Just Scrub It

A short horror story.

“Just scrub it.”

That’s what her landlord told her about the mold. It started in the top left corner of her bathroom, a barely visible easily ignored shadow in a high corner. Until it started to spread. In just two weeks it spread until it covered most of the ceiling in her bathroom.

So, Sarah climbed onto a kitchen chair and tried to wash it away with a sponge. The sponge seemed to only spread the mold around. No matter how hard she scrubbed the black would not come off.

By the third week it had escaped the bathroom and traveled across the hall ceiling into her bedroom. She was afraid to take her eyes off of it, lest it move another inch while she wasn’t paying attention. The fractal patterns it grew in seemed to be spelling out a message.

During the fourth week her neighbor knocked on her door. “You don’t smell that?” he asked, nose wrinkled in disgust. “It’s coming from your apartment.”

She didn’t smell anything but she let him in anyway. He looked in every nook and cranny for the source of the smell. But he never looked up, where the ceiling where the mold no longer looked like mold, but flowed like water, following them as they toured the home.

It wasn’t until the fifth week that the spores found the gas line. The explosion was so large it damaged buildings the next block over. When investigators searched the rubble once its cooled, they were astounded to find Sara there, still breathing, still alive somehow.

Her lungs were full of a black substance that also seemed to mix with the blood in her veins. When she blinked it was with a nictitating membrane of pure black sliding sideways over her eye and back again.

She’s in quarantine now. Nobody is allowed in the room with her without a hazmat suit.

In the top left corner of her room, mold has started to form.