Jimin skipped ahead of Jin, and felt the moonlight shine on his gleaming face, cheeks turned a bright shade of red from the biting, arid cold. The streetlights cast bright pools of light on the ground, illuminating the sidewalk every couple of meters as the two boys hurried down an empty street, their laughter vanishing in puffs of smoke.

“Oh my god it’s cold out here,” giggled Jin, his soft nose tinted a sharp pink.

“I know,” whined Jimin. “How much longer, Hyung?”

“It’s not too far from here,” Jin assured him. “Five minutes at most.”

In fact, it only took the boys three to reach their much anticipated destination, and when they did Jimin could see that it was a large, white house. Modern in design and cube-like in structure, it appeared to be some sort of miniature apartment block - one that would only fit two or three separate units inside. The garage made up the entire ground floor, and the rest of the building towered at the base of a very steep hill. The location was on the outskirts of their little city, and the buildings before the two young men were all abandoned and largely dilapidated.

“Cool,” Jimin commented.

Jin walked up to the rotting front door while Jimin stayed behind on the sidewalk to pace. He wanted to look the house over from the outside before going in, and that was what he began to do now as Jin worked on picking the lock.

❧

“Urban exploring” was what Jin had called it, and the name had piqued Jimin’s interest immediately. It sounded plain awesome - in a creepy kind of way - walking around buildings that no one had been in for years or decades; seeing what old, forgotten stuff there was to explore and find. Jin said that he’d spent many a weekend night during his youth just rifling through the empty buildings - and upon hearing this fact, Jimin had begged the older man to take him along.

“I don’t do that anymore,” Jin had protested. “It’s kind of… illegal, you know?”

“Yeah, but it’s not like anyone really cares,” Jimin insisted.

The younger man had pleaded and called Jin names, dancing dangerously close to the line of what sort of conduct his older friend would normally deem respectful and appropriate. And in the end, Jin relented as he always did, agreeing to take Jimin to the last place on his list that he had yet to actually cross off.

This giant cube was the building, apparently, and Jimin couldn’t understand why the other man had given up his hobby before bothering to at least check it out. The apartment looked ancient despite its modern architecture, and Jimin was sure that it would prove to hold more than one staggering, life-altering secret.

“Don’t get your hopes up, little ChimChim,” yelled Jin from the door, almost as if he could read the younger man’s thoughts. “There’s probably not too much here that’s gonna be interesting.”

“Why didn’t you come here before tonight?” wondered Jimin. “You know - when you were still into the whole ‘urban exploring’ thing?”

“Ah, my friends all lost interest in it,” said Jin as he finally popped the lock. “It wasn’t much fun to do it without them, so I guess I just… stopped before I made it out here.”

The older man stood as he brushed off his hands, but didn’t push open the door just yet.

“Alright,” Jin announced. “It’s ready. So… shall we?”

“Heck yeah!” giggled Jimin.

On his way to the steps that led up to the entrance, Jimin stopped in his tracks as he stared at something stuck high on the face of the multi-storied house.

“Hey, Jin?” the boy called. “Come look at this.”

The older man came to stand beside Jimin, and looked where he was pointing to a spot on the side of the house. Draping down from one of the windowsills on the second - or, technically, third - floor was a kind of yellow growth that didn’t match the white paint of the exterior at all. It was lumpy and porous-looking, and it reminded Jimin of an oddly opaque icicle.

“What the heck it that?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” confessed Jin. “Maybe some type of fungus? We can check it out once we’re inside, if you want.”

Jimin agreed wholeheartedly to this, and with that, the two men bounded giddily up the steps, past the garage to the first actual floor.

❧

When Jimin carefully turned the handle, the weathered door all but fell away in his hand as he slowly opened it, revealing a hallway with a staircase to one side and doors that spanned all along either decrepit wall.

“Whoa,” whispered Jimin while stepping inside.

Behind the young man, Jin his headlamp, and Jimin hurriedly did the same with the one Jin had given him, illuminating the wallpaper and moldy carpet of the interior. Almost immediately, the latter realized that Jin’s guess regarding the thing hanging outside was most likely correct, as the vast majority of the floor was totally blanketed with small, white mushrooms where the wooden boards peeked sporadically through. They looked almost luminous when Jimin leaned close, the light from his headlamp penetrating the mushroom’s thin caps to produce the illusion of a soft, steady glow.

“Careful, Jimin,” warned Jin, in a nervous breath. “You don’t know if those are poisonous.”

The older man snapped on a pair of thin gloves before bending down to snap one of the mushrooms’ stalks, examining it under his own intense lamp.

“Well I wasn’t gonna eat it or anything,” Jimin grumbled.

Although slightly offended, Jimin had to admit that his friend looked like he knew exactly what he was doing. The older man had certainly come prepared with the gloves and headlamps - two things that Jimin never would have thought to bring, yet had already made the experience easier. Jimin thought to himself that it would probably be good to follow Jin’s lead if he wanted to avoid getting himself into trouble - though of course he didn’t admit that to the other man. He crossed his arms in a halfhearted attempt to preserve his pride, and crept up behind Jin to look at the fungus for himself.

Jimin had to stand on his tiptoes to see anything past the taller man’s shoulder, but Jin turned the mushroom around for him to study from all angles before placing it gently back on the ground. The two of them gazed out at the colonies of little white caps for a minute without saying anything.

❧

When someone finally did speak, it was Jin, and all that he offered for analysis was a simple, “Interesting,” before venturing deeper into the house.

Jimin followed closely behind, and the pair ascended the creaky staircase until they found themselves on the second floor. The stairs went up for one more level, but Jin crossed the floor here, saying that he wanted to find the window from which that weird, yellow blob had been hanging.

The building was really more of a townhouse than an apartment complex, and the small kitchen and communal living area on the landing ahead of him suggested to Jimin that each level of the house had once been rented out to a separate family. Jimin was willing to bet that there would be similar layouts on the first and third floors, and that the several doors branching off the short hallway on this level were most likely bedrooms. That would make sense, Jimin realized, because there were three separate garage doors on the ground level connected to the driveway, and there were three habitable floors in the house itself.

Jin swung opened the first door he came to, and quickly discovered that the room into which it led was not the one with the fungal lump. It was, however, home to its own plethora of various species of mushrooms and mildew, and Jimin was correct in his assumption that it had probably been used as a bedroom at some point.

A musty mattress stood rotting in the corner - or, really, more like liquefying under the thick, oozing layers of heavily-encrusted mold - but other than that, the room was bare. The only other fixtures were the multiple mushrooms that inhabited every available surface as they continued up the peeling walls. It was like standing in a life-sized terrarium; complete with moss hanging in curtains from the ceiling.

Jimin spun, marveling at the different colors, shapes, and patterns of fungus, while Jin looked through the mushrooms that littered the floor, using his gloves to push some of the specimens out of his way.

“Hey, check this out,” said the older man as he broke off a piece of the seamless cover of fungus.

Jin brushed away a few clinging stalks on what appeared to be a small blue book. The pages were yellow and disgustingly damp, but the writing inside was still fairly legible. It was a journal, apparently; probably left behind by the previous tenants in the harried confusion of moving house. Jin opened the book to the first soggy page, and read the beginning entry aloud.

❧

May 24th

Dear Diary,

That’s how you’re supposed to start these things, right? God I feel like such an idiot writing in this stupid journal. I’m a guy; I’m not supposed to be sharing my feelings with some little lame- book.

Jimin interrupted the reading with a poorly stifled snort, but Jin shushed the younger man as he continued to quote the angry journal.

I guess I’ll introduce myself anyway. My name’s Jungkook. I’m seventeen years old, and my mother is making me write here because she thinks it’ll help me “get through the divorce.” News Flash, Mom: no amount of scribbling around in some stupid ing book is gonna make me feel better about the fact that you and Dad apparently hated each other’s gut so much that you both had to go out and start screwing other people.

“Troubled kid,” Jin murmured.

The entry went on for just a bit longer, and Jin finished reading it without further intervention.

I hate this stupid rental house. It’s been a week since we moved here, and I already can’t stand it. I hate my stupid parents. I hate that I have to stay here in this dump with Mom and her idiot boyfriend. He’s too ing young for her and he smells really funny. It’s so goddamn boring here and it’s so ing dusty that I can’t stop sneezing. I can’t wait to move out and get a place of my own. Until next time, stupid Diary.

-Jungkook

❧

The first journal entry stopped there, and Jin closed the book fully as he and Jimin both stopped to silently contemplate what they had just read.

“Jeez,” whispered Jimin after an eternity. “This kid sounds pretty damn pissed at life. Guess I can’t blame him, though; divorce , and it must have been hard to be forced to live with someone he didn’t even seem to like.”

Jin nodded in agreement before wandering out of the room and across the hall, and Jimin followed closely behind him. The door on the other side was slightly stuck, and since Jin was still holding onto the diary, Jimin volunteered to try opening the entryway a bit more persuasively.

The younger man kicked and slammed on the door, which budged, but wouldn’t open anywhere even close to fully. It was almost as if there was something pressed up against the hinges, holding them firmly and stubbornly in place so that the portal couldn’t be opened.

“Hang on, hang on,” grunted Jimin. “I can do it.”

With one final ram, the door flew open, and Jimin spilled out onto the floor of a bathroom. Much like the bedroom they had been in previously, the entire area was carpeted and wallpapered with various species of mold and fungus, and the once-white porcelain tub in the corner was probably home to the most mushrooms of all. Not even that was the most remarkable feature of the room, however, because the first immediately noticeable thing was the large clump of yellow fungus that sat right by the window, spilling out of the cracks at the base of the frame as it prodded and leaked its way outside.

Jimin stood up and brushed himself off, and looked at the man still standing in the hallway.

“Hey! Nice job,” praised Jin with a smile. He stretched both hands out in front of him to gesture grandly at the giant yellow blob that sat on the floor. “And we even found where that weird yellow stuff’s coming from.”

Before Jimin could respond with anything more than a reciprocative grin, there was a loud creak followed by an ear-splitting crack, and the frame of the bathroom door came crumbling down under a shower of rubble from the higher floor. Jin dropped the book as he leapt quickly backwards, pulling his arms close to his body in an attempt to protect them from the unforeseen fall. Jimin, too, was taken aback, but he did little more than flinch as the doorway was sealed behind piles of concrete and rotten wood.

“Oh, crap,” came Jin’s muffled voice from the other side. “Are you alright, Jimin?”

“Yeah,” replied the younger man, his shaky voice suggesting slightly otherwise. “What about you, dude?”

“I’m okay, but there’s a huge support beam blocking the door out here,” explained the other man. “I don’t think I’ll be able to move it. You’re trapped in there ’til we can get someone else to help us.”

Jimin panicked. It wasn’t because of his inability to get out of the bathroom so much as it was a result of his fear of getting into some sort of trouble with the police. The young man knew that he and his friend weren’t supposed to be snooping around the abandoned house, and now he had gone and gotten himself into a situation where he needed outside help to escape. He was sure that Jin was suggesting that they had no other choice but to call the authorities - and maybe even the fire department in an effort to get the support beam out of the way so the young man could actually leave. Jimin explained as much to Jin, shouting through the wall of debris as he begged the older man not to involve any city officials.

“Sorry, Jimin, but I don’t really have very much of a choice,” confessed Jin sorrowfully. “We need help to move the beam out of here; otherwise you’re not gonna make it out. Don’t worry, though, I’m sure the cops will let you off with a warning. Try to act really shaken up.”

Jimin thought that he would have no trouble convincing the officers that he was scared by the whole experience, as in all honestly, he was really starting to worry and panic. The terror dawned on him as Jimin began to feel very isolated in the humid bathroom, the hunk of yellow fungus his only companion as he waited impatiently for help to arrive. With a somewhat dramatically heavy sigh, he agreed to let Jin go get the police, and the older man left with the promise to return quickly and bring back help. Jimin just hoped their assistants would take pity on him and his utterly miserable situation.

❧

With nothing else to do while he waited for Jin to get back, Jimin sauntered over to the mysterious clump of mustardy fungus on the densely-populated floor. It was nestled among more patches of the white-capped mushrooms from downstairs, and Jimin’s headlamp swept over the lumps and indents of the porous yellow stuff as he looked it hastily up and down.

The chunk of slimy fungus was certainly large, and Jimin guessed that it was at least as wide as his body, if not bigger. The glass of the window was broken in places where the fungus had crept up and burst through, and when he worked up the courage to lean out and check, Jimin found that he could see the strange yellow stalactites cascading down the side of the house.

Weird.

He had the strange compulsion to touch it, but decided that it was probably best to refrain from doing so, seeing as how he didn’t have any latex gloves. Although it was cold on the street outside, it was almost sweltering in the little bathroom, and Jimin wiped at the sweat on his forehead as he wandered back over to the blocked-off door.

The crash had caused the mushrooms to release little spores, and the remnants of these clouds of particles floated up to tickle and itch at  Jimin’s nose as the young man sifted through the heaps of wood. He covered his mouth as he dug deeper, but not before the dust could bother him so much that he sneezed loudly, the sound seeming almost absurdly loud in the small, confined, and sealed-off bathroom.

Brushing a few pieces of rubble away, Jimin discovered that the small blue journal had ended up on his side of the avalanche, and he thought that he might as well read some more entries to keep himself cognizant and entertained. It felt a bit odd reading somebody’s diary when he didn’t even know the young boy it belonged to - although Jimin guessed that it wouldn’t be any less weird if he did know Jungkook. He flipped to the page that Jin had left off on as he sat on the closed lid of the toilet, ignoring the mildew as best he could.

“Let’s see what Jungkookie had to say about his crappy step dad,” chuckled Jimin, delving into the second entry.

❧

May 27th

Mom’s boyfriend tried to get me to call him “Dad” today. Ew. Dude, you’re, like, ten years older than me (at most); you’re not my ing father and I don’t want you to think you ever can be. Not like my real dad’s much better, haha. He’s barely even talked to me since he and Mom split, and sometimes I feel like I don’t even exist amongst all the that everyone’s throwing. Everyone has their own petty problems, and I only ever get in the way…

Jimin couldn’t help but feel bad for the kid. The latter’s writing made it seem like he wasn’t exactly the most lighthearted of people, but Jimin was certain that Jungkook wouldn’t have been quite so mean-spirited if he hadn’t been forced to endure a crappy home life that he seemed to claim that he wanted no part of. The new house, new boyfriend - maybe even a new school full of people the other boy didn’t know. It had to be hard to make so many different transitions at once, and Jimin felt a small lump form in his throat as he continued.

Speaking of problems, Mom took me to the doctor’s today for my sneezing. It’s been getting worse for the past few days, and now I’ve started coughing as well. The doctor said it was likely just allergies, and she gave me a prescription for eye drops and . I have to take nasal spray - twice a day - like some kind of ing sniffly nerd. God, I hate life; I’m gonna go crazy waiting to finally move out. Once again, I cannot take this stupid place. Talk to you soon, or maybe I won’t.

-Jungkook

Jimin paused to look over at the dark yellow lump, letting the previous entry soak in before moving quickly on to the next. This one was dated almost a week later, and Jimin noticed that the handwriting was a little less neat than the tightly printed, impeccable script of the first two letters.

June 2nd

Cough is getting worse. I swear the medication is hurting me more than it’s helping things. My eyes are watery all the time; I can hardly even breathe at night. Even Mom and her stupid boyfriend are coughing now, and I’d bet my life’s savings it’s because of this house. There’s mold in the corners of my goddamn room, and yesterday I found a ing mushroom growing between the tiles in the bathroom. This place is gross and just unclean, and I can hear the families above and below us sneezing almost constantly, too.

At this point, Jungkook had scribbled over the next several yellowed lines, making them impossible for Jimin to read. The young man could only speculate that it was more swears and exclamations of general hatred, but Jimin couldn’t shake the feeling that he might have been missing something important. He felt a tickle in his throat as he skimmed down to the last line, which was the only remaining one that hadn’t been altered.

I don’t care what Mom says anymore; I am getting the out.

❧

Jimin’s chest rattled as he coughed painfully, feeling the tickle spread throughout his chest and into his lungs. He looked at the lump of fungus in the corner again, and realized that whatever infestation was going on now must have started when the building’s last inhabitants were still trying to live there. No wonder the place had been abandoned; Jimin couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to share their house with a bunch of mushrooms.

The young man turned the page and continued reading; the handwriting that made up this entry even more deteriorated than that of the last.

June 3rd

Holy . I woke up today with some kind of weird ing rash all over my hands.

More scribbles, obstructing Jimin’s view of the words until he glanced further down the page.

No.

No; that’s all ing stupid. I’m fine. It’s just a really strange rash. I tried to wash off some of the gross yellow crusty stuff, but that just made it spread even farther up my arms. It’s so goddamn itchy. Mom just made me yet another doctor’s appointment, but the earliest slot she could get was for tomorrow afternoon. I saw some of the stuff on her leg, too, though, so I know that she knows how miserable this stuff is.

I want to do nothing but itch and scratch, but I know that that’ll just make it spread more. I can’t touch anything. I probably shouldn’t even be writing in this book, but I’m so ing bored with nothing else to do. I’ll throw the pen away after I’m done, ’cause I’m sure it’s covered in germs or bacteria or who-even-knows-what. . My eyes are so itchy. I sound like a lunatic.

The entry ended in the middle of the page without Jungkook signing off as usual, but the writing picked up again at the very bottom of the paper. Jimin wasn’t sure if it was from the same day or perhaps even the morning of the next, but the young man did know he had a bad, sinking feeling that the lump in his throat was more than just regular pity or fear.

It’s all over my back. ing Christ; I can barely move with this stuff all over me - it’s miserable. I can’t breathe. Mom and her boyfriend are nowhere to be found, but my eyes and ears are so crusted over that I doubt I’d be able to find them even if I had a ing clue where they were. I can barely see what I’m writing here. Everything itches. I can feel it in my lungs. I can’t ing breathe. I have to get out of here. I have to  

Fu

Jungkook had only managed to complete the first half of his final word before the pen ran right off the page in a jagged line. Jimin felt his own eyes start to water as another cough welled up in the pit of his chest, his lungs struggling to hold it back.

❧

Shaking violently, Jimin set the journal down on the counter by the sink, and turned his attention back to the yellow blob of fungus by the window. The lump was practically calling to him at this point, and he found it impossible to resist as he got up off the toilet and stumbled over to the mustard-colored lump.

He held back another gurgling cough as he poked at the fungus, and found that it was very peculiarly spongy, yet also oddly rough in texture. He scratched off a small piece of the amorphous mass, and squeezed the fragment between his fingers. Tossing that aside to the ground, the young man broke off a larger clump, unable to keep his lungs from hacking at the cloud of spores that the thing produced. His eyes were totally burning at this point, and Jimin fought to keep them open as he tore off another yellow hunk.

Jimin gasped.

The sudden intake of air sent of a series of spasming coughs through his chest, and he couldn’t control them as he stumbled backwards, falling onto the floor that was blanketed by red spotted mushrooms. The fungi broke his harsh fall as the panicked young man continued to tumble, desperate to scramble away from the thing that his digging had unveiled from the fungus. Staring back at Jimin from the pile of yellow was a partially preserved and sticky corpse - its flesh still stringy in places where bone was not yet fully exposed to the mildew. Within the tall fungus lay the face boy, his one intact eyeball glistening in the light of Jimin’s headlamp.

Jimin felt tears rush down his fear-twisted face, salt trails continuing to form as he gasped - the spasms in his diaphragm now uncontrollable. He clutched a hand to his heaving chest, and felt the lump in his throat expand.

Have any of you ever played The Last of Us? I have not personally, but I’ve seen other people play it, and that game was some of the inspiration for this story. Like, seriously, how creepy is fungus? It just grows and grows and occasionally invades your body and traps you under a giant yellow clump of slime mold. Ew >_<

The other half of the inspiration came from a really weird old condominium unit in one of the towns next to mine. It’s basically the exact same house in this story: a big, white, multi-story box with a really strange yellow growth coming out one of its gross windows. I only noticed the lump-thing the last couple times I drove by the building, and that got me thinking about what it could be. Hopefully not really a fungus-encrusted body, but you never know! (Until you go check…)