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.