That night, poor blighted “Alvin” hit the local news—anonymous tip, I was told—and the following morning, the entire investigation changed. It was hinted at obliquely in a group email that someone else might be assigned lead on the case. Dr. Chalmers pulled Ollie into an early phone conference with senior management ahead of a later phone conference with staffers at the mayor’s office ahead of a press conference that afternoon. Everyone else poked at their work the way Marigold pokes at food she doesn’t want to eat. There was a pervasive expectation that we were all going to be re-tasked just as soon as the higher-ups figured out a game plan. The mood toward me was definitely mixed.
Tucker had finished surveying the grocer but had left 98% of the paperwork unfinished on my desk. I saw the three-inch stack, sighed, and got to work.
Type.
Scan.
Double-verify.
Stamp.
Sign.
Next.
Midmorning, I got a call from our counterparts across the river. It was from a cell phone. I could hear traffic in the background. A man asked if I was the one who reported a mass of dead animals. I said yes and he confirmed the address.
“There’s nothing here,” he said. “Are you sure that’s the correct address?”
I verified the location. I even talked him through the various landmarks—the old used car lot, the kebab joint, and the rest. I asked if they checked upstairs, and he said they weren’t allowed to go.
“Excuse me?”
“Can’t do it,” he said. “That building is condemned. Not sure if you saw the notice. The upper floors are not structurally sound. I can’t put my guys up there.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Not for a bunch of carcasses.”
“But there was a—” I stopped. “At least, I think . . .”
“You think what?”
“Nothing. So, you’re just going to leave it there? Is that safe?”
“We talked to the owner. Rep from the company met us here this morning. He says the place will be demolished by the end of the week anyway.”
“End of the week . . .”
“Yeah. So, just letting you know. Have a good one.”
He hung up and I sat back.
By the end of the week.
I dropped the stack of paperwork on the floor and plugged my phone into my laptop. I downloaded the pictures and used a graphics editor to isolate the symbols on a white background. Then I did a reverse image search. I got millions of results, of course, which the search site proudly told me it had delivered in 0.64ms. And yet, there was almost nothing of relevance. The very top results were stone carvings from some place in Ireland called Newgrange. Neolithic tomb. 5,200 years old, apparently—give or take. That’s older than the pyramids, by the way. Carved on the rocks were swirls and circular labyrinths similar to the ones I saw, but also simpler, like half-remembered copies. The next-closest result was ancient cuneiform, specifically the Sumerian dingir, which was the sign for (little g) god. After that, the valknut, the knotlike symbol of the Norse god Odin. And on and on.
I traded the open web for an online database of scholarly papers. It was expensive, of course, as knowledge always seems to be, but my access was paid for by the government. I wasn’t familiar with anthropological journals, and just like the web, there was such a flood irrelevant results that I wasn’t able to find anything. I gave up and went back to work.
It was another 20 minutes before it hit me.
“I’m acting like a scientist,” I said suddenly to myself.
“That’s a good thing,” one of my colleagues quipped as she passed my cubicle.
I had approached the problem like a question of natural science, where there’s a right answer, or at least a demonstrably more correct one. But the “right” answer didn’t matter. What those symbols originally meant, if anything, didn’t matter. All that mattered was what the people who made them today thought they believed. I began searching esoteric sites, arcane databases, book listings, whatever I could find. I even slummed it on the deep web, which is where I found an old archive. It was defunct, an early attempt to catalog and preserve the internet. The original page was long gone. The copy was dated 1997. It was titled “The Lost Language of the Gods.” There were a handful of broken image links and some text.
From the sound of it, the symbols were part of a much larger set. It didn’t seem to be a written language. In fact, it predated the earliest writing by at least a thousand years. But it was clearly structured. There was a whole organized system, which suggested it was more than decorative. The symbols meant something—only nobody knew what anymore.
I right-clicked on all the broken image blocks and followed them to their source, one by one. Almost everything was dead. But I did eventually find a second piece which explicitly mentioned a book, supposedly penned by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, circa 600 BC. The word “semi-mythical” was used, implying that there might have been a real book, but that much of what we know about it was probably wrong. Supposedly, it was rediscovered as a palimpsest, a work on vellum that had been scraped away in the Middle Ages to make room for something else. Such works are only recoverable with modern technology, typically UV light. In that way, book detectives reveal hidden words much the same way that real detectives use luminol to reveal hidden blood.
The site reassured me that contrary to popular myth, the vellum was not in fact made from human skin, that the volume in question had been discovered in Germany in the 19th century, and that it was hidden underneath the “Zakynthite Atlas.” And that was it.
My phone dinged. I got a single-word text from my wife.
PLEASE
Mom must have phoned the house again. I imagine Marlene wasn’t happy with that. It looked for sure like I was ducking her now. I sent a reply from the bathroom. When I got back to my desk, the red voicemail light on my desk phone was lit. I listened to the message from the medical examiner’s office. I grabbed my cell and called Dr. Pratt. He even answered.
“What’s the good word?”
“We were about to try you again.” They were on speaker. I heard him talking to someone in the background. “Are you sitting down?”
“What?”
“Stomach contents were inconclusive. But all five of your vics were suffering a raging infection.”
“Yeah, it was hard to miss.”
“Any idea what it was?”
“Aren’t you supposed to tell me?”
“It wasn’t something we could culture, but since you were so nice and patient, I took micrographs and emailed them to a colleague of mine at Columbia, who about shit himself.” I heard laughing. “Ray Milhoun. He’s here with me now. Had to see it for himself.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said. “See what?”
“Are you sitting down?” he repeated.
“Yes.” I wasn’t.
“Mycena lucifera. It’s a fungus. Grows on animal tissue. Highly luminescent when flowering, and extremely toxic.”
“Luminescent?” I sat down. “As in bioluminescent?”
“Exactly.”
Some kinds of mushrooms glow in the dark, similar to fireflies and angler fish. There’s even a couple species native to North America, although their light is very faint.
“This one’s exceedingly rare,” he said. “Discovered in 2003. Big mycology hunt in Venezuela.”
There was a long silence. I didn’t know what to say.
“You there?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“It flowers from the corpses of dead animals and emits a sweet stench, not unlike rot.”
“To attract scavengers,” I said.
“To attract wasps,” he corrected.
I stood again.
“The wasps walk on the flowering bodies where the tiny hairs on their legs trap spores. Then they fly away. Sooner or later one of them stings an animal, depositing the spores under the skin, where the toxin inhibits the animal’s local immune response and allows the organism to get a foothold.”
“Wait. You’re saying this is a predatory fungus.”
“That’s the theory.” I heard him talking to his colleague again. “BUT . . . I’ll be damned if I could find any wasp stings on your dead illegals.”
“So how’d it get in in their system?”
“They appear to have eaten it.”
“Eaten?” I was scowling. Deeply.
“Their GI tracts were swollen all the way through.”
“Why would Chinese immigrants have eaten a rare Venezuelan fungus? Where would they even have gotten it?”
“Aren’t you supposed to tell us?” he asked with a chortle. “After the mycology came back, I reexamined the stomach contents. The mushrooms had been cut and cooked before being chewed and swallowed, so they looked completely ordinary. They were mixed with bread and carrots and peas. The toxin would have kicked in quickly. No more than a few hours. After that, they would’ve been in unspeakable pain. Nausea. Cramps. The works.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I said.
“Scotch.”
“Excuse me?”
“We drink Scotch. Single malt.”
“Well, have one for me,” I said.
The two men laughed and that was it.
I immediately hit the academic portal again and found everything written on the species in a single search. It wasn’t much.
What we call a mushroom in everyday life is really just the fruiting body of the organism. The mushrooms on your lawn, for example, erupt from the filamentous network of fungal strands that grow in a wide area under the soil, breaking down and feeding on dead organic matter. The fruiting bodies erupt to spread the powdery spores through the air, similar to how dandelion seeds disperse on the wind. But if the mycologists were right, this fungus actually evolved a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive species of tropical wasp. I’d never heard of anything like it. Just one more way the jungle can kill you, I guess. Along with piranhas and malaria.
Half an hour later later, after I’d read everything there was on the species, I grabbed my computer and barged into Ollie’s windowless office.
“Hang up,” I said as I opened up my computer on his desk and took out my little USB projector.
He looked at me like I was crazy. He hit the mute button on the phone but kept the receiver at his ear so he could listen.
“The press conference is in an hour.”
“We got it,” I said.
He looked at me like I was full of shit. “Folks from the mayor’s office are on this call,” he whispered, as if the phone weren’t muted.
I projected my laptop’s screen on his bare wall. It was on an odd angle at first.
Oliver stared at the image for a minute before his mouth fell open. Then he unmuted his phone.
“Yeah, I’m gonna have to catch you all later.”
He set the phone in the cradle. I could hear the overlapping exclamations right before the line went dead.
“Okay.” I got excited. “It gets a little weird.”
“It’s already weird.”
I brought up one of the web pages I had found. He read the title.
“A mushroom?” he said, scowling. “You want me to tell the mayor’s office that he should go on TV and say we’re looking for a killer mushroom?”
“Well . . . Not exactly.”
“The story on the evening news is about a seven-year-old boy,” he said. “My 16-year-old won’t even eat mushrooms on pizza.” He thought for a moment. “Although if they glowed in the dark she might.”
“You can’t believe this is a coincidence,” I said, pointing.
“Maybe not. But if you take this upstairs, with only the illegals, the first question you’re gonna get is how your theory applies to the kid, who—just being honest—is the only one anyone cares about right now. And your answer is: Dunno. You need confirmation, Alex. A second case, at least.” He sighed. “Come on. You know this. It’s textbook.”
I nodded. He was right, of course. I rubbed my beard, then my eyes under my glasses.
“You look tired,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You sure you’re okay?”
“I dunno.”
“Jesus, man. You gotta step back. Take a break. You can’t move a whole city by yourself. Everybody’s gotta do their bit.”
I leaned against the wall. “At some point, that becomes an excuse.”
He snort-laughed. “Maybe. But insulting the rest of us won’t change anything. The hospital pumped the kid’s stomach, right? Go see if they found something similar. Then we can talk to Chalmers.”
“Yeah . . .”
“Come on. Don’t take it so hard.” He scowled at the projection. “Jesus. Carnivorous mushrooms. Where the hell does something like that come from anyway?”
I switched the screen again. A single picture in a scientific paper of an odd-shaped mushroom erupting from the deflated, furry corpse of a half-submerged capybara.
He read the summary out loud like it was his own obituary. “Native to the Amazon.”
“Is that significant?”
He stared. “Native to the Amazon,” he repeated.
“Ollie?”
He sat up. “Call the hospital. Ask them—”
“You already said that.”
“Right. Then go write up a short summary. Right now.” He dug in his desk for his keys. “Don’t say you cracked it. Say you got a lead or a hypothesis or something. Email it out to the team. Let’s make sure your name is all over this one.” He stood.
“What about you?”
“It’s your theory. I’m not taking credit—”
“No,” I interrupted. “I meant where are you going?”
“I gotta run out. I’ll be back in a bit.”
“Run out? Five minutes ago I couldn’t pry your hands from the phone.”
Oliver grabbed his coat from the rack and scowled at me. “Just write the damned summary.”
“Aren’t you gonna need that?” I asked, pointing to the briefcase he had left on the other side of his desk. I bent over and lifted it, showing him.
“Thanks,” he said. “I can’t remember the glasses on top of my head anymore.”
I held it out and he took it. “You don’t wear glasses.” I looked at him skeptically.
He saw my face. “What?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Nothin’.”
He stopped in the hall. “Good job, by the way. You’re getting the hang of field work. It’s more about the personalities than the science.” And then he was gone.
I walked to my desk and grabbed my tablet—gift from my wife when I got the post-doc appointment. I brought up the Find My Phone app. I watched on the screen as a blue dot in front of the Department of Health building pulled away.
He must have taken a taxi.