Have you ever seen those videos of fungus or mycelium sped up? The veins of fruiting fungus spidering out like arteries in the body? How they bloat and swell and then settle in thin webs and slivers, reaching and stretching across whatever surface they have multiplied upon? This is what we open with. My minds eye is filled with these scenes and as I focus on what it is I may be looking at, I realise that what I am watching has entirely shifted and I experience the arial and stunning view of the dreary long-stretched landscape of a river delta, winding and spanning like blood vessels. At the far distance ahead of me is the grey and dreary coast. The topography, flat and seemingly endless in the other direction is only met against the stormy coast where silver and black skies dance with unthreatening rainclouds, boding no real threat but soothing and chilled mists. This scene only lasts for a moment before I find myself knee-high in the waters of the river delta.
Somewhat beyond my reach is the weathered boards of a long and expansive threading walkway. Nearby there is a ladder, and I wade through the waters to reach it. The rungs are damp but I grip and pull myself up to the boardwalk where I look one direction into an expanse that resembles a village. While no such thing was viewable from my initial imagery of the river delta itself, it appears that among some of the waterways clusters of houses in either twos or fives or even sixes seemed to have been erected along the boardwalk. If they were closer knitted it would almost be an entire suburb of tall-standing houses, hiked on strong though deeply barnacle encrusted pillars and water bitten ropes.
I approached a house. Knocked upon the door. When it opened, I was not greeted whatsoever but the thousand yard empty stare of a sodden corpse stood before me. The sallow flesh was damp with unknown slick and the hair was matted. How old the corpse was, I did not know, but as sodden as it was, it was not bloated with prolonged exposure to deep waters, but hollow and dreary like a drenched rat. It was not shy when the door opened and the ruins of the insides. Overturned tables and nautical tools were in disarray but I was not focused enough on those items to pay too much mind to them. The voice came from the pallid lips of the corpse. “You may not create a net without tying many knots. Without a net, you yield no catch.”
The door closed.
I approached the house beside it and knocked once more. I could not recall if the first body had been a man, woman, or other. But the body that answered had been a woman. Her body was sallow and an eye was quite gone, but upon the entire left side of her face sprouted tons of thoracica, encrusted and deeply pitted. Her mouth opened, but the same voice greeted me. “To cast anything is to admit that you may reel in nothing. To throw the spear or lease the arrow is to know it may be lost forever. But a line always returns if reeled.”
The door closed.
I paused and spent a bit wandering the expanse of the board walk. It stretched for tons and tons of miles, all pocked with small clusters of gathered houses. I made my way towards the ocean coast, though it was still yet so far into the distance. I noticed the water level had begun to rise. I came upon a house perched on the edge of the main expanse of the boardwalk, the wood here soggy and giving way with gentle groans as I approached the steps. The window beside the door was alight with bottles and candles within them. And I mean it. As one would imagine sticking a candle stick into the neck of a bottle as a makeshift candlestick, the bottles had been hung from their bottoms, necks facing down. Crammed within them were candles, all lit against the depression glass of hues of green and blue. I made an outwards comment that “That isn’t quite how physics works,” and knocked upon the door.
A child answered, hands swollen and bloated, body stiff and algae peeling from a scalped head where bloodless tissue was exposed. It was as if the child had fallen from somewhere high enough where the impact upon his head scraped and peeled away flesh and matted hair where it now hung limply and loosely, drenched in whatever moisture had enveloped the so-called town. The voice was the same as the other houses. “A tied boat may still yet sink.”
The door closed.
I got the impression that I was looking for something in particular here, though what it was, I did not know. But I then continued my search, each house like a morbid fortune cookie being cracked open by the bodies of the previous tenants. I came upon another, marked by strange discoloured cloth that blew with heavy weight of dampness in the amble winds. The window on the side of the house as I approached the door was broken and shattered, a matted mess of long black hair clung wetly to the shards of broken glass, draped over the shattered remains of the sill. Ancient blood was caked down the rickety wood and left an unsightly scene before me. I knocked. The man that answered was thin and wiry, neck in a place it ought not have been and limbs fucked in ways that make the body wince at the sight of such disjointed and snapped limbs. It reminded me of a tree branch. Ever taken a thin whip of a branch and just smacked it against the thick unyielding body of a great oak or pine just to watch it snap in two with some degree of satisfaction? That is what this man’s arms looked like. But they were still yet held together by sinewy ligaments and tissues.
“How far are you willing to submerge yourself as you grasp for what lies in the depths?”
“I would drown myself,” I answered.
The thing that was puppetting these bodies seemed to contemplate this. “What is it do you think you seek?”
“I do not seek anything,” I replied, “I desire something that does not need seeking for I am satisfied by exploration. But the thing that would bring me great satisfaction is something I will recognise when I see it.”
It thought about this, still and utterly silent aside from the misting rains drenching my chilled flesh. Goose pimples had erupted up and down my body as the clothes I wore really began to feel the chill of the exposure. It seemed satisfied by this answer and weakly lifted an arm, gesturing in an acute manner the direction I was encouraged to go. I looked in that direction and when I looked back, the door quietly clicked shut.
I had carried on, and passed by a house with ten sodden heads all crammed into the windowsill, empty dead eyes unblinking and fogged like the overcast skies. They were watching me, I knew, but for what I did not understand. I wanted to knock on that door, to see which one had answered, and so I rounded the corner and approached the steps. I knocked. The figure that opened the door was not any of the ten heads I had seen when I walked by, but an elderly robed figure with hair long since falling out, fallow and wispy thing. “There is no birth without water.”
The door shut after a long delayed pause. I had expected more. But that was all that would be revealed to me.
Disappointingly, I had been wandering along the boardwalk, the water having risen to a metre below the dock, swallowing all the plantlife and the delta itself as it was engulfed in water. Pillars and stones stood out across the water plains beyond me and I was brought out of the dream by my alarm.