‘With what?’ Elise asked in her hoarse bark of a voice. ‘What can we use?’

He looked around and saw several sheets of plywood, elderly and dark, leaning against one wall. Not much, perhaps, but something.

‘That,’ he said. ‘Help me to break it up into smaller pieces.’

They worked quickly and frantically. There were only four windows in the cellar, and their very narrowness had caused the panes to hold longer than the larger windows upstairs had done. They were just finishing the last when they heard the glass of the first shatter behind the plywood… but the plywood held.

They staggered into the middle of the cellar again, John limping on his broken foot.  From the top of the stairway came the sound of the toads eating their way through the cellar door.

‘What do we do if they eat all the way through it?’ Elise whispered.

‘I don’t know,’ he said… and that was when the door of the coal-chute, unused for years but still intact, suddenly swung open under the weight of all the toads which had fallen or hopped onto it, and hundreds of them poured out in a high-pressure jet.

This time Elise could not scream. She had damaged her vocal chords too badly for that.

It did not last long for the Grahams in the cellar after the coal-chute door gave way, but until it was over, John Graham screamed quite adequately for both of them.

By midnight, the downpour of toads in Willow had slackened off to a mild, croaking drizzle.

At one-thirty in the morning, the last toad fell out of the dark, starry sky, landed in a pine tree near the lake, hopped to the ground, and disappeared into the night. It was over for another seven years.

Around quarter past five, the first light began to creep into the sky and over the land.