When the mushrooms made their return, I was on the lookout for them, so I noticed when they first appeared as tiny pale lumps in the carpet. Unlike the first mushroom, these stuck around till daylight; they also seemed reluctant to fully bloom, instead keeping close to the carpet. Thus I was not sure they were actually mushrooms.

I tried to take photos of the mushrooms to prove to other people that they existed. (80 per cent of the people I have discussed the mushrooms with have deemed them hallucinations. I’m glad my friends have such faith in my sanity.) In all the photos, however, the mushrooms came out purposefully blurred, much like the faces of people who watched the Ring videotape. I found this highly suspicious, to say the least.

I had by now developed an unhealthy fascination with the mushrooms. I was spending a great deal of time sitting across the room at a safe distance, peering at them to see if they’d got any bigger. I pondered their liminal nature. I sprayed them from time to time with air freshener or insect repellent to see how they would react. (No reaction.) I lay in bed and debated what I should do about them. On the one hand, they could (according to the internet) potentially cause me asthma. On the other hand, I was desperately curious to see what they would do next.

Also, nobody else I knew had mushrooms. It made me feel special – like the mushrooms had chosen me, or something.

By the morning of my birthday, the mushrooms had formed a neat cluster in front of my ensuite. This is how these things happen. They enter your carpet, enter your room, enter your life – and all in the most stealthy and insidious fashion, so that one morning at 4am, you look up and they’re looking back at you. Your gut instinct tells you they’re dangerous. So do your friends. So does the Internet. You know you should get rid of them, but somehow you can’t bring yourself to. You want to see what happens if you let them get bigger - like how the people in Jurassic Park thought it’d be cool to grow raptors. You tell yourself they’re not so bad. You even contemplate cultivating them. By now you’re firmly entrenched in the illusion that despite everything you know about the nature these things, you can somehow make them yours.

Sometimes you think about breaching the gap, about touching their powdery, miasmatic caps.  Just to see how it would feel.

And so you let them grow, because without them the crack will close, the liminal spaces will shrink into themselves, the magnetically fascinating abyss you can glimpse through the fissures of your sanity will no longer be visible. Your room goes back to being safe. Your room goes back to being boring.

I realised at this point that it was no longer just about the mushrooms.

So the next day, I trotted over to Langton Close to call on the Angel of Mercy, i.e. the Assistant Warden. I call him this because he is literally the nicest man alive and the reason why I’m not in the only double room of Frances Gardner sharing a bed with a total stranger.

“Hello,” I said. “I may have mushrooms in my carpet. I’m pretty sure by now I’m not hallucinating them, but I would like an impartial party to verify that they exist.”

“Let’s take a look,” said the Angel of Mercy, getting his keys and not commenting on the latter half of the statement. I did say he was the nicest man.

Up in my room we both got on our knees and stared at the mushrooms.  “Right,” said the Angel of Mercy, after some time.  “They are very real.  And very bad.”

This was simultaneously relieving and terrifying.  “Oh,” I said.

The Angel of Mercy got up.  “We’ll get somebody in to look at them as soon as possible,” he reassured me. 

The mushrooms seemed to realise this.  Overnight, they spawned with desperate vigour, almost getting as high as the sill of my ensuite.  I could have sworn they were trying to get into the bathroom, maybe retake what they thought was the source of the Water of Life.  I tried not to breathe around them, in case they were sporulating.  Sporulating is a nice word, but it doesn’t mean nice things.

The next morning, I was awoken by someone hammering on my door.  It was not, as I had hoped, the Eleventh Doctor; instead, it was the janitor.  “They say you have a problem?”

I pointed out the mushrooms.  The janitor took one look at them, pulled on rubber gloves, and uprooted the entire cluster with one large, rubbery finger.  The mushroom fragments lay on the carpet.  They looked fragile and sad.  I felt a surge of pity within me, and hastily quashed it.

Commandeering my sink, the janitor mixed up some toxic blue concoction that smelt like acidised prophylactic.  Then he drenched the carpet in it and went to town on the whole thing with a massive sponge, furrowing up huge swathes of carpet as he went.  Bits of carpet and mushroom flew through the air.  I could not tear my eyes away.

The carpet slowly drowned in foam.  The janitor appraised his work, scooped up the mushrooms and carpet swathes in one hand and his equipment in the other, and said to me: “You okay with that?”

I could hear, like Esther in Bleak House, the sound of great water gates opening and closing in my head.  “Yeah,” I said faintly.  “Thanks.”

“Okay,” said the janitor, and departed.  The sound of the door banging shut ricocheted around behind my eyes.  Dizzy with fungicidal fumes, I went to open the window.  “You’ve had some cowboys in here,” I heard the Doctor saying in my head.  “Not actual cowboys…though that can happen.”

Airborne carpet particles floated lazily past my nose.  I went cross-eyed trying to stare them down.

I came to the conclusion that this was more anxiety than I felt like dealing with in a day, put on some clothes, locked the door on my ravaged room and fled to church.

“You all right there, love?” said the man who runs the counter at Lumen. 

“Been better,” I said.  “What’s the soup of the day?”

“Wild mushroom, love.”

I blanched.  “I’ll just have a cappuccino, thanks.”

In the clean, echoing foyer of the church, I drank coffee and wrote commentaries to the strains of someone singing the Lacrimosa softly in the background.  All churches, I felt, should be like Lumen.  With high ceilings and opera music and nobody trying to force things on you, unless it was extra banana cake.

One commentary and three annotation exercises later, I stretched and looked up and felt my soul to be as clean and empty and blue as the perfect sky through high windows.

Then I braced myself and walked back to Langton Close to fetch the vacuum.