To call Cyan's room 'filthy' might be the greatest understatement ever made. For starters, the sunlight-shunning human being known as Cyan inhabited an entire studio apartment, not just a single room. This fact was easy to forget, as the sanity-defying filth which radiated outward from his desk like the eye of a hurricane made the entire place feel like one unified disaster. Conversely, 'desk' is an overstatement. Cyan spent a majority of his waking, breathing existence hunched over a gunk-glazed laptop which sat upon the kind of plastic and metal folding table you might encounter at a yard sale.
There was just enough room underneath it for his bratwurst-like legs, and his putrid, uncared-for feet to rest on a cushion of garbage. Covering all but some well-trodden paths in the floor was this garbage; a nauseating blend of discarded take-out containers, fossilized laundry, empty snack wrappers, ancient drink cans, and forgotten glassware all glued together by a generous filling of dust, crumbs, and caramelized food waste.
Cyan had long ago lost his ability to smell anything that was not more than two inches from his nose. This was a necessary survival adaptation, as any of God's other creatures would be struck dead in spectacular fashion if they had the misfortune of entering Cyan's apartment unprepared to handle the stink. The stench nearly defies description: every possible aroma from rotting food intermingled with persistent body odor and olfactory hints of organic decay that one might experience when opening a mature compost bin.
As the sun rose once more upon this landscape of dysfunction, pitifully shining through the thick layers of dust on his permanently-shut blinds, Cyan stirred atop his noxious throne of a bed. He was camouflaged in the crap that surrounded him, a motionless husk wrapped in some faded relic of a pullover sweatshirt and gym shorts bearing every type of tarnish imaginable. The morning silence—really the eternal droning of his choked air-conditioning unit—was shattered when his phone began blaring a Japanese pop song through its fried speaker.
Cyan awoke with a terrible groan, using one of his scraggly arms to shuffle through the junk strewn across his mattress in search of the noise's source. "Urgh... fuck off!" he growled, swatting aside an empty bag of chips in a terrific spray of crumbs to reveal his smartphone hiding underneath.
Upon discovering his device, Cyan grasped it viciously, bringing the scratched and spit-stained rectangle up to his face. Cyan's face had seen better days. Once there had been a handsome young man's soft hazel eyes, who smiled at others through a thin goatee with bright teeth and gentle laugh lines. Now his eyes were hollow brown pits, a pair of tarnished crown jewels resting above his emaciated cheeks and smoke-yellowed incisors, ringed by a fetid thicket of patchy facial hair that ran from his ears to his throat like dying ivy.
Turning on his phone to silence the synthesized Japanese voices bidding him good-morning, Cyan took note of the date, and something resembling a smile pulled at his chapped, cracking lips. "Well, happy birthday to me," he rasped into the empty room. "The big three-oh."
Cyan's birthdays had passed in relative obscurity since his twenty-first came and went. Those were the sunset days of college, when there were still roommates to do the cleaning and Mom's house for depositing dirty laundry on weekends. Like most other college-era birthdays, he'd spent it getting outrageously drunk with his friends and pulling in a humble chunk of change from his relatives. Someone had taken Polaroids that day, and he'd kept them, but where they had gone beneath the dunes of junk which carpeted his bedroom was now lost knowledge.
"Another decade come and gone. Hallelujah." Cyan grumbled as he sat up, scratching a fresh plume of dandruff free from his neck-length hair and looking around. His eyes locked onto a dented box of Slim-Jim's resting near his desk, and his stomach urged him to his feet.
Plodding the trail of matted napkins and flattened socks towards his desk, he scooped up the box of morsels and pulled up his trusty folding chair so he didn't have to keep standing. With an errant hand he ripped his breakfast free from the box and chucked it aside, peeling open and savaging the Slim-Jim with all the grace of a diseased hyena. Absent of other thoughts, the notion of his thirtieth birthday bubbled up again as he chewed on the stale beef. Cyan didn't like his birthdays now. All they did was make him remember, and remembering wasn't any fun.
All too quickly college had come and gone; Cyan's friends disappearing on the breeze as they found jobs and lives of their own far beyond the town that had brought them all together. To his credit, Cyan graduated alongside them: obtaining a bachelor's of arts in history with a concentration on Ancient Rome. But employment never really saw eye-to-eye with him.
Shunning a Master's degree, the best he could as an educator was middle or elementary school—and he despised dealing with children more than any other kind of human contact. That left simple entry-level work like retail, where Cyan proved his remarkable talent for being reviled by customer and manager alike. As the years crept on, ways of keeping the lights on continued to dwindle, until he found his calling as an internet tasker.
For pennies on the dollar, Cyan performed all manner of digital odd-jobs; answering surveys, ranking product names, and summarizing customer service logs, just to name a few. It was mind-numbing work, but it kept Cyan from having to see or hear any other human being, which was just how he liked it by that point in his life. Thus each day, from sunrise to sunset, for almost five years straight, Cyan would hunch over in his folding chair to peer at the grease-blurred screen of his laptop and alternate between completing digital tasks and surfing the internet.
The internet was where his last few friends lived. They came without faces, and often without names, sometimes even as adversaries when there was a historical debate which needed violent correcting, but they were the last simulacrums of people Cyan could call his friends.
Slim-Jim finished, he instinctually opened his laptop and pressed the power button on the side with his thumb, summoning it for another day of service. Its fans sputtered to life in time with the screen, ushering in the wait for everything to boot up.
"Come on, you piece of shit," he growled, rapping his knuckles against the plastic top of his desk. That was Cyan's least favorite part of the day. He swore his laptop took longer to boot with every week that passed.
After a few more muttered profanities, the little laptop's boot screen gave way to a desktop almost as messy as his room; a disaster of folders, shortcuts, and forgotten files which completely obscured his generic background. There was never much time to gaze upon Cyan's desktop due to his messaging program automatically launching and covering the screen. The moment it loaded he would dive right in, eagerly consuming the pages of meaningless conversation which had transpired during his brief digital absence. From there it was off to his usual group chat, ringing in the start of the day's conversations with the crunchy clicking of his sticky, faded keyboard.
"Morning bros, and happy birthday to me," he messaged.
"Isn't it already noon where you are?" one of the group members replied. That was Mike, and everyone hated Mike. "How old are you today anyway, you crusty fuck?"
"Thirty," Cyan wrote back without fanfare.
"Shit, someone better check you into a retirement home, old man!" came a message from Dennis. Cyan always considered Dennis to be one of the funnier people in their group chat.
"Already ripe for dementia and you still haven't ever gotten a crumb of pussy," Mike said, attempting his own brand of humor.
"That means Cyan is officially a wizard!" Josh interjected. "Quit listening to these two assholes and make your wish!" Josh always tried his best to be informational instead of cynical.
"Make a wish? I don't exactly have any birthday candles lying around," Cyan wrote.
"Not like a dumb birthday cake wish," Josh replied, "this one's different. This is your wizard wish!"
"Quick, wish for a dirt-cheap hooker!" Dennis said, but Josh was quick to chastise him.
"Ha-ha. Nobody would waste their wizard wish on something so fleeting. A wizard wish uses all your soon-to-be magical power to make the impossible... well, possible! All it takes is a little concentration."
Cyan audibly scoffed. "Well, if that's the case," he typed, "my wizard wish is to have a special someone I can fuck as much as I want, for free."
There was a short electrical pop which made Cyan start in his chair. He checked his laptop, picking it up off the table to make sure nothing had decided to spontaneously combust. Seeing nothing amiss, he shrugged off the strange sound and returned to typing on his computer, which was here he remained for the next several hours.
But while Cyan spent the rest of the day wandering between messaging, tasking, and mindless scrolling, something otherworldly had been set in motion within the most remote and decrepit part of his entire room: the underside of the bed. For all of Cyan's outwardly displayed hygienic horrors, it was under his bed where he hid the castoff from his most vile habit of all. Whenever he finished servicing his lusts—an all too frequent occurrence in his noxious isolation—Cyan would wipe up the aftermath with washcloths, old socks, or really any scrap of fabric that was within reach. Immediately afterwards said cloth was hastily banished via a quick toss into the gap between his bed and the floor.
This process had repeated itself multiple times a day for years on end, with Cyan never thinking much of it at all. But that whole time, unbeknownst to him, this mass of cloth and organic filth had slowly become a twisted cradle for new life. Long ago even the cockroaches had forsaken Cyan's room, but in the heaps of trash there were fungal spores biding their time for a chance to flourish.
It was in that tangled mass of dirt, sweat, cotton, semen, and crumbs where they found their opportunity. Day by day, week by week, what began as a few fledgling spores started corrupting the socks and towels with expanding mycelium. Dust bunnies laden with bits of food and fresh donations from Cyan kept the colony bustling—and now the enigmatic forces of his wizard wish were taking aim to transform this biological curiosity into a proper monstrosity.
By the time night fell and the meager amounts of sunlight bleeding through Cyan's blinds had faded away, Cyan remained unmoved from his chair. It had been a long day of ranking blog posts, arguing over the history of Hadrian's Wall, and gathering a mixture of birthday messages ranging from robotic to hateful. He was exhausted and ready for some well-earned rest.
Smacking the lid of his laptop closed, he stood up and shed his greasy tee shirt in exchange for a crumpled hoodie which rested a few paces away. Though there was an ancient lamp next to his bed, lights were unnecessary for Cyan since he knew the paths around his room by heart. The motions came naturally; donning some bedtime garment off the floor, ripping back the crunchy bedsheets atop his mattress, and flopping down with a pronounced 'oof' to begin the slow descent into sleep.
Cyan had been laying down for two minutes when there came a noise from under his bed.
Already a quarter-way asleep, he thought nothing of it. Then the sound came again. It was far from an innocent sound—some sort of wet scraping noise accompanied by the shuffling of junk on the floor.
"What the fuck...?" Cyan mumbled under his breath, eyes now wide open. He didn't dare to move a muscle yet.
Thump.
That was his empty shoe box being pushed aside, Cyan recalled with all the familiarity of a hoarder.
Then it came again, that horrible gooey ripping noise. More boxes and scraps of paper being pushed aside. Cyan had broken into a cold sweat. His arm acted on its own, reaching over to pull the chain on his bedside lamp.
The sight that greeted him was enough to turn even his own chalk-white skin a paler shade: an amalgamated mass of fabric, fruiting bodies, and finely-aged spunk, infested and puppeteered simultaneously by stringy brown mycelium. The gathering of contaminated material had been twisted into humanoid form, something Cyan's brain registered as vaguely female in shape before his fight-or-flight response kicked in.
"WHAT THE FUCK!" he hollered, scrambling onto his hands and knees to put distance between himself and whatever was crawling out from under his bed. This only succeeded in slamming his back against the wall his bed frame was pushed up against, giving him a perfect view of the creature turning around.
There was no room left to doubt it was impersonating a female appearance; a buxom torso shrouded in hexagonal indusium like a dress of lace, with waist-length hair created by glued-together crew socks and other lengthy bits of cloth. Any crack or gap in the miscellaneous fabrics sculpting her body were filled by a thick fungal paste which stretched and pulsed along with her movements, combining with the protruding, curling shrooms dotting her body to make every inch of the thing sickeningly alive. Her face was an eyeless imitation of a humanoid skull, only a pair of lips made from glossy, spongy mushroom material defining it at all.
It regarded Cyan for a moment of suspended silence, then made a bizarre, watery trilling sound so far removed from anything human that it sent icy shivers up his spine. The mushroom-woman's vocalizations covered a disconcerting range of tones, from sticky rumbles to curious warbling—all of which grew quiet in response to Cyan's frightened yelling.
"Fuck. Fuck! This has got to be some kind of nightmare!" he said, already on the edge of hyperventilating. "Don't come near me... stay the hell away from me!"
With an inquisitive hum, it set a dripping arm on his mattress and began to pull itself up. The movement was clumsy and ungainly, but it was clear she had some measure of intelligence behind those blank sockets.
"No! Stay back!" Cyan pleaded, throwing himself sideways off the bed to land on the floor with a heavy thud. The mushroom-woman reached out towards him with both hands, her fingers coated in a viscous substance which dripped onto his sheets and floor.
"No! Stop!" Cyan pleaded, backing up until his back hit the wall behind him. "Stop! Don't touch me!"
He watched helplessly as she crawled forward on her hands and knees, leaving a trail of slime wherever she touched. She was fast approaching him, her expressionless skull seeming to leer down at him as she moved.