He fishes it up with his hand, wary that it might sprout thorns or something.
At exactly that moment, it sprouts thorns.
“Fuck!”
He drops it instantly, only just manages not to get jabbed as one of the spines catches and breaks its tip off in his glove.
He quickly pinches out and flings down the point.
The thing rolls back into its hole, starts using its tendrils as sweepers, covering itself with dirt.
“You little fucker.”
He jabs at it with the spade, finds its texture not wholly potato-like, tougher on the outside, slimier inside.
Probably turning animal, probably full of blood.
It writhes away from the jabbing spade but can’t escape. At last he strikes it hard enough to make it rupture, and bleed it does. It’s still writhing and dripping, like a spiny liver or other organ, as he waddle-runs it around back to the fire.
He braces himself for a sound.
It shrieks when he throws it in, high and infantile, though not exactly human. Outraged that it never had a chance to do its job.
To kill me.
But how?
It was growing.
The fire is huge now, and here comes Salvador with another armload of split logs, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, literally ready to throw all the wood in.
“That’s enough, Sal.”
Sal puts the wood down.
“Help me find them now.”
He holds the spade up; the portrait head inclines slightly, the automaton’s articulated hand touching the spade’s blade almost tenderly, as if it were a flower.
The fire casting amber light on the painting’s glossy finish.
Dalí’s nostrils appear to widen just a bit as Salvador takes in the scent.
His wicker hips waggle just a little.
Smelling things is so deliciously doglike.
All right, you anticipated the thorns and the blood and the shrieking. You have her number, know how she thinks. What’s next? Prepare yourself. The next one will be bigger.
Salvador points at the ground where a quartet of tendrils are carefully smoothing down the mound the thing made burying itself.
Clever, awful little things.
Andrew spades up the dirt.
This one is the size of a small squash, not a potato.
It starts burrowing farther down.
He spades the hell out of it until it, too, bleeds, burbles, and weakens.
No thorns on this one. Could they all be different?
Now a tiny mouth, like a baby’s, forms, bites feebly at the blade.
He grimaces, strikes a few more times.
Ruins the tiny mouth.
Pulps it all.
Shovels that out and takes it to the fire.
Have to work faster, they’re growing.
The next one, the size of a cat, has enough tendrils to try to fight him for the spade. It loses.
The sun has gone down.
Think!
The next one must be carried into the fire in a bucket.
When the blisters begin to weep and sting within his gloves, Salvador digs.
The one after burrows farther down before he spades the life from it, and he gets an idea.
When the next one goes deeper, Andrew flings fireglass into the hole.
Bhastrika!
Fire gouts up from the hole, licks Andrew’s jeans.
The potato-thing screams and dies.
His nonluminous neighbors don’t hear a scream.
They hear a train.
The work goes on into the night.
He digs them up, finds abominations ever larger, stronger, harder to look at. He burns them, they shriek or squeal, he shovels out the smoldering mess and buckets it over to the bigger fire.
The last one Salvador finds is as large as a bear cub.
When the magus shines the light down into the hole, eyes shine up at him. He pauses, stunned. The eyes look human. It starts covering itself back up.
He runs for the house, gets his revolver, a .357 Smith and Wesson, and a fire extinguisher. Salvador is losing the garden spade to it, holding the light on it with one hand, clutching the spade with the other, digging furrows with his planted prosthetic heels.
A whitish vine has snaked around one of Sal’s legs.
He’s whimpering and growling.
Andrew levels his magnum’s six-inch barrel at the thing in the hole.
It blinks at him.
I wonder if it knows.
It lets go of the spade, covers its face with the larger tendrils, tendrils that look suspiciously like hands.
Andrew fans a hand over the gun, imagines a kid banging on a metal garbage can lid. When he fires, that’s what the neighbors will hear.
I wonder if it’s going to say please.
It says please, or tries to, its mouth full of dirt.
“Prease.”
It sounds a lot like the ghost in the car.
Slavic forest magic.
Very, very strong.
It almost has a hand-tendril around the barrel when Andrew recovers from its mild charm.
The trash can lid bangs six times.
A train whistles.
The thing in the hole mostly dies.
“Stand back, Sal.”
The wizard throws so many fireglass stones into the hole that when he says bhastrika the flame burps up, makes a ring that lights brush and lower branches.
He uses the extinguisher.
Turns around to find Nadia looking at him, pleased with him.
It is near two A.M. when he satisfies himself that he has found them all. Salvador covers the whole property. They trespass onto the neighbor’s land, Nadia holding the light, all of them invisible; if they are spotted, they will look like errant fireflies. This spell strains the already weary magus, but it must be done.
Slogging up to his front door, he sees a raccoon running off, dragging the bag of pickled eggs.
Just a raccoon.
Just eggs.
This strikes him really funny and he laughs the way people do on the subway sometimes when they’ve stopped caring who’s looking at them.
Just as suddenly, he stops laughing, remembers what he was just doing. Shudders to think what those things might have grown into.
Before the shower, he looks at himself in the mirror over the sink.
He looks at the wall behind his shoulder, happy it’s just wall.
Happy there’s nobody behind him.
Is the old witch really dead?
What the fuck is after me?
He is filthy, his hair flecked with something like potato, his skin stippled with blood.
And then there’s his eye.
He has popped the blood vessel in his sclera again.
It hurts.
He decides to let himself get a little older, at least until he has his strength back. Gray runs down his Indian-black hair in several fine skeins, like runs in a nylon stocking. The lines around his mouth deepen. He looks fortyish now, feels sixty. But his eye stops hurting, clears up.
His muscles are so sore he can barely turn the knobs, but the shower is good. Grime and blood run down across the Italian tiles and down the drain.
He’s watching the last of the night’s dirt swirl into the plumbing when he sees her long, pale feet step just behind his. The rusalka can’t resist the water. The smell of deep lake and tide overwhelms him, but seems oddly pleasant after the high, seminal smell of the potatoes. Odd how their scent changed as they grew, became bloodier, more mammalian.