The Mold of Saint Elmo

I was sixteen when I first saw the thing in the boiler room of St. Elmo’s Orphanage, the same year I began hearing the damp whispers that would follow me into adulthood. My name is Frankie, and I grew up on the edge of the Louisiana bayou, where the air is thick enough to chew and the moss hangs like old men’s beards. The orphanage was a crumbling antebellum mansion that had been converted into a home for wayward kids like me, and it sat on a plot of land that the locals swore was cursed. They said a slave revolt had been put down there in the 1850s, and the bodies were buried in the walls. I never believed them until I saw the mold.

It started in the summer of 1964, during a heat wave that made the floors sweat. I was assigned to clean the boiler room, a task that had been given to every new kid as a rite of passage. The room was a nightmare of rusted pipes and coal dust, lit by a single swinging bulb. The walls were covered in a greenish-black mold that seemed to pulse in the dim light. I remember thinking it looked like a lung, breathing. As I scrubbed the floor, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I spun around, but no one was there. Then I heard a voice, a wheeze like a man dying, say, ‘Get out while you can.’ I ran, and I didn’t stop until I was in the chapel, gasping for air.

I told the head nun, Sister Agatha, but she dismissed me as a troubled child. She had a face like a crumpled napkin and a heart to match. But the mold kept spreading. It appeared in the laundry room, then the dining hall, always in patterns that looked like faces contorted in agony. I started having dreams where I was drowning in a sea of green slime, and when I woke, my sheets were wet with a cold, clammy liquid. The other kids began to notice too, and soon the orphanage was a place of constant dread. We would huddle in our beds at night, listening to the pipes moan and the walls weep.

By the time I was eighteen, I had become something of a chronicler of the evil. I kept a journal, documenting every sighting, every sound. I mapped the mold’s growth on a blueprint of the building, and I realized it was spreading in a spiral, converging on the chapel. That’s where the demon was strongest. One night, I decided to confront it. I armed myself with a flashlight and a crucifix, and I crept into the chapel at midnight. The mold had overtaken the altar, forming a writhing mass that looked like a man in priest’s robes. It spoke in a voice that was both a whisper and a thunder, saying, ‘You are my son, and you will carry my seed.’

I tried to run, but the doors slammed shut, and the mold reached out with tendrils that felt like cold, dead fingers. It wrapped around my legs, my arms, my neck, pulling me towards the altar. I screamed, but my voice was swallowed by the mold. It entered my mouth, my nose, my ears, filling my lungs with its dank breath. I thought I was dead, but then, just as I was about to lose consciousness, the chapel bells rang. They had not rung in decades, but they rang that night, loud and clear. The mold recoiled, hissing like a snake, and the doors flew open. I crawled out, coughing up black phlegm, and I never looked back.

I left the orphanage the next day, but the mold came with me. It’s inside me, growing in my gut, feeding on my fear. I’ve seen it manifest in every place I’ve lived, always in the corners, always in the damp. I’ve tried to cut it out with a knife, but the next day, the wound is covered in green fuzz. I’ve tried to burn it with holy water, but it only sizzles and spreads. The doctors say it’s a fungus, but I know better. It’s the orphanage’s will, and it wants me to return. I’ve been avoiding Louisiana for thirty years, but last week, I received a letter, postmarked from St. Elmo’s, stamped with a moldy fingerprint. It says: ‘The father awaits. Your seed is needed.’

I’m writing this from a motel room in Baton Rouge, just a few hours from the orphanage. I’ve rented a car, and I’ve got a can of gasoline in the trunk. I’m going to drive there tonight, and I’m going to burn it to the ground, and myself with it. But I’m afraid. Not of the fire, but of what I’ll become when the mold is gone. Maybe I’ll finally be free, or maybe I’ll just be a hollow shell, like the others who tried to escape. I guess I’m about to find out.

I just hope if anyone reads this, they’ll understand why I did what I did. I wasn’t a bad person. I was just a boy who saw the mold, and the mold saw him.