The Toad Wife

The Toad Wife

Darius Day Vanhoeke was a miserable man. He hadn't always been so. For much of his youth he had been fairly happy, if not always content. He grew up poor, but managed to improve his lot by the sweat of his own brow until he had achieved a certain level of comfort in life that some folks would even find enviable. He was also a generous man who hated to see anyone else doing poorly, and tended to make many friends among those that the less charitable members of society would label as losers. Sometimes some of them would turn out to be good friends, and some of them would not, but that was no different than what Darius ever expected. He accepted such things as the normal flow of life, and maintained his own happiness through gratitude for things that went well. But as he approached middle age he had felt the need to marry, and had chosen his bride very poorly.

Lucretia Patton was someone that Darius had gone to school with, and had always considered a friend. He had even had a crush on her in high school. She had never noticed his affection then, and had ended up married to another school acquaintance of theirs, who was a boorish, violence obsessed, ego maniac named Arnold Brackish. According to the story Lucretia told Darius, Arnold had then spent over a decade emotionally and mentally abusing Lucretia and their two children, Vera and Cain. Lucretia escaped from Arnold after catching him molesting the mentally challenged teenaged daughter of one of their neighbors. She and the children hid out in the run down farmhouse of Darius's elderly parents. That is where she was living when she and Darius had their reunion. Lucretia told Darius that she had filed for divorce before leaving Arnold, and told him horrible story after terrible tale of what had been done to herself and her children over the years, by Arnold and his mother, Zora Brackish.

Zora Brackish was the defacto matriarch of the Brackish family, and had been for the past thirty years, ever since a mysterious accident had left her husband crippled and cowed. She had a face like a troll, with uncombable hair that she kept under a babushka scarf, and enough bristles on her chin to earn the nickname Bearded Woman, which was less onerous than her other nickname, the Child Taker. That name had been earned by her habit of aggressively using the Child Protection Agency and the foster care system to steal children from their homes, and raise them in her peculiar personal religion. It was well known that her religious habits were both unorthodox and secretive, and indoctrinating the children was how she spread her odd practices. More than two dozen children of relatives and strangers had passed through her door, including Lucretia's two babies. Some of those children had suffered strange accidents resulting in their deaths, but the many who survived were fiercely loyal to their matriarch. Somehow, the accidental deaths were never investigated, usually being blamed on the biological parents. The police and social workers always seemed to side with Zora, no matter what. Even most of the parents of the children in Zora's care seemed to hold her in some kind of mystical awe, and behaved as though they were in thrall to her. Darius didn't know to what god Zora prayed, but it apparently granted her considerable power. He had no trouble believing Lucretia's stories of abuse.

After six months of Lucretia, Vera, and Cain living with the Vanhoeke family, Darius confessed that he had feelings for Lucretia. Lucretia latched on like Darius was the last lifeboat on a sinking ship. She talked about destiny, soul mates, and fates that were written in the stars. Darius grew to love Vera and Cain as if they were his own, which was no surprise to those who knew him. Within a month of her very messy divorce being finalized, Lucretia and Darius were married. Darius moved out of his luxury apartment, and purchased a house for his new instant family. Lucretia and Darius took a two week honeymoon at a cabin in the woods, and they made the most of it. Lucretia was insatiable. On the final night of the honeymoon, Darius reckoned that he had finally found the happy estate that would bring his life the fulfillment he had always felt was missing. Little did he know that it would be his last moment of happiness in this world.

Almost from the very instant the newlyweds returned home, having retrieved the children from the elder Vanhoekes, the bad luck began. Later, Darius would say that he ought to have known he was cursed. It began with a foot injury that left Darius unable to work for three weeks. Then the creek at the back of his property flooded, destroying the new garage and carrying away Darius's car. That alone was devastating to him, since he had worked hard for years to afford such a nice car, and it meant a great deal to him. The house was also flooded, requiring expensive repairs. Following that, Darius's business failed, and he had to take a third shift custodial job at the old high school. All the while, he was constantly being harassed by the Brackish clan. Zora Brackish was hellbent on taking Cain and Vera away from Lucretia, and destroying Darius in the process. She made numerous false complaints to the authorities, always referring to herself as the children's true mother, while calling Lucretia "the trash". There were death threats from Arnold and his thuggish friends. Guns were fired at the roof a couple of times a week. At one point, Lucretia's pet cat was nailed to their front door by it's paws. The stress of it all took an awful toll on Darius's mental health.

Worse yet, the marriage began to suffer. Lucretia seemed to resent Darius for something that she would never articulate. She took her frustrations out on him in petty ways, like throwing away his personal possessions while he was at work, tearing his clothing, ruining the new floors with gouges in the wood, and ignoring him when he spoke to her. She stopped sleeping with him, and he began to suspect that she was having an affair with another man, possibly her ex husband. The children were increasingly disrespectful as well, and were stealing from him on a regular basis.

One night at the school, Darius's foot began to ache from it's previous injury, which had never really healed properly, and he discovered that he had accidentally left his pain medication at home. So, he waited until his meal break and drove home in the rusted out jalopy one of his friends had loaned him. The house was quiet as he entered, and he assumed that everyone was asleep. He made his way as quietly as possible to bathroom, and retrieved his pills from the medicine cabinet. He swallowed the pills with a bit of water from the tap, and allowed himself a small sigh in anticipation of the relief of his pain. He decided that since this was his meal break, he would go ahead and eat something before returning to work. As he crossed the hallway toward the kitchen, he caught a glimpse of something strange through the window in the back door of the house. At the back of the property, next to the creek, it appeared that someone had lit a small bonfire. Suspecting more foul play from the Brackish clan, Darius retrieved a baseball bat from the hall closet and crept out into the back yard. As he got closer, he realized that it was not a bonfire he had seen, but an arrangement of several dozen large candles, and the person who presumably had lit them was standing by it with their back to the house. The person seemed to be a woman, dressed in a scarlett gown with a matching veil, in imitation of a wedding dress. Her arms were gesticulating wildly in a series of bizarre but deliberate motions, while she held long bones in her hands. Her feet rose and fell with a strange rhythm as she shifted her weight from one leg to the other.

Darius had seen enough. He strode forward purposefully and grabbed the woman by the shoulder, turning her to face him. To his utter surprise, the face he saw was Lucretia's. But in a moment, the face began to change. The mouth widened to the edges of the jaw, exposing rows of needle like teeth, the lips stretched long and thin, the nose receded into the swell of the cheeks, the eyes swelled up until they bulged from the sockets and turned black, the skin turned greyish and lumpy. A foul odor of sulphur arose from the creature that had been Lucretia. With clawed hands she reached for Darius's throat. Panicking, he shoved Lucretia into the candles, where her dress caught fire, and she tumbled into the creek. Darius turned and ran back into the house. He grabbed a silver cross ornament that had been a wedding gift from his grandmother, just in case it might help protect him and the children from the monster outside. He tucked the cross into his shirt and went up to the children's rooms. The doors were locked. He still had the bat, so he used it to break the lock and forced open the door to Cain's room.

On the bed where Cain slept, a nasty looking creature squatted, hissing with it's toad like mouth, and glaring with black eyes. It swung a clawed tentacle at Darius, who struck the creature to the ground with a swing of his bat, and ducked out into the hallway. Another creature, like the first, was crawling stealthily out of Vera's room. She looked at Darius for a brief moment with an inscrutable expression, and slunk off down the hallway to the stairs. Cain was back on his clawed feet at this point, and launched himself onto Darius's torso, trying to sink his needle teeth into Darius's throat. Darius shoved the bat lengthwise into the little monster's mouth, breaking several teeth. Black ichor oozed out of the stumps. Cain clamped down with his jaw and shook his head violently, attempting to pull the bat away from Darius. Darius pushed Cain away with the bat and sent him sprawling down the stairs. As Cain tumbled, the silver cross fell from Darius's shirt, landing directly on Cain's exposed belly. The lumpy grey flesh began to sizzle and smoke as Cain screamed and thrashed, shattering the stair railing and impaling his tentacle on a shard of wood. Cain threw off the cross and scrambled away, fleeing through the front door.

Darius followed quickly, and as he arrived at the open door, a large pick up truck barrelled up the drive and skidded to a stop in front of the porch. Darius recognized the truck as belonging to Zora Brackish. Half a dozen very large creatures like the children were squatting in the bed of the truck, as it was being driven by another. The thing leaning out of the passenger door had the uncombable hair of Zora Brackish herself. The creatures began to ululate in awful voices that sounded like a hundred drowning men losing their last breaths. The children lurched from the shadows toward the truck. Darius took one step onto the porch. At that instant, another figure stepped between Darius and the children. Bedraggled, burned, and soaked in creek mud, Lucretia stood menacingly at the bottom of the stair. Her needle teeth exposed, the toad like creature that had been Darius's wife hissed, and wiggled her clawed tentacles in a repulsive manner that was clearly meant as a threat. The children clambered into the waiting embrace of the monstrous members of the Brackish clan. Once they were secured, Lucretia turned and placed her claws on the edge of the truck bed, as though she would climb in herself. But Zora screeched, "No! The trash is not worthy of the gift! Leave her!"
Darius watched in horrified fascination as one of the disgusting creatures, which he now recognized as Arnold Brackish, clumsily raised a semi automatic rifle, and shot Lucretia in the head. Green bits of brain, and black ichor exploded from the back of the ruined head, and the dead thing collapsed to the ground as the old pick up truck lurched away at top speed.

Darius sat down on the porch, and stared at the grotesque corpse. That's where he was found, dehydrated and unresponsive, three days later. The authorities examined the rotting headless monster that was found at his feet. They didn't know what to think about it, or pretended not to, and wrote it up as an unidentified animal. People assumed that Lucretia had taken the children and run away from her marriage, again. They sent Darius to the closest hospital, where his parents went to see him. The hospital refused to release him in his catatonic state. He was eventually moved to a nursing home in a neighboring county, which his parents paid for by selling his house. He never spoke again, locked into his mind by the horrors he had endured.