That the fungi are so steeped in death might account for much of their mystery and our mycophobia. They stand on the threshold between the living and the dead, breaking the dead down into food for the living, a process on which no one likes to dwell. Cemeteries are usually good places to hunt for mushrooms. (Mexicans call mushrooms carne de los muertos — “flesh of the dead.”)
–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma
He awoke in darkness, on a brick plain.
He remembered the journey — the tunnel of light, and the descent into the underground. He remembered the things he had seen on the way — maddening half-finished obelisks and pyramids, painstakingly constructed from countless perfectly regular stones; gargantuan trees, their leafy branches like grass-covered platforms, their trunks descending into valleys so deep that they vanished from his sight; and everywhere, everywhere, the endless alkali expanse of brown brick.
He remembered the life he had had before, a normal, dull, workaday existence as a capable but unexciting craftsman. He almost remembered the heart attack — but not yet, not yet.
He remembered the woman’s face.
He stood, quietly, dusting off his overalls.
“Mamma mia,” he muttered.
***
The blocks mocked him.
Everywhere he turned, they were there, hovering before him, frustratingly out of his reach, but this was perhaps not that different from the mirages he saw on the horizon, a few trees or a fence, which remained the same distant background images no matter how long he spent heading towards them. But the trees were just trees. They meant nothing, indicated nothing. The blocks had a message for him — but it was this:
?
Just that. An endless expanse of question marks, as far as he traveled in this hideously empty land, echoing his confusion and fear. He felt like punching them. He considered it. His fist clenched and unclenched. He turned, to regard one directly…and something moved.
He recoiled, falling back, nearly spraining a wrist on the unforgiving stone, then scrambling away, to his feet. Through the cracks of the brick protruded a thin red stem, joined by another, and then another, as they crawled snakelike over the ground and wrapped around one another and grew large in folding and plaiting, and stood upright and fixed him with one mycotoxic eye.
“Greetings,” the fungus said to him. “I am Toad. Who are you, that you have come here?”
“It’s me,” he said. “Mario.”
***
They walked. Fungi can’t walk, of course, but the growth before him — it — and the falling away of dead matter behind it provided a reasonable facsimile. Mario kept moving, desperately trying to avoid the necessity of further conversation, but eventually his need to know overpowered his desire to avoid knowing.
“What is this place?” he asked.
“This is the Mushroom Kingdom,” Toad said.
“So you’re…you’re all mushrooms,” Mario said.
“We are the dead,” Toad said blithely. Mario stopped, and turned to look at him. “We were people once…ordinary people, with lives and dreams. This is what we have become. Not animals, not plants. Something…in between.”
“So why am I here?” Mario asked.
Toad just looked at him.
He remembered the heart attack.
***
When he was able to stand again, he coughed, struggled to his feet, refusing Toad’s offered fungal hand. “So is that what I’m going to become? Something like you?”
“No,” Toad said. “You have a different purpose.” He gestured. “Do you know this girl?”
He saw the woman’s face again.
“Yes,” Mario said. “I saw her, when I came here.”
“She needs you,” Toad said. “You must go to her. Save her. She is in danger.”
“She’s here?” he asked. “Who is she?”
“She is the Princess,” Toad said.
“So she’s a mushroom? Like you?”
“She is the Princess,” Toad repeated. “You are the Hero. You must save her. That is why you have come.”
“That’s not why I have come,” Mario said. “I’m dead, right? I’m dead, and that’s why I’m here.”
Toad just looked at him.
“So what is this bullshit?” he said, feeling his face grow red. “There’s no princess, I’m not a hero. This is all just meaningless. Why are you doing this? Why are you lying to me? What if I don’t want to be a hero?”
“That is exactly what your brother said,” Toad replied.
Mario stopped dead. “Luigi’s here? Where is he?”
And he saw it — the endless, roiling, dark sea, filled with monstrous, writhing, inhuman life, and his brother, treading wearily along the ocean floor, lungs aching for breath that would never come, desperately avoiding the creatures that surrounded him, lost forever in a hopeless, unending odyssey. The Minus World.
And he rose to his feet, when he was able to rise again, and he nodded, and said, grimly, “All right. Where is she?”
And fireworks exploded in the sky above them.
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