again, regressing: amphibious

Late that night, like clockwork, Randy wakes up.
He can hear Yagoro’s whispers, like the echoes of scratches on the insides of copper pipes.
Randy gently shoves Donald Duck and Owlie aside (the soft tumbling of bells), and peels the ragged covers off of his body.
The air is cold to his exposed skin. With his first shiver, he realizes something about tonight is different. He blinks the sand out of his eyes just to be sure. The air around him remains suspended and cool, everything hiding within its skin. He glances around at the huddled occupants of his room: the bookshelf, the desk, the clumsy looking bed. Everything is painted in shades of blue or grey or silver. The familiar red warmth of his previous dreams is absent. Tonight, the colors are dead and cold and flat and real.
Randy creeps out into the hallway. The texture of the matted carpet grounds him as he passes, first the guiltless snores at his brother’s bedroom, and then the slightly distanced interpenetrating rhythms of his parents’ log-saws. He descends from the second floor to the first, the stairs unpredictably creaking beneath his weight. By the time he reaches the groaning front door, his bare soles numb on the frozen tiles of the foyer/laundry room, he decides that he definitely needs his shoes tonight. He shuffles his feet into his distinctly weatherworn pair, laces open and bleeding like viscera.
His footsteps are too loud as he makes his way through the backyard. He proceeds tentatively, and finds the wooden door in the back fence. He can feel the texture of the rough, splinter-shod wood as he presses his palm onto its surface to slowly push it out.
The weedelia field beyond is pale and washed out beneath a diffuse moon. The waxy leaves are dark and absorbent, keeping their reflections to themselves; the usually gaudy yellow flowers peek like countless cyanotic fetus-heads. Randy creeps on the dark pathway between the silent watch of the flowers and beneath the moon, until he is before the maw cut in the chain-link fence. He gingerly steps through the opening.
The concrete slope of the canal is both rougher and more slippery than he remembers. He finds he must concentrate to keep his footing, as he edges his way through some vast and illegible spray-painted symbol, frozen and luminous. He reaches the canal floor, and feels the dry lichens and dessicated sediment crunch beneath his shoes.
Randy proceeds through the canal, each step producing a dead and echoless sound. He reaches the lip of the rainwater, before the solid black darkness of the tunnel. He takes a first step, imagining countless swarms of tadpoles squiggling away like disturbed and restless commas. The water, soaking through the fabric walls of his shoes and drowning the spaces between his toes, is unimaginably cold. Air bubbles up, deserting the sinking ship of his foot. He feels the waterline as a distinct boundary, settling uneasily a bit above his ankles; it is the edge between a vague sense of himself above, and the cold and almost painful clarity of himself below. His second step is reluctantly taken, given the experience of the first. But then he takes another step, and another, and with each successive step, he comes to feel a certain inevitability, if not comfort, in his progression.
He approaches the tunnel mouth. Strange, but when he came here on other occasions, there was always a red-tinged light illuminating surfaces and guiding him. Tonight, he almost feels as though the darkness at the tunnel mouth were a solid wall of pitch. He proceeds nevertheless and relentlessly. The first thing to pass into the darkness is a hand; for a moment, he has the disorienting sensation of losing that piece of himself in the black drink. And when that hand is followed by an arm, a shoulder, a torso, a face, he feels as though he were literally disappearing. But even after his entire self is encompassed by the inky blackness, he still feels his feet in the cold waters, slushing and sludging forwards.
Eventually, he hears a voice.
“Tonight,” whispers Yagoro, his voice scratching the dark walls. “Tonight, Ranidae, I will let you swim in the cold waters, the real waters. I will tell you a secret, a secret that the world has hidden away and drowned and buried. Tonight, I will reveal to you the truth of this world, in honor of our fallen comrades.”
Randy tries to echo-locate Yagoro’s voice, but it is difficult. It seems to come from everywhere, from the walls, from the waters, from the darkness itself.
“Do you know where the kappa come from?” Yagoro asks. “I have mentioned that we are the unwanted children. I was not merely speaking metaphorically. The kappa, my kind, we are aborted fetuses. Our mothers, hidden away from sight, would eject us. Ashamed of our cries, they would drown us in nearby rivers. Our fontanelles would still be soft and unclosed. Open to the cruelty of the world.”
Randy finds a wall with a flat palm. He slides along its surface, feeling decades of red-tinged watermarks stain his skin.
“Later, the villagers would whisper tales of horrid creatures called kappa, wicked and malicious water spirits, to scare the living children away from the riverbanks, to insure that they would never see. Thus, when someone chanced to see a floating bloated corpse with a bowl for a head, they rushed back to the village to speak excitedly about spying a kappa and having lived to tell the tale. In this way, the shame of the aborted fetus was concealed.”
Randy is close to Yagoro now. The whispers have more body now, and a source.
“The villagers told the story too well. You see, there is a kind of magic to words, a kind of magic to lies and denials. If you attempt to cover something up enough, then that thing transforms, and takes on a kind of half-life. But half a life is not enough, is it, my little Ranidae? We deserve what the living have. We deserve legs, and a firm ground to stand upon.”
Randy’s eyes have adjusted as much as they can to the darkness, his pupils straining circles. He makes out a shape, shuffling and crouched, but a few feet before him.
“Yagoro?” Randy whispers. His voice is a dry croak, but it seems to boom within the confines of the tunnel.
The shadow does not turn around. “Oh ho ho,” it sings. “And here returns our little Prometheus. Have you come to grant us illumination and warmth? Have you come to make good on the sacrifice of your comrades? Or perhaps you would like to give up a liver?”
There is an icy malice in Yagoro’s voice. Randy backs away uneasily. Almost in defense, he stutters: “I- I came here to warn you.”
Yagoro does not respond.
“I came here to warn you,” Randy repeats, his voice solidifying somewhat. “My brother- my brother and his friends- they are coming here tomorrow night. They’re going to hunt down all the toads that they can find.”
Yagoro laughs; it is the sound of a knife scraping scales. “You’re here to warn us? Isn’t that a joke, Ranidae? This falls into our plans perfectly. Have you never wondered what a kappa eats?”
The shadow turns, and scrabbles closer to Randy. Randy takes a stumbling step back, his back pressed up against the concrete wall of the tunnel. But he is not fast enough. Soon, Yagoro is upon him. Even in the darkness, Randy is able to make out the decayed face of a bloated and overgrown fetus, and the pale, hairless bowl where its brain ought to be. The smell of rot is overwhelming.
“When your brother and his friends come here tomorrow night, they will think they are hunting us. But I will be hunting him.”
Randy somehow manages to shove Yagoro off of him. As he scrambles out, breathless and cold, he hears Yagoro’s laughter follow him.
The canal, the slope, the fence, the weedelia field, the yard, all pass in a blur. Randy doesn’t stop until he is in bed, huddled between Donald Duck and Owlie, concealed beneath his ragged blanket.
His feet, muddy and wet, soak into the mattress.