The men took their seats for the briefing. There were six in total—three from the National Guard, two from the Loveland Police Department, and one small and owlish fellow from the University of Cincinnati. Staff Sergeant Ryan Williams was in ostensible command of Specialist Jeremy Pate and Private First Class Carl Dabney. Williams was new to the Ohio National Guard, but well-versed in Army life. A twelve-year veteran with multiple combat tours in Afghanistan under his belt, Williams was by far and away the most seasoned NCO of the 371st Sustainment Brigade. The same could not be said for either Pate or Dabney, although Pate had spent a year in support of Operation Inherent Resolve.
Seated beside the soldiers were the two police officers. One was the lean and hungry-looking Patrolman Scott Banks. His black hair, furrowed brow, and hawk-like nose gave him the face of a predator. “Manhunter” was his nickname around the department, even despite his rather unimpressive arrest numbers. Banks blamed this on the objectively true fact that Loveland, Ohio was not a hotbed of crime. The other officer was Banks’s opposite. The balding, fat, and jovial Patrolman Anthony Combs did not care much for police work at all. For him, wearing the uniform was about securing a sinecure. Steady pay kept him steadily fed, and that’s all that the bachelor Combs cared about. He and his partner Banks knew why they were there but felt no need to demystify things from the still-in-the-dark Army boys.
The weirdest one of the bunch was Professor Hartzel K. Wilkins. Five feet five inches tall, with a wild and uncombed mane of dirty blonde hair, Wilkins looked at life from behind a pair of moon-shaped eyeglasses. His students snickered behind his back about his close resemblance to Harry Potter, with some calling the pudgy older man “Harry Pot Roast.” If Wilkins knew about these personal jabs, he never let on. Instead, the absent-minded oddball kept busy with his idiosyncratic studies. Wilkins enjoyed the complimentary donuts in the conference room while the others whispered back and forth between each other.
The last man to arrive that night was none other than the city’s mayor, Bob Hardman. The former center for the Dayton Flyers, Hardman still towered over most despite losing an inch or two after he reached seventy. The iron-haired Republican, who once littered his campaign literature with thinly veiled innuendos about the origins of his distinct surname, wasted no time with pleasantries.
“Gentlemen. I want to first apologize for any inconvenience that this callout has caused you. However, you all need to know that this concerns a matter of grave municipal importance. You are here to stop rumors from becoming a widespread panic. Do you understand?”
“Not at all, sir,” Williams said.
The mayor turned a stern eye to the staff sergeant. “Officers Bank and Combs, please fill these men in.”
Banks took the lead. He got up and stood next to the mayor. He cleared his throat before speaking.
“Last weekend, Patrolman Combs and I were working the night shift. At approximately one a.m. that morning, our vehicle turned onto Riverside Drive. At a three-way intersection (one of the soldiers audibly snickered at the word “three-way”) flanked by a series of houses, we saw a large shadow move from one side of the road to the other in an east-to-west direction. Our initial suspicion was that the shadow was an unknown individual. Such an individual walking at that time and in that residential neighborhood should set off alarm bells.”
“Robbery,” Williams remarked.
“Yes, or possibly home invasion,” Banks said.
“Transient,” Combs added to make himself feel useful.
“Either way,” Banks continued, “it was our responsibility to investigate further. Upon hitting the shadow with our flashlights, we were shocked to see that the shadow did not belong to an unknown male subject. The shadow did not belong to a human at all, but rather a human-sized frog walking upright on two legs.”
“What the hell!” Dabney’s voice contained more than a hint of mockery. “A frogman?”
“I do not know what to call it exactly, but I know what I saw. The creature stood above five feet, possibly weighed somewhere between 120 and 150 pounds, and had all the features of a frog,” Banks said.
“Or a toad,” Combs added. “It can be hard to tell a toad from a frog.”
“You agree with Officer Banks’s account?” Mayor Hardman stared at and through Combs.
“Yes, sir. As I said in my report, I saw the creature. Banks and I watched it cross the road, and when it slipped behind a tree, we made haste to follow it. At some point, the creature disappeared.”
“Why did the frogman cross the road?” Dabney joked.
“How do you lose a giant, man-sized frog?” Williams asked in total seriousness.
Banks leaned a little forward, but the attempt at bravado failed to mask the embarrassment. “The creature moved with a surprising amount of speed. It was exceedingly hard to follow.”
“Did it hop?” Dabney asked.
Combs did not get the joke, so he answered honestly. “No, it scurried. Less like a frog (or toad), and more like a scared kid.”
“You two saw some kind frog creature. Ok, but what does that have to do with the National Guard?” Williams asked.
“You lot are the first to know about this outside of the department. Chief Horrall made the decision to keep it under lock and key. After all, no crime was committed,” Mayor Hardman said. “However, since these officers saw that creature, we have been inundated with other sightings. The fine, upstanding citizens of this town have been seeing frog creatures every night since last weekend, and frankly, it is worrisome.”
“Is it possible that word leaked out from the police department, and now it’s a sensation?” Williams asked.
Mayor Hardman shook his head. “No. We conducted an investigation based on that same premise. We found nothing, and furthermore, the internet accounts did not surface until one of the eyewitnesses published a video on Facebook. We are lucky that the statewide media has not picked it up yet. Probably because it’s too zany.”
Dabney made a face at the word “zany.”
“What we have here, gentlemen, is the beginning of a panic. Now, my office has not said a word on the matter yet, and hopefully you lot will resolve it before we are forced to talk about it. I do not want to give my opposition ammunition by getting on stage and rambling like a crazy person about a giant frog.”
“Mayor Hardman…” the quiet and hesitant voice belonged to Professor Wilkins.
“Yes.”
“Would it be okay if I interjected here?”
The mayor sighed before giving the odd little man the greenlight. The professor stood up and bowed.
“My name is Professor Hartzell K. Wilkins. I represent the History Department at the University of Cincinnati. This information can be slightly deceiving, for I am in actuality a folklorist who specializes in American cryptids.”
“‘Cryptids? Like bigfoot?” Dabney asked.
“Yes, that is correct.”
“And they let you study that? Like for real at a real university?”
“Yes, I am employed by the University of Cincinnati. My work has appeared…”
“Please say your peace, Professor,” Mayor Hardman grumbled.
“Of course. Given the eyewitness accounts that I have read, I feel that I can make a supposition on what we are dealing with. Please take a look at these.” The professor handed each man several pieces of paper. The papers formed a brief presentation replete with photographs and references to academic papers and manuscripts. Professor Wilkins had put a lot of time and effort into the presentation, only for each man in that room to either discard it or put it out of mind immediately. The professor carried on as if he had everyone’s rapt attention.
“As you can see, the frog-humanoid creature is a common trope found in Ancient Egypt. The Egyptians had frog deities, both male and female, and these deities were associated with the annual flooding of the Nile. The frog gods were associated with fertility, as well-watered and fertile soil meant life to our Egyptian forebearers.”
“That’s all well and good,” Williams said, “but what does that have to do with our Ohioan creature?”
“Prepare yourselves, gentleman.” Mayor Hardman folded his arms and rolled his eyes, for he knew all about Professor Wilkins’s odd theory.
“After years of study, I believe that a small band of Egyptians, maybe no larger than thirty-three in number, arrived in North America sometime during what is known as the Late Period. During that epoch, Egypt was lorded over by foreign powers, most notably the Assyrians and Persians. The Assyrians in particular were keen on suppressing the native religion, and thus the temples and shrines to the frog gods like Heqet were torn down and replaced by devotionals to the Assyrian gods. This gave motivation to the faithful to escape. Some came here, albeit by a circuitous route. First, the Egyptian pilgrims landed near the Yucatan. From there they traveled northwards into the Mississippi Delta until finally reaching our approximation of the Nile—the mighty Ohio River. Everywhere these men went they left behind monuments to their gods. Is it any surprise that the earliest civilizations in the New World, from the Toltecs and Olmecs in Mexico to the Adena of our state, built elaborate pyramids? Were these autochthonous? Highly doubtful. It is much more believable that these disparate and unconnected cultures had a single thread running through them all—Egypt.”
“Are you serious?” Williams asked.
“The only issue that I admit uncertainty about is the dating. The Egyptian pilgrims may have come much earlier. Another candidate would be the Eighteenth Dynasty, when the worship of Aten was mandated, and the old gods removed. I am open to the possibility that our Egyptian forebearers came in the 14th century B.C.”
“This has to be a troll,” Dabney said. “It has to be. This is the craziest damn night of my life. But we’re getting paid, right?”
“If I can be blunt, sir,” Williams asked the mayor directly, “what is the mission? I still cannot figure out how everything connects, especially with me and my soldiers.”
“We are going to hunt this frog creature. Your soldiers and my police officers will capture the thing or kill it. Between us, I prefer it dead. You might find these useful.” Mayor Hardman handed the soldiers a pair of M-4 carbines and a Mossberg 500 shotgun. “I know you can handle these,” he said. “Banks and Combs will rely on their sidearms.”
“Have a twelve gauge in the cruiser too,” Banks added.
“Perfect. And as for Professor Wilkins, he is an insurance policy. I personally do not buy his theory. Then again, two weeks ago I would have laughed at anyone suggesting that humanoid frogs exist. I am in no laughing mood, and Professor Wilkins at least takes the whole thing seriously. Isn’t that right?”
Professor Wilkins wiped his mouth after consuming his third or fourth donut. “Yes, mayor. I take it all very seriously, and better yet, I think I know where we can start.”
***
At midnight, the armed assemblage (minus Mayor Hardman, who decided to spend the night sleeping rather than hunting) took up positions inside of a verdant state park. They had been tracking the frog creature for hours at that point, and it was only after hours of failure that they finally agreed to let Professor Wilkins dictate their next moves.
“As you all know,” he said while handing maps to the soldiers and policemen, “this state park includes a snake-shaped mound, much like a smaller version of the more famous Great Serpent Mound. Our mound stretches from here to here,” Wilkins moved his finger along a pair of points on the map. “Altogether, our mound really represents the base of a larger pyramid-like structure that collapsed at some point in the distant past.”
Professor Wilkins geared up for another lecture but was cut off by Williams. “What do you want us to do?”
“Two of your soldiers should set up a perimeter around the northwest side of the mound. As for you,” Wilkins turned to Banks and Combs, take your place on the southeastern side, please. Patrol these two areas. As for you,” Wilkins looked at the hardened veteran Williams, “you will be a rover covering all the points in between.”
“It’s an unnecessarily complicated plan,” Banks said.
“It also stinks,” Dabney added.
“We’ll do it for an hour,” Williams said with authority. After that…well…we may as well hang it up. He then whispered something that sounded like “damned foolishness” under his breath.
When the rest of the hunting party took their positions, Professor Wilkins made a beeline for the ruins of the mound. Professor Wilkins followed an inner voice—the same voice that he had been listening to for months. The voice, which called itself Aiwass, had spoken to a dreaming Wilkins about all manner of wonders.
“The pyramid still lives beneath.”
“There is a city of gold.”
“The old gods still breathe.”
The most important of the messages though was the one about the gates. Aiwass had informed Wilkins multiple times about the gates to the Priory of Heqet. That is what the voice called it—the Priory of Heqet.
“They worshiped her when they came here. They worship her still,” it said in Wilkins’s dreams. “Do you desire to worship her too?” The professor always answered in the affirmative. So, the voice told him where to find the gates. When the time was right, Wilkins sent the policemen and the soldiers far enough away so they could not observe his subterfuge.
Under the cover of silent darkness, Wilkins scrambled to the gates. They could not be seen with the naked eye. The gates did not stand, for they were sunken and left only as a special indentation in the earth near what had once been the entrance to the beautiful pyramid. Aiwass told him what to expect, and yet Wilkins still had to close his eyes and hold his breath. Nothing scared him so much as the primitive fear of falling and falling into complete darkness horrified the professor in ways that nearly brought him to madness. Wilkins found the rough indentation and fell forward. His tense body moved so quickly that he only felt the faintest touch of dirt and grass as both brushed his cold flesh on the way down.
Wilkins opened his eyes in complete darkness. The primary sensation was the one in his lower spine. It hurt terribly because of the fall. The other, lesser sensation was coldness. The interior of the mound was ice cold. While the world topside was warm and sticky like most July nights in Southern Ohio, Wilkins could see his breath with each movement of his lungs. He picked himself off the cold earth and began to feel his way forward. Eyes open or closed did not matter; the darkness was so thick that Wilkins was reduced to primitive guidance in the form of touch, sound, and smell.
The cold commingled with the damp, as Wilkins slowly walked through the blackness. His fingertips prayed for stone but found nothing but soil. The smell, close and pervasive, was the smell of a grave. Although he trusted Aiwass completely, Wilkins could not stop his human nature from asserting itself. He was afraid. Driven by fear, Wilkins began to claw his way up and out.
“You will walk forward.”
For the first time, he heard the voice of Aiwass while wide awake. Wilkins stopped and listened. The voice had changed. It was subtle but no less jarring. Rather than whispering in a sing-song melody that helped the professor to sleep and dream of fabulous curiosities from the Egyptian colonization of the Americas, Aiwass spoke with authority. It demanded subservience.
“I am scared,” Wilkins said.
“Fear is fuel,” Aiwass rejoined.
“How far must I walk?” Aiwass did not respond, but Wilkins found himself walking all the same. He steadily increased his pace, almost as if pushed by an unseen hand. Eventually, Wilkins reached a moment when the darkness parted. A speck of luminous green light cut through the inky blackness. The light was feeble at first, almost as if it were a memory of light rather than something real. Wilkins continued forward, and the light increased in brilliance until it was stronger than the darkness. By that point, Wilkins had found the source.
A man-sized pond greeted Professor Wilkins. Unnatural green water bubbled below the surface. Wilkins could tell from where he stood that the water was warm. He could also see the eyes and hear the croaks. A series of eyes—large and uniformly black but ringed with yellow—made a circle around the pond. Although he could not see them, Wilkins heard the croak of several vocal cords and vocal sacs. They were loud and booming articulations. Yet they were not so loud that Wilkins failed to hear Aiwass when he intoned: “Get in.”
“What?”
“Get in the water.”
The croaks became a Greek chorus that drowned out any intrusive thoughts. Wilkins was left only with Aiwass’s command. Again, with his eyes closed and his breath captured, Wilkins submerged himself into the unknown. He screamed once as the water burned his skin. After that, he could never scream again.
***
“This is the crummiest thing that Uncle Sam has ever done to me,” Dabney said. Both he and Pate were busy flinging rocks into the night. So far, Pate had done better, with his rocks going much farther than the ones thrown by the lackadaisical Dabney.
“If that’s true, then the Army has been good to you,” Pate said. “This is just boring. Imagine being Williams and having a lifetime’s worth of bullets and bombs in your head.”
“I’d rather be in Fallujah in 2004 than here.”
“Liar.”
“I’m serious,” Dabney stood up for emphasis. “You and me are stuck in Ohio, chasing ghosts, and achieving nothing all at the same time. That’s a circle of suck, my guy.” Pate cracked up laughing. Realizing that he had a captive audience, Dabney continued his semi-serious tirade.
“Hell, if it were up to me, I’d take the weapons we have and invade Kentucky. Now that is a mission worth having.”
“And you’d be in charge, of course,” Pat said.
“Naturally. The military governor of the Kentucky colony.” Dabney began parading around. His pantomime included mockeries of famous tyrants like Napoleon and Mussolini. When he made ready to do his best Hitler, Pate cut him off.
“You hear that?”
“Yeah, it’s just frogs. There are loads of them around here.”
“I know that, but man, doesn’t that sound like there’s a million out there?” Pate asked.
Dabney stopped and listened. Yes, it did indeed sound like he and Pate were surrounded by an army of frogs. “What the he…”
“Jesus!” Pate turned and attempted to scramble away from the creature that emerged from the darkness. Dabney aimed his M-4 and got off one shot before the creature’s gigantic webbing struck him in the face. Pate froze the moment he saw Dabney fall. He failed to put up a fight when the large webbing came for him.
“Someone just let off a round,” Banks said to Combs. “C’mon.” Banks jogged in the direction of the gunfire. He momentarily stopped when he saw that Combs was not behind him.
“We gotta go,” Banks barked.
“Do we have to?” Combs mewled.
That was it. That was the final straw. After over a year of pushing and pulling Combs’s deadweight, Banks had had enough. He leveled his SIG Sauer 9mm at Combs.
“Move your useless ass right now.” Combs, with eyes as big and wide as basketballs, did as he was told. The two patrolmen ran through the darkness only to find nothing.
“I know I heard a shot from right here,” Banks said. The Manhunter squinted hard and tried to find something—anything nearby. All he found was blackness. For his part, Combs kept his weapon ready. He no longer trusted his partner.
“Maybe one of the soldiers got spooked, or was just goofing off,” Combs said. Banks grumbled something unintelligible. Soon enough both men were joined by Williams, who remained in a tactical stance the entire time.
“That was one of my guys. It was a rifle round for sure,” Williams said.
“Get them on the comms,” Banks suggested while pointing to the civilian-style radio clipped to Williams’s chest.
“Already tried several times,” he said. “Dead silence.”
“Don’t like that,” Banks added.
“So, what do we do now?” Combs asked.
“We find them.”
“And that professor fellow too,” Combs added. Williams and Banks had forgotten all about Hartzell K. Wilkins. “Let’s go to him first because he’s back at the mound, right?” With that the three men jogged in the direction of the ancient mound.
***
Mayor Hardman was awoken at three a.m. by one of his assistants.
“What the hell is it?” he yelled into the receiver.
“A bunch of frogs are sacrificing people at the courthouse.”
“What?”
“Me and a few others are getting our guns ready, but we wanted to get permission first.”
“Permission for what?”
“City ordinance forbids the use of firearms in the downtown area. Can we make an exception this time, mayor?”
“Jesus yes,” Hardman said as he left his bed and made his way to his private vehicle. Inside the glove compartment was a .38 revolver. Hardman had it out and cocked by the time that he saw the ritual.
On the steps of the city’s courthouse, a circle of man-sized frogs were busy judging the dead. The ritual, which had not been seen by human eyes for over a millennia, saw the frog in the center remove the vital organs from the bloodied corpses of three men. Hardman recognized the dead as Staff Sergeant Williams and the patrolmen Banks and Combs. Hardman and the others stared in stunned horror as the frog-priest lifted livers, kidneys, and hearts into the air. Each raising of the organs was accompanied by unfamiliar words from an unrecognized language. Only Mayor Hardman found any familiarity, and he tried to put this out of his mind. After all, it was insane to consider the possibility that Professor Hartzell K. Wilkins of the University of Cincinnati had somehow become a giant frog.
“To hell with it, boys,” Mayor Hardman said. “Open fire.” All the assembled men from the Loveland municipal government let loose with pistol and shotgun fire at the morbid scene. The shots were not accurate but given the volume and close proximity of the targets, the bullets and shells found their mark.
“Well, I’ll be.” Mayor Hardman exclaimed as he saw the giant frogs fall one by one. A lifetime of horror movies had subconsciously conditioned him to expect resilient monsters, so he was surprised that ordinary ammunition had ripped the frogs apart. He kicked at the dead one that had sounded like Professor Hartzell K. Wilkins. The slimy body was covered in black ichor that smelled like blood. The mayor’s stomach churned a little when he saw that the creature’s guts were exposed.
“How are we going to cover all this up? The National Guard will want an explanation, never mind this town, half of which thinks Vietnam just erupted on main street.”
“Not to be glib, but that’s your job, mayor,” said the county assessor.
“Asshole,” Mayor Hardman shot back. “We can start by cleaning up.”
Little did the assemblage know, but the frogs, one of which had been the unfortunate Hartzell K. Wilkins, had accomplished their mission. Aiwass was pleased. So, as the mayor and his men busied themselves with placing bodies, both human and frog, into industrial-sized trash bags, Aiwass’s voice cooed over the underground pool. The hot water bubbled with a primordial heat—the heat of creation.
The old god laughed as he watched a new legion of webbed claws crawl forth into the hot Ohio night.
— Arbogast is a writer, editor, and sometime paranormal investigator out in the backcountry. His books include HEARTBREAK & LECHERY, THE CASEBOOK OF PATRICK MIDNIGHT, and THE SHANGHAI HORROR.