Free Bumper Crop by Joe R. Lansdale Page A

it's not impersonating our houses, it's impersonating a house."
    "That's wild, Lem ."
    "And the more I drink from this flask, the wilder I'll get. Take this for instance: it could look like anything. Consider all the ghettos in the world, the slums, the places that no amount of Federal Aid, money, and repair seem to fix. Perhaps these chameleons, or whatever you want to call them, live there as well—because despair fills walls as much as love—and they become the top floors of rundown tenement houses, the shanties alongside other shanties on Louisiana rivers—"
    "And they feed on this love or despair, this energy?"
    "Exactly, and when it's sucked out, the houses die and the creatures move on."
    "What are we going to do about it?"
    Lem turned up the flask and swigged. When he lowered it, he said, " Something , that's for sure."
    Â 
    T hey left the car, cat-pawed across the street, crept through backyards toward the sleeping house. When they were almost to the lot where the house squatted, they stopped beneath a sycamore tree and wore its shadow. They passed the flask back and forth.
    Way out beyond the suburbs, in the brain of the city, they could hear traffic sounds. And much closer, from the ship channel, came the forlorn hoot of a plodding tug.
    "Now what?" Harry asked.
    "We sneak up on it from the rear, around by the back door—"
    "Back door! If the front door is its mouth, Lem , the back door must be its—"
    "We're not going inside, we're going to snoop, stupid, then we're going to do something."
    "Like what?"
    "We'll cross that blazing tightwire when we get to it. Now move!"
    They moved, came to the back door. Lem reached out to touch the doorknob. "How about this?" he whispered. "No knob, just a black spot that looks like one. From a distance—hell, up close—you couldn't tell it was a fake without touching. Come on, let's look in the windows."
    "Windows?" Harry said, but Lem had already moved around the edge of the house, and when Harry caught up with him, he was stooping at one of the windows, looking in.
    "This is crazy," Lem said. "There's a stairway and furniture and cobwebs even . . . No, wait a minute. Feel!"
    Harry crept up beside him, reluctantly touched the window. It was most certainly not glass, and it was not transparent either. It was cold and hard like the scale of a fish.
    "It's just an illusion, like the doorknob," Harry said.
    "Only a more complicated type of illusion, something it does with its mind probably. There's no furniture, no stairs, no nothing inside there but some kind of guts, I guess, the juice of our houses."
    The house shivered, sent vibrations up Harry's palm. Harry remembered those long arms that had come out of the side windows earlier. He envisioned one popping out now, plucking him up.
    The house burped, loudly.
    Suddenly Lem was wearing Harry for a hat.
    "Get down off me," Lem said, "or you're going to wake up with a tube up your nose."
    Harry climbed down. "It's too much for us, Lem . In the movies they'd bring in the army, use nukes."
    Lem took the can of lighter fluid out of his coat pocket. It was the large economy size.
    " Ssssshhhh ," Lem said. He brought out his pocket knife and a book of matches.
    "You're going to blow us up!"
    Lem tore the lining out of one of his coat pockets, squirted lighter fluid on it, poked one end of the lining into the fluid can with the point of his knife. He put the rag-stuffed can on the ground, the matches beside it. Then he took his knife, stuck it quickly into the house's side, ripped down.
    Something black and odorous oozed out. The house trembled. "That's like a mosquito bite to this thing," Lem said. "Give me that can and matches."
    "I don't like this," Harry said, but he handed the can and matches to Lem . Lem stuck the can halfway into the wound, let the rag dangle.
    "Now run like hell," Lem said, and struck a match.
    Harry started running toward the street as fast as his arthritic legs would carry him.
    Lem