The Color Out of Time

by Michael Shea

  But when we had drawn near, and I had begun to shout our announcement, the bullhorn woke to life behind us. Hargis was letting the instrument move freely, having got up the kind of spirit that would serve him, and his friends began strafing the beach with humorous variations on the themes of plague, environmentalism, our age and even, surprisingly, monsters in the water.

  The children naturally imitated this interference, and though we had some attentive listeners—mostly older women—they seemed more engaged by the curiosity of our appearance and position than by our words, which they could not have heard very well in any case. After a bit Sharon put her hand on my shoulder and shook her head.

  "It’s in his pocket,” she said. "It may be all we can manage just to stay clear of him. We sure aren’t going to change any minds here.”

  I nodded. "We tried. There's no more time to spend on it, we have too much to do.”

  And so we returned as we had come. The bull-horn sent pleasantries wafting over the lake to us as we retreated. After a long silence Ernst growled:

  “If he’s not an outright servant of the enemy, then he’s trying out for the job.”

  Sharon gave a bitter laugh of assent. "And even so, I think he is just a bull goose—smarter than average, but just a bull goose who’s only pleasing himself. I think he makes money on those cards, and that he likes running things, and he sees no further than that. But damn his jackass soul! He’s holding those people here just like a... basket of food for that thing.”

  XII

  We docked at the rangers' pier, and remained in our boat to lunch on sandwiches and fortified coffee. We refilled our hip flasks as well as our cups with the Wild Turkey that Sharon had had the congenial foresight to stock at our last provisioning stop before arriving at the lake. Before she joined us in the third round of the latter which Ernst prepared, she drew out the fourth of the Elder Signs she had brought and hung it from a hook over the cabin’s door. We drank together, and then set out up the path toward the toll-house.

  We were agreed that Hargis, having identified us as disruptors of his order, was capable of interfering with us, and that we should move our cars to the rangers' house only after dark, when the toll-house was closed. Similarly, our observations in the parking area must be swift and unobtrusive.

  It was easy to make them so. We merely counted the number of empty boat-trailers stationed there. We planned an afternoon circuit of the lake’s shores to count the boats present on excursion from the public docks. We expected, by adding the count we made on our cruise to the count we would presently make of the craft moored in the docks, to arrive at a figure lower than the trailer-count, which we accomplished in less than six minutes. There were fifty-two empty trailers parked in the lot.

  We then divided for our next task. Sharon and Ernst approached the left wing of public campsites, and I the right. The game on the raft was still in progress, and while we could mingle with the campers unmonitored by Hargis we wished to do so. Meanwhile, as we worked toward the smaller peripheral sites we could look for an abandoned cyclist's camp or, in any vacant plots we found, the traces of such. Ernst’s resourcefulness had provided us with a plausible “cover” activity. He had several collecting jars and nets and other paraphernalia of entomology, a hobby of his.

  And so, as I made my way along the gravel road that connected the campsites, I could go slowly and scrutinize the ground, occasionally turning over a rock and tweezering bits of debris (I found no insects here) into a jar for credibility’s sake, or applying a magnifying lens to the trunk of a tree. People watched me, returned vague, uncomfortable smiles to my convivial salutations. Most seemed satisfied that my recent identification as an aged "environmentalist type” accounted sufficiently for my eccentric activity—and also seemed content to keep their distance, uneasy at the thought of interaction with so freshly and officially certified an oddball. I beamed congeniality, while avoiding any appearance of eagerness to converse—sure to be off-putting. I exchanged little more than conventional salutations with all but two persons, both middle- aged women, and these two ladies were reticent enough. Both had arrived since the beginning of Hargis’s present prestige. While both made very emphatic acknowledgments of all that this enterprising man had done to "organize things,” their most—and indeed, only—striking similarity was their half-conscious urge to air doubt about his character. In both cases it was almost immediately clear that while the wife was dubious, her husband was a firm partisan of Hargis’s social faction.

  In the end, the mute testimonials I found proved more telling than the verbal witnessings. I came after about half an hour to the "walk-ins,” to which the access road narrowed, and which were not scaled to admit campers or the like. The vegetation-barriers separating these plots were much thicker than those permitted to survive the more incessant erosion in the vehicle sites. I found the first two of these plots vacant, and at once initiated that close search for clues that my "cover” could so aptly legitimize.

  I spent more than a quarter of an hour in the first, and experienced a growing sense of futility as I peered and probed. After all, the cyclist might have grabbed a quick bite by the lake without unpacking, then pedaled to the rangers’ residence on some quest, to be taken with all his gear, before he had made any camp.

  After some moments, however, I recognized in this defeatism the symptom of some covert cause, which was in fact the resurgence of that hated, soul-sapping aura, whose menacing abeyance we had noted on arriving that morning. And as I identified that circumambient poison, I all but knew that in the second site, I would find something.

  The indications which leapt with such quick clarity to my eyes were surely slight things to the casual witness. The foliage at the lakeward end of the site had the dishevelment and torsion of limb and branch that would result from being shouldered through by a bulky form, but the vigor of children and young adults on vacation surely imparted such effects to a lot of the camp vegetation. Moreover, the simple carelessness of a materially abundant and somewhat sloppy culture made the second thing I found a thing of scant inherent significance: a firmly driven aluminum tent- stake, with a half-foot of yellow, nylon guy- line still attached.

  For my third find, however, I saw no blithe dismissal possible. It lay on the ground below a scorched place on one of the trees. It was a seven-link fragment of steel chain snugly jacketed with a thick polyethylene sleeve to retard the action of hack-saws. In plainer terms, it was a piece of an expensive bicycle-chain. The fragment of guy-line had been sundered by melting, but this was a common, even recommended way to cut nylon line. That the chain had been sundered by the same means was disturbing by anyone’s standards.

  At that moment, crouching in that grove which so effectively muffled the bright noise of the vacationers nearby, I was possessed by an excruciating sense of aloneness. What would it be, I asked, to lie in scorching bonds beneath the water just offshore there—to lie like a living mummy, a soul encoffined in its paralyzed, tormented flesh, with its most detailed memories splayed like a map before an alien eye? To lie blind in the lake’s midnight cold and yet see one’s recent campsite—see for the tormentor one’s possessions so that these could be dragged down to the same cold darkness?

  I literally jumped to my feet, and shuddered through the length of my frame. Were these thoughts my own meditations, or poisonous implantations of despair direct from the Enemy’s unclean presence? And was this unimaginable entity, in fact, sardonically whispering to my unconscious ear, and taunting my pursuit?

  An hour had elapsed since our parting when I rejoined my friends. I found them seated on a blanket in the fringe of trees that divided the beach from the parking area. They had a good view of the beach, while not being particularly visible therefrom. They had a companion—doubtless the owner of both blanket and the picnic basket centered on it. This was a thin-faced woman of about forty. I saw from her posture and movements that she was in the throes of earnest disclosures while, simultaneously, eating a la
rge and varied meal. Sharon too ate from the basket, more, it seemed, as a gesture to generate rapport than from hunger. I joined them.

  Mrs. Farber was not greatly interrupted by my arrival. When her provisions were exhausted, her account grew more continuous, but no less repetitive, so that I was soon oriented in the tale. There was a palpable misery about the woman, both in her speech and in the almost desperate way in which she comforted herself with food, which largely neutralized a certain comic impact some of her mannerisms had. She was an anxious and, I fear, rather dim person.

  Mrs. Wingate Farber, from far off Needles, California, had been sympathetic to our afternoon's embarrassment because, though timidly and unavowedly, she disliked Jeffry Hargis. She was an unimpressive woman, was what is called hatchet-faced, but was the opposite of sharp and forceful. One sensed that her conversation always took the form of a mild but insistent enumeration of grievances. But, as Sharon's easy and efficacious sympathy brought Mrs. Farber's natural vagueness into greater clarity, it grew clear to me that this woman and her husband were, as one says in parapsychology, "sensitives.” Introverted, intensely interdependent, fussily attentive to one another’s health, both were more than normally observant of environment, and at some point, early on in their stay at the lake, they had become subliminally aware of the Enemy.

  She insisted that they were very "impressed” with the lake’s beauty. From the viewpoint of Needles, California, it did present the eye with a rare lushness. But despite their stubborn determination to enjoy every day of their projected vacation here, they felt 'real depressed', and 'never quite right' most of the time.

  “Do you know," she asked us, "that if you go out for a little hike, you’ll see bugs and ants that are this big? I mean we have some big ones out in the desert, but this big. One morning Wingate woke up with such a nagging headache we thought maybe something’d bitten him.”

  Such withdrawn, strongly symbiotic couples, meticulously aware of one another’s views, tend to be isolationist in their reaction to clubs and other such boisterous aggregations with their inevitable imposition of group authority on individual behavior. Hargis's busy initiative, his readiness to penetrate their—or anyone’s— shell of privacy to recruit them to his social hierarchy, aggravated the couple’s initial indisposition toward him. It appeared further that Wingate felt some disgruntlement with Hargis's local eminence due to a sense of prior territorial establishment, since the Farbers' arrival had preceded Hargis’s by a day.

  But precisely for these reasons, Wingate Farber offered an impressive example of Hargis’s domination techniques. Mrs. Farber, while understanding far less than she conveyed, presented a very circumstantial picture of the Hargis family’s quite striking presence. They had arrived, a couple and five children, in two motor-homes, one of which towed a boat.

  They had come on the day after our departure, while the question of a contamination was reverberating among the campers who had heard Nugent’s “broadcast” and yet lingered in doubt. I think it likely that some common issue of concern was precisely what Hargis stayed alert for in any new camp. That he went to many—probably spent the summer going from one to another—seemed past doubt. He was expert in generating and centralizing sociability which created a milieu for the casual and lucrative poker games that I guessed were his primary object wherever he went, though I think too that the disinterested love of controlling and manipulating others stood high among his motives.

  Hargis possessed an impressive arsenal of macho fetishes and totemic objects essential for the Male Club in its modern North American form. He had a gun collection, a full-size, collapsible card table, a video-and-cassette player with twenty-inch screen and thirty-inch speakers, a library of expensive pornographic magazines, a portable pool table, a well-stocked bar, and a generator only a bit less powerful than the one we had just brought up. To invite "key” men among the other campers—subdominants, so to speak—over to this private valhalla of hardware for a drink and a talk about "this contamination thing,” was an easy matter, as was the bringing-around of these men to an accord, once in the jovial, conspiratorial atmosphere of his well-furnished “clubhouse.” Hargis's greatest advantage would lie in seeing the question of contamination as a "scare,” and the necessary interpretation could be laid quite easily upon the actual events. People had been startled awake by a bullhorn, and dazzled by a searchlight, and an "announcement” had been made. Had anyone actually seen that it was a ranger who made it? Surely, if there was really some kind of official evacuation contemplated, there would also be official directions issued by Park personnel who would be on the spot to direct the operation. Matters wouldn’t be entrusted to a brief, cryptic shout in the night.

  People’s inertia disposed them to staying, at least until some official notification and direction was given them by the responsible individuals whose salaries, after all, their taxes paid. As might be expected a good deal of hostility was generated by the diffuse anxiety which Nugent’s panicky abruptness had enkindled, and embracing a defiant attitude established a pleasant sense of unanimity, of group authority, among the campers. The men joked, brought out beers. A congenial mood of self-approval prevailed, which Hargis quickly improved on. He proposed a committee to man the toll-booth, another to keep "lifeguards” on duty. When Americans meet a little inconvenience they don’t just fold up and sit on their hands, do they? The whole venture was felt to be exciting, enterprising. It might get written up in a national news magazine.

  From these beginnings it was inevitable that a status group should develop, composed of the most assertive of the vigorous males. The group would be defined by Hargis's distribution of access to his fetishes and talismans of male prestige. The men he flattered by inviting to his pool or poker games, or to see the allegedly pornographic video-cassettes he sometimes ran in one of his motor-homes—all these naturally came to court his approval. They competed for his attention, copied his mannerisms, grew eager to bask in his aura of potency and fearless, insolent ease. The "lifeguards,” by the fourth day, had become the floating poker-game—that is, the card-players formally adopted the duties of watching the camp's young swimmers and sailors. Simultaneously, of course, they and their enviable club sacrament were being displayed to the rest of the community.

  It was a beautiful stroke of management. Hargis was certainly a man of great native intelligence. Personally, for what it may be worth, I felt then, and continue to feel, that he was a sociopathic type with strong homosexual/ sadistic impulses, but I must stress that I disliked him from the first, and am far from being an unbiased judge of his character. What seems certain is that Hargis derived from his prestige both a considerable cash income, and an essential satisfaction in the pure prestige of club-dominance. And his fetish-arsenal, his practiced manner in generating instant bud- dyism, his incessant and subtle use of physical intimidation and covert coercion—all these pointed to highly developed strategies for satisfying his status-drives. His wife was a very outspoken, folksy-friendly woman with highly developed secondary sexual characteristics. She had the southern habit of using constant endearments in speaking to other women. She was quick and deft with an arm around the shoulder, and an uninhibited cheek-kisser. She presented, in fact, the female version of the same mode of aggressive seduction of her peers that her husband did. Their two daughters were loud and cute. Their three sons, all very strongly built, had in common an almost perfect taciturnity, and three different degrees of acne, inversely proportional to age.

  It must be understood that Hargis exercised an entirely psychological coercion, and was never guilty of overt intimidations that could create strong adversary sentiments among the community. When the disgruntled Farbers, after three days of the Hargis regime, had started packing, Hargis himself heard of it and came over. In the most natural manner in the world he declared his regret that they were leaving because the "gang” had just been planning to invite Mr. Farber to try out the pool table.

  Wingate came home four hours
later and the Farbers decided to stay on at the lake. "I think they saw one of those porno movies of his,” Mrs. Farber told Sharon, "after they played pool. But I think it was the pool Wingate liked. You see he’s proud of his game, he's really very good at it...

  At length we left Mrs. Farber, assuring her that if she stayed out of the water, the greatest danger of contamination could be avoided, though of course we urged her to leave as soon as Wingate sailed in. He had gone out earlier for a cruise, miffed, she thought, because he hadn't been invited to join the afternoon poker game. She would tell him what we had said, and surely they would leave this time.

  We found another out-of-the-way part of the beach for ourselves and discussed our findings as the day lengthened and rich, barbaric red and gold seeped into the lake's surface. We found we had little to say about my discoveries. Their implications were only too gruesomely clear. Hargis was our main topic.

  "It’s quite remarkable,’’ Ernst said at last. “Sharon was right—Hargis's presence is pure chance, I'm sure of it, and he’s simply pursuing his own personal patterns of exploitation. But at the same time, he serves the Enemy’s purpose so perfectly! He keeps the food in the net, as you said, while the Enemy feeds up to strength enough to take it all. What are we to think?”

  "I think the Enemy did some balance-tipping,” Sharon said. "On his way here, he must have passed through one of the southern cities, and drunk some of this water before he ever arrived. Maybe only a taste of the Enemy is enough to work on a man like Hargis. So let’s say the Enemy nudged him up this way, and now that he’s got Hargis so near, maybe he moves his mind a bit directly, who knows? It’s possible.”