Potato Incident

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Farmer Jimmy Joe John Jameson Bellringer Jr the fifty-third was sitting on a milk crate on the back porch chopping potatoes. Rain coats his dirty arms as he works with his knife. Jameson is focused on sliding the tool through the body of the potato without cutting the lanky spuds sprouting smooth, slender, and slimy out of each. He's so focused that he doesn't notice when the first one goes missing.

But the second potato to disappear does so by standing up on its sprouts and leaping from his open hand. It scurries across the ageing oak floor and crawls behind a stack of scrap wood. Farmer Jameson turns to see the state of his remaining potatoes.

One is making a web to escape down the side of the porch. Another jumps around in the rafters hissing like a mad cat. A third stands perfectly still and screams a high pitched noise that can only be described as the sound a potato makes. All of the other potatoes scatter for safety from the farmer and the rain.

Farmer Jameson flips his potato cutting knife by one half turn in his hand and throws it like only the three year logging games champ can. It pins the screaming potato to the floorboard silencing it very little. Farmer Jimmy Joe John Jameson Bellringer Jr the fifty-third plucks his knife from the wood and takes a large bite out of his last juicy potato.

They say that if you put your ear to the farmer's tummy you can still hear the screams of a potato.

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Black Cat

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Armed with a pitchfork, several knives and a sawn off shotgun, farmer Jameson made his way to the stables out back. A cloud of dust traced a line into the building. As the farmer crossed the threshold, he locked eyes with the large peepers of a long-faced cow. It let out a moo of uncertainty and looked up to the rafters, "Mooo?"

Walking on the planks up high was a potato. It bent its spuds like a newborn kitten prancing around to figure out how legs work. It paused in its tracks and started hissing.

Jameson staked his pitchfork in the ground and drew a throwing knife. He wasn't about to let no potato or cat get the best of him. A wave of nausea washed through him as the knife flew, probably that potato he ate, and stuck the wall in front of an already spooked horse.

His mind only grew more unsettled as the arcane potato radiated a hopeless dread and filled him with a sense of bad luck. Jameson drew the double barrel and aimed to the rafters.

The cat-like abomination was gone in a blast of buckshot, but the noise rattled the farmer from his dreary daze. Blood splattered his face from the once thick neck of his prized horse.

The potato scurried out of the door almost unnoticed. Just a moment before it left the doorway, Jameson tagged it with his second round.

Limping with only three out of five legs left, the poor potato turned around to face the farmer. The air around coalesced into the potato. It shriveled inward and the grass around faded into ash on the spot. Jameson drew his pitchfork and launched it into the potato as it finished charging and let out a beam of devastating energy.

Dark energy made a gray and black line towards the farmer's neck, only to be redirected at the barn when the pitchfork hit. A streak burned diagonally across the full length of the stables. Everywhere the energy touched became gray, rotten and decayed. Mold and fungus tore the building apart.

The remaining cows and horses nearly trampled him in their flight, but the farmer ignored them. There were potatoes left to hunt.

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Black Widow

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The family graves were disturbed to say the least. Webbing covered many of the names, and a few corpses had even been dug from their graves. Just the act of seeing his near-freshly buried brother, Jimbo, laying over the side of his tombstone was enough to make Jameson paralyze in grief and fright.

And then bubbles began to shift around in the dead man's chest. Jimbo rolled off of the gravestone and little bugs burst from his chest. Several of the tiny crawling potatoes scrambled towards the farmer. Two blasts of his gun made sure most stopped in their tracks, but a few slipped through.

The tiny bugs quickly dug into his boots and slid underneath the flesh of his feet like starving scarab beetles from a 90s mummy movie. Jameson pulled his pants down faster than a virgin in a whore house.

Three bumps crawled up the inside of his left leg. He took a knife and cut a line through the interior calve. The other two ran up his thigh. The farmer smashed one with the handle of his knife, but the other traced a quick path around his hip. Hands grabbed and slapped frantically at his shirt before falling to his back. The bug burst out of the skin on his chest and screamed into Jameson's face.

Jameson screamed back, before finally squishing the potato-bug with a calloused hand. He took an awkward glance around to see if anyone else saw that, reloaded and set off toward the crypt engraved: Jimmy Joe John Jameson Bellringer Senior. On either side of the door was a small pavilion with a large brass church bell.

You would expect a crypt to be dark, damp, dirty and reek of death. You would be right.

The staircase down into the void of this crypt was sticky as well. Sticky with thick tapestries of web. Although the walls were thick with grave dust, the webs were still fresh with juices from the creature that wove them.

It is inevitable, that prey finds itself trapped in the spider's web. This simple farmer was no different. One moment he was taking cautious steps and the next his skin was being pulled on in every direction by a net of unyielding secretion. He swung frantically, but only managed to get stuck further.

And make noise.

While stuck, there was plenty of time to adjust to the darkness. He wished his eyes had just stayed blind. Right next to him, in the same web, the skull of a man gave a blank stare from its perch atop a large silk cocoon.

Across the room, a fleshy egg sack with several dark holes inside covered the far wall. They begin to crawl with movement. Out of the biggest hole in the center of the wall three long spindly legs grip the edges of the opening, between them a slight glare of moonlight from the open crypt glimmers off of a dozen black eyes.

A large sectioned body with an hourglass carved into the skin swings out of the hole and oscillates around between the very articulate legs of a spider.

Jameson forces Sweet Amy (his shotgun) forward. The webs cling to the barrel like the cheese in a pizza commercial when the first slice just doesn't want to come out of the pie. (You know they put glue on the crust to make it look that way, waste of a pizza if you ask me.)

The bright flash consumes the barrel of Sweet Amy and for a brief moment casts a haunting shadow of the beast on the far wall. At least a hundred smaller bugs can be seen swarming out of holes all over the room, but only for a second. Then all is black again.

The spider slinks away to the corner of the room and shoots a web that pins Sweet Amy to the larger trap. With only seconds to spare, Jameson rummages through his pocket for a small metal square.

The square's top opens with a click.

The mother lumbers over him with fangs clipping at the air and a stinger swaying as if ready to strike.

Jameson flicks a spark out of the zippo.

The smaller spiders cover his feet.

The venom dripping face of the big spider is illuminated by the small flame of a hand lighter.

Then everything erupts in beautiful red and green flames that stretch the entire crypt. The shrieking of bugs nearly wakes the dead.

Jameson was sure to ring both bells on his way out of the crypt. A warning cry that the Bellringers were here to stay.

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Mashed Maniac

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Now, I know what you're thinking; that part in a horror movie where the hero could have escaped has come and gone at least seven times. Well, you'd be right. Except that farmer Jameson ain't no two-bit hoot n' anny who'd just give up on the home he was raised in!

He damn sure weren't no two-bit hoot n' anny who'd let some rotten potatoes run him off of his farm! His entire livelihood since he was a child!

He was, however, a three-bit hoot n' anny when it came to water, and all of the possibilities swimming under the surface. It made the hair stand on end, against the wishes of the dew matting it down. The paradox caused the skin to crawl like crawdads over wet sand.

Things much creepier than crawdads were forming below the swamp tonight.

Post-rain dew clung to the trees like sweat. As the valley slopped lower into the woods, the ground turned from a swampland scattered with water to a wetland scattered with Earth.

Tracks wound deeper through the trees in groupings of five.

Five markings that were not quite hooves, neither the mark you get from jamming a stick in the ground, but a little of both.

At first, Jameson was careful to follow the footing of the creature that had come before him, as one step off the path would have him sinking to a watery grave. The tracks soon vanished under waist deep muck with bugs biting viciously at any exposed flesh and small things began to take a turn for the worse. The nearby debris rattling to make way for something, water rippling in the corner of the eye, a sense of dread permeating the swamp with a visible fog, and the smell of starch lingering in the air.

A long fleshy tube with a head resembling a potato eye strikes from the bushes on nearby land as quick as a snake. There are no teeth on the creature, only the flaky and featureless bulb on one end. This head sparked throughout with a deep blue electricity that struck Jameson's shoulder numb and charred it in a gross pattern. After it had struck, Sweet Amy spit burning buckshot into the dirt around its wriggling form.

It gave a final death spasm. The woods went quiet. Then a different sound rose from every direction; the sound of a hundred snakes slithering across water and over mud.

"Shit!"

The water came up to chest height, with the alien creatures near eye level. Their skin was a shimmering gray blanketing the mucky water. Their heads resembled a lopsided field of flowers with pedals, all yet to bloom. Strange electricity traced lines around the eels. If normal lightning portrayed light, then the eels portrayed darkness.

In his hurry to escape the alien critters, his foot slipped into a mound of soft mud.

Jameson pushed himself upright with his pitchfork, desperate to keep above ground. The pitchfork only shoved more of the wet ground into the water, and Jameson slid into the murky depths with it. Laying just under the water, he pulled his shotgun up in desperation but his last bullet was soak and wet.

No sooner than the gun clicked did four or five slithers stick to his torso and face by cauterizing themselves to the skin with lightning. The farmer saw only light as he drifted down the current towards one of the many sinkholes that dotted the landscape.

His unconscious body drifted to deeper and deadlier depths. Sinking through the dark water with only the lightning showing through closed eyelids. Even that discomfort vanished, one strand of electricity at a time. All that was left were normal eye worms dancing where the real light had been on the other side.

He washed up in a cave opening, surrounded by pulsating mash clinging to the walls and dripping from the ceiling like clumps of flesh.

A storm raged outside; feeding the growing mash with water running into the cave, and giving no quarter for someone to turn back.

Water washed over the black scars burnt in chaotic patterns over his face and under torn clothing, painful proof that mutated potato eels had just electrocuted him. So much for the whole day turning out to be a fever dream.

Only three steps in and the mash proved to be more than just alive, it was hungry like quicksand. A sticky substance stretched out from the bottom of his boot to the floor, like chewing gum, clinging to him with every step.

The tunnel opened up into a cave just large enough for a five legged potato the size of a car. It sported clumps of writhing maggots for eyes and a mouth full of blocky herbivore teeth, only the teeth were large enough to crush every bone in a human body with just one bite.

Fleshy tree trunks grew out of the cramped landscape, and partially bloomed at the end. This slight separation of gray flower glowed with an even grayer aura. In the center of the bulb was a black void of life. Thrashing within all of the bleak color was the same deep anti-lightning as the eels.

The spud stalk trees fired their death rays into the farmer's pitchfork, refracting into a dark rainbow over his head. Jameson threw a knife dead center into one of the trees, and the object collapsed with the sound of a broken bone. The massive creature slumped over the mashed quicksand at the charging madman and caught him up in a gapping maw with more strength than a crocodile.

To his credit, the farmer caught the upper ring of teeth with his hands and pushed the bottom half away with his feet. He held this pose for an entirely too impressive three seconds, until the mouth snapped closed with 'most' of Jameson on the inside. Three fingers and half his hand came off as if they'd been cut clean. His right leg remained clamped in-between the flat teeth until the beast decided to chew it into paste and swallow him whole.

The insides of the potato burn like acid, melting Jameson's flesh to the bone in places and singeing his long hair to his sizzling cheeks.

A pitchfork rises out of the monster's body like a dark victory flag, and the scream of a potato can be heard all across the farmer's land.