The Color Out of Time

by Michael Shea

  "Mr. Nugent?” I said, “We are terribly sorry to startle you, sir. We are Doctors Carlsberg and Stembruck. We called in.” I went on in this vein, as smoothly and reassuringly as possible, while Ernst edged down the embankment and, finding the trees' support firm enough, stood on the truck and got Harms door open. When Nugent was sufficiently calmed he aided us with the flashlight while we got Harms out of the cab and up into the yard. Luckily he was far lighter than even his wizened looks had promised, almost unreally light. Then I addressed my friend loudly, for Nugent’s benefit:

  "Let’s go down with Mr. Nugent. You tie up the boat et itouffer le feu and I’ll help Mr. Nugent get Harms comfortable in the truckbed. I'll ride down back there with Harms and you can follow in our car.’’

  Nugent did not catch the aside, and seemed glad enough of a course of action to seize. By the time the truckbed was prepared, and Harms wrapped and ensconced in it, he had accomplished the recovery of self-control we had been working for. In fact he became somewhat fractious, growing rather stiffly aware that he, the official, had so far shown no initiative. By the time we were finished and Ernst was returning from his battening-down, Nugent was admonishing us for using the rangers’ pier and protesting the present emergency as the only thing that could induce him to allow our boat’s temporary tenure there. Having gotten a clip-board from the seat of his truck, he now tucked it meaningfully under his arm, more as a power fetish than implement of use, it seemed. "And now," he demanded of us, "where is Mr. Jarvis?”

  The man was ready. Ernst said gently: "He is dead, Mr. Nugent. Harms burned his body with gasoline, no doubt an act of delirium. I’ve just extinguished it. It’s on the pier.” Nugent’s shaky-voiced insistence on seeing the body made me glad of our circumspection. Even the dead ashes, revealed by pulling back the blankets with which Ernst had smothered them, so shook him that he was very near hysteria in an instant—and did they not shake us as well to the very soul? He glared at us, backing away, his head coming back officially.

  "We're going to need a lot more information about this. A lot more information.” His voice was ghastly, and his horror at the corpse was clearly overflowing into a paranoiac suspicion of ourselves. I was thankful we had left our guns aboard the boat when we came ashore. Ernst was beginning to remonstrate with him when Harms’ voice, an eerie husk of the voice I remembered, came to us.

  "Nugent! Nugent! I did it! I burned Arnold! Nugent, hurry!”

  As we returned to the truck we saw a spindly form sit up from its bed, as some reanimated skeleton might do from its coffin. So unreal was that shape that Nugent drew his flashlight and beamed it on Harms’ face, keeping him, as it were, at bay with this lance of light.

  "Just leave him to burn,” that hideous, tattered face said as we neared. "Get his feet too! His hands, all of him! Wasn’t an inch left of him not rotted and blasted clean through. I knew it without looking! I got me the auxiliary can off the truck, Nugent. Nugent? I soaked him, mainly his face, that was the worst. Then I lit it. Thank God that ended him! You hear me, Nugent?”

  I gently forced him to lie back—how I hated touching him!—and his face calmed, the pithless body yielding easily. Ernst got in front, and I in back with Harms.

  During our drive to pick up our car, Ernst urged on Nugent the idea of a contamination in the lake as the cause of Harms' sickness. Nugent resisted it vigorously. He had not been given any instruction regarding an evacuation order—this despite our laborious insistence on the telephone the night before. It was only the horror of what he had witnessed that at length induced him to do as much as he did. While Ernst unlocked and started our car Nugent drove to the verge of the lot, switched on his spotlight and took out a bullhorn.

  "Please exercise caution. The lake water may be hazardous to health. Please use caution! The lakewater may be hazardous to your health!

  He kept repeating these idiotic phrases, and slowly strafing the docks with his light. The electric brutality of his amplified voice woke dozens, heads popped up from cabins, lanterns were kindled, and frail, unamplified voices began to call questions. But then, just as he was getting an alerted audience, Nugent broke off and swung the truck out of the lot. We roared off, with Ernst behind us, speeding to catch up.

  Whatever Nugent’s timidity afoot, he was a demon at the wheel. And I confess that I felt, with him, a mountingly urgent impulse simply to flee this place, be gone from and free of it. Abortive though the warning had been, these people had been warned. Let them now awake and flee in their turn, or let them be damned. We had done all we could and had, for the moment, power to do no more.

  We swung for hours through the dark. At length the wind of our progress pouring against my hooded head had lulled me to the brink of sleep. Just then I heard Harms' voice: “You were talking about the water.”

  I moved nearer to him. “What about it?” I asked.

  “That’s not all there is to it. It's what did me, all right. Lord God, this afternoon it took me terrible, I could just feel it cracking and splitting me inside, and I was drinking our water, you see. But what got Arnold was more. What got Arnold was something that come out of the water.”

  He only laughed when I urged him on, so I desisted. After a silence his thin voice came again, a little stronger.

  “The trees were poisoned, and he had to sail away. Had to cross the ocean and escape something that lived among the poison trees.” Another silence. Then: "This is Arnold, I mean. He started to raving, 'bout mid-afternoon, just as I was taking so sick myself. I could barely make the stairs when he started shouting. Got up there and held him down. He looked not much worse but his jabbering! That boy never lived near the sea in his life, but he was saying he always had and he still did and he had to get away from this forest out onto the open water of the ocean. I got him quieted and went back down, and then I was out, so sick myself I passed out soon as my head touched down.

  “It was just dark when I woke up. I felt a draft down from the stairwell, made me think Arnold might have got his door open. It was so quiet I thought I might be still asleep and dreaming it. I went up the stairs. The door was open and the room was empty. I don’t know why I did it, but I went real quiet over to the window, instead of going down outside to find him. I went up to the window very slow and careful, and looked out of it. Arnold was there, all right. He'd waded a little ways into the water by the foot of the pier. And there was something with him, on him, around him. It had him the way a spider takes a bug it’s sucking on. Jesus God, a spider was what it was most like, and big as Arnold himself, and all of a color like no color of God’s earth!

  "And Lord help me, I didn’t move for as long as I saw it there, and I didn’t stir to help till I saw it climb off Arnold, satisfied, and go back into the water. And all the time it had him, Arnold was twitching and struggling, and his mouth was working like he was begging or praying..."

  Out of a long silence, I asked: "How did you get him up onto the pier?”

  "Get him up onto the pier!?" My nape crawled at the tone in which Harms said this. "I didn't get him up onto the pier—that’s how far he’d crawled by the time I got down there!”

  There was another silence I did not try to break. Harms went on: "I got the gas. I worked fast. He rolled on his back and opened his mouth, like to say something. His tongue was like one of them walnuts you open and find all black and shrunk up in the shell. Some of the gasoline went in his mouth, and when he tasted it he nodded his head like saying yes, hurry! When I saw he was finished, I tried to run then. Damn truck was in gear and lurched off the bank.”

  The road was straighter now, though the terrain was still lightless and wild. Among the eastern stars I thought I saw the premonition of dawn. When Harms’ voice came again it had an ugly, sneering humor in it. "You know what it is I’m dying of, Perfesser? I’m dying of Fool-itis. I’m dying of being a goddamned fool. My sister Sharon told me to be watching, always to be watching. Watch for the color, she said. My Daddy’s farm was in that same v
alley the lake is now, and there was some poisoning or wasting sickness took a whole family up the valley from us. That was my first year off from home, but Lord, I should have believed, the way Sharon went on about it, I should have believed her. You know she got me this job? More’n thirty years ago. And all so that I should be watching, you see, watching for the color. And God damn me for a fool, I’ve laughed at her in my mind these thirty and more years, and I haven't watched for nothing. But if you care, Perfesser, if you want to stop this thing, you go to her, you go to my sister, Miss Sharon Harms. She knows what this thing is. I’ll tell you her address, and you say it back to me.”

  I readily agreed. There was such a strange earnestness in the way he made me rehearse the information several times aloud, that I asked him if he felt well, or if he feared losing consciousness. A bark of laughter came up from that shadow-face, buttressed amid sleeping bags.

  “Fear losing consciousness, Perfesser? Thank you kindly for everything, but everything inside me’s dead and rotten. I can feel things tear and break like drenched cardboard. Everything about me but my mind is already dead. I’m not about to fear losing consciousness, nossir!” What followed instantly was a sharp spike of noise stabbing my ears and recognizable only after a moment—so unlooked-for was it—as the discharge of a twenty-two pistol.

  VII

  An elderly lady living amid cats—the notion suggests certain concomitants: embroidered comforters, photographs crowding the mantel, a smell of simmering preserves.

  Miss Sharon Harms, though she was an elderly lady living amid many cats—topaz- or opal-eyed brutes, fat and glossy, languorous or menacing, mounting or slowly pouring off of or sleeping curled up on every stick of furniture in the small parlor—was surrounded by a very different aura indeed. Her walls, so small in their physical extent, were labyrinths of mood and image. Sketches, watercolors, oils and prints covered every square inch of them. And the smell of the place was far from culinary. The reek of paint, solvent, fixative, ink was tonic, the breath of a still vigorous mind, so to speak.

  Vigor was in her person as well. She was short and spare, her face rather large and big-featured for her frame’s slightness. Age had rather tautened than loosened her skin, and one saw a kindly authority in her strong nose and shapely, slightly jutting chin. She wore rather thick glasses, and yet her gaze was so prompt and direct it made her seem sharp-sighted.

  We could not forbear peering at her abundant works—for so a common technique suggested most of them to be, despite a wide variety of medium and subject—and we were perhaps the more apt to do this because of the painfulness of the conversation before us. Miss Harms acknowledged our repeated compliments, which her work well deserved, With warmth and brevity. This, and her general calm, showed her to be something of the stoic her brother had been, for she knew of his suicide from my phone call of the previous day, and it had not failed to move her.

  She had had no more than the gist of the news when, in a voice which betrayed tears, she had anticipated my account of her brother’s symptoms with graphic precision. She had finished by saying:

  “But they aren’t symptoms, Professor, not of a sickness. They’re the marks of a killer, and the killer comes out of that lake."

  If I had needed any further encouragement in what amounted to our dishonesty with the Sheriff’s Department—from which I was calling—these words would have provided it, revealing as they did a potential ally precisely informed about the horror we had discovered, and making me doubly anxious lest we be detained. As it was, Ernst and I, there by the roadside where we had pulled over at Harms’ suicide, had already swiftly agreed on a less-than-candid report for the authorities. Nugent’s tendency to hysterical suspicion of us was making itself all too clear from his rantings at my “failure of responsibility" even after I had explained the complete obscurity in which Harms had acted.

  Our tale was certainly not subjected to a searching appraisal, for only a sole, distracted deputy was to be found in the station to take our report. The misrepresentation in what we said to this young man lay primarily in what we left out. I said nothing of Harms’ last conversation, and of the Venturesome Gal we said we had seen her run seriously aground, as we hastened toward the rangers’ pier, and we were sure that her owners had looked unwell that morning. In short, we did all we could to stimulate an official discovery of that ghastly wreck, without making reference to incredible manifestations, or to humane but illegal acts of euthanasia.

  The exceptional stress we put on the idea of the lake’s contamination seemed to arouse in Nugent an increasing defensiveness, but the bickering between us had the lucky result of harassing the deputy beyond his patience, and motivating him to transcribe our statements swiftly and send us on our way. His distraction had an obvious cause. The dispatcher's exchanges with officers in the field, broadcast from a speaker on the wall, suggested an unusually active climate of accident and unrest in the several townships comprising the county.

  I do not pretend to a professional grasp of criminological norms, but surely two combination murder-suicides perpetrated by despondent heads-of-households in different towns on the same afternoon, constituted an alarming statistic. In the worse of the two a pregnant mother had drugged her children, drenched them and their room with gasoline, and set it afire. Incredibly to us, the Deputy’s attention was not caught by the item; the incessant reports of highway collisions, violent altercations in bars, a riot in the correctional facility, and even of a rampaging, assaultive mad dog, seemed to be something to which he lent only half an ear, unwillingly, alert only for some specific call on his own services.

  But Nugent plainly both heard the item and registered its hideous similarity to our experience. Rather than dispose him to greater acceptance of our alarmism, however, this seemed to crystallize his opposition. I suppose the young man’s cup of horror, a-filling since the bus disaster two days before, had simply run over. I cannot, even now, despite his undeniable instrumentality in the later, unspeakable atrocity, blame him much for the posture of rigid denial (in the psychologist’s sense of that term) that he now adopted. When our depositions were completed and Ernst, having ascertained from the Deputy that the county drew its water from the lake, suggested that the water’s deleterious effects were partly responsible for the calamities we were even then hearing broadcast, Nugent spoke up fiercely:

  “Mr. Carlsberg, I’m going to call my superiors, and I'm going to set up an immediate check on that water and I’m going to personally offer my services to conduct that check, so believe you me sir that everything possible is going to be done about this idea of yours, and you can stop sitting there and accusing the Park Services Department to my face of pollution or contamination or whatever, and you can wait until we have some specific facts before you go spreading a panic when things are bad enough as it is without that.”

  This prodigious sentence was followed by others, and Ernst and I quickly agreed, by a shared glance, to abandon futile insistence— which could produce but scant action from an already overtaxed constabulary—in favor of pursuing whatever new information Sharon Harms might possess about the Enemy that we had just discovered. We cut Nugent off with courteous thanks for his aid, and agreed to convey to Miss Harms the Deputy’s message that her brother’s body might have to be retained for several days before it could be autopsied. We left those two embattled servants of the public weal to their own devices, and came away.

  Now, though we had done no more than look at Miss Harms’ graphics, I felt that new insights—frightening ones—were indeed impending for us. There was about her, underlying the friendly patience with which she bore our perusals, a tautness, as of urgent purpose in abeyance. Moreover her work, apart from the respect its technical mastery inspired, hinted an eerie competence in the super-real that felt, ominously, very much to the point of our visit. The work was, with few exceptions, mythic in theme: symbolic monsters, dream landscapes, mass rituals invested with a cryptic eloquence of gesture and atmosph
ere, visions of cyclopean cities bizarrely architected, battle-scapes of uncouth soldiery under alien skies. No devoted interpreter of the Human Dream—and such we were, Ernst and I, if nothing else—could have forbore to look, and look again.

  And, when we had so far overcome our distraction as to sit on the couch from which Miss Harms had evicted no less than four cats—why, then one canvas more caught our attention with such force, we rose once more. It was a country scene at night, a house, bam, and well, backgrounded by the denuded trees of an orchard. These trees had a wrenched, unpleasantly sinuous posture, and one understood that they were writhing, with a motion no earthly breeze could ever impart. But horripilatious as this was, the canvas presented a yet more striking and frightening feature, one which trees, house, barn and well all shared—namely, a faint corona, a kind of polychromatic exhalation outlining every one of them.

  Very earthly colors, of course, were used in composing that hellish lambency, but they had been so mingled as to suggest a wholly alien spectrum, a color that was liverish, leaden, and at the same time corruscated with furtive, obscene nuances of ghastly rainbow. The work was a triumph of innuendo and illusion. I turned from it to Miss Harms and said, rather dramatically, I fear:

  “Madam, not only is this canvas a marvel of technique, it is a proof of our own sanity. A terrible proof. The luminescence that you’ve put—implied here, is precisely that which we have seen on the lake where we met your brother.”

  Perhaps my ending with that word added a resurgence of grief to the confusion of urgency and artistic pride she was already clearly feeling, but she looked at me without answering, her lips parted as though she would speak, and at last she said, with a forlorn smile that apologized for the non-sequitur: