The Color Out of Time

by Michael Shea

  Whatever the exact truth might be about Hargis, we agreed that he was very likely to interfere with any conspicuous measures we undertook in pursuit of our, to him, inadmissible aim. Even if it were clear to him that we could do our work and be gone without the beach greatly noticing, we felt he would oppose us instinctively, perhaps without fully understanding his motives for doing so.

  We decided to wait till sunset to count the boats in the dock, which should allow time for most of the stragglers-in to arrive. When we made our count, we discovered that we were probably in for a crushing confirmation of our worst fears. Forty-five boats were safely berthed by the time the purple gloom was ripening upon the forested slopes. We knew from our own experience that the number of convenient shoreline anchorages outside the public beach was small, and from Mrs. Farber we had learned that lying out overnight at anchor on the lake was not a popular practice, since Hargis's activities had created an atmosphere of "nightlife” in the camp that kept people around, even if only on the fringes. We might reasonably expect two or three boats to be still out on the lake, and that meant four or five cars and boat-trailers in the lot whose craft were likely to prove unaccounted for.

  “That could add up to more than twenty victims,” Sharon said.

  "Let’s make our tour and be certain,” I answered.

  It was a ghostly cruise. Before we were half through it, night had fallen. We had a searchlight, but a big, lopsided moon came up soon after dark, so we switched it on as seldom as possible. The lake was normal in its aspect— the Enemy still kept his colors dimmed—but it was, to us, unreal, seemed a huge, silver- surfaced tarn of blackest poison.

  Yet at the same time our boat itself had a corresponding—a compensating irreality of its own. It seemed to have an added buoyancy, a secret new capacity for flight or maneuver. With some diffidence I expressed this conviction.

  “Yes,” Sharon said. "It’s the elder signs, I think. They’re like windows to the Enemy’s presence—even though he’s hiding himself, the signs let through to us the feeling of his presence. And at the same time they give us an added strength to withstand him, and that strength we can also feel.”

  XIII

  In that tour of the darkling lake Sharon—more than circling her own drowned birthplace—was in a sense completing the orbit of her personal destiny, homing in on the struggle for which the whole of her adult life had been a vigil and a preparation. It led her to speak of her friendship with that author whose tales she had lately had us read. The quiet intensity of her affection for Lovecraft forms, to my mind, one of the most telling eulogies he can have received, though today he does not lack enthusiastic partisans from every conceivable class of reader.

  "I say it without boasting wisdom,” she told us, “but he made a literate woman of me. He was a very private kind of man, yet he was unbelievably generous, with his time and his understanding, to his younger admirers.”

  Sharon rapidly progressed from rustic precocity to sufficient sophistication to understand her friend when he told her that his stories conveyed primarily truths of spirit, while in them he had subjected the facts they dealt with to a hundred distortions and transpositions of detail, for purposes of clarity and impact. He taught her the healthy discretion that people like themselves—people who had seen— must always adopt with their fellows, all far less tolerant of the unusual than they.

  Listening to Sharon, one saw the young woman she had been, her infatuation with the kindly recluse’s refinement and knowledge, and one saw too this man—of not inconsiderable talent and education—gently encouraging the girl’s affections to her own advantage, recommending books, discussing them with her, tactfully correcting youthful fallacies. By the time he died, a little over a year after their meeting, he had come to trust her sufficiently to leave her some very ancient relics that he had in his obscure but always diligent life amassed. Chief among these were the elder signs we wore.

  “He said more than once,” Sharon told us, "that fiction could reach hundreds of thousands of people, and plant a lasting feeling for certain kinds of experience in their minds. But something told as fact, if it wasn’t the kind of fact people were used to, would be laughed off and go unheard by anyone.”

  We used our spotlight on a dark cove overhung by trees. The beam showed us rocks and empty water.

  “I knew so little when I met him,” Sharon said sighing and smiling. "He opened the world of books to me, and through them, the world, and I never lived in the country after that. I often get sad about it, but I’ve never regretted it. My father at first would write me every year or so to tell me to stop being a damn-fool typist—or whatever job it was I had at the time—and come back home—in the years before this lake, I mean. I would always answer him 'Dear Poppa, I miss you all terribly, but it just feels too dark at home for me to live there.' They thought I meant what happened to the Simeses, remembering how hard I took it, and they didn't pressure me too hard. And of course I did mean that too. Maybe you’d say, if you felt psychological about it, that I took another father in Mr. Lovecraft. He was so generous. A man who loved to help you understand, with no interest at all in standing on his knowledge to make himself bigger than you.”

  I had to laugh. "The way you say ‘psychological’! I see you think we are psychological, and stand pompously and professorially on our knowledge.”

  "Dear Gerald—and Ernst!” she laughed. "Not at all! Or at the very worst maybe just the tiniest bit professorial.”

  But it was only rarely during that eerie cruise that our laughter sounded over the waters. And when it was done, and we neared the docks again, it was indeed a sobering statistic at which we had arrived. We had seen two boats riding at anchor on the lake. There were five trailers too many out on the parking lot, five cars whose owners would probably never drive them away. With futile repetition we demanded of each other—how could people go on for days, noticing nothing at all? Five boats!

  Reminding ourselves of the tendency of our countrymen to notice as little as possible about one another, of their dread of the mutual human responsibility that flows naturally from an atmosphere of mutual awareness, did little to assuage the anguish and rage we felt at the perfect privacy with which the Enemy had been able to feast practically in their midst. The heedlessness to the shades and nuances of their environment which many people show is perhaps only another aspect of the heedlessness they show to one another—perhaps the two should be seen varieties of a single cardinal sin—inattention. In any case, the Enemy had here profitted by both types of disregard.

  As we passed the dock on our way back to the rangers' pier, we observed that it was a "big night" in camp. At the Hargis site there was a movie going on in one motor home, the stereo in the other, and a pool game under a floodlight out on the ground between the campers. Much of the camp, apparently, had been invited to one or the other of these. From the picture we’d gained through Mrs. Farber's account, this was an unusually "open” party. Now even the older people, along with many of the children, mingled in the little wonderland of Hargis’s adult toys.

  "He is consolidating full tribal support now," I said, "admitting even lower status individuals to the ritual center of his power-fetishes. I conclude that he feels a threat from us. He probably senses that there is something here that menaces group allegiance to him, something that might frighten and convince, and now he is working to generate increased group solidarity.”

  Sharon shook her head slowly, musing on the starkly lighted revelers, whose noisy islet of activity we from our vantage saw environed, engulfed by the darkness of the lake. "Whatever we say about people’s not noticing each other, there's something else, so plain it’s staring us in the face. The Enemy’s awareness—it's among these people, it branches through them, sees, hears and understands who they are and who they are to each other. The Enemy knew the right boats to take, knew whose neighbors wouldn't see or didn’t notice much.”

  "Yes,” Ernst murmured. "The Enemy’s surveillance mus
t be both incessant and... intimate with its victims. And consider, then, the fineness of control, even if subliminal, that it might be exercising on Hargis, its shepherd.’ We sailed past, and in a short while were back at the rangers' pier mooring the boat. We walked back to the public beach without speaking, and reached it a little after ten p.m. Hargis’s party was in full swing. We skirted it and found Mrs. Farber’s camp.

  We found the woman obviously distraught, sitting at the campsite bench trying to pump a Coleman lantern up to pressure, and weeping quietly as she did so. Sharon took her in hand and got her a glass so that we could pour her some brandy from my flask. Ernst started the lamp for her.

  For a woman of her narrow and simplified emotional environment, she had received a serious shock. Wingate had snarled, and then shouted at and cursed her in public. The brandy helped, and we gave her more.

  Wingate had apparently returned shortly after we left her in the afternoon. He had been, in his self-contained way, morose at his exclusion from the poker game. He had returned vindictive, quick to take up his wife’s suggestion that they leave, once he had learned of our announcement and subsequent personal urgings.

  But before they had gotten very far along in their packing, Hargis’s party had begun warming up, and everyone was out and mingling. The Farbers could have packed everything in their boat and sailed it round the center of activity to the loading-slip, but Wingate peevishly chose some pieces of gear to carry in his arms to the car, passing through the milling campers as he did so, and passing near the Hargis site. It seemed he had to make a statement to Hargis, who had wooed and then abandoned him. And on his way back from the car Hargis had snared him. Wingate was appeased and converted with pathetic swiftness. “You’re leaving at the start of the party?... But how could I invite you, you’ve been out on the lake all day! We were waiting for you to shoot a rack of cutthroat with us.”

  Wingate literally joined the party on the spot, following Hargis straight back to the pool table, and leaving his wife perplexed at his not returning. After half an hour she came looking for him. Wingate was at the table and had been drinking. One could picture how her timid questions drove the poor, foolish man into an embarrassed rage, helped by appropriate sound-effects from the “boys" who, by making furtive clucking sounds, had slyly accused him of being henpecked. The unfortunate woman, far from resilient, easily hurt and frightened, had burst into tears and walked dazedly back to the Farbers’ camp.

  We sighed, gave her more brandy. The three of us discussed our options after Mrs. Farber had grown drowsy and Sharon had got her bedded down in her tent.

  “The Enemy doesn’t want a single morsel to get away,” Sharon said. "Whether Hargis knows what he's doing or doesn’t, I think we should expect him to interfere with us any way he can.”

  Ernst and I agreed. "We should make up some kind of raft,” I suggested, "and sail out at midmorning. No more warning the people. Any disclosures of what we mean to do would only inform him better on how to frustrate us.”

  When we walked back we chose a route that gave us a look at Hargis’s party without making us conspicuous to the central group. The affair was well-engineered. The stereo in one of the motor-homes, blaring from its open door, provided a nucleus for a large group of both sexes, many of whom danced in the open space around the vehicle that had been smoothed and prepared for that purpose. The other motor-home was closed and lit from within, and judging from certain humorous sallies directed toward it by those outside, it appeared that Hargis’s inner circle were being

  regaled to pornographic video-tapes there. Meanwhile, the pool table and the Ping-Pong table that had been set up between the two vehicles attracted a mix of campers as spectators or turn-waiters. A completely unanimous atmosphere was established while differing centers of interest maintained the general fascination. There were tubs of popcorn and ice chests of beer, and the combined light and noise of the whole ensemble must have sealed up the celebrants' senses entirely from any perception of the lake and the surrounding forest—from any hint of what lived there that the waters or the trees might have whispered to them had they sat long enough in silence, and listened.

  We slept in the rangers’ house, laying our own bedding on the floor. We kept watches and had all doors and windows locked. Wakefulness was an easy thing in that place. I commit no facile overstatement, but speak in strict faithfulness to the facts when I say that this building—every plank of it—was saturated with hatefulness. The Enemy had feasted here. Here he had waxed in his obscene prosperity. Those walls, if they did not actually observe us, seemed literally to breathe with the power to do so. There was a palpable something in that house which I must, for lack of more precise analogue, liken to cold, but an actively malign cold, a sly, probing chill. After my turn on watch I woke Ernst in time to take two hours’ sleep. I managed to sleep less than an hour and a half and then, to occupy myself, I prepared our breakfast.

  We had fried bread with bacon, and strong coffee laced with bourbon. Though we were silent, we ate with great appetite, and felt fortified. Then we stepped out into the gray light, and went down to make our raft.

  In the maintenance garage were three canoes, old wooden ones. Though the hull of one was cracked near the bow, we saw it could be made watertight without straightening, and we needed mere buoyancy, not navigability. There were also lumber and tools, and we carried all these things down to the water’s edge on the level side of the pier, where Simes had seen Arnold—lying half in the water and half out of it—all but consumed. We set the canoes parallel and nailed three two-by-fours crosswise to their gunwales, and by sheeting this frame with planks we soon had a stout platform floating on three evenly spaced pontoons. We rigged a rope-tow to one end of it, and then it was time to bring the cars in from the lot, and unload our gear.

  The booth was not manned, and when we entered the lot we heard only a sodden silence beyond the huge old trees. On the docks we found no one stirring. The party had run late.

  We drove onto the rangers' road, Sharon towing the generator in a trailer with her Buick, and ourselves driving behind. When, after considerable trouble, we got the generator up on our rather high-riding raft, we had blocks waiting, and nailed the machine firmly over the center of gravity. It would be essentially a buoy, and should be perfectly stable on the lake’s calm waters. We topped off the generator's tanks and strapped two emergency five-gallon cans to two of its legs. The generator’s cable we ran along the towing-yoke; the outlets for our underwater lights we would carry in the stern of the boat where Sharon would be, piloting and anchoring our dive from above. We hitched the raft to the stem of our boat, and towed it out a little way for last adjustments. We checked our wet suits, tanks, floodlights, and explosives. We had an underwater rifle, a "bang-stick” which actually amounted to a short-range twelve-gauge shotgun. Ernst had a casual proficiency with firearms but I was enough of a hobbyist in this childish sport to be, of the two of us, the acknowledged “shot." Thus I was to handle only one of the floodlights and the gun, which possessed a powerful kick. Ernst was to manage the other light and the explosive packet, which we apologetically insisted to Sharon that we take down "just in case,” despite her assurance that the fourth Elder Sign, which Ernst was also responsible for carrying down and casting into the old Simes well, was the only weapon we needed.

  Though the Enemy’s increasing materiality seemed to promise a capacity for harm by shells and explosives, we had no assurance whatever of this. I will confess that even the powerful lights we bore seemed to us a possible weapon, seeing that the Enemy seemed to favor the dark. But we simply did not know, that was the essence of it. Of our explosives Sharon, for her part, said nothing. Of the guns, she tersely approved, saying only, "Some other poor soul like Mr. Gregorius might need us to have them.”

  And it was now clear she would need to be armed against any possible interference by Hargis while she was monitoring our dive. While we were readying our gear, Sharon practiced aiming and dry-fir
ing the Enfield, and working the action. Large, hungry stray dogs had been an occasional threat during her childhood, and she had become so proficient with her father’s rifle as to kill more than a few of them, once she had grown big enough to handle the weapon.

  When we were ready, noon—the time we had chosen for our dive, for maximum light- penetration of the waters—was less than two hours off. The sounds of awakening in the camp had begun to drift to us from a mile upshore, and among them, smudged by distance, came the unmistakable sound of Hargis’s bullhorn.

  "Listen Sharon,” Ernst said, "perhaps you'd like to try a few shots of live ammo, to feel confident with it. You might... be standing guard for some time. .. Sharon laughed.

  "You mean take a few shots to give you confidence in me. I don't mind if I do.”

  Her late brother’s truck had been righted by the sheriff’s deputies and stood now at the edge of the yard. She pointed to it.

  "Take us out a bit and I’ll try for the tires,’ she said. “I know these heavy-duty shopwin- dows on my face don’t inspire faith.”

  "We're already pretty far out for the tires.’

  "Just a bit more—I don’t want that Hargis to even get this close.”

  We got about seventy yards offshore. Oddly, the wantonness of the act didn’t bother us. We were involved in urgencies of a far different order of magnitude. I focused my binoculars on the truck and I had no sooner got a clear image than the gun roared. A long dust- cloud streaked under the truck near the rear tire, and almost instantly, after another roar, I saw the tire flinch and wobble, and a big, tom-out tuft of rubber sprout from its rim. The truck was not even squarely broadside to us. I was about to voice my admiration when the firearm spoke again and the front tire burst. I pulled down the binoculars and saw the suddenly-small truck still rocking in the yard from the collapse of its supports.

  Sharon racked the gun and Ernst simply stared at her with a smile, as I did, for that matter. Sharon said, with a pleased flush, “It’s just something I always had the knack for. It would make my poppa laugh and laugh—he took me out a lot when he saw I had a talent.”