Here's an oldie to get us started...

I wrote it a year ago, but it's still hardly been edited, so feel free to pick holes... (Sorry if some of the paragraphs are stuck together - I just tried to seperate them for this Topic and I might have missed one or two.

Frog in the Cauldron
(C)

The lemonic force�


You�d be amazed some of the places you can wake up when you have a split personality disorder. The location I�m referring to specifically as I tell you this is the small hole in the west Earlham woods that had been created when a huge tree was up-rooted� when I woke up there, I was all huddled up and completely naked. It was freezing, and all I had to keep me warm were the random clumps of grey animal fur that were dotted around me. It seemed like a real pain at the time that my alter ego apparently had more fun than I usually did.

Even once you�ve taken the blessing that I live almost next door to those very woods into account, it doesn�t make explaining the situation to people I meet on the street while walking home naked any easier at all.

As far as the people of Earlham are concerned I�m a �menace to society who should be locked up�, but I personally don�t see what�s so menacing walking through the nearly empty streets of a quiet little residential estate at three or four in the morning with your package hanging out� that�s not half as bad as what the people they turn out of the clubs do to the area.

Apparently the police keep finding women who�ve been torn into shreds, either by some big cat that�s escaped from a zoo or by a psychopath that the papers have dubbed �The Earlham Ripper�. The police say that the clubbers must have seen something, but no one�s coming forward with any real information. I wouldn�t mind betting that the killer was one of them. I don�t really know much about it though; I don�t read the papers.

I read comics sometimes, I did right through school and I didn�t even stop reading them when I left four and a half years ago. I also read the kind of cheap paperback Sci-Fi novel that only has around ninety pages because none of their readers have attention spans that can handle any more than that. I read these at work when there�s nothing worth watching on the two channels that can be picked up by the little cream-coloured black and white TV set that stands on the counter, a proud relic which belongs to a time that the human race has almost forgotten, a time that some of us can�t even believe ever existed.

It�s still the most modern thing in that stupid shop though. �The Magic Cauldron,� the only place in all of Norwich, let alone Earlham that will hire a known weirdo like myself. We sell �magical goods� and �occult antiquities� to anyone brave enough to step over the bird shit that paves the doorstep. I�m the manager, so in other words, the only employee.

I remember there being an old man who used to run this place when I was little. He really fitted in with the decor. He had long grey hair, grey skin, one milky coloured eye, he smoked an oriental looking pipe and spoke excruciatingly slowly� he was like part of the furniture. I guess he�s dead now though, because I�ve been sitting behind this counter for three years waiting for somebody to actually buy something�

I guess I�m exaggerating a tiny bit because there has been one customer. That kind of has a story attached to it. That all started with a box. On the day when I last woke up in that hole in the woods.

I was reading a comic about Wolverine teaming up with Punisher, which involved lots of violence and explosions, the moral of which was completely lost on me, as they usually are. I was also occasionally glancing to the TV which was showing some old movie with a couple who were sitting by an impossibly round moon (It�s so stupid how television always does that, anybody with an ounce of intelligence and the ability to look up at night knows that the moon is at best a sort of squashed circle and never completely round).

My boss (that is to say; the idiot who pays my wages), Mr Gray entered the dusty little shop carrying a small wooden box, causing me to pull my legs down from the counter, switch off the television and run my fingers through my scruffy hair in a vein attempt to make myself appear presentable.

Mr Gray was always dressed immaculately in mismatched antique clothing. Had I ever stopped worrying so much in his presence long enough to see past his strange clothing, I would have realised that he couldn�t have been much older than me. However, he seemed older, and very confident; I�d only met him twice before, he hardly ever spoke, but he never stopped smiling. I vowed to spend as little time in his presence as possible. When he was around you couldn�t help but feel patronised.

That day though, he didn�t seem even half as cocky as I remembered him being. He was holding the box as though it might explode at any moment. It didn�t look explosive. It looked like an elaborately carved cigar box, made out of pine or something. It reminded me of this big wardrobe that I used to hide in when I was a little boy.

It had little metal hinges and a small keyhole in the wood. He just placed it on the table in front of the television and gave me strict instructions not to open it under any circumstances, or I�d lose my job.

It�s funny� if he�d simply placed it on a shelf and left, I�d not have paid any attention to it. I�d almost definitely never touch it. I don�t even dust things� but� he had to go and leave it in my immediate view� in front of the television� and create an air of mystery by telling me not to touch it. I could touch, use, or read anything else in the shop if I wanted to (hell, I could probably have taken it all home and never brought it back, no one would have noticed), but I couldn�t even move this out the way of the television.

I was Adam, the Cauldron was my dusty little Eden, the box was the forbidden fruit and my conscience was Eve� Eve was telling me that the fruit tasted great and I should try it� just one bite� just one little peek in the box�

A whole hour passed. The shop seemed hotter than usual and my chair no longer felt comfortable. All I wanted was to look in the box� I wanted it more than I wanted to relive the losing of my virginity and god knows I dearly wanted that. I felt like Pandora only male and hairy (It was strange, I never used to be so hairy). At one point a friend came to the door of the shop and offered to buy me lunch. I told him I wasn�t hungry (I actually wasn�t, ever since I awoke in the hole that morning, the last thing I�d wanted to do was eat anything, I think my alter ego must have eaten a horse or something). I just continued staring at the box. He told me there had been another murder during the night, but all I was interested in was figuring out how to look in the box without getting fired.

Eventually, once my friend had left I decided to try and look through the keyhole. I lay my head on the table and moved as close to the box as possible and squinted through. It was very dark, I could just about make out a small shadowy figure that could very possibly have been a lemon, �I knew it,� I exclaimed triumphantly, �A lemon!�

On further inspection though, I decided that it might be a little rock� I decided to get my Zippo out and see if it could shed some light on things. I held it in front of the keyhole and flicked it alight. The box hopped.

I jumped back and fell to the floor, my heart beating so hard I could feel it, the tingly feeling of fear rested in my bladder. The box hopped again.

Clump, hop, clump, land� and clump�

CLUMP!

The box had jumped from the counter onto the dirty floor that had been left unwashed for generations. It continued to hop� what ever was inside it was jumping up and down, causing the box to move. I made a quick decision and grabbed a charm that we�d promise customers would ward off demons (if the Cauldron ever had customers) from an old display and shook the dust from it... I figured that if it worked on demons, it�d probably work on lemons, after all, there�s only one letter separating the two things.

Holding the charm in front of me like a shield, I closed in on the hopping box and shakily placed one foot on top of it.

I looked around for something I could lever it open with and during my frantic search I felt it hop beneath the sole of my shoe, almost causing me a heart attack. I shoved my foot down on the box as hard as possible, hoping to crush it and its contents. The hinges gave and the lid slipped forward leaving my trouser leg exposed to the box�s lodger.

Something slimy shot up the back of my leg and hopped around in my trousers while I ran in circles screaming. The next few minutes closely resembled an ancient African dance or something as I franticly tried to stop the slippery hopping demon from reaching my groin� it was time to make a brave decision that was aided greatly by all those times when I�d had to walk home stalk nude in the morning.

It was time to abandon trousers.

I fell to the ground with a heavy thud and kicked myself free of my jeans before kicking them into a remote corner of the shop. The thing inside them hopped around while I sat hyperventilating and cursing under my heavy breaths� I began to feel dizzy and tired�

Suddenly I could feel myself running� or crawling� I�m not sure� I was chasing something� It smelled of colours� pink perfume� blue/brown nicotine� sweat that was murky orange� and the moon hung in the sky� it was big, white and round, not the squashed circle I was used to. It was like a flashback to a wonderful dream where I was stronger and faster than anything I�d ever encountered�

I snapped out of it. My heart was still racing, but this time it was on my side. Whatever the little trouser climbing box dweller was, it was smaller than me� I was bigger� stronger� I could crush it in my jaws with little or no effort� I was the hunter� the thing was my prey�

I leapt at my hopping trousers, screaming, my arms flailing widely, my teeth tightly clenched� I grabbed them and threw them at the wall of the shop, causing three elderly volumes to fall from a nearby shelf. Something green, red and slimy looking jumped from my discarded Levis and in two huge leaps landed on my face, clawing at my skin with it�s rubbery hands- it felt like an oddly shaped, lubricated novelty condom.

My rage disappeared and fear filled my body. I screamed and fell backwards onto an old crystal display, bruising the middle of my back.

The thing was a frog.

A small, strong, talking frog.

It was shaking my face and yelling at me in a quiet, small, scared voice.

�Fire,� yelled the frog, �Fire! Fire! Run, there�s a fire!�

I calmed down and passed out.


A conversation with a frog�


It�s funny how dramatically your perception of something can change in only a short period of time. Well, not funny �ha ha�, just funny.

When the frog was in the box he was the most interesting secret in the world, then when the box was hopping he was a terrifying lemon-related mystery that I wanted no part in, then when he was in my trousers he was a horrific demon, soon after that he was my prey (and I think that for some strange reason that I wanted to eat him), then he was a scary monster again� and after that�

After that� he was a small talking frog in a red waistcoat, named Kevin, who was a really nice guy provided you didn�t mind an upper class kind of guy with four hundred IQ points and probably an Oxford diploma hidden somewhere in his little outfit�

When I regained consciousness I had a headache that felt like there were tiny little sharp pins floating around in my brain. I could see the little frog on the counter. I could remember how scared his voice had sounded when I passed out, but I was still unsure whether the frog was evil or not, could evil be scared?

I scanned the floor and snatched up the demon repelling charm that I must have dropped earlier on whilst fighting to free myself of my demon infested clothing.

The frog appeared to be prancing back and forth along the counter like a man whose wife was in labour while he was outside in the corridor waiting to be told what sex the baby was. When the frog noticed me staring at him he stopped moving and appeared to brighten up.

�Hello,� said the frog in his soft, quiet little voice, �I was beginning to worry, you�ve been down for a while.�

I looked through a hole in the bookcase and out through the window into the street. It was getting dark.

�I�m Kevin by the way,� said the frog, �sorry I don�t think I caught your name.�

I rose to my feet with caution and then said, in what I believed to be my most casual tone of voice; �Hi, I�m Eddy. Are you evil?�

�Someone came in,� said the smiling frog, apparently ignoring my question, �he thought that this was the Earlham Library, so I gave him directions��

�You�� I began urgently, and then realising that I could think of no better way to end the sentence, I continued lamely with the words; ��are a frog.�

Kevin just smiled and asked me for a cup of tea.

�Sure, just hold this for me would you,� I said, passing him the demon charm. He took it in both hands and went on smiling. I felt a lot more comfortable when he didn�t melt whilst cursing me in Latin or anything. �How do you take it?�

�Cold with milk and one sweetener,� said Kevin the frog.

My head was seriously trying to kill me. I hated the fact that I was experiencing a heavy migraine whilst something this weird and interesting was going on and I was completely out of aspirin, so there was nothing I could do about it. I felt kind of dizzy. It wasn�t just my head either, all of my muscles ached and my whole body was itching.

I took the tea to the counter once I�d finished boiling mine on the stove, and took the eight agonising steps to the door to turn the sign around. I was really in a lot of pain. It was getting dark so I flicked on the light.

�How is it that you can talk and walk around on your hind legs,� I asked the frog, my jaw was aching and it felt oddly out of place. I kept biting my tongue.

�Ah, yes, I thought you�d notice that,� said the frog, looking down at his webbed feet, �I never used to be able to; the speech came about rather recently. My life all changed when that boss of yours, Gray took me out of the pond and placed me firmly under his wing. He cast a spell on me, giving me a human personality, turning me into the well-rounded individual you see before you. I must say that I prefer things this way around. I never did like flies, they�re far to tricky to catch, I much prefer the Caviar that your boss has got me eating.�

�Caviar?�

�They�re little fish eggs-�
�What do you mean, a spell?�

�It�s all in that book over there�� Kevin waved his arm towards a bookshelf, �I was really just a result of one of his earlier experiments with that particular piece of literature. Even though my ability to speak and move around as I do were meant to fade away long ago, I fancy I was quite a success.�

I read the title of the book that the frog was pointing to, ��Wind in the Willows�,� I said astonished, �my mum read me that when I was little� it�s a children�s book��

�It�s in a special code,� said Kevin.
I was amazed.

�But,� I began, then I cut my top lip with my bottom canine tooth and started again, �but when he bought you in, he was acting as though you were dangerous. He told me not to look at you and then placed you right on the counter� he was carrying you as though you were going to blow up in his face��

�He just didn�t want to drop me,� said the frog, taking a sip from his mug of tea, �we�re very good friends.�

�He locked you in a box��

�No, I had the key. I was locked in for my safety.�

�Why did he bring you here?�

�Well� I guess there�s no harm in telling you,� Kevin smiled, I could tell that he�d really been looking forward to this, �the boss wanted me to keep an eye on you. He thinks you might be� gifted. He thinks you may be very important to him in the future.�

�Gifted?�

�Well� or mystically diseased, depending on how you look at it.�

�What are you talking about,� I asked. My left arm was tingling� and my heart was beating like a Salvation Army drum� I wanted the frog to hurry up because I got the feeling that something big and bad was about to happen to me.

�We think that you may suffer from Lycanthropy, that�s the technical name for the disease which affects werew-� Kevin trailed off�

Pain shot through my entire body, my body began to twist around against my will� my fingers began to feel restricted� my hind legs� I mean� my legs, began to feel too weak to hold my body and I fell forward to my hands� blood fell from my nose as it began to stretch forward� the sound of my breathing filled my ears.

All I wanted to do was eat.

No� not eat� something else�

Hunt.

A terrified Kevin stood in the centre of my vision� he was screaming words I recognised, but I couldn�t understand them and as soon as he�d said them, they simply dropped out of my memory� words weren�t important�

I could see something behind Kevin; through the blurry textured storeroom window� it was the moon� for the first time in my life, as far as I remember, it appeared to be completely round.

I think I blacked out, because I don�t remember anything from there on.


Sorry Rover, It�s just not working out between us�

You�d be genuinely shocked at some of the places that a person with a split personality disorder will wake up on a Friday morning, after what felt like a long nights drinking. The place I�m referring to this time is the dogs kennel three doors away from my house. I had my arm around a Doberman and once again I was covered in clumps of grey fur. I dreaded to think about what had been going on the night before.

Now to some of the people who read my story, my condition probably seems easy to diagnose, the missing nights that I (with my one GCSE in Psychology) had once credited to an advanced form of schizophrenia, the fact I�d never seen a full moon before my night in the shop talking to the frog, the random clumps of animal fur, the kennel, not forgetting my odd transformation in front of poor Kevin (and if you have figured out what my problem is, don�t go and spoil it for everyone else)�

It also may seem like I�m ignoring the obvious and that I�m stupid not to see something like this that�s staring me in the face, but to be honest, some times the human brain, after years and years of being conditioned only to believe that which requires little or no explanation, simply can�t register those things that seem so far out and impossible to believe.

The taste in my mouth that morning after the day when I found the frog in the Cauldron reminded me of a meal that my mother had once tricked me into eating on a trip to France. It was the most disgusting thing I�d ever eaten when I was ten, and I could never look at a frog�s legs or a French person in quite the same way again.

Quietly and carefully, I stopped spooning the Doberman and crept out of the kennel as stealthily as a man who was trying to escape after a possible one-night stand with a vicious, scary, huge, salivating canine could. I climbed the wooden fence, which isn�t the most comfortable thing for somebody who isn�t wearing any clothes to do (imagine where you could get splinters, it doesn�t bare thinking about) and landed in the alleyway that connected all of these houses. I got to my house without any trouble. I got dressed and left for work.

When I got there, I unlocked the door at arms length (to avoid the aforementioned bird droppings), stepped over the soiled doorstep and entered the shop.

Gray was waiting there, leaning against the counter and staring at me. He was wearing his trademark bowler hat and it was cocked to one side. He also wore a dark red waistcoat with a visible golden pocket watch that he kept glancing down towards. He was like the soul survivor of a time long forgotten. He was smiling, but only with his mouth, his eyes showed anger.

The events of the previous evening re-entered my mind for the first time that morning, the scuffle, the urgent removal of my jeans and my conversation with Kevin. �Oh god,� I thought, remembering the taste of frogs legs in my mouth and the terrified look on his face the night before� I looked around for proof that it had happened, that I hadn�t simply imagined it all�

There were some books lying on the floor, my trousers strewn across it, there were the teacups on the counter, as well as the demon charm� but there was something else on the counter as well. Kevin�s box. I hadn�t put it there, as far as I remembered it was still on the floor when I... left?

The boss was watching me.

Eventually he spoke.

�Hello,� he said smiling a wide smile, �you didn�t touch my little wooden box did you?�

�No,� I lied, swallowing the scared lump that was lodged halfway down my throat. He knew I was lying though. I could tell. It was where the anger in his eyes was coming from. He must have been the one to have picked up the box� and re-fixed the hinges.

�I�ll be taking it then,� he said, staring past my face and into my guilty mind, �and I�d like to buy this book too.�
He placed it on the counter. It was �Wind in the Willows�.

I couldn�t look the boss in the eyes for fear of baring my soul. I keyed it in to the till and took his money, placing the entire year�s takings at a tidy three pounds and forty pence. This was the best year yet.

The boss smiled and left without speaking.

I let out a relieved sigh and suddenly realised that my shoulders were tickling the bottom of my ears. I let them sag. Some words from the previous night filled my mind; �He thinks you may be very important to him in the future.�

I looked around and realised that something else was different about the shop. The storeroom door was shut. I specifically remember it being wide open. All the time actually, I�d never been in there before that I could remember and I never bothered to shut the door. Even taking that into consideration, the fact that the door had never previously been closed, the idea of opening it now scared me.
I did it anyway though.

I didn�t know what I expected to see, but I�m sure this wasn�t it, because I did expect there to be walls. What there was in place of the walls was a whole lot of rubble. Covering the floor was the roof, which was more or less intact. With all of my strength I tipped the fallen roof over into the back garden. The shop still looked more or less structurally sound, the storeroom appeared to have been a small extension that had been tagged onto the back of the building. I could see that the future involved leaving the storeroom door shut.

Panting from my efforts, I perused the wreckage. There were old cardboard boxes and bricks laying everywhere, as well as the occasional smashed jar and broken pieces of textured windows. For some reason I got the distinct feeling that I had a part in this the night before, when I switched personalities. I picked up a random box that was labelled �frogs legs�; it had what looked like a dog�s teeth marks in it and the contents were missing. There were different things lying around. Old spell ingredients I guessed.

Did I do this? Did I trash the Cauldron�s storeroom?

I heard something moving around near a smashed jar that had once contained frogspawn. The closer I got to it, the easier it became to hear the sobbing.
It was Kevin. He sounded miserable. He was covered in dust and he was digging a little hole.

�That, hngh, murdering, hngh, bastard,� he sobbed, picking up a single egg and placing it in the hole.

I tried seeing things from the little frog�s point of view; this was the frog equivalent of me walking into a room and finding a mountain of dead babies.
I laid a finger on his miniscule shoulder and he looked up towards me. �Did you know,� he asked, pointing to the countless jars of frogspawn and boxes of dried frogs.

I shook my head, because I didn�t. Not that I would have thought that there was anything wrong with it before I saw little Kevin making graves for the unborn tadpoles, �no, these all must belong to Mr Gray, or the old guy who used to have my job. I think they were meant to be used in spells.�

Later I helped Kevin dig a big hole in the yard where we dropped all of the frog related merchandise, or as Kevin would have it, bodies. We held a small funeral. Kevin cried. I think. I�m not sure a frog can cry. He sounded like he was crying.

I set him up a small bed in a section of the draw in the till, using mud and water, which is what he claims is his favourite type of bedding. I told him that I couldn�t afford Caviar, but if he wanted to stay around, this old shop attracted all the flies he could eat. That probably had something to do with that ham sandwich I lost the year before. He told me that it was okay because he�d never cared for Caviar.

I�m not sure which of us had it worse really, Kevin had seen the massacred bodies of hundreds of his people and I�d very possibly gotten a Doberman Pregnant.

That evening I asked Kevin about a word I remembered him saying that I didn�t understand. �Lycanthropy�.
It�s the real name of the disease that causes men to turn into wolves on full moons.

Men like me I guess.

Am I the Earlham Ripper that the papers were talking about?

Did I kill those girls?


THE END