The Library

Sonny

Darkness had settled over Stinkhorn Manor and its grounds by the time we’d reached Jenny.

I’d guided Claude by the light of the torch and from memory alone, using the fungi I’d spotted earlier as landmarks. Luckily it was only a short walk back—approximately three kilometres—and we didn’t get lost. I couldn’t very well suggest we used the compass, because that would have meant admitting to Claude I’d stolen the thing whilst he’d tugged on his trousers.

Like everything, I didn’t intentionally steal it. My eyes had caught the evening sun glinting off the brass, and my fingers seemed to move of their own volition. I’d return it, like I planned to return all of his possessions. I just wasn’t sure when that would be.

When I got back to my room, I had the quickest shower known to fae, and replied to two emails—both from Mash, both about my lecture slides—and a text message from Goldie.

Goldie:

This is more amusing than anything else, but I thought you should know. Someone has stolen your pee-bale.

Before our trip to the pool, my afternoon had been filled with virtual student meeting after virtual student meeting. Unlike the in-person versions that usually took place in my office, we managed to keep the online counterparts fairly brief. Though most students hadn’t required too much input from me anyway. For most, it seemed they were just checking off yet another mandatory box on their academic to-do lists. Which was fine. Great even. They didn’t desperately need me, and I wasn’t at risk of pissing anyone off by spending more time here with Claude. Which I really, really wanted to do.

Yes, we were learning more about the mushroom magic and the ritual, and I could spend an eternity studying this magic house alone, but it was the moments with only Claude and me, me and Claude, that had me wishing the twentieth would never arrive. That I could spend longer here.

Swimming with him at the waterfall had been like all of my fantasies come to fruition. Claude had been so different from every version of him I had met before: the taciturn U-Rail conductor, the guy crying out for help in the emails, the grumpy land owner forced to share a bed with me, the sprouts stan, the “I take no shit from estate agents” fae. They were all great. But the silly, naked, cannonballing guy who fell to pieces under my touch—that was the real Claude.

It had felt like there was only us.

No city of Remy. No university. No students. No papers. No academic journals. No Dr Sorrel. No overarching “save the planet with ancient shroom magic” theme.

There was also no pollution out here either, or litter. The air was clean and breathable, and besides the lawyer and agent, I hadn’t seen another vehicle for weeks.

Just me and him and the sunset. And nature in all its breathtaking majesty.

And didn’t I choose mycology because of my love for nature?

How had that landed me in the second largest city in Borderlands of all places?

Remy was fine. Good if you were young—or Mash—but there was a considerable deficiency of nature.

I dressed in clean PJ’s and headed over to Claude’s room, expecting him to have done the same—showered and changed for bed—but he was still wearing his suit and a very serious, sombre expression.

“Gods, who died?” I asked, stepping onto the plush carpet of Claude’s lounge area.

“Please can you take a seat on my couch,” he said.

My adrenaline spiked. Was he about to ask me to leave? Say that what we did by the pool earlier should never have happened?

“I have something I need to tell you.” He paused, then rolled his eyes. “Fine, we. We have something to tell you.”

I sat down. Kept my gaze fixed on him.

“Jenny would like to apologise,” he said, sitting next to me.

Okay, wasn’t expecting that. “For what?”

“See, I told you he wouldn’t care.” Claude eyed the ceiling, obviously talking to the house. He paused, then clicked his tongue. “It said it thinks it’s made an inhospitable environment for you—for us—and it would like to make amends.”

I frowned back at him, for once lost for something to say.

“Basically, it doesn’t want us venturing off its land to... do things, because it’s lonely... You just told me you’re lonely. I can’t lie, remember?... Right, you were lonely, and now you’re not because Sonny and I are here... No, but you just said—” Claude shook his head and shot me a look which loosely translated to Jenny’s been haranguing me since we got back, and I’m about up to my wit’s end. “Anyway”—he raised his voice—“Jenny said if we would like a tropical lagoon to... frolic in, it can magic one for us within the grounds.”

Claude couldn’t maintain eye contact after the word frolic.

“We were only following the compass,” I added.

“Right, that’s what I said.” Claude looked up to the rafters again. “See? Neither of us knew where we were going. How were we to know your boundary ends two-point-six-five kilometres west?”

I gently cleared my throat. “So...” I gathered all my breath in my cheeks while I considered what I’d say next. Or rather, how I’d say it. I didn’t want the house to take offense. It seemed to have the ability to make life hellish, if it so chose. “I’m not sure what happened at the waterfall earlier would have happened if we’d been on Stinkhorn grounds.”

Claude waved a hand, which I presumed was a gesture aimed at the house.

“It’s simply that I don’t think we would enjoy having an audience,” I clarified, giving up all pretence of speaking through my fae companion and aiming the conversation at the walls.

Claude nodded, then sighed. “Jenny says we don’t need to worry about it watching us. That it’s working in a more supervisory role. It wants to reassure you—us—it has no sexual organs and does not possess the ability to even become aroused, let alone get off whilst watching us... get off. It would like to add that it’s aromantic and does not, nor will it ever, hold romantic feelings towards either of us, or any of its occupants.” He looked up. “Did I get everything?”

“All I’m saying,” I said to both of them this time. “Is that Jenny doesn’t need to apologise, but I still feel weird about a sentient house seeing me come.”

“Agreed,” Claude said. He nodded along to Jenny’s silent-to-me response. “Okay, it says it can put its mind inside a little box so it dampens what it sees and hears.” Another pause. “It doesn’t conceal everything, but it’s not as clear as before.”

“Sure,” I said. I felt weird about the house watching, but that didn’t mean it would stop me from doing anything sexual with Claude. So long as he initiated it.

That was the crux of it. It wasn’t fair for me to initiate something and then fuck off back to Remy for the rest of forever. It felt like I was playing with his emotions.

Because if he was anything like me, he was already halfway to falling in love.

Ah, who was I kidding? One gentle shove in the right direction and I was already there. Full-way in love.

I was toeing a dangerous line, but a few more weeks and there’d be no more Claude and Sonny. No more us. We would go back to our lives as they were before—or not before—but very much separate.

Though, if I learned anything from my time at the waterfall, Claude would be foolish to give all this up and move back to the dank, dark, dirty city, only to have his colleagues forget his name, to have passengers yell at him, to go back to living in a one-bed basement flat instead of this incredible palace.

“That’s absolutely fine with me. I’m up for whatever you are.” I turned my face to hide the blush creeping up my cheeks, but not before I caught Claude’s one-sided smile.

“Excellent, well,” he said, straightening the lapels on his jacket. “Jenny asks if you’re still interested in gaining access to the library. I’ll admit I’d forgotten all about the library. I guess we don’t need it anymore, but Jenny says there are numerous books about mushrooms and some about mushroom magic.”

An excited squeak left my throat. “Oh, yes, please.”

“That’s settled then. Tomorrow we will go to the library. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a few moments, I need to shower and wash the lagoon from my skin.”

“I’ll wait for you in bed,” I said, then immediately closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see Claude’s reaction. It sounded a lot saucier than I’d meant it to.

“Okay,” he replied with a laugh, before he disappeared into the bathroom.

That night, after Claude got into bed he rolled onto his side, leaving his hand in the middle again, I wanted to reach for it. I wanted to kiss him goodnight, cradle his jaw, tell him how incredible earlier had been, tell him—in detail—all the ways I was looking forward to exploring his body. But it was too much. Too dangerous.

I might never recover.

“Night, Sonny,” he said, snuggling down under the covers. “Thank you for today. I had a lot of fun.”

“Me too,” was all I said in reply.

I woke before Claude, desperate to pee, so I tiptoed out of his bed, down the staircase, out of his rooms, and into my bathroom where, after peeing, I noticed two things. One, the house had magicked my douche onto the glass shelf in the shower alongside my regular cleansing products.

And two, overnight I had grown a full beard.

I gazed into the mirror and scrubbed my hands through it. It was a short beard, each strand only measured three or four millimetres, but it was thicker, more lustrous than any beard I’d grown before. My actual hair seemed a little longer too, and a lot more unruly.

Would Claude like the beard? Or should I shave it off? I tilted my head from left to right, admiring the thickness of it. Something I ate, maybe? I foraged a few mushrooms yesterday, swallowed them raw after picking them straight from the ground.

The ground that just so happened to be embedded with ancient shroom magic. Enough to power an entire sentient mansion.

No wonder I had grown a beard.

I should make a note of that. Do some further research into the properties. It could help people suffering with alopecia. Not that I needed to add more research projects to my extensive list, but maybe it would give me a decent excuse to come back to Stinkhorn Manor in the future.

As long as I could convince the dean to grant me a few years’ sabbatical.

But that would mean certain heartbreak, wouldn’t it? There’d be no way to escape the inevitability. I couldn’t spend that amount of time with him and not fall in love. And it would hurt even more when I’d have to leave.

Because I had to leave, right? I couldn’t stay here indefinitely. My career was in Remy. My whole life was in Remy—the paper I had been working on since forever, my friends, my apartment, my allotment.

I shaved the beard off.

“Good morning,” Claude said, once I joined him in the guest house. He had his usual plate of eggs royale in front of him. But by the looks of things, he was still on his first serving.

“Good morning.” I sat opposite him.

Within seconds, Willow placed my breakfast on the table. Waffles with chicken of the woods and syrup. “The beard suits you,” they said.

“Beard?” Claude paused his fork halfway to his mouth.

I passed my hand over my face. Maybe it had grown back in the thirty minutes since I’d shaved it. It hadn’t. Willow must have had a sixth sense for those types of things.

“Every day you have the same breakfast. Don’t you ever get bored?” I blurted out, changing the subject. I couldn’t say why, but I didn’t want to talk about the beard.

“I guess not. If I became bored, surely Oggy and Willow would serve me something different.”

Hmm. That made perfect sense. They’d never failed to deliver on my cravings before.

“Plus, I enjoy knowing what to expect,” he said. “I like the reliability of it. Eggs royale is incomparable to anything else. Why risk the potential disappointment of a mediocre deviation when I know I’m guaranteed perfection?”

Damn, that made so much sense. Why did it make me want to kiss him? Sweep everything—eggs royale included—to the floor and throw him onto the table.

The library was perfect. Utterly perfect. The epitome of an ancient hallowed chamber bulging with the knowledge of generations. Shelves lined every wall, floor to cathedral-height ceiling, crammed to near bursting point with books. Smaller shelves, tables, and trolleys were dotted around the place, fattened with even more books. The only natural light filtering into the space was through the glass skylights.

“Are you crying?” Claude asked me, as we stood in the doorway, too awestruck to step over the threshold and enter the room.

“Yes.” I wiped my face on the heel of my palm, not even remotely embarrassed. “I just really love books.”

Claude took my hand in his and guided me into the centre of the library.

I spun around in slow circles as I tried to take everything in and not let myself succumb to the totally overwhelming feelings. “Where do I begin?”

I ran my finger along the spines lining the closest shelf. Leather-bound tomes with gilt titles, some in foreign languages, some so old the leather had dried and flaked away. Fairy tales, and classic literature, and epic fables. It appeared I was in the fiction section.

Suddenly, I was so grateful for my two-thousand-year fae life expectancy. If I were human, there’d be no way I’d get through even a fraction of these. I’d still struggle with all the time I had left.

“Jenny asks what books you’d like to start with,” Claude said. He pulled out a leather-padded wooden chair from a nearby table and sat down. Evidently, this trip to the library had been solely for my benefit.

“Got anything on the history of this place? About Stinkhorn Manor?”

Claude was quiet, but a smile crept across his face. An unnatural darkness fell over the room, as though a cloud had drifted in front of the sun, and a light switched on. A lamp, like one of those desk lights with bendable necks, illuminated a section on some distant shelves about two feet tall and three feet wide.

I spared Claude an excited, curious glance, and I practically ran to the light.

“Oh, my gods. Oh, my gods,” I whined, openly bawling now, as I retrieved tome after tome and stacked them into my arms. I brought the pile of books over to the table Claude sat at and pulled out a chair.

A history of Agaricus Town Centre

Secrets and Traditions of the Agaricus Townsfolk

The Legend of Stinkhorn Manor

A Collection of Documents pertaining to Stinkhorn Manor

Phallus Impudicus: Why the Stinkhorn Mushroom is Supreme and all other Mushrooms are Craptastic

For the next few hours, or possibly days, I read. Claude sat at the other end of the table joining the edge pieces of a new jigsaw puzzle. He would pause often, leave the library for a few seconds—though in reality it was closer to fifteen minutes—and would return with chai lattes for us both, or muffins, again for us both, or an empty notepad, sticky tabs, and a variety of stationery for me.

I had one-to-ones to attend later that day, but I couldn’t seem to tear my eyes away from the texts.

There were family trees—Claude’s family trees, stretching back millennia. Angus his father was there, as was Angus his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, all called Angus. The Stinkhorn line ended with Claude.

It entered my thoughts that Claude might want to continue this line to keep the house alive, but I batted it aside. Another problem for another day.

There were ledgers recording every person to have ever stayed in Stinkhorn Manor, and separate ledgers for the guest house. There were planning applications, floor plans, blueprints, letters to the council, all relating to the B&B, and yet nothing on the construction of Stinkhorn Manor itself. I couldn’t work out how the house came to be. It seemed as though one day Jenny was not there and then the next, it was.

“Are you organic, then? Or were you designed and built? And if it’s the latter, were you given glamour, or did you grow into it? Because of it? And how are you sentient?” I said to the house, and because Claude had paused his puzzle assembling to stare at me, I added, “I need to know.”

A book wiggled itself free from the pile and dropped into my lap. I guessed it was Jenny’s way of telling me I’d find the answers in there.

The cover was a forest-green, cotton-like fabric with gold-embroidered stinkhorn mushrooms. Gods, they were so phallic it was impossible to look at them and not blush a little. The gilt script read: AMOR SUI VITAS SALVAT, the house’s motto, and Gaius Valens , which presumably was the author. The pages were aged and yellowing, and the text was all in another language. I recognised the language as the one we used for plants. The one the motto was written in.

“Okay, thank you,” I said, puffing out a determined breath, and opening my new notepad to page one.

Shamelessly Phallic

Hyphal knots

Glamour

Germination

Some of the words I’d understood from my everyday mycological usage and could therefore translate easily. I didn’t understand everything—partly because of the dead language, and partly because it had been written at a time when printing presses omitted certain letters from its typeface. Ss were Fs and Ts were Ys, and so on. I had to write things down several times before they made any real sense. But also because back in those days, nobody ever got to the fucking point when they wrote something.

Why not just say, the house is organic, borne from magic? Why say, the residence in question is of the most natural sort, brought forth by sorcery both worthy and noble in nature? Why?

And I wasn’t even sure that’s what it said. Took me over thirteen scribbled attempts to decipher that one. There was a good chance I was projecting what I wanted to read.

My pen scratched against the paper as I copied another sentence out over and over.

Magia in sporis est.

Sporis had to be spores, right? And magia must be magic. Magic spores.

The magic in spores? The magic is in the spores?

In. The. Spores.

Spores from where though? I flipped the book closed to look at the embroidered stinkhorn mushroom on the cover.

The house’s spores?

Was that what Angus Stinkhorn did twice a year? Collect the house’s spores and redistribute them to the ley lines? Like a... fly?

Was that what Claude would become?

“Are you organic?!” I said to Jenny, scare jumping Claude. I mouthed an apology to him, which he waved away, smiling.

“It says it doesn’t know for sure,” Claude said. “It remembers being smaller, when it only had a few thirty-foot turrets.”

“Jenny has grown, then?”

“Must have. It said nobody has ever come to do any construction work on it. Except on The Night Cap.”

I scribbled a note in my notepad. “Is it still growing?”

Claude shrugged. “It doesn’t think so. Said it’s been the same size for a half a century-ish. Said it’s difficult to tell time when you’re a house and were created before the existence of modern calendars.”

Still, just because the house’s growth had stabilised, didn’t mean it wasn’t responsible for the redistribution of magic to the soil.

“Created? As in built?” I asked.

“It asks if you remember being born?” Claude put on a slightly whiny voice, giving me a tiny insight into how the house sounded. “How can the mycologist know he’s organic? How does he know he’s not a deepfake Sonny robot programmed to replicate the real Sonny who’s lying comatose in some battery pod miles underground? I’m sorry,” he added at the end, and I knew the apology was from him and not the house.

“I’m just trying to figure all this out. I really wish I could speak to you, Jenny. That I could hear what you say.” I rested my elbow on the table and cradled my forehead in my palm.

“It says, ‘Naw, sweet.’ And it wishes you heard it, too.” Claude moved to the empty chair next to me, abandoning his puzzle. “Why is it important?” Again Claude was speaking, it wasn’t Jenny asking. His voice was soft, mindful.

“Honestly?” I said, like I could be anything besides honest. “Vibes. Super scientific, I know, but if the house is natural, if it’s the fruiting body of a magical network of mycelium, then perhaps we are looking at something a little more rudimentary. Perhaps we’re looking at spreading spores, or spore germination. I’m pretty sure this paragraph”—I showed Claude the page in the book—“says the magic is in the spores.”

Like someone had stabbed him in the bottom with a pin, Claude jumped to his feet. “Jenny says warmer!”

My chair legs scraped the wooden floor, and I stood just as abruptly. “Oh, my gods.”

“Does that mean it’s not the lightning?” Claude looked up at the glass ceiling and rolled his eyes. “It can’t say. Sure.”

“Jenny, I need a ladder!” I was already running back to my rooms before I heard—through Claude—what its answer would be.