August 2026
Lynda Clark, Tuber Uber Alles
Spearheaded by gastronomic wunderkind-
“Wunderkind?” Giordano hisses at the magazine’s glossy pages. “Enfant terrible more like!”
Spearheaded by gastronomic wunderkind Tenebrae Libris, this sensational restaurant is housed in a former university laboratory. Apt, since Libris commands her kitchen with the gravitas of a-
“Blah blah blah.”
-small black espresso which was also excellent. However, it’s the main course, truffle-topped parmigiana, that really sets Abyssalis apart from every other restaurant in town. Somehow combining the earthy richness of a Winter Black with the heady perfume of a Terfez, this Tuber was a truly transcendent touch to an already exemplary meal. You might call it a Tuber Uber Alles.
“You might if you were a hack!” Giordano scoffs.
The article is accompanied by a large, full colour close-up of the parmigiana. Truffle shavings trail tantalisingly across the crisp surface of the aubergine slices like footprints on a golden beach.
When asked the name of this exquisite delicacy, Libris merely averted her eyes and blushed. Hardly surprising, because when the supplier becomes known, you can expect to see this stunning truffle on every menu on the restaurant strip.
“Just don’t expect the others to be anywhere near as good!” Giordano reads the final line aloud in a singsong voice then folds the magazine and tosses it onto the counter in disgust. He throws up his hands to ensure that his Sous Chef, Prudence, knows he’s genuinely agitated and not just engaging in theatrics. Prudence is poaching lobster tails for evening service. She refuses to take her eyes from the butter foaming around the reddening carapaces. He knows such watchfulness is necessary. Excessive heat toughens the meat. He taught her that. But sometimes he wishes she’d just indulge him.
He picks the Gastronomicon back up, returns to the offending article. “Who wrote this?”
Of course, the magazine is highly secretive about its reviewers so the chefs they visit cannot cheat. An extra spoonful of caviar or glass of fine wine could sway a certain sort of critic.
Giordano holds the photo close to his face, trying to see the disgusting charlatan reflected in the wine glass at the edge of frame. No such luck. Something else catches his eye. It could be a printing fault, but the truffle has a rainbow sheen on its dark surface, like oil in a puddle. “It’s that damned truffle,” he informs Prudence, slinging the Gastronomicon again, so forcefully this time that it slides all the way across the counter and onto the floor at her feet. Prudence carefully spoons the lobster tails into a container and seals it before stooping to retrieve the magazine. Her large dark eyes skim the words like sea-skipped stones.
“‘Transcendent’,” she quotes. “Our bay-infused barnacles were called sublime by Deliceuse.”
“Sublime isn’t transcendent.” He can’t believe he needs to explain. “Deliceuse isn’t Gastronomicon.”
Prudence shrugs, handing the magazine back as he reaches for it once more. “Scissors,” he demands.
She sighs and takes a pair from a drawer. “You shouldn’t use those for paper.”
He snips around the article so savagely the sharp point of the blades catches his fingertip, drawing blood. He pops his finger into his mouth and sucks it, scowling. “It’s that damn truffle,” he says again, although Prudence is now preparing swordfish frittatas and pays him no mind. Cursing Prudence, the Gastronomicon and Tenebrae Libris in particular, Giordano takes a cigarette from his shirt pocket and stomps outside.
He means only to lean against the window of Piscis and exhale into the street until his anger is expelled with the smoke, and yet somehow, he’s walking. Down the street and across the road, past the post office and the lingerie shop that deals exclusively in enormous lacy bras and into the cobbled, pedestrianised Old Town. Old Town where Abyssalis sits, once part of the ancient university, long ago portioned off by property developers. Many of the basements here link up with an underground tunnel system. The tour guides say they go all the way to the sea, routes for rum smugglers in times of prohibition.
He peers through the dusky glass, one hand knocking cigarette ash to the pavement behind him. He’s surprised there are diners. Open and serving at 4pm. Giordano can barely keep the sneer from his face. What is this, a fast-food restaurant? Too early for dinner and too late for lunch. Hardly transcendent. They must have just filled the window seats to make it seem busier. He stubs his cigarette out on the wall, pushes the door open and steps inside to look.
Every table is taken. Couples clinking glasses, well-dressed groups having important conversations. Even an enormous table filled with a delegation of what Giordano can only assume are diplomats, due to the plain suits and the range of languages being spoken. The room is cacophonous, and he turns on his heel, mindful that the concierge—A concierge! At four o’clock! —is regarding him strangely. He turns back, mouth half open to explain why he’s here gawking, but as he gropes for a lie, a voice cuts through the scraping of cutlery and hubbub of voices.
“MORUS!”
There she is, Tenebrae, as bright-eyed and brimming with enthusiasm as she was at culinary school. Unchanged, in fact. He suppresses a shudder. What kind of chef comes out of the kitchen so much? Always mingling with the clientele, it smacks of insecurity, needing to see everyone oohing and aahing over every morsel.
Next to Tenebrae and the willowy and well-dressed concierge, Giordano feels like an old shoe washed up on the shore. The concierge looks as perturbed as Giordano now feels, but Tenebrae sidesteps her underling and shakes his hand heartily, grasping his elbow.
“A table for my good friend?” she asks Giordano, and before he can react, she’s already turned to the concierge and repeated as fact: “A table for my good friend.”
“But-” the concierge leafs through their ring binder. In a restaurant such as this, ninety per cent of a concierge’s job is to turn people away, to ensure casual visitors know walk-ins are impossible. Tenebrae’s smile becomes wider, kinder, and yet the concierge grows more flustered. Their hands shake, and they stop consulting the binder and start consulting the room itself, hunting for an opportunity. Their gaze lands on a couple who have just drained their glasses and will surely request the bill soon.
“There!” the concierge almost yells. “That table will be vacant shortly.”
Tenebrae bows low to Giordano and then retreats, saying as she walks backwards: “I’d join you, but we have a private party of sixty arriving at eight. I’m sure you understand.”
He wishes he did.
To the concierge, Tenebrae adds, right as the kitchen doors swallow her whole: “You’re an angel. Take good care of Mr Morus.”
The concierge takes this request so seriously it makes Giordano uncomfortable. They put a ‘closed’ sign on the door the moment the couple leaves, and show him to his seat, talking him through the menu in great depth. Giordano cuts them short—he came here for one reason, and one reason only, he knows that now.
“Just the parmigiana,” he says, handing the menu back uninspected. “Please.”
The concierge suddenly looks like they’re trying to gulp down a large sea urchin. He thinks for a moment that they’ll refuse, no doubt considering the eye-watering cost of such a dish.
But after a tense moment, they nod and incline their head. “I believe that pairs well with the primitivo?” Giordano nods, knowing he shouldn’t. Prudence will smell it on him. She won’t say anything, but he’ll know she’s judging him.
#
The first taste is with the eyes, as they say, and when the plate is finally set down in front of him, Giordano’s are ravenous. He takes in the aubergine slices, golden flesh edged with frills of dark skin, gaze darting over the sprig of purple basil perched like a corsage, racing across the vibrant red of the tomato bubbling up through the cheese like hot blood and alighting, cautiously at first and then with a full-bodied stare, on the slivers of truffle. More than expected, a positively decadent amount. Perhaps not so expensive after all. The colour’s unusual, grey with a chromatic sheen, like rainbows in spilled oil. The magazine photo was indeed a faithful representation.
However, unusual doesn’t necessarily mean rare. The purple basil Giordano barely acknowledged in his haste to study the truffle is an ‘unusual’ garnish, and yet he has planters of the stuff growing on his windowsill.
This truffle, though—three generous slices, artfully arranged—surely cannot have such humble origins. He realises he’s been hovering his fork over the dish for some time, feeling almost shy in the presence of the truffle. Ridiculous. Prudence would be rightfully disgusted with him. He presses the tines into the tuber cautiously, as if it might scream. They slide in easily, and he worries he’ll get aubergine too, but manages to extract the fork just so, truffle skewered yet untainted by the unimportant food beneath.
He has stalled long enough.
He must eat.
A bead of sweat prickles his temple as he brings the fork to his mouth.
As truffle touches tongue, the effect is instantaneous. His toes curl. His fists clench. It takes every ounce of his strength not to throw his head back and close his eyes in orgasmic ecstasy. Some small, primitive part of him remembers where he is and that he mustn’t give Tenebrae the satisfaction and so he swallows the elation down with the truffle and keeps his face impassive.
#
He barely remembers finishing the meal, although he supposes he must have. Did he drink the wine too fast? He can’t recall that, only the truffle. ‘Mana from heaven’ is an insufficient description, as it overlooks the truffle’s earthiness. His toes twitch inside his shoes.
He knows he tipped the concierge, pressed money directly into their resisting hands, but it could have been a handful of pennies or five hundred pounds, he has no idea. The sweat is pouring off him now, and he’s trying to get back to Piscis, but the streets all look the same. He can’t get his bearings. He sees a passer-by in his peripheral vision, but when he turns to ask for directions, finds he’s alone in an empty street. He wheels round, looking for a street sign, but when he spots one, the letters are writhing hieroglyphs. Did Tenebrae spike his wine? Was the truffle hallucinogenic? As he remembers the truffle, the taste fills his mouth once more, earthy and ancient and powerful. He breathes deeply. He wishes he’d smelled it before eating. An opportunity wasted. And yet, he cannot feel sad, not when he’s tasted the soul of the universe. The cobbles glint in the sun, a yellow brick road guiding him home and he trips back to Piscis feeling only joy and strength.
Nothing else.
#
“We need to add truffle to our menu.” He’s supposed to be filleting pompanos but he’s chewing the plaster on his cut finger instead. Since the truffle, his mouth cannot be still, his teeth need something to worry.
Prudence is peeling potatoes, coiling the discarded skin in neat piles on the countertop. Giordano thinks this task beneath her, but she says she finds it calming. She wrinkles her nose. “Truffles are darkness and soil. Piscis is sea and sunlight.”
“It could garnish the salmon,” he persists. “We haven’t updated the salmon in years.”
“I’m not convinced the textures would work,” she says, dropping another potato into her rapidly filling bowl. “Truffle butter with the shrimp perhaps?”
“NO!” He slams his filleting knife down so hard the untouched pompanos jump on their tray. “Not butter! Truffle! And not just any truffle! The truffle from Abyssalis!” He storms over to the coat hooks by the door and retrieves his jacket.
The commis chefs cringe over their workstations as Prudence raises her voice. “Where’re you going? Service starts soon and you’ve barely done anything!”
#
The markets have little left at this hour, of course, but the deli counter at the high-end supermarket has some summer truffles. Unlikely Tenebrae would use something so simple, but what if that’s her master stroke? Perhaps the truffles themselves are immaterial and she’s using some arcane technique to create that sheen, that richness? He buys all the remaining stock and hurries back to Piscis.
Service is in full flow, Prudence commanding the kitchen with ease. She doesn’t need him. He heads upstairs to the tiny bedsit above the restaurant, thankfully currently without a tenant. Depositing the jar of truffles on the bedside cabinet, he realises he’s exhausted, wrung out. Unconcerned by the lack of sheets or pillow, he falls into bed and sleep takes him almost immediately. He dreams of distant oceans, waking in the small hours with sweaty hair plastered to his forehead and a fat tongue stuck to the roof his mouth like a sea slug. He again wonders if there was something in his drink, or the truffle itself, but it seems impossible. What would Tenebrae have to gain by drugging him?
His stomach growls, but if he can’t have the truffle he doesn’t want anything. He remembers with a jolt the jar of summer truffles waiting for him on the cabinet and snatches them up. She can’t have done much, because everyone knows that the joy of a good truffle is the thing itself—to grill or bake or sauté for any length of time is to rob the truffle of its essence… He taps his teeth thoughtfully, studying the dimpled spheres from all angles. Maybe that’s the trick? Not actually a truffle at all, but an essence, a distillation, an extraction of the truffle’s truffliness reconstituted into a truffle-like appearance?
He hurries back down to the kitchen.
#
Truffle Dough
Mix flour, egg yolks and finely diced truffles in a food processor for two minutes. When the mixture resembles damp sand, stop. Wrap the mixture tightly in cling film and leave to rest in a cold, dark place for three hours. Once ready for use, treat as you would any other dough, although bear in mind its fragility.
Truffle Mousse
Blend truffles in a food processor to produce a moist mince, stopping at intervals to scrape the detritus from the blades with a spatula and return it to the mixture. Add salt and pepper and mix. Chill in a cold dark place. Enter the cold dark place. Wait. After fifteen minutes, return the mixture to the food processor and add cream. Watch it swirl into the greyness and become one with it. Become one with it. Portion off a small amount of the mixture for testing. Wrap in cling film and lower into simmering water with a slotted spoon. After several minutes, unwrap. Taste. Adjust seasoning and cooking time as necessary for the remainder of the brood.
Truffle Caviar
Heat the oven to 1000ºC. Halve the truffles. Score the flesh without cutting the skin. It serves no purpose, but doesn’t the knife feel pleasing? Place the scarred truffles on a large baking tray. Push garlic into the disfigured flesh. Dust with oil and thyme. Wrap with foil and put in the oven. Do not flinch from the heat. Watch the truffles curling in the inferno. Do not look away. They long to be seared. They crave-
#
“Giordano, what are you doing?!” Prudence sounds furious and horrified but he has bigger fish to fry.
He tastes the reduction straight off the hob, burning his tongue. Disgusting. He retrieves the simmered solids and pushes them through muslin to produce a concentrated paste. The problem of the rainbow sheen can wait until he’s attained the flavour.
The compressed dark mush looks unappetising, but he dips his spoon in nevertheless and tests. Worse than disgusting. He moves on to the truffle caviar, retrieving the dried husks from the oven and crunching on a handful. Before he can properly process what he’s experiencing (heat, pain, garlic), he takes another batch and blends them vigorously, throwing in all the umami-enhancing flavours gathered from around the kitchen—Parmesan cheese, seaweed, soy sauce, fish sauce, tamari.
“Do we have miso?” He asks, dipping his finger into the emulsified truffle shake and sucking it. Not as repugnant as the other attempts, but not close to transcendent.
“Miso?” she sounds confused. “Giordano, have you slept? What’s gotten into you?”
“Umami!” he claps his hands trying to draw her attention back to the matter of importance. “I need more umami! Miso! Taste this!”
He grabs the wooden spoon from the bowl of truffle reduction and thrusts it towards her. She bows her head, frowning, but lapping at the brown paste anyway. She presses her lips together and he can tell she’s momentarily forgotten his bloodshot eyes and the armpits of his whites, grey with sweat.
“What is this?” she asks, taking the spoon from him and sucking it eagerly. He shrugs and points to his piles of discarded notebook pages, handwriting deteriorating further into illegible runes with each recipe.
“One of those.”
“Imagine this drizzled over oysters,” she says. “Sublime.” She glances his way and he can tell she’s seeing plating possibilities rather than his five o’clock shadow.
“But is it transcendent?”
“This again!” She throws the spoon back into the pan and rolls her eyes. “Do you need a holiday, Giordano, is that it? Why are you still obsessing over that woman and her truffles?”
As she says the word, the taste haunts his tongue once more. Ancient darkness, leaf litter, centuries of decaying bark.
“That’s it!” he cries and storms out of the kitchen leaving his aborted creations scattered across the counter tops, some still on the hob, bubbling.
#
Mallori is an edible variety of mushroom sporting a taupe cap dusted with white, dark brown gills (deeply grooved) and slender stem with a bulbous end, semi-hidden beneath a frilled white skirt. Generally found in shaded woodland areas it smells strongly of cloves.
Not to be confused with the poisonous Mollari, which has a white cap dusted with taupe, deep brown gills (strongly pleated) and a tapering stem with a thick base, although this may be concealed beneath the many-layered skirt. Proliferates in shady, wooded areas. Side effects include monochromatic vision, involuntary bowel movements and death.
Another interesting type to look out for in this area is the Edible Fruiting Aestiver, recognisable by its pocked surface and irregular silhouette. Also known as Black Knocker, a misnomer as this rare truffle is actually dark green. Immature fruits are said to have hallucinogenic properties when boiled, although this is unconfirmed. Found in knot holes and root balls, this rare treat has a strong creamy taste with notes of-
#
Birds shifting their feet on branches, tree roots sucking water from the soil, he can hear every woodland sound. His face feels hot and sunburnt, which it could be. The sun was high in the sky for a few hours of his search, although now it’s dipping back below the trees. He has a penlight torch in his pocket for emergencies, but he doesn’t want to use it yet as he worries it’ll destroy his night vision and right now he’s enjoying feeling fox-like, padding between the trees, recognising the outline of every bush, smelling the shape of each leaf and crawling insect. His cut finger itches, and he scratches absentmindedly, although he can barely feel his own skin.
Can you ever feel your own skin?
Pain lances his stomach and his knees buckle. He collapses to the forest floor in a flurry of leaf litter and vomits copiously. He’s a little frightened. Maybe it was that last mushroom? The funny little spiny one? He’s lost count of the varieties he’s eaten, some which he couldn’t find on the mushroom identification videos on his phone. He pats his pockets even as he retches and pukes again. Gone. Dropped. Or maybe thrown? That seems possible, because there was a moment when he was being chased and he threw things.
He sinks forward, face buried in leaves and half-digested mushrooms. What if he’s dying? He could’ve eaten a highly poisonous one, although he thought he’d avoided everything brightly coloured or spotted and aren’t those the most dangerous? He heaves again, but there’s nothing left apart from a rush of bile that burns the back of his throat. He lets out a long baritone fart and the stabbing in his guts subsides.
He rolls onto his back and through the canopy can see a million stars all glowing rainbow colours like the sheen on petrol, a billion years old and some dead already. So terrifying and hilarious. He laughs at the sky, or maybe he’s crying. Doesn’t matter because he’s just a tiny speck of insignificant biological matter in the depths of a cold infinite universe.
Nothing else.
#
He comes to on an unfamiliar bed. His hair is still slicked to his scalp with sweat, but his vomit-smelling outerwear has been removed. He’s wearing just his stained vest, baggy old underpants and one sock. The plaster on his finger is muddy and sodden, wound throbbing beneath. In the distance, there’s the sound of a washing machine on spin cycle. He stands and dresses in the only clothing available—a brown towelling dressing gown hanging on the back of the door. The sleeves barely reach his elbows, but the waist tie is generous, and he makes a neat bow around his midriff.
An orange cat streaks across the landing at his approach and as he stumbles down the stairs, he knocks several pictures off the wall—all of Prudence and another woman, her hair bleached white and shaved into a fashionable, asymmetric style.
“Pru, he’s up,” an unfamiliar voice calls through the house. She sounds irritated.
“Giordano?” Prudence appears at the bottom of the stairs as he’s fumbling with the front door, which is locked. “Stop that. Where are you going?”
He sways stupidly, as if drunk, although he’s so sober he can see every pore in her face, can smell the poached eggs she had for breakfast, feel her partner’s displeasure radiating from another room. “Abyssalis,” he tells her, although really he’s seeking the truffle, the location is irrelevant.
She rolls her eyes. “Giordano, please,” she says. “Let me go and speak to Tenebrae. I’ll ask where she got the truffle, put an end to this.”
“She’ll never tell you.” The idea tugs at him, though, the taste pricking his tongue, the merest memory of a flavour. He needs to strengthen it again. What if she did tell? He chews on the dirty plaster (soil, leaf litter, bark). “All right.” He must have sounded too eager because she looks worried again, but she nods and reaches for her coat.
“Okay.” She unlocks the door. “Stay here.”
“No!” He and Prudence’s partner protest together. She’s joined them in the hallway, keeping her distance from him the way one would avoid a washed-up jellyfish.
A silent conversation passes between the two women and eventually Prudence turns to Giordano and says: “Okay, but stay in the car, you hear?”
He nods.
She shakes her head and mutters: “I hope no-one sees you like this.”
#
Prudence’s car is a rusty green two-door which she parks some way down the road from Abyssalis, presumably because of her misplaced concern for him. She insists he must stay put while she speaks with Tenebrae. That irks him. He should be the one demanding Tenebrae share her secret, watching her eyes in case she lies. But then, as he hunkers down in his seat worrying his plaster, he notices Abyssalis’ concierge standing in a doorway, smoking a cigarette in long slow drags. The fire door, papered with signs reading: “Do NOT prop open”, is propped open with a bucket which the concierge is using as an ash tray. As they stub out their cigarette against the door handle, black and ashy from frequent use for such a purpose, Giordano unclicks his seatbelt and sits forward. The concierge combs their fingers through their fringe a few times, then heaves a heavy sigh and turns back inside. Giordano presses his face to the car window. The concierge lets the fire door swing limply behind them, and it lodges on the bucket, failing to close fully.
Felicitous!
He tries to get out. She’s locked him in. That bitch Prudence has locked him in her shitty car. He climbs across to the driver’s seat, leans back and kicks the centre of the window with his socked foot. A few more good thuds of his heel, and the whole thing drops out, smashing on the pavement. A passing woman gasps, actually gasps. He ignores her, reaching through the window and fumbling for the handle, wrenching it until the door opens. Perhaps it wasn’t locked after all, maybe the passenger door was merely stiff. No matter. He leaps the smashed glass in a bound, dashes down the alleyway and squeezes through the fire door, feeling magnificently boneless, an octopus contorting itself into a rocky crevice to hunt.
#
He’s holding his breath, although he’s not sure why—the relentless noise of Abyssalis’ perpetually busy dining area penetrates even this quiet corridor. The clashing of crockery interwoven with voices exchanging mindless pleasantries when all they really want to do is shovel forkfuls of expensive food down their scarcely appreciative gullets. He sniffs. He can smell it somewhere close.
He pursues the scent like a shark trailing blood, eagerly inhaling that woody aroma, the smell of a thousand centuries, of earth and sea and stars. He reaches the door of what he expects will be the kitchen, but it isn’t, it’s a large storeroom, dimly lit. The smell is overwhelming here, and he feels impossibly tiny again, a microbe on a lump of rock hurtling through space. The smell grows stronger and stronger as he walks past vast bags of flour and cases of olive oil and shelves of fine preserves and pickles.
There, right at the back, the origin of the delicious aroma.
Surely not? And yet his nose tells him it is.
Not a crate overflowing with rare and precious truffles, but a silver cage. Within, there’s a creature, flesh blubbery and rough, a mass of dense, barnacle-like protrusions, yet soft-looking too, resembling the saggy hide of a walrus. It has few other features: a long and warty protuberance could be a nose, a trunk, or simply a fleshy growth; and bright eyes, small and black like raisins pressed into its doughy body, its rear scored with a lattice of cuts. As Giordano moves closer, inhaling the creature’s intoxicating fragrance, he realises his cheeks are wet with tears. Or salt water, at least. On top of the cage rests a large, sharp butcher’s knife, blade coated in a viscous substance. When his gaze falls on the knife, the creature makes a bubbling sound and pulsates, its hide taking on a rainbow sheen. His cut finger throbs, synching with the technicolour pulses. He hears footsteps behind him, knows that it’s Tenebrae, that he cannot waste this opportunity.
He grabs the knife.
END
Author biography:
Lynda Clark is currently Lecturer in Creative and Critical Practice at Abertay University. Her debut novel, Beyond Kidding (Fairlight, 2019) is in development with Film4 and BAFTA winner William Stefan Smith. Her collection, Dreaming in Quantum (Fairlight, 2021) contains the highly acclaimed ‘Ghillie’s Mum’, which won the Commonwealth Prize for Europe & Canada and was shortlisted in the BBC Short Story Award and the Tom Gallon Prize. A new novel, Strange Talk, is on the way in November 2026. She lives on the East coast of Scotland with her husband and dog, Badger.