He scrabbled at the wall in the dark, and his fingers found the raised cylinder, which was the old-fashioned toggle light-switch. He flipped it, and that was when Elise began to scream again. A toad had gotten tangled in her hair. It croaked and twisted and turned and bit at her neck, rolling itself into something, which resembled a large, misshapen curler.
Elise lurched to her feet and ran in a large circle, miraculously avoiding a tumble over the boxes, which had been stacked and stored down here. She struck one of the cellar’s support posts, rebounded, then turned and banged the back of her head twice, briskly, against it. There was a thick gushing sound, a squirt of black fluid, and then the toad fell out of her hair, tumbling down the back of her tee-shirt, leaving dribbles of ichor.
She screamed, and the lunacy in that sound chilled John’s blood. He half-ran, half-stumbled down the cellar stairs and enfolded her in his arms. She fought him at first and then surrendered.
Her screams gradually dissolved into steady weeping.
Then, over the soft thunder of the toads striking the house and the grounds, they heard the croaking of the toads, which had fallen down here. She drew away from him, her eyes shifting wildly from side to side in their shiny-white sockets.
‘Where are they?’ she panted. Her voice was hoarse, almost a bark, from all the screaming she had done. ‘Where are they, John?’
But they didn’t have to look; the toads had already seen them, and came hopping eagerly toward them.
The Grahams retreated, and John saw a rusty shovel leaning against the wall. He grabbed it and beat the toads to death with it as they came. Only one got past him. It leaped from the floor to a box and from the box it jumped at Elise, catching the cloth of her shirt in its teeth and dangling there between her breasts, legs kicking. ’Stand still!’ John barked at her. He dropped the shovel, took two steps forward, grabbed the toad, and hauled it off her shirt, It took a chunk of cloth with it. The cotton strip hung from one of its fangs as it twisted and pulsed and wriggled in John’s hands. Its hide was warty, dry but horridly warm and somehow busy. He snapped his hands into fists, popping the toad. Blood and slime squirted out from between his fingers.
Less than a dozen of the little monsters had actually made it through the cellar door, and soon they were all dead. John and Elise clung to each other, listening to the steady rain of toads outside.
John looked over at the low cellar windows. They were packed and dark, and he suddenly saw the house as it must look from the outside, buried in a drift of squirming, lunging, leaping toads. ‘We’ve got to block the windows,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Their weight is going to break them, and if that happens, they’ll pour in.’
‘With what?’ Elise asked in her hoarse bark of a voice. ‘What can we use?’
He looked around and saw several sheets of plywood, elderly and dark, leaning against one wall. Not much, perhaps, but something.
‘That,’ he said. ‘Help me to break it up into smaller pieces.’
They worked quickly and frantically. There were only four windows in the cellar, and their very narrowness had caused the panes to hold longer than the larger windows upstairs had done. They were just finishing the last when they heard the glass of the first shatter behind the plywood… but the plywood held.
They staggered into the middle of the cellar again, John limping on his broken foot. From the top of the stairway came the sound of the toads eating their way through the cellar door.
‘What do we do if they eat all the way through it?’ Elise whispered.
‘I don’t know,’ he said… and that was when the door of the coal-chute, unused for years but still intact, suddenly swung open under the weight of all the toads which had fallen or hopped onto it, and hundreds of them poured out in a high-pressure jet.
This time Elise could not scream. She had damaged her vocal chords too badly for that.
It did not last long for the Grahams in the cellar after the coal-chute door gave way, but until it was over, John Graham screamed quite adequately for both of them.
By midnight, the downpour of toads in Willow had slackened off to a mild, croaking drizzle.
At one-thirty in the morning, the last toad fell out of the dark, starry sky, landed in a pine tree near the lake, hopped to the ground, and disappeared into the night. It was over for another seven years.
Around quarter past five, the first light began to creep into the sky and over the land. Willow was buried beneath a writhing, hopping, complaining carpet of toads. The buildings on Main Street had lost their angles and corners; everything was rounded and hunched and twitching. The sign on the highway, which read: WELCOME TO WILLOW, MAINE, THE FRIENDLY PLACE! Looked as if someone had put about thirty shotgun shells through it. Flying toads, of course, had made the holes. The sign in front of the General Mercantile, which advertised: ITALIAN SANDWICHES PIZZA GROCS FISHING LICENCES had been knocked over. Toads played leapfrog on and around it. There was a small toad convention going on atop each of the gas-pumps at Donny’s Sunoco. Two toads sat upon the slowly swinging iron arm of the weathervane atop the Willow Stove Shop like small misshapen children on a merry-go-round. At the lake, the few floats which had been put out this early (only the hardiest swimmers dared the waters of Lake Willow before July 4th, however, toads or no toads) were piled high with toads, and the fish were going crazy with so much food almost within reach. Every now and then there was a plip! plip! sound as one or two of the toads jostling for place on the floats were knocked off and some hungry trout or salmon’s breakfast was served. The roads in and out of town – there were a lot of them for such a small town, as Henry Eden had said – were paved with toads. The power was out for the time being; free-falling toads had broken the power-lines in any number of places. Most of the gardens were ruined, but Willow wasn’t much of a farming community, anyway. Several people kept fairly large dairy herds, but they had all been safely tucked away for the night. Dairy farmers in Willow knew all about rainy season and had no wish to lose their milkers to the hordes of leaping, carnivorous toads. What in the hell would you tell the insurance company?
As the light brightened over the Hempstead Place, it revealed drifts of dead toads on the roof, rain-gutters that had been splintered loose by dive-bombing toads, a dooryard that was alive with toads. They hopped in and out of the barn, they stuffed the chimneys, and they hopped nonchalantly around the tires of John Graham’s Ford and sat in croaking rows on the front seat like a church congregation waiting for the services to start. Heaps of toads, mostly dead, lay in drifts against the building. Some of these drifts were six feet deep.
At 6:05, the sun cleared the horizon, and as its rays struck them, the toads began to melt.
Their skins bleached, turned white, then appeared to become transparent. Soon a vapor that gave off a vaguely swampy smell began to trail up from the bodies and little bubbly rivulets of moisture began to course down them. Their eyes fell in or fell out, depending on their positions when the sun hit them. Their skins popped with an audible sound, and for perhaps ten minutes it sounded as if champagne corks were being drawn all over Willow.
They decomposed rapidly after that, melting into puddles of cloudy white shmeg that looked like human semen. This liquid ran down the pitches of the Hempstead Place’s roof in little creeks and dripped from the eaves like pus.
The living toads died; the dead ones simply rotted to that white fluid. It bubbled briefly and then sank slowly into the ground. The earth sent up tiny ribands of steam, and for a little while every field in Willow looked like the site of a dying volcano.