My horror novella TOADHEAD arrives in just one week and I’ve been sharing the opening chapters. You can read the previous chapters here:
With the toad now firmly at home on top of his head, Teddy Doucet’s lonely world begins to get nastier, and the toad’s appetites become more perverse…
Chapter 3
It was an animal scream. A high-pitched shriek of surprise and pain which degraded into a protracted, gravelly yowl. It was Caligula. Teddy rolled from his cot and scrambled out of the laundry room. The hallway was truly dark now. It was night once more. He had slept through the whole day.
Caligula screamed again. It was coming from the back of the house, from the kitchen. Teddy stumbled forwards. He’d never heard Caligula make noises like that before. What if she had taken some stray buckshot from one of the neighbouring farms? Who knew what she got up to when she went wandering; he wouldn’t put it past her to find her way into a chicken coop or two.
The curtainless kitchen was bathed in moonlight the colour of soured milk, but even so, Teddy couldn’t make out the shape of the cat amongst the piles of hoarded clutter. He hit the light switch and squinted, holding his hand to his brow like a visor, and he realised, with a numb kind of relief, that the toad was no longer perched upon his head. The awful sounds were coming from the other side of the kitchen table and Teddy rushed around it. Caligula was lying on her side. Her breathing was shallow, as if she had been sedated, and he could see her ribs beneath her mangy orange fur. There was a small amount of blood and it was bright against the tiled floor in this harsh light. Laying across her head –
“No!” Teddy rushed to his cat.
The toad’s mouth was over Caligula’s face. It was palpating her cheeks with its front feet like a baby suckling at the teat. There were beads of white fluid coming from glands that were set behind each of the toad’s eyes. The sticky secretions were dribbling onto the old cat’s ratty fur. Without a thought of preventing that stuff from getting onto his own skin, Teddy grabbed the toad around its squidgy belly and yanked it off.
Caligula’s rumbling growl rose into a new scream, and as Teddy pulled the toad free he understood why. The toad had attached its tongue to her eyeball, which was already bulging and weeping blood. As Teddy tore the toad away, the eyeball came loose from its socket and the toad sucked it straight into its fleshy mouth. Now that Caligula was free of her tormentor, she scrabbled to regain her feet and fled. The image of her ruined face – scooped out red pulp against bloody orange fur – strobed in front of Teddy’s eyes whenever he blinked, like the bright after-image of a flash bulb.
He had a firm hold of the toad, so much so that he could feel it swallowing Caligula’s mashed up eyeball. He dropped the creature in disgust and it made a dull plop as it hit the floor. Teddy’s palm was smeared in whatever crap it had been secreting, and as it crawled away into the shadows he rubbed his hand on his jeans vigorously, then he went to the sink where he washed it three times over. By the time he was done, his hand was all pins and needles and he was feeling floaty and light-headed.
He searched beneath the kitchen table and behind the assorted boxes and bags which cluttered the room, but he couldn’t find the fat devil. He moved into the hall and his head swam. There was no sign of the toad here either. He called out to the cat, hoping to find her as well, so that he could assess her injuries.
An unbidden memory came to him of a time when he and George had gone hunting in the wooded areas around the farm. Their father had given them a BB gun and told them to “bag some critters.” His parting order had been, “Don’t come back until you’re both men.”
After what had seemed like hours of tramping through the leaf litter, George finally spied a squirrel, drew a bead on it and fired. He hit it, more through luck than skill, and they ran over to where it had fallen. George had shot it right in the eye and the mess coming out of the hole had been… well, it had been loud. There was no other way that Teddy could describe it. The red and grey blobs of matter were loud against the brown and orange leaves. The squirrel twitched for a few seconds and then it was still. They didn’t speak and Teddy began to cry when George picked it up by its tail and put the body in a sack. Teddy refused to take the gun from his brother. Instead, they spent another couple of hours searching through the undergrowth until they found a dead bird; a stiff-winged crow. George put a pellet in the bird’s body, bagged it, and they agreed to tell their father that Teddy had shot it.
Teddy hadn’t thought about that for years.
The light from the hallway spilled into the reception room and Teddy could see a dark blot on his mother’s reading chair by the window. He scrambled into the room, so woozy now that he fell to his knees and had to proceed on all fours. The toad was sitting on her chair.
“Get off that!” he said, “that’s not yours!” The toad watched as Teddy crawled across the faded circular rug. Its throat was making those repulsive, silent gulping movements. Teddy was kneeling in front of the chair now and everything was swimming. His hand had gone numb, the one that had touched the toad's gunky secretions. He placed both hands on the seat cushion to steady himself and he could feel tears of frustration stinging his eyes. “Please,” he said. The toad was producing more of its toxins, lactating poison, as if daring him to touch it again. Teddy was crying freely now. “Please,” he said. “Please.”
Steadily and deliberately, the toad pushed itself up and began to walk towards him. Teddy watched in a daze as it climbed onto the back of his numb hand and moved up his arm. “Yes,” he said quietly as it clambered onto his shoulder and then up onto his bowed head. That fat little thing was back where it had started. And its weight there… so help him, it comforted him. “Yes,” he said again, even quieter than before.
From its perch, the toad began to complain. It was a wet and insistent noise.
Teddy understood what the thing wanted now. Just before he blacked out, Teddy understood that the toad was still hungry.
***
When he came to, Teddy was still on his hands and knees, only now he was somewhere outside. It was freezing and he was digging in the dirt with cold hands. The toad sat heavy on his head. It was still night, but the sky was cloudless and the moon was bright enough that the words on the gravestone in front of him were clear.
In loving memory of
a belove wife and mother
MARGARET TANNERMAN
May 13 1891
August 7 1959
He was back in Plainview Cemetery and he was shivering. His hands were working away in the soil and he watched them as if they were something separate from himself. The cold air gave him a kind of detached clarity. This grave was only a few days old, that was why the soil here wasn’t hard. That was why he could break it up with his hands.
He knew that his mother’s resting place was somewhere nearby, with his brother’s next to it. It was only an idle thought, though, as he pawed through the topsoil of Margaret Tannerman’s grave. His fingers brushed the wriggling body of a fat earthworm and the toad mewled. Teddy grabbed the worm and it coiled in his fingers as he fed it to the toad, which snatched it eagerly and slurped it down. Teddy soon came across a black, glistening slug, and that went straight into the toad’s mouth as well. Then he found a clutch of snails on the rear of the headstone, all stuck down for the night. He twisted them off the cold stone and fed them to the toad, one at a crunchy time.
The eating noises of the contented toad calmed him. The still of the cemetery in the moonlight calmed him as well. It was a shame that day would inevitably follow night out here and the outside world would insist itself upon him once again.
Teddy let out a long breath. It felt as if he was letting go of something he’d been holding inside for a long time. His shoulders dropped and the tightness in his neck melted away. It was peaceful here. The air was rich with the smell of freshly tilled soil. He scooped up a handful of grave dirt, pressed it to his face and inhaled greedily. He held the soothing smell inside for as long as he could, but inevitably he began to get dizzy and had to release it.
The toad was asleep now. It was finally sated. Teddy patted down the earth in front of him so that no one would be able to tell it had been disturbed. Then he got to his feet, quietly and carefully, and made his way back through the headstones to his pickup. The toad slept as he navigated the dusty back roads. He would be home soon, and even though the outside world would be coming back to buzzing, intrusive life, he had built a bulwark against it behind his front door. Sometimes he felt as if he might even be able to hold time at bay within those walls, and if that was true - if he could make it true - well, what might be possible then?
You can pre-order the eBook of TOADHEAD now and on 25 July it will be available in paperback, eBook and Kindle Unlimited through Amazon.
Amazon US order here
Amazon UK order here
As a cat owner, this one was hard to read! I am looking forward to reading the rest, though. :)