Some buildings, especially in a city like Youngstown with its deep strata of neglect, don"t just decay; they transform. They become unintentional laboratories, petri dishes on an architectural scale, where neglect, moisture, and darkness conspire to cultivate life forms far stranger than simple rot. The old Avalon Apartments, a once-grand but long-forgotten structure on the city"s North Side, was one such place. Abandoned abruptly after a devastating fire gutted the top floor and attic years ago, the building sat vacant, its windows crudely boarded with weathered plywood, slowly, inexorably succumbing to the relentless siege of the elements. The massive amounts of water used by firefighters had drenched the lower floors, saturating plaster walls and wooden beams. A subsequently leaky roof, never repaired, allowed rain and snowmelt to seep in year after year, creating a perpetually damp, humid environment within the sealed structure. The Avalon wasn"t just empty; it was saturated, a perfect, lightless incubator for whatever opportunistic spores drifted in on the wind or were carried in by rodents and insects.
Marco, an amateur photographer with a morbid fascination for urban decay and the aesthetics of ruination, knew the Avalon by its grim reputation among local explorers. It was generally considered too far gone, too structurally compromised, too dangerous by most – persistent stories circulated about collapsing floors, treacherous stairwells, and hazardous air quality thick with asbestos fibers and toxic mold spores. But Marco wasn"t like most explorers. He was drawn precisely to the extreme cases, the places where nature wasn"t just passively reclaiming man-made structures, but actively, aggressively transforming them into something else entirely. Armed with his DSLR camera, a high-powered flashlight, a respirator mask, and a healthy dose of reckless curiosity, he found a loose section of plywood covering a ground-floor window and slipped through the narrow gap, stepping out of the mundane world and into a realm of pervasive dampness, deep shadow, and unnatural growth.
The air inside hit him immediately, thick and heavy, clinging to his lungs despite the respirator. It carried the cloying, almost suffocatingly musty scent of rampant, unchecked mold, an odor far more intense than the usual damp basement smell. Black stains, like malevolent shadows thrown by an unseen fire, coated vast swathes of the walls, spreading outwards from water-damaged areas. Wallpaper, once perhaps elegant, now peeled away in long, damp, curling strips, revealing vibrant, almost fluorescent patches of green, yellow, and orange fungus flourishing beneath. Water dripped steadily, rhythmically, from the stained ceiling above, echoing in the silence, pooling on the warped, buckled floorboards that squished unnervingly under his boots. It was bad, Marco acknowledged grimly, significantly worse than he had anticipated even from the building"s derelict exterior. But as he ventured deeper into the labyrinthine corridors of the former apartment building, flashlight beam cutting a nervous path through the gloom, he began to notice that the pervasive growth wasn"t just extensive; it was… weird. Unsettlingly organized.
Instead of the typical random splotches and fuzzy patches of common household molds, the fungal and mold growth here formed intricate, repeating patterns that seemed almost designed. Delicate, fractal-like structures, resembling frost patterns or alien circuitry diagrams, spread across entire walls, connecting different patches of growth. Different colors – velvety black, slimy olive green, sickly sulfur yellow, and even a faint, pulsing, almost ethereal viridian – grew in distinct, sharply defined zones, their borders meeting with an unnatural precision, as if respecting unseen boundaries. In what might have once been a grand living room, a massive fungal structure resembling a grotesque, multi-lobed, fleshy organ pulsed faintly on the wall, glistening with a viscous, unidentifiable moisture. In another room, clusters of bioluminescent fungi, species Marco had never encountered before, cast an eerie, faint green glow, illuminating strange, intricate, web-like mycelial networks that stretched like macabre decorations from floor to ceiling, pulsing with the same faint viridian light.
This didn"t look like simple, chaotic decay. It looked structured. Purposeful. Almost intelligent. Marco felt a prickle of unease that went beyond the usual calculated risks of exploring structurally unsound, abandoned buildings. This felt fundamentally different, alien. He moved more cautiously now, his earlier excitement tempered by a growing sense of dread, photographing the bizarre, beautiful, yet repulsive growths. As his camera flash fired, momentarily illuminating the pulsing "organ" on the wall, he could have sworn he saw it quiver visibly, its slick surface rippling slightly in reaction to the sudden burst of light. He tried to dismiss it as an optical illusion, a trick of the light interacting with the moisture, or perhaps his own mind reacting to the oppressive, spore-laden atmosphere.
But the feeling of being watched, of being sensed, intensified as he moved deeper into the building"s core. He noticed patches of the black mold seemed to shift slightly, subtly rearranging their patterns when he wasn"t looking directly at them, only to freeze again when his gaze returned. He began hearing faint, unsettling sounds – a wet, sticky popping noise, like thick bubbles bursting; a soft, continuous hissing, almost like escaping gas but organic; a low, guttural gurgling – that seemed to emanate from within the walls themselves, from the heart of the pervasive growth. Reaching out tentatively, against his better judgment, he lightly touched a dangling tendril of the strange viridian fungus; it felt unnervingly warm, almost feverish, and retracted slowly, deliberately, from his touch, like a disturbed sea anemone.
The air grew thicker still, the musty smell intensifying, taking on a sickly sweet, almost cloying undertone that reminded Marco vaguely of overripe fruit and decay. He started feeling dizzy, a dull pounding beginning behind his temples. The intricate patterns on the walls seemed to writhe and shift more noticeably now, even in his direct vision. Was it the spores? He knew some species of mold and fungi could produce potent mycotoxins, some even hallucinogenic. Was the very air he was breathing, despite the respirator, affecting his mind, altering his perception, making him see movement and intent where there was only decay?
He pushed onward, drawn by a morbid, almost compulsive curiosity towards the basement, logically assuming the water damage, and therefore the fungal growth, would be most extreme there. The stairs leading down were treacherous, coated in a thick layer of iridescent, multi-colored slime mold that seemed to pulse with its own faint, internal light. Each step threatened to send him tumbling into the darkness below. The basement itself was partially flooded, the stagnant water reflecting the flashlight beam eerily, the air almost unbreathable, thick with the stench of decay and the sweet, nauseating perfume of the fungus. And the growth here was exponentially more extensive, more alien, more terrifyingly vibrant than on the floors above. The fungal networks covered everything – walls, ceiling pipes, forgotten debris – forming thick, rope-like mycelial cords, pulsating, translucent sacs filled with murky liquid, and delicate, feathery blooms in vibrant, unnatural shades of viridian, purple, and orange.
He saw movement in the murky, stagnant water – not rats, though he saw evidence of them too, but thick, pale, fungal tendrils undulating slowly beneath the surface, like eyeless eels. Then he saw the rats themselves, or what remained of them. Several carcasses were caught in the fungal mass near the water"s edge, their bodies partially consumed, enveloped, covered in a fine, downy, green fuzz, their forms distorted, grotesquely integrated into the larger, spreading organism. Marco felt a wave of bile rise in his throat, the visceral body horror aspect hitting him with full force. This thing, this entity, wasn"t just growing passively; it was actively consuming, incorporating other life forms into its own expanding biomass.
He felt something soft land on the back of his exposed hand. A tiny puff of greenish dust, released from a nearby pulsating sac as he brushed past it. Spores. He brushed them off frantically, heart pounding, but the skin beneath already felt itchy, irritated, inflamed. He imagined the microscopic spores taking root, sending invisible hyphae burrowing into his flesh, breaching his defenses, making him part of this… bloom. Panic, cold and sharp, began to set in, overriding his photographer"s detachment.
He noticed the growth seemed densest, most concentrated, towards the rear of the sprawling basement, near a section of the foundation wall where a major water main or sewer pipe had likely burst years ago, providing a constant source of moisture. It converged there into a massive, terrifyingly organic, pulsating mass of interwoven fungal matter, glowing with a stronger, more insistent viridian light than anything else he"d seen. It looked like a grotesque, diseased heart, easily six feet across and embedded deep within the crumbling concrete and brick of the foundation wall, with thick, root-like tendrils spreading out from it in all directions, burrowing into the earth below and climbing the walls above. This had to be the source, the nexus, the central intelligence – if such a term could apply – of the entire building-spanning network.
As he cautiously approached this central mass, drawn by a horrified fascination, the pulsing quickened, becoming a steady, rhythmic throbbing that he could almost feel vibrating through the damp air. The air grew thick with spores, released in coordinated, visible clouds from pores opening on the surface of the central mass and surrounding structures. Marco felt a strange, intense pressure build inside his head, accompanied by a disorienting jumble of images, sensations, and emotions that felt alien, intrusive, not his own – overwhelming feelings of dampness, darkness, slow inexorable growth, the taste of decay, the sensation of consumption, and a profound sense of interconnectedness, of being part of a vast, silent, unthinking network… Was it communicating? Probing his mind? Or was he simply succumbing more intensely to the hallucinogenic effects of the concentrated spores?
He raised his camera, driven by an almost automatic instinct to document this impossible, terrifying discovery, the heart of the viridian bloom. As the flash fired, bathing the pulsating mass in harsh, momentary light, the central structure reacted violently. It convulsed with a wet, tearing sound, and several thick, whip-like tendrils, previously unseen, lashed out from the wall with surprising speed and force, whipping through the spore-filled air directly towards him. Marco cried out, stumbling backward in pure terror, falling heavily into the stagnant, knee-deep water. The tendrils slapped hard against the surface where he had been standing just a second before, sending up foul-smelling splashes.
He scrambled away on all fours through the filthy water, terror overriding any thought of retrieving his dropped flashlight or taking more photos. He had to get out. Now. He splashed blindly through the flooded basement, ignoring the unsettling feeling of things moving beneath the surface, brushing against his legs, back towards the faint light filtering down the stairwell. The slime mold on the steps seemed thicker now, more active, its luminescence brighter, seeming to actively try to impede his progress, grasping at his boots with sticky pseudopods.
He half-climbed, half-crawled back up to the relative safety of the ground floor. The patterns on the walls seemed more active now, writhing, pulsing with an inner light, the air thick with the sweet, suffocating scent. He felt spores landing on his face, in his hair, tasting them on his lips. He ran blindly for the faint outline of the window he"d entered through, ignoring the increasing dizziness, the pounding headache, the growing, terrifying certainty that something alien was growing inside his lungs, taking root in the warm, damp darkness.
He burst out through the gap in the plywood into the fading grey light of the late afternoon, gasping desperately for fresh, clean air, collapsing onto the overgrown, weed-choked lawn. He lay there for several minutes, coughing violently, spitting thick phlegm onto the grass, trying to clear his lungs, his body trembling uncontrollably. He looked back at the dark, silent facade of the Avalon Apartments, giving no outward sign whatsoever of the alien ecosystem thriving, consuming, and potentially thinking within its decaying walls.
Getting home felt like navigating a dream. Marco stripped off his contaminated clothes in the garage, sealing them tightly in multiple trash bags. He showered for almost an hour, scrubbing his skin raw with antiseptic soap, terrified of any lingering spores finding purchase. He meticulously cleaned his camera equipment, wiping down every surface, but couldn"t bring himself to look at the photos on the memory card yet. The fear remained, deep-seated. He developed a persistent, hacking cough over the next few days, and strange, itchy rashes appeared on his arms and neck where the spores had landed. He became intensely paranoid about mold, bleaching his bathroom obsessively, scrutinizing every dark corner of his small apartment, jumping at every shadow.
He never released the photos from the Avalon. Who would believe him? They"d dismiss it as just unusually extensive mold growth, his perceptions exaggerated by fear, the inherent dangers of the location, and maybe the effects of inhaling common mold spores. But Marco knew what he had seen, what he had felt, what he had sensed. A vast, slow, ancient, consuming intelligence was growing in the damp, neglected heart of Youngstown"s decay, an alien life form thriving in the shadows, potentially spreading beyond its initial incubator.
Weeks later, walking downtown after a period of heavy rain, Marco noticed a small patch of vibrant, almost iridescent green fungus growing on the damp, shaded brickwork of an old, neglected storefront, miles away from the Avalon Apartments. It formed a delicate, intricate, fractal pattern, disturbingly familiar, seeming to pulse with a faint, inner viridian light. It was spreading. The bloom beneath the city, nurtured in darkness and decay, was finding new soil, reaching out, perhaps preparing for a wider, more visible emergence.