Uninvited Guests

Uninvited Guests

His heart was pounding. He was sure he had seen the doorknob turn. This was his third day on stakeout. Ever since he’d noticed small things going missing, moving, or disappearing for days and then showing up somewhere unsuspected, he had been growing suspicious that he had a poltergeist, or something worse, in his house. Of course, he had known about the small door in the basement since he had moved in. Always behind it was just dirt. Not even special dirt. He had been meaning to remove the door for years.

It really came to his attention when his bag of pistachio nuts had gone missing. He had a thing for pistachio nuts, and so when the bag disappeared right off his armrest while he was reading in his favorite armchair, he had stormed around the house, surely going mad by imagining that someone was stealing his pistachio nuts. The next day, he found a screwdriver wedged into a block of cheese. He put out mousetraps for a week, but all he caught was his own foot, when all the mousetraps mysteriously moved to be right on the edge of his bed.

He decided he needed a trap. This thing seemed to have the same dietary needs as a mouse or other rodent. Cheese, he decided on (he remembered the screwdriver in the Gouda). He set it out – a piece of cheese, tied with a piece of floss to a bell by his bed. He lay awake that night, watching the cheese in the half-darkness, pretending to be asleep. Soon, he was awakened (he must have fallen asleep) by the ringing of the bell. High-pitched voices squeaked in alarm. He bolted up from the mattress, and grabbed the baseball bat that was leaning against the nightstand. The cheese was gone, but the floss was just now disappearing around the corner! He ran around the corner, feet kicking wildly up into the air as he bolted, still half asleep, to catch this thief. The floss was trailing down the stairs to the basement. Whatever it was, it could move fast. He ran down the stairs. The floss was disappearing under the strange little door! His clumsy hands tried to work the tiny brass knob. The door opened. There was the dirt. The cheese was gone.

Three days later, and he was sitting on the stairs. He didn’t have much to do now that he was retired and his wife was gone. He could afford to sit on the stairs and watch a little door. He wondered if whatever it was was watching him, waiting for him to go away so that it could go get food. Perhaps there were other strange little doors in other people’s houses. Perhaps they were all interconnected. There was a lot to think about during those three days. But then the doorknob turned, and it was all worth it. He grabbed his baseball bat and laundry basket. He intended to trap it. The doorknob turned, and out came the ugliest little potato he had ever seen.

It was about two feet tall, with a little pointed head. Dirt brown, black, with little tendrils of green sticking out of the black eyes on it’s dusty skin. Two spindly little legs protruded from its underside, and where there should have been a sprout on a potato, there was a nicely trimmed coiffure of leaves. Almost a 1950’s hairstyle of slicked-back green leaves. Its arms were knobby like birch sticks, and it looked like a hunched homunculus in brown burlap pants. Another followed, a female, with a little brown dress made of a material that looked suspiciously like the moleskin that had gone missing from the first-aid kit two months ago.

The two little potato-creatures turned around, and helped five smaller potatolings out onto the concrete floor. The whole family, he could see, was friendly and genial. They walked, communicating with tiny whistles and waves of roots, toward the stack of newspapers that he kept at the base of the stairs. They took off the top page, and walked with it back toward the door from which they had come. They put the newspaper up against the wall and closed the door behind them, sandwiching themselves between the door and the dirt behind it.

He moved out two weeks later, and took up residence in a nice little country villa. He has been happy since, and nothing has gone missing.