There was no time for gentle measures or soothing words. He bunched the front of the shirt she was wearing in his fist and yanked her down the hall like a cop dragging a recalcitrant prisoner to a squad car. One of the toads which had been in the vanguard of those hurrying down the stairs leaped gigantically and snicked its mouthful of darning-needles shut around a chunk of s.p.a.ce occupied by Elise's bare heel a second before.

Halfway down the hall, she got the idea and began to come with him of her own accord. They reached the door. John turned the k.n.o.b and yanked it, but the door wouldn't move.

'G.o.ddam!' he cried, and yanked it again. No good. Nothing.

'John, hurry!'

She looked back over her shoulder and saw toads flooding down the hall toward them, taking huge crazy sproings over each other's back, falling on each other, striking the faded rambler-rose wallpaper, landing on their backs and being overrun by their mates. They were all teeth and gold-black eyes and heaving, leathery bodies.

'JOHN, PLEASE! PL - '

Then one of them leaped and battened on her left thigh just above the knee. Elise screamed and seized it, her fingers punching through its skin and into its dark liquid workings. She tore it free

and for a moment, as she raised her arms, the horrid thing was right in front of her eyes, its teeth gnashing like a piece of some small but homicidal factory machine. She threw it as hard as she

could. It cart-wheeled in the air and then splattered against the wall just opposite the kitchen door. It did not fall but stuck fast in the glue of its own guts.

'JOHN! OH JESUS. JOHN!'.

John Graham suddenly realized what he was doing wrong. He reversed the direction of his effort, pushing the door instead of pulling it. It flew open, almost spilling him forward and down the stairs, and he wondered briefly if his mother had had any kids that lived. He flailed at the railing, caught hold of it, and then Elise almost knocked him down again, bolting past him and down the stairs, screaming like a firebell in the night.

Oh she's going to fall, she can't help but fall, she's going to fall and break her neck - But somehow she did not. She reached the cellar's earth floor and collapsed in a sobbing heap, clutching at her torn thigh.

Toads were leaping and hopping in through the open cellar doorway.

John caught his balance, turned, and slapped the door shut. Several of the toads caught on their side of the door leaped right off the landing, struck the stairs, and fell through the s.p.a.ces between the risers. Another took an almost vertical leap straight up, and John was suddenly shaken by wild laughter - a sudden bright image of Mr. Toad of Toad Hall on a pogo-stick instead of in a motor-car had come to him. Still laughing, he balled his right hand into a fist and punched the toad dead center in its pulsing, flabby chest at the top of its leap, while it hung in perfect equilibrium between gravity and its own expended energy. It zoomed off into the shadows, and John heard a soft bonk! as it struck the furnace.

He scrabbled at the wall in the dark, and his fingers found the raised cylinder, which was the old-fashioned toggle light-switch. He flipped it, and that was when Elise began to scream again. A toad had gotten tangled in her hair. It croaked and twisted and turned and bit at her neck, rolling itself into something, which resembled a large, misshapen curler.

Elise lurched to her feet and ran in a large circle, miraculously avoiding a tumble over the boxes, which had been stacked and stored down here. She struck one of the cellar's support posts, rebounded, then turned and banged the back pf her head twice, briskly, against it. There was a thick gushing sound, a squirt of black fluid, and then the toad fell out of her hair, tumbling down the back of her tee-shirt, leaving dribbles of ichor.

She screamed, and the lunacy in that sound chilled John's blood. He half-ran, half-stumbled down the cellar stairs and enfolded her in his arms. She fought him at first and then surrendered. Her screams gradually dissolved into steady weeping.

Then, over the soft thunder of the toads striking the house and the grounds, they heard the croaking of the toads, which had fallen down here. She drew away from him, her eyes shifting wildly from side to side in their shiny-white sockets.

'Where are they?' she panted. Her voice was hoa.r.s.e, almost a bark, from all the screaming she had done. 'Where are they, John?'

But they didn't have to look; the toads had already seen them, and came hopping eagerly toward them.

The Grahams retreated, and John saw a rusty shovel leaning against the wall. He grabbed it and beat the toads to death with it as they came. Only one got past him. It leaped from the floor to a box and from the box it jumped at Elise, catching the cloth of her shirt in its teeth and dangling there between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, legs kicking.

'Stand still!' John barked at her. He dropped the shovel, took two steps forward, grabbed the toad, and hauled it off her shirt, It took a chunk of cloth with it. The cotton strip hung from one of its fangs as it twisted and pulsed and wriggled in John's hands. Its hide was warty, dry but horridly warm and somehow busy. He snapped his hands into fists, popping the toad. Blood and slime squirted out from between his fingers.

Less than a dozen of the little monsters had actually made it through the cellar door, and soon they were all dead. John and Elise clung to each other, listening to the steady rain of toads outside.

John looked over at the low cellar windows. They were packed and dark, and he suddenly saw the house as it must look from the outside, buried in a drift of squirming, lunging, leaping toads.

'We've got to block the windows,' he said hoa.r.s.ely. 'Their weight is going to break them, and if that happens, they'll pour in.'

'With what?' Elise asked in her hoa.r.s.e bark of a voice. 'What can we use?'

He looked around and saw several sheets of plywood, elderly and dark, leaning against one wall. Not much, perhaps, but something.

'That,' he said. 'Help me to break it up into smaller pieces.'

They worked quickly and frantically. There were only four windows in the cellar, and their very narrowness had caused the panes to hold longer than the larger windows upstairs had done. They were just finishing the last when they heard the gla.s.s of the first shatter behind the plywood . . . but the plywood held.

They staggered into the middle of the cellar again, John limping on his broken foot.

From the top of the stairway came the sound of the toads eating their way through the cellar door.

'What do we do if they eat all the way through it?' Elise whispered.

'I don't know,' he said . . . and that was when the door of the coal-chute, unused for years but still intact, suddenly swung open under the weight of all the toads which had fallen or hopped onto it, and hundreds of them poured out in a high-pressure jet.

This time Elise could not scream. She had damaged her vocal chords too badly for that.

It did not last long for the Grahams in the cellar after the coal-chute door gave way, but until it was over, John Graham screamed quite adequately for both of them.

By midnight, the downpour of toads in Willow had slackened off to a mild, croaking drizzle.

At one-thirty in the morning, the last toad fell out of the dark, starry sky, landed in a pine tree near the lake, hopped to the ground, and disappeared into the night. It was over for another seven years.

Around quarter past five, the first light began to creep into the sky and over the land. Willow was buried beneath a writhing, hopping, complaining carpet of toads. The buildings on Main Street had lost their angles and corners; everything was rounded and hunched and twitching. The sign on the highway, which read: SWELCOME TO WILLOW, MAINE, THE FRIENDLY PLACE!

Looked as if someone had put about thirty shotgun sh.e.l.ls through it. Flying toads, of course, had made the holes. The sign in front of the General Mercantile, which advertised: ITALIAN SANDWICHES PIZZA GROCS FISHING LICENCES had been knocked over. Toads played leapfrog on and around it. There was a small toad convention going on atop each of the gas-pumps at Donny's Sunoco. Two toads sat upon the slowly swinging iron arm of the weathervane atop the Willow Stove Shop like small misshapen children on a merry-go-round.

At the lake, the few floats which had been put out this early (only the hardiest swimmers dared the waters of Lake Willow before July 4th, however, toads or no toads) were piled high with toads, and the fish were going crazy with so much food almost within reach. Every now and then there was a plip! plip! sound as one or two of the toads jostling for place on the floats were knocked off and some hungry trout or salmon's breakfast was served. The roads in and out of town - there were a lot of them for such a small town, as Henry Eden had said - were paved with toads. The power was out for the time being; free-falling toads had broken the power-lines in any number of places. Most of the gardens were ruined, but Willow wasn't much of a farming community, anyway. Several people kept fairly large dairy herds, but they had all been safely tucked away for the night. Dairy farmers in Willow knew all about rainy season and had no wish to lose their milkers to the hordes of leaping, carnivorous toads. What in the h.e.l.l would you tell the insurance company?

As the light brightened over the Hempstead Place, it revealed drifts of dead toads on the roof, rain-gutters that had been splintered loose by dive-bombing toads, a dooryard that was alive with toads. They hopped in and out of the barn, they stuffed the chimneys, and they hopped nonchalantly around the tires of John Graham's Ford and sat in croaking rows on the front seat like a church congregation waiting for the services to start. Heaps of toads, mostly dead, lay in drifts against the building. Some of these drifts were six feet deep.

At 6:05, the sun cleared the horizon, and as its rays struck them, the toads began to melt.

Their skins bleached, turned white, then appeared to become transparent. Soon a vapor that gave off a vaguely swampy smell began to trail up from the bodies and little bubbly rivulets of moisture began to course down them. Their eyes fell in or fell out, depending on their positions when the sun hit them. Their skins popped with an audible sound, and for perhaps ten minutes it sounded as if champagne corks were being drawn all over Willow.

They decomposed rapidly after that, melting into puddles of cloudy white shmeg that looked like human s.e.m.e.n. This liquid ran down the pitches of the Hempstead Place's roof in little creeks and dripped from the eaves like pus.

The living toads died; the dead ones simply rotted to that white fluid. It bubbled briefly and then sank slowly into the ground. The earth sent up tiny ribands of steam, and for a little while every field in Willow looked like the site of a dying volcano.

By quarter of seven it was over, except for the repairs, and the residents were used to them.

It seemed a small price to pay for another seven years of quiet prosperity in this mostly forgotten Maine backwater.

At five past eight, Laura Stanton's beat-to-s.h.i.t Volvo turned into the dooryard of the General Mercantile. When Laura got out, she looked paler and sicker than ever. She was sick, in fact; she still had the six-pack of Dawson's Ale in one hand, but now all the bottles were empty. She had a vicious hangover.

Henry Eden came out on the porch. His dog walked behind him.

'Get that mutt inside, or I'm gonna turn right around and go home,' Laura said from the foot of the stairs.

'He can't help pa.s.sing gas, Laura.'

'That doesn't mean I have to be around when he lets rip,' Laura said. 'I mean it, now, Henry. My head hurts like a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, and the last thing I need this morning is listening to that dog play Hail Columbia out of its a.s.shole.'

'Go inside, Toby,' Henry said, holding the door open.

Toby looked up at him with wet eyes, as if to say Do I have to? Things were just getting interesting out here.

'Go on, now,' Henry said.

Toby walked back inside, and Henry shut the door. Laura waited until she heard the latch snick shut, and then she mounted the steps.

'Your sign fell over,' she said, handing him the carton of empties.

'I got eyes, woman,' Henry said. He was not in the best temper this morning, himself. Few people in Willow would be. Sleeping through a rain of toads was a G.o.ddam hard piece of work. Thank G.o.d it only came once every seven years, or a man would be apt to go s.h.i.t out of his mind.

'You should have taken it in,' she said.

Henry muttered something she didn't quite catch.

'What was that?'

'I said we should have tried harder,' Henry said defiantly. 'They was a nice young couple. We should have tried harder.'

She felt a touch of compa.s.sion for the old man in spite of her thudding head, and laid a hand on his arm. 'It's the ritual,' she said.

'Well, sometimes I just feel like saying frig the ritual!'

'Henry!' She drew her hand back, shocked in spite of herself.

But he wasn't getting any younger, she reminded herself. The wheels were getting a little rusty upstairs, no doubt.

'I don't care,' he said stubbornly. 'They seemed like a real nice young couple. You said so, too, and don't try to say you didn't.'

'I did think they were nice,' she said. 'But we can't help that, Henry. Why, you said so yourself just last night.'

'I know,' he sighed.

'We don't make them stay,' she said. 'Just the opposite. We warn them out of town. They decide to stay themselves. They always decide to stay. They make their own decision. That's part of the ritual, too.'

'I know,' he repeated. He drew a deep breath and grimaced. 'I hate the smell afterward. Whole G.o.ddam town smells like clabbered milk.'

'It'll be gone by noon. You know that.'

'Ayuh. But I just about hope I'm underground when it comes around again, Laura. And if I ain't, I hope somebody else gets the job of meetin whoever comes just before rainy season. I like bein able to pay m'bills when they come due just as well as anybody else, but I tell you, a man gets tired of toads. Even if it is only once every seven years, a man can get d.a.m.ned tired of toads.'

'A woman, too,' she said softly.

'Well,' he said, looking around with a sigh, 'I guess we might try puttin some of this d.a.m.n mess right, don't you?'

'Sure,' she said. 'And, you know, Henry, we don't make ritual, we only follow it.'

'I know, but - '

'And things could change. There's no telling when or why, but they could. This might be the last time we have rainy season. Or next time no one from out of town might come - '

'Don't say that,' he said fearfully. 'If no one comes, the toads might not go away like they do when the sun hits em.'

'There, you see?' she asked. 'You have come around to my side of it, after all.'

'Well,' he said, 'it's a long time. Ain't it. Seven years is a long time.'

'Yes.'

'They was a nice young couple, weren't they?'

'Yes,' she said again.

'Awful way to go,' Henry Eden said with a slight hitch inhis voice, and this time she said nothing. After a moment, Henry asked her if she would help him set his sign up again. In spite of her nasty headache, Laura said she would - she didn't like to see Henry so low, especially when he was feeling low over something he could control no more than he could control the tides or the phases of the moon.

By the time they'd finished, he seemed to feel a little better.

'Ayuh,' he said. 'Seven years is a h.e.l.l of a long time.'

It is, she thought, but it always pa.s.ses, and rainy season always comes around again, and the outsiders come with it, always two of them, always a man and a woman, and we always tell them exactly what is going to happen, and they don't believe it, and what happens . . . happens.

'Come on, you old crock,' she said, 'offer me a cup of coffee before my head splits wide open.'

He offered her a cup, and before they had finished, the sounds of hammers and saws had begun in town. Outside the window they could look down Main Street and see people folding back their shutters, talking and laughing.

The air was warm and dry, the sky overhead was a pale and hazy blue, and in Willow, rainy season was over.

My Pretty Pony.