"Yes," she agreed, "and I feel like a horse"s a.s.s. I always feel like a horse"s a.s.s when I see the way they look at us. At me."
"Well," he said, "it"s only once every seven years. And it has to be done just that way. Because - "
"Because it"s part of the ritual," she said glumly.
"Ayuh. It"s the ritual."
As if agreeing it was so, the dog flipped up his tail and farted once more.
The woman booted it and then turned to the old man with her hands clamped on her hips. "That is the stinkiest mutt in four towns, Henry Eden!"
The dog arose with a grunt and staggered down the porch stairs, pausing only long enough to favor Laura Stanton with a reproachful gaze.
"He can"t help it," Eden said.
She sighed, looking up the road after the Ford. "It"s too bad," she said. "They seem like such nice people."
"Nor can we help that," Henry Eden said, and began to roll another smoke.
So the Grahams ended up eating dinner at a clam-stand after all. They found one in the neighboring town of Woolwich ("Home of the scenic Wonderview Motel," John pointed out to Elise in a vain effort to raise a smile) and sat at a picnic table under an old, overspreading blue spruce. The clam-stand was in sharp, almost jarring contrast to the buildings on Willow"s Main Street. The parking lot was nearly full (most of the cars, like theirs, had out-of-state licence plates), and yelling kids with ice cream on their faces chased after one another while their parents strolled about, slapped blackflies, and waited for their numbers to be announced over the loudspeaker. The stand had a fairly wide menu. In fact, John thought, you could have just about anything you wanted, as long as it wasn"t too big to fit in a deep-fat fryer.
"I don"t know if I can spend two days in that town, let alone two months," Elise said. "The bloom is off the rose for this mother"s daughter, Johnny."
"It was a joke, that"s all. The kind the natives like to play on the tourists. They just went too far with it. They"re probably kicking themselves for that right now."
"They looked serious," she said. "How am I supposed to go back there and face that old man after that?""
"I wouldn"t worry about it - judging from his cigarettes, he"s reached the stage of life where he"s meeting everyone for the first time. Even his oldest friends."
Elise tried to control the twitching corners of her mouth, then gave up and burst out laughing. "You"re evil!"
"Honest, maybe, but not evil. I won"t say he had Alzheimer"s, but he did look as if he might need a roadmap to find his way to the bathroom."
"Where do you suppose everyone else was? The town looked totally deserted."
"Bean supper at the Grange or a card-party at the Eastern Star, probably," John said, stretching. He peeked into her clam basket. "You didn"t eat much, love."
"Love wasn"t very hungry."
"I tell you it was just a joke" he said, taking her hands. "Lighten up."
"You"re really, really sure that"s all it was?"
"Really-really. I mean, hey - every seven years it rains toads in Willow, Maine? It sounds like an outtake from a Steven Wright monologue."
She smiled wanly. "It doesn"t rain," she said, "it pours."
"They subscribe to the old fisherman"s credo, I guess - if you"re going to tell one, tell a whopper. When I was a kid at sleep-away camp, it used to be snipe hunts. This really isn"t much different. And when you stop to think about it, it really isn"t that surprising."
"What isn"t?"
"That people who make most of their yearly income dealing with summer people should develop a summer-camp mentality."
"That woman didn"t act like it was a joke. I"ll tell you the truth, Johnny - she sort of scared me."
John Graham"s normally pleasant face grew stern and hard. The expression did not look at home on his face, but neither did it look faked or insincere.
"I know," he said, picking up their wrappings and napkins and plastic baskets. "And there"s going to be an apology made for that. I find foolishness for the sake of foolishness agreeable enough, but when someone scares my wife - h.e.l.l, they scared me a little, too - I draw the line. Ready to go back?"
"Can you find it again?"
He grinned, and immediately looked more like himself. "I left a trail of breadcrumbs."
"How wise you are, my darling," she said, and got up. She was smiling again, and John was glad to see it. She drew a deep breath - it did wonders for the front of the blue chambray work-shirt she was wearing - and let it out. "The humidity seems to have dropped."
"Yeah." John deposited their waste into a trash basket with a left-handed hook shot and then winked at her. "So much for rainy season."
But by the time they turned onto the Hempstead Road, the humidity had returned, and with a vengeance. John felt as if his own tee-shirt had turned into a clammy ma.s.s of cobweb clinging to his chest and back. The sky, now turning a delicate shade of evening primrose, was still clear, but he felt that, if he"d had a straw, he could have drunk directly from the air.
There was only one other house on the road, at the foot of the long hill with the Hempstead Place at the top. As they drove past it, John saw the silhouette of a woman standing motionless at one of the windows and looking out at them.
"Well, there"s your friend Milly"s great-aunt," John said. "She sure was a sport to call the local crazies down at the general store and tell them we were coming. I wonder if they would have dragged out the whoopee cushions and joy-buzzers and chattery teeth if we"d stayed a little longer."
"That dog had his own built-in joy-buzzer."
John laughed and nodded.
Five minutes later they were turning into their own driveway. It was badly overgrown with weeds and dwarf bushes, and John intended to take care of that little situation before the summer got much older. The Hempstead Place itself was a rambling country farmhouse, added to by succeeding generations whenever the need - or maybe just the urge - to do some building happened to strike. A barn stood behind it, connected to the house by three rambling, zig-zag sheds. In this flush of early summer, two of the three sheds were almost buried in fragrant drifts of honeysuckle.
It commanded a gorgeous view of the town, especially on a clear night like this one. John wondered briefly just how it could be so clear when the humidity was so high. Elise joined him in front of the car and they stood there for a moment, arms around each other"s waists, looking at the hills, which rolled gently off in the direction of Augusta, losing themselves in the shadows of evening.
"It"s beautiful," she murmured.
"And listen," he said.
There was a marshy area of reeds and high gra.s.s fifty yards or so behind the barn, and in it a chorus of frogs sang and thumped and snapped the elastics G.o.d had for some reason stretched in their throats.
"Well," she said, "the frogs are all present and accounted for, anyway."
"No toads, though." He looked up at the clear sky, in which Venus had now opened her coldly burning eye. "There they are, Elise! Up there! Clouds of toads!"
She giggled.
" "Tonight in the small town of Willow," " he intoned, " "a cold front of toads met a warm front of newts, and the result was - " "
She elbowed him. "You," she said. "Let"s go in."
They went in. And did not pa.s.s Go. And did not collect two hundred dollars.
They went directly to bed.
Elise was startled out of a satisfying drowse an hour or so later by a thump on the roof. She got up on her elbows. "What was that, Johnny?"
"Huzz," John said, and turned over on his side.
Toads, she thought, and giggled . . . but it was a nervous giggle. She got up and went to the window, and before she looked for anything, which might have fallen on the ground, she found herself looking up at the sky.
It was still cloudless, and now shot with a trillion spangled stars. She looked at them, for a moment hypnotized by their simple silent beauty.
Thud.
She jerked back from the window and looked up at the ceiling. Whatever it was, it had hit the roof just overhead.
"John! Johnny! Wake up!"
"Huh? What?" He sat up, his hair all tangled tufts and clock-springs.
"It"s started," she said, and giggled shrilly. "The rain of frogs."
"Toads," he corrected. "Ellie, what are you talking ab - "
Thud-thud.
He looked around, then swung his feet out of bed.
"This is ridiculous," he said softly and angrily.
"What do you m - "
Thud-CRASH! There was a tinkle of gla.s.s downstairs.
"Oh, G.o.ddam," he said, getting up and yanking on his blue-jeans. "Enough. This is just . . . f.u.c.king . . . enough."
Several soft thuds. .h.i.t the side of the house and the roof. She cringed against him, frightened now. " "What do you mean?""
" "I mean that crazy woman and probably the old man and some of their friends are out there throwing things at the house," he said, "and I am going to put a stop to it right now. Maybe they"ve held onto the custom of shivareeing the new folks in this little town, but - "
THUD! SMASH! From the kitchen.
"G.o.d-d.a.m.n!" John yelled, and ran out into the hall.
"Don"t leave me!" Elise cried, and ran after him.
He flicked up the hallway light-switch before plunging downstairs. Soft thumps and thuds struck the house in an increasing rhythm, and Elise had time to think, How many people from town are out there? How many does it take to do that? And what are they throwing? Rocks wrapped in pillowcases?
John reached the foot of the stairs and went into the living room. There was a large window in there, which gave on the same view, which they had admired earlier. The window was broken. Shards and splinters of gla.s.s lay scattered across the rug. He started toward the window, meaning to yell something at them about how he was going to get his shotgun. Then he looked at the broken gla.s.s again, remembered that his feet were bare, and stopped. For a moment he didn"t know what to do. Then he saw a dark shape lying in the broken gla.s.s - the rock one of the imbecilic, interbred b.a.s.t.a.r.ds had used to break the window, he a.s.sumed - and saw red. He might have charged to the window anyway, bare feet or no bare feet, but just then the rock twitched.
That"s no rock, he thought. That"s a - "John?" Elise asked. The house rang with those soft thuds now. It was as if they were being bombarded with large, rotten-soft hailstones. "John, what is it?"
"A toad," he said stupidly. He was still looking at the twitching shape in the litter of broken gla.s.s, and spoke more to himself than to his wife.
He raised his eyes and looked out the window. What he saw out there struck him mute with horror and incredulity. He could no longer see the hills or the horizon - h.e.l.l, he could barely see the barn, and that was less than forty feet away.
The air was stuffed with falling shapes.
Three more of them came in through the broken window. One landed on the floor, not far from its twitching mate. It came down on a sharp sliver of window-gla.s.s and black fluid burst from its body in thick ropes.
Elise screamed.
The other two caught in the curtains, which began to twist and jerk as if in a fitful breeze. One of them managed to disentangle itself. It struck the floor and then hopped toward John.
He groped at the wall with a hand, which felt as if it were no part of him at all. His fingers stumbled across the light-switch and flipped it up.
The thing hopping across the gla.s.s-littered floor toward him was a toad, but it was also not a toad. Its green-black body was too large, too lumpy. Its black-and-gold eyes bulged like freakish eggs. And bursting from its mouth, unhinging the jaw, was a bouquet of large, needle-sharp teeth.
It made a thick croaking noise and bounded at John as if on springs. Behind it, more toads were falling in through the window. The ones which struck the floor had either died outright or been crippled, but many others - too many others - used the curtains as a safety-net and tumbled to the floor unharmed.
"Get out of here!" John yelled to his wife, and kicked at the toad which - it was insane, but it was true - was attacking him. It did not flinch back from his foot but sank that mouthful of crooked needles first over and then into his toes. The pain was immediate, fiery, and immense. Without thinking, he made a half-turn and kicked the wall as hard as he could. He felt his toes break, but the toad broke as well, splattering its black blood onto the wainscoting in a half-circle, like a fan. His toes had become a crazy road-sign, pointing in all directions at once.
Elise was standing frozen in the hall doorway. She could now hear window-gla.s.s shattering all over the house. She had put on one of John"s tee-shirts after they had finished making love, and now she was clutching the neck of it with both hands. The air was full of ugly croaking sounds.
"Get out, Elise!" John screamed. He turned, shaking his b.l.o.o.d.y foot. The toad which had bitten him was dead, but its huge and improbable teeth were still caught in his flesh like a tangle of fishhooks. This time he kicked at the air, like a man punting a football, and the toad finally flew free.
The faded living-room carpet was now covered with bloated, hopping bodies. And they were all hopping at them.
John ran to the doorway. His foot came down on one of the toads and burst it open. His heel skidded in the cold jelly, which popped out of its body, and he almost fell. Elise relinquished her death-grip on the neck of her tee-shirt and grabbed him. They stumbled into the hall together and John slammed the door, catching one of the toads in the act of hopping through. The door cut it in half. The top half twitched and juddered on the floor, its toothy, black-lipped mouth opening and closing, its black-and-golden pop-eyes goggling at them.
Elise clapped her hands to the sides of her face and began to wail hysterically. John reached out to her. She shook her head and cringed away from him, her hair falling over her face.
The sound of the toads. .h.i.tting the roof was bad, but the croakings and chirrupings were worse, because these latter sounds were coming from inside the house . . . and all over the house. He thought of the old man sitting on the porch of the General Mercantile in his rocker, calling after them: Might want to close y "shutters.
Christ, why didn"t I believe him?
And, on the heels of that: How was I supposed to believe him? Nothing in my whole life prepared me to believe him!
And, below the sound of toads thudding onto the ground outside and toads squashing themselves to guts and goo on the roof, he heard a more ominous sound: the chewing, splintering sound of the toads in the living room starting to bite their way through the door. He could actually see it settling more firmly against its lunges as more and more toads crowded their weight against it. He turned around and saw toads hopping down the main staircase by the dozens.
"Elise!" He grabbed at her. She kept shrieking and pulling away from him. A sleeve of the tee-shirt tore free. He looked at the ragged chunk of cloth in his hand with perfect stupidity for a moment and then let it flutter down to the floor.
"Elise, G.o.ddammit!"
She shrieked and drew back again.
Now the first toads had reached the hall floor and were hopping eagerly toward them. There was a brittle tinkle as the fanlight over the door shattered. A toad whizzed through it, struck the carpet, and lay on its back, mottled pink belly exposed, webbed feet twitching in the air.
He grabbed his wife, shook her. "We have to go down cellar! We"ll be safe in the cellar!"
"No!" Elise screamed at him. Her eyes were giant floating zeros, and he understood she was not refusing his idea of retreating to the cellar but refusing everything.