Cordyceps

You’ve probably heard of the Ophiocordyceps fungus. It’s a nature documentarist’s dream, with a dramatic propagation style, perfect for close ups of dying… well. On the off chance you haven’t heard of it, sit back. It spreads when ants pick up the spores off the forest floor. The ant goes about its business for a bit, but the spores are slowly cutting their way into the carapace of the ant. The ant doesn’t notice, obviously, as it is an ant, and it gets pollen and spores on it all day, but as the spores grow inside of it, it winds up through the nervous system, causing convulsions and strange behaviour. It reaches a hand into the brain, twisting synapses and reason, and takes control of the ant. The ant now goes to the highest place it can, usually a leaf, and it clamps its jaw on. Then it dies, and a great sprout of fungus slowly tears through its head and neck as the ant dies, spreads its spores, and the cycle continues. It’s quite ingenious, really, and as it is a fascinating subject, me and some friends decided to… study it. For school.

Really, that’s all it was! Me and a couple other mushroom nerd friends, Mark, Sam and Ayla, we’re all in the same science class and we had to pick a plant or fungus to take some research notes on, anything we wanted really, and we could try and grow one for extra credit. So we picked Ophiocordyceps, it’s honestly such an interesting mushroom, and we decided to start an ant farm. I, uh, one of the guys got one off of Amazon or whatever, it was one of those see through ones with the gel. Now here’s the funny bit. We decided to get cordyceps spores. We couldn’t find any on the basic shipping sites, obviously, but… Well, we wound up purchasing it off some seedy, weird looking site. Probably not the best idea, but everything checked out… now the site is gone. Classic. At any rate, the cordyceps spores came through in a little package, just some little pollen looking grains, and everything seemed normal. We put the cordyceps into the enclosure, put a stick with some leaves in, and waited for the ants to start acting funny.

The ants kept acting normal and never displayed any signs of brain damage. We waited far past the allotted time for the cordyceps to infiltrate the ant’s little brains, but it never happened. We were all really irritated, as the so-called cordyceps was so expensive, and it had turned out to be a scam. The ants didn’t care, though. They just ran around and ate leaves. Then… uh, then Sam disappeared. It was awful, really. He was such a chill guy, I don’t get why he would do something like that. You probably heard about that. They never found him, unlike the others. They couldn’t figure out, as well, why he did it. As far as anyone knew, he didn’t have problems at home or anything. Maybe he found out what was going on and ran off. I hope he did. I hope he’s ok. Anyway, in the aftermath of his going missing, nobody noticed when Mark started acting weird, and, hold on, because I mean weird.

He started getting on top of things. Not, like, he cleaned up his act and was good at school suddenly, not like that, I mean literally on top of things. I’d go over to his house where he kept the ants and he’d be sitting on the top of the frickin’ fridge! I’d ask him, you know, what’s going on, and he’d act like he had no idea how he got up there. He’d just stop and climb a tree when we went out for a walk, and he’d just be sitting in the highest branch he could, spacing out. The thing that made this all really creepy though is that before this, he was afraid of heights! I asked his mum about it, and she was as confused as I was. We just figured Mark had gotten over his fear of heights.

Then Ayla, the last one of our group, started doing the same thing. This was a week after Mark stopped showing up to school. She even got in trouble for going up to the roof of the school, which was a stupid thing to do, but she’s a little weird so nobody paid it too much mind. Then Ayla stopped coming to school, like Mark had, and we were all pretty nervous at this point. I do remember thinking the mushrooms had something to with it, but that was stupid, after all they were duds right?

At any rate, all my group members were gone, so I had to explain to the teacher what was going on, and I had to carry the rest of the project. I’d been slacking a bit before, so this kind of sucked, but whatever. I turned in my project, got an abysmal grade. Figures. I was a touch pissed at all this, everybody in my group just up and left on me, so I stormed over to Mark’s house after school to ask him what was going on, exactly. Even if he was sick, nobody had even the courtesy to text me, and it had been two weeks, so he was going to get chewed out for that at least. I opened the door and almost dry heaved. It looked like everyone there had been gone for months, not just a fortnight. There was a choking layer of dust, the food had started to go bad in the fridge, and there was a sheet of mouldering grime on the sinktop. The window had been left open, and dark rain streaks sloped down the pale wallpaper. I walked around the house, trying not to breathe through my nose, and called for anyone. It looked to be that everyone had left in a hurry, as the toothbrushes and a lot of clothes were missing. Except for Mark’s stuff. At this point I was just about shitting bricks, as I had just gotten down the hallway to Mark’s room, and was absolutely terrified as to what could be going on in there, what scenes of gore and rot could be in there. Despite my every nerve screaming at me not to, to just leave and call the cops, my hand reached forwards as if possessed. But, as you know, horror stories rely on the protags making stupid decisions, and I opened the door. Inside was a clean, albeit dusty, room.

Until I looked towards his closet and just about screamed. Maybe I did. I have no idea. But.. i-it… It was horrible. I’m sorry. Do I have… to describe it? Ok, alright. This is kinda, well, weird, so bear with me, please. For lack of a better term, he was biting the top jamb of the closet door. Like, really hanging on there. There were score marks running down the wood where his head had tilted back after he lost muscle control. His hands were curled around and back, one was hanging on near his head and the other one looked almost broken near the shoulder. His eyes were wide open and cloudy, and he almost looked like he was screaming. He was basically Spiderman-crouched, backwards, on his dresser. C-can you picture that? Enough info? Oh, yes. The worst part, by far, was when I saw the giant black stalk torn through his skull base and the mushroom that topped it.

I immediately sprinted out of the house and called the police. Then I realized what it was. The cordyceps. It was cordyceps. This led to another nasty realization. I took off my outer clothing, shirt and whatnot, and washed any exposed skin and my hair with the outdoor hose. I changed into my gym clothes that I had in my bag and waited for the police, another twenty five minutes or so. I also texted my parents, in vague terms, that I had found something suspicious at Mark’s, had called the police, and was waiting for them. The cops finally arrived, had me wait outside, all that. The woman that went in to investigate, when she came out though, she mostly just looked disappointed, like something bad had been confirmed to be true. I was confused at first, honestly, but the lady took me aside and said that his parents and sister had been found in very similar conditions in a motel some hours away. I told her about the cordyceps issue as much as I could, a bit frantically, and she nodded and said something about decontamination, etc. It was getting a bit blurry at that point, as the ramifications of what was going on were starting to hit me. I might have cried. I don’t know. I do remember they took me into custody and had me answer questions about the website I got the mushrooms from, the type of ants, the erratic behavior of Mark, Sam and Ayla, and whether I had experienced any symptoms. There was other stuff too, I guess. And now..I’m here. I-I… uh. They told me too- they found Ayla on the roof of a building. They asked anyone with symptoms of memory loss or the urge to climb to turn themselves in… and… Oh God, it’s my fault. I suggested the stupid mushroom project and now they’re dead because of me. I killed them. I killed them. That was my fault, now they’re gone. They’re gone. I can’t imagine how it must have been. I.. I. Uh. C-can I leave? Please. I’m done, I don’t have anything else. I swear. That’s the whole thing. Thank… you.

Oh. Wait. I forgot.

They never found Sam.