Otherwise known as "Mushroom Marvin," but if you're hoping we discovered a funny, walking toadstool, I'm afraid you're out of luck. The first call regarded a "faint screaming" coming from underground, thankfully just inhuman enough that the caller only suspected some sort of weird animal activity. But when we cleared out the first site and dug down far enough, what we saw was far too human.
It looked like the head and torso of a grown man in perfect, naturally proportioned detail, right down to individual hairs and skin pores, except that it was uniformly a sort of pale, dull, subtly translucent yellow. It even had a suit, a tie and glasses, complete with "lenses" hiding its permanently open eyes, all formed from that same creamy tissue like a wax model. All except for the glistening blue-black interior of the toothless and permanently stretched open "mouth," which was more of a conical pit with a tiny, puckered hole in the center. This, of course, emitted the screaming, which felt like it might burst our eardrums as soon as we exposed it to the air. Not knowing if there was actually any humanity in the thing, none of us wanted to jump straight to smashing it, and the best anyone came up with in the heat of the moment was to dump the last shovelful of dirt right back in its face, which fortunately worked to quiet things back down. It wasn't just the sound itself muffled by the soil, but as if the entity was immediately calmer, or maybe the shriek was light-activated, or something.
As we carefully dug around the waxy, rubbery clone of whoever it was, we found it hadn't formed any arms or legs, but ended abruptly in a flat stump, like a chess piece, or so we thought. One of us noticed that what we took to be a whole lot of surrounding plant roots were running in and out of the thing's base, and on closer inspection, definitely the same material, hundreds spreading outward and branching every few inches. We tried widening the hole, but there was no end in sight to the veiny lattice. We spread out further, experimentally scooping out new holes around the property, only to find the same lacey network. We started to worry just how far it might go, and it still unnerves me to say that we never even found out. Anywhere we checked in town, there it was, only distinguishable from natural roots if you knew exactly what you were looking for, or maybe if you were, say, the kind of person who puts unfamiliar biological materials under a microscope and knows when they have something weird, because our next call came a few days later, from my own neighborood's community college.
It turned out that a botanist and her students had discovered the roots months ago, finding them to be unlike any known category of life as we know it; something about it being one big cell, but not in the same way as anything else that's one big cell. Sorry I'm not a bio kid myself. I don't know what it would it be about its nuclei that was so mindblowing, or maybe it was that it didn't have nuclei, or it had something else to it that none of them recognized. Whatever was up with it, they kept it to themselves, just in case they were on to some unique new discovery. They were, of course, but soon their ongoing field study unearthed a familiar sounding anomaly.
As they explained to us in a couple of simultaneous interviews (our friendlier way of saying "interrogations"), most of them ran for their lives when what looked very much like a fresh murder victim started howling like a banshee, at least one of them passed out, and two were sent into fight mode. A single kick apparently pulverized its "head" like an overripe pumpkin, at which point it dawned on them that it couldn't have been human. They even suspected it was one of those motion-activated Halloween props, some nasty prank someone left in the woods, until they got a better look at the mushy remnants and their connection to the "roots."
Unfortunately, the "body" apparently deteriorated into nothing but a blackish mush in only a few minutes, and that was gone without a trace by the next day. Even if they wanted to take their discovery to the press, they had no evidence, and now they were even more determined to figure it all out on their own. It was the instructor that finally broke down and reached out to one of our "ghost hunter" dummy lines, and turned out to be a lot more superstitious than I'd have expected from a cellular biologist. She even sheepishly admitted that she personally struggled to reconcile long-held religious beliefs with her scientific career, but she seemed relieved when I told her I've never seen anything like a "ghost" in my entire line of work.
That class turned out to be the best help we've ever had on a case, and we definitely needed it, because, like I said, we never actually found the limits of the "lifeform." I think that's why it was given the outrageous Class 13 designation, not because it was necessarily dangerous, but because it had spread so alarmingly far without notice. I've been told that there were "related phenomenon" in neighboring states, and maybe further still, but we were "lucky" to be near what finally turned out to be the origin point.
Between our meticulous surveying by ear, audio scanning equipment and an uptick in related calls, we finally found - and destroyed - more than 25 instances of "Mushroom Marvin," a nickname actually from one of the bio students, after a distant resemblance to their neighbor. The longer it took to find them, the closer they were to breaching the surface of the ground, their heads craned back, their mouths stretched even wider than humanly possible as they prepared what would have probably gone down as a noise disturbance of historic proportion. Luckily, that only made them easier and easier to find in time, and by then, we'd figured out that the most advanced growths were concentrated around the same central point: a long-disused water tower.
What we found in that tower officially became police business. It was a familiar looking body, a real one, but don't ask me how the "biomass" knew to copy his clothes and glasses, especially considering that the stuff wasn't actually coming from him, or from the tower, or even from the soil where it stood. The screaming dummy things were more developed the closer they were to the tower, but the "roots" were consistent with what we'd figured out were the younger filaments, and the closest were still several yards away from the tower's base. And by now, you know there's often that one detail that really gets under my skin about these freakier cases, but this one still gets worse:
We had been tracking Mushroom Marvin for over a month, but the man's time of death was determined to be only two weeks before we found him. His family and coworkers even saw him only hours before he would have disappeared into the woods, acting as "goofy and carefree as always."
Those things, those wailing doppelgangers of a man in his last suit and tie, had already been converging on his final resting place while he was still clocking in and out of his desk job, still going home to a wife and two sons, all the way up to the day he decided, with no known motive, to climb a crumbling old water tower and lie down in the middle of its empty interior...where his life, it turns out, would finally be taken by an undiagnosed brain tumor.