The Unique Culture of Stinkhorn Manor

Sonny

The silver of the blade grew red within the flame. I held it there for a few seconds longer, then removed it, let it cool, and wrapped it in a sterile linen. It would be impossible to kill off all the microorganisms. It always was when working outside of a lab, but especially whilst operating up a ladder at thirty, forty, fifty feet.

I did the same with a pair of metal tweezers, passing the points through the fire until they glowed, and I repeated these steps with a further four sets of scalpels and tweezers. I packed them in a plastic wrap along with five new petri dishes, some disposable latex gloves, and a permanent marker, and stuffed them inside my backpack.

“Ready?” I called into Claude’s room, letting myself in.

He rose from his couch, tossing the jigsaw-puzzle lid back onto the coffee table. “What’re we doing?”

“It’ll be easier to show you rather than explain, but I need you.”

“Really?” Claude’s shoe snagged on the edge of his rug and he stumbled forward a few steps.

I caught him in my arms and stopped him from hitting the floor. His gaze caressed my face, flicking from my eyes to my lips and back again. We both held our breath.

The moment would have been romantic—should have been romantic.

Had I not pickpocketed him.

Why was I like that?

My hand, without instruction from my brain, slipped into the inside pocket of his jacket, closed around its treasures and removed them from his person before I had even a fraction of a second to reconsider my actions.

“I’m so sorry. I never meant to pickpocket you. I have no control over this sometimes.” I wanted to be upfront and honest about what I’d done. He deserved that much at least, and I didn’t want any secrets between us—besides my rapidly growing affection for him—so I held my palm up, showing him the spoils.

And immediately, I prayed Jenny would read my sudden and overwhelming, soul-deep need for the ground to open up and swallow me whole.

Claude’s freckles glittered. “Ah, fuck, it’s not what you’re thinking. I mean...” He blew out a breath, and I looked down again at what was unmistakably a condom. In its golden wrapper. An equal parts nerve-racking and exhilarating XL printed on the foil. “I’m not being presumptuous. I only thought of being prepared.” He hid his eyes behind his fingers.

“I thought the same,” I said, and removed from the front pocket of my shorts a travel-sized bottle of lube. “Just in case we go skinny dipping again.”

Claude motioned to say something. His mouth opened and stayed open, but no sound came out. He reached forward and took the bottle of lube from my hand. Maybe testing it to see if it was real.

A smile blossomed on my face. I stopped it forming all the way by catching my bottom lip between my teeth.

“Damn,” Claude said. “When you bite your lip like that...” He let his eyes travel over my body, though they froze when he noticed the straps on my backpack. He tucked the condom and the lube back into his jacket pocket and straightened his lapels. “Good to be... ready for whatever situation. What did you need me for?”

“Right,” I said, shaking my head and loosening my thoughts. “Yes. I want to see if I can collect some of Jenny’s spores, and make some cultures from them. From it, the house.”

“Well, that sounds a lot more important than—”

I didn’t let Claude finish his sentence. I pulled him towards me by the lapel of his jacket and kissed him. Soft and deep. Wet, hot, and breathy. Then, I pushed a gap between us. “It is very important work, but I needed to do that first.”

“The spores on fruiting bodies of fungi are usually found in the gills. You know, those frilly bits underneath the cap,” I said. Claude nodded along as though I wasn’t mushroom-splaining his own species to him. “With stinkhorns, it’s in a smelly, sticky substance called gleba at the top. It smells like shit, basically, and attracts flies, which then help spread the spores around to other decaying parts of the forest. If Jenny is okay with it, I’d like to collect the teeniest sample of this liquid. I want to see if spreading these spores onto the tablet at the ley lines is part of the ritual, but I also really, really, like... super really need to create a culture so I can analyse it in my lab.”

“Okay.” Claude said the word as though there should be a question mark at the end.

We were standing in the gardens of Stinkhorn Manor, looking up at one of the mid-sized turrets. In the late afternoon sun, it appeared faded pink, with a yellow... cap? Head? Roof?... Still couldn’t decide which term was most appropriate.

“So, if you could ask Jenny, pretty please, for its consent?” I looked at him, but he remained silent.

“Jenny said, ‘Knock yourself out, but don’t get too excited.’”

“Why not?”

Claude listened. “It doesn’t produce spores, never has. But you’re more than welcome to scrape its walls and put them in your little dishes. Says... No, I’m not repeating that.” He huffed out an exasperated breath. “Fine, it says it’s been an age since it’s had a decent wall scraping.”

“Do you have gleba, Jenny?” I watched Claude for the house’s answer.

“No, apparently not.”

I lifted my arms up and slapped them down at my sides. Then what the hell was the house?

The soil samples I’d already collected from around the grounds showed me there was life. I’d seen it with my own eyes. Minerals, microorganisms, mycorrhizae, and weensy particles of glittering glamour. If the magic wasn’t coming from the house itself, where was it coming from? Fungi from the fields? And if so, how was there enough magic in those tiny mushrooms to power an entire thirty-turreted, soul-reading, sentient mansion who conjured ice rinks and atriums and butt-plug storage closets at will?

I needed to see it for myself. Needed to take some samples from the house’s structure to study more closely. Not that I didn’t trust a house I couldn’t hear, but... okay, whatever, I didn’t trust the fucking house.

I was sure I’d had it sussed and then it goes and says no spores. No fucking spores. How was that possible?

How did it get to be this size? Would it ever produce spores?

Now I was getting annoyed.

“Jenny, I believe I asked for a ladder!”

A spindly, rickety wooden ladder popped into existence against the wall of the house.

Claude spoke before I could. “Jenny, if you let him fall, I swear to the gods I will stand at the top of the cliff beside the waterfall and I will watch you crumble to dust on the solstice.” He paused. Folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t care if it’s not as dramatic as crumbling to dust. Either way, I’ll do diddly squat as you turn into substrate.”

Substrate. He’d been listening to me. Damn, that was way hotter than it should have been.

Beside us, the ladder transformed into a much sturdier looking metal tripod version.

“Thank you, Jenny.” I said. I picked up the ladder, moved it a few feet to the left, and extended it to its full height.

Claude positioned himself to brace the bottom of the ladder and I climbed up. I didn’t look down. I wasn’t afraid of heights, but I wanted to focus on the task at hand: collecting samples of the house’s structure to make cultures. I tried not to think about Claude, steadying the ladder despite it being one of the safest brands for elevated work. Not to think about how he white-knighted that entire moment without me saying or asking for anything.

I reached the top section and stopped. The wind was stronger up here, the waning sun still beat down on my shoulders. The view stretched out for miles, and I wondered if I might glimpse the pool and the waterfall. I couldn’t see them from this angle, but maybe when I sampled one of the other turrets.

Adrenaline began pooling in my legs, making them feel jellylike. Wasn’t afraid of heights—I’d been up this high before to collect fungi from treetops, and rotting beams, and once a rock face I’d had to abseil down—didn’t mean I enjoyed it.

Here, the turret’s stalk morphed into its cap, but unlike a real stinkhorn mushroom, the tip was dry and odourless. No spores. Damn. I looked around at the other turrets, but from this distance they all appeared the same.

The wall didn’t feel organic at all. It felt... like a wall. Cold hard stone, roughly rendered. It snagged at the dry skin on my fingers. The transition from stem to cap was seamless, no sign of organic matter, no sign of gills, or gleba, or any spore distribution system.

“Fuck,” I said.

Regardless, I shucked my backpack and propped it between my knees. From within, I took out a roll of linen and unwrapped the knife and tweezers.

“This might hurt a little.” I had no idea if it would, or if Jenny could even “feel” like a living being did, but it was only fair I gave it a heads up before cutting a fingernail-sized chunk out of the wall.

It cut surprisingly easily, giving me the niggling sensation that one, perhaps the house was more organic than it appeared to be, and two, Jenny probably felt it.

“Very sorry about this,” I said as I used the tweezers to dislodge the piece of definitely-not-stone and placed it in the centre of the first petri dish. With the permanent pen, I scribbled onto the corner of the lid. NWT, for northwest turret. I cut out a larger chunk and dropped that into an empty plastic baggy. I needed to find out what the house was actually made of.

Kicking myself because I hadn’t considered doing this before, I climbed down the ladder and resisted the urge to kiss Claude. I repeated the sample collection on another four different turrets, labelling the petri lids with the turret designations so I’d know if any part of the house contained a higher degree of glamour particles than the others. All the turrets felt the same. Like stone, not like living, fruiting bodies of fungi, i.e., disappointingly void of magia.

But there had to be magic there. Claude hadn’t been talking to himself the whole time, had he?

No, of course not. What was I thinking? He was fae, just like me. Neither of us could lie even if we wanted to. So even if Claude had the capabilities to rig an elaborate system of fancy rooms and tricks and reappearing pee-bales, he still wouldn’t be able to tell me anything but the truth.

“Do you want me to accompany you to your laboratory?” he said once we’d reached the top of the spiral staircase leading to our bedrooms. His cautious tone of voice made it clear he’d sensed my upset.

I wanted him there. But I also wanted to be alone. And I was low-key panicking now.

The magic is in the spores.

Could it still be lightning related? Was Claude right to believe it? Maybe he was. Maybe I was worrying over nothing. But he’d still need to master it. Because I wouldn’t be here at the summer solstice.

Unless . . .

He couldn’t learn to do the lightning by himself. In which case, I’d have no choice but to stay and help him. Every six months for the rest of eternity.

That would be... inconvenient. And kind of amazing. Kind of really amazing.

Fuck, Sonny, pull it together.

We had just under a month to figure it out for certain.

A month left until the solstice ritual. And only a month left with him.

Damn it, it wasn’t Claude’s fault, or even Jenny’s. I guessed I was more disappointed in myself for not figuring it out by now.

An idea struck me. “Would I be able to take some samples from you?” I asked.

Claude’s brows knotted together. “What kind of samples?”

“Swabs?” I didn’t know why I phrased it like a question. “It won’t hurt.”

“Oh, sure. I was expecting you to say urine for some reason.”

I laughed. “Well, now that you mention it, I wouldn’t say no.”

Claude laughed too, obviously mistaking my nervous chuckle as joking around. “You’re not kidding? Okay, whatever helps. But we tried the blood, didn’t we? Did you, uh... I mean, I’m fine if you want to draw blood again. I trust you. But, uh...”

“I could take some blood, but let me analyse the swabs and pee first, and I’ll let you know if I need any other liquids from you.”

We made our way inside my lab. I washed my hands, then unpacked the bag onto the countertop and found and laid out all the equipment I’d need. I washed my hands again, then pulled on latex gloves.

Claude stood beside me, quietly watching everything I did. Occasionally, he’d tilt his head to the side, like a puppy dog —curious and interested in what was happening around him, but not understanding a second of it.

“Open wide,” I said, a tongue press and a medical swab poised at his lips.

He did, even made the “aghhh” noise. I held the tip of his tongue down and rolled the swab on the inside of both cheeks. I transferred it to a petri dish and labelled it with Claude—oral. And because I was a sucker for comparison, I did the same to myself, and labelled my dish Sonny—oral.

Then I handed Claude an empty urine pot. “Midstream please.”

He smiled and popped into my bathroom, returning a minute later with a lovely, still-warm bottle of piss. I loved my job. I had no idea why this made me so happy, but it really did. I wrote Claude’s pee-pee on the label.

“Are you going to do it, too? With yours?” he asked.

“Can’t beat a good comparison.”

After I’d filled up my own sample pot, Sonny’s pee-pee , I put them both in the centrifuge machine for about seven seconds, then tipped the liquid away.

“What are you doing?” Claude said, panic evident in his voice. Perhaps he thought I’d made a mistake, or perhaps he was worried he’d have to fill up another pot after only just emptying his tank.

I showed him the tubes, with their golden coloured sediment lining the sides. “That’s what we’re going to be looking at.”

“Looking at?”

“Under the microscope.”

I prepared a couple of slides with both our samples. “Okay, this one is mine.” I peered into the eyepiece and immediately moved out of the way for Claude to look.

It was normal. In every way. Normal, healthy fae pee. I must have looked at my own pee hundreds of times before. It looked no different.

Claude stood next to the microscope, and pressed his eye to the eyepiece. After a while, he said, “It’s very yellow. Isn’t very yellow pee a sign of dehydration?”

“Normally, yes, but we’ve separated the urine and the sediment, and this is just what’s left.”

He hmmed , still looking into the eyepiece. “What are the bits? Protein?”

“No, protein usually indicates illness. Kidney disease or something. Those sparkling star shaped bits you see are glamour.”

“Glamour, really?” He pulled his face away from the microscope to look at me. “I didn’t know you could see magic.”

“You can see magic particles in everything living. The soil, the plants, animals, even humans will have some inside them. In their pee, their blood, in their flesh. But magical creatures, like us, will typically have a higher quantity of visible particles.”

Claude raised a brow. “In human flesh? Maybe I don’t want to know how you know there’s glamour in human flesh.”

“Maybe not,” I said, trying to quash my nervous laughter. That had been one extremely interesting—but stomach-churning—lecture. “But magic exists everywhere. It’s impossible to remove it entirely from anything living. It simply exists in higher quantities within magical beings like fae.”

“So, my pee will look like this?” he asked, then snorted. “Wow, I have said so many sentences today I’d never dreamed I would ever say.”

I replaced my slide with the one containing Claude’s sample. “My lab buddy at Remy Uni is a werewolf. His area of expertise is dendrology. Trees,” I clarified, because Claude had pulled his eyebrows into knots. I sighed. There was no way to expand on this without relying heavily on stereotypes. “Because, you know... dogs, sticks, bark? Anyway, his answer to pretty much every problem is pee. ‘I pissed on it, so it’s mine. Have you tried pissing on it?’ That kind of thing.”

Claude still looked confused, and I regretted my tangent.

“That was a roundabout way to say this, in fact, is all very normal conversation for me.”

He observed me quietly. His head tilted to the side, his bottom lip puckered where he chewed on the inside. “What’s your friend’s name?” he asked, eventually.

“Mash. Uh, Mash Cassidy.”

He looked up as though recalling something. “Sounds familiar... I’ve seen it on one of your papers, I think.”

The thought caught me off guard. I’d written a couple of papers with Mash, on the relationship of trees and plants with mycelium. Written a few books too.

“Oh! Oh, I remember seeing his picture now. Oh,” Claude said. His final “Oh” was resigned, but before I questioned him on it, he cradled the eyepiece of the microscope and peered inside. “Oh, my gods!”

I practically pushed him out of the way to look myself. “Holy shit,” I whispered.

Whereas my slide represented a typical sample for a fae of my type, age, and health level, Claude’s was anything but. Mine showed a smattering of glamour particles, like freckles on sun-kissed shoulders or stars in the night’s sky. Claude’s was more like the whole “can’t see the forest for the trees” kind of thing. There were so many specks of glamour it almost appeared as one homogeneous shining particle.

“You. You are the magic,” I said, my voice soft. Reverent.

But how to get the magic from Claude into the ley lines...

I mean, there was one obvious answer. Could it be that easy? That crude?

I thought about the flowers growing out of Claude’s butt. The one that drained from his bathroom, not his actual butt.

“Claude, um, bit of a personal question, but do you pee in the shower?”

He jolted back, an affronted look on his face. “Ew, no, I would never.”

Damn, he couldn’t lie.

“Why would you ask that?” His tone was more curious than offended.

I blew out a breath. Okay, here goes. “You know how I said there is so much goodness contained within our... fluids? It’s evident your pee is especially magically potent. I’m wondering if the ritual might be, uh...” Why was I having trouble saying it? We’d been talking about pee for at least an hour, and I’d told him before—in depth—about how much I loved pee.

“Piss on the ley lines?” he guessed.

“Yeah,” I said, turning my face from his and scratching at my suddenly very itchy neck. I couldn’t read Claude’s expression, but I’d hazard a guess it was disgusted.

“Jenny?” He waited for Jenny to answer. “It says, ‘No, gods no.’”

For some reason, that made my cheeks heat even more. “Okay, well, at least we can cross that off the list. But... I just need to think of how to get the magic out of you and into the ley lines.”

“We already know,” he said, placing his hand on my bicep. “The lightning.”

Maybe. Maybe it had been the lightning all along.

It made sense. Thunderstorms and mushrooms had been affiliated for centuries, millennia even.

Maybe I needed to trust Claude’s instincts.

“I think you might be right.” I took off my gloves and tossed them into the bin.

Claude reached forward and ran his thumb over the crease between my brows. “Jenny would have told us if it wasn’t, right?”

I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t speak.

Everything was silent and still in the lab, except for our breaths and heaving chests.

Claude stared up at me. His gaze flitted down to my lips and stayed there.

“I want to kiss you,” he said, finally meeting my eyes again. “Actually, I want to do so much more than kiss you, but...” His fingers fell to my lower lip and swiped across it. “But I’m very conscious that in over three weeks you’ll be le—heading back to Remy.”

I made to reply, but Claude bridged my mouth closed with this thumb.

“I just need to say this, okay?”

I nodded.

“In a few weeks’ time, we’ll have separate lives again, and I’m not saying that should change. You have a life to go back to. You have an important job, friends, colleagues. You’re making a difference. You belong in Remy, and I belong here. But...” He swallowed. His gaze flicked down to my lips again. “Can we belong to each other for the next few weeks?”

I had to close my eyes and lean into Claude’s touch to stop myself becoming overwhelmed at his words. I wanted that. I wanted that so much I could pass out.

We both understood the dangerous line we were edging, how easily this could transcend into no-going-back territory.

Claude waited for me to open my eyes.

I nodded again. “Yes,” I whispered, the word barely audible.

He stepped forward, crowding my space, disappearing all the gaps between our bodies. His heart pounded. I felt it against my own pounding chest. He was shaking. From want or adrenaline or nerves, I wasn’t sure.

“Sonny?”

“Yes?”

“Can I take you to bed?”