MalContents (12 page)

Rainwater pooled on the boat’s plastic cover. The puddles sat gray and clotting.

Just get in there, start the motor, and go . . .

Sunny tipped a glance toward the house. Her purse, her things, even the sanity she’d come here to reclaim were back there. Ashes?

She chuckled out loud, shook her head, and aimed both middle fingers at the swirling mists.

“Eat this, Bustamante,” she shouted.

The mist bounced her voice back at her.

“Ashes? It’s fucking
pollen
.”

Sunny swaggered back to the house, no longer afraid of apparitions. It was time to utilize her overactive imagination in healthier ways.

A wedge of lemon floated in a tall, sweating glass filled with ice and bubbly seltzer, a tiny slice of sunshine on the end table. The air conditioner pumped cool, dry gusts through the room. The silence no longer seemed ominous; in fact, she welcomed it. Seated on the sofa with her feet tucked beneath her and the laptop balanced on an accent pillow, Sunny’s fingers flew across the keys.

Darkness fell outside. And then, inside as well, as the lights and the air conditioning and every other electrical appliance shorted out. Only the laptop’s screen provided any illumination.

Sunny froze. The silence in the absence of all background white noise crawled across her skin. The nothingness fluttered at her ears. The house, which had always been Sunny’s place to escape to when the pressures of life in the spotlight grew overwhelming, went from being her sanctuary to a shadowy no-man’s land.

A crackle of what she wrongly assumed was lightning sparked outside the house. Moving on memory, Sunny ascended the stairs to the second level. Peering through the dirty bathroom window, she waited. The spark lit again, somewhere in the distance. She tracked it mentally through the mist, to the dark waters of the pond’s surface.

“The power cable,” Sunny gasped, hating the sound of her voice in the strangulating silence.

The power line leading from the shore to the island had been severed. It was the only explanation. The convenient excuse about tree pollen wasn’t so easy to believe in the darkness, which grew steamier by the second.

Drenched in sweat, she sat and waited for the dawn. The last time she glanced at her watch, she saw that it was just after three in the morning. Sunny dozed off. The next glance was after five. A murky gray light oozed through the fogged-over window panes. It was time to return home to air conditioning, noise, and Joseph.

She grabbed her purse and the tote containing her laptop and the first chapter of
Sunny Weathers
, the working title of her new autobiography, and headed out the door. The eerie silence again challenged her, the absence of birdsong so obvious that her arms broke in gooseflesh halfway down the stairs. But that oddity was soon trumped when, as her free hand glided down the rail, it collided with a soft, spongy object attached to the side. Sunny recoiled as the unmistakable smell hit her nose. Congealed gray glop hung off her fingers, the putrefying remains of a mushroom.

Eyes wide, she glanced around the house. They were growing everywhere, gray-skinned and gilled, clamped to the outside of the house, pushing up through the rain-soaked layers of pine needles carpeting the ground, stuck onto the trunks of trees. Mushrooms, a plague of mushrooms, everywhere she turned, all the way down to the dock, where Sunny’s rising panic was long last given substance.

The boat was gone.

Eyes still wide and blinking only when they started burning, she caught sight of the boat, her Grandpa Wally’s old boat, submerged about twenty feet away from shore. The tie down lay in ragged pieces and had been cut.

Silence.

Sunny paced the deck. If she’d had a cigarette available, she would have smoked it down to the filter. Ditto on a funny cigarette, or something bigger. Though she and Joseph had promoted healthy living, he did enjoy the occasional cigar with the guys at the sports network, usually on Super Bowl Sundays and throughout March Madness and the World Series Fall Classic.

Fucking mushrooms,
everywhere
.

The dregs of the gritty gray ash staining her once-pristine, white Adirondack chairs crawled with dark nubs. Mist lay just as thickly over the treetops, filtering out most of the daylight. The sun could barely be detected, a vague platinum glow.

A musty odor, rotten at the edges, hung around the house. The boat was gone. She could try swimming the distance. Seven years of working out at the
YUM!
private gym had put her in excellent shape, even factoring in the knife wound.

Except that someone or
thing
had cut the mooring line and sunk the boat, she was convinced. And she started to suspect the same of the power cable between the island and shore. She was started to suspect and imagine a lot of things.

“Mushrooms,” she whispered.

Sunny walked back into the house and set down her bags. The musty mushroom fetor followed. Whatever comfort and coolness the central air had provided was completely gone. The inside of the cottage felt just as swampy now, and the pretty furniture and watercolor artwork took on a used, dilapidated appearance. The place no longer felt cozy; it had an atmosphere of danger and felt like a trap, a well-laid one.

Drawing in a deep breath, Sunny moved into the kitchen. She opened the fridge, which discharged an agonal puff of barely-chilled air. She grabbed a bottle of seltzer and chugged. The scintillating rush of bubbles down her throat helped her to think. She could swim the distance, she was sure of it. Foster’s Pond and the surrounding shore were home to garden snakes, not cottonmouths or water moccasins. And while snapping turtles did lurk in the thickets and swampy region west of her, she’d never seen anything bigger than a sun turtle between the cottage and boathouse.

A deep
croak
shuddered through the house.

In the absence of other sounds, this one was loud enough to almost hurt Sunny’s ears. She waiting, listening to the counterpoint of tiny, hissing bubbles in the plastic bottle.

Croak
.

Her eyes shot toward the closed door to the left of her top-of-the-line propane-fired oven. The sound originated from behind the door as well as underfoot. It had come from the cellar. The rank mushroom smell down there was even more pronounced.

An unpleasant
drip-drip
issued up from the darkness. Sunny aimed the flashlight ahead of her, aware of the shake in her hand and the jiggling beam, but was powerless to still it. She reached the bottom of the stairs and tilted the beam around the cellar.

Water lay across the bare cement floor, another sign that decay was being forced upon the property because, before this weekend, the foundation had been declared sound and free of cracks. She did-n’t store much of anything down there, just paint cans and brushes, so she knew that the misshapen lump in the darkest, wettest corner was a new addition to the cellar landscape.

Eyes wide, a snippet of a prayer on her lips, Sunny cocked the flashlight toward the horror, which quivered, jellyfish-like. The beam touched upon a pallid blob, far too big to be what it appeared, and yet here it was, growing in her cellar.

The giant mushroom reacted to the beam, flinching. A loud
croak
shuddered through the air, no longer muffled by the house’s floorboards. It twitched, shook. The prayer on Sunny’s lips degenerated into a rosary of expletives. Up close, the sound reminded her of Rona Bustamante’s riding crop from the audition video.

The horror turned, and the pair of black markings she hadn’t dared believe were eyes zeroed in on her. Sunny screamed and ran, and Rona Bustamante’s threat to take vengeance even if it meant from beyond the grave rose fresh in her thoughts.

The thing in the cellar, the giant mushroom, it even looked strangely
human
around the edges.

Sunny tore out of the house. She made it to the bottom of the stairs without tripping, only to launch face-first when her right foot hit a patch of muddy earth. Her chin struck hard enough to shatter teeth. A taste she equated with sucking on pennies ignited across her tongue.

She picked herself up, aware of the hellish ache along the back of her jaw that hadn’t been there before, the reawakened pain in her breast, and the gray mud splattered across her shirt and jeans, though these things barely registered. There was something growing in the darkness of the cellar. It had come down in the rain, born of ashes and spores, and she knew it was going to look like Rona Bustamante when it was ripe.

She reached the dock, dug in her heels, hesitated. The image of the drowned motorboat loomed before her, doubly sinister now that she possessed the horrifying knowledge of what was happening on the island. Beyond that grim marker, curtains of mist cut off her view of the shore. But the shore was still there. So was her car.

The car keys were back in the cottage, in her purse.
Fuck ’em
, she thought. All she needed to do was reach the far side. The rest didn’t matter. She’d knock on doors and scream down help in the neighborhood of new homes built atop the bruised earth that used to be her family’s farm. The least those yuppy fucks owed her was the courtesy of a call to 911.

A shadow darted through the platinum-colored water. Sunny tracked it, lost it. A trick of the light, from not blinking?
Boat sunk, power line cut
.

Every instinct told her not to do it save the one that screamed the loudest, the one reminding her that Rona Bustamante was coming back from the dead, reincarnated as fungus in Sunny’s cellar. She dove.

The world went blurry. Pond water slick with algae smooched her face, her ears. Sunny broke the surface and paddled, doing an impressive job of the strokes and kicks, her Inner Bitch agreed. Within the first few seconds, her imagination drifted back to the nonexistent cottonmouths and the snapping turtles that existed, though not likely around her island. It wandered into territory populated by moray eels, which most certainly didn’t live here, and sharks, and then the Inner Bitch clamped down on that kind of nonsense.

Sunny reached the capsized boat. The shore was a long way off, but she knew she could make it despite the foul pond water crawling over her skin and the phantom chill crawling around inside her.

She reached out, swept back the water, putting more and more distance between her and the island. On one of those forward grabs, something latched onto her hand and deftly sliced off one of Sunny’s fingers.

She staggered ashore, hoarse from screaming, but still screaming anyway. Sunny hauled herself onto the dock, cradling a hand soaked in fresh blood. She held it up, just to be sure. He right pinky finger was gone from the first knuckle up, spitting blood, and showing no sign of stopping.

“
Ohmygodohmygodohmygod
,” she wailed.

The swim back to shore had probably taken less than a minute, but had felt like hours. Whatever had latched onto her hand had gotten a few decent swipes at her feet on the return swim, too. The sole of her right sneaker lay open in a jagged cut, looking like a person with pinking sheers and superhuman lower arm strength had taken a slice at it. There was a good-sized tear in her jeans below a knee that hadn’t been there earlier. Inner Bitch wondered if she’d sustained the rip in her earlier tumble until she saw that wound, too, was weeping blood.

She was bleeding enough to die if she didn’t find a way to stop it. Dry tears stung at Sunny’s eyes. If she wanted to live, and she did, she had to return to the house. She saw very clearly what she needed to do.

Standing, she crossed the dock and picked up the woodland path, no longer looking as quaint as bulbous gray mushrooms rose out of the ground along both sides. Water splashed. Sunny revolved and saw what had attacked her. She should have known. Like the mushrooms, it all made twisted sense.

The crab—or a creature that resembled one—skittered out of the turgid water. The image kept her from passing out, and though the amputated finger throbbed worse than the knife wound, worse than
anything
, the urge to swoon vanished. She wobbled on shaky legs, but Sunny was, Inner Bitch reminded, still standing.

Gray-shelled, with legs and claws a sickly shade of yellow, it was as big as a cat. Another scrambled out after the first, and two more in addition to that. Sunny stopped counting after seven, turned, and fast-walked back in the direction of the cottage. Clicks and scrambling sounds rose out of the woods, and she realized there were quite a few more than seven coming at her.

She made it up the stairs and into the cottage, her formerly-beautiful little island retreat, which now smelled hot and rancid, of rotted crab and mushrooms just like Rona Bustamante’s apartment in Lovell Green. Into the kitchen, toward the stove. Her beautiful propane-fired gas stove, one of the few functioning modern conveniences now that the power had been cut off. Cut off, like . . .

There were few things Sunny Weir hadn’t cooked in her years as a celebrity chef, the everyday and the exotic. Basic comfort food turned up a notch as well as the kind of rare, luxurious ingredients most of the human race’s palate would never experience, like black Périgord truffles and edible gold. But she had never cooked with this one particular meat before, and now her life depended upon it.