Mama's Boy and Other Dark Tales (6 page)

"Yeah,” said Danny, sitting across from Samantha. “I heard the evil hibernates in your flesh, and all it takes to wake it up is a little blood.” He slapped his hand on the kitchen table, and Samantha's body jolted. She dropped her chin to her chest, hoping the veil of her hair would hide her flushed face.

With a satisfied grin, Danny said, “You know, Sam, when you get older, Mom's gonna make
you
go down in the root cellar—down in the dark all by yourself.
We've
had to do it."

Eddie shook his head with regret and stared down at the floor. “Yup, it's just a matter of time before it's your turn, Sammy.” Her brothers stared at each other with concern. “Poor, Sam,” they said in unison as they walked by, patting her shoulder and snickering behind her back. “Just be careful what you touch down there.” Sam listened to them laughing as they ran upstairs, but of course, she knew they were right.

"Go on down to the cellar and get me some potatoes, Samantha,” said her mother as she dressed a chicken for supper. Samantha froze on the spot and looked at her brother standing in the doorway. He looked back at her and nodded with his eyebrows raised in a “see, I told you so” look. Shaking his head sympathetically, he disappeared from the doorway.

Samantha dawdled, putting on her jacket and tightening the laces on her sneakers. “What are you waitin’ for girl?” her mother asked, shoving a basket in her hands and chucking her under the chin. “Go on now. Those potatoes aren't gonna walk into this kitchen on their own."

In the waning afternoon light of autumn, Samantha crossed the yard to the root cellar like she was marching to the drone of a funeral dirge. A chill breeze gusted up from behind her as if urging her on toward her fate. Accepting her doom, she sighed, put the basket down at the entrance, and opened the heavy cellar door. It squealed in protest, exposing the wooden steps below.

The stairway down to the root cellar was littered with shadows from the fading light. With stoic determination, Sam hooked the basket over her arm and clomped down the steps, one by one, feeling her way along the cool wall with her hands. As the darkness closed around her, she felt a sudden prick from something sharp along the wall. She cried out and stuck her finger in her mouth, tasting the rusty tinge of blood and feeling her thin courage slipping away like a ghost. Her face turned hot with tears and anger. Why would her mother put her in such danger? Hadn't she heard about the witch? It didn't matter, she thought to herself, because once her mother gave an order, there was no turning back.

Resigned to her duty, Sam continued down the steps with her shoulder to the wall until at last she felt the hard dirt floor beneath her sneakers. The damp odor of the room surrounding her smelled like an open grave; she shivered.

Sam had watched her mother pull the light string at the bottom of the steps many times, so she groped around above her head in the dark, searching for the string. Unable to feel it above her, Sam's fear of what lurked in the cellar escalated. Her already shallow breaths became gasps in her desperation to find the light pull. Her groping turned into flailing, while the cut on her finger throbbed to the rhythm of her pounding heart.

When Sam finally felt the light string touch her palm, she grabbed and gave it a violent pull. The cellar burst into earthy color. With a heavy sigh, her shoulders relaxed and she looked around at the rows of shelves packed with homemade fruit and vegetable preserves, and baskets and sacks of produce neatly lined along the side walls. She was relieved by the tidiness of the surroundings and infuriated that her brothers had frightened her for so long about nothing. “I'll show them,” she said to herself as she tramped over to the bumpy brown sack marked “potatoes."

She set her basket down on the dirt floor and reached into the sack. A putrid stench met her nose just as she sank her hand deep into a warm slime. Wormy fingers grabbed at her hand, sucking at her skin like starving maggot mouths. Before she could pull away, her wrist was squeezed tight in a firm-fingered grip within the swarming mass; the open cut on her finger burned with the sting of acid. Shrieking and yanking at her arm, Sam finally wrenched her hand free. Just then the light snapped off, and she was left in complete darkness.

A deep panic rose in her belly, while under her skin crawled the ghost of the wormy fingers. Soaked in cold sweat, she panted like a frightened animal and stumbled back toward the stairs. The potato sack shifted behind her, and in the dying afternoon light still dusting the stairwell, Samantha saw a shadow pass in front of her. She stopped dead still, holding her breath, praying that her pounding heart couldn't be heard in the dark. A scraping sound came from behind, as something clamped down hard on her shoulder. Sam screamed and windmilled her arms around her.

A loud cackling echoed through the cellar. The light popped on. Her brother, Danny, held the pull string while Eddie doubled over beside her, his eyes watering from laughter. In tears, Samantha slapped one brother with her slime-covered hand and kicked the other in the shin as hard as she could. Pushing past, she screamed, “I hate you!” and ran up the steps, sobbing.

Samantha never forgave her brothers for their cruel prank, which of course became family legend. Since that day, she loathed the sight, the smell, and the feel of potatoes. For many years, she had full-blown phobic attacks of sweating and hyperventilating at the mere sight of a potato. Besides this problem, Sam was plagued by a strange reaction whenever she accidentally cut her formerly slime-covered hand. Even a paper cut could bring on a blazing rash from her fingertips to her shoulder, followed by an unbearable wormy feeling that swarmed beneath her skin. Unable to cure the problem, several doctors assured her it was all in her head.

Teased mercilessly by her brothers—"Spud Alert! Spud Alert!"—Samantha sought therapy for her potato phobia. After years of counseling, she was no longer thrown into a panic by the proximity of potatoes. French fries and hash browns lost their hold as subjects of her nightmares. With a family of her own, occasionally Samantha even subjected herself to buying potatoes, if only to prove that she could do it. Still, she never cooked them, leaving them to sprout, wither, and rot away in the safety of the potato drawer.

When Samantha's parents retired, Eddie assumed the duties of the Sommerville Farm. After years of teasing her about her earthy nemesis, her brother suddenly stopped mocking her without explanation. In fact, she noticed that during her visits to the farm, they no longer served potatoes at the family meal. An uncharacteristic courtesy by her brother, Samantha suspected it had been the doing of his wife, Petra. When she thanked her for the kindness, she was assured that it was Eddie's firm instructions that potatoes be banned from the table, and from the house for that matter—apparently he'd developed an allergy. Samantha had her suspicions about the allergy but she thought it was best to avoid the subject. She was just grateful for the absence of what she secretly still considered to be putrid lumps of evil.

When Eddie disappeared without a trace a few months later, Samantha knew what had happened, but her years of therapy taught her that to believe such a thing was simply “surrendering to irrational fear brought on by stress and unresolved grief."

3—Tuber Duty

No longer noticing the fine spring day outside her kitchen window, Samantha took her time cleaning up after the baking project, glancing at the potato drawer with trepidation. Stalling as long as possible, she covered Cody's cake and placed it on the kitchen table. She washed and dried all the dishes—by hand—stacking them neatly in the cupboards. Sweeping the kitchen for any stray crumbs, Samantha steered clear of the potato drawer. Finally, with the kitchen spotless, she could no longer avoid the inevitable encounter with the dreaded tubers.

Like a soldier preparing for battle, Samantha pulled her heavy duty rubber gloves out from under the sink—the ones she used for nasty cleaning jobs and harsh chemicals. Shoving her hands deep into the thick red gloves, she walked toward the potato drawer like a bomb squad technician, the sound of pulsing blood hammering in her ears. As she reached for the drawer handle, she hesitated, hearing a muffled sound of rustling. She told herself that it was just the leaves on the trees blowing in the breeze outside the window. Cold sweat beaded on her forehead and her underarms went slick as she reached for the handle. Taking a deep breath, she gave the drawer a tug. It didn't budge. She tried a better grip, but the drawer didn't move—it felt as if it had been glued shut.

Samantha considered her options—a stuck drawer could be a good excuse for not making potatoes for dinner, but then again she knew that her son would come along and pull the drawer right open. She'd never hear the end of the teasing. “Oh, come on Mom. They're just harmless potatoes. See!” he'd say as he chased her around the kitchen with a hideous potato. No, she had to get the drawer open on her own.

After several rounds of unsuccessfully yanking and tugging, Samantha's potato fear faded into the background, as the important job at hand was simply to open the stubborn drawer. Finally, she resorted to a good strong butcher knife for prying it open. Choosing the biggest and thickest blade she owned, she slid it free from its sheath in her butcher block.

The red gloves hindered her grip, so she tossed them to the floor and grabbed hold of the knife handle with her bare hands. Gripping the thick wooden handle fist over fist like a hari-kari blade, Samantha slotted the knife around the edge of the drawer with determination. She kneeled before the drawer, gritting her teeth, and levered back as hard as she could. With a loud
Crack!
the drawer popped open and her sweaty hands slipped down the razor edge of the blade, slicing deep into the flesh of her palms and fingers. With the shock of the wounds, Samantha dropped the bloodied knife, leaving it to fall into the open drawer; her warm blood mingled with the spindly roots that had emerged.

The old terror rose as the maddening wormy feeling rushed under the skin of her sliced palm, then crept up the length of her arm. The allergic reaction left her breathless; her chest tightened with fear.

Trailing blood behind her, she ran to the sink, cursing herself for being so careless. She turned the faucet on full blast and let the cold water run over the gaping wounds in her hands. The water spun red around the sink and down into the drain. Hot tears rolled down Samantha's cheeks as she washed the deep cuts with stinging soap. The allergic reaction intensified, the burning rash covering her skin. She mumbled self-recriminations and watched in horror as red hives crawled along her arm.

"How could I be so careless? How could I be afraid of stupid potatoes? What in the hell is wrong with me?"

She pulled a long strip of paper towels from the holder and wrapped a wad tightly around each hand—no doubt they would need stitches.

"Damn it,” she said to herself. “What a fine thing to do on Cody's birthday!"

The shock and loss of blood made her feel woozy. On shaky legs, she turned and grabbed the phone. As she dialed her husband's work number, she looked down, feeling something squeezing her ankles. Horrified, she saw slender white roots spreading across the kitchen floor, winding their way around her ankles and crawling up her bare legs.

Screams pealed from deep in Samantha's throat.

Her feet were yanked out from under her and blinding pain seared the back of her head as it slammed against the edge of the kitchen table. Her world became a slow-motion movie as somewhere from a distance she watched the birthday cake tumble from the table and splatter beside her on the floor; bits of frosting and shards of the shattered plate flew at her face.

Samantha's eye welled with tears, gazing as if in a dream at the chocolate icing and the yellow innards of the ruined cake scattered across the floor.
My poor, Cody
, she thought. Feeling a tug at her wrist, she glanced down; a sharp pain shot through her head from the movement. She blinked hard to clear her vision and saw that the long, fingery roots had followed the trail of her blood from the open drawer. In a flash of clarity, she remembered the wormy fingers in the potato sack in the root cellar, the acid-like burning in the cut on her finger—her blood was tainted, dormant with the evil curse her brothers had thought was a joke. Her therapist had assured her that curses weren't real. The doctors said the crawling rash of her allergy was psychosomatic. As she lay paralyzed on the kitchen floor, feeling the slimy root fingers wrapping around her body, she finally knew they were all wrong.

Samantha felt the fleshy roots roping around her, tugging and pulling at her body until she began to slide. Unable to resist, her back slipped across the smooth tiles of the kitchen floor, through the splattered icing, the chunks of broken birthday cake, and past the industrial strength gloves she wished she'd never taken off. Helpless to cry out, Samantha started to feel squishy, as if she were melting inside her own skin.

The long white fingers continued to flow and creep around her body, squeezing and tightening until breathing became nearly impossible. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she felt the tangle of roots rustling over her face, searching for any skin left bare, until they blinded her. The searing pain jolted her to full awareness one last time. She cried out, and the roots slithered into her mouth and up her nose. In a final moment of horror, the disappearance of Samantha's brother was no longer a question—her flesh was dissolving, like she knew he had dissolved at the farm. Hot tears of grief fell from her blind eyes and she gagged on the roots burrowing down her throat and worming up her nose and into her brain. With her final breath, she felt the crushing sensation of being squeezed into a drawer like a deflated rubber doll.

The memory of her husband's embrace flitted across her ebbing thoughts, along with images of her family ... Cody's cherubic grin, her mother in the kitchen at the farm, playing hide and seek with her brothers in the cornfield. As her mind slipped away, in a final flash of madness she felt tiny eyes bud on the surface of her melting skin.