Writing 2: Electric Boogaloo

        The sirens racing down the rain-slicked city street would shock many, echoing through the idyllic suburbia in the dead of night and rending near every concerned housewife, husband, and child up from their beds in a fit of worry and drawing them to their windows and doors to follow the shrill cry of ‘Something’s happening!’ given off by the racing police cruisers and fire trucks.

        Those that dared venture past the red-and-blue strobing of the cruisers’ lights on their curtains and into the misty night were greeted by a cluster of vehicles all gathered around the overgrown, ivy-covered house at the dead end of their street… Seventy-five Lilyview Lane.

        Not five years ago was it built, and filled within a week of completion. Its denizen was an older man, quiet and reserved and taking long leaves of absence from society to withdraw into the reaches of his home and let nature subsume it, bit by bit. This very same, quiet man was currently being dragged by his arms and legs out of his home shouting profanity and cursing out the men carrying him, their mothers, and their mothers’ mothers as more officers began to roll out the yellow tape to crisscross over the door to dissuade any amateur intervention.

        The entire display was startling to the residents of the quiet street and the quiet town it was a part of, mothers covering their children’s ears and eyes as the cruisers pulled away and brought the shouting man with them, leaving only a pair of of cops to finish unraveling the tape around the place before they too headed back to the base.

        As they took their leave, some people would simply move back into their homes for a good nights’ rest, already in the process of forgetting about it. Some would let the thought linger, perhaps looking into it in the morning. However, one would linger in the lightly-misting night, garbed in a hoodie and jeans and holding a head full of ‘why’s.

        Walking toward the taped-up house was Haley, a mild-mannered girl from two houses down… She didn’t have any particular interest in the house before, or any connection to its owner… But hell, it was interesting now. Why was he arrested? Why was he so disgruntled about it? What was he doing when he secluded himself in there? Questions raced through her mind, a sense of anxiety rushing through her body as she moved closer and closer.

Now longer needing it to protect her soft auburn hair, Haley would flip down her hood after stepping into the cover of the odd house’s porch. Everyone had either gone to sleep or otherwise gone, leaving her looking down the eerie, empty street from the taped-up house, already putting her waif-like form to good use slipping past the tape covering the door… Good, they didn’t lock it. She was intent on discovering why he was taken, but wasn’t about to break a window to find out or anything.

        Haley would readjust the police tape after slipping through, paranoid. It was admittedly dangerous and… Perhaps juvenile just to barge in like this for no good reason other than curiosity, but it wasn’t like there was anything that could hurt her in here… Right? The cops must’ve taken everything that could hurt someone, even if they were just here for a little bit… Worry surged through her now, making the other side of the police tape seem all that much more inviting. Regardless, she would press on into a small living room, Spartan and dusty despite its recent occupation. The blinds and curtains were drawn as well, making the room seem untouched… Did he even use it at all? The kitchen, adjoined by a small hallway, seemed to be a lot more worn, though still quite messy. Pots and pans littered the tables and odd stains of blue and grey and green spattered the walls like he’d been painting… Just what the hell was he doing? Turning around, Haley would come face to face with a slightly-cracked door, a small amount of light filtering from a stairwell leading downward behind it.

        “This isn’t a good sign, is it…?” she would whisper to herself, backing up. A basement was never a good sign… She’d seen enough horror movies to vouch for that… But those are just movies, right? Haley would whimper, despite her body’s eagerness to move forward. The stairs below led into a dingy, ill-lit hallway which in turn terminated in another door which once again bred doubt within Haley. Despite it, she pushed it open with a sense of inevitability. She was just going to open it anyway… Why fight it?

                Much to her surprise… There was nothing in the basement to confirm her fears. At least, none immediately apparent. Ominous blue lights would emanate from some glass case on the far end of the concrete room, just beside an expensive-looking computer, its keyboard on the floor and the adjacent chair toppled as if in a struggle. Haley would move beside it, cocking the monitor toward her using a gloved hand… She didn’t want to get caught tampering with evidence or anything. On the screen lay charts and notes all coldly detailing some… Fungus, if she understood it at all. Use of compost compared to this odd subject’s growth was displayed on a line graph beside the number of open text files, the name Cordyceps semilanceatea. The first rings a bell, though she can’t recall from where.

        Turning her attention back to the glowing case, she would find it a terrarium, filled with dirt and grass, but dominated by a single massive structure in its center. Beneath the blue light sat a massive, fat mushroom with a wide brim casting shadows over the dirt and allowing shelter for smaller versions of it to flourish as it extends its roots through the dirt and… Seemingly strangling the grass around it, or at least in a plant’s terms. Its main body seems to be white, yet its cap is dominated by an array of brilliant colors ranging from bulbous red growths tapering into yellowing tips to smatterings of blues and purples, broken only by veins of green trailing across it… The whole thing looked like spin-art, if someone dumped a bucket of pain on it afterward.

        Curiosity welled within her, forcing her closer and closer to the mushroom to spy rivulets of amber-colored goop dripping from a fleshy crater of blue and purple, running off the side onto the smaller caps and seeming to feed them… The only mushrooms she’d ever seen in her life were puffy balls of brown or whatever you can put on a pizza, and this one fascinated her. Could this have been what got him arrested? Moving closer, she would fail to see the small thermometer begin to rise from its place at room temperature, at first a degree, then ten, then higher still.

        All too soon, Haley was raising the lid and reaching in to take a sample for herself… This had to be interesting. Using her glove to shield her hand from whatever dangers it may hold, she was mere inches from a smaller cap before the massive mushroom burst. There was no other term to describe it, each of the red pustules simultaneously ruptured and gushed forth a cloud of  spores, bearing with them the colors of the rainbow… only growing more and more vibrant as Haley took a lungful, unprotected and unsuspecting.

        “Gaaaaah!” she would squeal, gagging and sputtering and toppling the terrarium and only serving to cascade more spores throughout the confined basement, resting on the ill-lit room and the squirming girl within its confines. Haley heaved and gasped for air not choked by the foul-tasting payload the mushroom had released, souring her nostrils and tastebuds with the taste of earth and numbing them to everything else. The chromatic spores adhered to her flesh and innards as they sunk deeper, holding fast as Haley tried to rise and run, to be met with failure and fumbling back onto the colorful ground.

        What came next startled the girl, sweat beginning to bead up across her skin and fear stunning her as her vision shifted. The basement grew… Colorful. Not just due to the dull coating of spores, but… Impossibly so. The blue light radiated reds and yellows and began to blend them and infect the rest of the grey and black room with smatterings of vibrant, neon-esque colors. Next came her… A pressure growing in her body as she saw her clothes slough off and expose her prone form, her flesh growing blue and streaked with orange as heat welled up within her. “Hehehehe…~” she would hear, an airy feminine voice coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. Her voice still raspy from her coughing fit, Haley would shout back “Who’s there!?”, trying to support herself on her purple arms, all six of them, as her body continued to shift.

Her legs thickened and plumped up, muscle packing on as they too began to multiply and split into golden tendrils, bending backwards to give her form a tight hug. Next her hair followed, clumping and receding as it grew into a thick pair of… Lips, opening the back of her head and pushing her brain out of its place with a long tongue, sending convulsions through her body as it fell onto the floor beside her, in her view. Her small breasts grew large before growing breasts themselves, each leaking a rich green syrup that pooled onto the floor and rose up as a soft patch of grass. The voice wouldn’t respond… Rather, chuckling once more.

The maw behind her would extend its tongue to wrap around her head, probing into her mouth as it grew long and veiny and bulbous, pulsing and leaking something into her mouth as it moved. Shivers of delight swept across Haley, her tendrils moving up to her breasts and her arms cradling them as they began to stroke and prod, her pussy licking its lips with yet another tongue as it began to drool.