by Michael Shea
The Color Out of Time
Michael Shea
Co 1984
(V.3.0)
***
I
All the dire occurrences which I now set myself to report had for their setting a lake in the New England region—a dam-created lake which I shall not name. Let it—in the full force of that archaic formula against evil— remain nameless.
It was, as a setting, indescribably discordant with the horrors it gave place to. Photographs of it in Park Department brochures did not lie: its waters were a sun-bright blue, it was long and timber-shored, its summers were warm, fragrant and clear. A single two-lane highway approached it, but was tangent to it only at the boating beach, retiring politely thereafter to leave the lake its primitive, chill calm at night. The dam, which struck one as incongruously small to be responsible for so large a body of water, had no more than a gravel service road leading to it. The same pair of rangers who tended the vacation facilities doubled as maintenance men for the dam, so slight was the management that it required. Since it was set in the narrow mouth of the valley the lake occupied, it was visible from very few points along the much-bayed shoreline. In sum, the lake’s feel of primordial isolation was all but unaffected by these works of human engineering.
But if its gorgeous seclusion unsuited it as a stage for horrors, so much the more did its congeniality. In July, the month of our coming there, people either brightly clothed or brightly skinned with sunburn jostled on the beach. The white puzzle of docking-floats was crowded with craft, and in the camping areas past either end of the beach, glossy vans and motor homes, and futuristic tents of garish nylon, wedged intimately among the ancient, scaly trees. The air was filled with radio music, the snore of outboards, the shrieks and squeals of children in the float-marked swimming zones. Such sounds are not a proper prelude to the mindless screams, the crescendo of agony, that we were to hear raised up from those same sunny waters at the end.
This is not to say that I and my friend, Dr. Carlsberg, reveled in this traffic and hubbub. The place was congenial to the majority mind, not to ours. We would have much preferred mooring at some secluded point along the nearly twenty miles of lakeshore. The stars in their plenteous glory do not require the improvement of popular radio stations and their incessant, perky advertisements. Nor does the water’s liquid calm, savored at dusk, require as an additive the squalling of some hypervocal child wronged by its siblings. Park regulations however, required that all craft be moored within the docking compound between dark and dawn.
It was, in fact, just as we were debating slipping the tether of this vexing rule—after five nights of radios and raucous, beery card games—that we received our first hint of what was awakening in those waters. We were anchored off a wooded cove at the eastern end of the lake, catching the last of the setting sun’s rays. We had sipped bonded bourbon and conversed earnestly, and had at length agreed: we should have taken to mooring privately days ago, the rule was often breached by others, and it was, altogether, odd that we had moored amid discomfort for so long.
This brought us to a further, and more disquieting, point of agreement: our inertia seemed due to the fact that we had both been feeling a subtle diminution of energy since arriving here, an effect precisely contrary to the exhilaration such settings normally brought us.
Of course we were old. At the time I write of I was fifty-nine, and Ernst was exactly threescore and ten. But we were—I must say it for mere factual clarity—both vigorous men. We were inveterate swimmers, frequent runners, and aqualung divers too from time to time during that academicians’ blessing, the summer term. We resolved now to end our curious sloth and reassert our independence. We opened dark-beer chasers for our whisky, and pronounced this spot our berth for the night.
With new ease, with anticipatory relish for the hours of peace ahead, we watched the purplish shadows seep into the forests sloping to the shoreline. And then, when the last and most nearly horizontal rays of the sun knifed in athwart the water’s surface, we suddenly saw on the face of the lake a bizarre layer of coloration, an oily, squirming stratum of rainbow which covered the water, and which somehow the incidence of the sun’s light had enkindled, or revealed.
It was a meld of colors utterly alien to the experience of either of us—and to that of all sane men, we wholeheartedly believed. For the phenomenon carried that special quantum of shock that attaches to confrontations with the completely unknown. And as alien as the color itself was the manner in which its light passed through the sun’s—slightly distorted in the process, perhaps, but unobscured, eerily distinct within the normal light of sunset. This vision, granted us for some ten or fifteen seconds, left us speechless for many minutes afterwards, periodically searching one another’s eyes with incredulous looks. Then, when we began to discuss our impressions, we found speech as powerless to explain as silence had been. Anthropologists may be excused from knowing much of optics, or of the possible refractive properties of gaseous exhalations from the surfaces of montane lakes. The raw impact of the apparition’s utter uniqueness, this alone kept us puzzling long after we confessed our inability to account for it. But even the trained mind quickly tires of grappling with phenomena for which it has no approach, no vocabulary of explanation. By the time full dark was on us we threw up our hands. Ernst poured us more bourbon.
“Let’s be content with a mystical appreciation, Gerald.” He was smiling. “Let’s assume the lake spirit has simply made manifest its mana, a reward of Vision granted two old shamans who have left the herd seeking—” “Ernst!” I broke in heedlessly and stood up from my chair. “Mask the lantern. Look at the water near the shore. And the trees there. Look to one side of them. Get their images in your peripheral vision.”
We stood in the stern, the darkened lantern at our backs. We looked for a long time. I had not been mistaken. So elusive was the impression, it was as if that unearthly color had “stained,” ever so faintly, our very eyes. For the color was still there, a delicate, misted corona round the nervous rim of the lakewater, and around the trees that stood nearest that rim. Under the direct gaze it melted off instantly, but it limned weirdly all things registered in vision’s periphery. It was far dimmer than the first apparition, but undeniably the same.
“It’s so damned ambiguous!” Ernst said out of the long silence. “Like the afterecho of sharp sound in the ear. It could almost be a visual echo from that first shock of color.”
“But it is there!”
“Yes. Yes it is. It’s there, damn me if it isn’t! And there’s something more about it, something else ..
This struck so squarely on my thought that I voiced it in spite of myself: “Yes. It has a feel about it—a feel of evil.”
II
Two metaphysical old fools? We were, fortunately, old enough to prefer our own folly to the “sanity” of anyone else. We agreed, after further exhumations and comparisons of our private impressions, that the slight loss of energy we had felt surely had the lakewater as its specific cause. We had noted a very faint effervescence in the water’s taste, and now agreed that on a virtually subliminal level—so ephemeral was the sensation—we had found a sickishness, an unpleasantness in this flavor. Furthermore the color, which we did not cease to see throughout that night, almost certainly emanated from, and thus inhered in, the lakewater. The tinge upon the trees would thus be the result of their suffusion with that water.
And so on the sixth day we did not swim, meaning to test the effect of this on our strength. Instead, we returned our boat to its mooring in the compound, and set off on a hike around the lakeshore.
The path was very narrow and ill-kept, and constituted a walk of over twenty-seven miles, so widely and often crazily did it v
eer from the lake’s lesser circumference. In fact it was seldom we had a clear sight of the water. Our excursion could not be called a lakeside jaunt. It was, far more, a deep plunge into very ancient forest.
That hike was to us a revelation as unsettling as that of the previous evening, though more gradual, cumulative, in its impact. If we had thought by our walk to remove ourselves from a certain ill essence in the lake, it was our ironic fate to sink even more intimately into it with every stride we took amid those massive trees.
I am aware, of course, that any deep-woods environment exerts a slightly hallucinatory influence on people used to open spaces. This is true to a degree that persons familiar primarily with the city or open country cannot easily appreciate. The often sinister religious motifs associated with deep-woods cultures— the druidic, most conspicuously— have their roots in an almost mystical impression, immemorially engendered by the forest in human consciousness. For such places mock man’s position in Time. Their centuried shadows murmur to him that he will be mulch before they have significantly aged at all—tell him he is as brief and negligible as their own expendable multitudes of leaves.
But what we found ourselves entering was a very different aura, with far more of restless malice in it than is felt with such archetypic awe. The dense-growing trees were exceedingly fat and twisted of trunk and branch. They grew unusually large, and their bark presented to the eye a scaly glossiness that was disturbingly vivid. A tremendous vitality, and a profound quality of disease, pervaded the gloomy vegetation in precisely equal degree.
Meanwhile the thickness of the insect life, on the ground and in the air, roused similar emotions. Everything—wasp, fly, beetle— seemed very large for its kind, and the ants were most remarkable. The little brutes grew more than two inches long. They made frequent crossings of our trail, swarming so numerously that we could not avoid crushing them, for indeed they were quite sluggish for ants, and uncertain of movement. There was something infinitely depressing and disturbing about the exaggerated little reek of formic acid these crushings released. Big, fat bluebottle flies were almost as abundant as ants. They moved bumblingly through the humid gloom, often colliding with our sweating cheeks out of an odd torpidity or ineptitude. They were easy to swat in midair with a sweep of the palm.
For quite a few miles we said little. We were not naturalists, but we had a fair grasp of the region’s ecological norms. And this incessant violation of those norms, in every minor life form, occurring as it did in the stifling, shifting, almost submarine dimness of the forest, generated in both of us a formless anxiety that made it difficult to speak.
But at last Ernst stopped. Explosively, as one who throws off suffocation, he cried:
“Incredible! Has no one before us noticed this? We aren’t dreaming! It’s a distinct phenomenon, a localized supernormal luxuriance … a hypervitalism …” He ended so sputter-ingly we both had to smile, but I was quick to nod.
“Yes. But remember no one hikes here. Who have we heard mention it at the beach? The rangers obviously don’t maintain the path much. They may be stupid besides, or so long accustomed to the place they no longer observe it.”
It was certainly true that the vacationers all seemed to regard the forest strictly as scenery, a background for properly picturesque boating. Like many Americans they were very much bound to their shiny, motorized toys, technology’s treats. If the lakeshore had offered more convenient picnicking spots, perhaps people would have become more intimate with the forest. But the valley’s slopes met the water rather steeply and the perimeter, except for the “made” beach of the compound and a few treeless outcrops of rock, did not beckon the boater ashore. Meanwhile, though a dense barrier of tall, venerable trees had been left to surround the parking lot and the beach, and to fill the camping areas, these stands were thinned, and cleared of undergrowth, and human feet, with their usual erosive power, had trampled them bare of any life forms less massive and durable than the big trees themselves.
Ernst and I walked on, mutely taking in the fervid, tainted vigor with which the treetrunks seemed literally to bulge and contort, and the gross dungbeetles to swell and stagger, as if drunk with it. As we went, we kept starting to speak and giving it up. I felt a black sadness begin to chill my heart. Soon it seemed that in soul as in body I struggled through an airless place, where fear in vague forms tugged at me to stay my passage, to sap me of my forward momentum, my very will to move. At last I burst out: “It is precisely that feeling of the water, Ernst! But stronger! That same heaviness, and sadness, and sense of threat….”
“Yes. And look down there, Gerald.”
It was well past midday, and we had for some minutes been descending into the relatively narrow gorge which terminated at the dam. Ernst stood before me on the path, and he pointed below where it swung down among trees in a deeper shadow than we had yet encountered. And perhaps when I have said that those gloom-embedded trunks presented outlines that seemed to smolder faintly with an unreal coloration, I will need to add no further description of that uncanny luminescence. We were but halfway down into the gorge, and still several hundred feet above the lake, but in the combined shadow of the mountain and the forest canopy itself we saw a corruscation as unmistakable as that the shoreline trees had presented to us in the dark of night.
When we proceeded, our movement must have been a very pantomime of hesitant amazement, a slinking, peering progress like that of two old cats entering an unknown room. Our eyes probed with the squeamishness of exploring fingers that expect the touch of some nameless filth. Tersely, we traded hushed observations as we went.
Nearness to any tree stripped it of coloration, while everything at more than a few yards’ distance was feverish with it. But our sensation was not that the color fled our approach, for the subtle woe, the faint, icy weakness in the heart, which seemed somehow part of the color—these feelings seemed to press in on us from without. They were intricate emotions murmured by thought’s voice in the mind’s sanctum, they were utterly personal to us, and yet they came from without. And so we moved, and that delirious radiance continued to retreat from our eyes, even while it invaded the private places of our souls.
At length we came down to a trestle bridge, from which we could look up the neck of the lake that it crossed, and see the dam an eighth-mile distant through the gorge. Chain-link fence was affixed to the trestles at water level, so the lake-neck was empty of boats, though there were several not too distant out on the lake behind us. We breathed the open air gratefully, and viewed the woods where they crowded down at either end of the bridge.
It began to be paradoxically reassuring, this sudden enlargement of last night’s somehow menacing phenomenon. We had discovered a bona fide environmental event, producing biological and psychochemical aberrations. A new detachment of attitude was possible. We discussed excitedly what might be the hydrodynamics of a lake’s diffusion through the circumjacent ecology. We traded speculations, even proposed scholarly reports in one journal or another, until our ingenuity ran out.
Then, quite abruptly, the exhilaration of our spurious objectivity began to desert us. For now, notwithstanding our elaborate hypotheses of psychochemical effects, which should have neutralized any strange emotion’s power to sway me, I began to sense something which I can only describe as profoundly frightening. I said nothing of it to Ernst—perhaps he felt and did the same. But as I looked at the dozen miles of forest we had yet to cross, and looked at the lake, which the boats had deserted even as we had talked, and looked at the shadowed water, whose arrhythmic lurch and shiver seemed a kind of unhuman parody of our speech—as my eyes thus sought some visible cause, and failed to find it, my breath got shallower and shallower with the subtle, absolute conviction that Ernst and I were not alone in this place.
And when, out of the growing, intolerable silence, I all but shouted: “Let’s go on!” Ernst did not seem to find it strange, and set out with a nervous abruptness like my own. Grimly we plunged back into
the trail, climbing, now, the gorge’s other flank. Instantly, all was toil and anxiety again. We struggled through the eerie oppression for hours that had no feature save the steady diminishing of such daylight as leaked down to us.
Near sunset we rested at a bare knolltop.
Camp was four miles on, and delay would benight us on the trail. But we did not feel we could go without rest and fresh air any longer. There was a huge, lone oak on the knoll, and we sat amid its roots, leaned our backs against its trunk, and watched where the red-gold sunlight still lay like velvet on the slopes. Ernst was still catching his breath when he spoke two words with bitter emphasis: “Senile despair!”
I understood at once, and answered him: “Such a bleakness of spirit! Yes! But don’t you feel how it’s feebler here in the clear air? It’s from outside.”
“But the thoughts are my own! I was remembering every failure—I was remembering Gudrun’s last month in the hospital. I was discovering in myself—”
“Ernst. It was the same for me. But we’re only a day older than yesterday! This sudden despair and decrepitude, it’s simply not natural, not really ours—”
It had been said. We looked silently at each other while this reverberated in our thoughts. Very bleakly, Ernst smiled.
“Thank you,” he said. “I actually preferred accepting the delusion, to acknowledging what I felt down at the subtlest level of intuition. But of course, even this inmost intuition might be chemically caused, an effect of this incredible… miasma.”
“Of course!” I agreed eagerly, but both of us balked at following this thought.
Presently Ernst said: “You know, on the bridge I was thinking of those cities south of the mountains, the ones this lake supplies, and in fact where most of our fellow vacationers come—”
At that moment a very large bat surged up between me and the sky and dove, in a wobbly swoop, for my face.
