Chapter 2: The Old Man's Tale

Chapter 2: The Old Man's Tale

The next forty-eight hours were a blur of organized futility. The park transformed overnight. State police cruisers lined the access roads, their flashing lights muted and surreal in the perpetual twilight of the forest. Divers, sleek and black as seals, slipped into the reservoir’s chilling embrace and emerged hours later, shaking their heads, their faces grim masks. Volunteers in bright orange vests combed the woods in grid patterns, their calls of “Ethan!” growing hoarser and more desperate with each passing hour.

A pall of silence had fallen over Leo’s crew. Zach, for the first time since Leo had known him, was quiet. His "Toad Curse" joke from the day before now hung in the air between them, a toxic, unspoken thing. He kept glancing towards the water, his usual bravado replaced by a twitchy nervousness. Alex looked hollowed out, the new kid’s enthusiasm scoured away by a horror he was too young to process. They performed their duties mechanically, refueling the search teams’ generators, clearing paths for the ATVs, all while the vast, indifferent wilderness watched.

Leo couldn’t shake the image of the three toads on the log. It was burned into his mind, a polaroid of dread. He tried to rationalize it, to dismiss it as a freakish coincidence his stressed mind had latched onto. But the feeling—that cold, ancient certainty that the boy was not lost, but taken—clung to him like the park’s damp morning fog.

By the end of the second day, the search was officially scaled back. The professionals called it "moving to a recovery mission," a sterile euphemism that meant all hope was gone. The boy’s mother, a wraith of a woman now, was led away by family members. The volunteers dispersed, their shoulders slumped in defeat. The park began to empty, leaving behind only the oppressive quiet and the lingering question that no one dared to ask aloud.

Leo found he couldn't go home. He couldn't face the four walls of his small apartment, where the silence would be just as loud. Instead, he drove the utility truck to the old maintenance shop at the far end of the park, a corrugated metal building that smelled of rust, oil, and decades of stale cigarette smoke.

He knew he’d find Jedediah there.

The old man was exactly where Leo expected him to be, leaning on a shovel near the open bay doors, a lit cigarette dangling from his lips as he stared out at the distant, darkening reservoir. Jedediah ‘Jed’ Miller had been a park fixture longer than some of the oldest trees. He was wiry and grizzled, with a face like a roadmap of every hard season the park had ever seen, and eyes that held a deep, weary knowledge.

Leo walked up, the crunch of his boots on the gravel the only sound. Jed didn’t turn.

“They called it off,” Leo said, stating the obvious.

Jed took a long drag from his cigarette, the tip glowing like a malevolent orange eye in the dusk. “Water keeps what it takes,” he rasped, his voice gravelly from a lifetime of smoke and disuse. He finally turned his head, his sharp eyes pinning Leo in place. “You saw somethin’, didn’t you, boy? Somethin’ other than a lost kid.”

The directness of it caught Leo off guard. He’d come here for answers, but he hadn’t expected the question to be waiting for him. He leaned against the doorframe, the cold metal a small, solid comfort.

“The day it happened,” Leo began, his own voice low. “Before the kid went missing, we were fixing the pump at Aspen Grove. There were three toads on the housing. Big ones. Just… watching.”

Jed’s expression didn’t change, but a flicker of something dark and ancient passed through his eyes. He said nothing, waiting.

“Then, when the mother started screaming, down at the beach… I saw them again. On a log by the water’s edge. Same three. Sitting in a line. Watching the whole thing.” Leo finally looked Jed straight in the eye. “Zach called it the Toad Curse. He was joking.”

A humorless, rattling sound that might have been a laugh escaped Jed’s lips. “That boy’s a fool. But even a fool can stumble on the truth. It ain’t a curse. It’s a tax.”

“A tax for what?”

Jed gestured with his cigarette towards the vast, placid reservoir. “For all this. This park, this lake… this tomb.” He took another slow drag. “My grandfather’s house is down there. The old church steeple, too. On a clear day, when the water’s low, you can almost see it. Town was called Silvanus. Good place. Quiet place. Then the state came with their eminent domain papers and their promises of progress. Said the valley was perfect for a reservoir.”

Leo had heard fragments of the story before, but never like this. Not with this weight.

“Most folks left,” Jed continued, his eyes focused on something deep beneath the waves. “Took the state’s money. My family was one of the last. They said there was something in the valley, something old that wouldn't like being disturbed. The elders called it the guardian. The genius loci. The spirit of the place.” He flicked his cigarette butt into the gravel, where it hissed for a second and died.

“They flooded it anyway. And they woke him up. Or maybe he was never asleep.”

A cold knot tightened in Leo’s stomach. “Woke who up?”

Jed finally met his gaze again, and for the first time, Leo saw genuine, bone-deep fear in the old man’s eyes.

“The Toad King,” he whispered, the name itself seeming to drop the temperature by ten degrees. “He was the spirit of the valley, and now he’s the king of that drowned town. This is his kingdom now. We’re just trespassers. And every so often, he collects a toll for our trespass.”

“The toads…” Leo prompted, his voice barely audible.

“They’re his eyes,” Jed said, his voice flat and final. “His harbingers. He sends them out to watch, to choose. When you see the three, it means he’s hunting. It means he’s about to collect his tribute.”

The air crackled with a sudden burst of static from the radio in Jed’s office. It was the park’s head ranger, his voice strained.

“All units, Ranger Davies reporting a 10-94 Alpha near the Black Creek tributary. I repeat, animal investigation. Looks like a deer. Something’s not right with it. Advise caution.”

Leo and Jed exchanged a look. A mutilated animal wasn’t uncommon—coyotes, the occasional black bear. But the ranger’s tone was wrong. It was spooked. Driven by an instinct he didn’t understand, Leo pushed off the wall. “I’m going.”

Jed gave a single, fatalistic nod. “The pattern holds.”

Leo found the spot minutes later, guided by the sweep of a flashlight beam through the trees. The ranger, a young man named Davies, was pale under his wide-brimmed hat. The smell hit Leo first—the coppery tang of fresh blood, thick and cloying.

The deer lay in a heap by the creek. It wasn’t a kill; it was a demolition. Its legs were bent at impossible angles, the bones jutting through the hide like broken branches. Its ribcage was concave, crushed inward by a single, immense application of force. There were no claw marks, no bite marks of a predator. It looked as if it had been squeezed to death by something impossibly strong.

“Never seen a bear do that,” Davies muttered, his light trembling.

Leo’s gaze drifted from the mangled carcass to the soft, muddy bank of the creek. His heart seized in his chest.

There, pressed deep into the mud, were tracks. Not the delicate cloven hooves of a deer or the padded paws of a predator. They were huge, three-toed, and distinctly webbed. Three sets of them, leading from the dark woods, to the deer, and then back towards the silent, waiting reservoir.

The pattern was complete. Three toads, then bloodshed. Jed’s folklore had just been given a terrifying, physical context. The Toad King wasn’t just an old man’s tale. It was real. And it was hungry.