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.