The Color Out of Time

by Michael Shea

  The most moving thing in her eyes as she asked this was a certain dreary, grim expectation that we would not understand. I am happy to say she did not find in us that complacent prejudice that recognizes a man’s need of honor and self-respect while failing to acknowledge a woman’s. It may have been the warmth of our assurances which caused Miss Harms’ eyes to fill with tears, or it may have been the thought which she, with some initial difficulty, spoke next:

  "Now I’ve given it Hazzard. It was me that landed him that job! He promised me he’d watch for it, but in his heart he refused to believe in it. And I knew that he refused to believe in it, but what could I do?

  "I’m sorry to be so weepy. I started to put myself in perspective, didn’t I? Well, that shame was a starting point for me, my shame about Danny, that and of course the pure impossibility of the thing itself. I never stopped hating the thing. I never stopped fighting to keep my memory of it, to keep my belief in it. And everyone else who’d had anything to do with it did just the opposite.

  "I got contrary and stubborn about it, till people started saying I had turned ‘broody.’ I always brought it up to new people, until being laughed at and contradicted made me stop, and made me hate my ignorance, that always kept me from answering those contradictions. You read about the Outside World intruding into this or that person’s secluded life, and opening their eyes, or such like? Well it surely was something from the Outside that opened mine.

  “When I was sixteen I found The Colour out of Space in a magazine. I spent the whole day with it and my dictionary, reading it through over and over. That same night I wrote Mr. Lovecraft a letter, telling him who I was and what I'd seen.

  "He wrote back immediately, and such a long letter! He was always a man who was very generous with his mind, even to strangers— or, somehow, especially to strangers. But anyway, sure enough, he’d had the story from our valley—had heard about the meteorite from one of the university men that first tested it, and then came himself just a week or so after the Simes farm was destroyed.

  “Well, you’ll notice how he changed some things— set everything several decades earlier, changed the names. My daddy, Obediah Harms, he called Ammi Pierce, and the Simeses he called the Gardners, and there were a lot of other small changes. And what he told me about that, I want to ask you to apply to all his stories, because he often did it himself. He said that he always worked with truth, but that he always had to add an artificial element to it. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but the truths had to seem artificial. Because such truths—that there are Enemies Outside, Enemies that know a different space and time, and yet can feed on men, and lust to feed on men—people just won’t look at such truths except as fantasy.”

  The upshot of Miss Harms’ newborn correspondence was her removal to the city of Lovecraft’s residence, for here she could enjoy at least occasional visits with a mentor willing to alleviate the hard and lonely toil which this young woman had proposed for herself. She "kept counter" at a drugstore, and devoted most of her weekends to cleaning other peoples’ houses, and after two years she enrolled in the city college and embarked on her formal training in art. The author, a genteelly educated man living in dignified poverty with a maiden aunt, guided Miss Harms’ reading, nurtured her budding command of English and of the basic techniques of study and thought, and imparted to her a thorough grounding in that horrible mythology which was, as he continued to insist, partly his invention, but fundamentally his discovery.

  Before she had finished the first term of her studies, Lovecraft had died (of an intestinal ailment), and Miss Harms’ family had been displaced from their farm by the completion of a dam at the mouth of their valley. There was much sadness in her remembrance of this time.

  "Poor Daddy and Momma. They hung on there right to the end, cursing and fuming at ‘that damned Roosevelt!’ and I know how much it hurt Daddy especially to think that I just wanted to get away from where I had been bom. He thought it had been poisoned for me! And he was so wrong. I had to leave to learn enough and grow strong enough to go back to that place. My home had been poisoned, all right, but I damn sure wasn’t driven away from it. Just the opposite! I promised myself that as long as ever I lived, I would be as near that valley as I could get, and I would be watching, and waiting for my revenge.”

  The years that followed seriously tested Miss Harms’ resolution. The reservoir and the surrounding mountains were incorporated into the State Park system, and residence near the lake became possible only for Park employees. Again and again she submitted job applications to the Park Services. How could she watch for the resurgent evil—she, with Lovecraft, deemed it to be still present in the earth beneath the accursed farm—if she could not be present, and exercise a daily vigilance over the lake? Again and again, she was rejected by the Park bureaucracy.

  She took every job-related school course, she learned every phase of the application process, every name in the system’s hierarchy, and she met with unvarying refusal. Why? She was a woman.

  She persisted fruitlessly for six years, and meanwhile juggled out a professional career as an artist and a gallery operator in those cities nearest to the Park, while yet still large enough to support an "art world.” At last, when she learned of a new opening for a Ranger, she engineered the application of her elder brother Hazzard, instead of her own. Though much in need of work at that time, he was very scantly qualified for the post in question. He was promptly hired. She undertook both the added expense of maintaining a car, and the—to her—uncongenial task of learning to drive it. She became an incessant visitor of the lake, and camper on its shore.

  There was a firm if reserved affection between brother and sister, but this allowed for forceful differences of view on many matters. The year of the Simes horror had been Hazzard’s first away from home, working as a hand on the distant farm of an uncle. He had been quick to take his version of events from those who were struggling against believing in them, as Miss Harms put it. Out of affection for her, and no doubt from a sense of indebtedness as well, Hazzard accepted the task of “keeping an eye out for the color, especially in the water.” And he had forborne to speak at any length about his disbelief in the whole project. Nonetheless, she knew that his skepticism persisted. More than this, it had perhaps grown, under the stimulus of her own constant concern, until it had become in him a kind of counter-obsession.

  Here I was moved to agree with her: “Yes, Miss Harms. When we met him, after his friend had become gravely and obviously ill, even then he showed a very strong resistance to the suggestion of tainted water. It’s hard to see how any blame in the matter could fall on you.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Stembruck. But now I’m done, and I hope you have both me and Mr. Lovecraft fairly centered in this picture, and can fairly judge how much of a crackpot I am, if such I be. So let me finish by showing you the weapons I talked about—my weapons, that you have agreed to use first of all. Let’s go into the porch—I’ll join you there.”

  The sky looked denser, with menacing smudges of black in it. At the horizon a tiny, wire-thin stroke of lightning tickled the far- flung suburbs and, long moments later, the thunder reached us, one faint thud. We crossed the yard while Miss Harms headed for an out-building that appeared to extend underground. We entered the enclosed rear porch of the house and took chairs, comfortable rattans. The place was a hanging garden of potted plants, and into this humid jungle, one by one, here and there, cats began to leak. Miss Harms followed presently with the books, the whisky, and a leather pouch.

  When we were all comfortably seated with a new round of drinks poured, Miss Harms opened the pouch and drew out four smooth, flat stones shaped like five-pointed stars with the points broken off. Though I am not unversed in geology, I could not identify the heavy, blackish green stone—evidently metamorphic—of which these talismans were composed. All four had been incised with dense, elaborate cursive runes. Both in motif and style, their art apparently pertained to a culture utterly unknown to me
or to Ernst, though their lush, serpentine symmetry, and uncanny, expressive finesse put us both strongly in mind of Celtic tradition. The vivid suggestiveness of the work was the more impressive because it was incredibly worn, all but obliterated. Inexplicably, apart from any learned judgment I might make, a palpable sensation of antiquity, of hideous age, powerfully invested all four of those stones. We handled them with an odd solemnity, and reaffirmed our commitment to using them at the critical moment, and Miss Harms set them aside, on a low shelf behind her on the wall. The three of us looked at one another, feeling the dense oppression of the air as the very embodiment of our state of mind. Ugly things impended to be said, inferences demanded to be drawn from what we had discussed, and read. At last Ernst said:

  “Well then, let’s size it up. It infects through water. It feeds on what drinks it. But also, it has a more ‘material,’ animal-like form, and this too attacks, and feeds. Forty years ago it gave much less definite indications of such a concatenated form. Someone saw a detached piece of the farm’s overall luminescence moving about near the bam, and by all indications there was some manifestation solid enough to drag a boy down into a well. As for now, well, we all remember Hazzard Harms’ report well enough, I suppose..."

  “All right then, a development.” As Ernst flagged I picked up the topic quickly, with the feeling of one who paints furiously a canvas whose image he dreads to see, but must complete, and be delivered of. “There’s a change in prey, a change in mode of feeding, and a change in—a complexifying of—appetite.” Miss Harms nodded vigorously. I hurried on. "It feeds by diffusion through the water table, and gains strength from vegetation and lower forms of animal life. Man too it taints through water, but seems to work up to feeding on him as a physical shape. It seeks to feed on men as a full-scale predator. And I think its reason is that only thus can it satisfy its evolving appetite. Because from men it craves body and soul. Only as a palpable monstrosity can it reap full horror along with its meal of flesh.”

  We all drew deep breaths and drank, feeling, with a curious unison of mood, a partial lightening of the tacit horror we shared. We traded wry smiles. Just then a big, swaggering orange tomcat, seeking nearness to Miss Harms, surged up from the floor to the shelf behind her. The beast flowed along the shelf, its purr of anticipated pleasure clearly audible. It was so much the picture of feline hedonistic aplomb, that its fiercely abrupt check, crouch, and hiss made me start. In the rigid pause of terror, the animal fixed its alien, slotted eyes upon the ancient, stellate talismans, and an alien comprehension, instant and total, seemed visible in its face. Then it bolted from the shelf and, a second later, the porch itself.

  Miss Harms looked at us gravely. “Let’s go on a bit,” she said. "Let’s say Mr. Lovecraft assumed rightly. It lit, and fed as far as it could—through the water-table as you say. It grew to a certain point and left the earth, like a grown wasp does from an oak gall. But it also left behind some kind of seed of itself.”

  Out on the plain of roofs the horizon had neared, and lost its sharpness of line. Scant miles off, the charged and bloated sky was being bled by quick scalpels of lightning. The humidity and atmospheric tension that enveloped us were almost unbearable.

  “But then,” Miss Harms was saying, "just look at the differences this offspring is showing. First, the speed of it. From what you two saw, my brother was just taking sick about when you arrived at the lake. Call it seven days at the most. In that time, those two men went from the infected stage, through the seriously weakened stage, and one of them was completely destroyed by the bodily form of the thing. With the Simeses all that took months and months. Here, even allowing the trees and such were suffering it weeks before my brother did, it’s ten times faster. I was up there not a month ago, walked in the woods several miles as I always do. If anything had been showing, I wouldn't have missed it—not this fanatic, oh no!

  "And then, worse than that, is the way that when it does reach form, the form is so much clearer. Not any vague shape, but a thing like a huge spider-”

  "Yes!” Ernst cried, eager for some moments to take up her line of thought. “Just look at the food-base it’s had this time around. A whole forest! All flora and fauna within and around the water! What you’re talking about is precisely what frightens me. Increased nourishment doesn't just accelerate this thing’s growth to form —it refines that form, endows it with a more delicately adjusted adaptation as a predator in this world.

  "For instance, might it not be foraging already in the towns its poisoned water has contaminated and disorganized? And if human food, blood and mind, is what feeds it best, why, think how swiftly it might..

  He stopped, because Miss Harms was shaking her head gently. Before she spoke, however, the storm reached us. A scattered tap on the fpof first hastened, then collapsed in a dense racket of water, and we could barely see the outline of the yard’s trees in the silvered, roaring gloom.

  We all relaxed a moment, grateful for the obliterating din. I felt that the rain's blind abundance cleansed my mind of an image whose foulness incessantly resurged there: Mr. Gregorius, eyeless, groveling on knees that splintered under him, groping with mummied, gangrenous hands, with fingers that snapped in half like sticks of charcoal.

  Miss Harms poured new drinks around, and I took mine willingly enough. She downed half of hers with a frank brusqueness that yet had about it an odd grace, a thoughtful quality. She looked at Ernst and shook her head again.

  “Of course we can’t any of us know, Dr. Carlsberg. But I don’t believe that will be the order of it. I’m starting from the idea that the enemy is rooted, that no matter how powerful it grows, its center is bound to that spot where its seed first lit. The fact is, that’s exactly why I believe our Elder Signs can kill it. Because, be it ever so swift and light and secret, we can go down to that well, down to the Simeses’ farm where it lies drowned, and we can tear the damned thing’s life-root from the earth!

  “But I also believe that the more power it gains, the farther it can range bodily from its center. I agree that it aims to feed down in the towns where its poison has already spread. But I think before it's able to, it’ll have to take every human being it can at the lake.

  Right now it can kill four at a sudden throw—, though we don’t know how much time it needed to finish them. It had all afternoon at its disposal, by what you say. I think it's still far off from taking big numbers by storm.”

  “And that’s what it wants,” I put in quickly, feeling the labor of defining our danger was nearly done, and wishing it over. "You’re completely right. It wants to snare the lakeful. That's precisely what's behind the way it mutes itself in the camping area. I'll offer a prediction: the Sheriff's Department won’t find Arnold's body, and they won’t find any trace of the Venturesome Gal either. And if any of the public remain at the lake, then the enemy will play the careful angler with them and, as you say, feed up stealthily for the big catch.’ It was done—all said. We sat dulled, drained, ready for sleep, and yet for a moment did not move. Lightning flared quite near; the trees stood drenched in their own colors for an instant, blacked out again, and the quick, tumbling thunder annihilated itself against the house.

  "I hope to the Lord that everyone left,” Miss Harms said. "Why couldn’t the idiot take more trouble to warn them? I'm very much afraid. Hazzard would always joke about that Nugent. Called him a jackass and a rulebook fool. I just pray he doesn’t get in the way. The enemy can twist a mind to its will, and use a man's natural stubbornness to turn him into its tool.”

  IX

  Five days later, near noon, Sharon Harms’ stout old Buick followed our Dodge up the last miles of mountain highway to the lake. She towed, on a rented trailer-bed, a powerful generator, coils of heavy electric cable, and air tanks. In the trunks of both vehicles we had distributed other gear: wetsuits, aqualungs, explosives, two large underwater lights, a specially modified "bangstick” (a weapon one might describe as a diver’s rifle), ammunition, an inflatable lif
e-raft, provisions, and whisky, not to mention a number of smaller items.

  Although our mustering of this gear had so exasperatingly absorbed us, involving us in drives to more than one distant metropolis, we had remained informed, by telephone, of the progress of affairs at the lake. Thus we were prepared for what we found, though preparedness did not prevent the situation’s eerie impact on us. The camp was open—a stolid, shirtless teen-ager manned the tollbooth. He took our money and tucked the registration tickets under our wiper blades with a practiced air. We drove in on the access road and heard, long before we could see the water, the busy, rejoicing clamor of children. We found the parking lot full of glossy, bright-colored vehicles—fuller than we had seen it at any time during our previous stay. We parked and walked to the beach, pausing while still among the huge, old trees that bordered it. We saw just such a sunny, sportive vista as menthol- cigarette advertisements are made of: the great amphitheater of green, and golden blue; the vivid, careening little boats with their exuberant, insect noise of distant motors; the children, thick as locusts on the water's fringe, their racket as steady and shrill as crickets’ din.

  It will not seem strange that this specious panorama possessed, for us, a mute, deep horror, and sense of falseness. Though our sun-struck, breeze-washed senses swore the opposite, we knew that what we beheld was a miasmic cauldron, a sink of putrescence and remorseless murder. And the spectacle’s very energy and populousness added an extra degree of terror to that which our personal experiences generated. For all this happy, oblivious traffic was the fruit—and fruit indeed it was to the lurking hunger here—of a bizarre sequence of circumstances seemingly designed for the ultimate benefit of our Enemy. To see things so propitious for this unspeakable entity, this furtive psychivore, gave me that feeling that comes in nightmares, when the Evil, nearing fulfillment, begins its inexorable acceleration.