Page 21 of Shroom for Improvement

Thank gods I was already seated. “My mother? My mother was here? At Stinkhorn Manor?”

Willow nodded, and Oggy sat up. Five, six centuries ago would have put them here around the time of my conception or birth. And more than once? I hadn’t realised they’d been in a courtship. Mum had always explained their history in a way that painted my father as a one-and-done kind of guy.

“You could call her?” Oggy said, peering up at me with those enormous glassy eyes. “You’re still in contact with her, no?”

I blew out my breath. The answer was yes, I spoke to Mum once a month, like clockwork. I was a good son like that. But in the past, whenever I’d dared to mention Angus Stinkhorn,I’d been met with a receiver slamming onto the holder. Or if we were face to face, the silent treatment.

“Call who?! Not the kid’s mother?! The clue is in the name. She’s a Button, not a Stinkhorn!” A shadow loomed over us.

Willow, Oggy, and John collectively gasped. John pulled his knees up to his chest and Oggy began sucking her thumb.

“Mrs Ziegler,” Willow said, with a pointed look at me. “Such a surprise to see you here, outside the cell boundary.”

The cell boundary?

“I’m looking for that bastard smoke cretin. Anybody seen him? Thinks he can release six thousand slightly miffed bees into my bedroom. Fucker forgot I love bees. Ate them all. Washed down the measly portion of melon I had for breakfast.”

Mrs Ziegler was not what I’d expected. Perhaps because I hadn’t let myself imagine what a person who inspired fear in both Oggy and Willow, and was unafraid to ribbonise the clothes of a nine-foot fire daemon, might look like. I definitely did not expect a short, squashy, human woman with frizzy salt-and-pepper hair and spectacles. She was in that nameless age, somewhere between middle-aged and ancient. Sixty? Sixty-five? She looked as though she could be someone’s cool grandma, the one who swore and smoked weed and let you climb the trees in her garden.

But I knew she wasn’t human. She was fooling no one. Because underneath all the dowdiness, there was a faintly glowing aura to her. It resembled a blue flame licking over her skin. Like a pilot light from a boiler.

I had a sudden urge to wrap myself in a silver anti-hypothermia blanket and find a shaded, desolate roadside to shiver beside whilst replaying every mistake I’d ever made over my five hundred and ten years.

In that moment, I decided, I too would be very afraid of Mrs Ziegler.

“No? Nobody’s seen that useless waste of oxygen?”

“The last time we saw him,” I said. “Was in the foyer. He took the bees up to your room and then we ran away to the field before he came down.” The words did not leave my throat through my own free will. They felt as though they’d been dragged out, like a magician producing a string of colourful kerchiefs all tied together.

“Did you now?” Mrs Ziegler’s face cracked into a maniacal grin. Blue flames danced inside her mouth.

“M-Mrs Ziegler,” Oggy stuttered. “You shouldn’t be out past the cell boundary for too long.”

Mrs Ziegler looked at the back of her hands and swore under her breath. “Fucking joke, this.” She turned to leave but paused, turned back, and indicated towards the general direction of the house. “You need a mushroom-magic... expert to explain the ritual, not a mushroom fae, and certainly not that cock-sleeve Button twirp.”

And then she left, leaving the rest of us bouncing frowns between each other.

Two thoughts flitted through my head. One, did she really refer to my mother as a cock-sleeve? And two, maybe she was right about needing a mushroom-magic expert.

“Cock . . . sleeve . . . But . . . ton . . . twirp,”John repeated slowly as he wrote it on his notepad.

I turned to Willow and Oggy. “Where do we find a mushroom-magic expert?” I asked.

Both sentry fae shrugged.

The Great Western Crested Ignoramus Bear

Claude

A grandfather clock awaited me in the centre of my room. It was a typical grandfather clock: tall, elegant, expensive wood, glass case with swinging pendulum, and an ornate gold face. Only, this one also had a panel in the middle with an ominous-looking countdown.

21st June, 04:13

The summer solstice.

Presumably when this ritual needed performing. I couldn’t not look at the countdown, which was currently showing two months, one week, two days, fifteen hours, and thirty-four minutes. It was like one of those haunted paintings with the eyes that followed me around wherever I went in myrooms, including the mezzanine level. I felt like it was watching me. Pulsating. Like a ticking bomb.

I necked four cups of fancy chai latte and paced the mushroom-print rug in my room for two hours before I’d worked up the nerve to call my mother. During that time, the clock bonged obnoxiously at me several times.

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