The Color Out of Time

by Michael Shea

  “Will you gentlemen drink something? I’m sorry to say I’ve got beer and I’ve got bourbon, but nothing else.”

  We hastened to applaud the idea of bourbon and water. When she brought us the stoneware mugs from her kitchen, her eyes were more pinkly rimmed than they had been. We drank. The bourbon had been poured with a bold and liberal hand. She spoke after one of those long breaths that follow tears.

  “I thank you for your praise. It is good, isn't it? And my Lord, to think there’s someone I could say that to, someone that knows it's true! It's very close, isn’t it? You see how thick the paint lies in the halo-ing? It took some doing, I promise you. But the memory was strong. I had a friend that lived on that farm back when I was a girl, and that color, whatever it may be, whatever manner of creature or plague—killed him. Consumed him.

  I’ve lived all my life since, remembering that. For almost fifty years I have remembered faithfully, and I have expected that the thing would come back. So it has. And now it’s had my brother Hazzard, in the same way it had Danny Simes.”

  Pain had so far overtaken her composure that Ernst, with an apology for our precipitousness, began to suggest we return the following day. This caused her to shake not just her head, but her entire person. With one decisive shudder her small frame pulled itself into a posture of new energy. "Nossir. Don’t think of it, Doctor Carlsberg. What ease could there be for me now except for revenge? Hazzard’s dead, and it's my fault alone, and that there’s no mending. But revenge is something. It's a damn sight better than nothing, as my father would have said it.”

  "But how is Mr. Harms' death your fault?" I protested, "and how—’’

  "Please, Dr. Stembruck. What we have to have is an agreement. I would be obliged to hear what you know first, because mine will take longer, and there are books I want you to look at. But before we even start we have to agree. I am not to be shut out of any part of anything we do to kill our Enemy. It's my hunt too, gentlemen, whatsoever we might do, every step of the way. I’m too old to be bamboozled out of the chance to do my most important work of all. No chivalrous horse- puckey then, but a straight contract. Are we agreed?”

  Her frank and humorous eye admitted of no grandiloquent posturings, nor did her tart remark on age fail to strike home. But there was more than this behind our prompt and smiling acceptance of her terms. For that direly numinous phosphorescence, ingeniously embodied on her canvas, that inconceivable Enemy of ours so clearly sprang from another segment of the Universe’s infinite spectrum of Entity, that before it there was no point in distinction of sex, or sex’s roles. What we opposed to it was our mere humanity, gravely vulnerable as it is in all of woman born.

  And so Ernst brought out the notes we had made. He read them aloud to Miss Harms, and I followed up with what supplementary recollections occurred to me. Miss Harms asked many questions. How sharply delineated was the campsite and beach zone of minimal “contamination”? Were we sure the vegetation there was inert as well as non-phosphore-scent? What about the psychic effects? Had they not, within the zone, had the same pathological quality, and merely suffered a diminution of stridency, like a radio station that is “turned down”? Judging by the marks we had seen on the wall, how large a thing had made them? How specific had her brother been about the size of the thing that had Arnold?

  The questions probed in a direction our own thoughts had explored. In the depths of fearful speculation, we were beginning to discern a hideous purposiveness and development a-lurking. When we had done speaking, we waited for Miss Harms’ revelations in the gravest silence. She stood up, rubbing her shoulders with her hands, as against chill. She smiled ruefully. "I'll start by refilling our glasses.

  She did so, and with the same laudable sufficiency as before. When she had taken two savoring swallows, she began.

  "If I was to go out on that lake, I could probably steer to a place right smack above a farm that was down in the valley, before they built the dam and filled it. And the fact is I did just that with Hazzard once. He mumbled and grumbled against it every foot of the way, but he owed me for getting him the job of ranger there so he did it. Well there was no being absolutely sure, but finally I judged we were almost directly over it, and Hazzard figured the water there would be about a hundred feet deep. All right then. That farm down there under a hundred foot of water, if we’re right, that’s the Simes farm. Little Danny Simes lived there with his Daddy, his Momma and his brothers. I went to the same school as Danny and his brothers did—that’s down there too I expect, at the other side of the valley. I learned my reading there. I don’t suppose you’d say the teaching was any too good, but then we never needed much in that way, living on our farms.

  "Danny Simes and I were best friends. You know how it can be with boys and girls not twelve years old and with lots of country to play in? Well, the early summer of the year I did turn twelve, Danny's Daddy had a meteor strike on his farm, near their well. And if you want to know what the Simes farm and the Simes well looked like, why, that’s them, in that picture you were admiring.

  “Well Lord knows we didn't know enough to call them by name at that time—in the early thirties it was—but that’s what it was, a meteorite. And I’ll tell you it made a big sensation. Danny wasn't a bragging kind of boy, but we all made the world’s end of it, and had him and his two older brothers always telling about it. The meteorite was there for the touching, half buried in the ground. It was made of a queer soft metal, and people from out at the university made tests on it and could not even get close to knowing what that metal was.

  “But they kept on trying. One reason was that the thing had a color about it, kind of playing across the surface of it in a haze, when you looked at it from certain angles. It was a color that people couldn’t stop talking about, and arguing about what to call it, and the reason was that it wasn’t like any color anyone had ever seen before. And to add to the strangeness, the Simes boys swore that it was shrinking even as it lay there—like ice might melt, you know, but leaving no runoff. Sure enough, the people from the university said their samples were shrinking and disappearing right in the containers they were keeping them in. Then, after several days, a thunderstorm came up, lightning struck the meteorite, and it was entirely vaporized. Nothing left but the hole it had made in the ground.

  “But truly, there was something left, though nobody guessed at it. The thing had put a poison in the land and water. The Simes' truck and their orchard fruit ali ripened huge and glossy, but foul and diseased to the tongue. And as for their stock, the poor beasts swelled up and died, with big, dried-out patches on their bodies that went deep to their vitals, till some of them were rotted half hollow where they stood, still grazing, till suddenly they'd just fall and cave in.

  "We heard everything from the Simes boys, until they stopped showing up at school. Toward the end they looked sick themselves, and afterward the other children would whisper how the Simes boys’ breath was queer, that they were drinking poisoned water, and weakening, but didn’t know it. Everybody’s folks had already told them not to play at the Simes'. My momma told me the same, and for her sake my daddy agreed, though he was sorry for me missing my friend, and having to stay away from him when he needed some company most of all. . ..”

  Miss Harms began to speak more quickly, more coolly now. She set the story forth in simple, uninsistent words which grew, if anything, more colorless as the horrors they conveyed increased. At the last I recognized the austerity of her manner for what it was: vivid rage, and grief still hot, masked with dis- passion, and smoothed in its telling from a lifelong habit of rumination on the dreadful images.

  It was nothing less than the tale of the Simes family's annihilation which she told us. Their soil produced abundantly; all grew twice the norm in size, and luscious to the eye, and every peck and morsel of it was sickish, feculent and pulpy on the tongue. The stock, which decomposed literally on the hoof in the latest stages of the disaster, began to display listlessness and an unmistaka
ble shrinkage of mass almost from the first. But even more dramatic to Sharon and her neighbors was something else that became apparent soon after the meteorite’s dissolution: a vague, yet fantastic luminescence that could be seen, at night, to play about the Simes farm, seemingly exhaled by every tree in its orchard, and every plank in its buildings. Sharon’s father often took his daughter hunting, a sport for which she was I avid, and one night, returning late across the valley, they had passed near the poisoned farm. At this time her friend had been absent from school for weeks, and the mother of the family was rumored to be insane, the rest ill. The eerie fever of light that she then saw crowning each branch and board of the place seemed to be the incarnation of that terrible, rumored sickness, in which she feared her friend lay. And then as they stared, man and child, in equal amaze, a second horror erupted from this first one. For there, in the windless night, some of those lambent, naked trees began to shudder, and to writhe. With mute, tortuous power, and a multitudinous, scaly whispering of limbs, they contorted as if insanely clawing the sky for a purchase by which to wrench their agonized roots from the venomous earth. The father was first to break from the trance; he seized his daughter’s shoulder, and they fled. But though she sought the dark as eagerly as he, the child was carrying away a vision, a glimpse of the more-than-real, an obsession.

  The wretched family's end came scant weeks later with the father’s death. The others had preceded him, all by the same hideous affliction that had destroyed the livestock, though there were strong subsequent indications that one of the boys had been dragged down into the well by which the meteorite had fallen months before. At the last Obediah Harms, Sharon’s father, had joined a small, quasiofficial party of men which went to the farm to investigate, and he witnessed there the enigmatic culmination of the farm’s ruin.

  As the night had drawn on, and the searchers were concluding their catalogue of the Simes' dreadful remains, the bizarre luminosity associated with the place was suddenly and vividly enkindled everywhere about them. The color grew ever more intense until it seemed to constitute a field of energy, or half material radiance which had for its focus of greatest concentration the air above the farm's poisoned well. The power inherent in this dazzling semi-substance, sufficient to drive the posse in terror out of the contaminated precincts, densened and cohered with a climactic, explosive violence, and leapt up into space. So intricate must have been its involvement in the substance of the farm that the latter was all but pulverized by its eruptive disengagement. The spot was barren for years after, a condition that never varied until at last the waters of the lake closed over it.

  By the time Miss Harms had finished, the day had grown very sultry, and she invited us outside for the reading phase of our instruction. Her house occupied a large tract of sloping ground, which she had had the sense to fill with trees and bushes. At the upslope end, flanked by huge old pepper trees, she had a marvelously overgrown arbor, and two wooden lounges for which she brought out cushions. Whisky, ice, and a bowl of fruit she also brought, and, last of all, she went for the books. Our position on the lounges gave us a vista of tract-house flatlands spreading from the hills Miss Harms' house occupied. Over the wide puzzle of identical roofs the sky was turgid gray, pregnant with humidity and pent electrical force. A thundershower was, in all probability, not many hours off.

  The books deeply disconcerted us. They were paperbacks with gruesomely illustrated covers, luridly blurbed. Their author, a Howard Phillips Lovecraft, was repetitiously biographized on the back of each, and identified as a famous contributor to the "pulp” fantasy publications that flourished during the Great Depression.

  In the period that followed I must confess our faith in Miss Harms was severely tried. With my first view of the garish productions she brought us came the swift and dismal conviction that I had, for the last hour, embraced the delusions of a plausible lunatic, and was now being amiably strait-jacketed by her into further hours of futility. Only the dreadfully precise congruence of the sensory experiences she had embodied in her oil painting, with our own of recent days, compelled belief that she knew something, and that her means of imparting it must be patiently borne with. Still, though wordless, we betrayed some of our dismay, for she checked herself as she was turning away, and fixed us with a leveller look.

  “Listen Dr. Carlsberg. Dr. Stembruck. I mean no offense, but I don’t care to be mocked. I make a point to talk as comes naturally to me, but I’ve read enough to know what sounds plausible to educated people, and what sounds ridiculous. I just have to ask you to have faith that I don’t read those stories any more naively than you do. But kindly read them. Read ‘The Colour Out of Space’ first off, and then the others. It's the gist I want you to see and feel, and not necessarily the details he dresses it in. So I'll thank you for your patience and leave you to it. Please just give a shout if there's something you want."

  VIII

  Not long after we had set to our task, my attitude to the work had struck a teasing balance between exasperation and enthrallment. On the exasperating side fell all the author’s obvious artistic strategies. As literary diversion, these were often highly successful. He combined a Ciceronian amplitude of style, a sonorous gentility of phrase, with an almost incantatory use of repetition and adumbration, which endowed the prose with a menacing, echosome quality. But precisely this excellence of artistry and effect disqualified the work as a source of the vital empirical data that we urgently needed for our counter-assault on our vague, unspeakable enemy. And as for the tales’ substantial actions, they involved a pantheon of malign entities which had a similarly "invented” quality, their names clearly chosen for a threatening dissonance, or in an effort to produce a phonetic facsimile of certain names in established mythology.

  But on the side of enthrallment was something both far more vague, and at the same time far more persuasive, than these considerations. For, as a pointillist's technical strategy aims at an unreal idiom which, seen from the right distance, conveys new realities of light, so did Lovecraft's narratives reveal, through an artificial idiom of fantasy, the true quality and meaning of the horror we had encountered. The precise psychological posture of that unique kind of dread, where awareness cringes from the first exploring touch, the first tenderly probing palpation of alien Entity, alien hunger—this was Lovecraft’s special preserve, and he fingered that web of stunning, reverberant horrors with matchless lucidity and resonance.

  We read for hours, while the choked and humid sky grew denser, like tightening muscle, over the vast chessboard of plastic-tiled roofs. And as the long afternoon unwound, various of Miss Harms’ cats leaked out of various fissures in the house, and sauntered over to share the arbor with us, until the point came when I looked up and found us quite surrounded by the sleek, flaccid brutes, not a few of which fixed us with the baleful calm of their yellow eyes. A sardonic comment seemed to flow from their gaze which at last impelled me, irritated as I was by my mind’s long vacillation between the ludicrous and the deeply fearful, to cry aloud, in what I hoped was amiable protest: "Miss Harms! Please! Can we talk?”

  She walked out with the same neat fluidity of movement her cats had shown. She carried a chair she had taken from the kitchen table, and when she was seated on it, she regarded us both for a moment before speaking. “Just throw out most of the particulars you want to,” she said. "I knew him. He was always quick to say that in what he wrote, sometimes more was fanciful than factual, and sometimes not. He wouldn't be bound one way or the other. So leave everything uncertain except a common denominator: enemies from outside. What’s in the valley—I mean, what’s in your lake—is part of something larger, one of many. It’s one form, and there are others. I only ask you to go that far, and no farther. Because I never had any expectation of convincing you—I only wanted to expose you to the reasons behind my one condition about our working together.”

  “I thought that condition was your participation, and that we’d already agreed,” Ernst objected.
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  “This is just another side of that same condition, Dr. Carlsberg. When we go against the enemy, you must use my weapon against it. Now you can also use any weapon of your own choosing too. You’ve only got to agree you’ll use mine first—and it’s a simple weapon to use, I promise you. Surely you’ll agree, professors?”

  We did, with what I hope was a courteous promptness and warmth.

  “Very good then,” Miss Harms said, smiling. "Let me talk like a painter a minute—let me put myself in perspective for you. I know you think, or are afraid, that I’m a rustic, a fanatic—you’ll admit at least that fear, won’t you gentlemen? Good. Thank you very kindly.

  “All right then, the first thing you have to see is how I felt after that night, when my father and I passed by Danny’s farm. Plain and simple, I was ashamed. You have to understand that when I stood on that knoll looking at the Simes farm I knew. I knew deeper than words can tell that Danny was lying sick in that farm, and that something not native or natural to this world was... sucking his life out. When I saw those trees move, and saw the pain in that movement, just like that I understood exactly what was happening to Danny Simes, understood it deeper than words can tell. And Danny and me'd sworn blood- brother-and-sister. We would always help each other, and we’d let nothing scare us. And as surely as any full grown woman can know anything, I knew as I stood there by my father and looked down on that farm that Danny Simes was lying helpless down there and something was feeding on his very life, feeding at its own sweet will. I stood there, and I knew this, and I was mortally afraid, and I didn’t dare to move a step to help my friend, to bring him out of that accursed place. My father snatched me away, but I knew then in my heart that if he hadn’t been there, I would have run away of my own free will, as fast as ever I could. And I know it sounds ‘rural’ of me, gentlemen, to say so, but the preacher tells us truly, blessed is he who will lay down his life for his brother. And just as truly, damned is she who will not. Do you understand what I felt?’’