by Brian Hodge
Ralph tripped down, heaving for air, saying to himself, There’s nothing I can do to help her, then realized all too suddenly that the woman must’ve died just after her last hideous scream because the only thing now holding her in the boat was the dead weight of her body wedged against the motor.
Despite her inaction, the things showed no sign of letting up, and they kept jerking the rope as tenaciously as ever, and just when Ralph thought her hand or arm seemed ready to rend itself from her body, a loud crack rang out. He imagined this to be another splintering bone, but soon discovered it to be the rear planks in the boat coming apart under the pressure. Without this obstacle, her body made an outrageous backflip off the rear of the boat into the water, and the tadpoles reaped the reward of their toils.
A moment passed, and the eerie silence returned.
Ralph collapsed alongside a picnic table and watched with dismay as Vinnie’s skiff went under.
He looked at his surroundings. There were a few picnic tables, but that was it. Everything else was under water.
Much of the afternoon he sat and waited, watching the entrance to Heaven’s Cove. No one came. He passed the time talking to himself and watching the waters. Every now and then thick dark clouds (Swarms?) flitted beneath the surface. They swirled and moved in a sensual way that had had him nearly mesmerized. This is what the girl felt when she put her hands in the water. This is what all those people felt, the missing people…
The air grew cooler. He watched the entrance. No sign of Vinnie. No sign of help at all.
The only thing that came was the night, and it lasted forever.
The sky began to brighten, and with it came a distant crowing. It brought Ralph to attention, his spirits suddenly livened. Sometime during the night he lay down across a picnic table, and for the first time did exactly what Vinnie had told him to do. He listened to the silence. It was indeed deafening, like ghostly plugs had been wedged in his ears. And all the time he imagined himself swimming across the flood to safety, away from the man-eating froglets and their poisonous discharge.
He leaped to his feet, biting his lip, breathing in and out.
He looked out over Heaven’s Cove.
The water was gone. Left in its wake were a myriad of horrible things: dead tadpoles, hundreds of them scattered like downed soldiers on a battlefield. Some of them still had some life left in them, their tails and fins flicking about in the mud and sludge.
Slowly, Ralph stepped down the hill, careful not to fall where the ground went from dry to wet. His shoes slid about in the muck, making the going treacherous. He stepped around the tadpoles, their dead-gray bodies drying out beneath the sun, their eyeless faces attempting to burrow in the soft earth. One seemed to peer up at him, its fishlike mouth puckering. Ralph could see tiny teeth in there mashing up and down.
He wound his way around the squirming things, toward the pool. The lovely heart-shaped pool. It had taken an amoebic configuration, nearly twice its regular size now, and as far as Ralph could tell, deeper than its builders had ever intended. He approached it with subtle footsteps and peered over the edge.
There was a gurgling puddle of sludge at the bottom perhaps twenty feet below. The wall opposite from where he stood had a fissure in it—a cave that must’ve formed due to pressure from the lake. That was it. There’d been a fault somewhere between the pool and the lake, and after years of pressure, it finally gave way, sending water everywhere. And, so it appeared, releasing some prehistoric creatures along the way. Now the water had subsided, taking back with it the hell it liberated.
Still, no bodies…
And that had Ralph curious. He stepped to the right, three feet back from the perimeter of the pool. His foot located a splintered slat from the pool’s picket fence, and it threw him off balance. He landed heavily on his rear and slid sideways across a slope heading closer to the pool. He held his arm out and managed to grasp a lounge chair sticking up out of the mud. He kicked his legs, panicking, breaking out in a sweat while forcing every muscle to pull himself back up.
Slowly, painstakingly, he struggled away from the hole in the ground.
But then the lounge chair tore free from the mud. With nothing to hold onto, he slid twenty feet down into the muddy pit.
Riddled with pain, covered in mud, he tested each limb until he was assured that no bones were broken. He propped himself, eyes slowly playing over the walls. Mud and slime. Shattered fragments of cement speckling everything like dessert sprinkles. There would be no going up until someone came along.
He heard something. A voice. Coming from the cave.
It sounded human.
“Hello?” Ralph called. Miraculously, he still had his gun. Also clipped to his belt was a penlight. It provided very little guidance, but enough to afford him entrance as he staggered to the mouth of the cave. He trained the light on the floor, which was a mess of lumps and puddles. His footsteps sunk three inches into the mud.
He called out again, stepping in five feet before stopping and flashing the light around. It picked up the walls, five feet away from either sides of him. The discharge from the lake was heavier here, riding up to his calves. He hesitated pressing forward until he heard the pained moan again.
“Hello? Anyone there?”
No answer.
He hesitated, then paced farther in. The slice of his footsteps started echoing, like that of the cavernous dripping around him. The penlight showed nothing but darkness ahead. This place is big. The reek was unbearable, an odor of tides and rotting fish.
He heard a swimming noise coming from behind him.
He spun.
They were there. The tadpoles. They had him blocked in. Hundreds upon hundreds of them, deathfully quiet in their determined movement. Ralph moved the penlight around, pinpointing their blind faces, the sliminess of their gray skin as they amassed in the entrance, moving in from the darkness all around him to pile up on top of their comrades.
Then the churning process started, spawning their lethal white foam.
Ralph turned in all directions, tried to run, made it a few steps before slipping down. He pointed the light to his left. The tadpoles were slithering by, tails the size of baseball pennants whipping about in the water.
He got up, staggered forward, up a small incline that took him out of the water. He heard the moan again, stronger, closer. It occurred to him that he’d never heard a noise quite like this. It was death about to happen: a period of existence long after the will to live had upped and taken leave. Again he fell forward, sliding uncontrollably down a long slope, deeper into the earth until he splashed into a puddle three feet deep.
Ralph looked up, and saw.
White cocoons big enough to hold human beings. Only a few were visible in the darkness but common sense told him they kept on going. What had Vinnie said? About a hundred seventy-five people stayed here? One of the cocoons had broken open and from within a pulpy mess oozed out, like the guts of a melon. It was a gruesome sight. Mutation in its finest hour.
There was a slithering noise to his right. He shined the light in that direction. A few more cocoons had burst open and from within thousands of hotdog-sized tadpoles emerged. Thousands of them. From beyond, another moan issued. One different than before. Jesus, some of the people were still alive. Back there. In the darkness. In the cocoons.
The white stuff is sperm, Ralph thought. Reproductive material. There was a nature program on television some time ago, where frogs were shown excreting their sperm on some biological host, like an underwater spore, or a strip of algae. The female would hop along and plant her eggs in the stuff. And the babies would emerge, thousands of them to ensure continuation of the population.
He heard a huge croak that filled the entire cave.
And that’s when it occurred to him.
He turned. Looked.
And screamed. He tried to pull his gun but only succeeded in dropping the flashlight. It pointed in the direction of the continual noises, the wet,
gushing sounds. Something huge shifting in the mud ahead. And then it lunged at him, confirming his postulation.
Tadpoles grew up to be frogs.
There was a horrible tearing sound. He tried to scream but the sudden pain cut him off. He looked down. His leg was gone and in the mouth of some huge limbless thing. It was twice the size of a man, eyeless like its children, the body obese and misshapened with warts the size of baseballs on its head. It made a deep barking noise as it swallowed Ralph’s leg, and he could see, barely, a wash of his blood on its bulbous lips.
Numbed, Ralph managed to flip over and attempt to crawl away through the mud. But the thing was upon him, and with one quick jerking motion scooped him up into its mouth. Ralph felt his body sliding across the thing’s muscular wet tongue. The frog had him swallowed to the neck, and even as his head dangled obscenely from its mouth, he still made a play to escape.
Eventually he fell free from the frog’s mouth.
He tried to scream. But couldn’t.
His lungs were still in the frog’s mouth.
“That there’s my boat,” said Vinnie, pointing to the damaged skiff.
Jason and the others were by the hole where the pool used to be. “What do you think?”
Harlan said, “Me thinks we need a few more lights and a bunch of rope.”
Jason turned to Vinnie. “You say the Sheriff came in here on your boat, while the place was flooded?”
Vinnie nodded.
Two men returned with lights and a hundred yards of spooled rope. Jason turned to Vinnie. “You coming?”
Vinnie shook his head, “I’m getting too old for that kind of work.” Trembling, he lit a cigarette.
“C’mon, a little mud ain’t gonna hurt ya.”
The security guard shook his head.
Five minutes later, the men were tied together.
And they lowered themselves into the hole.
Partners in Crime
“You know, Tommy,” Josie said, gazing at her French manicure, “there’s something about you I’ve always admired.” She noticed a small smudge on her middle knuckle, and rinsed it clean beneath the warm flow of water under the kitchen faucet.
“And what might that be?” His gruff voice took on an exotic inflection she’d never heard before: suspicious, yet…flirtatious. Good.
She paused and took a deep breath in attempt to alleviate the tension festering across the line. Although her usual banter with the other wives was never a concern for privacy, this time she wondered if someone might be listening in on the conversation.
Finally, she answered, “It could be those muscles of yours, the way your shirt is always opened a few buttons—I do love a man with a hairy chest. And…your eyes, so big and brown. Don’t think I haven’t noticed the way you look at me.”
An uncomfortable silence bled through the phone. Josie could hear Tommy breathing more heavily now, that Sicilian blood of his swelling with hormones, pumping through his veins, triggering his lungs to toil like day laborers.
“And just how do I look at you?”
“The same way I look at you,” she answered coyfully.
“You shitting me, Jo? Cause if you are…”
“Haven’t you noticed that every time you come to see Vito, I just happen to be in the kitchen or living room wearing a bikini, or short skirt?”
Silence. Then, “Is Vito there now?”
She giggled. “No, silly.”
“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” he asked, voice wavering with conflict.
“Never been more serious, baby.”
There was a pause. Then, “I’ll be there in thirty.”
After hanging up the phone, Josie slumped down on the kitchen stool, elbows pressed against the marble countertop, one fist covering her mouth in attempt to suppress the anxiety erupting from her lungs.
She stared at the family photo album laid out on the kitchen counter, at the snapshots from last Christmas Eve. Vito and Tommy, posed arm in arm in nearly every picture, donned in their black Armani suits. Partners in crime, and so much more.
Of course, regardless of the occasion, business or pleasure, the two would eventually slink down into the basement, into the cedar closet lined with tin foil (Vito was certain the Feds had no way of breaching his makeshift safehouse with their state-of-the-art surveillance devices) to discuss the current state of affairs, whether it be cash-flow concerns relating to the invitation-only poker game that went on after hours at the Green-Hollow country club; or rigging the receipts at the jewelry shop on Harrah’s Avenue in Atlantic City that fronted Vito’s loansharking business; or making collections at the thirteen streetcorner newsstands in Manhattan mining his bookmaking operation.
Tommy Cato had been Vito’s number one for six years, since the day he’d been made. And Tommy had faithfully earned his share, keeping close tabs on the gambling phase of the business, where there was always a constant flow of income…well, almost always. Every now and again the house would take a hit from some ballsy wise guy who either ‘palm-shined’ the cards, or striped them with soap, leaving Tommy the inconvenient position of utilizing his resources to track the con man down. And, no matter how long it took, Tommy Cato always got his man. He’d take back Vito’s money, then keep whatever he could above and beyond the pilfered funds by jointing it out of the poor bastard before leaving him to die in a puddle of his own blood.
Josie stared at Tommy’s picture in the album, using a thumb to cover up her husband’s face. “Tommy,” she murmured upon gaining her composure. You are handsome, aren’t you? Yes, he was, in a Richard Gere kind of way: tan, full lips, thick curly salt-and-pepper hair. And those muscles…
She looked up at the kitchen clock. Shit! Her mind had been racing. Tommy would be here in less than twenty minutes!
She ran upstairs to the master bedroom, quickly changed into a black silk nightie, then checked her make-up in the mirror, making certain to conceal the yellow bruise beneath her left eye. Once content of her appearance, she gave the bedroom a once-over. Still the same as she left it, the bed tightly dressed, the curtains drawn to preserve the room’s pallid light. She lit a candle and placed it on the nightstand, the pleasant aroma of cherries wafting up in a thin dark waver of smoke. An erotic palace, fit for a deserving king.
This afternoon, she told herself, Tommy Cato will be my king.
Screwing a member of her husband’s crew hadn’t always been a fantasy for Josie. But one night, a couple of months ago, she’d had a dream. She remembered it very clearly: Tommy Cato, sprawled out on the mattress of her bed (Vito’s bed), naked muscles tan and rippling against the sateen sheets as he moved to take her…and take her he did, delivering to her orgasm after orgasm that surpassed any rare instance of real sex Vito ever honored her with. She awoke feeling unimaginably invigorated, her traditional ways at once conceding to the previously unthinkable act of adultery.
Her obsession with Tommy grew to indescribable proportions, her nightly affairs of the mind harvesting into never-ending daydreams of the six-four muscle-bound Italian sexing her every-which-way. She would imagine herself as some dressed-up chestnut play-acting in the dirtiest of underground pornos—the kind available only from mail-order companies located in places like Sweden, or Norway—having every square inch of her body wholly violated until she lay paralyzed in a state of breathless ecstasy.
Josie sought hard to discover a logic behind her sudden submissiveness, never in the past having possessed such inclinations. She figured it had started with her eighteen-month marriage to the Mob Kingpin, Vito Antonio Scarelli—such a turn on it was knowing that her new husband’s sociopathic nature would have him burying the remains of a man he shot over late payments on a poker loan, only to return home, shower, shave, and fall asleep alongside her unfulfilled body. Now if only he would make love to her!
She’d find herself strangely allured those instances she stood by the entrance to the basement door, listening in on Vito’s conversations with Tom
my, their words very carefully chosen so no allegations could be made in relation to the previous night’s hit, or last month’s drug deal. And then, as always, the dialogue would shift to the money they made through their quote-unquote legitimate investments: real-estate, stock options, product deliveries, and so on.
For Vito, it was all about greed—nothing else mattered but money. Which in many respects, had worked out well for Josie, who realized quite well that she herself was just as acquisitive as her husband. She hadn’t worked a single day since marrying the mob boss, having surrendered her hourly wages as a cosmetics clerk at Macy’s for a life relishing in all the riches Vito Scarelli could shower upon her: a Mercedes Benz, Giorgio dresses, diamonds, weekends at the day spa.
However, Josie Scarelli soon realized that she herself had turned out to be just one of many trinkets in Vito’s treasure-chest of material possessions: a trophy for him to parade before La Famiglia at their weekly dinner functions. This, despite all her luxuries—the lavish home, the jewelry, the social lifestyle—left her feeling terribly hollow, and unfulfilled.
While pinned to his side, she’d take notice of him sticking his chest out, flashing his pearly caps and parading around like the pride of the jungle, soaking in the feigned respects of his fearful followers. And then, after dessert and coffee had been served and all cheeks were kissed and good-byes were said, he’d tap her on the rear and send her home to gather up the pieces of her shattered self-esteem, while he finished off the night conducting business with one of his Comares in the coat-check closet.
After a dinner party in celebration of their one-year anniversary, when Josie had had a bit too much to drink and thought maybe, just maybe, she might be able to maintain her lifestyle by securing his ‘assets’ through divorce, she confronted him.