The Great Toad

Well, it is Friday again! It's good to be home for the weekend, relaxing after work. Here is my third post for you. Again, please leave some comments and tell me what you think.

The Great Toad

I was fifteen years old. My dad got this new job in a place called Braeforth. It was in Vermont. We arrived there in August, before school began for me. It was like taking a step into a strange new world. 

Braeforth was a village. My dad would be working with an old college friend at a small law firm. The two of them and this crotchety, fat, old bag named Mrs. Biggs. She was a Mrs., but I imagined that if she still had a husband he was most likely spread through a series of jars across her sitting room. She gave me the willies. However, dad’s friend Mike said she kept the records straight and was great on the phone. Dad said he had slain dragons every day in the city so this one didn’t bother him a bit.  

“Besides, she’s just old that’s all. Her claws are useless.” He would say and chuckle. He was feeling good. He had told us about a year and a half ago that he just wanted the pressure to be off a bit and this was what he meant. Leaving the big city for the relaxed small town life. 

Mike was a bit odd as well. He was always stuffed into one of many brown suits. He said people had the most trust for a man in a brown suit, whatever that meant. He was fortyish, fat, smiling and greasy. I did not trust him, but he was my father’s friend.  

Mom seemed to be put off by him as well. She said she did not like the way he acted when he came by the house, every time right around dinner. She said he was expecting to be invited. And she was right. The truth was, he was lonely and my dad was as good for him as Braeforth was to be for us. Like symbiosis, I guess. 

I had a couple of weeks to settle in before school began. My chance to explore the lay of the land, so to speak. My parents had bought us a large house just at the outskirts. My sister, Jean was still missing her latest attachment from back home and this location was less than ideal for her. 

She would whine, “I miss Brad! He’s so far away now and how am I supposed to meet anyone else in the godforsaken outlands!” 

My dad would look at her over the top of whatever paper he was reading, one of those looks with his glasses slid down his nose. “You will meet someone. Even out here in the outlands! School starts and for your sake I just hope there are no Brads here! Just relax, enjoy life and this year, concentrate on school work, instead of boys! Sheesh!!” 

Eventually my mom would need to insert herself into these arguments, but by then I would have already made my personal escape out the back door, riding my Schwinn across the lawn and away down the road. Braeforth was not a sprawling community. Neither was it pretty. Unless you counted pretty run down. Some people, like Dad would call it tight knit. The houses were all older, turning grey as the sun and rain slowly washed away what was left of the owners’ imaginations when they had last been coated in better times. The economy wasn’t what it once was. Braeforth had been cut down in it’s heyday as a quarry town. Mike said, “Devonian, as good as anywhere else I suppose.” 

I had not a clue about Devonian granite, but the close of the quarry had marked the end of the good times for Braeforth. The quarry held a particular fascination for myself and I began to bike out there pretty much daily. There was something that drew me to it and I had no idea why, like a vibration in the air, or a beckoning that called to me.Vermont geology was different than anywhere else, and standing at the edge of the trees, looking out at the beauty of the old chiseled rock face, and down at the blue waters of the flooded bottom, I was always struck with how it was like men had been digging their way back through time. Back to the beginnings where no one had ever set foot before. 

I liked to hang out along the water’s edge, skipping rocks, searching for fossils I never found, but mostly just enjoying nature, even with the buzz of mosquitos. The water down close was still, dark and deep, a liquid pool of inky blackness. There were none of the usual signs of trespassers here except once, a pair of women's panties waved like a flag of surrender from a small bush. They had not been there the day before. I looked around for other signs someone had been there. I noticed a long stick, so I used it to hook the underwear and gave them a long arcing fling out over the water.  

“Hey! Those were mine, you little dink!” suddenly a girl appeared, rough looking with sandy hair. She stood with her hands on her hips, “Now look what you done! At least do something right and get away from the edge!” 

She reached out, grabbing my arm, pulling me back from the water, “You're a little young to be playing with panties!” 

“You shouldn’t leave gross trash lying around!” I retorted. 

“I do what I want and it’s none of your business! But, for your information, those weren’t trash. I came back to get them. I left them there last night.” 

“Eeeeew, that is so gross!” I looked at her quickly. She was scary and rough and beautiful. 

“And now I have no underwear. Thanks dorkwad. I should tell my boyfriend. What’s your name?” 

“Shawn.” 

“Well Shawn, today’s your lucky day. I don’t have a boyfriend. At least not after last night.” She looked sadly, out across the water at the limp, floating panties and sighed. “Well, that’s the way it goes.” 

She turned back to me, “C’mon let’s get out of here.” 

We began walking, as I pushed along my bike by the handlebars. The girl looked at me, “Crappy bike.” she commented.  

“You're not very nice.” 

“Yet, here you are. You don’t want to hang out around the quarry. It’s kind of dangerous sometimes.” 

“Sometimes?” 

“Just don’t go down there, that’s all. Look I’m giving you a warning. It’s not where you want to spend time.” 

We reached the main road. There was a car parked there, but the girl did not look old enough to drive. She climbed in anyway and started it up. She wound the window down, “I got to get home before my mom wakes up and notices her car is gone. I know you won’t believe me, but there’s something down there. Down in that pond. Something dangerous.”, she paused, “It’s even creepier at night.” 

“So where should I hang out?” I asked. 

“There’s an old barn, the end of Robinson Road. Tomorrow night. Be there at nine.” She began to pull away. 

“Hey, what’s your name?” I called out. 

“Rhonda.” I barely caught it as in the next minute she was gone. I was left standing there on the road in the sun with the quarry behind me. It was the first time I realized how quiet it was. An eerie stillness without any noise of birds or anything. A cool breeze sprung up and I shivered, took one nervous look around as I hopped on the Schwinn and headed home, whispering her name as I pedaled, “Rhonda.” 

The day flew by quickly. Once I told my mom I had met someone, she couldn’t get me out of the house fast enough to go spend time with them. I did not mention it was a girl. A girl who stole her mom’s car and went out at night doing God knows what! Robinson Road was easy enough to find. I sped along glancing down at the cracks in the old pavement. Abruptly, the pavement ended, turning into just gravel. The houses were further apart and more run down than any I had seen around town. A few were mobile trailers. The older kind, typically blue, brown, or yellow, and white. Some with dents and long grass grown up from overlooked lawns. Then I came to a road gate barrier with a rusted padlock. An aged and faded for sale sign was tied to the gate but the phone number was faded to an unreadable state. Beyond this was the barn, faded to grey with broken boards and gaps in the sides. The roof was starting to fall in. One of the barn doors was open a space, wide enough that someone could slip inside. The sun had just set and I could detect a faint glow inside from some source of light. I left the bike hidden in the bushes next to the barrier and crept forward through the grass to the point where I could see through one of the spaces between the old barn boards. 

Rhonda was seated inside on a hay bale, knees bent up leaning against a post. The light came from a lantern on the floor which she was using the light from to read an old Archie’s digest. A cigarette dangled from the fingers of one hand. As she exhaled, the smoke curled up towards the open roof where I could see stars in the night sky. She looked cuter than when we’d first met, wearing jeans shorts, cutoff with a red and white gingham shirt. She looked up, straight at me, “You coming in or just gonna stand there gawking like a perv?” 

“Um. Hello, I’m coming in, just a sec.” I went around and came in the door. “This is really nice. I like the view.” 

“Thanks. I just had it decorated. Want a smoke?” She waved her pack at me and I shook my head no. 

“Fine by me.” She tossed the pack down beside her, “So when did you roll into town?” 

“Couple weeks ago. My dad’s a lawyer. He got a job here.” 

“Must be one shit lawyer then.” She exhaled slowly, “My mom works at the hospital. Sleeps in the day and works all night. I never had a dad.” 

That explained a lot about Rhonda. She was like a hard candy with a soft center, but you had to work really long to get to it. I don’t even know why we seemed to hit it off, but I think it was that we wanted nothing from each other other, other than some company. That barn became a regular meeting spot for us over the rest of summer. We talked about school. She had dropped out over the last year and had no intentions of going back. School was a strange subject for her. 

“You watch your mouth when you meet the other Braeforth kids. Keep your thoughts to yourself. They’re not like any other ones you may have known before. This town,” she paused thinking on what to say but looking unsure. “well it has something different. You’ll see. When you have some questions though, you come to me first. Don’t you ever tell them you know who I am though. I’m the local outcast.” 

So the school year began for me, with a note of cautious optimism. Braeforth High sat on a low hill on the edge of the village. It was kind of scenic I thought, with a set of white columns in front contrasting with red brick walls, hemmed in by maple trees. The student body was small, so the school never felt overcrowded, but kind of airy and open. I liked it. The kids all looked pretty regular to me at a glance. Maybe it could be hard though, for me. These kids had known one another their whole lives and here I was, the new intruder. I decided at first to keep a low profile. 

That first day as I walked to school, deciding to leave the Schwinn at home, I caught sight of a large banner hanging off the school. “BRAEFORTH WELCOMES OUR TADPOLES” 

I wondered what it meant. Was I a tadpole I wondered? I wanted to ask Jean, but being the older sister, in typical fashion did not want her younger brother cramping her style. She had disappeared from the house about half an hour earlier than myself and was nowhere to be seen. Come to think of it, since we had moved in we had hardly hung out or spoken. Especially since I was hanging out with Rhonda in the evenings. Oh well, I mused, sisters, what are you going to do.  

Turns out, I was a tadpole. All but the final year seniors were. Seniors though were just seniors. The high school teams, whether it be basketball, football, or even chess were all  The Mighty Toads. I thought it was weird and the mascot looked grotesque. There was a rally right at the start where this poor kid had to gambol about in this hideous, homemade green toad suit, looking rather pathetic. Yet, the kids ate it up. They were pumped. I was utterly amazed at the spirit these kids had for both the school and it’s mascot. I sat alone on the bleachers looking around wide-eyed as these teenagers whooped and cheered for Braeforth High and its’ Mighty Toads. The band marched out onto the gym floor and blasted ‘Jeremiah Was A Bullfrog‘ by Three Dog Night. I figured it was probably hard to come up with an excellent toad song. 

What a weird school! In the main lobby, there was even a fountain, much like you’d see in a shopping mall. It was stocked with large, gross looking tadpoles by the janitor. I learned in Biology class that the dissection of frogs had been removed completely from the curriculum. This place loved their amphibians. For all of that, however, it seemed like a pretty decent place with motivated students. I thought it was quirky but neat. Jean didn’t like it so much. She claimed the student body was made up of creeps. 

We were all pretty much settled in though after that first week of school. I hadn’t had a chance to see Rhonda, so by the time Friday rolled around, I was anxious to get out of the house. We met up as usual at the barn. It was getting cooler so we huddled up together under a blanket watching the stars. She was curious about how I liked the school. 

“Bunch of stupid toads! How crazy is that?” She exclaimed. “What did you think?” 

I said I thought it was kind of weird, but just fun; in good spirits. 

“You’d think so, yes you would. Well you’d be surprised. There’s so much more to it than that, but I don’t know if I should tell you.” 

“Tell me what?” 

“Well, maybe instead I can show you! It is Friday night so I can. Let me explain first, but you’ve got to believe me it’s all real. Every bit of what I have got to tell you. Do you agree to be serious?” She took a draw on her cigarette, as I nodded and then she began. “Well, you know that quarry you were so interested in? It was busy as hell up to nineteen thirty seven. That hole out there was deep. Real deep, and the thing about Vermont stone is that they’re old. Older than we can imagine, like a folded up time capsule that this town dug down into. The story goes that they just kept digging deeper and deeper, until one night as the town lay sleeping in their beds, there was an earthquake. Just a mild one, mind you, but it was enough.” 

“The next morning, the town awoke and found that the quarry was flooding. There wasn’t anything they could do. Just dark water swirling and coming up from deep inside the earth, filling up their precious hole. The town began to fade immediately. People packed up and began to leave. No one noticed anything else strange going on around here right away. They just felt bad the town was dying. Then one day someone came across some bones. They were scattered, all around that quarry. All kinds of animal bones. Something was eating them. That water carried up something else from that time capsule and it was getting itself fed now. Not much was said, people just wondered. It wasn’t much more than a rumor at first. Then the war came. World War Two changed the face and people of the town even more. It was during that time though that something even more weird happened.” 

I admit I was feeling pretty funny, listening to Rhonda with disbelief on my face. She looked at me and stood up. 

“I’ll tell you the rest on the way. We’re going to take a walk out to the quarry.” She picked up the lantern. “But you better keep it quiet - or else. I am not getting caught out there on account of you!” 

We stepped out into the moonlight. The air was a little chill with the end of summer. We began to walk and as we did, she continued. “So, that thing in the pond. Well, you might guess. Folks said it was a giant toad. Maybe it was a toad, or maybe something else from back in time, but toad suits as good as anything. It’s there all right, as sure as I am telling you. There came a time, during the war years, the town was really losing. Families disappearing, men dying in places no one had ever heard of. That’s when Mike’s father stepped in. Yeah, Mike that your father works with. His father was just as greasy, and limp and gross as his son is today. I know you know what I mean. He lived out, on the edge of town. He was a lawyer too, and a thief, and a few other things is the way I heard it. He heard the rumors about that quarry and he had a pig he was keeping, raising to slaughter. One night, as the moon was getting full, this time of year, something came out of that pond and dragged off the pig. He awoke to it’s screams as it was dragged off in terror, death on it’s way. Story goes he followed the trail from the pig pen down to the water and saw this creature, a giant toad eating the pig.” 

“Sounds pretty far fetched though.” I interjected. 

“Yes, it does, but” She turned to look at me, “here’s the thing. It’s not just some urban legend. It’s all true, I swear. So Mikes dad, Arthur freaked out. He got it into his head that this thing was a deity he had heard of somewhere in his past. He believed it needed to be appeased or it would return for more than a pig, and the town would be destroyed. So he began to, along with some of the other local farmers, feed it. They took it in turns to provide different things; a pig here a cow there. It became a cycle through the year and as they spent more and more time at the quarry, they became different men.” 

We continued walking and I didn’t know really what to say so I just kept listening. I mean, what do you say when someone tells you that kind of thing? She went on, “I think the thing changes people. Like if you get exposed over time. Maybe it isn’t a deity, but it has a special power that you can’t deny. I think it was calling to you from the day you arrived in town. That calling out it does, well that changes too. You may not believe any of this right now but that thing talks to people. Not in words like we do, but it communicates in your head and you don’t notice at first. Those farmers, began to feed it and those feedings became more and more ritualistic. They changed in other ways, becoming sly and queer. You see it in Arthur’s son Mike the most. He’s odd and toad-like in his own way.” 

“I thought he’s just one of those guys you sort of feel sorry for, like pathetic.” I said. 

“Oh no, not at all, not him! He’s like one of their leaders now. It’s like a cult. They come together at the quarry. The leaders are pretty much the sons and daughters of the original ones that fed the thing. They treat it  like a religion and Bohruk is their god. They call it Bohruk and claim it has a message for the children of Eve. They hear it in their dreams and it calls to all of us from the quarry.” 

I admit I felt it. I knew that something had been pulling me to that quarry each day, like the vague distant buzzing of a bee you hear walking through a field. “If it has possessed everyone in the town and it’s in their brains, what makes you special? I mean why aren’t you affected?” 

“I am different. It’s a small town and surprisingly, I am the one epileptic. I have what’s called focal seizures. I take medication for them, but every know and then I have a seizure. Focal seizures occur in part of my brain and there is an electrical anomaly in my head is how I think of it. I think this spot prevents me from hearing Bohruk in the way others do. I’m aware of it, but I can just tune it out and I can’t comprehend it. Once, it got very strong, like it was trying to force it’s way in and I passed out. I woke up on my bedroom floor with a headache and a nosebleed. So, I know it’s aware of me some of the time.” 

I was trying to piece it all together now. “But what is the message? What does it want the people to do for it?” 

“Feed it, worship it. I keep my ear to the ground so I know what’s going on, but I keep away from them too. They’ve been getting ready for tonight. In case you haven’t noticed we are walking to the quarry now. There’s something now they all believe. Bohruk wants a special ritual tonight to open a portal. They’re all convinced that by completing some kind of spell, a gate will open to a place that Bohruk came from long ago. I listened to my mom’s conversations. Bohruk claims it is from another dimension long, long ago and it has others that want to come through to Earth.” 

I was trying hard to believe, but at the same time part of my brain was screaming how ridiculous this all was, another part could feel the pull of the quarry and a buzz inside my mind that was forming the germ of some strange intent. We trod across the grass and gravel as we approached the quarry. I began to discern sounds from ahead like a song or chant.  

“Keep low, we don’t want to get caught now. Concentrate on me, don’t let it get to you. Stay close.” Rhonda whispered and pulled me along behind her as she walked a path that ran along the top of the cliff, where we would have the vantage point over everything below in the quarry. I wanted to leave now, but Rhonda had my hand. Whatever parasite had latched onto my thoughts wanted me to come to it, be one with it and be part of it’s plan. I was sweating, resisting her as we reached the top of the cliff face made as stone had been dug away over the ages. Rhonda grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me to see the scene below. 

“Look!” She hissed, just above a whisper. Below was a mass of people. Townsfolk dressed in robes, just like some kind of unreal monks in a cheesy cult film. They swayed as they stood, holding aloft lights. It looked more bizarre when I realized some held up cell phones, took pictures, or waved glow sticks in a modern, twisted take on everything. They gathered at the water’s edge before a big block of granite serving as a kind of makeshift altar. I could see Mrs. Biggs, looking more crone-like than usual standing beside Mike with a long knife in her hands pointed upwards. What surprised me though, was my family beside them, and my parents holding onto Jean’s arms as she twisted about struggling to run away. She was crying and I could hear her screams through that buzzing in my head. The water in the quarry hole began to seethe and shift, become turbulent as something underneath rose towards the surface. 

As Rhonda spoke I could also hear it’s plan and I knew her words to be true. “It wants to do the ritual tonight. It wants to bring the others. It wants to do that spell tonight, but for some reason it needs virgin blood. I don’t know why. It’s been waiting a long time. When my mother got pregnant with me, it was because she knew she had to escape. The day we met, I had lost my virginity the night before. I met a trucker out by the interstate, but I had him bring me straight here, so it would know and I would be safe after. It has waited so long. It’s desperate now.” 

Rhonda was pulling something out from the waistband of her jeans. I hadn’t noticed it before; the gun. I could see the creature breaking from the water dripping with slime and like a giant brackish, yellow-eyed toad filled with the knowledge of another dark dimension it craved to connect with our own. I could hear it in my head, strong and clear and knew the truth of it’s intent, but what could I do? Rhonda was staring into my eyes, bringing me back, “Look, we have one shot here, but we need to work together if you want to save your sister and the rest of everything.”