mycelial

#0141102 - Mycelial

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[G. CHARLESTON]

Statement of Jonah Claermont, regarding his relationship with one Maria Nantasri. Original statement given February 11th, 2014. Audio recording done by Gregor Charleston on March 23, 2020

Statement Begins.

[G. CHARLESTON - STATEMENT]

I just want to say that she wasn’t always like that. There wasn’t anything she did before the hike that ever made me think she would do that. Any of that. No idea. I had been going out with her for months before all this shit started, and she never did anything that would even suggest she’d do what happened. I want you to know that, because if she ever comes to you about all this and tries to tell you ‘her side’ of the story, you’ll know what a fucking liar Maria is.

I’d seen her around before we actually met. Our uni doesn’t have that big of a campus, and especially when you’re in the same department you get used to seeing the same faces around. Technically, we weren't in the same department- I was a microbiology major, she was in botany, but we had enough of the same courses we’d seen each other around a few times. And oh boy, was she a fine thing to look at- a heart shaped face, shiny black-brown hair, almond eyes that turned up a bit at the corners and sparkled when she smiled. She was a bit lacking in the body department- more bony and long than I’d usually go for, but good lord was she gorgeous despite it. All my mates teased me for being so obviously into her, as we had never spoken, but I knew we were meant for each other.

We met at a house party. I can’t exactly remember when, probably late September or early October or something. When I came across her by the pool, I was already a few drinks in, but I could tell she wasn’t too happy being there. I think she’d come with some more sociable friends of hers who had all found others to hang with, leaving her alone with nothing to do but linger and have too many shots. She wasn’t drunk drunk when I came up to her- just kind of inebriated, spaced-out kind of drunk. Anyways, we got to talking, and I tried out all my, admittedly charming, pick-up lines I’d been saving for this occasion. She never responded- she barely even looked at me- and if I was any other guy I’m certain someone would’ve taken advantage of her. She never made eye contact, and kept muttering something about spores and hyphae or something. I knew she was taking a pretty intensive mycology course at the time, so I didn’t think much of it.

Anyways, after the party I managed to get her number at one of our shared molecular biology lectures, and we started going out. I really shouldn’t have stuck with her for as long as I did, but she was so hot I couldn’t resist. Turns out, Maria was a fucking looser. Her being at that party gave me a really wrong impression about her social life. Yeah, she had friends, but she rarely hung out with them outside classes and study sessions. She spent almost all her free time cooped up in her studio flat, tending to houseplants and burying herself in textbooks about tree anatomy. I quickly understood why she had chosen botany as a study path- her entire life revolved around plants. She liked them more than she liked people, I swear. One time, when I’d stayed the night over at her place, I accidentally knocked over a monstera she kept in this giant woven basket, and I thought she was just about ready to kill me right there. Clearly, you can see how insane this woman was. I won’t pretend our relationship was ever great- it was pretty on-and-off, even before she got all freaky, but I never thought things would go as far as they did.

Maria’s other main hobby, outside of the plant stuff, was foraging. As if surrounding yourself in wild plant life wasn’t enough, you have to go and eat it, too. If you, like me before all this, don’t know what that is, hobby foraging is basically just hiking with a picnic basket and grabbing as many probably-poisonous mushrooms as you can. Even now, I can’t wrap my head around it. I don’t know what she got out of it. I mean, hiking I kind of understand, as a form of exercise, but even then it’s not what I’d choose. And why pick mushrooms off the ground when you can get them perfectly fine and clean and pre-packaged from the supermarket? It was probably all illegal, what she was doing- some kind of food and drug offense, but I don’t have enough evidence to submit it to the police. Not that they’d be able to do much about it, anyways, what with where Maria ended up.

Since Maria and I started dating in the winter, I didn’t learn about this fixation of hers until well into our relationship. By the time spring rolled around and she invited me to forest for wild mushrooms in the woods close to our university town, I was too committed to really say no. The look on her face when I agreed was ecstatic- more happy than I had ever really seen her before- and I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d rather stay home and play GTA 5 with the lads. So off to the woods we went.

That was the first of Maria and I’s woodland explorations. She managed to drag me out on three or four before everything went to shit, though I know she went on more just by herself, or with other people from her botany courses. It was in mid-April when it happened, and it was right after a nasty thunderstorm, so the forest was still all wet and moisty and disgustingly steamy. Maria didn’t seem to mind the conditions at all- for some reason, she was excited about it. Kept talking about how all the moisture in the air was perfect for fungal development, and that we might even see some worms about. Dunno why on earth the woman was so excited about worms. Like I said before, you should be able to tell how insane she was from the start. Despite my protests and suggestions of a nice day spent indoors, Maria was having none of it, and we packed up in our raincoats and galoshes and set for a nice Sunday morning spent trekking through ankle-high mud.

Maria led the way, as she often did. I have a habit of getting lost anywhere more natural than a supermarket, and Maria’s foraging quests often led her far off the normal hiking paths. Even then, she moved through the forest like she was meant to be there- always knowing where to step and what tree branches to grab onto, without once turning back to help me as I trudged through the mud or landed face-first in the dirt. She had been right about one thing, though- the forest was absolutely full of mushrooms. So many that Maria made me hold the gathering basket while she cut up stalk after stalk after stalk. I had never in my life seen so many goddamn mushrooms in one place. I hope I never do again.

I’ll always remember her face when she spotted it. To me, it looked exactly the same as all the other brown-capped mushrooms we’d been looking at so far, if not a bit more… conglomerated. But Maria was convinced that she’d never seen anything like it before. That it was some kind of newfound mushroom species never previously discovered, and that she had to cut off a sample to take back to the lab. I tried to stop her, I really did, but of course, she never listened to my sound advice.

Maria crouched down by the fungal colony, which was eating its way through the corpse of a fallen tree, and got out the small knife she used for harvesting. It took her a long while to select a good specimen for harvesting, but when she finally sliced into the stalk, a cloud of spores erupted around her. Now, at this point, I’d watched Maria slice up any number of wild mushrooms, and none of them ever did that. I thought to myself: ‘maybe she was right about this being a new species’, but I couldn’t think much before I started coughing from all the spores.

Maria, obviously, got the worse of it. She emerged from the cloud on her hands and knees, and I could see she’d accidentally sliced her palm open when it erupted. She could barely stop coughing enough to reassure me she was still okay, and wanted to keep going, but at that point I’d had enough. I called the forest rangers to get us back onto a path I could navigate, and we went home.

I guess… I should talk about her wound. It went straight across her palm, and even from the first moment I saw it, it looked nasty. All… pus-filled and oily and infected. They had to clear away the spores when we went to the emergency clinic, but they just put her on some antibiotics and told her to come back if it didn’t show improvement within the next few weeks. By the time it got really weird… well, I don’t think she was really in the mood to go back to the clinic.

Maria fell ill after that. I mean, really ill. She stopped attending classes, she stopped going out with the few friends she had. She even stopped answering my texts. I checked on her a few times, at first, and everything seemed pretty normal. As normal as you could expect from Maria. She’d just lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. No TV, no music, nothing. All her plants were withering, but I just assumed that was because she didn’t have the energy to get up and water them. I mean, to the uninformed eye a dehydrated plant doesn’t look too different from an otherwise sick one. She did talk to me when I came to visit, mostly about whatever I’d been doing lately, but the more I did the more those conversations turned to more… fungal topics. She kept asking me when I was going to go back and harvest that weird mushroom for her. She wanted to study it- no, that’s not right. I keep remembering her saying that, but I’m almost certain the phrasing she used was that she wanted to understand it. Like it was a person she was making friends with.

Anyways, I lied to her. Obviously: dick move on my part, I’m not proud. I just kept lying to her, saying I’d get it for her at some point, when in reality both of us- at least, I hope both of us- knew that was never going to happen. Eventually, I just stopped visiting her. I got busy, and it wasn’t like she appreciated my company. After all, she’d stopped replying to my texts a month ago. We kind of just… mutually ghosted each other, and I accepted the fact. I was ready to move on to someone else, preferably someone with more… social hobbies.

Anyways, it just so happened that my bud Georgie was moving into the flat directly below Maria’s the following fall, and I tell you, the way my heart lurched when he sent me that call- he kept going on about how I wouldn’t believe what it was til I saw it with my own eyes. And he was right about that. The moment I walked in, I noticed it. His entire ceiling was infested with mold.

Georgie told me he hadn’t noticed it when he first moved in, but he’d been there a few months then and it’d gotten too bad not to notice. He knew I had an ex that lived directly above him, and figured I might want to participate in giving her a little ‘wellness check’. He’d even bought me a spare respiration mask. Said he thought me being around might keep Maria calm, if it got too heated. He didn’t say it, but the implication was clear: you being around might make me calling your ex a slob less offensive.

To this day, I don’t know why Georgie didn’t call the authorities, or even his landlord, and I don’t know why I didn’t bring up the idea then. I guess… back then, I didn’t even know what had happened. I didn’t even know it would cost Georgie his life.

We suited up, and climbed the stairs to the third floor where Maria’s door was. The mold was there, too- almost completely covering the doorframe. I remember thinking to myself how lucky I was we were both wearing gloves. As if gloves could’ve really kept me safe from what was beyond that door.

Georgie knocked, and nothing happened. I tried one last-ditch attempt to reach Maria by cellphone, but she didn’t pick up. Finally, we realized the door wasn’t locked. It was simply so encrusted with mold, we had assumed it was. We had to use both our full body weights- and neither of us are really small guys- to push it open, but we finally did. I’ll never forget what I saw behind that door.

I thought I knew the meaning of the word ‘infested’ when I saw the colony of mushrooms in the woods. I thought I knew it when I saw the fuzzy spots that decorated Georgie’s ceiling, or the way the mold formed crusts of fungal matter over the door frame, but I didn’t. It was when I stepped into that flat I finally understood what it means when one lifeform takes the place of another.

Everything was covered in mold. Every single surface, from the floor to the kitchen cabinets to the soft furniture. Black mold, white mold, green mold, violet mold- so many kinds of mold, but all there, doing the same thing. Living. Thriving. Persisting. In some places, it was so thick that I wouldn’t blame you for thinking there was nothing beneath the carpet of mold. Long, nebulous tubes of hyphae trailed up the walls, in patterns that mirrored lightning, or varicose veins. The air was thick and cloudy with spores- it was hard to breath, even with my respirator mask on. All the plants were dead, of course, and fully formed mushrooms had sprouted in their soil-filled graves. Mushrooms grew out of mushrooms- fungus grew out of fungus. I could feel it on my skin through my gloves, I could feel it in my lungs when I breathed. I could feel it on my tongue, even though I hadn’t opened my mouth since I entered. It gave me the hives- no matter how much I tried to convince myself, I couldn’t delude my brain into convincing myself I was clean. I didn’t even notice Maria until she noticed us.

She was sat in what must’ve once been her bed, judging by its place in the room and the rotting wood structure that used to be the bedframe around her. The mold that caked the room was equally caulked onto her- even in the dim evening light, I could see the way it glazed over her skin and made white mats in what was left of her hair. I thought she was dead, but- dead things don’t move. Dead things don’t get up to greet you. Dead things don’t talk.

Watching her stand was like watching a flower bloom, but a thousand times more disgusting. It was a strange, unfurling motion, a sort of creaking. She moved slowly, cautiously, the cords of hyphae that encircled and tethered her body never snapping or breaking. Her eyes were glazed over with something as she stood to greet us, but she made eye contact.

“Jonah….” She said, and her voice was so sweet it was sickly. She smiled so widely I could see the way the fungus had rotted her teeth. “I thought you’d never come back to see me again! Did you get my specimen?”

At that point, I think Georgie had enough. Maybe all the disgust and terror was getting to him. He started going off on Maria, ranting about how disgusted he was and how gross it was to let a place get like this, and how she should be ashamed for doing this to herself. He said some… pretty nasty things, that I’m not too comfortable recounting here. Called her a ‘slut’ more than once, and a ‘gold-digging whore’ multiple times, though I don’t really know how applicable either of those names were to the situation. I really tried to get him to calm down. I did. But he wouldn’t listen to me. All this time, Maria just stared at Georgie, with her blank, fungal gaze. She was waiting for him to stop.

When Georgie had run out of breath, or energy, or things to say, Maria approached him. She moved toward him with that slow, creeping walk of hers, and for some reason neither Georgie or I moved. We didn’t even move when she unclasped his respirator mask and pulled it away.

Immediately, Georgie started coughing and hacking and choking to death on the spore-thick air. I… I don’t know how quickly people usually die from spore inhalation, but… it felt faster than it should’ve. One minute, he was standing right beside me, the next he was on the ground gasping for clean air, and the next he was dead. I had stood there, blankly, the entire time- I didn’t know what to do! Georgie was one of my closest buds, and I had just watched him suffocate and die right before my eyes.

I was watching his corpse turn green when Maria dropped the respirator mask and crouched down beside Georgie’s corpse. She placed her hands over him, one on his head, another on his stomach, and….

Look, I don’t know how else to day this. She ate him. She ate him whole. Not in the way a human eats a meal or a predator eats its prey. She ate him in the way only a mushroom can eat. Mold spread across his body faster than I thought mold could grow, and started sapping away everything that had made Georgie himself. He went through every stage of decay, within a minute. I watched him wither and die until he was bones. And when nothing but bone was left, those bones were encased in a thick crust of mold and hyphae. New, terrible life sprouted from where he used to be.

That bitch took my best bud, and made him into mushroom food.

At that point, I screamed. I screamed so loud, I thought my ears might start to bleed. I sobbed. I cried. I felt grief, yeah, at my best bud’s death, but more than that, I just felt fear. And disgust.

And Maria laughed. She threw her head back with a sound like a piece of celery snapped in half, and she laughed. Her chest rose and fell in mimicry of breath. “Oh, Jonah-” She said between choking howls. “I really liked you, you know. I’m gonna miss you. I thought you were a really fun guy!”

A pun. She threatened my life with a mushroom pun.

I couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t want to leave Georgie- or whatever was left of Georgie- with her, but I couldn’t stay. I ran out the door we had left open, scrambled down the stairs, and left in my car. I’ve never been back. I don’t want to look it up, I don’t want to tell the police. I- I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.

But, uh, I heard about this place through your ad the other day. And I figured… if anyone needs to know this information, it’s you guys.

[G. CHARLESTON]

Statement ends.

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[G. CHARLESTON]

Mhm. Mold. I’m glad I ate before I read this, and I’m glad that what I ate was a fresh sandwich from the cafe. I am both grateful for and disgusted by the amount of detail Jonah Claermont decided to provide in his statement.

Original research into this statement, made by my predecessor Evan Slab, is… sparse. He only confirmed that both Maria Nantasri and George Williamson lived at the addresses Mr. Claermont provided, at the times specified. George was reported missing in late 2013, which does line up with the timeline provided by Claermont. His case remains unsolved to this day, though, if this statement has any factual truth behind it… we may have an answer to where George Williamson ended up.

Ollie was able to find something interesting, though. In the summer of 2014, when Maria had defaulted on almost a year’s worth of rent, the landlord arranged a routine inspection of her apartment. What they found was, predictably, a lot of mold. Police reports line up with what Claermont describes, save for the lack of human remains found at the site in 2014. What was found was a single handwritten, note, reading as follows:

[CLEARS THROAT]

‘So long, I hope I wasn’t a spore!’

It seemed Miss Maria Nantasri was very fond of her mushroom puns.

Regardless, there is little else I can do to follow up on this statement. Truthfully, I do not care to. I… do not doubt that if this is true, Nantasri is still out there, feasting on the unsuspecting dead, but there is little I can do about that but let it keep me up at night. If there’s one thing I know about fungi… they’re good at persisting.

Eugh.

End Recording.

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