Day 672

The buildings on one of the council estates by the edges of town was one of the older ones. Its buildings got hit pretty badly in the last storm to the point where the majority are now in dire need of repairs that the council can't afford and won't do. We've taken to calling "Tin Town" on account of all the scaffolding just waiting to be put to better use than a children's climbing frame.

One building stands out more than most and that's Jerri and Son's Organic Mushrooms. They've got both halves of a semi-detached house to themselves, fence built barely within the two metre legal parameter and painted with smiling mushrooms. I always thought they looked more like distorted human heads than anything edible but what did I know?

It was one of the worst hit during the storm. They'd been growing the mushrooms inside apparently and all that damp had rotted away at a good deal of the original timber framing. A few days after the storm we heard the sound of wood splintering and crashing. Seems the upper floor had just crumbled taking a fair portion of roof and rear wall alongside it. Even some of the fence had been dragged down into the detritus.

Within the hour Jerri and Son's had a temporary fence put up but it was a great deal shorter than the rest. A friend of mine said that if you stood on tiptoe you could see over the part where the new fence met the broken fence  - you could see right into the house. He told me that their garden was packed full of the fattest mushrooms he'd ever seen and that the ground was a deep red colour, nothing like regular brown dirt.

Deciding to check it out for myself I managed to scramble my way over the newer fence and into Jerri ad Son's Organic Mushroom Compound. My friend had been half right, the back garden was so densely full of mushrooms that you couldn't even see the dirt, much less tell what colour it was.

I wasn't impressed by the back garden much, it just looked like a bunch of overgrown fungus. I should have stopped there, headed back and told my friend he was just full of it but I was stupid enough to think I could just sneak past the broken wall with no consequences and be out before anyone knew I'd even been in.

It looked so easy at first, a wide open wall with blue tarp roughly nailed over it to try and stop the weather seeping through, the damp musty smell of an attic in summer and the faint haze of mushroom spores drifted out and tempted me to go in further which is exactly what I did.

First thing I saw was that every inch inside the house was covered in those same mushrooms, all enormous and seemingly sweating in the surprisingly intense heat inside the building. The collapsing of the roof and wall didn't seem to have affected the overall production much. Took me a fair while to see the bones lying among the fungal overgrowth. The bleached remains blended in well with the pallid domes but the closer I looked the more I saw.

It was like the fungi were growing from within those skeletons. Whoever they were it would be awfully hard to tell one body apart from another, much less identify any of them after this. I never told the police in case they nicked me for trespassing, in case I went missing, in case Jerri and son's needed any new fertiliser.

It's hard to say what's done more damage to the area in the long run - the storm or the "organic" mushrooms.