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 spaces 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 of 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.