Deadly Glow

IN the dark of the night the tall toadstools and wild mushrooms sprouted, thrusting their umbrella heads up through the dank soil of the wood. And night after night they grew and flourished in the rich soil, rearing up in the darkness, clothing themselves with a strange blue halo that warned those who would do them harm to keep well away. The eerie blue tinge positively glowed as they grew bigger and taller and stronger and bolder. The earth around them reflected back their glow and an alien bluish aura built up around them, as if marking out their territory beside the massive trunk of an age-old tree.

HE stood stock still, unable to take his eyes off these strange incandescent growths, as though his feet were rooted to the spot. He had stumbled across this menacing clump of luminescent fungi whilst returning home from a walk across the woods and the sight of them froze him in his tracks, leaving him open-mouthed and awestruck. The plants seemed to pulsate and throb with a blue and white energy that was as intense as it was mysterious. He did not know what to make of it. But one thing he did know was that it would be wise to give them a very wide berth.

AND so as the light began to fade and darkness fall, causing these strange unearthly fungi to glow ever brighter and to pulsate ever stronger, a fear took hold of him, bringing up beads of sweat on his brow and, with what seemed to be an almost superhuman exercise of willpower, he freed his feet from the pull of the earth and immediately broke into a frantic run to put as much distance as he could as quickly as he could between him and this unsettling fungal apparition. As he ran on towards the edge of the wood, without once looking back, he did not see that another crop of these mysterious mushrooms was pushing up through the soil, that the established fungi had grown yet taller, yet brighter, that they now throbbed and hummed with a bluish energy that coursed through their stems and lit up their huge heads.