Cockatrice: Black Toad
Part One of Three - Paranormal/Suspense
Greetings, Talebones Readers!
It’s been a while since I shared some shorter fiction…
This is Part One of a three-part story I’m calling Cockatrice.
The oddball idea for this one has been unfolding kinda slowly over the last week or so, and I’ve decided to share it with you in stages instead of attempting to post it all in one big chunk.
It’s a bit strange, a bit mysterious, perhaps a little creepy…just the way we like our Ferris Island fiction, amirite?
I hope you enjoy!
If you like this story and you want to see more like it, please let me know with a like, comment, share, or restack!
And for more fiction fun of various shapes and sizes, subscribe for free!
Click here for more stories set on Ferris Island!
Stevie Stoat pulled up to the slouching old rambler and shut off the engine, sighing.
Tired house, whitewashed house, hung ‘round with old mirrors on every exterior wall. Big ones, small ones. Faded from the rain, some growing moss.
Grandma Irma’s funhouse, the adults of the Stoat family—near and extended—had long since taken to calling it. Grandma Irma’s mirrored madness.
Mine now, I guess. Stevie climbed out of the old beat-up Taurus and stood for a minute, stretching after her drive. She had forgotten how quiet it was out here. Compared to the noise and nerves of Portland, tiny Ferris Island felt like being smothered in cotton-wool.
There were no other houses within sight. Grandma Irma’s property stretched out and away in a muddy winter-meadow mess where horses used to graze, and a distant ring of dark trees. There was an old fence out there at the edge of it all, but Stevie couldn’t see it. She wondered idly if it was still there or if the land had swallowed it up.
Nearer to the house was a small barn, a garden shed, and a big chicken coop; all were faded with time, but despite the mirrors nailed to them they were all in good repair. Grandma Irma had been very proud of the health and vitality of her chickens, often putting a FREE EGGS sign out at the end of the driveway so she could share her bounty with backroads passersby.
But now, the yard and coop were empty and still. The chickens had all been rehomed, sold off to help pay for funeral expenses.
Stevie fished the house key out of her pocket and walked up to the front door, grateful it was an overcast January day. Direct sun on that haphazard multitude of mirrors could sear your eyesight in a blink.
She unlocked the door and let herself in, grateful that there didn’t seem to be as many mirrors in here. Just the usual amount for a small house where a little old lady once lived.
The memories rushed in immediately with the sight of Grandma Irma’s old rust-red settee, the retro blockprints on the walls, the bare brown shiplap, the amber-and-avocado kitchen color scheme untouched since the seventies.
Stevie could still feel the un-air-conditioned heat of summer visits sitting on that couch, eating ice cream with her cousins. Or running around outside, playing hide and seek in the woods and fields in their shorts and tees while the adults took shelter on the porch. The kids had always been warned not to play their games too close to the house. Not to throw a ball or a stone or a stick in the wrong direction, lest a mirror shatter. They learned care.
Despite sitting empty for a few weeks while all of Grandma Irma’s affairs had been dealt with, the house was clean and neat enough. Master bedroom and bathroom were untouched, living room was free of clutter. In the kitchen there were piles of unsorted mail on the breakfast table and a single coffee cup left beside the sink with a ring of coffee dried on its porcelain floor. Likely not Irma’s; Stevie wondered if the attorney had helped himself to a cuppa on one of his visits.
There was one piece of mail on its own at the end of the kitchen counter, left out on purpose. It had Stevie’s name on it, and the envelope bore the letterhead of the office of Grandma Irma’s attorney.
Stevie ripped it open and pulled out the letter from within. It was written in Grandma Irma’s careful yet shaky script:
My dear Stevie, my sweet Silver Spring,
Welcome home, honey-girl. It’s right that you’re here. It’s right that this is your house now. Only a Stoat can do what you’re about to do. It’s a big job, but I know you’re ready.
Main thing is to watch the mirrors. Make sure they don’t break. Keep them clean and polished, replace them right away if they crack.
It’s important because if he’s allowed to get out he’ll seek vengeance, and you’ll be the first one he’ll go for. He’s a spiteful bastard. Good news is you’ll know it if he’s out: voice of a toad, cunning of a snake, strength of a spur-legged rooster. There’ll be signs.
Best not to let it get to that point. But you’ll know what to do.
Keep your head. I have every faith in you.
All my love,
Irma
Stevie stared at the letter for a long, long time. It felt like a bit of a cosmic joke, really. She had been hoping for something else. Something more heartfelt, maybe. Something with a bit more of Irma’s lucid self in it. She was hoping for some life-wisdom from grandmother to granddaughter, even if their relationship had been distant for a little while.
But no. It was the same stuff the family had been complaining about for years. Irma’s declining mental state. Her belief in something trapped under the house, and the importance of the mirrors. The kind of thing no one could convince her out of, the sort of thing she fought for to her grave. And here it was, in her final words, too.
Stevie folded up the letter, stuck it back in the envelope, and—in a symbolic gesture more than anything—threw it in the cold, empty fireplace.
She had already done all the grieving she had intended to do. Now, it was time to decide what would come next.
Stevie spent the next hour or so unpacking her things from the car. It wasn’t much; she hadn’t been settled anywhere properly for years. Portland had just been a good place to hang out for a while. Work a simple cash-only job, busk on the weekends, crash with friends. Sleep on couches, smoke on back porches, enjoy a transient lifestyle. It had seemed like heaven at first, when she was eighteen and rebellion felt like freedom. But the aimlessness caught up with her eventually. At twenty-one, she was craving something else. Something she couldn’t name.
After unpacking she sat on the front porch and smoked for a bit, looking out at the quiet meadow where birds scattered from dense thickets of creeping salmonberry and invasive broom. The idea of putting down roots was going to take some getting used to. The sense of iron bars closing in, trapping her in place, made her shiver.
But this is good, she thought, like a spell over her anxiety. This is good. You’re good.
She wasn’t even sure why Irma had adamantly left her the house, out of everyone else she could have picked. But she noted with some chagrin that none of the other relatives bothered to fight her for it, either.
Stevie left the porch to walk around the house, making a mental list of all the things that might need repairs. The list was short; Irma had been pretty quick to hire help when she needed it, probably a leftover from living with her husband for so many years. Grandpa Ed had been a contractor, never one to let any house problem fester for longer than a day or two. He had passed away nearly a decade earlier and, ever since, Irma honored him by taking on every house project as it arose. Quickly, thoroughly, and with care.
That said, the subtle signs of neglect over the last few weeks were present. Around the back of the house, Stevie noted the entrance to what was probably the house’s crawlspace low to the ground. The horizontal hatch door was knocked slightly askew, and some newish nibblings in the siding told her that vermin had been busy turning the underside of the house into a haven against the winter cold.
Stevie sighed out a puff of frustrated smoke. That could be expensive to deal with, depending on the extent of the problem. She hoped it wasn’t rats. She hated rats.
There was a mirror here, too, of course. A circular one, like you might find over an antique vanity. It had fallen from its nail above the crawlspace entrance and there was now a crack running through it. After considering for a moment, Stevie picked the broken mirror up and carried it with her back to the porch, where she propped it against the house to await its eventual fate.
The idea of removing all of these mirrors exhausted her, even more so figuring out how to deal with them all. What the hell was she going to do with a hundred moldy mirrors? Donate them? Take them to the dump?
Too many questions, not enough answers, but plenty of time to figure it out.
When the cold finally seeped in through her thin coat, Stevie threw her cigarette down on the frosted ground, stamped it out, and went inside to turn on the baseboards and bed down before the winter dark drew in.
*******
Stevie was awakened in the night by the sound of an old phone ringing.
She rose quickly, stumbled awake, and was halfway out the bedroom door before she realized that she was not in Portland. She was in Grandma Irma’s house, and the phone line was not connected yet. That was still on her to-do list.
The sound could not be a phone.
She paused, bleary-eyed and blinking, to listen more closely. It was a high, loud trilling sound, and it was coming from outside.
Stevie threw on her coat, slipped her bare feet into her boots, and opened the front door. Here the trilling was harsh, splitting the night in two. It was a bitterly cold stretch of lonely January and the sound echoed over the meadow and reverberated off the mirrors on the house’s exterior walls, rattling their edges against the siding.
She stepped down off the porch and tried to locate where the sound was coming from, but it didn’t seem to have a single source. As she was slowly gaining conscious thought, however, she realized that the sound did seem familiar. Wrong somehow, but a close approximation to something she had heard before.
Something from childhood, maybe? An animal? A bird?
But it was deafening. She clapped her hands over her ears and turned this way and that way in the gravel driveway, trying to see what could possibly be so loud, so grating.
In her searching she took a loop around the house, and around the back she noticed that the crawlspace door had been shoved all the way aside, the opening yawning like a dark mouth into the house’s underbelly.
Not rats, then, Stevie thought. Raccoons or something. Even worse.
Thinking of raccoons, she looked up on instinct in time to see something watching her from the edge of the roof. Something short and squat was perched there.
But it was bigger than a raccoon.
It glared down at her with slit-pupiled eyes glowing golden in the dark on either side of a wide alien face, its balloon-sized throat pulsing and round and glistening.
Toad.
The word rose into Stevie’s mind before she was willing to accept that that’s what she was looking at. A giant black toad on the roof of the house, round throat vibrating, impassive eyes gazing on her with malice.
But as soon as she locked eyes with the impossible thing, it vanished.
The trilling, too, was silenced in an instant.
Stevie lowered her hands from her ears, trembling. As if in mockery, the night around her seeped in quiet, still, even peaceful. As if nothing was amiss. All was typical. She was the only thing out of place in her unlaced boots and unzipped coat.
After standing there for a long time, unsure and unwilling to move, Stevie finally knelt and slid the crawlspace door back over the entrance, closing the mouth. Before she pushed it shut she thought she felt a breath of warm air from within the crawlspace, humid and thick. But she did not open it again to check. She didn’t dare.
That done, she carefully walked back around to the front porch, vigilant for movements in the dark. For the stare of glowing eyes. She sat there and smoked for a while. She sat and smoked until she convinced herself that it had all just been a very, very vivid dream.
Stress, she thought. New place. Old memories. Just stress.
Sure. She had had plenty of night terrors when she was a kid, stuff she could have sworn was real. Happened all the time. It even happened in Portland sometimes, when things were at their roughest. This wasn’t anything more than that.
Holding this thought like a lifeline against the terror, she stamped out her cigarette and went back to bed.
Stevie thinks all this mirror stuff is bunk. All us readers are telling her," No! You need the mirrors!" Like watching a horror movie and the heroine doesn't bother to recheck that the doors are all locked.
Superbly creepy!