Darker Than Weird: Fourteen Tales of Horror

The Thing in the Pond

They say Old Man Carter started digging the pond back in 1931. His wife and two little boys had died from tuberculosis. Folks said he’d lost his mind. He never even shed a tear at the funeral, but as soon as his family was laid to rest he went on home and started digging. Most folks thought he was digging a well at first. Others claimed he was digging the pond that his poor wife had always wanted. I remember my granddaddy’s take on it:

“Jeb Carter is plum crazy.”

Some men deal with grief in unexpected ways. Old Man Carter turned his grief into a sadness that would mar the earth itself. He dug, and he dug, and he dug. Folks brought him sandwiches from the General Store and farmers’ wives brought him chicken dinners. After a week the hole was forty feet deep, and they lowered his meals into the hole with a bucket-and-rope. Carter had rigged up a pulley system to haul up buckets of dislocated earth all day long, and a few local boys helped moved the dirt piles aside to make room for more. Everybody figured he’d give it up eventually.

Carter stayed in that damp hole, sleeping only when he’d exhausted himself, then getting right back up and digging again. All day every day — dig, dig, dig. He sent up the loose dirt in five-gallon buckets one at a time. People even came from other counties to stand at the top of the hole and watch Jeb Carter digging his way to nowhere.

“He’s bound to hit China someday if’n he don’t quit,” some said.

“Shee-it, he’ll die before he digs that far,” said others.

“I read a book says they’s fires deep in the earth,” said a boy. “Fire and magma. He keeps on digging he’ll open up Hell itself. Burn ’im alive.”

“He’s lost his mind,” they all agreed, but nobody could blame him.

After all, he’d lost everything else.

So after a while most folks forgot all about Carter and his hole. That is until the hole filled up with water that spewed out to drown the whole pasture overnight. Nobody saw Carter come out of that hole, and the county men said he’d struck some underground reservoir or river that had proceeded to drown him. In less than a day there was no more sign of the crazy old man or his hole. There was just a big pond of deep green water, sparkling in the sunlight.

Nobody went near the Carter place for months. Down at the barber shop folks would mention Old Carter and imagine his bones lying at the bottom of the pond, or maybe stuck deep down in the hole that had birthed it. At night the pond was a black mirror reflecting the stars, and the smell of the deep earth hung in the air about it.

Wild things don’t fear what men fear, so it wasn’t long before the pond was lousy with fat, burping frogs. A forest of tall reeds grew about its edges. A few years later, a group of young boys snuck out to the Carter pond to hunt bullfrogs. Seven boys went down there after midnight, but only six came home. I was one of those boys, so I can tell you what happened.

Johnny Haxton, always the wildest of our bunch, decided to go for a moonlight swim. The other boys stalked the reed forest, stabbing their three-pointed gigs into every frog they could find. Johnny yelled at us to jump in. “The water’s fine, boys!” he said. I remember him doing the backstroke, and I almost took off my muddy shirt and joined him.

Then I heard a gulping sound and Johnny was gone. In the center of the pond a ring of quiet ripples marked the place where he had been. I dropped an impaled frog into the burlap sack I was carrying and watched the ripples, waiting for Johnny to come back up. After about thirty seconds I started calling his name. I saw his hand come up once, the water splashing, and something dark as a shadow emerged for a half-second. Johnny’s hand went back under, and there was only the sound of bullfrogs croaking between the reeds.

“Johnny!” We all screamed his name. We stood in the mud on the edge of the dark water, screaming his name over and over. Looking at the pond was like looking into the night sky. Constellations glowed like scattered diamonds. Even the ripples disappeared. We hollered for Johnny as tears fell down our faces, but not a single one of us dared to dive in there and help him. Not a single one.

We ran from that pond like the devil himself was at our heels. Next day the county sheriff sent a diver in there to comb the pond, looking for Johnny’s body. It made the headlines of all the local newspapers, but they never found so much as a little finger. Johnny was gone, just like Old Man Carter was gone. Carried deep into the earth by the thing in the pond.

Nobody went down there to hunt frogs again.

The old Carter house stood half-submerged at the pond’s western edge. If you walked the dirt road that wound past it, you’d hear them frogs croaking and burping from the shattered windows of the house. Only frogs and toads lived in that old house now, and every kid in Ellot County knew it was haunted. My pa whupped me good for my part in Johnny’s disappearance. He warned me I’d get worse if I ever went near that pond again. So I didn’t. But I did see Johnny again a few months later.

It was April and a big storm blew in, thunder and lightning and sheets of rain thick enough to drown a man in the street. I was in my bedroom reading Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar. Johnny had loaned me his dog-eared copy the week before he died, but I hadn’t got around to reading it until now. I was so involved in the ape-man’s adventures I forgot about all the storm. Ma and Pa were huddled by the fireplace in the livin’ room with my little sister Sara. I was in another world altogether, a world of lost cities and deadly jungles, lost in the pages of my book.

Somebody knocked on my window. I looked up from the book, but the window was a gray mirror slick with raindrops. A pale shadow stood out there in the rain, something I could barely see. The knock wasn’t loud, and I thought maybe I’d imagined it. But then it came again, low and insistent. Johnny Haxton used to knock on my window like that when he wanted me to sneak outside after dark. My first thought was “Johnny! He’s still alive! He didn’t die in that pond — he ran off. And now he’s come back to tell me he’s okay.”

I went to the window and opened it. It was cold, and the air stank of fish scales and worm flesh. A dark figure stood in the rain, about Johnny’s height. He’d moved back from the window a ways, and the rain obscured his face. But I could tell it was Johnny Haxton. Same skinny arms, same wild hair, and the same knock on my window.

“Johnny?” I stuck my head halfway outside.

“It’s me,” he said. His voice was hoarse, like he had a mouthful of mud caught in his throat.

“You’re alive?” I said. The rain splattered my face.

Johnny didn’t say anything, just stood there in the cold rain. A different smell reached my nostrils, and it reminded me of a dead dog’s carcass I had once seen rotting on the side of the road.

“I found him,” Johnny said. I still couldn’t see his face well.

Thunder broke the sky above us.

“Found who?” I said, but I already knew.

“Old Man Carter,” he said. I noticed he wasn’t shivering at all.

“Come inside,” I said. “Come sit by the fire.”

Johnny raised a hand. “No,” he said. “I gotta get back soon. I…I wanted to let you know.”

“Let me know what?” I asked. “Where did you run off to?”

“Down there,” he said. One of his bony fingers pointed to the sopping ground. “He’s down there. Been down there all along.”

“Down where?” I asked. My hair was soaked, and the rain wetted down my nightshirt. I shivered the way Johnny should have been shivering. The cold air was seeping into my room, along with that rotten smell. Something had died out there in the mud, a drowned rat, a dog, maybe a stray cat.

“It’s wonderful, Teddy,” Johnny said. “You have to see it. It’s better than Opar. Better than Atlantis. Better than Camelot. Come with me…you’ll see.”

I shook my head. “Come inside, Johnny. I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

“Tsath,” Johnny said. “City of the Sleeping God. It’s been there forever…longer than the United States…longer than Egypt…ever since the Great Cataclysm. The Children of Tsathoggua built it from sapphire and quartz. It’s magnificent, Ted. And now they worship even stranger gods…”

“Tsathoggua?” I remembered the name from an issue of Weird Tales. “The frog-god? That ain’t real, Johnny. It’s just a story. Come inside and get warm now.”

Johnny laughed, and his teeth chattered.

“Now why would I lie to my best buddy?” Johnny said. “I just want you to see it with your own eyes. To see them. Come with me now, and you’ll never be cold again. This is your only chance…” Johnny reached out his hand and stepped closer to the window.

The lightning flashed and I saw his face. The skin was loose and pale about his skull, bloated and crisscrossed with blue veins. Black weeds hung tangled in his hair, and his clothing was nothing more than muddy rags. His eyeballs had fallen too far back in their sockets, and it was clear now that the rotting smell was him.

Johnny was dead after all, but somehow still walking and talking.

“Old Man Carter struck an underground river,” Johnny said. Dark foam streamed from his shriveled lips as his lower jaw clacked. “The deep water pulled him right down and the current washed him all the way to K’n-yan. That’s where they found his body — on the shore of the sunless sea.”

I told Johnny to shut up. Tears streamed from my eyes even as the rain washed them away. His dead mouth kept on moving, and his words burned into my memories.

“They raised him up,” Johnny said. “Now he serves them. There is no greater honor.”

“I don’t want to hear any more—”

“He came for me,” Johnny said. “So they could raise me up too. Oh, you should see it. The towers of blue crystal, the domes bright as gold, alive with atomic fires. They move like angels in globes of light, drifting and flying and making love…they made us their slaves and now we’ll never have to fear death again. What’s there to be afraid of when you’ve already died? They raised us up, Ted! Come with me before it’s too late! Let them raise you up!”

Johnny’s hand came closer and I slammed the window shut. I must have screamed because Ma and Pa came rushing into my room. Ma told me later they found me crying and drenched on the floor by the window, but I don’t remember that. They put me to bed and I lay in a fever for the next three days. I never told them about Johnny, or the things he said to me. I guess I figured nobody would believe me.

I never finished Johnny’s Opar book. I couldn’t touch it anymore. Every time I tried, I’d see his swollen, rotting face on the page. “They raised him up!” He say it again in my dreams, or during moments of quiet contemplation. I started sneaking whiskey from my old man’s stash to dull my dreams and still my racing thoughts. I think Ma knew I was drinking, but she didn’t say a thing about it. The booze kept me calm.

A month later I dug through the attic and found that old copy of Weird Tales. I found the story that mentioned Tsathoggua. Supposedly it was a massive, toad-like entity who dwelled in a deep cavern beneath the earth during prehistoric ages. There was no description in that story of a fantastic underground city known as Tsath, but it did mention various pre-human races who worshipped the toad-god with sacrifices of living flesh. But this was just a story in a pulp magazine — the kind of publication my parents called “ungodly trash,” and would throw into the fireplace if they got half a chance.

By winter I had convinced myself that Johnny’s visit had been only a nightmare. I walked by the pond and it was frozen over, as it always was during the cold months. It seemed harmless under all that ice. I tried again but still couldn’t finish the Tarzan book Johnny had given me. Eventually I dropped it into the fireplace, along with that copy of Weird Tales. I thought maybe burning them both would end my nightmares, and it worked for a while.

On the day I turned eighteen the local draft board let me know I was going to fight Nazis in Europe. The States had joined the war two years previous, and things weren’t going too well over there. Sixteen young men from Ellot County entered the service that month, although some had volunteered for duty. It didn’t matter — willingly or unwillingly — we shipped off to basic training, then to the battlefields of France.

The endless fear and trauma that comes with fighting a war kept me from thinking about Old Man Carter, his pond, or Johnny. At times I completely forgot about them. Sometimes, though, we’d march by a quiet little pond in the French countryside, and it all came back like a case of mental indigestion. Unlike the other fellas in my unit, I wouldn’t swim in or drink from any ponds. I had no problem with honest, free-flowing rivers, but I kept away from standing bodies of water as much as possible.

I remember sitting in camp one night, eating stew out of my helmet, imagining that every pond in the world was linked by a network of subterranean rivers, and that all of these rivers led to a sunless ocean that carried bones, jewels, and the bodies of dead men to the shore of K’n-yan. There, on sands bright as crushed sapphires, busy skeletons and restless mummies roamed about picking up useful and fascinating refuse for the Masters of Tsath. In the back of my mind, I saw the walking dead march from the sunless sea to the glittering spires of the toad-god’s city. Among those diligent corpses I recognized the faces of Johnny Haxton and Old Man Carter, although how I recognized them in such a decayed state, I couldn’t begin to say.

A buddy woke me up. I’d fallen asleep near the campfire while the rest of the unit bathed and splashed in a pond next to a burned-out French farmhouse. They teased me for a while about my fear of ponds, a terror so great it gave me mumbling nightmares. But I wasn’t so sure my vision of Tsath had been a nightmare at all. It seemed as real as the war itself: A manifestation of impossible horrors made real. I didn’t say anything like that out loud. I didn’t want to get kicked out of the army as a nut-case.

One morning near Toulon a division of German forces ambushed us and killed half the unit. I took a bullet in the leg that left me lame, so I’d get out of the service honorably, not by virtue of insanity. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to go back to Ellot County and Old Man Carter’s pond. Still the power of that dark water pulled on me like a magnet. There was no escaping it.

“I know you want to stay here and see this out with your buddies,” Captain Ross told me. “But it’s time for you to go home. You’re no good to us with a busted leg. Count your blessings, Ted. You did your part. Now go home and rest.” I thought about the men who had died next to me. I thought about the men I’d killed, either long-range or face-to-face. There were so many of them, I had lost count. I heard their screams again, the boom of the artillery. I cried in that hospital bed like I’d cried the night dead Johnny came to my window. The captain held onto my shoulders like a father would. He was a good man. The next day I began a series of flights that would take me back to the States. On that same day, Captain Ross went back to the front, where he took a German bullet in the head and died instantly. I found out about it when I opened a letter that had passed me on the way home.

Ma was sick with the cancer and wouldn’t last much longer. Pa was taking it hard, hitting the bottle. My little sister was just old enough to care for them both. They were happy for a little while to have me home again, but they could tell I wasn’t the same. I didn’t talk much anymore, and when I did they cringed at the things I shared. Nobody wanted to hear about the war — not the bloody details, the spilled brains, the slaughtered children, the constant staring into the face of death until you were numb and half-dead yourself.

I’d been back for three days when I found myself limping by the old Carter place. It was high summer, hot and humid. The pond was still the same size, but its waters were darker now. The sunlight couldn’t penetrate its surface at all. The old Carter house had fallen to rubble, half of it lying underwater. The cries of bullfrogs and toads filled the air, and I sat there until dark.

The moon rose full and round. I remembered looking at it from a battlefield five thousand miles away. Stand anywhere in the world and you’ll see the same moon as everyone else. The moon is a constant, like Carter’s pond. Now I saw the moon’s reflection gleaming on the surface of the pond, and a sudden understanding washed over me. It all made sense. Before me lay the gateway to an eternal world where change was a myth and death a distant memory. I bent down to drink the cool water, and my tears added a pinch of salt to its sweetness. I waded in and floated on my back atop the water, the moon fixed in my vision like the answer to an unasked question.

I waited for Johnny to come back. Waited to be pulled low so I could be raised up.

I was ready now. Sometimes the waters rippled and bubbled around me, releasing odd vapors into the air. Sometimes I called Johnny’s name, but it didn’t do me any good.

Maybe I’d waited too long and the gate to K’n-yan was closed forever. Maybe I would never walk the glimmering streets of Tsath, where statues of the toad-god stood like stone behemoths above luminous ramparts.

Now they worship even stranger gods…

When the sun came up, I swam to the pond’s edge and fell asleep. I woke up and walked back to my folks’ house to write all of this down on paper. People were bound to wonder about me like they wondered about Old Man Carter, and I wanted to explain things myself. I didn’t show what I wrote to anyone yet. I knew better. They’d use it as evidence to lock me in a crazy-house.

Two nights later Ma died in her sleep. We buried her on the hill behind the house, and my father stopped talking to me. We drank together, but we didn’t talk. My sister moved out of the house to live with a young man she’d been courting for a while. There was nothing else she could do for Pa and me.

Pa was still snoring when I got up this morning. I spent the last of my army pay on a case of good whiskey and left it for him on the dining room table. Then I hobbled over to the old Carter place and took a swim in the pond. Now and then deep rumblings came from below the water. I imagined scaly things swimming up from the sunless ocean with tongues extended like octopus tentacles, pulling me down, deep into the world below the world, where glorious Tsath awaited my service. Where Johnny’s bones rambled along golden beaches gathering the detritus of mystery and carrying it back to enrich the treasure vaults of the Masters.

I floated on the black water, reflected constellations swimming about me.

Still Johnny hasn’t come for me. Neither has Old Man Carter. I should have taken Johnny’s invitation on that cold rainy night so many years ago.

Now I have to do things the hard way. I found a big rock in the pasture, as heavy a stone as I could carry. It didn’t take long to weave some reeds into a sturdy rope. I tied one end to the rock and the other about my waist.

As soon as I finish writing this, I’ll wade through the mud to the center and let the stone carry me down…down into the swirling depths of Carter’s well…down into the rushing chaos of that nameless river…beyond that into the currents of the sunless ocean…and ultimately to the glittering shore of the toad-god’s kingdom. When I close my eyes, I see the crystalline towers of Tsath rising toward a stalactite sky, where flocks of serpent-bats glide like sparrows. I see myself marching along the jeweled strand, once again part of a unit with a purpose. Fleshless and deathless beings with no more blood or tears to spill.

One of them is my best friend.

Whoever finds this notebook has a choice. You can believe everything I’ve written, if you have a mind to. Or you can toss it into the fireplace like a worthless old pulp and watch it burn. Some folks just can’t abide the truth. Especially when it’s ugly. But for others the truth is all they have, no matter how bitter, strange, or unbelievable it might be.

The black toads gather around me, croaking their ancient songs.

They know what’s coming next.

See you soon, Johnny.