this statocyst-melon,” Dr. Nowston said. He gestured toward a microscope screen where the glitter-sac’s membranous edge was in the process of invading the surrounding tissue, infiltrating it with root-like structures. “As you can see here from the biopsies, it would have likely gone on to infest the entire brain cavity, given enough time.”

The thalamus was to the central nervous system what Grand Central Terminal down on Fish Street was to commuters at rush hour. Located smack-dab at the center of the brain, the thalamus was both the first and last stop for signals traveling up or down the spinal cord. It directed and redirected signals, ensuring that everything ended up at the right destination, and as such, the thalamus played critical roles in managing sensory input, motor control, alertness, sleep cycles, and Angel-knows what else.

“If the thalamus is affected, that might explain the neurological symptoms I’ve been experiencing,” I blurted out, hastily adding “with my patients,” before I got locked up in sequestration. “Somatosensory deficits responsible for the occurrence of Nalfar’s; the troubling ‘lag’ patients have been reporting between when they will their bodies to move and when their bodies comply with those commands.”

“Hmmm… this is curious,” Dr. Skorbinka said, nodding his head.

“Oh?” Brand said.

“Having seen other brain biopsies from Type One patients, it is clear that morphological features of fungal brain infestation in Types One and Two are vastly different,” the mycologist explained. He looked me in the eyes. “It is correct, Howle Genneth, reports of memory loss and other neurological symptoms in Type One patients, yes, but not Type Two?”

“Right,” I nodded, only to clarify, “well, Type Two does have neurological symptoms, but they’re of an entirely different kind compared to what we’ve seen happening in Type One cases.”

“Black hyphal filaments are trophic form of NFP-20. They extract and digest. They—”

—The mycologist’s eyes widened. He cut himself off, shook his head, and muttered something under his breath.

Dr. Horosha rose from his seat. “What is it, Dr. Skorbinka?”

“I should have seen it sooner!” Mistelann snapped, thumping his fist on the tabletop. He raised his head and looked at the rest of us, his face trembling.

“World is full of monsters,” he said, “in dark corners where no one looks. There is species of fungus, Tochukaso… it make zombie of insects. It whispers madness into tiny ant brain. Little creature climb up onto tall grass, squeeze mandibles tight—hold in place—and fungus bloom, rain spores on ant colony. Touch of spore is touch of death.”

Dr. Skorbinka glowered at the mutant corpse on the tray.

“Type Two is reproductive form of NFP-20 fungus! Transition between trophic mode and reproductive mode in fungi draws upon separate aspects of phenotypic profile, comparable to cellular slime mold. It feeds madness into transformee brain; it twists them to serve fungal ends; it manipulates them like ants!” He staggered back. “Is hand of dark god.” His breaths raced. “Death. Judgment.” Moisture condensed on the inside of his visor.

And then, he took a very deep breath

“I will have smoke break now, Howle Genneth.”

Mistelann stared me in the eye like I’d promised to walk with him down the road to Hell. Then again, I suppose I had.