Entity story · 4 min read ·
The Impression Fungus of the Cathedral Close
A gardener clearing the lawns of a cathedral close finds a pale fungus that grows in the exact shape of whatever has rested on the grass for years, and beneath the bench where the dean used to sit the shape is a man who has not yet been buried.
The lawns of the cathedral close at Vallis Reach had been kept the same way since the Victorian gardeners laid them out: a long oval of velvet grass, edged with box, sloping gently down to the river. The garden staff were proud of them. In summer the lawns were cut twice a week, and in winter they were rolled and aerated, and nothing was ever allowed to grow on them that had not been planted by hand.
In March, the head gardener, Irene Brisk, found a patch of fungus growing under the dean's bench.
It was pale, almost white, and it grew in a thin velvety mat over a square of turf about the size of a single flagstone. At first it looked like ordinary lawn fungus. Then she brushed it with her hand and found that the mat was not flat. It rose in a faint, regular hollow, a shallow dish a few centimetres deep, and its edges were sharp, as though something had pressed into the turf for a long time and then lifted away.
She pulled back the mat. Underneath, the grass was pale and fine, and in the centre of the hollow there was an imprint of a man's shoulders and head, the back of a skull, the curve of a shoulder blade, the length of an outstretched arm. The impression was perfect, every detail there, the way a body leaves its shape on a bed after a long night.
Irene asked the dean whether he had been sitting on the bench in the winter. He said he had, every afternoon for thirty years, while he read his newspaper and waited for evensong. He had never noticed anything under the bench. He said it was probably the damp.
Over the next week, Irene found more.
A second patch, under the yew by the west door, in the shape of a woman kneeling. A third, beside the sundial, the outline of a child sitting cross-legged with a book on its knees. A fourth, at the far end of the lawn, where the bishop had once knelt to pray each morning for twelve years. The fungus grew in each one with the same pale, velvet persistence. Each impression had been made by someone who had rested there for a long time, and when Irene lifted the mat, she found the grass below the shape was always a little greener, as though it had been feeding on what was left behind.
She told the chapter. A canon, a pleasant man named Thorne, said it was all a matter of fungal growth on decaying turf, and that the impressions were a curiosity, nothing more. He asked Irene to scrape them off and burn the debris.
She tried. The fungus came up in her hands, soft and cool, and the shapes it had taken came with it. When she turned the mat over, the impression was on the underside too, a perfect negative, and she saw that the pale threads were arranged in a pattern of faint lines, like a map, or like the lines of a face drawn very carefully by a patient hand.
She did not burn it. She buried the mat under a rose bush at the edge of the close, and put the impressions back where they had come from, and when she went out the next morning she found them grown again, deeper and clearer than before.
By the end of the summer there were eleven shapes on the close lawns. Each was of someone who had sat in the same place for a long time, a dean, a canon, a choirboy, a verger, a pilgrim, a woman with a baby, a man with a crutch. Irene walks the lawns each morning now, with a rake she never uses, looking at the shapes. She knows most of them by name. The shape under the dean's bench has been filling in slowly since the spring, and yesterday, very faintly, it showed the outline of an old man in a black cassock, his head bowed, his hands folded, his face turned up toward the cathedral as though he were waiting, quite patiently, for someone to come and sit down beside him.