3 - The Case of the Moldwife

Roberta smoothed her skirts. One gloved hand picked up a candle, and held it aloft.

"I have often sought proof of the supernatural. Of the survival of something after ****. My investigations have led me to some strange places, although to my surprise, the most interesting cases are sometimes close at hand, here in Dagon's Hollow. So it was in what I call...

THE CASE OF THE MOLDWIFE

The house had been sold to pay the hospital bills. Hospice took Ann Waite's books, clothes, and furniture. When the cancer was finally finished with her, the widower William Waite had little left to remember her by, and fewer resources. In those reduced circumstances, he sought out a furnished apartment, and found one, a second-story back room in the old downtown.

The room he saw must have been much as I later saw it. The room was dominated by a large dark couch, which folded out into a bed. A flatscreen television mounted to the wall had been the centerpiece of the former occupant's life. A kitchenette, a chest of drawers, a few built-in bookshelves, and a small bathroom made up the rest of the apartment. Probably there was a layer of dust on everything, for the room had sat empty for some eight months, and there was a faint smell that promised mildew.

I do not know if Will Waite ever asked about the former occupant, although I did. Anna Gamwell worked at a local grocery store, one of those spinsters who was married only to her job, from high school until pneumonia took her. A neat and clean person, always proper in public, though not a beauty. Her apartment had been her small world, and I wonder then at what she impressions the walls might have absorbed there, what hidden passions they paid witness to.

Will Waite slipped into the apartment like a cock into a condom. I asked the liquor store clerk who sold him beer by the case, the gas station attendant who sold him his pipe tobacco, and the cannabis outlet that sold him the weed he cut the tobacco with. The landlady, Mrs. Gupta, that let the room, and owned the whole building, said only that the miasma of the room seemed to cling to him when he left.

She saw little of the room, as he came and left, but was under the impression that it grew dingier as the widower settled in. The window was never opened, so all was dark, the air closed up. Once, not long after he moved in, he complained about mold in the shower—the landlady provided the card for a cleaning service that was never called.

I imagine as he sat there in the dark, he must have missed the patch of mold on the couch. Wallowing in the emptiness, smoking and drinking his life away, perhaps he did not see the way it settled into the folds left by Anna Gamwell's ass on the seat cushions, into the impression of her back that still remained where she sat.

He did not sit in that spot. A local sex worker whom we may call A. told me he engaged her once to alleviate his crippling loneliness told me how he would sit next to it. A. herself was **** to get on her knees on the floor before the couch, to suck him off. Her mouth working on an unwashed cock that tasted of stale sweat and something earthy and rank. Yet A. was a professional, or imagined herself so, and was being paid well enough for the work.

Yet when he came, she coughed and spat the bitter seed onto that cushion. Will did not seem to mind. Simply stuffed his cock away and paid her off.

You know how mold grows. How swiftly it can spread, when the conditions are right. The wet, dank smell that fills the air and seems to settle into everything, even the clothes on your back, the sheets on your bed. The liquor store man mentioned how pale he grew, in those final weeks. The persistent cough caught the attention of the gas station attendant. The cannabis seller confided that Will had inquired, discreetly, about something stronger. A conversation that went nowhere.

No one saw him, those last few weeks. He must have spent long hours on that couch, coughing and wheezing, his head in the moldy depression that had been Anna Gamwell's ass and pussy. Eyes locked on the television as it flickered through its endless programs. It was playing a sex tape that he and his wife had made, when they found him, clutching his penis tight. There is a kind of fever that penetrates the flesh near ****, they say. A last spontaneous urge to reproduce.

It was the rotting smell that brought Mrs. Gumpta and the police officers to do a wellness check, and they found the body there, dehydrated, shriveled, eyes sunken, the face patchy with black mold as though from strange kisses. Yet what surprised everyone was the clear and distinct form that the mold patch took, as of the shadow of a woman sitting on the couch, with William Waite's head on her lap. The mold had actually begun to colonize him, little black strands binding skin to fabric.

I had a chance to see the room, before Mrs. Gupta brought in the cleaners with their masks and bleach. Stood just in the doorway and breathed deep. You know how morel mushrooms, as they dry, have a distinct smell like semen? That strange mix of musk and ammonia? Well as I stood in there, and stared at the mold stain with the definite impression of arms and legs and buttock, I smelled a damp musk that could only be described as the kind of raw, sweaty pussy-smell that comes from a woman with thick hair after a long hard day on her feet...and I will tell you something else.

On the couch where Will Waite had laid, there was beginning to form an outline in mold, of a man laying down with his head in her lap.

Roberta pinched the candle, and let the thin stream of smoke rise up into the night.