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The ticking noise continued unabated after she’d finished, and she set the plate down, remembering her brief dream. Rather than speak to the Caliph, she instead chose to quietly address the ticking noise itself.
She found that it was responsive.
She breathed a gasp of surprise as she began to almost converse with the noise; it suddenly dawned on her that the sound was some sort of vegetation inside the Caliph himself. Something caught her attention; she looked up and saw that the Caliph’s shoulders had twitched, just slightly.
She tried again, addressing the tick: WHO ARE YOU?
The noises she received in response were unintelligible. The Caliph twitched again, his shoulders jerking slightly on his frame.
The tone of the noise suggested it was some kind of organic living thing, but decidedly not human. It had all the cadences she was accustomed to hearing from the plant world, just in a different dialect—if such a thing could be said. And then she realized:
She was speaking to the Spongiform.
WHERE ARE YOU?
Ticking. Ticking. The Caliph shook his head slightly.
She took that as a sign. IN THE SKULL?
YESSSSSSSS, the ticking codified into a word.
She recalled learning in life science about the strange and delicate relationship between parasites—particularly fungi—and their hosts. There were bacterial parasites that could change the makeup of someone’s thinking—certain parasites that transformed action and behavior, drawing the host toward more environments where the parasite might be better distributed and ingested by other organisms. The whole class had chittered with disgust and disbelief; now Prue found herself face-to-face with such an example.
COME, she thought. COME FORWARD.
She channeled her language, commanding the noise forward. She used the same tone she did when she found herself able to make grass weave around her toes, to make branches bow in still air. COME.
The Caliph, still silent, shook in his chair, as if an earthquake had erupted just below his feet. And then: a noise, a human noise: a cough, a sputter.
The ship tilted in the wind, the crewmen shouted from above, and the Caliph on the chest went spilling to the floor, his hands grabbing for his face mask.
Prue leapt up from her cot and pressed her face between the bars of her cell door: FORWAAARD!
The Caliph on the floor made loud retching noises, and his hands flew to his face and whipped off his headgear, the mask and the cowl, as if he were suffocating and his strange outfit was the cause of all his discomfort. The silver mask went skittering across the floor of the belowdecks and Prue was surprised to see, revealed beneath the mirrored thing, none other than Seamus, the Wildwood bandit. His beard was matted with sweat, and his skin looked as if it had been deprived of sunlight for a long time. His eyes were wild and bloodshot as his dirty fingers scraped at his face, like he was trying to peel his own skin away.
“Seamus!” shouted Prue, reaching her hand between the bars. “Seamus, it’s Prue!”
But the man couldn’t hear her. He was too busy writhing on the floor, jamming his fingers into his mouth and nostrils. His chest spasmed in great gasps as he dry-heaved repeatedly, his knees jammed firmly into his chest. Finally, something seemed to give as there was a kind of liquid choking noise from his throat and something very brownish green and viscous, the size of a walnut, was ejected from his right nostril. Wide-eyed, he grabbed it and began to pull; little tendrils ran away from the greasy little object, a tangled mesh that connected it to the inside of his nose. Carefully pulling at the stringy lattice, retching all the while, Seamus managed to extract a veritable spider’s web of mucus-covered tendrils that, when collapsed into a ball, resembled a leftover pile of mutant brown spaghetti. It lay there in a quivering lump, ticking away in Prue’s brain.
“Seamus,” she hissed. “Throw it out the window.” It seemed imperative that he do this; it was sucking at the air, it was ticking loudly in her mind.
Pulling himself together, as one does when painfully sick yet desperate for a drink of water or access to the television’s remote control, Seamus grabbed the slimy stuff in his hand and crawled to the nearest porthole. Heaving himself up onto an obliging crate, he opened the window and tossed the contents of his fist out into the fog-covered river basin.
The ticking stopped. The creaking of the ship, the whining of the rigging, was all Prue could hear.
“Where . . . ,” gasped the man in the robe. “Where am I?”
“You’re on a ship. Bound for the Crag.”
He looked up at the speaker; his sudden recognition of his old friend Prue seemed to fall on him like a barrel of rocks. “Prue!” he shouted. “Prue McKeel! What are you doin’ all locked up?”
“Well, to be honest, you sort of had a hand in putting me here.”
“I did?” He was busily wiping a layer of snot and grime from his face. He held a strand of it at arm’s length. “What was that stuff?”
“Spongiform. The blight on the Blighted Tree. Someone fed it to you.”
“Who?”
