The Fungus Line

In the late autumn of 1987, when the maple leaves had turned to brittle amber and the air carried the first bite of frost, my friend Danny and I decided to camp on his family’s abandoned orchard. Danny’s grandfather had once cultivated a vast apple grove that sprawled up the lower slopes of the ridge behind their farmhouse, but decades of blight and neglect had left the land to the weeds. The trees still stood, gnarled and skeletal, their branches like cracked fingers reaching for a sky that never seemed to clear. Danny’s father, a taciturn man named Gerald, had warned us to stay clear of the ‘back forty’—a stretch of land beyond the broken irrigation ditch where the ground grew soft and sour, and where the old cider press had rusted into a hollow carcass. But Danny and I were sixteen, and the warning only made the place more tempting.

We pitched our tent in a clearing near the old access road, just a few hundred yards from the main house, but it felt like a different world. The orchard swallowed sound; even the birds seemed to avoid it, and the only noise was the dry rustle of dead leaves skittering across the hard-packed earth. We spent the first day exploring the nearest rows, kicking through the undergrowth, and pretending we weren’t keeping an eye out for the dead elms that stood like sentinels at the property line. Danny had brought a slingshot and a pocketknife, and I had a flashlight and a pack of cards. We planned to fish for crawdads in the creek that bordered the property, but the water ran dark and sluggish, and we found only a few that had died mid-molt, their shells cracked and empty.

That night, after the fire had died to embers, I woke to a sound like wet fingers dragging across canvas. I lay still, listening, and heard it again—a slow, rhythmic scrape, as if something was circling our tent. Danny was already awake, his eyes wide in the glow of the last orange coal. ‘It’s the wind,’ he whispered, but there was no wind. The air was dead still. Then the tent flap moved, just a few inches, and the smell of rotting apples flooded in—so strong it made my stomach turn. We held our breath, and after a long minute, the smell faded, and the scraping stopped. We didn’t sleep again, and at first light we saw the cause: a long, pale streak in the dew, leading from the tent to the treeline, like the trail of a slug but as wide as a man’s torso.

We told ourselves it was a raccoon, or maybe a sick deer, and we spent the next day hiking farther up the slope, past the dead elms, into the back forty. The ground grew spongy underfoot, and the trees were thicker, their trunks covered in a pale, pulpy fungus that oozed a yellowish liquid. I remembered Gerald’s warning about the old spraying—how they used to douse the orchard with copper sulfate and DDT until the soil turned bitter. We found the old cider press, half-buried in brambles, and behind it, a small clearing where the earth had cratered in, revealing a tangle of black roots that looked almost like veins. Danny poked at it with a stick, and the roots gave way, revealing a hollow that descended into darkness. We didn’t go down, but we both felt a pull, a queasy attraction that made me lean in until Danny grabbed my arm. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, his voice tight.

We returned to camp, but the feeling didn’t leave me. That night, I dreamed of the hollow—of roots growing into my skin, of apples rotting from the inside out, and of a voice that spoke in the scratch of bark against bark. I woke to find Danny gone from his sleeping bag. Panic seized me, and I burst out of the tent to see him standing at the treeline, staring into the dark. He didn’t respond when I called his name. When I shook his shoulder, he turned, and his eyes were clouded, like old milk glass. ‘They’re looking for the source,’ he said, his voice flat. ‘The source of the sweet.’ Then he blinked, and the cloudiness cleared, and he looked at me with confusion. ‘What am I doing here?’ he asked. I didn’t tell him what he’d said.

We decided to cut the trip short, but as we packed, I noticed a thin, pale line running along the ground from the hollow, curving around the tent, circling us like a noose. The line was made of the same fungus we’d seen on the trees, and it pulsed faintly, as if alive. I scraped it with my boot, and it bled a clear fluid that smelled of sugar and rot. Danny saw it too, and without a word, we grabbed our packs and started down the slope. But the path we’d come up was gone—the trees seemed closer, the undergrowth thicker, and every direction looked the same. We walked for what felt like hours, but we always ended up back at the tent, the pale line now drawn tight around us, its radius shrinking.

By the time the sun began to set, the line had closed to within a few feet of where we stood. The fungus had grown into small, pale fruiting bodies, like fingers pushing up from the soil. I remembered the stories Danny’s grandpa used to tell—how the orchard had been cursed after they’d doused it with chemicals, how the trees had started to ‘weep’ a black sap that drove the birds mad. And I remembered the old cider press, how it had seemed to hum under my hand. Danny was trembling. ‘We’re inside it,’ he whispered. ‘It’s been here all along.’

As the final light faded, the line closed completely, and the fungus erupted into a thick, fleshy mat that swallowed our boots. The smell of apples intensified, sickly sweet, and I felt roots coil around my ankles. Danny screamed, but the sound was muffled, as if the air itself was turning to pulp. I looked down and saw that my legs were already covered in the pale growth, and I couldn’t pull free. The last thing I remember before the world went dark was Danny’s face, his eyes no longer clouded but clear and full of sorrow, and his voice, barely a whisper: ‘I’m sorry.’

They found our camp three days later, abandoned. The tent was still there, and our packs, but the ground around it was churned up, and there was a wide, pale ring that looked like a salt circle gone wrong. The searchers followed a trail of crushed foliage to the hollow, where they found the chamber had collapsed, filled with a soft, white mass that gave off heat and a faint, sweet odor. They never found us, though they dug down six feet and sieved the soil for weeks. But if you go up there now, on a still autumn night, you can still smell the apples, and if you press your ear to the ground, you might hear a faint, rhythmic scraping, like something large turning over in its sleep, waiting for the next ones to come looking for the source of the sweet.