The Collection

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.

In the morning it had moved. He did not know how it had moved—it had no arms or legs or other means of locomo­tion—but it was now definitely closer to the house. It was also bigger. Whereas yesterday it had been on the south side of his assembled boards, it was now well to the north, and it had increased its size by half. He was not sure he would be able to lift it now, even with Jack's help.

He stared at the potato for a while, looking for some sort of trail in the dirt, some sign that the potato had moved it­self, but he saw nothing.