Entity story · 3 min read · Set in Marston Services ·
The Footfall Under Marston Services
The night staff at a motorway service station in Ostmark notice that the fungal network under the car park reads their footsteps, and has begun to leave prints in the moss that match the gait of each person who works the late shift.
Marston Services sits on the Ostmark bypass, a low grey block of shops, toilets and a fast-food counter, surrounded by an acre of tarmac and a strip of dead hedge. The late shift is quiet. Mostly lorry drivers, a few families driving through in the night, and the cleaners who come in after midnight. Bridget Wren had been on the till for six years, and in that time she had learned to walk the back corridor by the feel of the floor, the soft give of the lino by the staff door, the loud click of the tile near the bins.
In February she began to notice the moss.
It was growing in the cracks of the car park, a fine silver-green fur, very thin and very even. It ran in lines from the staff door toward the lorry bays, and from the lorry bays toward the back of the building, and it showed the prints of feet. Not footprints in the sense of marks left in mud. These were patches of the moss that had been pressed down and then slowly lifted, leaving a faint outline of the sole, with the heel and toe distinct and the arch shaped exactly.
Bridget knew the shape of her own foot. She had been walking the same corridor for six years, and her left foot turned out slightly at the heel, a habit from a childhood knee injury. The prints in the moss turned out at the heel too.
She told the manager, Colin Haig, who said the cleaners had been walking the same route for years and it was probably the damp. Then she told the cleaners, who looked at each other and said nothing. The next night, one of them, an older woman named Sheila, came into the staff room with a small brown envelope and put it on the table in front of Bridget. Inside was a photograph of the car park at four in the morning, taken from the first-floor window, with the moss clearly visible in the lamplight. And in the moss, beside the lorry bay, there was a single print that was not Bridget's. It was smaller, and narrower, and it was walking away from the building.
Sheila said that print belonged to the girl who had worked the late shift before Bridget, a student called Anna, who had left suddenly in the autumn and had never come back for her wages.
Over the next weeks, the prints multiplied. They appeared each night, lining the corridors of the car park, and by March they had begun to show up inside the building as well, faint silver outlines on the tile by the staff door, in the carpet of the seating area, once on the glass of the till counter where somebody had left their hand. Each print matched the gait of a person who worked the late shift, and each one was slightly out of step, a fraction ahead of the real footsteps, as though the moss were reading the walk and predicting what came next.
Colin Haig tried to stop it. He had the car park resurfaced, a fresh layer of black asphalt laid over the cracks in a single night. In the morning the moss had come up through the new surface, in the exact lines of the old, and each print had been pressed in with a sharp heel and toe.
Bridget no longer tries to avoid the prints. She walks the corridor each night as she always has, and each night she sees her own footsteps in the silver fur ahead of her, and then, at the end of the corridor by the staff door, a second set of prints beside them, a little narrower, a little hesitant, going on alone into the dark car park and out past the lorry bays, toward the bypass, as if the fungus is still searching for the girl who walked that way in the autumn and never once looked back.