Beneath the Veins by Olivia Salter | Short Fiction

 

Beneath the Veins

By Olivia Salter

Word Count: 1,807

The fluorescent light overhead buzzed softly, casting the room in a sickly yellow tint. Shadows clung to every corner, faint but ever-present, as though waiting to close in. Jared lay strapped to the hospital bed, his chest rising and falling in shallow, labored breaths. A pungent, earthy smell clung to him, and the rough patches along his skin looked almost alive, a patchwork of tiny green specks and veins swollen to unnatural proportions. Each beat of his heart pulsed along his arms and neck, where something dark and rootlike seemed to creep just beneath the surface.

Olivia, the nurse on duty, approached him cautiously. She was used to seeing addicts and people with desperate choices etched into their skin, but this? She’d never seen anything like this.

She reached for his wrist, trying to calm the trembling in her hands. When her fingers brushed against his skin, a roughness rasped against her fingertips, as though the once-soft flesh had been colonized by something else, something that had taken root inside him. For a moment, she could almost feel it moving beneath her touch.

He winced and opened his bloodshot eyes, looking at her with a flicker of something that might have been hope, if not for the overwhelming glaze of pain clouding them.

“What… happened?” she asked softly, her voice barely a whisper.

Jared’s mouth moved, lips dry and cracked as he managed a raspy answer. “It’s… inside me,” he breathed, his gaze drifting away, perhaps to a memory. “I needed… peace. Just a way out of… all this.” His face twisted, as though even speaking took a monumental effort.

Images flickered through his mind: the cramped, cluttered apartment, the buzzing silence he couldn't escape, and the mushroom tea he’d boiled up after hearing from some stranger online that it would take him somewhere “beyond all this.” Anything, he’d thought, would be better than lying awake, feeling nothing but empty walls pressing in around him.

As Olivia watched him, her chest tightened. She understood the loneliness she saw in his eyes, but this… She forced herself to remain professional, but each second tugged harder at her, his desperation resonating deeper than she wanted to admit.

The hospital room’s hum grew louder, and a faint scraping sound caught her attention. Her eyes widened as she looked at Jared’s arm, where dark tendrils traced a path up his skin. Tiny white growths bloomed along the veins, spreading like spores on damp soil, each one digging deeper into his flesh. She pulled her hand back instinctively, heart hammering.

Outside the room, the doctors’ voices murmured, the words “mycelium infection” and “unprecedented” drifting in fragments through the door. She half-listened, the medical jargon sounding surreal against the reality before her.

Inside, Jared was losing ground to the thing growing within him. The tingling itch was now a consuming burn, spreading through his chest and limbs, wrapping around his bones. It hurt in a way he hadn’t thought pain could, every nerve screaming under the relentless invasion. He felt himself slipping away, as if whatever part of him had once been human was receding, replaced by a cold, consuming life that had no empathy and no end.

His eyes flicked back to Olivia, and he saw her watching him, eyes wide with a horror she couldn’t fully hide. He tried to form words, to explain, but they wouldn’t come. Instead, he managed a small, choked gasp, a sound both pleading and resigned. She wanted to reach out, to squeeze his hand, to tell him he wasn’t alone, that he was still human, but the sight of those green veins—of the fungus creeping ever upward—held her back.

Olivia stepped toward the door, her hand on the handle, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave just yet. She glanced back, meeting his eyes one last time, and saw something in them: a flicker of fear, and beneath that, a strange acceptance. He’d surrendered to it, the growing thing that was claiming him piece by piece, filling the emptiness he’d once felt with a living, relentless purpose.

As she watched, another line of spores pushed through his skin along his jaw, branching out like ivy searching for light. Jared’s eyes fluttered closed, and his breathing slowed, steadying as if the pain were fading, as if he’d reached a place beyond suffering.

Olivia took a step back, lingering in the doorway as she whispered, “I’m sorry, Jared.”

The silence that followed Olivia’s apology weighed heavy, pressing against her chest as she turned from the door, ready to leave him alone with whatever strange life was taking him over. But a faint rustle stopped her, pulling her gaze back to the bed. Jared’s body had gone still, the tension in his face melting into an eerie calm. His lips, once dry and cracked, softened, a hint of color returning to them as though blood—and something else—flowed fresh beneath the surface.

And then his eyes opened.

They were no longer clouded with pain or fear. Instead, they held a peculiar brightness, a depth that hadn’t been there before. His pupils seemed to pulse slightly, as though the veins connecting them to his heart now carried something far from human.

"Olivia," he murmured, and his voice was different, a low, steady tone that seemed to echo in her mind. He didn’t sound afraid anymore; he sounded calm, almost serene.

She took a step back, her hand tightening around the doorknob, but something in his gaze held her rooted in place. It was Jared’s face, his features, but there was an unsettling shift to them, a smoothness that made her stomach twist. His skin, pale and nearly translucent, had taken on an odd luminescence, a slight greenish tint beneath the surface. Where his veins had once pulsed, tiny white filaments now spread outward in patterns almost… beautiful.

"Are you… Are you still Jared?" she asked, her voice a hoarse whisper.

Jared tilted his head, as if considering the question. He lifted his hand slowly, fingers curling and uncurling, as though testing how his body worked. "I am… more than Jared," he said finally. “I am the one who found the peace he wanted. And I’m something… new.”

Olivia’s hand tightened on the knob, but she couldn’t make herself leave. There was a pull in his words, a quiet assurance that disarmed her even as it filled her with a creeping sense of dread.

“The loneliness, the hurt,” Jared continued, his voice steady, his gaze fixed on her with an intensity that left her feeling exposed, as though he could see the small, hidden parts of her soul. “I thought I could escape them with a drink, a pill, with this tea. But all I did was feed it… feed the darkness inside. Now I understand. The tea—it didn’t take me away. It showed me a path inward.”

The filaments beneath his skin shifted, growing in thin, delicate lines along his collarbone, down his arms, sprouting like roots seeking soil. His body no longer fought against them; it embraced them, let them flourish and weave with every beat of his heart. Watching him was like watching the quiet spread of moss over stone, the steady, inevitable creep of nature overtaking something once human.

“Jared,” Olivia whispered, a plea in her tone. “Let me help you. There’s still time… maybe they can….”

But he smiled, the expression both serene and haunting. “Help? I’m beyond help now. I’m part of something vast, something that has existed long before either of us. This…” He lifted his hand, fingers curling inward, his skin shifting to reveal a delicate web of mycelium beneath. “This is peace.”

Olivia’s heart raced, her instincts screaming for her to leave, but she hesitated, searching his gaze for some remnant of the man she’d seen only hours ago—a man who’d been so desperate to escape his pain that he’d reached for something unknown, something dangerous.

He seemed to sense her inner conflict and tilted his head. “It doesn’t have to be terrifying, Olivia,” he murmured. “Loneliness, fear, pain—they’re just parts of a world that tells us we’re alone, that we’re separate. But this—” he spread his arms, showing the web-like growths that pulsed with a strange life, a hidden beauty, “this connection runs deeper. We’re all just… threads in a larger fabric. You don’t have to be alone.”

Olivia felt a strange tug inside her, a whisper in the back of her mind, urging her to come closer. Her pulse quickened, and she took a small, involuntary step forward, drawn to him in a way she couldn’t explain, her thoughts muddying as she tried to remind herself of who he had been—Jared, the patient, the man who needed help.

But Jared wasn’t that man anymore. And as she stared into his eyes, she sensed he didn’t want to return to who he’d been.

“Join me,” he said softly, his voice low and soothing, like a soothing song, like a promise. “There’s no loneliness here. Just life. Just… belonging.”

For a fleeting moment, Olivia saw herself reflected in his eyes, her own exhaustion mirrored back at her, the isolation she’d felt, the weariness that came with watching suffering day after day. She understood that pull, that longing for something beyond, for something to fill the empty spaces.

But as her hand reached for his, something snapped inside her. She wrenched her gaze away, her fingers falling to her side, and stumbled back toward the door.

“Jared,” she whispered, a tremor in her voice, “I can’t.”

He watched her for a long moment, that same gentle, otherworldly calm in his gaze. He didn’t plead or try to convince her further. He only nodded, his expression softening, as though he already knew her answer and had accepted it long before she spoke.

As Olivia backed out of the room, she saw him close his eyes, a peaceful smile settling on his face as the filaments continued their quiet journey beneath his skin. He was content, whole in a way she’d never seen him before, a man who had found a place beyond fear, beyond loneliness—a place she wasn’t yet ready to follow.

The door clicked shut behind her, and Olivia took a shaky breath, pressing her back against the wall outside his room. She could still feel the pull of his words, the strange allure of what he’d offered. But she pushed it down, swallowing hard, reminding herself of who she was, of the life she still had yet to live.

And as she walked down the hallway, leaving Jared behind, she couldn’t shake the feeling that part of him had stayed with her, a faint, lingering presence woven like a thread into her mind, his invitation echoing softly in the depths of her heart.