Chores were left unfinished. Work stations were abandoned. By eleven o'clock, the household was asleep, and by midnight, they would be ensnared- and not just by the dark tendrils of their own imagination, drawing them deeper and deeper into a heady tumult of sounds and images and voices that grow steadily more and more intense, if one can attribute sensible accession to anything so timeless as a dream.
Unseen and away from the aggressive, hot glare of the sun, having spread its spores, it began to grow; first its soft, spongy body expanded and spread its poison between shelves in fleshy lumps that ripened like subterranean peaches. The damp heat of the day had been as ambrosia to its starved core, and it quickly outgrew the corridors of its darkened nursery in the library and began the arduous task of making the rest of the house a safe haven. With monstrous speed it put out its filaments of increasing girth and length, not only to accommodate that initial colony but to establish new blooms in slick, sticky bouquets in each and every new room they reached. Ethereal bunches of fruiting bodies, marshy grey and open-cupped to release their bounty, swallowed every surface they could reach through unlocked doors.
Its filaments, meanwhile, were evolving. Every now and then a strand would swell and sprout spines along its length, sharp enough to deliver a painful sting if threatened; contact would initiate a violent ripple outwards, jabbing them into the enemy force. Before it had even met its fellow inhabitants, the thing was already steeling its defences against them.
By the time their eyes are forced open by their own horror, of course, it's too late.
With each terrified awakening, cold sweat on skin warms to something clammier and each staggered breath sucks in a lungful of hot, thick air, now dense with peaty spores. The electricity is out and the rooms are dark, but the first steps beyond the safety of the bedroom should be telling enough; it's impossible to miss the phosphorescent glow of mushrooms climbing the walls, while the barefooted will themselves slipping on the thick, pulsing hyphae carpeting the hallways, slick with residue. They crawl along the floor and coil around furniture, slipping up the stairs from some unknown place below in such a multitude that the stairwells are almost completely blocked.
And maybe, just maybe, those with a keener ear might hear another irregular thumping for just a few moments, from the northern wing of the first floor, before it suddenly stops dead.
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