A rough male voice calls out, “With you guys, I swear. Half the time I don’t know what to clean up and what not to clean up.”

“I’m sorry—what?”

“You professors—you’re always leaving your crap lying around like a bunch of spoiled-ass kids, and then I get into trouble when I clean it up. People whining about experiments and the like. Well, I don’t know. How am I supposed to know what the hell’s an experiment and what’s just a damn mess?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Earl in Custodial, and I’m calling because I just walked into your lab. And I don’t know what to tell you, but I’m not cleaning whatever that is up. Do it yourself. Understand?”

“I—” But before Jack can ask him anything else, the caller hangs up.

Years ago, when he was still married, he returned from a three-day conference to find a surprise from Nora. His office was not as he’d left it. The furniture the university provided—a dented desk, a cheap roller chair, metal bookshelves, metal filing cabinets with gashes and sticker residue on them—had been replaced by furniture from Ikea and Pottery Barn. The white walls had been painted slate gray. His heaps of papers had been filed and his books alphabetized. Several maps and fungal charts had been framed and hung on the wall. Later on, he would feel at once grateful and mildly resentful that she needed to control even his workspace. But at the moment he stood at the threshold of his office, he simply gaped for what might have been an entire minute. Blinking. Slowly processing that he was not in fact in the wrong place.

There is a similar feeling of disorientation when he keys open the door to his lab. The dimensions are the same, but the familiar sight is gone. The air is thick with humidity and the smell curls his nose, an earthy sourness that you get from a dank cellar or a moldering bag of potatoes. The overhead fluorescents are off, but the light from the hallway is enough to show him that something has grown in his absence.

It is hard to know what to call them, tendrils or roots or tentacles, but they run across the floor and along the counters and on parts of the walls and ceiling. They are of varying length and thickness. They split and split again and then somehow seem to thread back together. The skin of them has a slimy pallor. Here and there he notes a kind of broccoli bloom, a tumorous sprout knuckling upward. And when he looks closer, he thinks he sees a bent arm here, a long-toed foot there, a knobby knee, a screaming mouth, the glossy sheen of an eye. But then he blinks—hard—and everything looks like one big, messy organic tangle. He steps fully into the room and lets the door close behind him and reaches for the light switch. He knows what he is looking at, even though he has never seen anything like it in his life. Fungus.