An Unkillable Frog Read online

the arcana of battles fought long ago. Ian knew the starting point for his obsession coincided with his first real taste of bullying. Until then the anti-Jeremy operations had been covert, as he smilingly described it. Then war was declared. The trio had friends among the fringes of their class within the chess players and proto-geeks. Jeremy disdained these social connections.

  "Why bother? If the rest hate us, let them hate us. Let's give them their target.”

  Needless to say, this philosophy invited only further scorn.

  His every attempt to deny the bullies their prize failed. Being the lightest out of the three, it was Jeremy's fate to be regularly tossed in the school dumpster amid the apple cores and waxed lunch paper. Yet even his tormentors grew to have a respect for him. Jeremy did not name them, even after he landed hard in a garbage-free area of the waste container and the destruction of his glasses tore a gash in his cheek that took three stitches to close. He explained to the doctor that it was merely play gone awry.

  After that the beatings lessened in duration and severity, but never intent. In the caste system of ten-year-olds, even those who were spat on by girls for amusement were grateful for Jeremy. He was neither the shortest nor the fattest. And there were other kids whose glasses appeared cut from the same stuff used to contain killer whales at aquariums. But Jeremy simply greeted his attackers with a smile every morning, and this they could not abide. Nathan and Ian were tolerated by the bullies, but offered no real sport. Nathan was merely another Fat Kid in a smorgasbord of targets of opportunity.

  Ian’s dysfunction was, in the opinion of his classmates, indeterminate. Their feeling that he was afflicted by some inherent wrongness was itself enough.

  The next day, Jeremy put Nathan in charge of Deep Tunnelling and Countermine Procedures. Jeremy had examined this to him thus:

  "In World War One they could only entrench -”

  A slow smile crawled upon his face.

  "I love that word. Entrench to a certain point, and past that the artillery would smash them like bugs in a matchbox. They then decided to go deep, to undertunnel the enemy's trenches and get them that way.”

  Nathan thought on this a moment. They had brought up with them a spray can of deruster, and he misted the blade of his shovel with it.

  "What is they were down there now?" he said.

  Jeremy nodded.

  "They could be extending galleries left and right to cover our flanks. Then, at a per-arranged time, their forces break through the earth to the surface.”

  Nathan's small brow furrowed with worry.

  Talk of impending attack seemed suddenly ludicrous to Nathan. The very fabric of night was warm and aromatic; only the slow designs of dreams could be woven there. From the sports ground near their school rose the shouts of soccer players. He closed his eyes and imagined them as the battle cry of an invading army, but failed. That sound was too infused with joy.

  "We would be over-run before we knew it!" he said at last.

  "But that will never happen, Nathan. Not while we control this hill.”

  "No," Nathan said, and scuffed the spade into the dirt.

  His frame was what his relatives would earnestly call "Chubby.” But they would never know the power to lacerate encompassed in that single word. Its mere derivatives were no less scourging. Nathan had borne these and many others all his short life. Here, up on the hill with a pine-scented breeze filling his lungs and fresh-turned earth beneath his sneakers, they had never happened. Or at least, the location of these affronts was obscured by a screen of trees he wished could fill the entire valley below.

  And in the undergrowth would run many-fanged things dripping claws for of all the things in the world to occupy his time, nothing pleased Nathan more than the imagining of beasts.

  Those of history and even legend were not sufficient to satiate him. The dinosaurs were the merest shadows of the animals that crowded his mind by night. On long hot school afternoons Nathan uncoiled great monsters down the classroom length; think stands of envenomed stingers nestling next to gullets lined with eyes. His stare focused at an infinitesimal point many miles distant. When like this, the other children would nudge and snigger, for it was not unknown for a silvery strand of drool to alight his lips and hang there.

  But the boy was not daydreaming. Nathan knew that a blossom of jaws rent the world's heart.

  Even now he imagined he stood astride the back of some vast-bulked sea creature. His job was to harvest hunks of lardy meat from it. A whole team of fleshcutters laboured alongside him, singing work songs praising the swiftness of their blades. He bent to his task, seeing veins spurting orange blood where water escaped the enclosing clay. His wound ate deeper into the animal's flanks until Ian appeared before him.

  "Jeremy has found something," Ian said.

  Their friend was crouched in a shallow pit as though his hands and feet were held fast there by cement.

  "Lads, we have not worked all this time for nothing,” he paused for effect, as they knew he was wont to do. "I think they must have mined here years ago, way before that -" he waved a hand dismissively at the encroaching suburbia - "Was anywhere near here.” With that, Jeremy brought his fist down hard, the rock clasped within causing a metallic boom when it landed.

  Nathan rushed in and almost bowled his friend over. Ian crouched at the pit mouth like an insect studying its prey. Jeremy had uncovered a square metal hatch, his grimy fingers gripping the handle like they were sucked to the gray steel by some force unknown to man or nature. Ian spoke slowly with measured tones.

  "It's getting really dark. We should leave this and come back tomorrow. We don't want to end up like Jake Sattler.”

  Nathan winced. Jake Sattler had been before their time, but the manic frenzy of his digging was equal parts inspiration and cautionary tale.

  Jake’s obsession had run to stockades and barriers within the glades nearby. These had risen like the palace of some wood demon until his ambition overcame his rudimentary engineering skills in spectacular fashion. The resultant collapse had crushed his left leg beyond all recognition and imbued the forest with a mythic appetite for the zeal of boys, one their present construction sought to conquer.

  "Ian is right, Jeremy," he said. "Crawling around in there like maggots is pretty dumb.”

  Jeremy shook his head and knelt in mock supplication.

  "Please God; spare me from friends with the hearts of little girls.”

  Nathan giggled. Ian shrugged, rose and scrabbled off in the undergrowth nearby. Nathan's hands now joined Jeremy's and they heaved in unison. The hatch creaked once, half-heartedly, and sprung open.

  "Stand back!" ordered Ian, and his friends quickly complied when they saw the large stone he bore in both hands. It disappeared into the void and the boys were rewarded with a satisfying crunching sound, as if it had smashed into a bed of ice.

  "Okay," said Jeremy. "Tomorrow is going to be a big day. Ian, we need you to get a torch. Nathan, if you can get a piece of thick rope or even better a rope ladder.”

  His friends murmured assent, their eyes shining in the dusk. Ian looked at the hatch and voiced their mutual thoughts:

  "This is going to be great.”

  Nathan's brother Scott had a ritual he observed every time he bought a new CD. Or to be more precise: a series of rituals amounting to a sacrament of Heavy Metal. The favour of the dark gods in whose dominion he was held thrall was not easily won nor retained. They demanded unwavering devotion. He would drag his speakers to the window and slowly rack the volume up to a level just below that sufficient to blow them. This point could only be aurally noted by an experience gained by painful experimentation.

  These were Scott's third pair of speakers, the first two sacrificed to the Metal Gods when his untrained ear had over-estimated their capacity. With the speakers in place, he sat in the backyard to let the sonic onslaught envelop the trees and lawn. Even the brightest summer sun would seem drained; the very rays unable to p
enetrate the billowing black noise below. Scott's favourite band, Pathogenic Demise, was his companion this afternoon. His lips followed the lyrics printed on the CD cover depicting a corpse in a biohazard suit wielding a bloody axe:

  "The slain will rise in hills of gore

  Your cities cauterized by flame

  In crimson torrents blood will pour

  You dare not speak my name!"

  A double kickdrum hammered steadily under a maelstrom of guitars, a malevolent landscape he knew well. This was his sound; this membrane of discordant music he wished could become his totality. The chorus of a new song rose and Scott stood, listening for the words. In a few seconds he had them and bellowed in unison.

  When Nathan arrived home from the hill a few hours later, he found his brother headbanging atop a crude pyramid of lawn furniture and empty beer cans. He smiled and ran to where two lengths of thick plastic tubing lay. Scott halted his head mid flight and fixed Nathan with a furious scowl.

  "Your Ninjitsu skills are still untested, my brother.”

  Nathan threw a pipe up to Scott.

  "Yet you will still die!" he growled in his best Samurai-movie voice.

  "So be it!" snapped Scott and vaulted from the furniture mound to swing the tubing down in a hissing arc. The younger boy stepped in expertly and met Scott's belly with his own weapon. Rising to his feet, Scott groaned in pain.

  "You have given me my death wound, young pup. But I am not in my grave … yet.”

  Nathan brought the sword above his head in a two-handed grip.

  "Defend yourself," he spat.

  The pair fought until the Mohican skull on Scott's black T shirt was sodden with sweat. Skin had been struck from Nathan's knuckles in several places but he still came on, despite Scott's advantage in reach and size. His brother had taught him well. Finally Scott reversed the sword and pretended to impale himself upon it.

  "We're on our own for food, buddy," he said. "Dad called but he's caught up.”

  Instinctively, Scott scowled and spat at his lie. Caught up. He placed his hand on Nathan's shoulder for a moment, a gesture of apparent tenderness belied a moment later by a judo throw that sent him tumbling into a flower bed. Nathan's laughter was extinguished by Scott's wrestling drop that swept the breath from his lungs.

  Jeremy and Ian ran their bikes slowly through the dark, the lights tracing a glow of sickly yellow among the pine trunks. The uniform spacing of the plantation was always unsettling at night, the black galleries arching away at right angles wherever you where.

  No imagination was required to see spectral shapes flitting past at the end of each gloomy avenue. Jeremy would speak softly of his personal nemesis, pairs of disembodied mannequin legs. In nightmares they hunted him, in packs that circled with a fluid, implacable grace. Ian had grown fierce when his friend revealed the terror to him.

  "Jeremy, we would just climb a tree. They've got no hands, right? What can they do?"

  That had unsettled Jeremy even more. The legs would not be troubled by a lack of hands. To pursue him up trees they would merely stride with their precise motion onto the trunk and continue upward towards him as if glued by each step. Ian would have none of it.

  "Then we'd get hammers or something and smash them! They're just plaster or wood!"

  His fear had not diminished, but he was gladdened by Ian's loyalty. That quality was never in question with his friend. Although none of the three had yet warded off a season of beating, Ian's scowl was sufficient to reduce their tenure. It was a visor he could drop upon his face at will, a powerful armour against the victimhood that enveloped them daily.

  Ian pressured Jeremy to join his favourite game: Bad Ways To Die. It was a sport of which they never tired. They competed for the rest of the journey down the hill, their small voices raised in exited talk of painful death. When they broached the road that encircled the forest the pair observed their other custom: speeding down the hill without brakes. Existence was now hyper-real: the blast of the cold air, sheer velocity bringing the black asphalt up towards them in a hissing rush, the low thrum of the tyres in their ears. Ian yelled in gibberish to the wind; Jeremy looked behind for a moment and saw dozens of the mannequin legs clattering after them. But their pace was superior, he knew. He and Ian were drawing away further with every revolution of their wheels. Tonight they might crowd the abyssal void beneath his bed, waiting with resolute intent for the moment to attack.

  That would be hours from now. At this perfect instant of wind and night, nothing could catch them.

  Jeremy did dream, of their school library at night cast in a beige pallor. At the windows was a pure state of blackness so profound, it was if the library sat on the bottom of a sea of liquid onyx pressing against the windows at a thousand tons per square inch. The book stacks were familiar, yet arrayed in a concentric pattern. Their layout was now as a stone circle from the Neolithic age. Nathan tried to navigate the ring towards the centre, but seemed to be always a turn away from his goal. The titles of books passing at side grew increasingly outlandish: Great Italian Hunters of the 16th Century, Gibbon Breeding for Beginners, The Walnut in History. The structure of the dream broke down then, as it is wont to do, and the carpet beneath his feet became desert sands. Each book stack floated above the dunes in perfect suspension, clanking gently.

  The next morning saw the three assembled at the hatch. Their normal session of play amidst the trenches had been forgotten. Nathan had quickly reconstructed a barricade that had fallen with the night's wind; Jeremy had waved him on with annoyance. His face was easy for his friend to read: Come on, we have work to do. Jeremy's plan was meeting with sullen resistance from Ian.

  "We should smash everything with rocks first," he said. "There could be snakes down there.”

  Jeremy was a study in frustration. "That's stupid," he said flatly. "There's no snakes. What there could be is a secret. Think about that for a moment.”

  Nathan's voice was low.

  "Ian, it could be anything. The army used this place during the war, my dad said. It could be bombs.”

  Rock impacting on a high-explosive warhead brought a smile to Ian. Seeing this, Jeremy spoke quickly.

  "Or guns, Ian. Secret storage for Sten guns.”

  The mythic lure of the Sten gun It was the minimal expression of a firearm, being merely barrel, magazine and rudimentary housing: an embodiment of brutal functionality. This purity of intent was understood by the boys on a primal level. On gloomy Saturday afternoons, when the commando movie was the violent sun around which their imaginations were locked in orbit, it was the abrupt and commanding bark of the Sten that laid the Nazi scourge low. All that was required to construct a replica was two sticks, one smaller than the other, and a hammer and roofing nail. Ian was the proud owner of a deluxe model with an improvised stock and silver paint.

  Jeremy broke their reverie with his customary correction.

  "Armoury. An armoury.”

  "Then let's find out" Nathan said. Peering forward, he saw a Kraken lying dried by countless ages in the gray dust of the pit before them. Its great eye would be crusted shut in sleep. Its tentacles would like line the cavern walls like veins, tremoring with excitement at their approach. After centuries of slumber, its thirst for blood -

  Ian shouted a curse at him, the one involving his mother that always made him smile in spite of himself. He whispered a greeting to the pit-beast and waited while Jeremy outlined the plan.

  The teamwork they had formed while entrenching was in evidence all that day. Ian and Nathan deferred naturally to Jeremy's leadership, as was their nature. But when working they were a true collective. Within a half hour they had gauged that the space below them was 10.45 metres deep. While that was an appreciable height, it did not daunt Jeremy.

  "Rope ladder. My uncle has a rope ladder, I know it.”

  "Ten metres is -" Nathan was unfurling their length of measuring rope. "This far. I don't think those things go that long.”

  I
an ceased making a noose with their spare rope and nodded in assent.

  "Well then, We tie the ladder to a rope with knots in it then. Commando-style.”

  Ian and Nathan started as if struck by a thousand volts at the mention of that world.

  "Yes," said Ian. "I'll go down there.” His eyes were beyond argument.

  "OK then," said Jeremy. "Let's get that ladder.”

  The next day, a little later then it was then, Ian was being slowly lowered into the pit. His mission had been delayed by an extended game of Grenade The Bunker, reluctantly sanctioned by Jeremy, involving the hatch opening and several dozen pine cones.

  Now Ian was inching down, the lower half of his body inside the void. They had tied a smaller rope to him, with pen marks at meter intervals. A part of Nathan he did not necessarily like anticipated the wet crunch of beak-like jaws upon his friend's midsection; they would drag him screaming from the hatch but only his torso would come, pumping blood. Jeremy looked away from Ian for a moment to the sky. Rain had threatened that morning and the blackening clouds had that baseless foreboding he hated.

  Were it in his power, he would train the mirrors of a thousand orbiting satellites to bathe the forest in eternal light. For a moment he thought he saw an owl swooping between trees, but he could have imagined it. Like the emotionless clatter of the mannequin legs, Jeremy was afraid of the Owl's eternal glare. He knew if there is a Hell, it is full of hungry, fat owls the size of phone boxes.

  Ian swung his torch around in small increments he imagined would indicate to any waiting in ambush below that he meant business. But his beam played upon only metal bulkheads on his sides, and below was blackness.

  "How much of the measuring rope have you let out?" He yelled upwards.

  A pause, and then Jeremy shouting back that he was two metres above the pit bottom. Ian slowed his descent. He knew that a good commando would have his trench knife at the ready, its razor edge probing for the neck of a sentry like a viper seeking prey. Then his feet were on the ground. Ian felt light spots of water patter to his head. Looking up, he saw his friends staring at him through a column of light diffused by weak rain. He was surprised that with no reference to indicate their relative distance, Jeremy and Ian's faces looked within his grasp. The boy sucked in a deep breath and knelt. Under his shins, the ground was cold and gritty. His torch beam crept to the walls, casting jagged shadows from a low mound before it.

  He stood and walked cautiously forward. The mound was heaped coal; he yelled this fact upwards. Exploration of the pit yielded nothing further: not a single ninja nor jaguar made the cavern its lair. A half hour later, he lay beside the hatch exhausted.

  "Nothing else," he gasped. "All that work for nothing.”

  "Give us a look at the coal," Nathan said.

  Ian fished in his rucksack.

  "I got a nice chunky bit," he