Inspired by artwork by Ella – SporeSigil on Tumblr, which you can see at the end of the story to avoid spoilers.
Statement of Jennifer Accardi, regarding the mould in the middle of her bathroom floor.
Statement recorded direct from subject on 16th November 2016.
Statement begins.
I’ve always been very careful about keeping my house clean. Not obsessively – though that didn’t stop one of my ex’s making a lot of jokes about me having OCD. My parents were very houseproud, and I suppose it just rubbed off on me. I always seemed to get ill less than my friends, so I think it was worth it. I’d rather be seen as a little weird than be getting sick all the time!
So when I finally found a flat to myself, I made sure it was professionally cleaned before I moved in. And I always put in the time to keep it pretty spotless. Nothing crazy, you understand – I’m just a little more careful where some people might be rather lax. I didn’t leave dirty things on kitchen counters or in the sink overnight; I mopped and hoovered regularly; I dusted once a week or so.
I know most people my age say they don’t have the time for this kind of thing, but for me to put just a little extra time into keeping the house clean always made me feel better about myself. Helped me feel better about my whole life, really. Like I have things under control and like everything is just a bit nicer. Safer, you know?
I especially made sure the bathroom was always well ventilated. Back in halls at uni I had seen how easily mould can grow in a damp bathroom, and that wasn’t something I wanted to experience ever again. So I was filled with quite some dismay when I first spotted the dot of mould creeping up between the tiles of the bathroom floor earlier this year.
The first time I noticed it I had just gotten out of the shower, so once I dried myself off I just came back and gave the floor a quick mopping. I didn’t even think it was mould at the time, probably just some dirt shaken off my clothes or something. I went to work without giving it a second thought.
When I got back from work that day, I went to wash my hands, as I always do – as everyone should always do, really. We bring in so many germs from outside on our hands, from touching handrails, door-handles, all those things everyone else touches but we barely think about. We touch so many other people without knowing, just by going outside. That’s how so many things spread.
So I washed my hands, glanced at the floor, expecting it to be still sparkling clean from the mopping it had received less than ten hours earlier. But there it was again. A little black spot on the grouting between two of the plain white tiles of the bathroom floor.
Of course, I immediately fetched some bleach, a sponge, and a bucket of warm water. I got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed it away thoroughly, giving it an additional blast with some spray on bathroom floor cleaner. I made sure it was properly cleaned this time, not just wiped off the surface by a mop. I did the whole floor, actually, just to be sure, before tidying away my cleaning supplies and getting on with my evening.
The next day when I got up it was still gone. My bathroom floor sparkling, just as it should have been, just as I expected. I thought that was it, just a weird little stain that had needed more elbow grease than I first thought.
I went to work, I came home, I went to wash my hands – and there it was again. That little speck of blackness, standing out so clearly on the white floor.
I could still smell the bleach from the day before. There was no hint of that nasty damp smell that tells you a room is prone to mould. Not yet, anyway.
This was where I began to think something was strange about it. It was in the same spot, right in the middle of the floor between the shower and the sink. I looked up at the ceiling to see if it was something dripping down, but there was no sign of anything wrong up there. Just clean, flat ceiling with an led light in one of those cheap, easy to clean white half-domes.
When I came to view the flat back in April, Mr Kundi – he’s the building owner, lovely guy, always wears very clean, smart suits. Well, he mentioned that they recently had some of the basement plumbing redone. Something about a bug nest in one of the pipes or something. But I was up on the fourth floor, so there shouldn’t have been any issues all the way up here.
When he told me, he was apologising for the smell, I think – not that it bothered me. The work had been completed, so it was just the smells of industrial cleaning chemicals and fresh metalwork. I quite enjoyed it actually, though it had faded by the time I moved in a few weeks later.
Where was I? Oh yes, of course, I got my supplies, and cleaned the bathroom floor again.
The next day, it wasn’t there. And the day after that I woke up to a clean bathroom floor. I started to relax at work – but when I got home I found it staring up at me again. It was this day that I properly inspected it before I cleaned it up.
I knelt on the floor and pressed my gloved fingertip into the groove between the tiles, rubbing it before lifting my finger to peer carefully at it. It smeared in that loose, easy way that mould does – leaving a shadow of the original shape behind, while streaking down the grouting where my finger had pushed it. I remember turning up my nose at the realisation that it was mould, not just some speck of miscellaneous dirt. And yet when I think back to before that moment, I don’t remember ever thinking of it as anything other than mould.
It was scrubbed clean very swiftly, though I didn’t do the whole floor this time. I didn’t want to accidentally spread it around. After dinner I went out and got some proper anti-fungal cleaning sprays – and some white vinegar, just to really make sure I was really giving it the full treatment. I already had plenty of bleach.
I double checked the extractor fan, too. It was working fine, drawing the air out of the bathroom and out through some invisible pipes buried in the walls. There was no window in the bathroom, which was surrounded by internal walls, so it was the only ventilation.
It was late by then, so I had to wait until the next day to pick up a little battery powered fan and a couple of those little dehumidifier boxes with pellets in, to help reduce the humidity in there. It didn’t feel too warm or moist, but I wanted to be extra careful. Prevention is better than cure, and while this one time I seemed to have failed at that, I wasn’t going to see a recurrence if I could at all help it!
When I got home with those supplies, I was very glad I had picked them up. Because the mould was back. I washed my hands without taking my eyes off the black dot, and I could have sworn it was just a little bit bigger than before.
So I set to work with my new cleaning supplies. This time, I did the whole bathroom, from the ceiling down. I emptied my bucket regularly, re-filling it with clean, hot water each time. I sprayed everything with first one anti-fungal, then another. Beached it all to finish it off, and gave the floor one last mopping to polish it nicely.
I was very thorough, because I didn’t want that mould spreading anywhere. I definitely didn’t want Mr Kundi popping around and finding mould in his building, just because I didn’t do a good enough job keeping my flat ventilated and cleaned.
Must have taken me a good couple of hours, honestly. I was so hungry by the time it was done that I ended up with barely any energy to cook dinner. Fortunately, I kept some ready meals in for these sorts of tired times – though usually it was because of working late, not from giving my bathroom the kind of cleaning that would make a forensics team suspicious.
So you can probably imagine my dismay when I woke up the next morning, and it was there again. And this time, it was definitely bigger.
All the cleaning the night before had meant I was so exhausted I slept in, so I didn’t have time to give it a proper clean before work. I just sprayed it with some bleach, wiped it away with a sponge, and got on with my day.
But it was back again when I got back from work that night. I stared at it for a long moment, brow furrowed. Part angry, part confused, part just plain tired. But after taking a deep breath to calm my nerves, I gave it a good cleaning, with all the various supplies – though I didn’t do the whole bathroom this time.
As I cooked and ate my dinner, I couldn’t stop thinking about that horrible spot on the bathroom floor. I was baffled by how on earth it could possibly keep returning despite all the effort I had put in to clean it away. I kept glancing at the bathroom, as though I might catch someone sneaking it to plant the filthy speck, like some awfully tasteless practical joke.
But the only people with a key to the flat were me, my parents, and Mr Kundi. My parents were not the practical joking sort, and Mr Kundi had seemed much too serious for anything like this.
Anyway, who would plant a tiny speck of mould as a practical joke? It had to be something else, but I couldn’t figure out what.
I struggled to sleep, unable to get the strangeness of it out of my mind, but eventually I drifted into strange dreams of mushrooms and fungal spores that sang a strange wordless song to me, and tried to communicate in curious patterns of shifting colours.
The next morning it was there again. I remember freezing at the doorway to the bathroom and swearing, far louder than was decent at such an early hour, before grabbing the cleaning supplies and scrubbing it away.
The previous night I hadn’t put the bucket, the gloves, the sponge, the rags or the bleach away. I guess a part of me had hoped that if I didn’t put them back in the cupboard, then maybe I wouldn’t need them. You know, like how everyone knows the best way to prevent rain is to take an umbrella with you?
Well, that hadn’t worked. I couldn’t tell you if it had gotten bigger, but it seemed just a little harder to clean away that morning. It might have just been how tired I was, but it felt like I had to scrub really hard to get that spot to look white again.
Once it was clean, I got back to my day, back to showering and getting dressed and going to work.
Of course, I avoided stepping on that spot in the middle of the bathroom floor. Whether barefoot and dripping with shower water, or in my socks after taking off my shoes at the front door when I got home, I didn’t stand on that particular spot. It didn’t matter if the mould was there or not, I just wasn’t going to stand right there.
You probably know how this is going to go now. Yeah, when I got home after work it was back. I cleaned it, slept, it was back. Cleaned it, went to work, it was back. Cleaned it, went to bed, it was back.
On the weekends I usually went out, doing some shopping, seeing friends – you know, having a life! But whenever I can home, it was back.
It was maybe two weeks of this. Every day, cleaning that speck from my bathroom floor once or twice a day. For the first week I was furious. A few days in I even grabbed one of my neighbours to come look at it, just to make sure I wasn’t going completely insane and hallucinating. He looked at me like I was crazy for dragging him into my flat to stare at a tiny spot of dirt on my bathroom floor, but he could see that it was there.
Worth seeming a little weird to be sure I wasn’t sick.
By the second week, it had started to seem almost normal. Frustrating, a little more expensive on cleaning supplies than I would have liked, but strangely normal. There was dirt and germs everywhere, after all. It wasn’t like I was cleaning a whole lot more than usual. My bathroom floor just needed a little more care than I had expected. Especially that one spot in the middle.
I had decided I would have to bring it up with Mr Kundi when I next saw him, see if the previous tenant had complained about it.
But it had been three weeks before I saw him again, and by then I was in too much of a rush to get home to stop and talk to anyone.
Because it was growing.
That first week or so I thought it might have been growing. It was easy to trick myself, it was so small it could have maybe been a little bigger, but maybe I was just imagining it.
By the end of the second week I knew it was bigger. It was still smaller than my fingertip, but it was definitely bigger.
By the end of the third week it was bigger than my thumbnail.
Every moment in that flat I had to force myself to not go and check on it. I had to spend so much conscious effort to keep having a normal life, to keep watching TV of an evening, and eating decent food. To not just sit on my bathroom floor and watch that spot.
I even kept inviting friends over for tea for that first month. I made sure to be home beforehand with enough time to clean up, but there was no reason to stop having company just because there was some stubborn mould spot, was there?
Sure, it got hard to focus on their words sometimes, and if they ever needed to use the bathroom I felt my heart beating hard and fast in my chest, hoping that the mould wasn’t back yet, or that they wouldn’t notice it. But they weren’t at risk, so it was ok.
I thought it was going to be fine. It might have been getting a little bigger, but I could keep it under control. I was sure I could keep it under control. As long as I kept cleaning it, and I definitely didn’t step on it.
That last thing felt like it was getting more and more important. Once I realised it was mould I wore a respirator to clean it, and I always wore my rubber gloves, so it didn’t feel like I was at risk of getting infected by anything while I cleaned. But I became more and more convinced that I shouldn’t touch that spot in any way.
It was fine. I didn’t have to stand right there to get out of the shower. I could just step a little to the side, and it was fine.
But, day by day, it kept getting bigger.
Every morning I cleaned it, every evening I cleaned it. Sometimes twice – once when I got home, once before bed. I went to bed later and later, got up earlier and earlier to clean more and more of it every damn day.
It kept growing faster.
I stopped inviting people round. I couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t have grown back before they left, even if I cleaned right before they arrived.
I stopped going out at weekends. I had to keep checking on the bathroom floor. Between my working weeks I still managed to avoid sitting there and watching it grow, but I had to keep checking on it. Watching it’s progress, fighting it back with sprays and scrubbing whenever I felt it was too much to handle.
I spent every day at work trying not to think about the growing mould in my bathroom. It was always growing, always there, I knew it. I could tell. I knew it would be back when I got home, and bigger than before.
It wasn’t just black any more either. It was starting to have patterns. Just little swirls, little streaks of colour, in organic shapes and shades. As though there was an invisible pattern spread across my floor, and this mould was all it needed to shine through. Just a hint of it at first, but steadily more and more.
Have you ever seen pictures of petri dishes? When they have all those different vaguely circular shapes, the splotches of earthy yet contrasting colours? It was like that, only, somehow deeper. Like it had more dimension to it than just the flat, tile floor. Like it was eating it’s way through, leaving great tracks of rot through the ceramics. But when I cleaned it away, there was only flat whiteness.
Then, one day, I was so tired from the terrible sleep; from the stress of struggling through every day with this mould always bothering my thoughts; from the unending, incessant cleaning I had to do just to keep it at bay. I was so tired, I slipped as I was getting into the shower. I just, slipped. Ever so slightly. Naked, barefoot, standing to the side of the freshly cleaned patch of floor where the mould kept growing back, over and over and over again. The floor wasn’t even wet from the shower. I just… Slipped.
I tumbled to one side, grabbed the shower rail for support, shifted my weight to catch myself. I didn’t fall over. But as soon as the instinctive reaction was over I realised where I had put my foot.
I didn’t look down. I didn’t need to. I could feel a horrible, slimy wetness under my heel. I had just cleaned it, not minutes before, but I knew by now that was no guarantee that it hadn’t grown back already. I couldn’t tell how much I had literally put my foot in, and I didn’t want to know.
I just stepped into the shower and got on with cleaning myself. I turned the tap so the water was extra hot, almost burning me, and scrubbed every inch of me so thoroughly my skin was flushed red by the time I got out. I was extra careful in avoiding that patch of mould on the floor that was now very clearly returning.
I went to work, and for the first time in a long time, I didn’t think about the mould on my bathroom floor. I got on with my work, I handled everything just fine, laughed with my co-workers – who remarked how nice it was to see me a bit cheerier, a bit more full of colour.
It was when I got home, dropped my bag on the side, and sat on the sofa with a sigh, that I realised something was wrong.
I took a few deep breaths, settling into myself, when I realised I was looking at my shoes, still on my feet. I hadn’t taken them off at the front door. I always take my shoes off at the front door. Ever since I was a child, since before I could remember. How could I have forgotten to do something I did without thinking?
It was with a sense of absolute astonishment that I realised I was sat on the sofa with wide eyes, unwashed hands, and my shoes still on my feet.
I turned slowly to look back down the hall that led to the front door, and looked with growing horror at my dirty footprints on the carpet.
I cleaned the whole house that night. Top to bottom, hoovering, dusting, polishing. I even went online and emailed a carpet cleaning company about coming round the next week.
And then, when I was done – which must have been at about 2am – I went into the bathroom to have a shower before bed.
I had left the bathroom until last because I knew the mould would only grow back if I did it earlier on, so it had been cleaned just an hour or so earlier. But there it was. The mould. The rot in the middle of my bathroom, at the centre of my life. Spreading like tendrils, like ripples of slimy, fuzzy corruption crawling towards me.
I stared at it, and my foot began to itch.
So I stepped past it, showered, and went to bed. I didn’t look at my foot while I cleaned it. I couldn’t bring myself to actually confirm what I thought that itching meant. I just ignored it. I scrubbed it extra hard, and went to bed.
But by the next morning, I knew. I couldn’t avoid knowing, because when I woke up and threw the sheets back, they were covered in mould.
Radiating out from my foot, up my leg, and out over the bed were those patterns. Veins and splotches, in deep reds and bruise yellows and weak greys. I leapt out of bed, as though getting away from the sheets would somehow help. But finally looking down I could see that my foot was covered in those same grotesque textures of the creeping mould.
I hopped to the bathroom, avoiding my foot touching the floor. But I had to pause in the living room, because I could see my shoes sat on the carpet by the chair. Had I really thrown them off last night and not put them back in the hall? How could that be, when I had cleaned the whole house so thoroughly?
I stared for far too long, until the itching in my leg dragged my attention back to present. My horrible, sickening present.
A shower wasn’t going to cut it, I thought. I put the plug in the bath and turned the tap on. Just the hot tap.
My cleaning supplies were by the door still, and I pulled the lid off the bleach, pouring the whole remains of the container into the bath. I tossed in a couple of other bottles of cleaners, forcing the lid off the anti-fungal sprays and throwing them in there too.
I could feel my tears running down my cheeks as I stood there in the middle of my bathroom, the air filling with steam, the smell of cleaning chemicals stinging my eyes. I was breathing hard, looking down at the bath, trying not to look down at my feet. Trying so hard not to look down at my feet that it took me a moment to realise that I was standing right in the middle of my bathroom.
Right in the middle.
I think I screamed then.
I know I jumped into the bath, ignoring the scalding heat of the water. Ignoring the way it turned a filthy grey as I splashed into it, submerging my body beneath the surface, and began desperately scrubbing at my skin with a sponge.
It wasn’t the body sponge I was using, though. It was the abrasive one I was still clutching from the floor cleaning bucket.
I felt it rubbing harshly at my skin, every furious, frenzied scrub leaving my flesh raw and aching. But it felt good. It felt like it must be cleaning me. It must be getting rid of that taint, cleaning the dreadful thing off me, purging it out of me.
I could barely see, steam and tears blurring my vision. The bleach in the water probably didn’t help either, stinging sensations setting my nerves aflame.
I don’t know how long I scrubbed, how long I filled that bathwater with greys and browns and red. It was more red than anything else when I was done.
I pulled the plug, letting the sickness drain away with the water. Chasing it down with the shower head, and rinsing my own body with the steaming stream of water until it ran just a little pink from the blood that seemed to sweat from my roughly scraped skin.
I couldn’t get out yet, though. Because I couldn’t see the floor. I had to wait until the steam cleared, so I could be sure I wasn’t going to step out right onto what I knew would have grown back into something huge and horrible by now.
So I waited, in that empty bath. I waited, but the steam didn’t seem to be clearing. It took me a moment, and then I realised the extractor fan wasn’t on.
When had that broken? I was sure it had been working the night before, it must have been! With no window to crack open, there was nothing I could do except sit there amongst the steam, like a red blemish in the grey air, waiting for it to cool. Waiting for it to condense all over my bathroom, so I could see again.
I was shivering by the time I could see the floor, and a dreadful ache had set into my joints, my head feeling congested, like it was sticky inside. I remember thinking how ironic it would be for me to be so worried about cleaning the mould that I ended up getting a nasty cold.
But I did get out, carefully stepping around the edges of the expansive patterns of mould on the bathroom floor. I paused at the door to stare at them for a moment. They filled me with revulsion, with a feeling of deep nausea that made my insides seems to rebel against me entirely. And yet there was something captivating about them. Something so hard to look away from.
So I turned away and went to the sofa. Past my discarded shoes. I put my feet up on the coffee table, kicking aside the wrapping from a takeaway I had eaten a day or so prior. I stared at my feet, both clean. Red raw from the scrubbing, but clean.
I was exhausted, but I was clean.
I must have passed out, because when I woke up a little while later, I was even colder. The sofa was soggy beneath me, and I realised with disgust that I had failed to dry myself after I came out of the bathroom. It seemed I had pulled on my underwear, but it was soaked through too. At least, I think it was soaked. It felt wet in a way that was maybe not quite right?
The sun had gone down, and the sickly yellow glow from streetlamps filtered into my window from far below. In the dimness, I climbed to my feet, and made my way across the carpet. The moist, sticky carpet.
I’m not sure if the floor actually writhed, or if my vision was just swimming with the fatigue and terror.
I stepped into the bathroom, turned on the light, and looked into the mirror. I looked at my own reflection ad could see those patterns creeping up my skin. They were above my waist now, and crawling around my back, up towards my shoulders. I think I was crying, but I’m not sure. I couldn’t stop staring, staring at how my skin was changing before my eyes, as though it was determined to become unrecognisable from how I once looked.
I expected this to hurt, this kind of sickness. This massive infection of my skin by a creeping, parasitic fungus. Surely it should hurt?
But if anything, I felt… numb. But not like when you get a local anaesthetic. I had an injection of local numbing stuff for a mole removal once – but this wasn’t like that. Not even like when you sit on your foot and it goes to sleep. This is like the numbness I imagine you might experience when you get frostbite.
So I took my time watching. I watched as the lines of infected redness crawled up my veins with absolute fascination. I observed so carefully the way the fuzzy circles bloomed like flowers across my arms.
I couldn’t tell you why I wasn’t scared. I should have been scared. I had been scared for months, more and more of my time eaten away by trying desperately to prevent this horrifying fate. But now it was here, it honestly seemed so… Beautiful.
I pulled myself away from the mirror, the reflection too far away, not able to give me a really close view of what was happening to me. So I sat down in the middle of my bathroom floor, and watched the growing intricacies of the patterns of my own skin. I felt it creeping across my body. I felt it moving across the floor beneath me, warm and soft and welcoming.
That’s where Mr Kundi found me. I don’t know how long I had been there, in the dimness under a light fitting mostly obscured by dirty grey fuzz that filled the air with spores. I don’t know how long I had been dripping the dirty water from the mop bucket over my skin to watch the patterns shift, or how long I had been dragging the rag over parts of me just to watch the shapes smear and reform in different curling coils.
I couldn’t possibly say how long it had taken for the entire bathroom to be covered entirely in the mould.
Long enough for my neighbours to complain about the smell, I suppose. Long enough for the scraps of food scattered around the rest of the house so start buzzing with flies. Long enough for some of the dirt on the carpet to begin writhing with worms.
They had to cut my toes out of the mould that had been keeping them so warm and cosy. The paramedics said they couldn’t tell where my feet ended and the fungal growth began. The doctors didn’t have much luck with that either, so during the surgery they decided to go aggressive and cut into me until there was definitely no infection left.
They were so surprised when I woke up from the anaesthetic the next day and the mould had already covered half the area again. And it’s so much more beautiful than my old skin.
It made it really quite easy to get here, even if they did take most of what used to be my legs. Now we have different legs, and they are so pretty! I had to cover them, and wear such a big coat, with such a big hood, because most people don’t appreciate how pretty we are now. I doubt they would have let us in if we hadn’t kept our skin so hidden.
You certainly wouldn’t have agreed to take my statement. But I simply had to share it with you. We had to make sure you could see it. I knew you would want to see it, all this under my coat, see! It told me you like to look at things like this – at things like us.
We can feel it going deeper, too. We’re sure it’s on the inside of our lungs now. We can feel it’s embrace, it’s warmth filling us up, making sure my flesh can never fail us again. It’s really so, so beautiful. We know you want to see. Let us show you, Archivist. Let us show you the inside…
Statement ends.
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