The Tehama and others

by Bob Leman

  In single file they marched out of the room, through the open front door, and down the steps, with Smithers following. They crossed the lawn, passed through a gateway in a low stone wall, and set out through the woods. It was growing dark, but there was still enough light for the creatures to be seen, and Smithers kept at a distance, moving in the deepest shadows. Once launched into motion, the pair continued to plod without further instruction; Smithers blew the freese only to change their direction from time to time.

  Gore's Survey was a wasteland, a tract of fifteen or twenty acres that still retained the name of an old three-thousand-acre grant to a pioneer named Gore, who had parceled it out in estates and farms in the middle of the eighteenth century. It had been highly desirable land at the time Gore took it, and during the next two centuries its value increased continuously, so that over the years most of the tracts changed hands many times. Along the way, a great many were divided into smaller farms, and as early as the nineteen thirties some of these were being further subdivided into residential building lots. Any large tracts that remained intact acquired enormous value. The two Evans estates had been in that category.

  It was rolling countryside, topographically varying from gentle slopes to moderate hillsides. A good deal of the aboriginal forest remained, mingled with prosperous farms. Clean small streams ran through it; there was an abundance of game. It was green and golden in the summer, and in autumn a carnival of reds and yellows. The winters were cold and white, but they spoke more of fat hibernation than of frozen hunger. Nature was kind, here.

  Except to the tract of acreage that still kept the old name; that had been blighted, somehow. Nothing grew there except a flaky dry lichen, and that only in spots. The land lay amid the greenery like a gray sore, an irregular blotch of sterility. From time to time down the years, someone would buy it from the county for a trifling price and spend a few years and a good deal of money on one scheme or another - complex drainage systems, irrigation, sophisticated fertilizers and chemicals - to make it productive. The schemes always failed, and in due course the county would take it for taxes again.

  In 1925 one of the hopeful entrepreneurs built a house on the tract, an undistinguished wooden farmhouse which, after its abandonment, sheltered squatters from time to time. Its current occupants were relics of the decade of drugs and violence, aging debris of the storms of the time. They lived in the past, still vaguely convinced that cooking their brains with chemicals and living in squalor revenged them somehow on a world that had passed them by and that found their existence irrelevant to its concerns. Their livelihood came from a regular cash remittance of mysterious origins, which was paid in consideration of their harboring and hiding a fugitive left over from the stormy past, a zealot who had once planted a bomb in the history stacks of a university library and managed to blow up an elderly night watchman along with the books.

  These were Smithers' witnesses, not the most credible, perhaps, but in the right place at the right time. They were assembled on the rotting porch of the house as he and his monstrous puppets reached the edge of the woods. The war dance had quite successfully engaged their attention, and they watched with dreamy approval as Gordon capered around a great bonfire to Dennis's erratic thumping on a set of bongo-drums.

  Smithers blew a honk that froze his charges in place behind a dense thicket, and cautiously approached through the shadows for a clear view. Gordon was speaking to Dennis, who stopped drumming. Gordon took up the rattles. He began the incantation.

  "Dead on time," Smithers said. "Get set, fellas." He waited. After a time he said, "Go," and blew. The creatures stumped out of the bush and moved ponderously toward Gordon's fire.

  A fog lay upon Gore's Survey, a fog that had not been there before the incantation began. It coiled and eddied sluggishly along the ground, thickening gradually as the chant proceeded, rising no higher than a man's waist. It ended abruptly at the border of the dead land. Smithers eyed it with apprehension; he kept the freese close to his mouth.

  Gordon's incantation ended with a truncated, minor-key drone and an elaborate flourish of the rattles. There was a moment of utter stillness. Then something came from under the earth.

  The dry, ashen soil shifted, heaved, and split; through the opening rose the figure of a man, an Indian warrior in deerskins. He seemed to be unfolding himself from a doubled-up position, stretching slowly to his full height. As he did so, the sporadic red glare of the bonfire showed his arms to be bound tight to his sides. On his face was an expression of unutterable pain, of an agony beyond any nightmare of agony. He stood for a long moment, his head thrown back, seeming to stare at the black sky. And then, between one flicker of the fire and the next, his face changed; the black gape of his silent scream was erased, the knotted contortion of the facial muscles softened and relaxed; an old suffering had ended, and its marks were wiped away. On the face at that instant of deliverance was an expression of serenity and peace.

  But only for that instant; then there was no face, there was no warrior. There was only a fine dust that floated and swirled gently for a moment and was dispersed by the eddies of the mist.

  "A Tehama!" Smithers said. "Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph."

  Suddenly there were things in the fog, fitfully visible through the slow coilings. They were a host, a swarm: foot-high stick-figures with heads like the skulls of toothed reptiles, deep grinning mouths wide in soundless shrieks of hate. They were in furious motion, making for the fire, the small limbs like flailing black wires.

  They reached Dennis first, where he sat frozen with the drums in his lap. They were over him like locusts, razor teeth tearing and ripping, little black talons clawing in a frenzy. In a moment they dropped away. Dennis toppled to the ground, quite dead. There was not a mark on his body.

  Smithers' puppets had almost reached the fire, now, plodding along mechanically, not to be stopped or turned except by the pipe that had set them in motion. The swarm boiled and swirled and raced at them, and up and over them, enveloping both as it had enveloped Dennis. The thick bodies continued to plod. Teeth and claws without number tore at them with insenate ferocity; their pace did not vary. The swarm dropped off them; they were dead. And still the bodies marched for a few more steps before they dropped. They were no more marked by the savage rending than Dennis had been.

  All of this had taken no more than two minutes, and Smithers had not moved a muscle. Now he broke free of his paralysis. "Run!" he bawled to the group on the porch. "Run! Run!"

  They paid no attention. Perhaps in their chemical trances they had often watched even stranger things and perceived this as nothing very different. One or two applauded, and one said.

  "Yeah!" And then the swarm was upon them.

  It left them sprawled in death on the decayed planks, and surged into the house and out again, and violently boiled about on the gray earth. The movement was perceptibly slower than it had been in the beginning, and they could be made out individually, the hard thin limbs and small terrible heads, the feral little mouths wide in their soundless shrieks. Smithers was shuddering and sweating copiously in the chilly night air. He put the pipe to his mouth and once again blew.

  The movement slowed further as he piped, and little by little the swarm coalesced into a dense pack, a shifting, flickering blanket of predatory small horrors covering several square yards of the dead soil. Smithers turned and entered the forest. They followed.

  ***

  It was dawn again when Smithers rang Helena's bell. He said, "Don't talk, Signe. Just get me some whiskey and call Helena." She took one look at him and obeyed without a word.

  When Helena entered the room, she found him slumped in a chair, drinking the whiskey. He said, "Well, it's done. You're rid of Gordon. And Dennis and the hippies, too. And damn near me." He had the look of a soldier who has been too long under fire.

  She said, "Signe's making breakfast. Eat something, and then you can tell me about it. Come along." Smithers carried the bottle with him.


  The dining room was airy and sunny, and a canary sang in a cage. Smithers had eaten bacon and eggs and reduced the bottle's level by several inches. His eyes had lost some of their wildness, and the tension on his face was softening into simple weariness. "Gordon got the spell a little wrong, again," he said. "It shouldn't have mattered, because I'd already activated the corpse-eaters, and what he was doing - even though he didn't know it - was just window-dressing. But it worked, and worked wrong, and he set free a Tehama that had been set to restrain; a nest of - I guess 'Biters' would be the best translation. I'd better explain what those things are.

  "The Biters are just about the worst things the legends tell about, little horrors so thoroughly evil that they were loathed by even the wickedest of the spirits. The myth has it that long ago the Great Good Spirit, Gitche-Manito, prevailed in single combat over his opposite, Hake-Manito, and struck him such a blow that Hake-Manito was shattered into a million million pieces. But each of the pieces retained life, and each had only one aim: to kill. To kill anything and everything, animal and vegetable, fish, fowl, and corn.

  "Gitche-Manito buried them in various places all over the world. But of course simple burial wouldn't hold them, and so he put a safeguard at each burial place: a Tehama. The Biters could be confined only if they could kill. So he gave them something to kill. He took the bad medicine men, the ones who had served Hake-Manito, and buried one with each clutch of Biters. Buried them alive, for the Biters to kill. And ever since, they have been killed by the Biters ten thousand times a day, every day, suffering agonizing death endlessly repeated, and yet they cannot die. And for so long as they do not die, the Biters can continue to kill them, and so somewhat slake their thirst for killing, and will remain in restraint.

  "But Gordon's spell released the Tehama; he died at last, was delivered from his long agony. When he died, the Biters were no longer confined to the grave, and they came out. They came out and killed, did enough killing to take the edge off their appetite, so I could control them, more or less, with the freese. I piped them over to Gordon's house and down into the tunnel the ghouls came out of, and bricked up the tunnel. And then I came down with the worst case of the shakes you ever saw. Those things are awful, Helena. You can't imagine how awful.

  "I stopped by Gore's Survey on my way back here. It's pretty clear, now, what made it a desert, why nothing ever grew there. That'll be changing. But it doesn't look so good this morning. Enough corpses for a small battlefield. The things from the tunnel aren't there, though; just a couple of wet spots on the ground. They must have totally decomposed, bones and all. Odd chemistry there. Somebody'll be finding the bodies pretty soon now, and calling the sheriff. I wonder what the autopsies 'll show. The bodies aren't marked. It seems the Biters don't actually bite. It may be that they don't even have any physical being. But they kill, all right. They do kill."

  Smithers gulped the rest of his whiskey and stared out the window. Helena said, "It's all pretty strange, Eddie. And pretty awful. And very hard to believe, to tell the truth. Did it really happen?"

  "Oh, it happened. You'll be hearing all about the bodies they'll find at Gore's Survey. I expect they'll end up calling it some kind of dope poisoning... There's about fifteen hundred dollars back taxes on that land. I can get it for that plus costs. I think I'd better do it today. It's going to be getting green, now. Going to be good land. Be worth something."

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know. Half a million, maybe."

  "If it's true. If it's not true, it's not worth the back taxes. Nothing ever grew there - ever."

  "It will now," Smithers said, confidently.

  "Well, then. We both gain some thing, don't we?"

  "I'm a businessman," Smithers said. "If an opportunity comes up, I try to take advantage of it. You should, too. Gordon's house will be yours, now. You'd better sell it as quick as you can. I have a notion the blight will be hitting that area pretty soon."

  "All right, I will. I can use the money... We're pretty cold-blooded, aren't we?"

  "Nothing wrong with taking advantage of something that's already happened. A little hard on the hippies, I admit. Best think of it as a natural disaster, something that couldn't be helped."

  "Yes," Helena said. "That's what I'll do."

  ***

  In the afternoon Smithers drove his gas-guzzler up the mountain to the end of a derelict road. When it became impossible to drive any further, he left the car and proceeded on foot through the trees to a clearing. He was dressed in old khakis and a leather jacket and moccasins. He gathered wood and built a small fire; when the fire had burnt itself down to bright coals and a tiny column of white smoke was rising vertically from it into the still air, he began softly to chant. From the pocket of his jacket he took a handful of something which he dropped onto the coals.

  Dense smoke rose and spread and began to chum and eddy, although there was no wind. In a few minutes the movement ceased, and it hung in a motionless small cloud around the bed of coals. It had thinned enough to permit a certain murky visibility, except for a clot of considerable density across the fire from Smithers. Smithers spoke to the clot: "Is it you, ghost of my grandfather?"

  He heard a reply, or thought he heard one, and he said, 'To tell you how things go with me, Grandfather. To tell you that I have contended with the Biters and have prevailed over them." He paused, listening. He said, "A Tehama was released through bungling, and the Biters came forth and killed. When their first frenzy was over, I could control them with the freese, and now they are as they were before. They are - I think this will I make you laugh, Grandfather - they are in a tunnel under a house. The tunnel was formerly the burial place of two corpse-eaters that are now destroyed."

  He listened again and said, "They are safely confined. I have given them a new Tehama. They will feed on him perpetually, and for so long as they do, they cannot escape. The Great Spirit's arrangement has been restored." He paused. "A man named Gordon Evans. A bad man, Grandfather. As bad as any of those medicine men who once served the evil spirit. The religion of this man's fathers preaches a hell. He has something worse, now. The eternal fires he was taught to fear must seem to him today like a cool oasis, a place to be longed for. And what he is suffering now, he must suffer forever. Or so we should hope. His deliverance! would free the Biters again, and that must not happen. He released the old Tehama through his efforts to do murder. It is only just that he serve as the new Tehama."

  Another pause. He said, "Oh, pretty good, Grandfather. The game laws keep getting worse. I'm only allowed to shoot one deer a year, but I usually poach a couple more. My wife died a few years ago. I have a grandson, six months old now. I don't know whether I'll teach him the lore or not. I'm not sure it wouldn't be an impediment to him. He's going to be pretty busy with his regular education. I've already entered him for his prep school, and he'll be going to Harvard or Princeton in due course. He'll have a lot of money when I finally join you over there, Grandfather. I want to prepare him to be a rich man... Grandfather? Grandfather?"

  A faint breeze had come up, and the smoke had dispersed. Smithers scooped dirt over the remains of his fire and trod on it. He returned through the woods to his car, performed the complicated maneuvers necessary to turn it around in the narrow roadway, and drove down the mountain.

  The mountain road led to a blacktop, and that to the highway. He pulled off the highway at Gore's Survey and parked for a time, staring reflectively out at the landscape. The dead fields rolled away to the distant tree line as they had always done, lying sterile and gray in the fading light. There was no sign yet of the green future. But it was only the first day.

  He drove on and at the Alfred Evans place turned in at the driveway. Nothing had changed here, either, except that around the house the flowers were just beginning to droop.

  Unlawful Possession

  (The Magazine of Fantasy & S.F., September 1983)

  A very wicked woman lived in a village in New England; she was in
fact a witch, and was more than three hundred years old. She had contrived, however, by supernatural means, to retain her youth in every respect save that of actual chronology, so that in appearance she remained as rosy and fresh and altogether appetizing as any centerfold to be found at the news-stand. But because she had lived in the town for more than seventy years, and had no wish to excite comment by her youthful appearance, she wore heavy veils on the rare occasions when she went out into the streets, and always walked with the gait of a very old woman.

  The necessity for thus disguising her appearance was a great inconvenience to her, but it was an inescapable part of practicing witchcraft in a village. The big city, with its tradition of anonymity and tolerance, would have afforded her a better opportunity to conceal an irregular way of living than did this small agricultural community, but the Devil communicates with his earthly minions by techniques that were instituted in very ancient times, and these embody to this day certain requirements which are necessarily rural. There are, as a matter of fact, no true witches at all in the great cities. The practicing witches of these United States (and there are fewer of them than one might suppose) are to be found only in our small towns and — less frequently — on isolated farmsteads. You have no doubt sometimes seen buttoned-up, sinister-looking houses on decaying small-town streets, and wondered who lived there, and what might go on behind the locked shutters. Most of these houses, as it happens, shelter nothing more than pitiable daft recluses; but one out of fifty or so is the lair of a witch.