Paul Jenning's Spookiest Stories

by Paul Jennings

  6

  There was a big space underneath the door. Just above the gap was scrawled:

  5. BEWARE OF LIMBO DANCERS.

  Another joke. But Mr Simpkin didn’t laugh. His lips were frozen in a bewildered grin. His tongue was stuck to the roof of his dry mouth. His eyes bulged.

  Music began to play. It sounded as if a whole band was playing inside the toilet. An invisible orchestra. He knew the tune. ‘The Limbo Rock’. Da da da da da da da da da. Da da da da da da da da. It surged and swelled. Rocking and rollicking.

  Suddenly a dancing, swaying line of people filled the empty building. They seemed to appear from nowhere. They wore crazy hats and blew party squeakers. They clapped their hands and kicked their feet. The line swayed and swerved and approached the cubicle door.

  One by one the partygoers leaned back on their heels and passed under the open door. They ignored Mr Simpkin. He was like an uninvited ghost at a banquet. He sat still, terrified on his velvet seat as the line came back for another limbo. Without warning a gust of wind slammed the door. It banged loudly. Mr Simpkin winced and closed his eyes. When he opened them, the line of dancers had disappeared. He was alone once more. Silence replaced the music.

  What was going on? What? What? What? Was this a nightmare? Every bit of numbered graffiti was coming true. What else was written there? People wrote terrible things on toilet walls.

  He looked above his head:

  6. DROWNED IN THE DUNNY AT DAWN.

  Mr Simpkin shrieked. He jumped off his velvet seat and stared down into the water. ‘No,’ he shrieked. ‘Not that. No, no, no.’

  He ran over to the corner. As far away from the pan as he could get. He squatted down on the floor, curling up into a tight ball. He closed his eyes and refused to read any more. He tried to sleep. So that he could wake up from this dreadful nightmare.

  But sleep wouldn’t come. He crouched there, not moving. The minutes and hours ticked by. His stomach rumbled. His legs were stiff. He thought his ordeal would never end. But at last the first rays of sunlight crept through the iron gate.

  Dawn.

  Mr Simpkin shook. He looked around for a weapon. There was nothing.

  7

  His eyes rested on a shape moving along the top of the wall of the empty cubicle. It was the rat. It crept forwards. Mr Simpkin crouched down. What if the rat leapt at him? Flew through the air with bared fangs?

  It was better not to wait. He stood up and waved his arms. ‘Shoo,’ he yelled. ‘Scat. Buzz off.’

  The rat was startled. It reared up on its back legs. And slipped. It fell, tumbling into the velvet toilet. With the speed of a cobra, Mr Simpkin lunged across the floor and pressed the diamond button.

  The rat disappeared in a gurgling flush.

  Mr Simpkin slumped down. The writing had come true. The rat had drowned at dawn.

  He wondered what else was written. It was no use putting it off any longer. He searched the walls for more numbered graffiti. And found one more piece. It simply said:

  7. THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME.

  Without warning there was a clang. A key turned in a lock. The iron gate was thrown open.

  Mr Simpkin took one last look around his prison. And fled. There was no sign of a gatekeeper. Who had opened the door? He didn’t know. Or care. He was free. He fled across the park.

  ‘There’s no place like home. You can say that again,’ he thought to himself. If he hurried he might get back before Gobble woke up. He could make Gobble’s breakfast especially tasty. He would hand over his pay packet. Gobble might forgive him for taking a night off. If not, well, he would just have to take whatever punishment was dealt out.

  Anything would be better than spending another night in that terrifying toilet. Running away had been a big mistake.

  He was hungry. Starving. After he had fed Gobble he would make himself a nice meal of …

  Sheep’s eyes.

  Mr Simpkin stopped running. He walked slowly with heavy steps. His shoulders were hunched as if he carried a great burden. Suddenly he stopped. And turned. He started to run back across the grass.

  The gate of the toilet was still open. He hurried inside and looked at his watch. Two minutes to seven. He felt inside his pocket. And found what he was looking for – a blunt pencil.

  He took it out and carefully wrote on the toilet wall:

  8. GOBBLE DISAPPEARS FOREVER AT SEVEN O’CLOCK.

  Mr Simpkin hurried home. He burst into the flat. ‘Gobble,’ he called. ‘Are you there, Gobble?’

  There was no reply.

  His brother was nowhere to be seen.

  I’ll tell you one thing for sure. Fruitcake and Pancake were the best pets that Martin had ever had. Boy, he could train them to do just about anything.

  Their best trick was to act as an alarm clock. Martin had rigged up the empty fish tank in his bedroom so that Fruitcake was on one side behind a piece of glass and Pancake was on the other. At exactly seven o’clock a little glass door would swing open and Fruitcake could hop through and stand on Pancake’s back. By doing this he could reach up and catch a dead fly with his tongue. The fly hung on a piece of cotton which stretched across the bedroom and was tied to Martin’s little toe. When Fruitcake grabbed the fly with his tongue the cotton would yank on Martin’s toe and wake him up.

  Martin sure was a brain.

  And Fruitcake and Pancake were the smartest cane toads in the whole of Queensland. Martin had even taught them to row a little boat up and down the bath.

  They were fantastic and Martin loved them just as if they were his children.

  Now this might seem a bit strange to you or me because most people think cane toads are just ugly pests that look like frogs and live in the garden. But not Martin. He thought they were beautiful. I have even seen him kiss the two toads full on the mouth.

  Don’t laugh, because when I tell you how Martin saved the lives of those toads you will understand why he felt this way about them.

  You see, there was this bloke called Frisbee who owned a shop near Martin. Frisbee was a great big bloke with a huge beer pot. His stomach hung out so much that his belt had to loop down underneath it. His shop was just out of town in the bush, near where Martin lived.

  It was a tourist shop. It sold stuff like real plastic boomerangs and animals made out of shells from the Barrier Reef. He had genuine Aboriginal tapping sticks with elephants carved on them. He also sold a lot of wooden rulers and letter openers made from trees cut down in the rain forests.

  His best-selling line was his toy koala bears. Once Martin peeked through a chink in the blinds at night and saw Frisbee cutting all the MADE IN JAPAN labels off the koalas. When he had finished he placed little Australian flags in the hands of the koalas.

  Every night when he closed up the shop, Frisbee would pull down the blind and put up a stretcher. This was where he slept. He never washed and he never changed his clothes. He lived and slept in the same clothes for years and years.

  But all these things are nothing next to what Frisbee used to do to cane toads. He hated cane toads as much as Martin loved them.

  Frisbee was a cane-toad killer. He used to find a lamp post near a busy road. You know how the insects hang around the street lights and the cane toads hang around too, so that they can catch the insects? Well Frisbee used to catch himself a bucket full of cane toads underneath the street lamp. Then he would throw them out onto the road when a car was coming.

  Some of the drivers were as mean as Frisbee and they would try to run over the toads. If they missed, Frisbee would yell out ‘Fruitcake’ at the driver as loud as he could. If the car hit the toad and squashed it flat, Frisbee would yell out ‘Pancake’ and jump up and down laughing his silly head off.

  Sometimes Frisbee and his mean mates would go back a couple of days later. They used to prise the dried-out, flattened toads off the road and throw them to each other like flying saucers. This is how he got the name Frisbee.

  Well, on the night I am talk
ing about, Martin was walking down the street right when Frisbee was throwing his last two toads onto the road. Quick as a flash, and without thinking of his own safety, Martin nipped out and grabbed the two toads just as a truck was about to flatten them. Then he nicked off into the bush before Frisbee knew what had happened.

  ‘Come back here, you squirt,’ yelled out Frisbee. ‘Give those toads back or I’ll stuff them down your throat.’ He ran off after Martin as fast as he could go. And that was very fast indeed. He was a good runner for a big bloke and he was as mad as a wombat.

  Martin was scared as he ran through the dark scrub. He knew he would look like a squashed toad himself if Frisbee got hold of him so he did the only thing he could think of. He charged off into Tiger Snake Swamp which lay at the bottom of the hill.

  Now there are only two things which live in Tiger Snake Swamp. There are cane toads and they wouldn’t hurt a fly (so to speak), and tiger snakes, which are deadly poisonous. Also, it is possible to get lost in Tiger Snake Swamp because it covers hundreds of square kilometres with twisted trees and murky waterways.

  Martin knew that it was dangerous, especially at night. He waded out through the weeds until he was up to his waist.

  Frisbee was too chicken to go in the water so he just stood on the bank yelling and swearing at Martin. In the end he said, ‘Don’t think you are going to get away with this, toad lover. I am going to fix you up. For good. Your little toad-clearing business will soon be wiped out.’ Then he turned around and stormed off into the night.

  2

  At this stage I should tell you about Martin’s toad-clearing business. On weekends Martin used to go around to houses and offer to clear out all of the toads from people’s backyards. Martin couldn’t figure out why people didn’t like to have thirty or so toads in their gardens. He didn’t realise that some people were scared of them. Others didn’t like standing on them in their bare feet at night. It was a bit yucky scraping the green and yellow stuff out from between their toes.

  For three dollars Martin would collect all their toads and then let them go in Tiger Snake Swamp.

  What he didn’t know was that Frisbee was about to go into the toad business himself. In a big way.

  As he waded out of the water Martin noticed that there were hundreds and hundreds of cane toads around him. Some of them looked familiar. Martin was the only person in the world who could remember the faces of toads. Most people think they all look the same. ‘G’day, Dodger,’ he said to one large toad. ‘Aren’t you the one I found in Mrs French’s outside laundry?’

  The toad gave a loud grunt as if to say yes.

  Martin made his way home from the swamp with the two toads he had rescued from the road. ‘I’ll keep you two,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you toads Fruitcake and Pancake. You might bring me luck.’

  The two toads did bring Martin luck. Bad luck. As the months went by Martin found that his toad-clearing business went from bad to worse. Every house he went to had already been cleared out. No one wanted toads removed any more and he couldn’t work out why.

  Then one day he saw an ad in the local paper. It said:

  TOAD STUFFERS PTY LTD

  CANE TOADS REMOVED

  FREE

  PHONE 505 64 0111

  No wonder he couldn’t get any more toad-clearing jobs. Someone was doing it for nothing

  Martin rang the phone number to see who it was but he already knew who was going to answer the phone. He wasn’t wrong. It was Frisbee.

  As soon as he heard Frisbee’s voice, Martin sadly hung up the phone without saying anything.

  That night Martin hid behind a tree and waited outside Frisbee’s shop. At seven-thirty Frisbee left the house pulling a large box of wheels. He walked into town and went into the backyard of a flash-looking house. Martin looked over the fence. Frisbee was fishing around behind the plants with a torch looking for cane toads. Every time he caught one, he gave its neck a quick twist and threw the lifeless body into the box.

  ‘Murderer,’ gasped Martin under his breath. He wanted to rush over and stop Frisbee from killing the toads but he knew he wasn’t strong enough. Frisbee was just too big for him.

  When the box was full, Frisbee made his way back to his shop on the edge of town. He took the box inside and shut the door.

  Martin peeked in through a crack in the blinds. What he saw made him shudder with horror. Frisbee put a hook thing into a toad’s mouth and pulled out all the innards. Then he shoved some cotton wool in place of the gizzards and painted the toad with a clear liquid. Next he put a little skirt on the toad and placed a small tennis racquet in its hand. He sat it on a wire stand on a shelf next to another stuffed toad which also had a tennis racquet. A little net was stretched between the toads. It looked just as if they were playing tennis.

  Frisbee wrote something on a piece of cardboard and placed it next to the stuffed toads. It said:

  TENNIS TOADS $35.00

  Frisbee gave a wicked chuckle as he looked at his work. Then he reached into the box and took out another dead toad.

  Martin felt sick. The shelves of the hut were lined with stuffed toads. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Some were sitting inside little toy cars. Others held tiny fishing rods. One pair was kissing. There was even a toad sitting on a tiny toilet. And all of them had price tags.

  At first Martin didn’t know what was going on. Then he realised that Frisbee was killing all the toads he caught and stufffing them. Then he was selling the stuffed toads to tourists from down south. Martin noticed eighteen toads all dressed in little red-and-white football jumpers. The Sydney Swans. On another shelf the whole Collingwood team of toads was lined up.

  This was the cruellest, meanest, most horrible thing that he had ever heard of. Martin knew that he had to stop this fiendish business but he didn’t know what to do. He was only a pipsqueak next to Frisbee.

  Then he had an idea. He walked home with a spring in his step. He would come back one night when Frisbee wasn’t there. He would stop him stuffing toads once and for all.

  3

  Two weeks later, Martin crept up to Frisbee’s shop. It was late in the night and very dark. Frisbee had gone off catching cane toads. Or that’s what Martin thought anyway. He looked around into the blackness but saw nothing. Something rustled in the bushes. He hoped it was a toad or a rat.

  Shivers ran down his spine. If something went wrong, there was nothing to help him. He took his father’s pair of bolt cutters and cut through the padlock on the shop door. Then he went inside and turned on the light. Light filled the room for a second and then vanished. The globe had blown.

  Martin switched on his torch and looked around. The stuffed toads looked eerie in the torchlight. ‘I hope toads don’t have ghosts,’ he said to himself. ‘Because if they do, I’m a goner.’ He looked at the tennis toads. They stood there as if frozen in the middle of an imaginary game.

  He picked up the tennis toads. They were hard and lifeless. ‘I’m going to give you a proper burial,’ said Martin. He put them down and reached into a small sack.

  In the silent night a twig snapped. He had to hurry. There was a sound of footsteps approaching. Someone was coming. He quickly finished, switched off his torch and slipped out of the door into the blackness.

  And there stood Frisbee. Even in the dark Martin could see that his face was twisted up in rage. He let out a bellow and charged at Martin with outstretched hands. Martin turned and fled. He ran and crashed through the undergrowth. Branches scratched his legs and face but he didn’t feel them. All he felt were his bursting lungs and the deep fear of what Frisbee would do to him if he caught him. He ran blindly, not even realising that he had come once again to Tiger Snake Swamp. He plunged into the water as before.

  But this time Frisbee followed. Martin felt himself grabbed by strong hands and pushed under the water. He couldn’t breathe. He tried to struggle free but Frisbee was too strong. Martin held his breath but the seconds seemed like hours. He knew he would have to
open his mouth and breathe in lungfuls of water. His chest hurt.

  And then, suddenly, he was released. Frisbee let go.

  Martin burst upwards and gulped in air. Then he looked at Frisbee. He saw an unbelievable sight. Frisbee was completely covered in a swarming sea of cane toads. They crawled over his shoulders and face and hair. He looked like a moving green beehive.

  He screamed and yelled. ‘Get them off. Get them off.’ He scraped at them with both hands but for every one that he threw away another ten clambered on to the pile.

  Frisbee struggled to the shore under the seething skin of toads. He grabbed a branch and started scraping them from his body. Then he staggered back towards his shop.

  Martin followed at a safe distance. As he went he passed dead and dying toads. He could see that Frisbee was winning the battle and the covering of toads was thinning out. By the time Frisbee reached the shop there was only one toad left. Frisbee plucked it from his hair and threw it on the ground. Then he stamped on it viciously, and went into the shop, slamming the door behind him.

  Martin smiled and quickly hooked the broken padlock through the latch.

  ‘You’re locked in,’ he yelled to Frisbee. ‘I’m not letting you out until you promise not to kill any more toads.’

  There was a furious rattling as Frisbee shook the door. ‘Let me out or I’ll skin you alive,’ he shouted. ‘That’s the only promise you’ll get out of me.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Martin. ‘See you later then.’

  Frisbee heard footsteps disappear into the night.

  Inside the shop it was dark. There was only a little moonlight filtering through the cracks in the blinds. The stuffed toads were silvery. They looked ghostly, sitting all around him on the shelves. Frisbee shivered. Then he went over and shook the door again. It was firmly locked. He could easily get out by smashing the window but he wasn’t going to do that. A customer could let him out in the morning.

  He set up his stretcher on the floor and sat on it. Then he opened a stubby and started swigging his beer.