Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF THE MUSHROOM SPAWN

The mushroom spawn grows under the entire forest, or maybe even under the whole of Primeval. In the earth under the soft forest floor, under the grass and stones, it creates a tangle of slender threads, strings and bundles, which it twines around everything. The threads of the mushroom spawn have great strength and push their way in between every clod of earth, tangle around tree roots and restrain huge boulders in their infinitely gradual onward motion. The mushroom spawn is like mould – cold, white, and delicate – underground lunar lace, damp, hem-stitched mycelia, the world’s slimy umbilical cords. It overgrows meadows and wanders under human roads, climbs the walls of people’s houses, and sometimes in surges of power it imperceptibly attacks their bodies.

The mushroom spawn is not a plant or an animal. It cannot gain strength from the sun, because its nature is alien to the sun. It is not drawn to the warm and the living, because its nature is neither warm nor alive. The mushroom spawn lives thanks to the fact that it sucks up the remains of juices from whatever dies, whatever is decaying and soaking into the earth. The mushroom spawn is the life of death, the life of decay, the life of whatever has died.

All year the mushroom spawn bears its cold, wet children, but the ones that come to light in the summer and autumn are the most beautiful. Along human paths, marasmius mushrooms grow on slender legs, near-perfect puffballs and earthballs show white in the grass, and slippery jacks and bracket fungi take crippled trees into their possession. The forest is full of yellow chanterelles, olive-green russulas, and suede boletus.

The mushroom spawn does not separate or single out its children, it gives them all the strength to grow and the power to spread their spores. To some it gives a scent, to others the capacity to hide from the human eye, yet others have shapes that are breathtaking.

Deep under the ground, at the very centre of Wodenica, there is a great, white tangled mycelium ball pulsing away, the heart of the mushroom spawn. From here the spawn spreads out to all corners of the world. The forest here is dark and damp. Luxuriant brambles hold the tree stumps prisoner. Everything is covered in lush moss. People instinctively avoid Wodenica, though they don’t know that here, underneath, the heart of the mushroom spawn is beating.

Of all the people, only Ruta knows about it. She guessed it from the most beautiful amanitas, which grow here every year. The amanitas are the spawn’s guards. Ruta lies down on the ground among them and examines the underside of their foaming, snow-white petticoats.

Ruta once heard the life of the mushroom spawn. It was an underground rustling that sounded like a dull sigh, and then she could hear the gentle crackle of clumps of earth as the thread of the mycelium pushed its way between them. Ruta heard the spawn’s heartbeat, which happens once every eighty human years.

Ever since she has been coming to this damp spot in Wodenica, and always lies down on the wet moss. If she lies there for a while, she starts to sense the mushroom spawn in another way, too – because the spawn slows down time. Ruta falls into a waking sleep, and sees everything in a completely different way. She can see individual gusts of wind, the slow and graceful flight of insects, the fluent movements of ants, and particles of light that settle on the surfaces of leaves. All the high-up noises – the warbling of birds, the squealing of animals – change into booming and rumbling, and glide along just above the ground, like mist. Ruta feels as if she has been lying like that for hours, though only a moment has passed. So the mushroom spawn takes time into its possession.