The Great Western Crested Ignoramus Bear

Claude

A grandfather clock awaited me in the centre of my room. It was a typical grandfather clock: tall, elegant, expensive wood, glass case with swinging pendulum, and an ornate gold face. Only, this one also had a panel in the middle with an ominous-looking countdown.

21st June, 04:13

The summer solstice.

Presumably when this ritual needed performing. I couldn’t not look at the countdown, which was currently showing two months, one week, two days, fifteen hours, and thirty-four minutes. It was like one of those haunted paintings with the eyes that followed me around wherever I went in my rooms, including the mezzanine level. I felt like it was watching me. Pulsating. Like a ticking bomb.

I necked four cups of fancy chai latte and paced the mushroom-print rug in my room for two hours before I’d worked up the nerve to call my mother. During that time, the clock bonged obnoxiously at me several times.

“Son?” she said, answering my call on the third attempt at ringing. The word was both feigned surprise and feigned indignation.

“Hi, Mum. How are you?” I sat on my leather sofa and immediately stood again. Resumed my pacing.

“Don’t ‘Hi, Mum’ me. It’s not the third Sunday of the month. What do you want?”

“Just wanted a chat.”

“Mmhmm. Is this about your father?” How did she find out? Somebody must have told her about him. Perhaps the solicitors, though I couldn’t imagine my father had left her anything in his will.

Part of me was relieved. I wouldn’t have to broach the subject now. Wouldn’t have to deal with Mum’s forced impassiveness.

“I heard about what happened to him. Mauled to death by a great western crested ignoramus bear,” she said.

What the hell was a great western crested ignoramus bear?

“If you expect me to grieve over that turd of a man,” she continued. “Well, you’d be wrong. And if you’re looking for a shoulder to cry on—”

“I don’t, Mum,” I interrupted before she could either go off on some rant I’d heard a thousand times before, or slam the receiver down on me. “I’m not upset he’s dead. I barely knew him.” That stunned her into silence. I’d find it difficult to grieve a man I saw six times in five centuries.

The upset wasn’t from my father’s death itself, rather the mess he’d left me to fix. If anything, I was annoyed with him too, for not leaving any instructions, or indeed paying me a visit to explain what I’d someday have to do twice a year for the rest of my life.

And what would happen if I died? I was a terminally single, five-hundred-year-old gay fae with no plans for any children of my own.

“Specifically, a direct descendant of Mycelium Stinkhorn the first.”

Was I expected to provide lineage? My own direct descendant to continue the legacy? I didn’t even know if I wanted kids, not that it mattered when I had no way of providing them. I wasn’t about to raise a family alone, and the closest I’d ever come to a long-term relationship was a luxury, self-heating stroker.

Anyway, none of this would matter until I figured out what this rhizome ritual entailed.

“I’ve inherited his house,” I said, deciding to dive straight in. The longer I pussyfooted around the subject, the more opportunities I gave her to hang up. “And I need to perform this ritual twice a year to keep the house and its occupants standing.”

Mum was quiet.

I waited thirty seconds... one full minute... before speaking again. “I’m not doing it for Dad. I’m doing it for the people that live here. They said you were with him a few times while he performed the ritual, and... I was wondering if you can tell me what it is? What’s the ritual, Mum? What do I need to do?”

She waited another minute before answering. “I can’t.”

“Look, Mum, I know you didn’t like him, but I have—”

“It’s not that. It’s... I can’t tell you what happened, what the ritual involved. Even if I wanted to, I physically would not be able to get the words out. It’s protected by ancient shroom law. Nobody can speak about the magic. Even your father couldn’t tell me. He just took me there one time and showed me, and then I went with him again a couple more times.”

“Try it? Can you at least try to tell me? Please,” I begged, fully aware of the desperation in my voice. “I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing here, and people’s homes and livelihoods are relying on me.”

She sighed. “Well, first you go to the ley lines, and you find the exact spot where they meet. It should be marked by a stone tablet.” In my head, I conjured the image of the flat, squarish rock. “Then you brrrrrrrrbbb.” Mum laughed, cleared her throat. “You fiiiissssssssss, fuuuuuussssssss, brrrriiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnggggg. See? Nope. Can’t do it.”

I mirrored Mum’s sigh and collapsed onto the chesterfield.

“Maybe it’s just something you figure out on your own. Or maybe you let that dick house wither and die, and the occupants will find somewhere else to live?”

“But how can I figure it out on my own? What if it’s some incantation? Am I meant to just guess at words until I get it right?”

“It’s shhhhhhhhuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuffffffftttt,” Mum said. “Urgh, this is fucking annoying!”

“So fucking annoying,” I confirmed.

Neither of us spoke for a few seconds.

“So, are you at Stinkhorn Manor now?” Mum asked.

“I am.”

She paused, before saying, “And do they still make the best eggs royale for breakfast?”

“I had three portions this morning. Half a dozen eggs! And practically half a salmon. That hollandaise sauce is unbelievable,” I said.

“That’s my boy.”

After Mum and I hung up the phone, I pulled my feet onto the couch and let my head fall to the armrest. The clock bonged again, giving me another mini cardiac arrest.

“Okay, what are my options here?” I said aloud to myself because I was alone, and if I didn’t get these thoughts out of my brain, there would be too many in the station and they’d end up derailing each other. I ticked them off on my fingers. “Trial and error. Try a bunch of random stuff and hope I stumble on the right thing.”

But the problem with that was how would I know if I had the right thing? Would there be any indication? And if there wasn’t, and I ended up missing the summer-solstice ritual, well, it’d all be too late.

I ticked off another finger. “Find someone else who was present at the ritual.” Another of my father’s mistresses? “Or find another shroom fae in the same predicament as me.”

But even if it were possible to locate any of the other women my father had shown the ritual to, they’d likely be able to say just about as much as Mum. Mum was fae too, she couldn’t lie. And the same went for other shroom fae with magical properties who had routine rituals to perform.

I raised another finger. “Do what Mum said and go back to Remy. Maybe I help find a new place for Oggy and Willow and the other occupants to stay—live in. The house will die, but it’s only a ho—”

The sofa rose into the air, upended itself, and dumped me onto the coffee table, scattering jigsaw-puzzle pieces over the rug.

Oh man, it took me so long last night to finish all those edge pieces.

I got to my feet and brushed down my shirt and trousers, looking around, but I was alone. The house did this. The house turfed me off the couch because I suggested I’d let it die. I remembered Willow and Oggy talking about it as though it were a person.

It’s manipulative.

A compulsive liar.

Argumentative.

Emotionally unstable.

A bit of a pervert.

I drummed my fingers against my thighs and blew out a breath.

“Can you... If you can hear and understand me... uh, give me a sign,” I said to the house. To the bloody house! I must have been losing my mind.

The jigsaw-puzzle pieces zoomed themselves from the floor and from the upside-down lid of the puzzle box and slotted themselves all neatly into place, making a complete scenic picture of a steam train tracking over a stone viaduct.

I lifted my gaze from the puzzle and stared at nothing for a full two minutes—could have been ten—before I spoke. “Thank you,” I said. Whispered, really, because I was talking to a fucking house. I’d gone bonkers, and I was talking to a house. “But I was kind of looking forward to completing that one myself.”

With that, the pieces shot to the floor, as though someone scooped them off the table.

“Okay,” I said, my voice quivering. I held up a fourth finger. “My final option. I do what the scary blue-flame lady suggested and find a mushroom-magic expert?”

I waited for the house to... do anything. It didn’t. I took this to mean this was the only reasonable option. “So a mushroom-magic expert? I... Where do I even start to search for one?”

The internet was probably the best place for that, but before I had even put my hand in my pocket to retrieve my phone, I was hit in the forehead. Hard. By something thrown from a distance. Something solid and smooth and about the size of—

“My wallet?! You threw my own wallet into my face?” I bent down, picked up the brown leather envelope, and put it back in my pocket—

It hit me on the nose this time.

“What the hell?”

I held it out in a flattened palm and it flipped itself open, displaying my credit cards, my library card, my U-Rail ID pass, and business cards I’d accumulated over the past century or so but hadn’t bothered to look at since.

Something caught my attention. A new business card, on crisp cream paper. The edges were not dented or grimy from sitting untouched in my wallet. I pulled it out and read it.

Professor S. Daye

Mycologist

Senior Lecturer of Fae Glamour and Biosciences at

The University of Remy

[email protected]

I read it again. And again. Professor S. Daye. Mycologist and fae-glamour expert. I’d never heard of him. Her? Them?

I looked around the room to the... house? “Okay, might as well start with this person, huh?”