The Tehama and others

by Bob Leman

  “What the hell do you suppose he’s up to?” Gilson said. He was still speaking when the window ceased to exist.

  House and lawn and white-suited declaimer vanished. Gilson caught a swift glimpse of trees across the clearing, hidden until now by the window, and of a broad pit between him and the trees. Then he was knocked off his feet by a blast of wind, and the air was full of dust and flying trash and the wind’s howl. The wind stopped, as suddenly as it had come, and there was a patter of falling small objects that had momentarily been wind-borne. The site of the house was entirely obscured by an eddying cloud of dust.

  The dust settled slowly. Where the window had been there was a great hole in the ground, a perfectly square hole a hundred feet across and perhaps ten feet deep, its bottom as flat as a table. Gilson’s glimpse of it before the wind had rushed in to fill the vacuum had shown the sides to be as smooth and straight as if sliced through cheese with a sharp knife; but now small-landslides were occurring all around the perimeter, as topsoil and gravel caved and slid to the bottom, and the edges were becoming ragged and irregular.

  Gilson and Krantz slowly rose to their feet. “And that seems to be that,” Gilson said. “It was here and now it’s gone. But where’s the prefab? Where’s Culvergast?”

  “God knows,” Krantz said. He was not being irreverent. “But I think he’s gone for good. And at least he’s not where those things are.”

  “What are they, do you think?”

  “As you said, certainly not human. Less human than a spider or an oyster. But, Gilson, the way they look and dress, that house—”

  “If there’s an infinite number of possible worlds, then every possible sort of world will exist.” Krantz looked doubtful. “Yes, well, perhaps. We don’t know anything, do we?” He was silent for a moment. “Those things were pretty frightening, Gilson. It didn’t take even a fraction of a second for her to react to Reeves. She knew instantly that he was alien, and she moved instantly to destroy him. And that’s a baby one. I think maybe we can feel safer with the window gone.”

  “Amen to that. What do you think happened to it?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? They know how to use the energies Culvergast was blundering around with. The book—it has to be a book of spells. They must have a science of it—tried-and-true stuff, part of their received wisdom. That thing used the book like a routine everyday tool.

  After it got over the excitement of its big feed, it didn’t need more than twenty minutes to figure out how Reeves got there, and what to do about it. It just got its book of spells, picked the one it needed (I’d like to see the index of that book) and said the words. Poof! Window gone and Culvergast stranded, God knows where.”

  “It’s possible, I guess. Hell, maybe even likely. You’re right, we don’t really know a thing about all this.”

  Krantz suddenly looked frightened. “Gilson, what if—look. If it was that easy for him to cancel out the window, if he has that kind of control of telekinetic power, what’s to prevent him from getting a window on us? Maybe they’re watching us now, the way we were watching them. They know we’re here, now. What kind of ideas might they get? Maybe they need meat. Maybe they—my God.”

  “No,” Gilson said. “Impossible. It was pure, blind chance that located the window in that world. Culvergast had no more idea what he was doing than a chimp at a computer console does. If the Possible-Worlds Theory is the explanation of this thing, then the world he hit is one of an infinite number. Even if the things over there do know how to make these windows, the odds are infinite against their finding us. That is to say, it’s impossible.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Krantz said, gratefully. “Of course. They could try forever and never find us. Even if they wanted to.” He thought for a moment. “And I think they do want to. It was pure reflex, their destroying Reeves, as involuntary as a knee jerk, by the look of it. Now that they know we’re here, they’ll have to try to get at us; if I’ve sized them up right, it wouldn’t be possible for them to do anything else.” Gilson remembered the eyes. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” he said. “But now we both better—”

  “Dr. Krantz!” someone screamed. “Dr. Krantz!” There was absolute terror in the voice.

  The two men spun around. The soldier with the stopwatch was pointing with a trembling hand. As they looked, something white materialized in the air above the rim of the pit and sailed out and downward to land beside a similar object already lying on the ground. Another came; then another, and another. Five in all, scattered over an area perhaps a yard square.

  “It’s bones!” Krantz said. “Oh, my God, Gilson, it’s bones!” His voice shuddered on the edge of hysteria. Gilson said, “Stop it, now. Stop it! Come on!” They ran to the spot. The soldier was already there, squatting, his face made strange by nausea and terror. “That one,” he said, pointing. “That one there. That’s the one they threw to the dog. You can see the teeth marks. Oh, Jesus. It’s the one they threw to the dog.” They’ve already made a window, then, Gilson thought. They must know a lot about these matters, to have done it so quickly. And they’re watching us now. But why the bones? To warn us off? Or just a test? But if a test, then still why the bones? Why not a pebble—or an ice cube? To gauge our reactions, perhaps. To see what we’ll do.

  And what will we do? How do we protect ourselves against this? If it is in the nature of these creatures to cooperate among themselves, the fine little family will no doubt lose no time in spreading the word over their whole world, so that one of these days we’ll find that a million million of them have leaped simultaneously through such windows all over the earth, suddenly materializing like a cloud of huge, carnivorous locusts, swarming in to feed with that insensate voracity of theirs until they have left the planet a desert of bones. Is there any protection against that?

  Krantz had been thinking along the same track. He said, shakily, “We’re in a spot, Gilson, but we’ve got one little thing on our side. We know when the damn thing opens up, we’ve got it timed exactly. Washington will have to go all out, warn the whole world, do it through the U.N. or something. We know right down to the second when the window can be penetrated.

  We set up a warning system, every community on earth blows a whistle or rings a bell when it’s time. Bell rings, everybody grabs a weapon and stands ready. If the things haven’t come in five seconds, bell rings again, and everybody goes about his business until time for the next opening. It could work, Gilson, but we’ve got to work fast. In fifteen hours and, uh, a couple of minutes it’ll be open again.”

  Fifteen hours and a couple of minutes, Gilson thought, then five seconds of awful vulnerability, and then fifteen hours and twenty minutes of safety before terror arrives again.

  And so on for—how long? Presumably until the things come, which might be never (who knew how their minds worked?), or until Culvergast’s accident could be duplicated, which, again, might be never. He questioned whether human beings could exist under those conditions without going mad; it was doubtful if the psyche could cohere when its sole foreseeable future was an interminable roller coaster down into long valleys of terror and suspense and thence violently up to brief peaks of relief. Will a mind continue to function when its only alternatives are ghastly death or unbearable tension endlessly protracted? Is there any way, Gilson asked himself, that the race can live with the knowledge that it has no assured future beyond the next fifteen hours and twenty minutes?

  And then he saw, hopelessly and with despair, that it was not fifteen hours and twenty minutes, that it was not even one hour, that it was no time at all. The window was not, it seemed, intermittent. Materializing out of the air was a confusion of bones and rent clothing, a flurry of contemptuously flung garbage that clattered to the ground and lay there in an untidy heap, noisome and foreboding.

  Feesters in the Lake

  (The Magazine of Fantasy & S.F., October 1980)

  Boneless pale creatures with ragged mouths full of teeth lived at the botto
m of the lake. We called them feesters. My Uncle Caleb said we called them that because that was their name. He said they were once a family who lived in the abandoned big house beside the lake, and long ago something very strange happened to them, so that now they could live only down there in the darkness, in the cold mud.

  Sometimes at night they would come in close to the shore, he said, and rise to the surface and cry. They cried like lost little children who have given up hope, a sound that was infinitely sad and desolate, a piteous sobbing that awakened in the hearts of unwary womenfolk a powerful desire to rescue and comfort. Those who succumbed to the desire were not heard of again. So Uncle Caleb told me when I was eleven.

  I half believed him. Telling stories was one of his specialties. In those days I spent my summers in Sturkeyville with my grandparents, and all summer long I was in Uncle Caleb's company as much as he would allow. There were a good many reasons for that, and the most important one was my fear that I was going to miss a story if I strayed from his side. I was always glad I did not miss the one about the feesters.

  Uncle Caleb had heard it, he told me, from his father, my Grandpa Scoggins, whose father had actually known Captain Feester and indeed had been his lawyer. The story went like this: Elihu Feester was a ship's master sailing out of Boston in the middle years of the nineteenth century. On one of his voyages, blown off course in the South Pacific, he made a landfall at a populated island that did not appear on the charts, and he and his crew were forced to spend some time there while they repaired their storm-damaged ship. There was apparently a quarrel of some sort with the natives, and the Americans fled the island, leaving behind a number of dead, both crewmen and natives.

  They took with them, however, their doom: a germ or a parasite or perhaps a curse. Before they had completed their trading along the China Coast, Feester found it necessary to execute several of the crew. (This was not reported until much later, by the captain of another China trader.) No one knows what happened during the return voyage. The ship burned to the waterline a few miles outside Boston harbor on June 16, 1851, and only Captain Feester came ashore.

  There was a great scandal, and a Board of Inquiry was called. Feester's story never varied: they were hardly out of the China Seas, he said, when the men began to fall sick, and one by one they died. The last leg of the voyage was accomplished with only himself, the second mate, and one able-bodied seaman left alive, and both of these had succumbed during the last days. He had no idea why he should have been spared. He had burned the ship because he was the only one left to do it, and most certainly his vessel had by then become a pest ship and might have infected the whole of Massachusetts. The bodies of the mate and the A.B. were still aboard at the time of the burning. He had nothing to add.

  His story was highly circumstantial, a detailed account of high fevers and delirium, of black vomit and dreadful pain, of sores and pustules. He produced the ship's log in evidence. Nonetheless, he was not wholly believed. But because he had been halfowner of the ship, a vocal minority held that his arson had in fact been a praiseworthy and sacrificial act, and in the end he was absolved. It was clear that he would never be given command of another vessel, but that fact did not appear to cause him any concern, and indeed he was heard to say that once he was free to do so, he intended to go where he would never have to look at the sea again. He left Boston the day the board cleared him, and he had been gone for more than a year when the trader captain brought home his account of the killings Feester had committed off China. They talked of re-convening the board, but no one had any idea where Feester might be found.

  He was, as it happened, far to the west in the town of Sturkeyville, a somnolent county seat in the northern Appalachians. He was building a house there, a few miles out of town near the shore of Howard's Lake. And by the time the house was completed he had acquired a wife to live in it, the only daughter of Ezra Stallworth, the banker who had sold him the land.

  There was a crazy streak in the Stallworths, Grandpa Scoggins told Uncle Caleb, a stubborness that went far beyond anything rational, and Agatha Stallworth Feester's stubbornness had as much to do with the final horror as did the germ or parasite or curse or whatever it was that Feester carried. For a long time she persisted in a blind refusal to accept the fact that her children were what they were, and when at last there was no escape from the truth, it was too late.

  Uncle Caleb's voice deepened dramatically at that point: "It was toooo late." Sepulchral, doom-laden. He enjoyed telling the story. It was plain, even to me, that he'd have preferred to be telling it at midnight in a room with shadowy comers, to a larger audience than one young nephew. But he was a story teller, and I had asked. I was getting the full performance.

  It was impossible for me to tell whether or not he believed any of it. He put the same sincerity into all of his stories, both the demonstrably true and the obviously fictional. It is quite certain that on the day he told me about the feesters he did not yet know the whole story himself; it would be another five years before Grandpa Scoggins explained all the details to him and passed on the responsibility. What Uncle Caleb told me that day was simply the folklore of the town, and although I was too young to perceive it, I suppose there was a good bit of irony in his narration.

  I was very fond of my uncle Caleb. He was thirty years old that summer (it was 1934), a bachelor, still making his home with my grandparents in the big house a block north of the square. He practiced law with my grandfather in chambers above Staub's Hardware, across from the courthouse. My grandfather owned the building. He owned a considerable part of the town, to tell the truth.

  Uncle Caleb always had time to spare for me, and I appreciated it. I did not realize until a number of years later that he had plenty of time to spare, that he worked very little, if at all. There was no real reason why he should have, of course. He and my mother were the only children of their generation in the Scoggins family, and the deaths of several maiden aunts and great-aunts had settled upon Uncle Caleb all the money he would ever need. He was nominally a partner in the law firm, and I suppose he handled the odd conveyance or probate from time to time, but his chief occupations were those of a sportsman and man- about-town — if the term was applicable in Sturkeyville. He hunted and fished and rode his horses, and played a great deal of golf at the country club. He belonged to clubs in New York and Philadelphia, and he had kept in close touch with friends from prep school and undergraduate days. So he was often away, leaving the family to learn of his activities from the Society pages of the city papers.

  My grandfather viewed Uncle Caleb's way of life with something less than enthusiasm, but the two of them

  did not, I believe, quarrel about it. I think that that was because Grandpa more or less agreed with Grandma's frequently expressed view that Caleb would in due course settle down like everybody else and that he deserved a little amusement to take his mind off what Dorothy Hodge had done to him.

  What Dorothy Hodge had done to him was to marry Holmes Ungelbauer, his oldest and closest friend. She did not exactly jilt Uncle Caleb; there was never an engagement. There was not even an understanding, beyond the understanding the three of them had had since they were children, that some day she would marry either Holmes or Caleb. The three of them had been a close, closed triad almost from the time they were toddlers, musketeers who invariably snubbed any would-be d'Artagnan. They had their private jokes and private slang and private laughter at the efforts of their contemporaries in the town to copy their speech and dress and comportment. My mother always said that they were rotten little snobs during their teen years, but she was watching them from a six-year advantage in age, and I have a notion that in her time she may have been much the same.

  I don't think they were snobs, exactly, but it would have been odd if they had not been aware of their position in the town. The Scogginses and Ungelbauers and Hodges were the three main families in Sturkeyville. The Scogginses had land and the bank, the Ungelbauers had coal, and the Hodges
had the foundry. Scogginses and Ungelbauers and Hodges served together on the boards of the businesses and on the vestry of the church, and they tended to marry each other. But my grandparents' generation produced only four children: Holmes, Dorothy, my mother, and Uncle Caleb; and my mother astonished the town by marrying a young man from — of all places — Chicago. That left one marriageable daughter and two marriageable sons in The Families, and it was wholly taken for granted that Dorothy would marry one of the two.

  In the event, she chose Holmes. I have no idea why. Family lore has it that she made her choice by flipping a coin, because she prized both young men equally. It could be true. It was said that up to the very day she announced her choice she had never given the slightest indication that she preferred Holmes to Caleb.

  Uncle Caleb, as might have been expected (and as would have been expected of Holmes, had their positions been reversed) was wholly the good sport. He gave the couple, as a formal gift, an elaborate coffee service from Tiffany's, and, in addition, in recognition of the old comradeship, a facetiously inscribed silver cup. He stood as best man at the wedding, fulfilling his duties efficiently and with aplomb. He was the organizer of the housewarming party that welcomed the honeymooners home from Europe and into their new house on Wetzel Avenue. He became the very model of Old Family Friend.

  But he had been more grievously wounded than anyone realized, and he changed. It was not quick or obvious, but after a time it became evident that some sort of spark had been extinguished or arrested, that he had elected, for a time at least, to become more spectator than participant. Although his demeanor did not alter perceptibly, those around him were aware of a certain detachment, of an ironical and sometimes almost sour amusement at most matters that would, under other circumstances, have been the chief concerns of his life. He declined to take serious things seriously. He pretended to an unchanged attitude, but he was not serious even about the pretense, and after a time he gave up pretending and frankly spent most of his time at play.