He must really love her a lot, I thought.
The house looked the same as always. The lawn was immaculately manicured, the trim on the house recently painted. Even the hose was curled into a neat circle. "The place looks good," I said.
He smiled at me. "I try my best."
We got out of the car, leaving the luggage in the trunk for later. My father found the house key on his ring and unlocked the front door, stepping aside to let me in first.
The inside of the house was demolished.
I stared in shock. Both the couch and the loveseat were overturned in the middle of the living room, their upholstery torn and ripped, stuffing leaking out. Scattered about were the broken pieces of our old dining room chairs and fragments of the dining room table. The china cabinet and its contents were heaped in a pile in the corner of the room. The walls were bare and covered with crayon scribbles. The living room rug, the rug that had been tough enough to withstand even my Tonka attacks and my G.I. Joe invasions, was a tatter of unraveled threads. Through the doorway of the kitchen, I could see smeared piles of food and bent food containers on the broken tile.
Everything was covered with a dusty white powder.
I whirled around to see my father's reaction. He was smiling happily, as if he did not see the disaster in front of him, as if he were viewing paradise itself. "How does it feel to be home again?" he asked.
There was the sound of something shattering in the back of the house, and a second later a naked boy came bounding into the living room on all fours. He was brown with filth and he smelled horrible. His hair was matted with grime, and his too-large teeth were a moldy green. He could not have been more than ten or eleven. He hopped onto the remains of the china cabinet and grunted wildly, snorting through his nose.
"There you are, my love," I heard my father say behind me, and I felt a sickening feeling of disgusted horror in the pit of my stomach. "I want you to meet David."
With an animal-like howl, the little boy bounded toward us. My father stepped forward and pulled the youth to his feet, hugging him to himself. He kissed the dirty child full on the lips. With fast and furious fingers, the boy tried to unbuckle my father's belt and pull down his pants. My father laughingly pushed him away. "Now now," he said.
The boy turned to look at me, and I could see that he had an erection.
My father smiled proudly at me. "Son," he said, "I want you to meet your future stepmother."
The filthy boy looked up at me and grinned. I could see that his mossy teeth had been filed into tiny points. He howled crazily.
I don't know what happened next. I guess I was in shock. I don't think I really blacked out, but the next thing I remember was walking down Lakewood Boulevard toward the ocean. It was dark out, night, and I was several miles away from home, so I had obviously been walking for quite a while.
I was alone.
I didn't know what I was going to do. My father had obviously gone totally insane. I looked up into the night sky, but the lights of Long Beach were bright and I could see very few stars. I wondered what my mother would say if she could see what was happening. I could not imagine my mother's reaction to this situation. It was totally unlike anything she had ever encountered in her life.
"Why did you have to die?" I whispered aloud.
My father would have to be put away, I realized. He would have to be committed. What he was doing was illegal, as well, and there would probably be criminal charges filed against him.
There would doubtless be a lot of publicity.
I thought of all the times my father had let me help him in his garage workshop, giving me imaginary chores to perform while he himself did the real work. He looked tall to me then, and invincible—the model man whose respect I so desperately craved and tried to earn. The man I wanted to be.
And then I saw him standing there in his immaculate suit, amongst the shambles of our living room, as a filthy wild child tried desperately to pull down his pants.
I started to cry.
I sat down on the curb and let the tears come, giving my emotions free reign, and soon I was sobbing uncontrollably, sobbing not only for the loss of my mother, but also for the loss of my father.
Ten minutes later, I walked toward home. I would not call the police, I decided. I could not do that to my father. We would handle this crisis on our own. It was a family matter, and it would be settled within the family.
The outside of the house looked deceptively calm. Everything was neat and ordered, in its proper place, just as it had always been. Inside, I knew, chaos reigned. Insanity prevailed.
The front door was unlocked. I pushed it open and walked inside. My father was just putting on his shirt. His pants were still unbuckled. Hopping around the room, laughing crazily, was the boy. The child looked up at me with unreadable gray eyes and suddenly ran forward on two legs, carrying something in his hands. Grinning up at me, he presented his offering.
It was a framed picture of my parents, smeared with shit.
I kicked the little bastard as hard as I could in the stomach, sending him flying. His grinning mouth contracted instantly into an open O of pain, and I was gratified to hear him scream.
"That's no way to treat your new mother," my father said.
I ran forward and kicked the kid again. Hard. He went down, and the heel of my shoe connected with his dirty head. Blood poured freely down his brown skin from a large cut above his scalp line.
"That's enough!" my father screamed, but it was not enough. I was not through. I pulled the kid up by his hair and punched him full in the face, feeling his nose collapse under my knuckles.
And then my father's strong hands were pulling me away. I kicked and screamed and lashed out at him, but he was stronger than I was.
I was knocked unconscious.
When I came to, I was lying in a bed, my arms and legs tied to the four posts with a thick coarse twine. My father was seated in a chair next to me, a concerned expression on his face, pressing a cold compress against my forehead. He was talking in a soothing voice—more to himself than me, I think—and I listened to him silently.
"... more than I loved your mother, but just as much I think. I can't help myself. I was lost when your mother died, lost, and I didn't know what to do with myself. I haven't felt this way in years. I'm learning how to feel again ..."
There was a series of inarticulate howls from the front of the house. My father's face brightened. "In here!" he called.
The boy bounded into the room, and a hideous stench assaulted my nostrils. I strained against my bonds, but the twine held tight. The child looked up at me. A crust of dried blood covered the left half of his face where my foot had connected with his head, and twin rivulets of hardened blood protruded from the pulp of his broken nose. He smiled at me and I saw again his pointed teeth, covered with greenish tartar.
My father drew the boy to him and kissed him on the lips, long and hard and lovingly.
"Father," I pleaded, almost crying. "Dad."
I could not recall ever having seen my parents kiss.
The boy moved forward, whispered something in my father's ear, and glanced furtively toward me. My father stood up and drew the compress from my forehead. "I'll see you in a while," he told me. I watched him step out of the room and close the door behind him.
The boy cavorted around the room after my father had left, grunting and snorting wildly. He squatted in the corner and relieved himself.
"Help!" I screamed as loud as I could, struggling against the twine, hoping some neighbor would hear me. "Help!"
The boy hopped onto the bed, climbing on top of me. He bent his face close to my own, and I spit at him. He let the saliva drip off the end of his nose, not moving, not wiping it off. He studied me for a moment, then said something in a foreign tongue, soft whispering words. I had never heard the words before, but they frightened me.
He stood up on his knees, and I could see his erection. He bent
down to undo my pants.
"No," I cried.
He laughed and said something else in his whispering tongue. He pushed his face near my own, and I could smell his fetid breath. I gagged.
He howled loudly and unzipped my zipper.
"Untie me," I said. I did not know if he could understand me, but he seemed to understand my father. I made my voice as soothing as possible. "Please untie me."
He slipped a grimy hand under the elastic of my underwear.
"I'll be able to help you better if I can move my hands," I said, keeping my voice calm. "Untie me."
To my surprise, he moved forward and began unknotting the twine tied around the bed posts. I lay there unmoving, letting him undo first one knot, then the other. I flexed my fingers, but I did not move or say a word as he untied my feet.
Then I kicked him hard in the chest, sending him flying off the bed. I jumped up, grabbed his head, and smashed it against the wall, leaving a smear of pale blood.
"What's going on in there?" my father asked from outside the door. "Love, you all right?"
I leaped out of the window. The glass cut me, but I was protected to some extent by the heavy drapes. I would not have cared if I had been sliced to ribbons. I rolled on the grass and jumped up, my arms and head bleeding from dozens of tiny cuts. I ran across the street to Mr. Murphy's house. I did not bother to knock, but threw open the unlocked front door.
Mr. Murphy's living room was a shambles, chairs and tables tumbled over, couch torn apart.
Cavorting about amongst the broken furniture, moving on all fours, was a naked wild boy, covered with filth.
Mr. Murphy stood in the hallway, stark naked.I ran next door to Mrs. Grant's house, but her place, too, had been torn apart by the dirty boy crawling across her ragged carpet.
I ran out of the neighborhood, out to Lakewood Boulevard, and I did not stop running until I reached a phone. My hands shaking, I fumbled through my pockets for some change. My pants were still undone. I found a quarter and dropped it in the slot.
But who was I going to call?
I stood there fore a moment. The police would not believe me, I knew. They would write my story off as a crank call— particularly when they traced it to a public phone. I knew none of my father's friends outside the neighborhood. I had no friends of my own left in the LA area. No one else would believe me because I looked like hell; they'd think I was crazy.
And all my suitcases were at my father's.
Retrieving my money from the coin return slot, I walked down the street to a bus stop where I caught a bus to a motel. I took a hot shower and slept, trying to calm down.
In the morning, I called my father's number, but the line was busy. I decided to call the cops.
The police didn't believe me when I told them what had happened. They gave me a urine test to see if I was on something. I called Janice back in Chicago, but she didn't believe me either.
There was nothing for me to do but use the return ticket in my wallet to fly back home.
It has been nearly a month now since I got back. Janice now believes that something happened out in California, but despite the continued repetitions of my story, she is not sure just what that something was. She thinks I have had some type of breakdown, and she keeps encouraging me to seek professional help.
I have not called my father since my return, and he has not called me. The bump on my head is long gone, and the rope burns on my arms have faded, but though the physical effects of my experience have disappeared, the psychological effects have not. I dream about the boy at least once a week, and the dreams are getting ever more vivid.
They are also getting scarier.
Much scarier.
In the last dream, the boy lived with me as my wife, in place of Janice.
And when I awoke from the dream I had an erection.
The Potato
When I was a teenager, friends of my parents who lived across the street from us would periodically hire me to baby-sit their son while they went out to dinner and a movie. It was an easy gig. I'd eat their food, sit on their couch, watch TV, and get paid for it.
I also used to tell their son scary stories. One of them, inspired by the short story "Graveyard Shift" in Stephen King's Night Shift collection, involved a huge living potato that lived in the crawl space under our house. These tales not only scared the boy, they also scared me, and I would inevitably let him stay up far past his bedtime because I didn't want to be alone in their small creepy third-story television room.
Years later, I remembered that living potato, and I put him in a new setting and different story.
***
The farmer stared down at the ... thing ... which lay at his feet. It was a potato. No doubt about that. It had been connected to an ordinary potato plant, and it had the irregular contours of a tuber. But that was where the resemblance to an ordinary potato ended. For the thing at his feet was white and gelatinous, well over -three feet long. It pulsed rhythmically, and when he touched it tentatively with his shovel, it seemed to withdraw, to shrink back in upon itself.
A living potato.
It was an unnatural sight, wrong somehow, and his first thought was that he should destroy it, chop it up with his shovel, run it over with his tractor. Nature did not usually let such abominations survive, and he knew that he would be doing the right thing by destroying it. Such an aberration was obviously not meant to be. But he took no action. Instead he stared down at the potato, unable to move, hypnotized almost, watching the even ebb and flow of its pulsations, fascinated by its methodical movement. It made no noise, showed no sign of having a mind, but he could not help feeling that the thing was conscious, that it was watching him as he watched it, that, in some strange way, it even knew what he was thinking.
The farmer forced himself to look up from the hole and stared across his field. There were still several more rows to be dug, and there was feeding and watering to do, but he could not seem to rouse in himself any of his usual responsibility or sense of duty. He should be working at this moment—his time was structured very specifically, and even a slight glitch could throw off his schedule for a week—but he knew that he was not going to return to his ordinary chores for the rest of the day. They were no longer important to him. Their value had diminished, their necessity had become moot. Those things could wait.
He looked again at the potato. He had here something spectacular. This was something he could show at the fair. Like the giant steer he had seen last year, or the two-headed lamb that had been exhibited a few years back. He shook his head. He had never had anything worth showing at the fair, had not even had any vegetables or livestock worth entering in competition. Now, all of a sudden, he had an item worthy of its own booth. A genuine star attraction.
But the fair was not for another four months.
Hell, he thought. He could set up his own exhibit here. Put a little fence around the potato and charge people to look at it. Maybe he'd invite Jack Phelps, Jim Lowry, and some of his closest friends to see it first. Then they'd spread the word, and pretty soon people from miles around would be flocking to see his find.
The potato pulsed in its hole, white flesh quivering rhythmically, sending shivers of dirt falling around it. The farmer wiped a band of sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, and he realized that he no longer felt repulsed by the sight before him.
He felt proud of it
The farmer awoke from an unremembered dream, retaining nothing but the sense of loss he had experienced within the dream's reality. Though it was only three o'clock, halfway between midnight and dawn, he knew he would not be able to fall back asleep, and he got out of bed, slipping into his Levi's. He went into the kitchen, poured himself some stale orange juice from the refrigerator, and stood by the screen door, staring out across the field toward the spot where he'd unearthed the living potato. Moonlight shone down upon the field, creating strange shadows, giving the land a new topography. Although
he could not see the potato from this vantage point, he could imagine how it looked in the moonlight, and he shivered, thinking of the cold, pulsing, gelatinous flesh.
I should have killed it, he thought. / should have stabbed it with the shovel, chopped it into bits, gone over it with the plow.
He finished his orange juice, placing the empty glass on the counter next to the door. He couldn't go back to sleep, and he didn't feel like watching TV, so he stared out at the field, listening to the silence. It was moments like these, when he wasn't working, wasn't eating, wasn't sleeping, when his body wasn't occupied with something else, that he felt Murial's absence the most acutely. It was always there— a dull ache that wouldn't go away—but when he was by himself like this, with nothing to do, he felt the true breadth and depth of his loneliness, felt the futility and pointlessness of his existence.
The despair building within him, he walked outside onto the porch. The wooden boards were cold and rough on his bare feet. He found himself, unthinkingly, walking down the porch steps, past the front yard, into the field. Here, the blackness of night was tempered into a bluish purple by the moon, and he had no trouble seeing where he was going.
He walked, almost instinctively, to the spot where the living potato lay in the dirt. He had, in the afternoon, gingerly moved it out of the hole with the help of Jack Phelps, and had then gathered together the materials for a box to be placed around it. The potato felt cold and slimy and greasy, and both of them washed their hands immediately afterward, scrubbing hard with Lava soap. Now the boards lay in scattered disarray in the dirt, like something that had been torn apart rather than something that had not yet been built.
He looked down at the bluish white form, pulsing slowly and evenly, and the despair he had felt, the loneliness, left him, dissipating outward in an almost physical way. He stood rooted in place, too stunned to move, wondering at the change that had instantly come over him. In the darkness of night, the potato appeared phosphorescent, and it seemed to him somehow magical. Once again, he was glad he had not destroyed his discovery, and he felt good that other people would be able to see and experience the strange phenomenon. He stood there for a while, not thinking, not doing anything, and then he went back to the house, stepping slowly and carefully over rocks and weeds this time. He knew that he would have no trouble falling asleep.
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