The Collection

kitchen, he returned to the living room and switched channels on the TV until he found another game. He watched it until a commercial came on, then went to the bathroom to wash his hands. When he returned to the kitchen to check on his lunch, small bubbles were starting to rise through the clear water from the hill of macaroni at the bottom of the pot. He quickly took a spoon from the drawer and began stirring, scraping. He didn't want the macaroni to stick to the bottom. It was hell to wash, almost impossible to get off.

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and looked down idly as he stirred. The water bubbled, a thin film of white foam seeping upward from the macaroni and whirlpooling into the center of the pot. The foam thickened, thinned, swirling about as he stirred, maintaining a roughly circular shape even as the metal spoon cut through its heart, sliced its edges.

He stared at the water, fascinated both by the amazing mechanics of boiling and by the shifting patterns of the bub­bles and the film on top. The effect was kaleidoscopic, though the only colors he could see were the translucent brown of the Vision Ware, the pale wheat of the macaroni, and the pure white of the foam. He continued to look down as he stirred, imagining he could make out vague shapes in the boiling water, impressionistic outlines of elephants and birds and—

          a face.

He peered closely at the contents of the pot, hardly be­lieving what he was seeing. He blinked. The features of the face, formed by clear spaces in the white foam circle, were somehow familiar to him though he could not immediately place their antecedent. As the water bubbled, individual pieces of macaroni rising to the top, the face seemed to move, eyes peering around, mouth opening and closing as if to speak.

He stopped stirring for a second.

The face smiled up at him.

Alan stepped backward as a chill passed through him. He was suddenly aware of the dim emptiness of the kitchen, of the fact that he was alone in the apartment. Unreasonably frightened, he shut off the gas. The bubbles died down as the heat disappeared, the foam face dissipating, swirling out­ward in fading tendrils to reveal the cooked macaroni below.

He was cold, but he was sweating, and he used a paper towel to wipe the sides of his face. His lips were dry, and he licked them, but his mouth had no saliva to spare. From the living room, he heard the roar of a football crowd. The noise sounded muffled, far off.

He thought for some reason of his mother, of his sister. Strange. He had not thought of them in years.

He looked down at the spoon shaking in his trembling hand. This was stupid. There was nothing to be afraid of. What the hell was wrong with him? Halftime would be over soon and the game would start again. He had to hurry up and finish lunch.

He turned the gas on again and tried not to pay attention as the still hot water began almost instantly to bubble. But he could not help noticing with a shiver of fear that the foam was again beginning to swirl, again beginning to take on the features of a face: eyes, nose, mouth.

He stirred. Quickly, harshly, rapidly. But the face re­mained intact.

He pulled out the spoon, afraid now to touch the water even through this metal conduit, and began to back away.

He heard a noise, a low whispery sound somewhere be­tween the quiet constant hissing of the gas flame and the percolating bubble of the boiling water. He had the distinct impression that the sound was a voice, a voice repeating a single word, but he could not make out what that word was. Summoning all of his courage, he looked into the pot.

The foam mouth closed, then opened, then closed, and seeing this movement timed with the whispering sound, he knew what word was being spoken.

'Blood,' the face said. 'Blood.'

Blood.

What could that mean? He had spent all afternoon think­ing about it. More than anything else, the word had sounded to him like a command, an order.

A request for sustenance.

But that was crazy. A random pattern formed by boiling macaroni was demanding blood? If he had read this in a story, he would have dismissed it as laughably implausible. If he had heard someone else mention it, he would have con­sidered that person a candidate for the rubber room. But he was sitting here thinking about it, had been doing so for hours, and the scary part was that he was actually trying to logically, rationally, analyze the situation.

But that wasn't really the scary part, was it?

No, the scary part was not that he believed this was hap­pening and that therefore his mind was going. The scary part was that his mind was not going, that this thing really ex­isted. This creature, this being, this demon, this ghost, this whatever-it-was could actually be conjured up by making macaroni and cheese.

But could it be conjured up at any time, or was it only on Saturdays and only at lunchtime?

He didn't know.

That night the apartment seemed much darker than it did ordinarily. There were shadows on the sides of the couch and at the foot of the bed, echoes of darkness in the corners of the rooms.

He went to sleep early.

He left the lights on.

He dreamed of a man in a doorway with an ax.

He had the rest of the week to think about what had oc­curred. Afraid, he stayed away from the apartment as much as possible, leaving early for work, coming home late. He cooked no meals for himself but ate out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner: Jack in the Box, Der Weinerschnitzel, Taco Bell, McDonald's.

He'd thought the fear would abate with the coming of a new day, that as the hours passed the horror of the occur­rence would dim. He thought he'd be able to find a rational explanation for what he had seen, what he had heard.

But it had not happened.

He recalled with perfect and profound clarity the con­tours of the bubbly foam face, the way the boiling water had made it smile. He heard in his head the whispered word.

Blood.

There was nothing he could do, he realized. He could move, get a new apartment, but what would that accom­plish? The impetus for this horror might lie not in his home but in himself. He could never cook again, or at least never make macaroni and cheese, but he would always know that the face was there, waiting, unconjured, below the surface reality of his daily life.

Blood.

He had to confront it.

He had to try it again.

***

Everything was the same. He put in the water, put in the salt, put in the macaroni, turned on the flame, and out of the pot's swirling contents emerged a face. He was not as fright­ened this time, perhaps because he had been prepared for the sight, but he was nonetheless unnerved. He stared down at the white foam.

'Blood,' the mouth whispered. 'Blood.'

Blood.

There was something hypnotic about the word, some­thing almost... seductive. It was still terrifying, still horri­fying, but there was also something attractive about it. As he looked at the face, saw its vague familiarity, as he listened to the whisper, heard its demand, Alan could almost under­stand what was wanted with the blood. In a perverse way that was not at all understood by his conscious mind, he felt that it made a kind of sense.

Outside, a dog barked. Alan looked up. The barking came closer, and through the open window he heard the sound of paws on the dirty sidewalk of his small patio. The animal continued to bark loudly, annoyingly.

Alan looked down into the swirling pot of macaroni.

'Blood,' the face whispered.

Nodding to himself, Alan opened the cupboard under the sink and drew out the small hand-held hatchet he used to cut rope. He moved out of the kitchen and walked across the liv­ing room to the front door.