The Probability of Spores

I first noticed them during a summer thunderstorm in 1994, perched on the edge of the greenhouse where I worked after school. A flicker of gold, no bigger than a firefly, hovering near the condensation on the glass. I blinked, and it was gone. I told myself it was a reflection, a trick of the dying light. But then it happened again a week later, while I was pruning the roses. This time it was a cold blue, darting between the thorns, leaving a faint afterimage that felt more like a memory than a sight. I didn’t tell anyone. I was seventeen, and I already knew the stories about kids who saw things.

I tried to ignore them, but they multiplied. By autumn, I was seeing them daily. They were never the same size or color, though they all shared that mirage-like quality, the sense that each eye was seeing a slightly different ghost. I started keeping a journal, detailing every sighting: the date, the time, the color, the shape. I drew them in the margins, little spirals and points. I even tried to capture one with my camera, but the film always came back blank, except for a faint, silvery smudge that could have been a dust particle. My mother caught me staring out the kitchen window one evening. She asked what was wrong, and I almost told her, but the look in her eyes stopped me. It was the same look she’d given me when I’d confessed to seeing the ghost of my grandfather at his funeral, a look of concern laced with something like fear. I said it was nothing. She didn’t believe me, but she let it go.

In December, I saw the big one. It was late, and I was walking home from a study group, cutting through the abandoned golf course that had been reclaimed by weeds. The moon was full, but the field was dark, and I was using my phone’s flashlight to navigate. That’s when I saw it: a circle of light, about the size of a dinner plate, hovering at the edge of the treeline. It was a deep, pulsing red, like the glow of a coal furnace. And it was moving, not toward me, but along the fence line, as if it were following something. I froze, my heart hammering. The light stopped, and I swear it turned toward me. Then it began to grow, expanding until it filled my entire field of vision, and I felt a pressure in my head, like a change in altitude. It passed over me, and for a second, I was inside it. There was no light inside, only a deep, suffocating darkness that was not empty, but pregnant with unseen presences. I heard a sound like a thousand insects clicking, and then it was gone, and I was on my knees in the dirt, gasping for air.

After that, the smaller lights became more frequent, but they also seemed to be watching me. They would appear in clusters, always at the edge of my vision, and when I turned to look directly at them, they would vanish, only to reappear somewhere else. I began to feel a crawling sensation on my skin, as if I were being brushed by invisible tendrils. I stopped going to school. I stayed in my room, with the curtains drawn, and I recorded everything. I wrote down that the lights were not random; they were patterns. I started to see faces in the patterns, not human faces, but something else, something that had no name for itself. I knew then that they were not hallucinations. They were real, and they had been with me since high school, and they were waiting.

The waiting ended one night in March. I was sitting in the dark, my journal open in my lap, when I felt a warm breath on my neck. I turned, and there was a light, the size of a marble, hovering an inch from my face. It was black. Not the black of absence, but the black of a void, a tiny hole in the fabric of the world. I felt an immense pressure, and the light began to pulse. With each pulse, I heard a word, not in my ears, but in my mind, a name that was not a name but a sound, the sound of spores being released from a fungal body, a fine mist of particles that settled on my skin and began to grow. I looked at my hands, and I saw tiny pinpricks of light, like the lights I had been seeing, burrowing into my flesh. I understood then that I had been a host, and the lights were the symptoms, the first signs of an infection that had been dormant for years, only now reaching full bloom.

I don’t see the lights anymore. I’ve become them. When I look in the mirror, I see a network of glowing veins, pulsing with a soft, ethereal luminescence, and I feel the spores drifting from my body, ready to find a new host. I’ve learned to control it, to a degree. I can dim my glow, pass as human, and I’ve managed to secure a job as a night custodian at a hospital, where the fluorescent lights are a perfect cover. And sometimes, when I walk the deserted corridors, I see a flicker of light at the edge of my vision, and I know it’s one of mine, a fragment of myself that has broken off and is now searching for its own heart. I don’t know what they are, these lights, but I know what I am now. And I know that I’m not alone. In the quiet hours, in the forgotten corners of the world, there are others like me, and we are the beginning of something that will end in a burst of light.