What the Pale Growth Remembers
From the personal diary of Mr. Edmund Crale, formerly employed as Head Groundskeeper at Blackwood Manor, Shropshire. The diary was discovered in the potting shed on the estate, wedged behind a rusted cold frame, in circumstances which the estate's solicitors have declined to elaborate upon. Certain pages have been damaged by moisture. Others appear to have been damaged by something else.
3rd March
Arrived at Blackwood this morning on the nine o'clock coach from Shrewsbury. The house is larger than I had expected, and in considerably worse repair than the advertisement suggested — though I confess the advertisement had been vague on the matter of repair, as it had been vague on rather a great many things.
Mr. Aldous Brent, the estate's solicitor, met me at the gate. He did not come through the gate. He stood on the other side of it, passed my key through the iron, and told me the house was not presently occupied, that my duties were to the grounds only, and that I should under no circumstances trouble myself with the eastern cellar.
I thanked him. I asked what the eastern cellar contained.
He said: nothing of consequence to a groundskeeper.
He left before I could form a second question, which in retrospect I suspect was the intention.
The grounds were, in the technical assessment of a man who had spent thirty-one years attending to the soil and cultivation of seven estates across three counties, a disaster of the first order.
Edmund Crale was not, by temperament, a man given to alarm. He had worked through two hard winters at Thornfield and managed the rose gardens at Penhayes through a summer of unprecedented blight. He understood that grounds fell into neglect; he understood that neglect was, ultimately, a problem amenable to diligence, to proper application of labour and knowledge and the correct variety of fertiliser.
What he did not understand, moving through the knee-high grass of Blackwood's eastern lawn on that first grey afternoon, was why the grass grew shorter as he walked, not longer — as though something beneath the ground was drawing it downward by its roots.
He knelt. He pressed his palm flat against the earth.
The earth was warm. This was not itself remarkable. What was remarkable was that the air above it was not.
He stood. He made a note in his small leather journal. He was a methodical man and found comfort in the act of notation, in the reduction of experience to legible record.
The eastern lawn sloped downward toward a stand of yew trees so old that their branches had collapsed inward upon themselves, forming a darkness at their centre that daylight appeared reluctant to enter. Beyond this — Edmund did not discover this until his third day, when the business of noting, mapping, and cataloguing the grounds' more accessible failures had been sufficiently attended to — there was a door.
6th March
The door is set into a low stone structure which I initially took for a disused icehouse, though the stonework is of a character inconsistent with that function — too elaborate, and carved at the lintel with a device I do not recognise. It is not on any plan of the estate that Mr. Brent supplied to me.
I have added it to my own plan.
I have not yet opened it. The lock is of an unusual type, and the key I was given does not fit. I have written to Mr. Brent to enquire.
The device at the lintel appears, in certain lights, to be a depiction of a root system. In other lights, it appears to be a depiction of veins.
Mr. Brent did not reply. Edmund, being both methodical and, when pressed, capable of a persistence that certain of his former employers had described as stubbornness, examined the door for four days before understanding that the lock responded not to a key but to sustained pressure at a specific point on the stone surround — a discovery he made accidentally, leaning against the wall in a moment of frank exasperation.
The door opened inward. The steps beyond it descended.
He had brought a lamp.
The lamp was, he would later note, very little help.
The mausoleum — for that is what it was, though no name appeared on the four stone biers arranged in the chamber's centre, and no inscription marked the walls — was not dark. This was the first thing Edmund understood as he descended the final step and stood at the threshold of the chamber proper.
It was not dark because it was lit.
The light was not his own. The light was the chamber's.
It grew from everything.
9th March
I have been returning each morning for three days. I do not fully understand why.
The growth covers the walls entirely now — or rather, it covered them when I first entered, and I am only now learning to see it properly. It is not a mould, as I first supposed. A mould does not pulse. I use that word with reluctance, as it implies a regularity, an almost respiratory quality, which I am not certain I am not imagining.
The light it produces is pale. Blue, perhaps, or something adjacent to blue — a colour for which I find I do not have the word in English, though I am confident the word exists in some language.
When I descended this morning, I noticed that my breath produced vapour.
The temperature outside was fourteen degrees. I have verified this twice.
Something in the chamber is cold in the way that a thing is cold when it has consumed all available warmth, rather than in the way that a thing is simply cold.
I find I am sleeping better than I have in years.
On the eleventh day, the growth had extended six inches up the steps.
Edmund measured this with a ruler, as any reasonable man would, and recorded the measurement with the date and the time and the barometric pressure, which he had begun monitoring from a small instrument purchased in Shrewsbury without being entirely certain why.
The growth was, upon close inspection, beautiful. He did not permit himself the word until the eleventh day, and even then he recorded it in the diary with a marginal notation reading: this is merely an aesthetic observation and should not be taken to indicate a lapse in professional judgement.
On the fourteenth day, he sat down on the lowest step, the one where the stone met the chamber's earth floor, and he held his lamp close to the nearest wall, and he watched.
The growth moved toward the lamp. Slowly. Too slowly to observe directly — he could only confirm that it had moved by looking away and looking back. But toward. Deliberately toward.
He moved the lamp.
The growth moved with it.
He sat for a very long time in the pale blue light of a thing he had no name for, in a room that should not have existed, on an estate that no one apparently wished to explain to him, and he was aware — the awareness arrived not as a sudden revelation but as the slow emergence of a thing that had been present all along, the way one becomes aware, gradually, of a sound that had not previously registered — that it was not moving toward the lamp.
It was moving toward him.
14th March
I have been attempting to ascertain the nature of the organism through consultation of such reference texts as I have available to me, which are admittedly not numerous, as I am a groundskeeper and not, for example, a mycologist. I have my Practical Guidance on Soil Composition and Horticultural Management (third edition, revised), and my Encyclopaedia of British Garden Plants, and a botanical dictionary which I have found useful in other circumstances but which has proved entirely silent on the matter at hand.
The organism is not in any of them.
I have written to Mr. Brent again. I have also written to a Professor G. Vane at the University of Birmingham, who is, according to an article in The Shropshire Horticultural Review, a specialist in anomalous fungal growth in enclosed environments.
Professor Vane has not replied. Mr. Brent has replied, briefly, to say that I should on no account open the eastern cellar.
I have explained, also briefly, that I have already opened what I believe to be the relevant structure, and that it appears to be a mausoleum.
Mr. Brent's subsequent letter arrived the same afternoon, which suggested a proximity to Blackwood that he had not previously disclosed. It contained three sentences. The first expressed, in formal terms, considerable distress. The second instructed me to leave the mausoleum immediately and permanently. The third was crossed through with a single line of ink, and beneath it, in a different hand — smaller, less assured — someone had written: does it know you yet?
There was no record of Edmund visiting the mausoleum on the fifteenth day. His diary entry for that date described, at unusual length, the correct method for edging a gravel path, and contained three different marginal amendments to a single sentence about the proper angle of the spade.
On the sixteenth day, the diary recorded the following:
Have measured again. The growth on the steps has extended by a further four inches since the eleventh. This morning I observed that it is now present not only on the stone of the steps but on the ground immediately outside the door. A thin margin only. The width of a finger.
It is very cold this morning. The barometer reads nothing I understand.
I noticed, descending, that I could no longer see my breath.
I stood for some time considering what this meant.
I believe I understand, now, what the organism is doing with the warmth it takes from the air.
I believe I understand why the previous groundskeeper's tools are still in the potting shed.
The final entry in the diary was written on the seventeenth day, in a hand that those who had known Edmund Crale's handwriting described, when later consulted, as almost his, in the same way that a copy of a thing is almost the thing itself.
The biers are not empty.
I should have looked more carefully on the first day. I did not look carefully on the first day because I was, I think, not encouraged to look — not prevented, precisely, but deflected, in the way that one is deflected from the corner of a room in which something sits that does not wish to be noticed.
They are not empty, and what occupies them is no longer entirely what it was when placed there.
I find that I am not as disturbed by this as I would have expected. I find, in fact, that I am not disturbed at all, and I am writing this note because I believe that the absence of disturbance is itself a thing I should record, if recording things remains possible, and if the record will be found by someone capable of understanding why its author stopped writing precisely here.
The eastern cellar door at Blackwood Manor was sealed by order of the estate's solicitors in April of the same year. The sealing was performed by a firm from Shrewsbury whose proprietor later declined all further enquiries by citing, simply, the terms of the contract.
The growth on the steps was described, in a brief note submitted by an unnamed party, as having retreated.
The note observed that "retreated" was perhaps the wrong word.
It did not supply the right one.