Croaked (3 page)

“We’re after a different effect this time,” she said as she cinched the blindfold tight. “We’re trying to slip through the Veil between the Worlds. It’s approaching Samhain, so it’s thin anyway. And there was once a gateway here big enough to pull a lake through, so we ought to be able to locate it.”

“So why am I blindfolded?”

I jumped at the sudden touch of her lips on mine. “So you can get lost. You can’t
find
the path to the Land of the Fae, you have to stumble across it.”

I vaguely knew the legends of people lost in the woods wandering into a land of elves and faeries, but I’d always thought of them as European stories; the idea that you could do it on a country road in Tennessee struck me as a little strange.

Tanna twined her fingers through mine and gingerly pulled me off the road into the woods, the blind leading the blindfolded. The croaking grew louder as we wandered through the forest. I felt the presence of trees all around me, but managed to avoid smacking headfirst into any of them. In a few moments I was, in fact, pretty thoroughly disoriented.

Tanna suddenly squeezed my hand, at about the same moment my feet squelched into mud. I smelled pond water and algae. “I think we’re here,” she whispered.

I removed the blindfold.

We stood at the edge of a dark, placid lake bordered by tall pines, their branches twinkling with fireflies. Above me the stars glowed unnaturally bright through the clear air. A bright full moon hung just above the tree line and cast its glow over everything. And the amphibian cacophony was deafening.

“I thought it was supposed to be a dark moon,” I said.

“It is back in our world,” Tanna breathed, almost giddy. “And look--there are fireflies.”

Fireflies magnify her psychic powers, hence her Craft name. They also gifted her with genuine, visual sight in spite of her congenital blindness, so in their presence she saw things as well as I did. Maybe better.

“And just where is ‘here?’” I asked.

“Why, where do you think? We’re in the Land of the Fae.” She giggled. “Okay, not really, we’ve actually just shifted to another dimension of reality. It’s no less or more real than our own, just different.”

“If it’s so easy, why don’t more people do it?”

“It’s not so easy. I’m just good.”

It was a lot warmer here, and I glanced down to unzip my jacket. Dozens of frogs clustered around my feet, and when I squinted at the ground, I saw wall-to-wall frogs packed into every available square inch.

It made me a little nervous. “Damn,” I said. “There are a lot of frogs here.”

“And that’s the man who brought them here,” Tanna said, and pointed. A rowboat moved across the lake toward us, leaving a slow shimmering wake on the ebony surface. “Kelso Mitchell, the Spiritualist who stole Salamander Lake.”

“Nope,” I said smugly.

“’Nope,’ what?”

“That’s not Kelso Mitchell.” She looked at me in surprise, not an easy look to get out of her. “Hey!” I called toward the man in the boat. “Mr. Vantassel!”

“Wait--who?” Tanna almost shouted.

“Yeah, who’re y’all?” the man called back. The light was too weird to make out his face, but he was a tall man, with long legs bent awkwardly in the small boat.

“We came over from Weakleyville to see how you’re doing,” I answered honestly.

The boat eased into the shallows, scraped on the bottom and stopped. “We’re doing fine here, buster. Now y’all just go back the way you came.” He leaned forward to place his oar in the bottom of the boat, and when he raised back he held a long, old-fashioned but healthy rifle.

I stepped between Tanna and the gun. “Whoa, Mr. Vantassel, take it easy. Nobody wants to hurt you.” I tried to sound casual. “Man, I think you got every frog in the world here.”

The rifle didn’t lower. “I like frogs; y’all got a problem with that?”

“Who
is
this?” Tanna demanded.

“Tanna, this-here’s Mr. Felix Vantassel.” I exaggerated my already considerable Southern accent, hoping he’d consider me just another good ol’ boy. “Back when Salamander Lake was where it was supposed to be, he ran the hatchery. Only he didn’t hatch fish, he hatched frogs. ‘The southeast’s only commercial supplier of gourmet frog legs,’ right?” That was the odd phrase I’d noticed on the sign in the faded old photo.

“Woulda cornered the market. Woulda
created
the market,” he said, and shook his head. “Didn’t work out, though. Now I just take care of the frogs. And that’s all right with me.”

Tanna, still a beat behind, said, “Then where’s Kelso Mitchell?”

“Had to kill him,” Vantassel said. “He wanted to take us back once the tornado finished up. But I like it just fine here. Got my boat, got food and water. Got my frogs. Don’t need nothin’ else. So I cut his throat. Didn’t want him bringin’ no strangers back to bother me.”

The boat drifted slightly, and the moon shone full on Vantassel’s face: triangular, with eyes that bulged over wide, thin lips. His hair frizzed away from his head, making him look like a dandelion in the moonlight.

“You’ve got
all
the frogs, Mr. Vantassel,” Tanna said. “The gate that brought you here is still open. The frogs are pouring in, and the world’s ecosystem is about to collapse from it.”

“The world’s what?”

“The natural order,” Tanna rephrased. “Frogs eat the bugs, fish eat the frogs. Without them, you’ve got too many bugs, not enough fish.”

“Don’t give me that. They breed, they leave. They go back if they want. Mitchell left the gate open so we could get back if we wanted, too.”

“But the gate’s not working right, they’re coming back messed up.” Tanna used her best therapist voice. “Mr. Vantassel, do you know how long you’ve been here?”

“Three months. Long enough to realize I don’t want company.”

Tanna took a deep breath. “Mr. Vantassel, you’ve been here over a hundred years.”

He laughed. “That’s crazy talk.”

“Is it? You’ve had a full moon every night for those three months, haven’t you? It never rains, it doesn’t get any hotter or colder. Doesn’t that seem a little strange? And really--” She waved her hands to encompass the whole lake. “--even you have to admit, this many frogs in one place is just plain unnatural.”

Vantassel frowned, and Tanna pressed on. “I know what Mitchell did: he made a bubble in time, that’s outside of real time. You have to come back with us so I can take it down.”

Vantassel’s head snapped up. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere,” he said with certainty. “And since you’re another smart-ass like Mitchell, neither are you.”

As a multi-generational redneck, I have an innate instinct for the moment another Southern male is finished talking and ready to shoot. I shoved Tanna one way and I jumped the other just as Vantassel fired, the ball making a big SPLAT in the mud between us. The recoil spun his boat slowly in place, as smoke from the blast twirled into the clear sky.

“Dang!” Vantassel shouted. The frogs croaked in sympathetic outrage.

“Stay down!” I ordered Tanna, and ran at Vantassel, betting that his rifle was a single-shot affair that would take time to reload. I splashed into the shallows and tipped the boat over; Vantassel came up swinging. I ducked and body-blocked him into the mud, surprised by his wiry strength.

Finally, though, I got him in a chokehold and twisted one arm behind his back. He couldn’t get any leverage, and struggled mightily in the knee-deep water. I glanced back at Tanna. “So now what do I do with him?”

She stared at me as if I’d suddenly turned into Elvis. Then she pointed. Not
at
me, but
behind
me.

A frog the size of a tool shed, and I’m
not
kidding, rose from the water with barely a ripple. Its slimy skin glistened, and its gigantic eyes looked down at us with amphibian disdain. As if in respect, the other frogs in the immediate area fell silent.

The great slit mouth opened wide enough to swallow the national debt, and something shot toward me. I released Vantassel and jumped aside again, as the frog’s enormous tongue sliced the air.

It smacked Vantassel right between the shoulder blades as he turned to run.

He screamed, that high-pitched panic scream you make when you know you’ve bought it, and flew backwards into that huge mouth. His screams carried through the frog’s thin skin, and the sack under its chin bulged with his struggles. Then the frog made a big swallowing motion, the screaming grew more muffled, and the frog’s throat swelled out in a huge bubble. The croak that washed over us rattled the leaves on the trees.

“Come on!” Tanna yelled. I splashed toward her, anticipating the thud of the monster’s tongue against my back, but one victim apparently satisfied it. Tanna pulled me close, and with one hand drew a circle in the air around us. “Close your eyes,” she whispered urgently, and I did, just as a great cold wind blew over us. She pulled me along behind her.

***

I didn’t open my eyes again until I felt gravel under my feet. We emerged onto Lost Lake Road at almost the exact spot we’d entered the woods earlier. The icy autumn wind cut through my wet clothes as I unlocked the car doors. “I’m going to be the hypothermia poster boy. What the hell kind of damn frog was that?”

“Something prehistoric, maybe,” Tanna said. “The lake was out of linear time, it could pull frogs from the past, the future, anywhere.” She turned back toward the woods, which she could no longer see because of the absence of fireflies. “By the Goddess, we didn’t close it. The frogs are still there. I’ll have to bring my coven out here as soon as I can; it needs more than just my magic.” She paused. “Of course, the poor frogs that are in there will be trapped. They’ll die off.”

“Well, what happens if you open it all the way up instead?”

“Then the lake comes back. That would make a mess, wouldn’t it?”

“Might. Can we get in the car now?”

The dashboard clock showed that only fifteen minutes had passed in “real” time since we’d parked. With shivering hands, I worked my car keys out of my soaked pants pocket, started the engine and turned on the heat full blast.

And of course, immediately the radio greeted us with Three Dog Night singing,
“Jeremiah was a--”

Well. You know.

~III~

THE DESCENT

A copy of my own newspaper smacked onto my desk. A jowly man in an expensive suit glowered down at me.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“Are you the editor?”

The nameplate on my desk clearly established this. “Yes, I’m Ry Tully,” I said as I stood. He didn’t offer his hand, and neither did I.

“I’m Titus Barstow, the director of the Redneck Riviera,” he snapped. “What do you think you’re trying to do?”

I stared blankly. I was good at that.

“Your story on the Descent ride,” he went on. “Flying demons, screaming skeletons. What kind of theme park do you think I run?”

Now I blinked. “The Descent?”

“We have
nothing
sacrilegious at the Redneck Riviera,” Barstow said. “I’m a Christian, a father, and a Baptist lay minister, and I would
never
condone that sort of thing. We run a family theme park, and we’re proud of that.”

“But...I talked to people when they came out,” I said weakly. “That’s what they
said
.”

“So you didn’t take the ride yourself, you just relied on hearsay? That may fly in blue states, Mr. Tully, but this is Tennessee, and we don’t accept that. Not at all!”

He stomped out in a cloud of legal threats, leaving me open-mouthed and astounded. Two seconds after the door closed behind him, I was on the phone to our lawyer.

***

“Do you have your notes from the kids you interviewed?” Alan Forbeck asked after I described the encounter. We were in his office, four doors down from my own.

“I’ve got the audio file, yes. I mean, dang, this was just the opening of some new ride. I went for Tanna’s sake, she wanted to hit the Hangman rollercoaster.”

“And why didn’t you ride the Descent?”

“They didn’t give me a free pass, and I’ll be damned if I was going to stand in line for an hour just to take some five-minute haunted house ride.”

Alan picked up the brochure and looked at it. “Is that what it is?”

“That’s what the kids I talked to said it was. I don’t know what the hell Barstow thinks it is.”

“Man, I haven’t been to the Redneck Riviera since I was a kid and my church youth group went. I’m surprised they haven’t turned it into a shopping mall.”

“I guess it’ll stick around as long as there are church youth groups willing to make the drive to Nashville.”

He unfolded the brochure. “According to this flyer, it’s ‘a ride through a futuristic nightmare’.”

“Doesn’t that sound like a haunted house ride to you?”

“Maybe. If they pursue it, though, they’ll just end up looking silly.”

“Like that’s ever stopped anybody,” I said.

***

Nothing came of Barstow’s threat, but something happened two weeks later that reminded me of the encounter.

The wire service put out a story from its Nashville bureau. A fourteen year old boy named Jere Rundle disappeared somewhere inside the Descent. He went in with three friends, and when the car returned to the start, he was gone. The Descent building and the Redneck Riviera grounds were thoroughly searched. They found nothing.

The Descent was closed while the safety measures were revamped. After all, if he’d been able to voluntarily leave the moving car, someone could just as easily fall out. The general consensus was that the boy had run away from home; nothing further was heard from him.

Until the next full moon. And from the least likely source.

***

That June, the full moon was on a night that threatened to be stormy, so Tanna’s coven, the Circle of Evening Light, met indoors at our house, specifically in her study. We had hardwood floors, and Tanna painted a permanent circle in the middle of the room. A small table served as the altar, and wax stained the floor at the four cardinal points from years of candles.

Tanna’s coven was still small that year. She, as the high priestess, was picky about who she invited into her circle. There were three other women and a man, none of whom shared either Tanna’s third-degree rank or experience. In fact, most of them were new to the Craft, learning it under her tutelage.

Most senior was Andrea Lewis, another professor at West Tennessee University. She taught, predictably enough, Woman’s Studies, and could be counted on to turn any conversation to feminism. Yet she also spent three weeks escorting young women into a clinic past screaming and ranting protestors, at a time when doctors who performed abortions were being shot and killed. That sort of bravery made the pedantry easier to take.

Sara Brine was a graduate student in comparative religion, studying some eclectic mix of archaeology and parapsychology. She was gay, and tended to be quiet and observant, two qualities I also cultivated. She missed very little, and often had the most interesting comments.

The youngest woman was Jo Slade. She was still in high school, but her parents, who had grown up on a commune, whole-heartedly supported her interest in Paganism and Wicca. She had the zeal of a convert and the beauty of a potential bikini model.

The only male was Wade Stevens. He was one of those people you’d never expect to be Pagan: he attended West Tennessee University (called “WesTN” for short) on a tennis scholarship, and looked every inch the East Coast scion of wealthy bankers that he was. He sometimes acted as Tanna’s ritual priest, and was preparing to take his own second degree.

I was not involved in the coven at all. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in the things Tanna worshipped, it was simply that I couldn’t step out of my own cynicism about the world. Wiccans and Pagans were, if nothing else, idealists, and I both envied and pitied them that.

So while the coven was meeting in her study, I sat in the living room surfing the net on my iPad. My job was ostensibly Guardian of the Circle, which meant protecting the coven with my life if necessary. Usually my sobriety wasn’t even necessary, which is why I sipped my third beer of the night.

Then the study door flew open, slammed against the wall and Tanna called, “Ry, come here!”

She’d gone to the trouble to cut herself an exit from the circle’s energy, so I knew this was important. She grabbed my hand and pulled me into her study, up to the edge of the circle; I knew better than to cross the line.

Although the lights were out, I had no trouble seeing. Dozens of fireflies, admitted through the two wide-open windows, lit the room. They perched on every available wooden surface, avoiding anything inorganic, and pulsed in unison like a slow strobe. Candles flickered in the pre-storm wind gusting from outside.

It was also very warm and humid in the study. We had air conditioning in the rest of the house, but not here. It wasn’t a problem, because Tanna’s coven met “skyclad,” i.e., naked. That could be a little disconcerting, especially since they were mostly female, but I’d gotten as used to it as I was likely to. That meant I knew where to direct my gaze to avoid either embarrassment or a slap.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim, fluctuating light. At first I couldn’t make out anything unusual. Then, like one of those 3D images that suddenly resolves when you’ve stared long enough, I saw a smoky shape that I thought at first literally
was
smoke. It didn’t billow or change direction like the smoke from the candles.

It was a person. A
ghost
.

The shape was masculine, and youthfully lean. This cloud-man lay on his side, his back to us, one hand reaching out toward the altar.

“You see it?” Tanna said softly.

“Yeah,” I said, matching her tone. The skin on my neck and arms was pebbled with goose bumps. “So you’re conjuring ghosts?”

“No, it’s nothing we did. It came to us, on its own.”

“But is it a ghost?”

“Maybe. Maybe an astral body from someone living. I’m going to try to talk to it. Everyone else is concentrating on holding the circle, so I want you to be my observer.”

The other four stood at the cardinal points, eyes closed in concentration. Tanna held a small ceremonial knife, called an
athame
, and cut a doorway in the air at the edge of the circle, just like the one she’d used to exit. She knelt by the ghostly silhouette.

“Hello,” she said softly. “I’m Lady Firefly. Why have you come here?”

The ghost-man turned slowly, as if sudden movement would dissipate him. His features were blurry and indefinite. The smoky hand reached for my wife’s face. Tanna gasped when it touched her.

“I can help you,” Tanna said, “but you have to communicate with me. Try, please.”

The hand slowly pulled away from her face and pointed across the circle.

At me.

I blinked. “Uh....” I said, glib as always.

The hand formed a writing shape.

“He wants your pen,” Tanna said. “Slide it to me. Use the door I cut.”

I took the pen from my shirt pocket, removed the cap and rolled it across the floor. She placed it on the floor, and the ghostly hand closed around it.

Laboriously, as if it weighed a ton, the pen lifted and the tip scraped across the wooden boards. In the silence it sounded almost industrial.

“Jere,” Tanna read. “Your name? Where are you, Jere?”

Again the pen rose, but the effort seemed greater. Suddenly it twirled, drawing some sort of spiral pattern on the floor. Then it fell, and the smoky boy vanished, blown away by the elements.

The coven let out a group sigh. They were all sweaty and slumped with exhaustion.

“That was intense,” Jo said.

“It wasn’t a ghost,” Andrea said definitively. “I know what a ghost feels like.”

“Then what was it?” Wade asked. “Who was it? Does anyone here know a Jere?”

A bell went off in my head. “Jere. Jere Rundle. The boy who disappeared from the Redneck Riviera.”

Tanna said, “If that’s true...then how do you explain this?” She tapped the floor, where the spiral design was visible on the wood. “If he vanished from an amusement park ride in Nashville, why is his spirit in Weakleyville, drawing a design that shows the path to Hell?”

***

Later, after the circle ended and everyone got dressed, we crowded around Tanna’s desktop computer. The screen displayed two images side by side: a photo of the drawing on the study floor, and a page from an ancient alchemical manuscript. I couldn’t read the text--it seemed to be in Italian--but clearly the design was the same.

“This is literally the road to Hell,” Tanna explained. “Drawn by Ignation Tatagliani in 655 AD. Only he was smart enough not to mark the starting point. After all, can’t have a bunch of tourists visiting Hades.”

“I don’t get the connection,” one of the witches said.

“I don’t either, yet,” Tanna admitted. “But this boy’s spirit was pretty desperate to pass this along to us.”

***

So the next night, Tanna and I stood in line at the Redneck Riviera to ride the newly re-opened and improved Descent. Crowds of tourists filled the theme park, and I think half of them were in the Descent line with us. The outside of the hangar-sized building featured a landscape painting of a ruined urban skyline. Instead of promising a “futuristic nightmare,” it now claimed to be a “trip to the edge of the end of time”: grammatically iffy, but still undeniably catchy.

Fireflies filled the trees scattered through the park, and clustered most strongly in the ones near us. Most patrons probably assumed they were special effects; in a sense they were right, because they let Tanna see as well as I did, as special an effect as there could be.

An hour and fifteen minutes later, the safety bars finally snapped down around us, and the rollercoaster-style car lurched forward.

The ride was okay. Lots of flashing lights, recorded screams and thumping techno music, as the car rose toward the cavernous ceiling then spiraled toward the ground. The other passengers screamed and laughed, but it was kind of a let-down. It certainly didn’t seem as exciting as those kids made it sound opening night. Maybe they’d toned it down after Jere Rundle disappeared.

Afterwards, Tanna and I sat in the park’s fake New Orleans cafe, a plate of
faux
beignets (
faux
because you can get real ones only in New Orleans) untouched between us. Usually she couldn’t resist them, so I knew something was wrong.

“Didn’t enjoy it?” I finally asked.

“No, not at all,” Tanna said grimly. “I know where that boy is, and what happened to him.”

“After one ride?”

“Yep.” She looked over at the Descent building, her blue eyes cold. “That rollercoaster exactly duplicates Tatagliani’s Spiral, but in three dimensions, not two. He left that bit out of the drawing. For centuries, people have tried to use it on flat surfaces, like open fields and floors, and it’s never worked. That’s why Tatagliani never wrote down the starting point. You can enter Hell from anywhere, if you realize you have to spiral up and down as well as around.”

“But I didn’t see any monsters tonight,” I said.

“No, but the kids that first night did. Remember what they said? They saw a lake of fire, with screaming people swimming in it, and zombies, and monsters that flew up into a red sky. They said the spit from one of those monsters made the paint blister on the car they were in. They thought it was all part of the ride, and that it couldn’t hurt them. They had no idea how close they came.” She finally ate a beignet and delicately wiped her mouth. “Somebody’s obviously changed something. But not in time to save Jere Rundle.”