by Michael Shea
At least, a bat was what I assumed it to be in the first instants, from its size. But as it brushed near me, and then wavered back up, preparing another dive, I saw that it was a moth, its body fully as big as a rat’s, its furred wings—two handsbreadths each—winnowing the air with a slow, feeble force. It dove again, and in a blind recoil of disgust I thrust out my hand against the jawless insect. I saw its frondlike antennae nod like warplumes over my fingers.
Hurt, it wrenched itself back into the air a second time and, moving out of the tree’s shadow, caught the late sun on its warped wings. And within those wings’ brown trimming we saw a dull dazzle of impossible color—smoldering, unearthly, and now, all too well known to us. Then, as this creature faltered in the air, and we stared our horror at it, precisely then we felt the tree we leaned on writhe against our backs.
It was no mistake. A tremor, a protesting heave of the hard bark, bruised our spines, and under our thighs the huge roots twisted and squeezed the earth. We catapulted to our feet. Ernst, in a transport of revulsion, slashed with his walking-stick at the moth, breaking one of its helmet-shaped black eyes. The wretched mutant swerved and struck the earth.
We looked at the tree and saw it—unmistakably—flex itself through every branch in a single ghastly spasm of undulous power! There was no wind, nor had the earth—even slightly— shaken. The tree had simply moved, and now was still.
It had moved, and we had become the rooted ones—at least I don’t know how long we stood as though we were. When at last I found my tongue, I said, with woozy fierceness: ‘‘We’ve got to do something!” —and it rang so stupidly in that other-worldly silence that we both burst out laughing. We tried no further speech. With desperate concentration, we dove into the trail again, jog-trotting to devour the miles before full dark should sift down on us where we walked beneath the dreadful trees.
III
It seems odd to me now that what we ultimately did on regaining the beach, just after dark, was no more than to sit in the afterdeck of our boat and drink black coffee generously laced with bourbon.
Of course, whenever the limits of the Possible are violated by some unheard-of thing, the entire mind suffers much the same kind of shock as that which follows, let us say, a thirty-five mile-per-hour auto collision, a good, solid smack. The stunned man is not aware of the extra rapidity of his movements, the shrill edge to his voice, or the erratic speed of his trains of thought. Others assure him that he is in shock, and after a bit of rest, he realizes it too.
Our minds were racing, just dazed enough to believe we were taking stock of things, while in fact we were more or less stupefied. We gazed almost gratefully on the raucous Gregorius party to our left; we were positively soothed by the radios and beery conversations all around us. For a long while we simply, inertly took in these sights and sounds, these healing infusions of normality, and drank with thirst the fiery balm we had concocted.
But after a time, calm and perspective returned to us, and still we did not move. For we found that, when it came to framing the report that we had determined to make to the park rangers, we confronted a profound ambiguity in our own impressions. A chemical contamination, or something of the sort—something which induced striking abnormalities in both fauna and flora—to this we could firmly testify. But we could not leave out of account the concomitant psychic effects of this thing, and here a terrible uncertainty all but paralyzed us.
Nor had this anything to do with the uncertainty of memory. For even here, though it was effectively overlain by the active presence of our fellows, we could still feel that subtle, unmistakable chill upon the spirit. It was a mere echo to what we had experienced in the forest, but our discernment of it was hyperacute, and there was no mistake.
And thus we could, by introspection, test from moment to moment that harrowing, elusive doubt: were these woeful explorations of the grimmest of our memories, these irresistible visions of the most feared or hated images our minds contained—were these our own despair at work, or were they kindled by the probing of some insistent sentience, some Other that craved experience of our most inward agonies, and had uncanny means of access to them?
Indeed, it was no less than this we halfbelieved! It was a long while before we finally avowed it to each other in so many words, and afterwards we sat mute at the thought that we had both drifted so far off—as it were— from the mooring of sanity. The circumambient noises drifted through our silence: a rebel yell from among the trees, a child shouting its siblings to dinner, a hand of cards triumphantly thwacked down by Mrs. Chatsworth over in the Gregorius’ boat.
“Why doesn’t anyone else feel anything?’’ I muttered. “It’s faint, yes. People are unobservant, yes. But surely someone should feel it! If not this… mood, then at least that weakness from the water itself!”
“No! Notice, the drinking water seems to be piped in from somewhere else. Only swimming or the like gives intimate contact with the water. And we seem to be the only old people who swim regularly and at length. All the others are young and vigorous.”
I shook my head sardonically at this, but Ernst persisted:
“Our age and habits of introspection make us fine discriminators of our own degree of energy, and even we found the sensation so subtle it took us five days to isolate it. And now we’ve seen what we have—what no one else has—the thing seems stronger. And perhaps it even is stronger by a degree or two, but still effectively subliminal for everyone else here.”
“We’ve seen what no one else has,” I echoed him. “Ernst, the color. Can you make it out anywhere around here? On the water? Around the trees?”
After just a moment, I could see him take my meaning. It shook him, as it had me.
“Well, of course, the contamination might not have suffused the entire lake…”
“Yet it’s an unpartitioned body of water in constant agitation and circulation. The contaminant has been present a long time—those insects didn’t grow overnight. Why wouldn’t the contaminant be fully diffused—something pervasive enough to enter the vascular systems of trees a quarter mile above the lake? Why, if it was only a question of the mechanics of diffusion?”
“You are suggesting that it… hides itself where witnesses are thickest.” I think Ernst intended a stern irony, but what he showed me was consternation, and a dawning credence. I nodded.
“As long as we entertain that ‘intuition’ we spoke of, let us add this to it. Because I tell you, Ernst, I feel it in the same way. When I sense that Otherness, I also sense a quality of murderous patience about it. And you’ve felt the same, I can see it.”
He stood up. “We must go to the rangers. Now. Even if this is true we can say nothing of it. We must speak only of contamination, and alarm them with the physical proofs. If there is more to it, it must be left to reveal itself further, for it lies in such a darkness now we can make nothing out for sure.”
We had to walk out half a mile along the beach access road to reach the main highway, where the tollbooth was, and where the road back to the rangers’ quarters also issued. We felt unmistakably what I can only call a thawing of our hearts, an almost intoxicating liberation from a dread that had nagged at us not forcefully, but without cease. Soon the trees we passed were exuding—not menace—but night’s freshness. At the tollbooth we lingered for the sheer pleasure of it—the road to the rangers’ house would take us back down to the lakeside, at a point two miles below the public beach.
“It’s a sharp delineation,” Ernst said. “Perhaps we could guess it at a constant half mile from the shore. During our walk we were never more than that from the water, and the aura never faltered. But now we are definitely out of it.”
“Yes, and what a pleasure it is! It’s a physical thing, damn it, that can be stepped into and out of, and no more than that.” But when I looked at Ernst for confirmation he turned away.
“Come on,” he said, “they might go to bed early.”
Turning lakewards again gave me a shudder
some feeling much like that of having to don foul clothing on a cold morning, for want of clean. It was when we turned that we saw the “Full” sign had been hung out on the tollbooth. Now the docks and campsites alike, though busy, still offered empty berths, well over a dozen at the least. Though we were not crowd-lovers, it seemed a cavalier way to treat vacationers who had perhaps driven many miles expressly to come here. We were already walking a brisk pace, gathering our momentum against the bleak anxiety that was steadily reasserting itself within us, but the thought that the rangers might be ill or somehow incapacitated caused us to speed up.
I have indicated that infringement of docking rules was not uncommon. Part of the reason for this was that the two rangers had been very little in evidence in recent days. The day we arrived the younger of them, who had manned the booth, came down to the floats near dusk. He was a beefy, prematurely balding man who wore his diminishing hair long. He had had his clipboard in his hand, but I thought he seemed rather vague in his movements and he had not, so far as I had seen, written anything down. After about a quarter-hour he left quite abruptly.
On our second day the older ranger appeared. He was a very lean man with ill-fitting false teeth that made him, in his efforts to adjust the bite, seem continually to be snarling. He had not gotten out of his pick-up. He had sat there, gazing at the beach, gnawing on his teeth. He seemed more alert than his colleague, but in the end he drove off without doing anything.
We strode into the gathering aura of the lake. The road was narrower than that we had walked out on, and the trees crowded more densely here to either side. Ernst nudged me with the pint bottle that he had pulled from his jacket. We drank without slackening pace.
“It’s stronger here,” Ernst said, “far stronger, almost like the deep woods today. Up there, is that—?”
“Yes!” The alien color had begun to limn the upper branches of the trees ahead of us. A few hundred yards more and its lurid, smutty glow was everywhere, and anguish was a vivid, ratlike tearing at our thoughts’ core. Presently Ernst said, “There’s the house!”
We had seen its lakeside aspect from our boat—a solid, heavy-beamed old house of two stories with a water tank on the roof and a small pier where a pair of skiffs and a larger boat were moored. But seen from this side it might have been a landlocked farmhouse from the last century—shadowy, archaic, a place that housed a family, not state employees. A naked bulb was lit over the porch, and one of the ground-floor windows was illuminated, and this scant light, spilling out into the hollow of the yard, with the big trees surrounding, looked like a matchflame cupped in huge, dark hands. The truck was parked at the edge of the yard— rather dangerously, it seemed, for the yard’s perimeter fell away in a steep embankment, and was unbarriered. We heard, very feebly, the sound of a radio, not from the lighted window, but apparently from a darkened one upstairs.
We knocked on the screen door, and waited. Idly, I looked upwards. There, in the corner of the porchbeam nearest the door, I saw a huge black widow hanging in the disorder of its web. Its body was easily as big as a golfball, while its scarlet triangles were both as big as the nail of my forefinger, and bright as blood. A voice sounded inside the house. It was a flat, untrying noise that seemed not to want to be heard. I knocked again, and Ernst called: “Excuse us! We are campers! There is a problem!”
At this we shared a look that was not devoid of wry humor at the words’ inadequacy. The voice came again, an eerie, spiritless tone. We took the liberty of trying the door, and found it open.
Inside, all was austere wood, darkly stained. The light was from a bulb in the ceiling and it fell most strongly on a plank table beneath it which was littered with dirty dishes, and the odds and ends of various foods. On one side of the main room we could see into a doorless kitchen which, though in shadow, looked even more disordered than the table. Against the room’s opposite wall was a cot, and on this, staring at us with flat, black eyes, like a beaver’s, was the older of the two rangers.
With remarkable detachment he lay watching us walk into what was, after all, his home, and as we drew near we saw there had been a great alteration in the man. We had seen snap and energy in the slant of his gaze and the impatient way he’d chewed on his teeth. Now his gaunt jaw was slack and his eyes—as still as the rest of his body—had an animal impassivity.
“Forgive us,” Ernst said. “We are sorry to come in like this. You seem sick, and perhaps we can help you. But we must report something. We have become aware of a kind of… contamination in the lake.”
The withered chin moved, was still. I despaired—the complexity of the idea seemed too much for those waxen eyes to take in. But then:
“Sick,” the ranger said murmurously. “You bet I’m sick. My partner too. Dog-sick. For days.”
“Four days?” my friend asked. The head rolled a spastic negative on the pillow: “Don’t know. Days. A contamination. A contamination?
He looked a degree more wakeful now. I noticed that his skin had an odd roughness, a bit like what is caused by severe sunburn and subsequent peeling, but with a strange Assuring, scaling one might almost say, that went deeper than the effects of sunburn. Moreover he had just implied that he had lain indoors for some time.
“What contamination?” he asked.
“Do you drink the lakewater here?” I asked. “Pump it up to your tank through some treatment filter?” He looked at me until I was about to repeat myself before he nodded.
“We drink it. We drunk it forty years. Done us no harm.”
“Listen sir—Mr. Harms—” Ernst leaned close over the man and read the little name-plaque pinned above his shirt pocket. “The water of the lake—it might have a weakening effect on the body. In some parts of the lake it glows a strange color—late in the day, and also in the dark. And the life around here, the trees and insects, they aren’t normal, they’re overgrown and seem somehow diseased, and we believe the water’s affected them, because some of them show the same, strange color. Haven’t you noticed the way things grow around here? Why there’s a spider above your front door that—”
He stopped. Harms, showing a waking restlessness, had begun licking his lips with an unhealthily dark-looking tongue, and gazing down at a canteen he had on the floor within arm’s reach.
“Please,” said Ernst, “take this instead.” Harms drank of our bourbon, paused, and drank again more deeply. He propped himself higher on the pillow and looked at us with new alertness. Ernst tried again: “Mr. Harms, does the camp drink the lakewater too?”
“Nossir. It’s over from Furnace Welis. Lake’s got a soda taste, real slight, always has had. No harm in it, but not for the tourists—that was their thinking. Now you’re saying we’re sick from that water?”
“We’re almost positive, Mr. Harms. We want to urge—”
“Well lake or not, I don’t know. Why would it be now if never before? But sick—you bet I’m sick, and Arnold worse than me.” He took another swallow of bourbon and gestured at a dark stairwell across the room, down which thin traces of radio music drifted. ‘‘I ain’t got up to look in on him in a whole day—or maybe two days? I’m just so weak! And all the time I feel: “What’s the use?’ Both of us. Each day we put off driving ourselves down, then we just couldn’t. So now we’ll just wait and the supply courier will come by tomorrow night and we’ll go out in his pick-up. And all the time I been thinking ‘What’s the difference? What’s the use? What’s my life?’ You know I was bom not twenty miles from here? Went to school in this same valley as is now underwater? My whole life’s gone nowhere, I’ve not done nothing, in all my years I scarcely moved twenty miles across the earth. And where’s the use of moving at all now?”
A silence grew that echoed with the despondent cadence of his voice. Neither Ernst nor I failed to shudder at a queer familiarity, almost a quality of deja vu, in the doleful eloquence of this half-rustic man. We knew intimately that upwelling nihilism that appeared to animate him. And seeing that psychic poison coupl
ed, in Harms, with bizarre skin damage and bodily lassitude, I received a hideous intuition. I glimpsed the hazed form of an Evil so consummate, a predation so total and remorseless, that thought might sooner abdicate than contemplate its face. I could not speak. Ernst too was silent. Harms drained the bottle, and subsided on the cot to his original posture. The outburst of anguish had taken his strength, while the alcohol appeared to be numbing him fast. I shook myself from my fearful daze.
“Mr. Harms, you’re very ill. Let us use your telephone. If they know there’s an emergency they might send someone sooner. At least they could get things ready to treat you.”
“No emergency. Nossir. We’re handling it and we don’t need to holler for any help. Courier’ll take us down. Want to sleep now. Can you bring more whisky? That whisky helps.”
“We’ll look in on your partner, and we’ll bring you water from the camp and whisky. Sleep will be good for you.”
He nodded once and closed his eyes. We moved away from him for a whispered discussion. We agreed on telephoning as soon as Harms was asleep, then making the pair as comfortable as possible before retiring ourselves.
“I don’t think we should stay here with them,” I ventured, after a hesitation.
Ernst nodded sharply: “Nor anywhere near the lake. We must get our sleeping bags and find some place among the trees out near the highway. Getting ourselves… infected would aid nothing. We must certainly not stay here.”
This made explicit something we had both been feeling for some moments now, and we looked anxiously around the big, ill-lit room. Harms was already unconscious. Down from the dark stairwell, along with the radio’s queasy murmur, there now came, it seemed, a distinct chill, and an odor.
Or was it, precisely, odor? For the olfactory sense, in moments of great fear, can seem to become a sort of spiritual touch, whereby the harkening mind takes in, as if tactilely, the very thought and mood of that Other whose presence it suspects. If that which crept down to us amid the twisting current of chill air was an odor, then it was a whiff of the charnel house; but if, as well, the intolerable menace of that night had drawn our nerves so taut that we now sensed that Other’s inmost thought— then that thought was, unmistakably, a cold and hungering hate.
