The Collection

I moved forward slowly. On the side, through the other doors, I could hear whispers and shuffling. Out of the corner of my eye I saw furtive shadows, dashing, darting, follow­ing. I stared straight ahead.

I grew frightened as I drew closer to the end of the hall, my fear focusing on the lighted room. It wasn't logical, but it was real. I was supposed to turn off the light, but I was afraid of the room with the light in it. The dark room was scary only because it was dark. The lighted room was scary because something was in it.

I reached the end of the hallway and ducked quickly into the darker doorway. I was breathing rapidly, my heart pounding so loud I could hear it. Trembling, I reached around the corner into the other room and felt for the light switch. I flipped it off and—

I was in an Arizona farmhouse with a man and two chil­dren I had never seen before but who I knew to be my uncle and my cousins.

I was eight years old. I lived with them.

My uncle looked out the window of the empty farmhouse at the dry dusty expanse of desert extending unbroken in all directions. "Get us something to eat," he told Jenny, my fe­male cousin.

She went into the furnitureless kitchen and looked through each cupboard. Nothing but dust.

"Whoever lived here didn't leave no food," she said. She waited for my uncle's reply, and when he didn't say any­thing she shrugged and picked up a broom leaning against the wall. She began to sweep some of the dirt out of the house.

We slept that night on the floor.

The next day, my uncle was up before dawn, riding the tractor, attempting to till that dry useless soil, attempting to grow us some food. Jenny was hanging curtains, determined to make the house livable.

So Lane and I went out to play. We walked around, ex-|- plored, talked, threw dirt clods, decided to build a club­house. He ran off and got us two trowels, and we started digging. Both of us wanted a basement in our clubhouse.

After nearly an hour of digging in the hot Arizona sun, I our tools struck wood. We dug faster and deeper and harder I and found that the wood was part of a trap door. I turned to my cousin. "I wonder what's under it."

"Only one way to find out," he said. "Open it."

So I slid my hands up under the board and pulled up. A cold chill ran through me as I saw the stairway descending into the ground. The stairway that led to a hall. I turned around and my cousin was no longer my cousin but a grin­ning, gap-toothed Appalachian woman. "Turn off the light at the end of the hall," she said.

I stood in front of Mike's Market, disoriented. I did not know where I was. What happened to the hallway? I won­dered. Where was the woman? It took me a minute or so to adjust. Then I realized that this was reality; the fair, the alley, the hallway, and the farm were not.

And I began to be afraid. For before this, the occurrences always seemed like dreams. Even when they started hap­pening in the daytime, they were clearly illusions juxtaposed onto a real world. But now the illusions were becoming or­dinary, the surrealism real.

I was losing the battle.

If only Kathy were here. Two of us could hold the tide; two of us could dam the flood. We might even be able to have some semblance of a normal life.

Now, however, I was alone.

And they were getting stronger.

***

Last night it was the spider.

It had been a long day with no occurrences. At least, no malicious occurrences. I'd spent the day clearing a path through the woods to the pond. The old path had become overgrown with weeds through disuse and inattentiveness. Although the day was cool and even somewhat overcast, the work was hard. And by the time I was ready to quit, I was hot, tired, and sweating like a pig.

I deserved the bath.

I decided to use the third floor bathroom, the small one with just a toilet, tub, and sink in a space the size of a closet. The water felt soothing and good, so I leaned back and re­laxed, getting comfortable. I fell asleep in the tub.

When I awoke, something was wrong. The bathwater was still warm by this time but not warm enough to stop goose bumps from popping up on my arm. Scared for no particular reason, I hurried to unstop the drain, then arose from the tub and grabbed a towel to dry myself.

It was then that I noticed the spider. Black and big as an apple, with bright blue eyes and a row of blue button teeth, it was hanging from its thread in the middle of the bathroom. I don't know how I could have missed it.

It started moving toward me; slowly, evenly, still sus­pended from its thread, as though the entire spiderline were on some sort of track in the ceiling. I flattened against the wall, nude and trembling. The spider kept coming.

Desperate, I jumped over the rim of the tub, hitting my knee on the edge, and rolled along the floor underneath the hanging creature. I climbed onto my throbbing knee and tried to unlatch the bathroom door, which I had stupidly locked.

But I wasn't quick enough. The spider and its thread were coming back toward me now, faster, gaining speed.

Once again, I rolled under it, and I jumped back in the tub just as the last little trickle of water swirled down the drain. I was getting claustrophobic. The bathroom seemed smaller by the second. The toilet's in the wrong place, I thought dis-jointedly. The sink took up too much room. I found that there was no place for me to move except along the narrow path the spider was guarding.

Maybe I could make it to the door this time. The pain in my knee almost unbearable now, I climbed on the rim of the tub, hit the side wall, and slid by the hanging horror, its large hairy body half an inch from my own.

I reached the door and turned around at the same time. No chance. There was no time. The spider was heading straight for my face, moving fast and grinning.

And then it was gone.

It had been another one of their tricks. I slumped to the floor, sweat pouring from every inch of my body though the temperature was barely above freezing. I should have known from the beginning, the way Kathy and I had always known, but I had not figured it out until the whole thing was over. I'd accepted it as reality all the way through.

I was losing the battle.

This morning I awoke early. I'd decided to spend the day just cooking. It would relax me. It would allow me to think of a way to combat this encroaching madness. I rolled out of bed and put on my robe. My eyes were still half closed, and I rubbed them so I could see clearly.

It was then that I noticed the room.

It was not my bedroom at all but a bowling alley. I was seated next to an old couple who were looking at me quizzically, as though they expected me to say something. "I'm sorry," I found myself mumbling. "I didn't catch that."

The old man stood up from his plywood folding chair and grabbed a large black bowling ball. "I said, 'Do you want to go first?'" he repeated. He stepped up to a lane. "Never mind. I'll go." He rolled the ball down the lane and it grew larger as it moved away from him. My eyes followed the ball to the pins, but there were no pins. Instead, a group of people stood in a pin formation, unmoving, as the ball rolled ever larger toward them.

One of them was Kathy.

"Oh my God!" I cried. Luckily, the old man was not a very good bowler and the ball slid into the gutter, missing Kathy completely.

"Not good, Hubert," said the old lady two seats down from me.

I could not believe this. I jumped out of my chair and ran down the lane. I grabbed Kathy in my arms. "Watch this!" Hubert announced. He rolled the ball again, and I stood there, a human bowling pin unable to move, holding my Kathy as the ball rolled ever closer. I felt the wind as the now monstrous object passed us.

Hubert was talking to his wife and getting ready to bowl again, so I threw Kathy over my shoulder (she was light) and ran up the lane, past the old couple and through the door. Outside the bowling alley, my house was a maze of cheaply paneled rooms with red carpeting and bare bulbs hanging from low ceilings. Each room had several doors and each door led into another room which, in turn, led to other rooms.

I just ran. With Kathy over my shoulder, I ran. Behind us, I could hear the sound of bowling pins being knocked over. Loudly.

Only they weren't really bowling pins.

The rooms we ran through now had furniture. In one was a low couch, in another a bed. More beds became notice­able, and in one room we ran through, a man and woman were sitting together on a waterbed.

It became apparent that we were running through the back regions of some monstrous bordello.

Then the cheaply paneled rooms ended and we were in my room, in my house. Kathy and I.

I had her back.

She was still in some type of trance, but her eyes were be­ginning to move, and I thought I saw her left pinky wiggle. Quickly, I carried her into the bathroom and placed her gen­tly in the tub. I turned on the cold water and splashed it over her face in order to jar her awake. But the water was like acid to her, and she stared to melt into the liquid.

And she was gone.

From somewhere, I heard laughter.

That was the last straw. I could take anything but this ... desecration of my life with Kathy. And suddenly I didn't care what happened. I just wanted to save myself, to pre­serve my sanity, to get the hell out of there.

Without even stopping to put on real clothes, still in my robe, I ran out of the house and into the garage, where the car waited. I grabbed the key from its hook on the press-board wall, got in the car, and slammed the door. The car was a little difficult to start since it had not been used after Kathy left, but eventually it kicked in.

And I was off.

I drove straight through the town without even looking. The people must have thought I was mad. It had been so long since I'd driven that I was not very familiar with the area, I did not know where many of the roads led. But that didn't make any difference. I just drove. And drove fast.

The car stopped around noon in a strange city. With smoke pouring from under the hood, I pulled into a gas sta­tion. A mechanic dressed in greasy jeans and an oil-stained T-shirt came out of the garage and popped open the hood. I got out of the car to join him.

"Your radiator's leaking," he said simply.

"Can you fix it?" I asked.

He closed the hood and looked at me, pulling a rag out of his pocket to wipe his hands. "I can either patch it for you or replace the radiator. I have a lot of parts in the back."

"Which one's cheaper?" I asked.

"Patching. It won't last forever, but it should be good for a couple of months at least."

"Fine," I said. "Patch it."

He said it would take a couple of hours. Since I had an afternoon to kill, I started walking down the main street of the town. It wasn't very big. I browsed through the one tourist shop, looked through a bookstore, sat down and had a cup of coffee in the grimy coffee shop, and still had more than an hour until the mechanic said he'd be done.

I decided to check out the town's department store.

I was looking through the greeting cards, wondering whether I should warn Kathy that I was coming or just drop by uninvited, when a gunshot rang out. I turned toward the entrance and saw what looked like a gang of terrorists mov­ing, commando-like, into the department store and spread­ing out. I hit the ground.

A burst of machine gun fire destroyed the lights and the store was plunged into semidarkness. One woman screamed and was shot. "Stay where you are, don't move, and you'll be all right!" the leader of the terrorists announced. He strode up to the checkout counter nearest me, and I could see that he had a ski mask pulled over his head. Like the rest of the group, he was dressed all in black. He picked up a tele­phone, punched in a number, and spoke into the mouthpiece. "Don't move," he warned again, and his voice echoed from speakers throughout the store.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around, expecting to be shot, and saw instead a man in a three-piece suit lying on the floor next to me. The name tag on his jacket said: MR. BOWLES, MANAGER. "Come on," he whispered to me. "We have to get upstairs. It's our only hope."

There was suddenly a lot of shooting and commotion in the shoe department, and the terrorist leader left our counter to investigate.

"Now!" the manager whispered.

Crawling on our hands and knees, the two of us reached the escalator. Like the lights, it was shut off. We crawled up the serrated metal steps, keeping our heads below the rails. We reached the second floor and—

We were on the ledge of a cliff, overlooking the beach. Below us, our people were playing happily in the sun and sand, frolicking in the water. We were watching them. "They don't care if they ever leave the beach," the manager said disgustedly. "Look at them. They really don't care."

And they didn't. Although the small strip of sand was surrounded on three sides by the large cliff on whose ledge we were standing, and on the other side by the ocean, the people did not feel trapped in the least. They were just happy to be alive.

"Well, we can't just sit around and play," the manager said. "We've got to get out of here."

The prospect frightened me. I had never been away from the beach, and even climbing this high up on the cliff had been a major departure for me.

But I knew he was right.

We started up.

The cliff was mostly sand and several thousand feet high. We had to be very careful how we climbed. One slip and we'd fall to our deaths. Several times, in fact, one of us made a wrong move and slid down a couple of feet in the sand before again finding purchase.

It was dark when we reached the top.

We crawled the last few feet over the edge and found our­selves in the parking lot of a huge mansion. All of the lights were on in the gigantic house, and we could smell the scent of a multitude of gourmet foods wafting toward us.

We hid next to a bush. "It's the boss's house," I whis­pered.

"Yeah," the manager whispered back. "Which one of us is going to ask?"

"You," I told him. "I'm afraid."

"Okay." The manager glanced around to make sure no one had seen us, then ran across the driveway toward the door. Lights and bells went on in the trees around us and a burst of gunfire mowed down the manager. I was suddenly grabbed around my neck and—

I was sitting in my car. In my garage.

I had never left.

I could never leave.

To be honest, I do not know how long I've been here in the house. I don't know why Kathy and I moved here to begin with, and I cannot recall how all this started. I do not even know how many days or weeks or months or years or decades ago Kathy left me. For now I just exist. Every day is like every other and I cannot tell them apart. My routine is established and I seldom vary from it.

It was different when Kathy was here. We performed our duties, of course, but we also got on with our lives. We had friends. And we had each other, corny and trite as that may sound.

But they grew stronger even then. Our nights, more and more, were taken up with this ... combat. Our dreams be­came less our own. Our time together became more difficult.

Finally Kathy had to leave. She too realized what our po­sition was, where this house was located, what it would mean if we left, but in the end she didn't care. The respon­sibility was too much for her.

I could not leave, however.

So here I am—isolated, partly by choice, partly by cir­cumstance, in this house. Alone. And here I stay, trying to figure out what to do next, trying to stay on top of what is real and what isn't. There is no one to help me, and with these latest developments I don't know how much longer I can make it by myself.

I need Kathy.

But Kathy is gone.

And I am here, fighting with ghosts.

The Baby

It was the late 1980s, and I was driving with some friends through a dilapidated industrial section of Los Angeles on the way to a concert, when I looked out the window and saw three dirty young boys kneeling before a cardboard box in an empty lot. They were clearly looking at something in the box, and I thought: a dead baby. I don't know why that thought occurred to me, but the next day I sat down and wrote this story.

***

"You go in first."

"No, you."

"No, you."

Steve, always the bravest, stuck his head through the open doorway and peered into the dark interior of the aban­doned warehouse. "Hello-o-o-o!" he called, hoping for an echo. His voice died flatly, as though it had been absorbed by the blackness, by the walls. Someone—Bill or Jimmy or Seun—pushed him from behind, and he almost lost his bal­ance and fell through the door into the building, but he waved his arms to maintain his equilibrium and jumped quickly back out to the safety of the open air. He whirled on them, his face seething with the heat of his anger, ready to beat the hell out of whoever had done it, but all three of them looked at him innocently. He stared back at them for a moment, then laughed. "Wimps," he said.

Jimmy turned toward Steve. Nervously flipping the switch of his flashlight off and on, he asked, "Are we really going in?"

Steve looked at him scornfully. "Of course," he said. But he was far from sure himself. Back home, sitting on the ce­ment driveway, surrounded by houses filled with grown­ups, the idea had sounded good. They would bring lights and ropes and Bill's metal detector and explore the old aban­doned warehouse. None of them had the guts to go near the warehouse by themselves—not even in the daytime. But to­gether they would be able to explore the old building to their hearts' content, to plumb its unplumbed depths and bring forth what treasures they could find.

Now, however, standing in front of the multistory struc­ture, looking into the darkened doorway, the idea did not sound nearly so good or nearly so feasible. Theoretically, they should be braver in a group than they were individually. There was safety in numbers. But it turned out that they were just as scared together as apart. Steve looked up toward the top of the building, where the bare concrete wall was blackened by soot, where flames had once leaped up through the night stillness toward the moon, and he silently hoped that one of them would chicken out. Maybe Seun, the youngest of them, would start crying and want to go home.

But all three of them stared silently at him, waiting for him to make the decision.

"Let's go," he said, turning on his flashlight.

They walked slowly, softly, cautiously, through the open doorway of the warehouse, Steve leading, Jimmy and Bill following, Seun bringing up the rear. Gravel and charred rubble crunched beneath their feet.

"I don't want to be last!" Seun said suddenly. "I want to be in the middle!"

"Jimmy! Trade!" Steve hissed. He didn't want any of them to talk, but if they did talk he wanted them to whisper. He wasn't quite sure why.

"Why me?" Jimmy hissed back.

" 'Cause I said so!" Steve told him.

Jimmy and Seun switched places, and all of them moved a little closer together.

They walked farther into the darkness. Soon the doorway was little more than a patch of square white light behind them, no longer offering any illumination. The gravel crunched beneath their feet as they walked, and their flash­lights played nervously upon the walls and floor. The thin yellowish beams piercing the blackness made the surround­ing dark seem that much darker.

"I don't think we're supposed to be in here," Bill whis­pered.

"Of course we're not," Steve whispered back. "But no one cares. The place is abandoned."

"I mean, I think the other half of it's across the border."

They all stopped. None of them had thought of that. De­spite the way it looked on the maps, the border between Cal­ifornia and Mexico was not a straight line, they all knew. Several stores and homes throughout the city straddled the boundary, and many of them had rooms which were techni­cally in both nations.

Visions of himself falling over some stray chunk of con­crete and breaking his leg in the Mexico side of the ware­house pushed themselves into Steve's consciousness. He didn't know what would happen if that occurred. Would he have to be rushed to a Mexican hospital? By a Mexican am­bulance? Or would he have to crawl back across that invisi­ble border into his own country?

"Don't worry about it," he said aloud. They started walking again.

Although it was too dark to see the sides of the ware­house, Steve had the feeling that the walls had narrowed, that they were now walking through a room much smaller than that which they had originally entered. He shined his light to the left and right, following the contours of the floor, but his beam was not strong enough to reach a wall. He de­cided to change course, to find a wall and follow it instead of stumbling through this inky blackness in the center of the building. He veered off thirty degrees and the other kids fol­lowed him.

He bumped his head on a beam. Steve screamed, and his right hand shot instantly to his forehead to check for blood. His fingers came back dry. "Jesus!" he said.

"What is it?" Seun's voice was scared. "Nothing." Steve played his light along the wooden beam. But it was not a beam. He had reached a wall. His eyes and his flashlight had been concentrated on the floor, and he had been looking through a large hole in the bottom section of the wall. He shined his light to the left and to the right and saw several similar holes. Holes big enough for a person to crawl through. He bent down on his knees and crept closer to the nearest one, shining his light through to the next room. It looked exactly the same.

"Let's crawl through," he said, "see what's on the other

side."

"No!" Seun said.

Steve knew how Seun felt, but his fear was now sub-servient to his spirit of adventure. They had come here to ex­plore, and they would explore.

He crawled through the hole.

"Steve!" Seun yelled.

"Come on through. There're no monsters."

There was a quick moment of indistinguishable mum­bling from the other side of the wall, then Jimmy poked his head through. Seun followed, scrambling, and Bill came im­mediately afterward. They stood up and shook themselves off, Jimmy brushing what felt like cobwebs from his hair.

"What do we do now?" Bill asked.

"Search around." Steve started walking, following the wall, keeping his left hand in constant contact with the smooth concrete.

"Are we going to be able to find our way back?" Seun asked.

"Don't worry about it," Steve said.

There was not so much rubble on the floor here, and the ground seemed much softer beneath their feet. It felt like dirt. Steve pointed his flashlight up for a second and he could see no ceiling.

They kept walking.

The four boys wandered past a series of doors. Steve turned in one of them and the rest followed. They were in a much smaller room, and the walls on both sides could be made out with their flashlights. They walked out of the room through another door and found themselves in a cavernous space with an endlessly high ceiling. Their footsteps echoed as they walked.

Steve was no longer following any kind of wall, and he swung his beam back and forth across the ground in front of him to make sure he knew what was up ahead. The light touched upon an ancient rotting box in a slimy pool of water, moved across several chunks of wood and plaster, and stopped on something small and smooth and brown.

A baby.

Steve stood in place, staring at the infant trapped in his beam, and Seun ran into his back. Jimmy and Bill, walking side by side, ran into Seun.

The baby was obviously Mexican and obviously dead. It lay scrunched and unmoving, half in and half out of a pud­dle of stagnant water. A trail of small ants wound around its folds of fat and entered its open, toothless mouth. Steve moved slowly forward and tentatively touched the baby's skin. It was cold and soft and spongy and gave a little at the poke of his finger. Immediately he drew back.

"What is it?" Seun asked. His voice was more hushed than usual, whether from awe or fear Steve could not tell.

"It's a baby."

"How did it get here?"

Steve shook his head. He did not know himself. Had the baby been born in the warehouse and abandoned by its mother to die in the darkness of the deserted building? Had the baby been born dead and left there? Had it been brought by illegal aliens trying to sneak into the country and left be­hind accidentally?

Steve walked carefully around the dead infant. It was small, and there was no hair on its body. It did not look more than a week or so old.

The beam of his flashlight touched the baby's white eyes and was reflected back.

He knelt down silently in front of the infant and stared into its face, gazing raptly at its pure innocent expression. He had never seen anything like it. The infant's dead eyes stared back, seeing nothing, seeing everything, knowing all.

Jimmy knelt down next to Steve and gazed at the Mexi­can baby to see what was so fascinating.

Bill, captured by the look of hope on the infant's face, so incongruous in these terrible circumstances, bent down as · well.

Seun, dropping silently to his knees, completed the semi­circle.

The low benches, stolen from the barbecue sets of moth­ers and fathers, were arranged like pews in front of the altar. Candles of various sizes and colors, also stolen, burned dimly in their makeshift holders. In front of the benches, on the altar itself, the baby sat upright in a Coca-Cola crate, staring out into the darkness. The crate had been spray painted gold.

A single beam from a flashlight perched on top of a card­board box shone into the baby's white eyes and was re­flected back.

There were more than four of them now. Nearly twenty kids, all approximately the same age, sat silently on the benches staring at the dead infant. None of them spoke. None of them ever spoke.

Steve knelt before the baby, lost in thought. He saw an ant crawl slowly up the baby's fat brown arm, and he flicked it off. The ant went flying into the darkness.

There was a rustling sound from the area off to Steve's left, and he turned to see what caused the noise. A new kid— a girl—emerged from the depths of the warehouse. Her nice blue dress was dirty and sweat rolled down her face. It was obvious that she had been stumbling around in the dark for some time, trying to find them.

Steve smiled at her. He said nothing, but she understood.

She knelt down next to him in front of the baby. Her face was filled with rapture.

A few minutes later, the girl withdrew from her small purse a dead lizard. She held it gingerly by the tail and dropped it into the round fishbowl in front of the baby. There was a split-second flash of glowing luminescence, and the lizard dissolved in the bubbling liquid inside the bowl.

Steve patted the girl's head and she smiled, proud of her­self.

They sat in silence, staring at the baby.

One of the candles burned all the way down and after a few last gasps of life, a few final flickers of fire, was extin­guished.

They sat in silence, staring at the baby.

One by one, the candles surrounding the benches and the altar went out. When the last one had finally flickered out of existence, the kids on the benches stood up and walked silently, in single file, into the blackness. The girl, too, stood up, moved away from Steve's side, and started back the way she'd come. Jimmy and Bill and Seun walked up to the altar where Steve still knelt. They bent down for a moment them­selves, then stood up as one.

They covered the baby's crate with a black cloth.

Walking back through the labyrinthian warehouse toward the outside, Steve wondered how he could have ever been afraid of the building. Now it was more friendly than home, and even little Seun traversed the way without a light. The whole tone of the place had changed.

And all because of the baby.

As always, the bright light of the afternoon hurt their eyes as they stepped out of the warehouse. The other kids were gone, already starting home, and there was no sign of them. Steve squinted in the direct sunlight, trying to keep his eyes from watering. "What time is it?" he asked.

Bill smiled. "After lunch and before dinner."

Steve scowled at him. "Anybody have a watch?"

"It's about three," Jimmy said.

They started walking. Bill picked up a stick and threw it into the bushes. Overhead, a plane sailed through the clear blue sky a few seconds ahead of its noise, leaving a trail of jet white in the air behind it.

"He seems so alone," Seun said.

Steve looked at him. "What?"

"He seems so alone. Don't you ever feel that way? I mean, what does He do when we're not there? He's all alone."

Steve stared at Seun. He had been thinking the same thing while he had been kneeling in front of the baby. He picked up a rock and looked at it. The rock resembled a frog. He held it between his thumb and forefinger and threw it. It whizzed through the air and hit a tree. "He is alone," he said.

"He doesn't have to be."

"What can we do about it?" Jimmy asked.

"Follow me." Seun ran down the path through the ravine and up the hill toward his house. He looked back at Steve as he ran. "I been saving this." He led the way through the wall of oleanders into his back yard. He pulled open the secret door to the clubhouse. The clubhouse had sat there virtually unused ever since they'd found the baby. The other three followed him in.

"Look," Seun said.

In the center of the floor, in a gold Coke crate, lay a little baby girl. She was dead. At her feet, Seun had poured out a jarful of black ants he had caught, hoping they would crawl up her body, but instead they had crawled onto the floor and were busily trying to find a way out of the clubhouse.

Steve knelt down in front of the baby. "Who is she?"

"Mindy Martin."

"Mrs. Martin's daughter?"

Seun nodded.

Steve looked up at him. "How did you get her?"

Seun smiled. "That's my business."

"Was she already dead or did you ... kill her?"

"Does it matter?"

"No. I guess not." Steve looked into the box and hesi­tantly put his finger forth. The girl's skin was cold and springy. He felt an instant of admiration for Seun. "How long have you had her?"

"Since yesterday. I got the box last week and painted it, but I didn't get her 'til yesterday."

Steve stood up. "Let's take her out there."

Seun looked nervous. "Think He'll like her?"

"There's only one way to find out."

Seun drew out a black cloth from his pocket and spread it over the top of the crate. All four of them picked up the baby, each taking a corner of the box. They lifted it through the secret entrance. Seun closed up the clubhouse and they started through the oleanders.

"Hey, what are you doing?" Seun's mother came out onto the back porch and stared at them. "Where are you going?"

The four boys stopped, looking first at each other, then at her. "Nothing," Seun said. "We're just playing."

"Playing what?"

"Church."

She looked surprised. "Church?"

All four of the boys nodded.

She smiled and shook her head. "Okay. But you better be back in time for dinner."

"We will," Seun said.

They carried the box through the oleanders and started walking toward the warehouse.

Coming Home Again

A friend of mine's parents divorced when he was ten. His father remarried when my friend was in high school, but my friend never liked his father's new wife. She seemed all right to me, but in his mind she was a complete witch.

The two of us lost touch, but years later I saw him again, and he was still complaining about his wicked stepmother. I thought, "Your father could have mar­ried someone so much worse...."

***

On the plane ride over, I tried to think of what I would say. The situation was bound to be awkward. I had been trying for over a decade to get my father to go out with other women, but now that he seemed to have found someone he cared about I was torn with conflicting emotions. On the one hand, I wanted him to be happy—he was my father and I loved him. On the other hand, I had also loved my mother and I couldn't help feeling, on some gut emotional level out of reach of my rational mind, that by finding someone else he was betraying her memory.

And he might love this new woman more than he 'd loved her.

I guess that was my real fear. What if he found someone he loved more than my mother? What if his emotions found not just a substitute for her but a replacement for her? A woman who would supersede my mother's place in his emo­tional hierarchy.

It was a babyish fear, I admit. An immature, childish worry. My mother would have been happy for him. She wouldn't have wanted him to live forever in that celibate state of self-imposed social exile that he'd been inhabiting since her death. And I, too, wanted him to be happy.

I just didn't want his happiness to come at her expense.

I glanced down again at the folded letter in my lap. "I have found someone I care for very much," he'd written in his typically formal style. "I'd like you two to meet."

I leaned my chair back and closed my eyes. I wanted to like her; I really did. I hoped I would.

The plane landed in LA two hours later. I disembarked, found my luggage, and walked across the street to the cof­fee shop where my father had said he'd meet me. He was standing next to the open trunk of a new Pontiac in the park­ing lot. He was smiling, and he looked better than he had in years. The gaunt tiredness which I thought had settled into his features for good had disappeared, and his formerly sal­low skin looked tan and healthy. As always, he was dressed in a formal suit—vest, tie, the whole works. My own clothes were nice, and comfortably stylish, but next to him I felt pitifully underdressed.

"It's good to see you," he said, and held out his hand.

"You too," I said. I couldn't help smiling. He looked so good, so fit and healthy and happy. I shook his hand. Our family had never been big on physical demonstrations of af­fection, and the pressing of palms was about as close as we ever got to a public display of closeness.

He took one of my suitcases and loaded it into the trunk; I put the other one right next to it. "How are things with you?" he asked.

"Oh, about the same as always." I grinned. "But your life seems to have taken a turn for the better."

He laughed heartily, and I realized suddenly that it had been years since I'd heard him laugh that way. "Yes," he said. "That is true. That is very true."

He unlocked my door and I got into the car, sliding across the seat to unlock his side. "So what's her name?" I asked. "You never did tell me."

He smile cryptically. "You'll see."

"Come on," I told him.

"We'll be home in ten minutes." He put the car into re­verse and looked at me. "It's good to see you again, son. I'm glad you came out to see me."

We drove over the familiar side streets toward home. It was not a ten-minute drive from the airport. It was not even a twenty-minute drive. Our home in Long Beach was a good forty-five minutes from the airport even without traffic, and we happened to be driving during rush hour. But I'd known that ahead of time, and I didn't mind. We talked a lot, got caught up on new gossip, restated old positions, and fell into our old familiar patterns.

By the time we pulled off the freeway onto Lakewood it was approaching dinnertime. I hadn't had a thing to eat save an almost inedible lunch on the plane, and I was starved. "Is she going to have dinner ready for us?" I asked.

My father shook his head. "We'll eat out."

I'd been trying to determine, through subtle questioning, whether or not his new girlfriend lived with him, and I gath-ered that she did. I was surprised. My father had always been ultraconservative, the most proper of men, and I could not imagine him lowering his concrete moral standards enough to live with a woman outside of wedlock.

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.

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.

He went into the barn to get his tools.

He had finished the box and gate for the potato, putting it in place well before seven o'clock. It was eight o'clock be­fore the first carload of people arrived. He was in the living room, making signs to post on telephone poles around town and on the highway, when a station wagon pulled into the drive. He walked out onto the porch and squinted against the sun.

"This where y'got that monster 'later?" a man called out. Several people laughed.

"This is it," the farmer said. "It's a buck a head to see it, though."

"A buck?" The man got out of the car. He looked vaguely familiar, but the farmer didn't know his name. "Jim Lowry said it was fifty cents."

"Nope." The farmer turned as if to go in the house.

"We'll still see it, though," the man said. "We came all this way, we might as well see what it's about."

The farmer smiled. He came off the porch, took a dollar each from the man, his brother, and three women, and led them out to the field. He should have come up with some kind of pitch, he thought, some sort of story to tell, like they did with that steer at the fair. He didn't want to just take the people's money, let them look at the potato and leave. He didn't want them to feel cheated. But he couldn't think of anything to say.

He opened the top of the box, swinging open the gate, and explained in a stilted, halting manner how he had found the potato. He might as well have saved his breath. None of the customers gave a damn about what he was saying. They didn't even pay any attention to him. They simply stared at the huge potato in awe, struck dumb by this marvel of na­ture. For that's how he referred to it. It was no longer an abomination, it was a marvel. A miracle. And the people treated it as such.

Two more cars pulled up soon after, and the farmer left the first group staring while he collected money from the newcomers.

After that, he stayed in the drive, collecting money as people arrived, pointing them in the right direction and al­lowing them to stay as long as they wanted. Customers came and went with regularity, but the spot next to the box was crowded all day, and by the time he hung a Closed sign on the gate before dark, he had over a hundred dollars in his pocket.

He went out to the field, repositioned the box, closed the gate, and retreated into the house.

It had been a profitable day.

***

Whispers. Low moans. Barely audible sounds of despair so forlorn that they brought upon him a deep dark depres­sion, a loneliness so complete that he wept like a baby in his bed, staining the pillows with his tears.

He stood up after a while and wandered around the house. Every room seemed cheap and shabby, the wasted ef­fort of a wasted life, and he fell into his chair before the TV, filled with utter hopelessness, lacking the energy to do any­thing but stare into the darkness.

In the morning, everything was fine. In the festive, al­most carnival-like atmosphere of his exhibition, he felt reju­venated, almost happy. Farmers who had not been out of their overalls in ten years showed up in their Sunday best, family in tow. Little Jimmy Hardsworth's lemonade stand, set up by the road at the head of the drive, was doing a thriv­ing business, and there were more than a few repeat cus­tomers from the day before.

The strange sounds of the night before, the dark emo­tions, receded into the distance of memory.

He was kept busy all morning, taking money, talking to people with questions. The police came by with a town offi­cial, warning him that if this went on another day he would have to buy a business license, but he let them look at the potato and they were quiet after that. There was a lull around noon, and he left his spot near the head of the driveway and walked across the field to the small crowd gathered around the potato. Many of his crops had been trampled, he noticed. His rows had been flattened by scores of spectator feet. He'd have to take the day off tomorrow and take care of the farm before it went completely to hell.

Take the day off.

It was strange how he'd come to think of the exhibition as his work, of his farm as merely an annoyance he had to contend with. His former devotion to duty was gone, as were his plans for the farm.

He looked down at the potato. It had changed. It was big­ger than it had been before, more misshapen. Had it looked like this the last time he'd seen it? He hadn't noticed. The potato was still pulsing, and its white skin looked shiny and slimy. He remembered the way it had felt when he'd lifted it, and he unconsciously wiped his hands on his jeans.

Why was it that he felt either repulsed or exhilarated when he was around the potato?

"It's sum'in, ain't it?" the man next to him said.

The farmer nodded. "Yeah, it is."

He could not sleep that night. He lay in bed, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling, listening to the silence of the farm. It was some time before he noticed that it was not silence he was hearing—there was a strange, high-pitched keening sound riding upon the low breeze which fluttered the cur­tains.

He sat up in bed, back flat against the headboard. It was an unearthly sound, unlike anything he had ever heard, and he listened carefully. The noise rose and fell in even ca­dences, in a rhythm not unlike that of the pulsations of the potato. He turned his head to look out the window. He thought he could see a rounded object in the field, bluish white in the moonlight, and he remembered that he could not see it at all the night before.

It was getting closer.

He shivered, and he closed his eyes against the fear.

But the high-pitched whines were soothing, comforting, and they lulled him gently to sleep.

***

When he awoke, he went outside before showering or eating breakfast, and walked out to the field. Was it closer to the house? He couldn't be sure. But he remembered the keening sounds of the night before, and a field of goose-bumps popped up on his arms. The potato definitely looked more misshapen than it had before, its boundaries more ir­regular. If it was closer, he thought, so was the box he had built around it. Everything had been moved.

But that wasn't possible.

He walked back to the house, ate, showered, dressed, and went to the foot of the drive where he put up a chain be­tween the two flanking trees and hung a sign which read: Closed for the Day.

There were chores to be done, crops to be watered, ani­mals to be fed, work to be completed.

But he did none of these things. He sat alone on a small bucket next to the potato, staring at it, hypnotized by its pul­sations, as the sun rose slowly to its peak, and then dipped into the west.

Murial was lying beside him, not moving, not talking, not even touching him, but he could feel her warm body next to his and it felt right and good. He was happy, and he reached over and laid a hand on her breast. "Murial," he said. "I love you."

And then he knew it was a dream, even though he was still in it, because he had never said those words to her, not in the entire thirty-three years they had been married. It was not that he had not loved her, it was that he didn't know how to tell her. The dream faded into reality, the room around him growing dark and old, the bed growing large and cold. He was left with only a memory of that momentary happi­ness, a memory which taunted him and tortured him and made the reality of the present seem lonelier and emptier than even he had thought it could seem.

Something had happened to him recently. Depression had graduated to despair, and the tentative peace he had made with his life had all but vanished. The utter hopelessness which had been gradually pressing in on him since Murial's death had enveloped him, and he no longer had the strength to fight it.

His mind sought out the potato, though he lacked even the energy to look out the window to where it lay in the field. He thought of its strangely shifting form, its white slimy skin, its even pulsations, and he realized that just thinking of the object made him feel a little better.

What was it?

That was the question he had been asking himself ever since he'd found the potato. He wasn't stupid. He knew it wasn't a normal tuber. But neither did he believe that it was a monster or a being from outer space or some other such movie nonsense.

He didn't know what it was, but he knew that it had been affecting his life ever since he'd discovered it, and he was almost certain that it had been responsible for the emotional roller coaster he'd been riding the past few days.

He pushed aside the covers and stood up, looking out the window toward the field. Residual bad feelings fled from him, and he could almost see them flying toward the potato as if they were tangible, being absorbed by that slimy white skin. The potato offered no warmth, but it was a vacuum for the cold. He received no good feelings from it, but it seemed to absorb his negative feelings, leaving him free from de­pression, hopelessness, despair.

He stared out the window and thought he saw something moving out in the field, blue in the light of the moon.

***

The box was still in the field, but the potato was lying on the gravel in front of the house. In the open, freed from the box, freed from shoots and other encumbrances, it had an al­most oval shape, and its pulsing movements were quicker, more lively.

The farmer stared at the potato, unsure of what to do. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he had been half hop­ing that the potato would die, that his life would return to normal. He enjoyed the celebrity, but the potato scared him.

He should have killed it the first day.

Now he knew that he would not be able to do it, no mat­ter what happened.

"Hey!" Jack Phelps came around the side of the house from the back. "You open today? I saw some potential cus­tomers driving back and forth along the road, waiting."

The farmer nodded tiredly. "I'm open."

Jack and his wife invited him to dinner, and the farmer accepted. It had been a long time since he'd had a real meal, a meal cooked by a woman, and it sounded good. He also felt that he could use some company.

But none of the talk was about crops or weather or neigh­bors the way it used to be. The only thing Jack and Myra wanted to talk about was the potato. The farmer tried to steer the conversation in another direction, but he soon gave up, and they talked about the strange object. Myra called it a creature from hell, and though Jack tried to laugh it off and turn it into a joke, he did not disagree with her.

When he returned from the Phelps's it was after mid­night. The farmer pulled into the dirt yard in front of the house and cut the headlights, turning off the ignition. With the lights off, the house was little more than a dark hulking shape blocking out a portion of the starlit sky. He sat un-moving, hearing nothing save the ticking of the pickup's en­gine as it cooled. He stared at the dark house for a few moments longer, then got out of the pickup and clomped up the porch steps, walking through the open door into the house.

The open door?

There was a trail of dirt on the floor, winding in a mean­dering arc through the living room into the hall, but he hardly noticed it. He was filled with an unfamiliar emotion, an almost pleasant feeling he had not experienced since Murial died. He did not bother to turn on the house lights but went into the dark bathroom, washed his face, brushed his teeth, and got into his pajamas.

The potato was waiting in his bed.

He had known it would be there, and he felt neither panic nor exhilaration. There was only a calm acceptance. In the dark, the blanketed form looked almost like Murial, and he saw two lumps protruding upward which looked remarkably like breasts.

He got into bed and pulled the other half of the blanket over himself, snuggling close to the potato. The pulsations of the object mirrored the beating of his own heart.

He put his arms around the potato. "I love you," he said.

He hugged the potato tighter, crawling on top of it, and as his arms and legs sank into the soft slimy flesh, he realized that the potato was not cold at all.

The Murmurous Haunt of Flies

I'm not a poetry fan. Never have been, never will be. But while suffering through a graduate class on the Romantic poets, the phrase "the murmurous haunt of flies" leaped out at me while we were reading John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." I thought it was a great line and wrote it down.

Some time later, I found myself thinking of my great-grandmother's chicken ranch in the small farm­ing community of Ramona, California. She'd died years before, and I hadn't been there in a long time, but I remembered a little adobe banya or bathhouse on the property that used to scare me (this bathhouse pops up again in my novel The Town). I remembered as well that there had always been flies everywhere— because of the chickens—and I recalled seeing fly­paper and No-Pest Strips that were black with bug bodies. The Keats phrase returned to me, a light went on, and I wrote this story.

***

"Stay away," my grandpa told me. "It is a haunted place, strange with secrets."

He had lived on the farm all his life, was born on the farm and would die on the farm. He knew what he was talking about. And as we sat in the old kitchen, chairs pushed up against the now-unused icebox, we grew afraid. I suddenly felt a wave of cold pass through me, though the temperature in the farmhouse was well over ninety degrees, and I saw multiple ripples of gooseflesh cascade down Jan's bare arms. Neither of us exactly believed the tale, but we were ur-banites, out of our element, and we respected the knowledge and opinions of the locals. We knew enough to know we knew nothing.

He struggled out of his chair and, one hand on his gimp leg, hobbled over to the screen door. The fine mesh of the screen was ripped in several places, from human accidents and feline determination, and a small covey of flies was traveling back and forth, in and out of the house. He stood there for a minute, not speaking, then beckoned us over. "Come here. I want to show it to you."

Jan and I put the front legs of our chairs back down on the wooden floor and moved over to the screen. I could smell my grandpa's medication as I stood next to him—a sickeningly acrid odor of Vicks, vitamin Bl, and rubbing al­cohol. He looked suddenly small, shrunken somehow, as though he had withered over the years, and I could see his scalp through the wispy strands of hair he combed back over his head. He was going to die, I suddenly realized. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for all time.

I was going to miss him.

He touched my shoulder lightly with his right hand while his left pointed across the meadow. "It's over there," he said. "You see the barn?"

I followed his finger. A large, square, dilapidated struc­ture of rotting, unpainted boards arose from the tall grasses beyond the chicken coops. I remembered playing there as a kid, when it was all new and freshly painted; playing hide-and-go-seek with my brother and my cousins, hiding in the secret loft behind the hay-baler, endless summer afternoons of sweaty searching. This was not the barn I once knew. I nodded, smiling, though I didn't feel happy.

His finger moved across the horizon, passing from the barn to a small cluster of shacks on the hillside to the west. "See those buildings there to the right of the barn?" Again I nodded. "On the hill?" I continued nodding. "That's it."

Jan was squinting against the afternoon sun, her hand perched above her eyes like a makeshift visor. "Which one is it? I see a couple buildings there."

My grandpa was already starting back across the floor. "It doesn't matter," he said. "Just stay away from the whole area." He sat down once again in his chair at the foot of the kitchen table. A sharp flash of pain registered on his face as he bent his gimp leg to sit down.

We, too, returned to our chairs. And we talked away the rest of the afternoon

.

Jan awoke screaming. She sat bolt upright in bed, the acne cream on her face and her sleep-spiked hair giving her the appearance of a shrieking harpy. I hugged her close, pulling her to my chest and murmuring reassurances. "It's okay," I said softly, stroking her hair. "It's all right."

She stopped crying after a few minutes and sat up, facing me. She tried to smile. "That was some nightmare."

I smiled back. "So I gathered. Tell me about it."

"It was about the bathhouse," she said, pulling the covers up around her chin and snuggling closer. "And I don't want you to take this wrong, but your grandfather was in it." Her eyes looked out the bedroom window as she spoke, and she gazed into the darkness toward the group of buildings on the hillside. "I was just sleeping here, in this bed, with you, when I woke up. I heard some kind of noise, and I looked on the floor, and there was your grandfather. He was crawling along the ground, looking up at me and smiling." She shiv­ered. "I tried to wake you up, but you were dead asleep. I kept shaking you and yelling, but you wouldn't budge. Then your grandfather grabbed me by the arm and pulled me down on the floor with him. I was screaming and kicking and fighting, but he had a hold on me, and he started pulling me out of the room. 'We're going to the bathhouse,' he told me. 'We're going to take a bath.'

"Then I woke up."

"That's horrible," I said.

"I know." She laid her head against my chest, running her fingers through my curly chest hair.

We fell asleep in that position.

The day dawned early, just as I'd known it would. Sun­light was streaming through the window with full force by six o'clock. Sunrise always seemed to come earlier on the farm than in the city for some reason. That was one thing I remembered from my childhood.

Jan was still asleep when I awoke, and I crept out of bed softly so as not to disturb her.

My grandpa was already up, planted in his chair at the foot of the table, drinking a tin cup of black coffee. He looked up and smiled as I walked into the kitchen. "Day's half over, city slicker. What took you so long?" His smile widened, the new ultrawhite dentures looking oddly out of place in his otherwise old face. "Where's your wife? Still asleep?"

I nodded. "I'm letting her sleep in. She had a pretty bad nightmare last night."

"Yeah, your grandma used to have nightmares, too. Bad ones. Some nights, she'd even be afraid to go to sleep, and I'd have to stay up with her." He shook his head, staring into his coffee cup. "There were some pretty bad times there."

I poured myself a cup of coffee from the old metal pot on the stove and sat down next to him. "You ever have night­mares?"

"Me? I'm too boring to have nightmares." He laughed. "Hell, I don't think I even dream."

We sat in silence after that, listening to the many morn­ing sounds of the farm. From far off, I heard the crowing of a rooster, endlessly repeating his obnoxious cry. Closer in, cowbells were ringing dully as four bovine animals moved slowly across the meadow to the watering pond. And of course, under it all, the ever-present hum of the flies.

"It's going to be a hot one today," my grandpa said after a while. "It feels humid already."

"Yeah," I agreed.

He added a dash of cream to his coffee, stirring it with the butt end of a fork. "What are your plans for today?"

I shrugged. "We don't have any, really. I thought maybe we'd go into town, look around a bit, then maybe go for a hike."

"Not there?" He glanced up sharply.

"No. Of course not. We'd just walk around the farm here. I think the barn's about as far as we'd care to go."

"Good." He nodded, satisfied. "For it is a haunted place, strange with secrets."

Jan walked into the room then, still rubbing the sleep from her eyes, and I blew her a kiss across the table. She smiled and blew a kiss back. I turned again to my grandpa. "You said that before. What is it? Part of a poem?"

"What?"

" 'It is a haunted place, strange with secrets.'"

His face grew pale as I spoke the words, the color drain­ing from his cheeks, and I felt my own flesh starting to creep as I saw his fear. I was immediately sorry I'd mentioned it. But there was no way to retract the question.

He looked from me to Jan; his eyes narrowed into un­readable slits. He took a sip of coffee, and I saw that his hands were shaking badly. "Wait here a minute," he said, standing up. "I'll be right back." Holding on to his bad leg, he limped across the room and out into the hall. He returned a few minutes later with a piece of folded brown paper which he tossed at me.

I unfolded the paper and read:

For He lives here with flies in shadow and dark

And He is happy here, at home

For it is a haunted place, strange with secrets

I handed the paper back to my grandpa, puzzled. "What is it?"

"I found it in your grandma's hand when she died. It's her handwriting, but I have no idea when she wrote it." He folded the paper and placed it carefully in the upper-right pocket of his overalls. "I don't think she ever wrote another poem in her life."

"Then why did she write this?"

He stared into his coffee. "I don't know."

Jan sat down at the table, pulling her chair next to mine. "How do you know she wrote it about the bathhouse?"

My grandpa looked up at her. It was a minute or so be­fore he answered, and when he did his voice was low, almost

a whisper. "Because," he said, "that's where she died."

***

We did indeed go into town, and we had some great ham­burgers at the lone diner: a dingy little hole-in-the-wall called Mac and Marg. After, we drove back to the farm and I gave Jan a guided tour of my childhood. I showed her the now-abandoned horse stalls where we used to lick the mas­sive blocks of salt with Big Red and Pony; I showed her the old windmill; I showed her the spot where we once built a clubhouse. I showed her everything.

We ended up at the barn.

"You really used to play here?" she asked, looking up at the decaying building. "It looks so dangerous."

I smiled. "Well, it wasn't quite so bad off in those days. In fact, it was still being used." I walked up to the huge open doorway and looked in. Light now entered the once-dark building through several holes in the roof. "Hello!" I called, hoping for an echo. My voice died flatly, barely managing to scare two swallows who flew through one of the roof holes.

Jan walked up and stood beside me, looking in. "You used to play upstairs, too?"

I nodded. "We played everywhere. We knew every inch of this place."

She shivered and turned around. "I don't like it."

I followed her back out into the sunlight. The day was hot, almost unbearably so, and though I was wearing a T-shirt, cutoffs, and a pair of sandals, I was still sweating.

Jan, ahead of me by a few paces, stopped at the edge of the tall grass and stared toward the hillside, silent, thinking. I crept up behind her and gave her a quick poke in the side. She jumped, and I laughed. "Sorry," I said. "I just couldn't help it."

She smiled thinly, and her gaze returned to the small cluster of buildings. "It is scary, isn't it? Even in the day­time."

She was right. The bathhouse and the small shacks sur­rounding it dominated the scenery, though they were by no means the most prominant figures in the landscape. It was as if the whole area, the scattered farmhouses, the fields and the hills, were somehow focused in on that point. No matter where one stood in the valley, his or her eyes would be drawn inexorably to the bathhouse. There was something strange about the makeshift hut, something a little off, some­thing entirely unrelated to my grandpa's story.

"Listen," Jan said, grabbing my arm. "Do you hear that?"

I listened. "No, I don't hear—"

"Shhh!" She put up her hand to silence me.

I stood perfectly still, cocking my ear toward the bath­house, listening intently. Sure enough, a low buzzing was coming from that direction, growing louder or softer with the wafting of the hot breeze. "I hear it," I said.

"What do you think it is?"

"I don't know."

She stood still for a moment, listening. The buzzing maintained its even rhythm. "You know what it reminds me of?" she said. "That poem by Keats. The one where he talked about 'the murmurous haunt of flies.'"

The murmurous haunt of flies.

It seemed suddenly hotter, more humid, if that was pos­sible. The wind, blowing from the direction of the bath­house, felt hellishly, unnaturally heated. I put my arm around Jan and held her close. We stood like that for a few minutes.

"How far do you think that is?" she asked, gesturing to­ward the hill.

"Why?"

"I'd like to go over there. You know, just take a look."

I shook my head emphatically. I may not have fully be­lieved my grandpa's story and his repeated warnings, but I had no desire to tempt the fates. "No way," I said. "Forget it."

"Why not? It's broad daylight. It's not even two o'clock yet. What could happen to us?"

I was sweating heavily by now, and I used my T-shirt to wipe the moisture off my face. "I don't know," I said. "I just don't want to take any chances."

She gave my hand a small squeeze and looked into my eyes. "It is scary, isn't it?"

That night, I had a nightmare. And it was Jan who woke me up and comforted me.

I had been walking through the tall grasses beyond the barn, the overgrown groundcover reaching above my head and causing me to lose my way. It was night, and the full moon shone brightly in a starless sky. I kept looking up as I walked, trying unsuccessfully to get my bearings by the moon, trying vainly to determine in which direction I was walking. Suddenly, I stepped through a wall of grass and found myself at the edge of a small clearing—face-to-face with the bathhouse.

The bathhouse looked smaller than I'd thought it would, and not as run-down. But that in no way diluted its evil. For it was evil. It was a forbidding and terrifying presence, al­most alive, and the light of the moon played spectrally across its adobe facade, highlighting the empty darkened windows, spotlighting strange irregularities in construction. There was something definitely wrong with the building, something savage and perverse, and as I looked at the struc­ture my muscles knotted in fear.

Then something caught my eye. I glanced over the front of the building once again and saw what I had noticed only peripherally before. I screamed. Peeking out of the black­ened rectangular hole which served as a doorway were two shriveled feet wearing Jan's stockings.

I awoke in Jan's arms.

And she held me, softly, closely, her calm, sympathetic voice assuaging my fears, until again I fell asleep.

The other local farmers knew about the bathhouse as well, we learned. My grandpa had several of the neighbor­ing ranchers over for a barbecue lunch the next day, and they discussed, in hushed whispers, the recent mutilation of sev­eral hogs. They all seemed to think the mutilations were connected with the bathhouse in some way.

"I went up there exactly once," said Old Man Crawford. "The first year we moved here. That was enough for me."

I was sitting next to Jan at the head of the table, keeping my ear on the conversation and my eye on the hamburgers. I turned toward Old Man Crawford. "What was it like?" I asked.

They stared at me then, six pairs of eyes widening as if in shock. The only sound was the sizzling of the meat dripping through the rusty grill onto the burning charcoal. No one said a word; it was as if they were waiting for me to retract my question. Jan's hand found mine and held it.

"What the hell is this? A wake?" My grandpa came out of the house carrying a tray of buns. He looked from me to the silent farmers. "Anything wrong here?"

"Nah," Old Man Crawford said, smiling and downing the last of his beer. "Everything's fine."

The mood was broken, the tension dissipated, and the conversation returned to a normal, healthy buzz, though it now revolved around other, safer, topics.

I got up and went into the house, rummaging through the refrigerator for a Coke. Jan followed me in. "What was all that about?" she asked.

I found my Coke and closed the door. "You got me."

She shook her head, smiling slightly. "Ever get the feel­ing this is all a joke? Some trick they're playing on the rubes from the city?"

"You saw them," I said. "That was no joke. They were scared. Every one of those old bastards was scared. Jesus ..." I walked over to the screen door and looked to­ward the hillside. "Maybe we should go up there and look around." An expression of terror passed over Jan's face, and I laughed. "Then again, maybe we shouldn't."

We rejoined the party and sat in silence, effectively chas­tened, listening to the farmers talk. After a while the talk turned, as I knew it would, back to the hog mutilations. A lot of hostile glances were thrown in my direction, but this time I said nothing. I just listened.

"Herman looked fine when I went out to see him," Old Man Crawford said, running a hand through his thinning hair. "I just thought he was asleep. Then I heard, like, a buzzing coming from where he lay. I moved in a little closer, and I saw that his stomach had been sliced clean open." He made a slicing motion with his hand and his voice dropped. "He'd been gutted, all his innards taken out, and the inside of his body was nothing but thousands of flies."

A middle-aged farmer I didn't know, wearing grease-stained coveralls and a cowboy hat, nodded his head in un­derstanding. "That's exactly what happened to my Marybeth. Flies all inside her. Even in her mouth. Just a-crawling around..."

"The bathhouse," my grandpa said, chewing the last bite of his hamburger.

Old Man Crawford nodded wisely. "What else could it be?"

That afternoon it rained—a heavy downpour of warm summer water which fell in endless torrents from the black clouds that had risen suddenly over the hills, and which formed miniature rivers and tributaries on the sloping ground outside the farmhouse. We sat in the kitchen, the three of us, talking and watching the rain.

"Good for the crops," my grandpa said, holding his leg as he limped over to the window. "It's been a helluva dry sum­mer."

I nodded my head in agreement, not saying anything. Jan and I had decided that we would ask him about the bath­house that afternoon—the real story—and I was trying to figure out how to broach the subject. I watched my grandpa staring out the window, looking small and frail and old, and listened silently to the depressing sound of rainwater gush­ing through the metal gutter along the edge of the roof. I felt sad, all of a sudden, and I wasn't sure why. Then I realized that something had happened to the kitchen; it was different. It was no longer the warm quaint kitchen of my grandpar­ents but the curiously empty kitchen of an unhappy old man—a stranger. The feeling hit me abruptly, inexplicably, and for some reason I felt like crying. I no longer felt like asking about the bathhouse. I didn't care. But I saw Jan star­ing at me quizzically from across the table, and I forced my­self to speak. "Uh, Grandpa?"

He turned around. "Yeah?"

He was silhouetted against the screen, the rain in back of him, and his face was entirely in shadows. He didn't look like my grandpa. I looked across the table at Jan, and she too looked different. Older. I could see the wrinkles starting.

She motioned for me to go on.

I cleared my throat. "I'd like you to tell me a bit more about the bathhouse."

He walked forward, nodding, and as he came closer his face once again became visible. And once again he was my grandpa. "Yeah," he said. "I've been expecting this. I was wondering when you were going to ask." He sat down in his familiar chair, holding his leg. A sudden gust of wind blew the screen door open then closed. Our faces were lightly splattered with water spray. He looked from Jan to me, and his voice was low, serious. "You feel it, don't you? You know it's here."

I felt unexpectedly cold, and I shivered, instinctively massaging the gooseflesh on my bare arms. Jan, I noticed, was doing the same, hugging herself tightly. Outside, the rain abated somewhat.

"It's like a magnet," my grandpa said. "It draws you to it. You hear about it, or you see it from far off, and you start thinking about it. It takes up more and more of your thoughts. You want to go to it." He looked at Jan. "Am I right?"

She nodded.

His gaze turned to me. "You're going to have to go."

There was a finality about the words and a determination in the way he said them which scared me. "I thought you wanted us to stay away," I said. My voice sounded high, cracked, uncertain.

"Yeah," he said. "I did. But once it gets ahold of you, it never lets go." His voice became softer. "You have to go there."

I wanted to argue, to tell him off, to deny his words, but I couldn't. I knew, deep down, that he was right. I guess I'd known from the beginning.

He looked out the door. "Go after the rain stops," he said. "It's safe after the rain."

But his eyes were troubled.

We walked across the wet ground, our shoes sometimes slipping in the mud, sometimes getting caught in it. The midsummer dust had been washed from the grasses, from the plants, from the trees, and everything appeared excep­tionally, unnaturally green. Overhead, the sky was a dark, solid gray broken by occasional rifts of clear, pure blue.

We walked forward, not looking back though we knew my grandpa stood on the porch of the house, watching. I don't know how Jan felt, but I was surprised to find that I was not scared. Not scared at all. I was not even apprehen­sive. I felt only a strange sort of disassociation; it was as if this was happening to someone else, and I was only an ob­server, a disinterested third party.

We passed through the wall of grasses and emerged in the clearing, just as I had in my dream. And the clearing, the bathhouse, and the other small shacks looked exactly as they had in the dream.

I was conscious of the fact that my reactions were re­playing themselves along with the scene. I knew exactly what the bathhouse would look like, yet once again I was surprised by its smallness.

Jan grabbed my hand, as if for support. "Let's go in," she said. Her voice sounded strange, echoing, as though it was coming from far away.

But the spell dissolved as soon as we stepped through the doorway. I was again myself, and, for the first time in my life, I felt fear. Real fear.

Sheer and utter terror.

The room was covered with millions of flies. Literally millions.

Perhaps billions.

They covered every available space—walls, floor, and ceiling—giving the entire inside of the room a moving, shifting, black appearance. They rippled across the floor in waves and dripped from the ceiling in grotesque liquid sta­lactites, all shapes, sizes, and varieties. The noise was in­credible—an absurdly loud sort of buzzing or humming which had definite tones and cadences. It sounded almost like a language.

Almost, but not quite.

Before I could say anything, Jan had stepped forward into the room, her right foot sinking several inches into the sea of squirming flies. But the tiny creatures did not climb up her leg. Indeed, they seemed not to notice her at all. It was as if she had stepped into a pool of black, stagnant water. "Come on," she said.

Somehow I followed her, my leg muscles propelling me forward against the protests of my wildly screaming brain. My foot, too, sunk into the flies. They felt soft, rubbery, slip­pery.

We walked to the middle of the room, moving slowly, then stopped. Here, there was a clearing on the floor, a space, and we could see the vague form of an unfinished clay sculpture lying on the ground. It was maybe six feet long and three feet wide, with no definite shape or features. Then the flies rippled over it in a tide, thousands of tiny fly-legs scraping against the soft clay. The wave passed and now there was more of a shape: the sculpture was definitely that of a man. Somehow, via a greater power or some col­lective mind of their own, the flies were metamorphosing this clay into a human figure. Each of their actions and movements, each motion of their miniscule feet, was pur­posefully ordered, planned out. Each step was fraught with symbolism.

Another wave passed.

And it was my grandpa.

Down to the drooping jowls, the backwardly combed wisps of hair, and the slightly askew gimp leg.

He was stretched out on the floor, his hands grasping for something that wasn't there, his eyes rolled upward into his skull. There was a look of intense, searing pain on his face.

I knew what it meant. "No!" I screamed, running out of the bathhouse and across the clearing. I did not look to see if Jan was following me or not. At that moment, I didn't care.

Behind me, the buzzing lowered into a soft whisper. As though the flies were quietly laughing.

I flew through the tall grasses and ran past the barn. The sky now was almost clear, and the day was beginning to heat up. Steam rose from the plants as I ran past them or hopped over them. I was too late, and I knew I was too late, but I kept running anyway, ignoring the flashes of pain ripping through my chest, ignoring the ragged rebellion of my tired lungs.

I bounded up the porch steps to the kitchen and flung open the screen door.

He was lying on the floor next to his chair, dead, his body in the same position as that of the sculpture.

I sat down next to him on the floor, taking his hand in mine. His face was not the same as that of the sculpture. It did not look terrified or in pain. But neither did it look pleased. Death had not been a hideous shock or a welcome relief. He was neither miserable nor content. He was only dead. His face was yellowish, drained of color, and he looked very slight and very small, almost like a child.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry, but I could not. I tried looking at his face, his face that I had loved, and thinking of our last conversation together. I tried thinking of the times we'd gone fishing. I tried remembering the presents he'd bought me as a youth. But it was no good. I could not make the tears come no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I wanted them to flow.

I just sat there staring at his lifeless body.

Jan burst through the door, her face red and sweating, out of breath. She looked at my grandpa's body on the floor and her face went from red to white. A look of fear, of horror, crossed her features. "My G-God ..." she stammered, her hands starting to twitch. "Oh my God ..."

I felt calm for some reason, perfectly in control, and I stood up and helped her into a chair. I got her a glass of water, which she drank with shaking hands. "Sit here," I said. "Don't move. I'll be right back."

I started to walk into the living room, then stopped as the scrap of paper caught my eye. I bent down next to my grandpa and picked it up. I thought for a minute, then crum­pled up the paper without even glancing at the poem he'd written.

I went to call an ambulance.

Credits

"The Sanctuary" (originally published in Cemetery Dance,

June 1989) "The Woods Be Dark" (originally published in Touch Wood:

Narrow Houses, Vol II, 1994) "The Phonebook Man" (originally published in Eldritch

Tales #27, 1992)

"Estoppel" (originally published in 2 AM, Spring 1988) "The Washingtonians" (originally published in Cemetery

Dance, Fall 1992) "Life With Father" (originally published in Going Postal,

1998)

"Bob" (unpublished)

"Bumblebee" (originally published in Cold Blood, 1991) "Lethe Dreams" (originally published in Night Cry, Spring

1987) "Paperwork" (originally published in The Horror Show,

Winter 1988) "The Idol" (originally published in Twisted, Summer/Fall

1991) "Skin" (originally published in The Horror Show, Winter

1988)

"The Man in the Passenger Seat" (originally published in

Borderlands 3, 1992) "Comes the Bad Time" (originally published in The Horror

Show, Winter 1987) "Against the Pale Sand" (originally published in Grue #10,

1989) "The Pond" (originally published in Blue Motel: Narrow

Houses, Vol. 3, 1994) "Roommates" (originally published in The Silver Web #9,

1993)

"Llama" (originally published in Hottest Blood, 1993) "Full Moon on Death Row" (unpublished) "The Show" (originally published in The Horror Show, Fall

1987) "The Mailman" (originally published in The Horror Show,

Summer 1988) "Monteith" (originally published in Expressions of Dread,

1993) "Pillow Talk" (originally published in Eldritch Tales #25,

1991)

"Maya's Mother" (unpublished) "Colony" (unpublished) "Confessions of a Corporate Man" (originally published in

The Fractal, Spring/Summer 1996) "Blood" (originally published in Cemetery Dance, Spring

1990)

"And I Am Here, Fighting with Ghosts" (originally pub­lished in Eldritch Tales #18, 1988) "The Baby" (originally published in Spwao Showcase 7:

Selected Works, 1989) "Coming Home Again" (originally published in New Blood

#3, 1987)

"The Potato" (originally published in Borderlands II, 1991) "The Murmurous Haunt of Flies" (originally published in

Murmurous Haunts: The Selected Works of Bentley

Little, 1997)