Tales from Kalgachia - 32
To the duty psychiatrist at his local DHPW clinic, Resten Olathatt was a "notable example of cumulative intergenerational iodine deficiency comorbid with parental mixing of incompatible Nezeni genotypes occasioning an insalutary effect upon neural development from the embryonic stage." To the rest of his fellow parishfolk, he was the village idiot.
The village in question, Mothpines, was located almost exactly midway between the provincial capital cities of Abrek and Katarsis, both some 150 kilometres distant. Unfortunately Mothpines had never benefitted from the road and rail links between its larger neighbours, which threaded through the high mountains a tedious eighty kilometres to the south instead of taking the more direct route nearer to the national frontier - this being, like most aspects of Kalgachi civil engineering, a national defence consideration. Mothpines itself was witness to another such consideration in the form of an immense belt of coniferous forest, part of the war refuge and timber reserve which cushioned the entire Kalgachi frontier and aside from a few agricultural smallholdings, enveloped the village so tightly that it could barely be seen from the air. Some four decades after they were planted, the trees were steadily approaching maturity - having been set into the thin soil around the same time Mothpines was founded, they had inspired the village's name along with the seasonal and somewhat pestilent presence of little brown moths which filled the air in great clouds during the dawn and dusk hours.
So it was that this modest timber outpost, easily forgettable from the moment of its establishment, only found greater seclusion in subsequent years as a sea of coniferous forest slowly towered up around it. Somewhat inevitably, jokes about the limited gene pool of the area's inhabitants became fashionable in the marginally more urbane environs of Fort Candycane, the nearest large town where the gravelly road from Mothpines was linked to the metalled glory of the Abrek-Katarsis highway. Indeed the sight of Resten Olathatt by any passing metropolitan, assailing anyone foolish enough to ask him directions with a cryptic torrent of half-Laqi provincial dialect rendered into hopeless gibberish by a speech impediment, might have affirmed their sneering prejudices for life.
Within the village however, Resten's presence was tolerated. His father, a small-time charcoal maker of substantial brawn, had deterred the worst of his son's bullies during childhood and although he had greyed and slowed as the years advanced, he was on good terms with the parish Proctor who saw that no great harm came to the young man shuffling lopsidedly, aimlessly, around the village's tracks of muddy gravel. Resten even had a job cleaning the village's underground church after the weekly Byeday service, earning him the moniker of 'my little zombot' from the church's elderly lady warden in reference to the undead automatons of the Minarborian era. Fortunately his limited wits caused him to interpret the ribald jokes of certain parishfolk about 'polishing the Credent's knob' as nothing more than honest compliments upon his care of the church's gilded liturgical ornaments.
The remainder of Resten's week was generally spent at leisure - after several attempts, his father was beginning to realise that Resten would never have the ability to tend a smouldering charcoal kiln overnight without supervision. The most recent such experiment had resulted in the village partisans being called out to extinguish a 25-hectare wildfire, an event which cost the family half a year's income in punitive fines to the parish. Although his parents did their best to conceal their seething despair at his bungling, Resten had picked up on the tension and began to spend increasing amounts of time in evasive solitude - both from the family home and from the middle of the village, where the usual gossips were busy condemning him as an idle-minded arsonist. Lately he had only ventured into Mothpines' central cluster of cottages for his weekly church cleaning visit, where even the Credent had taken the precaution of snuffing out the candles and locking away the matches before the peculiar young man was left to his work. Informed by the many little scandals and misunderstandings which had marked his previous interactions with village life, Resten knew to make himself invisible for a few months after each outrage until the gossip moved on.
His preferred escape was, of course, the young but immense tracts of pine forest surrounding the village. Here one could quite easily disappear for as as long as one liked. Resten was now spending most of his day shuffling up and down these dark verdant slopes, only returning home to eat and sleep - and these only at the insistence of his mother, a fast-ageing woman of portly stature and dubious health who worried aloud what might become of her afflicted son if he stayed out too long. It had been many years since a Tee-al was sighted in the area - these days they tended to be confined to the southern half of the country - but in the forest's lonely glades it only took a brush with a dreadnettle, or a step past the localised-motion-stimulated photosensors of a 'sharpshooter' primrose, to leave a solitary wanderer mortally injured with no hope of help. The same collision of rogue Deep Singer genes which had given Resten a host of physical and mental deformities, however, had also given him a good forest sense - a quick eye and a light foot in this half-lit world of black and green. Indeed one of his favourite pastimes was to throw a rock at a patch of sharpshooter primroses from a suitable point of cover, emitting a dribbling giggle of amusement at the resulting eruption of explosively-discharged seed pods as the plants' recoiling forms provoked each other unto a full firefight. To Resten's eternal dismay, the plants never seemed to have enough 'ammunition' to sustain the spectacle for long and it took several weeks for them to grow new 'bullets'. Still, there were plenty of other ways to amuse onesself in this great green playground.
It was as Resten moved along the bottom of a ravine, darkened by the cover of trees at the top, that he heard a rustling among the fallen pine needles which was not his own. It was in front of him, out of sight beyond a convex bend in the rock face. He stopped and listened - the rustling was accompanied by the occasional snap of a fallen twig and, to his slight alarm, a heavy snuffling sound. A large animal of some kind. Cautiously Resten moved forward to identify the thing, carefully avoiding twigs and loose rocks. The forest was occasionally visited by Mishalanski bears and Resten, initially fearing that it was, found himself wishing that it was when he beheld what was actually there.
Before Resten's eyes, browsing the ground in oblivious contentment, was a juvenile Tee-al. From where, he could only guess.
He might have escaped the creature at that moment, if he had quietly backed away around the bend. But as it was, the surprise of stumbling upon such a great beast at such close range caused him to emit an involuntary gasp of shock, which seized the animal's great rounded ears and within half a second its great furry visage was directed right at him. Its eyes were shining, almost glowing with a translucent red, its thick bristly whiskers set violently acquiver by a twitching nose. For a moment neither Resten nor the Tee-al made any further move, until the former overcame his nervous paralysis and broke into a run. As the still forest air turned into a raging wind past Resten's ears, he heard the beast thundering into pursuit behind him.
For a moment it seemed as if an improbable miracle was occurring, that Resten's frantic ducking and jumping through low branches and fallen trunks was somehow getting the better of the creature. It was perhaps an over-indulgence in the notion which distracted Resten enough to ignore the root of a half-fallen tree in his path - it caught the rising toe of his boot and wrenched his leg from under him, sending him crashing to the ground in a heap. A second, maybe two seconds before the Tee-al would close the distance and rip him to pieces.
But the Tee-al was not ripping Resten to pieces. It was not touching him at all.
Having involuntarily closed his eyes, Resten opened them again to reveal the Tee-al's wobbling edifice of coarse fur, looking at him from a distance of some five metres. Then it thundered around in a tight circle, chasing its spiked tail in apparent excitement before stopping to look at Resten again. Without warning it charged at him, once again causing him to screw his eyes shut and emit a strangulated scream - but instead of teeth or claws, Resten felt the creature's slimy snout slide under him and hurl him airborne, before the sideways impact of the ground sent him rolling over all manner of sharp rocks, twigs, and pine needles. When he came to rest, cut and bruised, the Tee-al was watching him again. This time Resten scrambled to his feet and began to stumble away. The Tee-al followed at his speed, this time without any apparent effort to close their relative distance.
Resten was, at that moment, the most frightened he had ever been. Even more frightened than the time in his early adolescence, when two of the village bullies had held him down in a muddy chicken coop and urinated on him. How he wished he could swap this Tee-al for those bullies now. The beast seemed to be deliberately toying with him. His attempts to break into a run would cause the Tee-al to match his speed - no faster - so he gave up and slowed to a shuffle, silently hoping that he could get back to the village and summon help before the animal decided to stop playing and devour him. He decided against stopping to catch his breath, lest the Tee-al start throwing him around again.
As he rustled along, his great furry pursuer was zig-zagging in his wake. Even to Resten's simple perception, it was obviously consumed by youthful amusement like some overgrown kitten. But still it refrained from pouncing. Resten tried to reason with it:
"Ey! Tee-al!" Came his shaky, adenoidal lisp. "Go way! Shoo!" He waved his hands but this appeared to excite the creature more - now it surged ahead and ran around Resten in circles, trailing flying rocks and broken tree branches in its wake. After a while it resumed its station behind him, feinting the occasional attack lunge to make him run faster.
Not a moment too soon, the wispy column of smoke from his father's charcoal kiln came into sight through the pines. His father was there too, looking up from the smouldering pile to see Resten charging out of the treeline at a speed the old man had never seen.
"Pabba!" came Resten's panicked scream. "Tee-al! Tee-al!!"
"Eh?" said his father, scanning the treeline beyond. "What you on about, boy? We don't get Tee-als around here... and what in the Tumultuous Wastes have you done to your face? Look at you..."
"But-!" Resten spun around to indicate the Tee-al, but it was no longer in sight. It had stopped somewhere within the trees. "But Pabba," he began to whimper. "Tee-al's in there. Tee-al chased me. Pabba we need get way!"
"Oh don't be daft," said his father. "It was probably just a bear. You remember what I said, right? They run off if you throw rocks at them."
"What's all this fussing about Tee-als?" came an elderly screech from the cottage at the far edge of the clearing. The dumpy personage of Resten's mother was marching across the coarse grass, shaking her head. "Shrub almighty, Resten. Look at the state of you! I'll be up all night mending that shirt! You've torn it right down to the-"
Her words were drowned out by the sound of ear-splitting slaps, reminiscent of a giant pigeon taking to flight. The actual creature taking flight was the Tee-al, soaring up above the trees and folding its batlike wings into a diving position.
"Oh Gahdn'," croaked Restern's father, his face turning white as he whirled around to face his wife and son. "Get inside! Quick! I'll-"
It was too late. The sight of Resten's mother, plump yet visibly ailing, was the stuff of predatorial dreams and the Tee-al could contain itself no longer. Hers was the first neck severed from its shoulders by half-metre-long rodent teeth, her last thought being that if she'd only signed the euthanasia papers proffered by her doctor instead of berating him in a fit of motherly morality, her halfwit boy would not have lived to lead a damned Tee-al, of all things, onto her doorstep. The sight of her frenzied dismemberment was mercifully kept from the eyes of Resten and his father who at that moment were diving into their cottage's underground cellar. Somewhere down the track, the commotion had been noticed and the village's hand-cranked civil defence siren was slowly wailing into life, imploring the local parishfolk to find shelter. In the church vestry a telephone call was being placed to the KDF's Whirdlebirb squadron at Fort Candycane but its response time, in an area of sparse Tee-al activity, was unlikely to match the better-practised units of Lithead and Lepidopterum. The people of Mothpines cowered in their basements, wondering would be left of the village by the time the helicopters finally arrived to bring an end to the Tee-al's rampage with a hypersonic missile.
For the Tee-al, things were looking good. Getting horribly lost from its pack had been frightening at first, but it had remembered the stimulating game its mother had taught it to play, where one doesn't attack a lone human on sight but follows it around instead, until it leads to more humans. More humans meant more dinners, and this place had more than dinners - there were all kinds of artificial structures to sharpen one's teeth on and line a burrow with - all that was needed was a passing female and life would be totally made.
Having swallowed half of Resten's mother and pouched the rest for later, the Tee-al was busy demolishing the roof timbers of the family cottage when the sound of approaching rotorcraft caused it to stop. Something about the whirdling of those strange birbs triggered an instinct, an unusually powerful sense of foreboding. A good time, the Tee-al decided, to take a little break and scuttle back to the safety of the forest.
