The Tehama and others

by Bob Leman

The witch called herself Sally Wheeler. It was not her original name, of course, but only the latest in a series of names she had used over the years as she moved from town to town making fresh beginnings. The time had now arrived for another move and another name. The necessity for disguise was becoming unacceptably burdensome, and it was plain that if some accident were to expose her real person, there could not fail to be a great deal of gossip, and perhaps even widespread publicity, since it was well known in the village that there was no possibility whatever that she could be less than eighty years old.

  Much poring over the atlas and a considerable amount of correspondence with chambers of commerce brought her at last to a choice, and it remained only to make an inspection in person. She had chosen a town at a considerable remove from New England, a northern Appalachian community of static population and uneventful history called Rumford's Mill. On a morning in June she arrived at the county airport, rented a car, and drove to the town. She parked on Main Street and walked briskly to the offices of Watkins Realty, Inc.

  She was not in disguise. The veil and musty dress and senile gait had been left in the rest room of the bus station in Boston, and it was an energetic and uncommonly good-looking young woman who presented herself at the realtor's desk. "Mr. Watkins?" she said, I'm Meg Hathorne." It was the name she had chosen for the next chapter of her life, and it was, as it happened, her true and original name. It seemed safe enough to use after three centuries, and she took some satisfaction in reverting to it, knowing that in the dusty archives of a certain Massachusetts town there were entries against the name that were very nasty indeed.

  "Mrs. Hathorne," Watkins said. "Welcome to town. I have a house here that I think will suit you to a T. Seems like just what you want, from your letter." If it appeared to him that her wants were somewhat odd, he gave no indication of it, and indeed one might have supposed, from his manner, that rich young beauties in search of decayed mansions on the outskirts of town were an everyday occurrence in Rumford's Mill. "We'll take my car," he said.

  She did not like the house at all. It was too new, too small, too close to other houses, and did not have enough trees round about. She complained bitterly. "Is this all you've got, Mr. Watkins?" she said.

  "Oh, I've got others," he said, "But I don't think they'll fill your bill as well as this one.”

  They drove about the purlieus of the town and looked at houses. None suited her. "I'm really disappointed, Mr. Watkins," she said. "I do very much like this town."

  They were at that point driving down Donley Street, near the place where the street's name changed to County Road Seven. In the remote years when the town had been growing, its growth had been in other directions, so that the street was at this point already a country lane, leafy and peaceful and sparsely inhabited. A driveway flanked by huge old lilacs caught the witch's eye. "Is there a house back there?" she said.

  "Oh, yes, there’s a house," Watkins said. "Not for sale, though."

  "Let's look at it, anyway."

  They drove up a neglected driveway that wound through a copse of old trees and emerged in front of a ruinous mansion, a dilapidated and weather-stained pile overgrown with dead vines.

  The witch evinced total delight at the sight of it. "It's perfect," she said. "I'll take it."

  "It's not for sale," Watkins said.

  "Of course it is," she said. "Just look at it. They'll sell it. Who owns it?"

  "The fact is," Watkins said, "the fact is that, uh, I do. I live here."

  "Well," said the witch, "that's all right, then. How much do you want?"

  "It's not for sale."

  "What would you say to three hundred thousand dollars?"

  She was, of course, very rich. To supplement the usual witch's hoard of gold, she had been making prudent investments for more than a century, more often than not with foreknowledge of the market, so that her private holdings were on the order of an oil sheikh's fortune. There was not a house in Rumford's Mill that was worth three hundred thousand dollars, least of all this crumbling relic, a fact which she knew as well as she knew that Watkins knew it.

  "I can't sell it," Watkins said, miserably. "I can't.''

  She looked at him. "Mr. Watkins," she said, "I like its smell. I want it. I will have it. I'm afraid I'm going to have to use a little coercion. I really didn't want to start off this way. Still, you won't remember, will you?"

  It is doubtful that Watkins heard her; he was a tortured man. She said, "Mr. Watkins, have you noticed my ring?" Watkins did not respond. "Look at my ring, Mr. Watkins," she said. It was a gold ring with a green gem, worn on the middle finger of her right hand. Watkins looked at it. She said, "Now, Mr. Watkins, you are going to do as I tell you. Are you not?"

  "Yes," Watkins said.

  ***

  So it was that Meg Hathorne came to Rumford's Mill. The town was puzzled, of course. They knew she was rich (word had leaked out about the price she had paid Watkins), and it was impossible to find a reason for a rich woman choosing to live in a house like that. Some people suggested that Fred Watkins was nothing less than a supersalesman, who had performed the extraordinary feat of unloading this notorious white elephant on a gullible outsider, but in time it became perfectly clear that Meg Hathorne was never anything but wholly satisfied with her house, and, in any case, most of the townsfolk had known Watkins too long to believe he could be capable of such a prodigy of persuasion. He was, and always had been, a commonplace colorless man, wholly ordinary and quite incapable of extraordinary accomplishments. He had, it was true, become somewhat odd after his wife ran away, but even his eccentricities were characterless and unobtrusive.

  His wife, Edna, had been even mousier than he, a drab little mate for the drab little man, and the two of them lived mild timid lives in the rundown big house that was the last remnant of the days when the Watkins family had money. If Fred and Edna were not ecstatically happy, neither were they exceptionally miserable; they were, on the whole, in their drab, mild way, content.

  But miserable things began to happen. These things were the consequence of nothing less than Edna's possession by a demon. There is no way of knowing how this tragedy came about, or why it was Edna who was chosen, or even exactly when it took place, since subsequent events demonstrated that she had been possessed for a considerable time before Watkins comprehended that she had become someone — or something — else.

  He thought at first that she might be losing her mind. She had had an aunt who in mid-life took suddenly to undressing in public places and required confinement; there could have been something in the blood. He tried to watch her carefully, but most of his work was done in the evenings, and as often as not he did not return home until close to midnight. One night he came in unexpectedly early and did not find her. He looked in all the rooms of the house, and then went down into the basement. Unidentifiable noises were coming from the cavernous unfinished area that comprised a considerable portion of the cellars, and he went to the low entrance behind the enormous old furnace and entered.

  She was at the far end, busy at something, working in the white glare of a gasoline lantern. He knocked against a box, and she whirled and saw him. Instantly she snatched up the lantern and ran to him. By the time she reached him she was weeping hysterically and shrieking something about a rat. He took her up and put her to bed. She would not permit him to leave her, and in the end it was he who first fell asleep, without ever having it made clear exactly what she had been at.

  The next day she simply refused to talk about it. When Watkins made a different attempt to press the matter, she turned on him with intemperate rage and venom, displaying a startling fluency of invective. He crept off, astonished and cowed. It was as if a placid domestic rabbit had suddenly bared its teeth and begun to emit menacing bass growls.

  He did not speak to her again about the incident, but made a serious effort to keep a close watch on her, striving diligently to be as devious and sly as possible. Such behavior was, of course, enti
rely foreign to his nature, and it may reasonably be supposed that she thought his clumsy subterfuges nothing more than a rather comical minor annoyance. In any case, he was given no opportunity to investigate the cellar room, because after that night she would never leave the house for any reason.

  Or so Watkins thought. But one evening at dinner he decided he did not want his coffee, and rather than incur her wrath by leaving it in his cup, he found a chance to pour it into the pot of a rubber plant when her attention was engaged elsewhere. As a consequence he did not on that evening ingest the soporific drug with which she was accustomed to dosing him when she had night business to transact. He went to bed at his usual time, but did not fall asleep. When she entered and spoke to him, he did not answer, for no particular reason except that he did not feel like talking to her.

  He heard her footsteps going down the stairs and then out of the house, and, in a little while, the sound of the car backing out of the garage and crunching down the driveway. He rose, dressed, lit the gasoline lantern, and descended to the basement. He went to the comer where the garden tools were kept, and selected a long- handled shovel. With the lantern in one hand and the shovel in the other, he ducked under the furnace pipes and entered the unfinished room. He went directly to the place where she had been working that night, and examined the floor. She had indeed been digging there. He put down the lantern, took up the shovel, and began to dig. In no time at all he found the first body.

  Poor Watkins was quite incapable of coping with such a discovery. The shovel sank into something squashily yielding, and came up dripping unspeakably. He stood frozen for a long moment, trying to comprehend what it was that lay on his shovel, and as he stood so, the stench struck him, a vile belch of corruption that was almost palpable in its intensity. His gorge rose abruptly and violently; at the same instant he realized what it was that he held on the shovel. He screamed and ran. He ran through the opening and slammed full-tilt into the pipes of the furnace. He rebounded, fell to the floor, and scrambled frantically on all fours into the center of the furnace room, to the place where the light was brightest, and crouched under the bright bare bulb, making piteous noises.

  He groveled there for some time. By degrees his moaning and retching subsided. He knelt there, trembling, staring at the floor. After a time he rose, squared his shoulders, and re-entered the room.

  It was either an act of the most exordinary courage or of impaired reason. Consider: this ordinary, timid little man, who often turned pale at the sight of bloody scenes on a movie screen, picked up his shovel and returned to that terrifying cavern and began to dig. And kept on digging, despite what his shovel uncovered. He dug, there in that hideous stench, as if each of the horrors he exposed was a valuable treasure that whetted his appetite to find more. Many of the bodies were those of little children, and there is no doubt at all that before he had finished he was somewhat crazy. As he dug he screamed steadily, in a choked and muted voice.

  Behind him a sudden harsh fierce voice said, "Leave them alone!" He spun around. It was Edna. Instantly, without conscious thought and without the slightest hesitation, he swung the shovel with all his strength. The edge took her just under the ear; the top half of her head was sheared off.

  It was very messy, of course, but far less disquieting than the rest of the contents of the room, and in any case the wretched Watkins was — temporarily at least — far beyond further shock or fear or remorse. He quite calmly set about the work of hiding all traces of both Edna's awful leavings and his own timely act of extermination. He worked coolly and efficiently, a craftsman intent upon doing a workmanlike job. His face was dead and expressionless. Out of it stared eyes that were quite mad.

  In a comer he dug a large deep hole. He gathered up all the ghastly offal he had exhumed, and threw it into the hole. He took both the large and small pieces of Edna and pitched them in atop her victims. He went into the furnace room and found the body of her last victim, which she had evidently been dragging in for burial when she saw Watkins's light or heard him at his digging. It was, mercifully, the body of an adult this time, a man in his forties, nastily mutilated. It took its place in the communal hole.

  He went to the bedroom and gathered together some of her clothes and toiletries (he was capable of foresight in his cold lunacy) and shoved them into a suitcase. As he was leaving the room he saw a gold crucifix that she had sometimes worn, hanging from its chain over the mirror on her dressing table. He took it with him.

  The suitcase went into the hole after the bodies. He took up his shovel again and began to fill up the hole. When the fill was within a foot of the top, he remembered the crucifix. He tossed it in. When the filling was complete he brought garden tools and raked the floor of the room to a uniform smoothness. He piled upon the grave splintered wood and broken pottery from the general litter, returned the tools to their accustomed places, stripped off his clothes and bundled them for burning, took a long hot shower, and went to bed. Two days later, when he called on the chief of police, his behavior was very close to normal.

  "She take anything with her? I mean, pack a bag or anything?" said the chief. His questioning had been perfunctory. His mind seemed to be on something else.

  "Why — I don't know. I'll have to look," said cagey Watkins.

  The chief heaved a sigh. "Fred," he said, "now Fred, what I'm going to tell you may come as a shock. But somebody's going to have to break the news to you, and it looks like I'm elected. Now Fred, it looks like Edna's run off with a man. Man named Tibbetts, salesman with Acme Manifold, out of Buffalo. Now that's what I think, Fred. You all right, Fred?"

  Watkins was goggling mutely, trying to understand. At last he said, "What—? Who—-?"

  "I guess everybody knew it but you, Fred," the chief said. "Lots of talk. Quite a night-life lady. Down at Five Points in one bar or another, two, three nights a week lately. Different men. Last couple times it was this Tibbetts. Yesterday morning Hazel Kleeb called in from over at the Starlite Motel, said Tibbetts hadn't slept in his room for two nights. We did a little checking, found out him and Edna's been doing the joints. Fred, they've run off, that's what it looks like. I'm sorry, Fred. But I reckon it's for the best.

  Edna. Last person in the world. You never know, do you? Feeling better, Fred?"

  Thus was Watkins delivered from the threat of prosecution and imprisonment; but — as he clearly saw when he reflected upon the matter — it was no more than a temporary deliverance. There remained, after all, a mass grave in the basement, and one of the murders had indubitably been committed by him. If the grave were discovered, the other atrocities would inevitably be attributed to him as well. He would then be tried and convicted as an inhuman monster, and probably executed. The more he pondered the situation, the more evident it became: there was nothing — nothing — as important as hiding the secret of the grave.

  All his life Watkins had been the most ordinary of men, the commonest of the commonplace. Now the town began to notice that he was becoming odd, that he was on his way to becoming a notable eccentric. From the day of Edna's disappearance, no one but himself entered the house, and anyone venturing onto the grounds was driven off. He continued to work (if he failed to pay his taxes they would take the house), but the instant the day's work was done he was back at the house, watching. Watching.

  He desperately feared burglars and vandals, malefactors who might break in and discover the secret. He wanted the house to be a stronghold, a fortress to hold such lurking predators at bay, but to make it so, to effect such improvements, would entail an incursion of workmen and suppliers, whose presence would be even more dangerous than that of the burglars because they would be tampering with the very fabric of the house. He felt, with every strand of his being, that the house must be untouched. No improvements. No repairs.

  And the dilapidation continued, and at last a day came when he somehow found himself selling the house to Meg Hathorne.

  ***

  The witch was as pleased with h
er acquisition as a young bride with her first home. She toured it from top to bottom, rejoicing in every one of the faults and defects that rendered it unsalable to an ordinary buyer. There was, in point of fact, no reason why she should have not dwelt in a comfortable new house with whatever shiny gadgetry she fancied; there were no special requirements in the covenant that specified particulars about a witch's habitation. But among the Devil's servants life follows art as surely as it does among ordinary beings, and the witch's conception of a fitting mode of life had been shaped by all the countless tales about her kind, just as our policemen have come to model their speech and manner after television policemen, and real cowboys ape those in the movies. She would have been uneasy without the conventional trappings, without cobwebs and shadowy comers and strange sounds in the night.

  At the front of the house she maintained two rooms for receiving the occasional unavoidable visitor; these rooms were clean, well-lit, and elegantly furnished. The rest of the house, where she lived, was kept more to her liking: a creaking dark warren of web-by passages and noisome chambers where the only light came from a carried candle or — in the room that served her as workroom — a single oil lamp that stood on a littered table and shed its drop of yellow light on tattered ancient books, scraps of parchment, crumbs of food, drying bits of viscera of small animals, and scurrying insects. It was in this room that she spent most of her time, sitting and scheming.

  Her devotion to tradition did not extend to her dress, and — had there been anyone to observe — she would have seemed an incongruous figure in her snug jeans and blouse as she sat there in the fetid gloom. She sat in shadow, visible but dim, sitting in perfect immobility. At her feet lay a creature that looked exactly like a cat.

  On the far side of the room something pale manifested itself in the darkness, an amorphous area of faint luminosity that seemed to emanate from the wall. The witch watched with interest. The luminosity eddied, darkened along the streams of the eddies, and began gradually to take on a certain tenuous solidity and shape. In due course it resolved itself into the insubstantial and intermittently transparent figure of a woman. As the upper portion coalesced into vague visibility it became apparent that the top half of the head was missing.