The Tehama and others

by Bob Leman

  Newly weaned pups also are fed on pure human blood for a time. The weaning is sudden and summary: the mother simply pries their mouths open and separates them from herself. She does this very carefully, because upon separation from the teat the savage little mouths begin to snap viciously, in a reflex action. An insensible human being is furnished for these occasions, and the mother places the snapping infants, one by one, upon this unconscious victim. The reflex causes the jaws to bite, and when there is flesh for the jaws to close upon, a further reflex causes the pups to begin to suck. For the first time they taste fresh human blood, and they are thenceforth doomed to a periodic need of it.

  The pups at this stage of their development still have disproportionately large heads, and mouths that are disproportionately large even for those heads. Their limbs are by now almost fully developed, but their muscular coordination is poor, and they are, except for the powerful jaws and ferocious teeth, almost helpless. At this age they are covered by coarse black hair, which they will lose by their fifteenth or sixteenth year, except for that on the head. (Male vampires have no facial hair. Stoker gives Dracula a moustache, but this is only one of many errors in Stoker's work.)

  Once the pups are weaned, the female begins to join the males in the hunt, and each night the young are left to themselves until, at some time prior to sunup, one or another of the elders returns to bring them nourishment. The pups are not subject to the coma that claims full-grown vampires between daybreak and sunset, but they tend to be lethargic during those hours, and the tendency increases as they grow older. The ability to assume the form of a bat, or of dust motes, appears to be a skill that is not learned until adolescence or later. The age at which adolescence customarily occurs has not at this time been precisely determined.

  Our earliest glimpse of Clifford M. comes from a packet of half-literate letters written in the 1880s by a young woman named Dulcie Fimber to her affianced husband. Both of these young people were from Comber County, a mountainous jurisdiction located near the point where Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky come together; but the young man had gone off to work in the mines for a year to earn enough money to furnish a cabin for his bride, and Dulcie, who still lived at home with her parents and a sizable clutch of younger brothers and sisters, wrote him weekly.

  The reference in these letters to "Ossie's monkey" are almost certainly about Clifford M. Ossie Fimber was Dulcie's brother, a boy of fourteen or fifteen at the time of her writing. By filling some gaps in the story sketched in the letters, and by making a few inferences, we can arrive at an account of the circumstances of the discovery of Clifford M. that cannot fail to be very close to the facts.

  Young Ossie was a wanderer and an excellent hunter. From the age of eleven it had been his habit to take his rifle and disappear into the steep forest for days at a time, always bringing home substantial quantities of game for the family table. As he grew older, his absences became longer, and the range of his wanderings increased, so that the cave he discovered may have been as far as fifty miles from the parental cabin. He found himself one day being soaked by a prodigious rain- sjprm, and took shelter under a rock ledge. At the back of it was a low opening into which he poked his head and shoulders and satisfied himself it was a cave. He made note of its location, and on his return trip he undertook to explore his discovery.

  It was not a complex or dangerous cavern, at least at the depth to which he penetrated. That was not, however, a great distance, because when he discovered the creatures he went no farther. He was inching down a slight slope with his resinous chunk of pine redly and smokily lighting his way, when he saw the eyes to his right, close at hand, like a bank of glowing coals. He recoiled and then froze. The eyes did not move. There were eight pairs of them, or nine. He advanced his torch a foot or so. Still no movement. He edged forward until the faces were illuminated, and then froze again, staring.

  He was a mountain boy, and a hunter, and there were things he knew by instinct. He was aware at once that these things were some sort of cubs or pups, and where litters of young were found, the mother was likely to be nearby, ready to attack to defend her get. He was very curious about these creatures — he had never seen anything like them — but there was danger here. He began cautiously to move backward, and as he did so, the eight or nine sets of feral teeth that had confronted him in the torchlight all began to snap, making a frighteningly loud noise in the narrow confines of the cave. Then he saw with horror that they were crawling out of the niche where they had been huddled together, and were moving toward him. They moved in an ill-coordinated and inefficient way, but the small red eyes were pitiless, and the evil pointed teeth snapped with hot rapacity, and the clumsy forward movement betokened, he thought, a mindless determination to devour his flesh.

  He backed off hastily, and they followed, wallowing along the rocky floor and emitting little moaning noises of greed. His retreat reached a spot where the passage widened and the ceiling rose sufficiently for him to stand. He stared at them from his full height, and as he did so he was suddenly swept by a powerful wave of disgust and revulsion and rage. He dropped his torch, reversed the rifle, and began to pound at them with the butt, caught up in a frenzy of loathing. He never afterward knew how long he pounded them, but when his frenzy had passed there was no movement on the floor of the cave. He remembered the mother then, and he grabbed his torch and plunged into the passage that led to the outside.

  The passage was low and narrow, compelling him to eel along on his belly, and there was no way for him to look back when he became aware that something was dragging at his heel. He could only squirm along at the best speed he could manage, whimpering and expecting great teeth to close upon his hindquarters at any moment.

  He burst out of the cave into a blinding glare of noontime sunlight and instantly whirled to look at the mouth of the cave. Nothing emerged. He let out his breath in a great sigh of relief, and as he did so he realized suddenly that the drag at his heel was still there. He looked down. One of the creatures had locked its teeth in the heel of his boot, and was futilely trying to suck nourishment from the hard leather. It had curled into a ball in the bright sunlight, and its eyes were squeezed shut, but the teeth remained fixed. The thing was about two feet long; it was entirely covered with hair and had four spidery limbs, two of them obviously arms. Shuddering, Ossie kicked off his boot. The creature remained clamped to it, still curled up in its ball.

  Ossie now had a problem: it was imperative that he put distance between himself and the cave as quickly as possible, because the mother was likely to turn up at any moment; but there was no possibility at all that he could make the long walk home without his boot, and he did not quite see how he was going to recover it. He had a healthy respect for teeth that could sink themselves to the gum line in the rocklike leather of a bootheel.

  He had with him a tough canvas bag for carrying small game, and it occurred to him that the bag might protect his hands while he dragged the thing off his boot. He hastily dumped out the squirrels and rabbits he was carrying home, and began to puzzle out the best method of folding the bag for purposes of grasping the creature.

  One of the squirrels had fallen near the boot, and with a movement almost too fast to be seen the teeth released the bootheel and snapped into the squirrel. Then the creature became as still as before. Ossie put on his boot, shoved his game into the bag, and then, moved by impulse, took a stick and lifted the pup, squirrel and all, and dumped it into the bag. If it turned mean, it could easily be clubbed to death through the bag, and if it remained inert, he could study it at his leisure at home. He walked all night, and it is probably as well that he did so, since at sunset the adult vampires must have awakened and discovered their dead children.

  There was a cage at the cabin, used from time to time to confine captured raccoons, and Ossie dumped the entire contents of his bag into it and hastily closed and fastened the door. His captive had transferred its bite to one of the rabbits. Two of the squirrels were on
ly bones. From the time of weaning vampires can digest meat, and indeed it constitutes the major part of their diet until adolescence, after which they must subsist entirely on blood, although it need not be human blood at every feeding.

  That cage was Clifford M.'s home for a number of years. There is extant a clipping from the weekly paper then published at the county seat, bearing a date of full five years after Dulcie first mentioned "Ossie's monkey." This newspaper story is headed, "A strange animal at the Fimber farm," and it describes Ossie's captive as "evidently some sort of ape or monkey." It is apparent from this report that Clifford M. was at that time beginning to lose his hairy coat, and that the intimidating baby teeth were being replaced by adult teeth, which are indistinguishable from human dentition to the casual eye. We may conclude from this that he was probably around fifteen years old, and his size at the time, as described in the newspaper ("about as large as a five-year-old child"), confirms this estimate.

  Shortly after the appearance of this newspaper story, Clifford M. made his escape, after taking the life of his first human victim. Early one morning Ossie's father found the lifeless, drained body of his son lying beside the open, empty cage, and at this point we lose sight of Clifford M. for something more than seven years. It is, however, made clear by subsequent events that he was simply a wild animal during those years, ranging through the dark Appalachian forest, living on the meat of small creatures, and from time to time — there is, of course, no way to determine how often — draining a human being of the blood that was necessary for his survival.

  In 1906 a book titled The Wild Boy of Johnson County was published (New York: Thomas Collier's Sons), and in 1958 there was a second edition from the same firm, retitled Harry, an American Feral Child. This book, by the Reverend Llewellyn Crockett, is an account of the winning over to human behavior of a child who had been, as it was thought, reared either by wild animals, or altogether by himself.

  A party of hunters, camping in the woods in the autumn of 1898, captured the wild boy as he was bent over one of the sleeping men for a purpose they were unable to fathom, but that is of course plain to us. They were forced to bind him to ensure their own safety, after which they carried him to Lexington and turned him over to the authorities. The Reverend Mr. Crockett, rector of St. Mark's in that city, who had been trained as an educator before he took holy orders, saw in the beastly waif an opportunity both to do the Lord's work and to put into practice his theories of pedagogy. He had no trouble persuading the authorities to turn the boy over to him, and he took him off to the rectory.

  According to Crockett's account, the boy possessed a high native intelligence, and very quickly learned to wear clothes and to talk. Crockett named him Harry, for no reason that he left a record of. The Crocketts were childless, but it does not appear from the book that they ever felt any genuine affection for Harry, and indeed it takes very little reading between the lines to infer that despite themselves they found the boy's presence to be distasteful. From our vantage point, we can discern the reason, and praise their perception, but it is clear that they flagellated themselves for their unchristian feelings.

  The Crocketts guessed his age to be ten or eleven when they took him in, but in fact he was probably twenty-three or twenty-four, which would have made him thirty or so at the time he once more disappeared. At that time these good people believed him to be seventeen or eighteen, and the book repeatedly observes that he appeared to be even younger than that.

  But his seven years with the Crocketts did educate him very well, for the time and place. After three years of private tuition at the rectory, Father Crockett entered him at the grade school, which within a couple of months concluded that it had nothing to teach him, and passed him on to the high school, where he unquestionably would have been graduated as valedictorian — if he had not killed Mrs. Crockett and disappeared a month before graduation day. His education in manners, poise, dress, and other word- ly matters was no less successful, and it appears that everyone he met found him to be a most admirable, if not (when you came right down to it) very likable, young man. Those who knew where he had come from viewed him as a highly remarkable freak, a judgment that in fact came much closer to the truth, and was, as we shall see, how he saw himself.

  He left behind him in Lexington a brokenhearted old man and the exsanguinated corpse of a good woman who had tried to behave like a mother to him. He took with him his clothes, ninety-seven dollars stolen from the desk in the rectory study, and a conviction that he was different from everybody else in a great many ways.

  Because he did not know what he was, you see. His memories (as we know from the journal now in Dr. Burbank's possession) began in the cage at the Fimber farm, and those early memories were the merest flashes. He could not remember that he had once been as hairy as a monkey and had teeth as ugly as a shark's. He thought he was a human being, and believed he was a freak. When puberty came, and his genitals changed, he was - obviously and blatantly a freak, and his mental processes began to be those of a predator.

  But he did not reach puberty for at least another eleven years. We can be reasonably sure of this because he was graduated from Harvard in 1916, which could not have happened unless he attended classes. After puberty a vampire must lie comatose during the daylight hours, and university classes are a daytime pursuit; so it must have been at some time after June 1916 that he reached adulthood and became prey to certain imperious needs that quite obviously had no chance of fulfillment, needs that were even stronger than his periodic, altogether irresistible urge to drink human blood. After puberty he recognized himself for a monster, and that was when he undertook to create for himself a way of life that would — he hoped — make it possible to satisfy his needs.

  We know nothing of his activities during the five years that followed his flight from Lexington, except that they somehow brought him some money. Our next actual sight of him is in 1910, when he registered as a freshman at Corinthia College, a small sectarian institution in Fowler, Illinois. He registered as Clifford M., which was, as far as we know, his first use of the name he was to use thenceforth. He provided spurious information about his previous life and education, but he had ready cash for the tuition fees, something very rare in the experience of the bursar of Corinthia College, and his credentials were unexamined.

  It is apparent that Corinthia was only a means to an end; he left after two years, carrying with him glowing letters of recommendation and a commendable record of his studies; and with these he achieved matriculation at Harvard. He entered as a freshman, remained for the usual four years, and was graduated, cum laude, in 1916.

  There is one curious circumstance in his Harvard years: his arrival had been preceded by letters to the ladies of Boston from Mrs. Gaines Sturdevant of Richmond, a lady of the very highest connections, and Clifford M. found in his mailbox as many invitations to the social events of the fall and winter as any freshman at Harvard. We shall never know how he prevailed upon Mrs. Sturdevant to write these letters —or even how he met her— but two of these letters have been discovered. The parts of them that are of interest here are identical, and give a highly romantic, and of course wholly fictitious, account of Clifford M.'s background and family. It appears that these letters were plausible enough to persuade the mothers of Boston debutantes that Clifford M. would be a good catch. Obviously, he never pursued such opportunities.

  We must at this point pause to consider just what it was that he was up to. Why Harvard? What was the purpose of the devious entry into Society7 What plans had he laid?

  Reflection upon these questions, in the light of present knowledge of his subsequent actions, leads to the conclusion that he was concerned solely with making acquaintances who could further his plan to acquire a fortune. Upon graduation he immediately found employment in a prestigious Wall Street brokerage house, a post he could never have achieved without "connections," and he was immediately taken under the wing of the senior partner, who was pleased to teach him th
e tricks of the trade. He remained with the firm for two years, and then suddenly resigned, at that time he began to acquire a reputation in New York as an eccentric. We may assume that he became an adult about then, and was thenceforth comatose during the daylight hours. Thereafter his Wall Street career was managed solely by correspondence, undoubtedly because he was always unconscious during the hours the stock exchange was open.

  He achieved a brilliant success, however, and by 1922 he had amassed a truly large fortune by speculation. He then retired, and removed himself to an ugly large house in the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania, which he purchased from the estate of a deceased coal baron. At this time he began the quest that was to occupy him for the next sixty years.

  It is clear that at some point between the Harvard years and his retirement from business he began to suspect his true nature. Records in the files of the Saltzman bookstore in Greenwich Village, very kindly made accessible by Mr. David Saltzman, show that Mr. Saltzman's father, the then proprietor, corresponded regularly with Clifford M., and that Clifford M. commissioned the elder Mr. Saltzman to scour the book world for volumes relating to vampirism, lycanthropy, and kindred occult matters. Through study of these books Clifford M. was able to arrive at an explanation of his strange impulses and curious history, and at an acceptance of the fact that he was not a human being, but another kind of creature — very probably a vampire.