The Tehama and others

by Bob Leman

  That turned out to be correct. When the breeze brought him a whiff of the smell, he knew with perfect cer- tainity that he had found them. What he had not expected was the kind of smell it was: an appalling, monstrous horror of a smell, a stink so abominable that for the first time in his century of life he experienced nausea. It was an odor of rotting flesh and mold and decay, of feces and ancient confined uncleanliness, the authentic odor of evil. He was stricken suddenly with apprehension and fear. Was he one of these?

  He veered from the road and followed his nose toward the source of the stink. In a little while he saw them, three pale faces floating in the shadow the stone cast in the moonlight. Apparently they recognized him for what he was; they made no move either to flee or attack.

  Now it is perhaps succumbing to the pathetic fallacy to ascribe human emotions to a vampire, but it does appear that at this point he felt a certain diffidence and shyness. This changed to fastidious dismay when he approached and saw them clearly. He was quite aware that he was seeing them with eyes conditioned by human ideas and standards, and that he should, in justice, judge them otherwise; but what he saw seemed to fit only too well with their disgusting reek. They were dirty, indescribably dirty, caked with the filth of decades, the ragged rustic clothing stiff with a thousand drooled spillages of blood, the pale skin ingrained with dirt, the hair and clothing spread with crumbs of earth and clots of mud. The thick, horny nails of their hands were long and black.

  One of the males spoke. The language was not only incomprehensible to Clifford M., it sounded like no language he had ever heard before. He said, "I don't understand. Do you speak English?"

  "Sure. 'Course. Who you? Hah come ya don't talk—?" He used another incomprehensible word.

  "1 was raised by — with — people," Clifford M. said. "I never heard it before."

  "Where the rest o' ya?"

  'There aren't any others. I'm alone. That's why I wanted to find you."

  There was a silence. The scarecrows looked at each other and then at him again. Dim minds were struggling with something new. Finally, the male said, "No others?"

  "No," Clifford M. said.

  "We don't know of no others, neither. We been a-huntin' a long time fer some. I guess we uns is all they is."

  It was a nasty blow. He realized then how much he had hoped to find a clandestine community of some sort, and... what? A female, certainly, and perhaps companionship. But with these things—?

  The male said, "You et yet?"

  "Uh, no. Not tonight."

  "Come on, then. Them two'll go north, we uns south."

  The other two were suddenly gone in a black sweep of great bat wings. Clifford M. said, "I can't do that. I don't know how. I'll wait for you here.

  I ate last night."

  They came back about an hour before dawn, replete and logy. The male said, "Hole's just big enough fer us. You got a sleep hole?"

  "Yes," Clifford M. said. "I suppose I'd better go now."

  For the first time the female spoke: "You want a piece 'fore you go?" She had hiked the dress up to her waist.

  Her it was, then: the object of his long search. He looked at the filth that covered her, and smelled the smell of her, and the lust of sixty years was suddenly gone, shriveled by a fierce disgust. "No," he said. "No. Not tonight."

  She spoke to the others in the strange language. One of them grunted, turned away, and passed through the doorless doorway into the blackness between the walls. The other took her quickly and roughly, a swift animal coupling, without speech or tenderness. They rose and disappeared through the doorway without speaking further to Clifford M. He turned and walked slowly back to his car.

  The next night he hunted on his own, and fed before midnight. He went back to the roofless house then, and found them sitting beside the wall, silent and motionless. They would not feed tonight, nor for several nights more. There was time now to talk to them, to learn about them — and about himself. He said, "What are your names?"

  There was a silence. After a time the female said, "We got names."

  "Yes," he said. "What are they?"

  Again silence. Then one of the males: "I don't just remember. No matter." And the other male: "No matter."

  Clifford M. tried again: "How old are you?"

  Silence. Then: "Old."

  "But how old?"

  "Don't rightly know."

  "What's the first thing you remember?"

  A very long silence. At last the female said, "That there baby that the telephone woke up. I had to git out."

  "They wake up sometimes," one of the males said.

  "Don't you remember anything earlier? Before there were any telephones, maybe? Do you remember any wars, say, or who was president?

  "Guess not. Don't rightly understand what you mean."

  He tried another tack: "How long have you been... sleeping here?"

  "Not long."

  "Where did you come from? Why did you leave? Why did you pick this place?"

  They could scarcely handle one question, let alone three. None of them ventured a reply. He said, "Did you ever live in a real house, instead of a hole?" He could visualize them in their daytime coma, squeezed together in a reeking lump at the end of their wet burrow under the wall.

  Surprisingly, the female said, "We had a table with a cloth on it an' shiny dishes an' real wax candles."

  "Yes," Clifford M. said. "Go on."

  But the flash of memory was only that. When the silence grew long again, he said, "Where else have you lived?"

  "There was that there cave," a male said.

  "Yuh. The cave," the female said.

  "Where was it? Can you remember?"

  There was no response. He said, "What was the town? The town closest to the cave?"

  "Caseboro," one of the males said, after the usual pause. "Maybe Caseboro."

  Clifford M. knew the town, a crossroads settlement in the forest he had ranged as a wild boy. He said, "Have you ever had children?"

  "Kilt 'em!" the female cried. "They kilt 'em!"

  "Yuh," said a male, "they kilt 'em."

  "Who? When?"

  "Well, you know. We was asleep. They pounded them young 'uns to death. We found 'em. Maybe one got away. We couldn't stay to see. We had to get us a new hole."

  It came to Clifford M. then that not only were these vile creatures his own kind, they were, quite possibly, his parents; and with the realization came a conviction that he himself must become like them, as the slow centuries came and went, and his almost-immortal body at last outlived his mind. It was his fate to become just such an unclean being, diurnally lying comatose in a muddy burrow, awakening only to prey disgustingly upon human beings, and, once fed, to spend the remaining hours of the night in mindless stolid waiting for the rising sun to drive him back to his hole. He said, "I must go now. I will be back to morrow night." The others did not reply-

  ***

  At about ten in the morning, Blanche, Hodge, and Polder arrived at the ruined house, prepared for the destruction of vampires. They had shovels and picks, poweful flashlights, eight sharp hickory stakes, hammers of various sizes, Bibles, crosses, garlic, pistols, and shotguns. This gear had been loaded into Hodge's van, which he had driven up to the very wall of the ruin. He said, “Well, where do we begin?"

  "Inside first," Blanche said.

  "Watch where you're going," Polder said. "There may be a cellar we -could fall into.”

  They went to the gap in the wall. Inside was a pit that had once been the basement of the house. Now it was almost filled with a confusion of rotting timbers from the fallen roof and floor. Through and over the timbers, brambles and great fibrous weeds grew in an insoluble tangle. The sun beat down with a white glare, and through chance interstices in the tangle of decay it was reflected by a green-scummed surface of water. Flies buzzed.

  "Good God," Polder said, "where do we begin with that?"

  "The side walls, I should think," Blanche said. "They'd have to
be where there's no chance of the sun striking them. Let's see if we can find enough solid footing in this mess to hunt for openings in the walls."

  Five minutes later, Hodge and found it: a two-foot hole hidden by carefully placed timbers and a bush. "Here it is," he called. "What now?"

  "Now we clear away enough of this stuff to give us a place to stand down there," Blanche said. They fell to work.

  After a time Hodge said, "That ought to do it. Hand me a flashlight. Let's have a look."

  He shone the light into the tunnel, and almost instantly leaped back. "There's one just inside," he said. "Only about a yard back."

  "Well, pull it out."

  "I'd just as soon not reach in there," Hodge said. "Give me the pick. I'll hook it out. The head's at this end. I can hook it under the arm. Blanche, hold the light."

  The body slipped out of the tunnel quite easily, and tumbled to the floor of the pit. "Clifford M.!" Blanche said. "It's Clifford M.!"

  "Didn't you expect it, after his note?" Hodge said. " ‘Four, not three' he wrote. I—"

  It was then that the smell from the unplugged tunnel reached them, and Hodge said no more, because he was vomiting. So was Polder. Blanche had been inured to foul odors by years of medical school and practice, but even so, she turned pale. "My God!" Hodge said, "I never smelled anything like that!"

  "Vampires," Blanche said. "Let's have them out of there and finish the job. The sooner we — my God, look at him!"

  Clifford M.'s face and hands were blistering under the sun's hot glare; blistering with extraordinary speed, almost bubbling, in fact. "Cover him up," Blanche said. "There's no need for that. We’ll be, uh, killing him in a little while. No need for that."

  Polder fetched a tarpaulin from the van and covered Clifford M. "Now," he said, "how do you suggest we get the others?"

  "We'll have to dig," Hodge said, "unless somebody wants to crawl in after them."

  "Let's dig," Polder said.

  It was four in the afternoon when they finally uncovered the three, and all the diggers had badly blistered hands. The heat was stifling, and the stench almost insupportable; the tempers of all the diggers were badly frayed. It was Polder's shovel that first broke through into the enlarged space at the end of the tunnel where the vampires lay tangled together in a muddy ball. At the bottom of the hole they were out of the sun's direct rays, but the instant they were hauled into the sunlight their skin began to bubble. Hodge said, "Frank, bring the stakes. I'll get the hammers."

  Without discussion each took a stake and a hammer. They laid the creatures on their backs, side by side, about a yard apart; Blanche went to the female, and the men to the males, and they positioned the points of the stakes. They struck in unison, as if they had rehearsed.

  The creatures squalled when the first blows were struck, and the sound was sufficiently nasty and inhuman to wipe away any misgivings or remorse the executioners might have had; they pounded fiercely and eagerly until the stakes had pierced the bodies through. Then they rose to their feet, backed off a couple of yards, and stared at what they had wrought.

  It was a marvel of swift decay, following precisely the classical progression set out in the relevant literature: the almost instantaneous bloom of the flesh into wet rottenness, followed in the space of a breath by its drying, withering, and falling off the bones in sere crumbs; and then the bones themselves disintegrating and crumbling and settling into lines of gray dust. In a very few minutes there remained only three sets of noisome rags stretched out on the weeds.

  Polder and Hodge scraped the clothing into the hole with the shovels and threw in enough dirt to cover them. Blanche returned to the pit where Clifford M. lay, and stood looking down at the tarpaulin. When Hodge and Polder joined her, she said, "Are we sure about this?"

  Hodge pulled off the tarpaulin. The sunlight, masked though it had been by the heavy canvas, had worked great harm to the face: the blistered flesh had dried and hardened, with strips of it being loosened and forced upward by fresh blistering, so that what they were looking at resembled a segment of the trunk of a shag-barked tree. Hodge said, "What do you think?"

  "I think we're sure," she said.

  When the stake entered his heart, Clifford M. emitted a screech much like the others, but the swift metamorphosis to dust did not take place. Except to the ruined face and hands, it might have been an ordinary corpse. Polder said, "Did we make a mistake? Is he — was he—?"

  "A man?" Blanche said. "No. Look what the sun did to him. The others went to dust because they were very old. But this one must have been younger. Maybe even as young as he looked. But he was one of them, all right. What puzzles me is why he put himself in this position — why he committed suicide, so to speak. And why he dressed up that way. Well, I suppose we can bury him now."

  Two days later, the man Robertson brought her the letter. It remains in her possession, and has been examined by the present writer. She has given her permission to quote from it. It is the only piece of confessional writing by a vampire that we know of, and is thus an extraordinarily valuable document. Clifford M. was, of course, far from typical, and one regrets that there is not an equivalent missive from the hand of an ordinary vampire. It would be invaluable.

  Blanche Tolliver read the letter to the two men that same evening. It is not, unfortunately, very enlightening about Clifford M.'s day-to-day (perhaps one should say "night-to-night") life, nor does it give much new information about his history — which, as I hope I have by now made clear, we have had to piece together from other sources, and which still contains a regrettable number of gaps. The value of the letter lies in its revelation of the reasoning that led Clifford M., in all probability the last vampire in the continental United States, to arrange his own death.

  "The encounter for which I had searched for so many years," he wrote, "the encounter that would, I believed, give me at last both a certain knowledge of my own nature and the companionship of others of my own kind, has turned out to be final and conclusive proof that I am quite alone, that I am sui generis, that —in my mind, at least— I am neither vampire nor man, and thus have no hope of finding, ever, peace or contentment. I was born a creature not human, and inhuman I am; but I was reared as a human, and human I am in my thoughts and attitudes. I exist neither as fish nor fowl, to use a cliche metaphor that has considerable irony in this context, and that might make me either laugh or weep, were I human enough to do either.

  "That, you see, (I am going to sound pretentious) is the tragedy of my life. I would like to be human. The picture I had of my own kind, I now perceive, was, until 1 actually met some of them, a picture of cultivated humans who possessed — as it happened — certain nocturnal proclivities, and who required a somewhat specialized diet. But I met monsters. And the fact that I found them to be monsters brought home very forcibly my utter isolation. It would be quite impossible for me to live among such creatures; I would rather live with hyenas. Yet they are my own kind, and they are what I am certain I would have become if my life were to continue for as long as theirs have.

  "So I have decided that I shall end it here and now. If you are reading this, then the deed has been done, and you have rid the world of some dangerous and disgusting vermin. I refer to my three... colleagues. I myself am not at this time dangerous, or, I trust, disgusting, but it would have come, it would have come. Some time in the future my mind would have failed, as theirs have, and my body would have gone on and on, year by year becoming more bestial and loathesome.

  "I much prefer for myself the ending I have arranged. I will put on evening clothes (a relic of my college days, when I was still able to visit the tailor for proper fitting) and go out to Dobie's Store, and — looking every inch the fine gentleman — advise those foul predators, my kinsmen, that I am throwing my lot in with theirs. They will tell me, I imagine, that there is no room for me in their hole, and I shall reply that I shall sleep in the entry tunnel for the nonce. If I have judged you and your associates correctly, Dr.
Tolliver, before sunset you will have taken care of my lodging problem for all time to come.

  "The evening clothes will perhaps puzzle you. They also puzzle me, rather. I suppose it is a final effort to show that although I am indubitably one of these creatures, yet still I am different — and better. And there is no doubt some sort of wry satisfaction, or even amusement, in knowing that I will be dressed like Count Dracula when I receive the stake. But that analysis is doubtless mistaken. I have never heard of a vampire finding amusement in anything, and a likelier explanation is that my mind is already beginning to fail.

  "I cannot be a human being. I will not live as what I am.

  "Yours, etc.

  "Clifford M."

  Instructions

  (The Magazine of Fantasy & S.F., September 1984)

  This is the only notice you will receive.

  You will follow the instructions set out below.

  1.

  Dress warmly and leave your house. Do not tell your family you are leaving. Do not talk to them at all. Do not listen if they talk to you. Dress warmly and leave your house.

  2.

  Proceed at a brisk clip to the center of town. Do not speak to anyone in the street. Do not —do not— become involved in any conversations. Step right along. Do not tarry.

  3.

  At the center of town, in the little park across from the courthouse, is a building that was not there the last time you were downtown. It will strike you as a very ugly building, and its appearance will make you feel apprehensive. Pay no attention to such feelings. Do not look right or left. Enter the building. It has only one doorway and no visible door. Go right in.