The Color Out of Time

by Michael Shea

  XIV

  We spoke little as we sailed out. I was experiencing—and my friends as well—a queasy and disturbing emotional change. Our spirits, I must point out, were high. When one has prepared carefully and at length, there is a fierce pleasure in the moment of fulfillment. For all our consciousness of danger, I think we felt a measure of exuberant immunity from harm. But then began the change. It was a sensation one might have if, walking in a public aquarium between bright tanks on a sunny Sunday, he suddenly found the light growing less, the tanks vaster, dimmer, with ever more gigantic submarine brutes swooping near the glass. The way steepens, and narrows, and the gay crowd grows haggard, dark, becomes a throng of mad-eyed, infernal victims, while immense multibrachiate shapes—shell-encrusted, big as ships—boil and writhe against the puny glass.

  As the public beach hove in sight, I felt I must acknowledge these feelings. Out of the silence I said, "I feel afraid... overtowered. By evil. An immense evil.”

  "Yes,” said Erast. "A crushing against the spirit. Something mocks and terrifies, crowds up against me and makes my heart race. It's the aura. It has returned.”

  And suddenly the sensation, so provocative of lurid images, was brought into focus. It was the Enemy's presence just as we had formerly come to know it, but with the addition of ... what? Sharon’s ancient stone burned against my wrist with a coolness it never lost, impervious to my body’s heat. In some indescribable way, the presence of this stone made possible a much greater sensitivity to the Enemy, and at the same time it created that curious sense of insulation from the Enemy expressed in my imaginings by the glass in the aquarium tanks. Somehow, because of this stone, the Enemy was nearer, and I was at the same time—somehow—more defended against it. But after we had talked and agreed that we shared these sensations, one thing remained to chill and perplex us: the fact that the Enemy, after having assumed what seemed so plainly to be a state of concealment, had, abruptly, cast off its disguise. Was it that detection by such people as might now prove sensitive to its aura posed no danger to the Enemy now?

  ''We've got to warn them again,” Sharon said, and we could not but agree. We put in toward shore, and I readied our futile little plastic megaphone.

  The afternoon was particularly brilliant. The lake surface, finely tooled with dazzles of sunlight, seemed some supple metal, both molten and cold. The sky was infinitely pure and deep, a wholly different blue, yet as rich and unearthly as the lake’s. The vacationers were up and milling—though few craft were out on the lake—and their garish gear and clothing had a clean, carnival look. As for the trees surrounding all—though here some psychological factor might have distorted my perception—their greenness was rich, lush and glossy to a point that bordered on the hallucinatory.

  We did not put in too close. Hargis was a dangerous man, and the Enemy’s vigilance would aggravate what was worst in his own natural predispositions. As we hove to a short distance outside the float-line, a number of heads turned. The camp, apparently, remembered the three odd oldsters, and now we had this curious raft atop three canoes. There was some laughter at us, I thought, but without Hargis's management, ridicule was not the crowd’s primary reaction. There seemed on the contrary to be some curiosity. And surely there was among them some dormant sense of that uneasy, unearthly thing in those waters that served them as a kind of playground and parking-lot for their large, bright toys. I spoke quickly, foreseeing Hargis’s quick reaction once my voice should reach him.

  "Fellow campers. Ladies and gentlemen!" (How I wished for some of that natural demagoguery Hargis had!) "Please listen to our last warning. There is danger here! This lake is dangerously infested. It is not a contamination. It is an infestation. There is a dangerous... organism in these waters!”

  As my words came out I almost ground my teeth at my own ineffectiveness. I could feel the feebleness of such words—infestation, organism. These were middle-American vacationers I was trying to rouse, and I was a white-haired kook shouting flaccid abstractions at them.

  "Oh my God! Oh Lordy me! There's KOOTIES in the water!” It was the bullhorn that lashed these words across the docks and beach. Hargis’s big shape, barefoot and wearing only trunks, leapt out onto the sand, did a wobbly walk of quailing dread to the water, stuck one foot in it and did a prodigious back-leap, blaring out:

  "Kooties! The water's full of em! Run for your lives!” He had a large laugh going, all eyes on him. The children who were in the water immediately took up the game of writhing and shrieking and pushing one another into it. The merry clamor was quite enough to blot out my scarcely amplified shout.

  "There is a danger to your health! A physical danger!” I struggled for concision. Hargis had straddled and launched a rubber raft. He had the bullhorn in one hand and a can of beer in the other and was cutting across every sentence of mine with jovialities aimed at this or that crony in the crowd. "Hair of the dog that bit me,” he said raising the beercan, getting a new laugh. Then: "Oh, you should laugh. And look at Harold over there, on his third can by now!” And so on.

  I stopped trying, and waited for him to paddle out. He did so by kicking his legs, and overall it was a good ploy. The physical feat displayed his powerful body—always an important point in these male dominance-hierarchies—while he was also, as the group’s "shaman,” decontaminating the waters by this ritual entry of them, this display of his own unharmed condition in them. Meanwhile his whole joking air worked to decathect us and our message of any threat in the crowd’s eyes. Behind me Ernst muttered, “He’s very good. We’ll never break them from his influence. Let’s go.”

  “Excuse me gentlemen.” Now Hargis was addressing us with the bullhorn. The crowd buzzed, ready for a show. "Are you good people from the Forestry Service? Can you show us some cree-dentials?”

  "No. We are campers, just like yourselves.” I played into his lead, taking the turns he gave me because at least then I was heard.

  "Well now you know my wife went down and called the service from the phone down the road. Yesterday afternoon. And at the office they never heard of any quarantine or contamination warning up here. Now just what do you make of that?”

  The phone call may or may not have been a lie—it didn’t matter. I shouted, "There are fifty-two boat trailers in the parking lot. There are right now a total of forty-seven boats on the lake. Count them yourselves. Five families are missing!”

  This rang in a perfect silence. Everyone heard. And then I realized that the silence it rang in was wrong, was terribly, unnaturally complete. The breeze had disappeared, leaves and water were perfectly mute. And then, just as a questioning murmur began—‘families missing?... boat trailers?' —there came a noise of creaking wood, a dry, wrenching sound as widespread as the beach itself.

  We saw the cause before the people on the shore did. In the dead stillness of the windless noon sunlight, all those huge, gnarled trees that hemmed the beach had begun to move. Slowly and stiffly, with a cold, reptilian sloth, the giant boughs began to gesture, and to writhe. Then, when a few on the beach saw, and screamed, the crowd as one turned and, in its turn, cried out.

  Though each tree’s movement was entirely aimless, it had a terrifyingly sentient quality. Each giant moved in shuddersome discovery of its flexibility and power and displayed, with an uncanny pantomimetic articulacy, a vengeful and evil will.

  Though to me it seemed incredible that anyone should approach these demented titans, several of the boatless families immediately snatched up minimal armloads of gear and began heading toward them. I suppose the character of their unnatural animation was only really obvious to us, who knew of the Enemy. These frightened folk assumed some unspeakable affliction or contagion, and had no thought of malign function in this unearthly display. There were several moderately wide intervals between trees, spaces which the movements of the branches did not seem to threaten. Three small groups—ignoring my shouts, if the general uproar even allowed them to hear them—had shortly drawn near such gaps and stood
hesitating, watching the trees a moment longer to be sure no injury threatened. The youngest, a couple with a babe in arms, moved first. The young man took his wife’s hand, and held his child in his other arm, rather as a runner holds a football. They dove into the shadowy arch of branches.

  I still see, in sweating dreams, the horrible swiftness of the two trees flanking their rush. Revealing a hideous limbemess that they had not betrayed up till then, both trees bowed laterally down on the couple—bent at the waist, as it were, and when they straightened, each bore one of the couple aloft in a complex, snakish grip of twigs and branches. Uttering indescribable, ruptured howls, the three victims were torn in fragments in a spray of exploded blood-vessels.

  At the same time a family of four, who had just checked their rush and were recoiling from the attempt, falling over each other in the process, were snatched up en masse by the swiftly stooping giant from which they had not recoiled far enough. They too died screaming, and were flung down in tom sides and splintered haunches, brightly clothed slabs of meat. Panic had taken the beach. People crowded into the water or, with more presence of mind, their boats.

  Our own moment had unmistakably come and Ernst was already swinging us round and heading us out to the open lake. I made a last attempt, and through desperate effort, made myself heard by some:

  "Don’t go in the water. Stay on the beach, out of the trees’ reach. Don’t go in the water!”

  My warning seemed to be having some effect, and Ernst cut the engines to give me some chance to develop it. A few people had begun to echo my cries and to drag their family or neighbors from the water. And then the Enemy moved again, and overwhelmed our efforts.

  Thus far only the big trees partitioning the beach from the parking lot had wakened. Now everything that grew ashore awoke, including the big trees in the camping areas, among which many campers, mobile homes, and tents were nestled. The lakeside forest seethed, and massy boughs reached down like misshapen, covetous hands, to seize all that lay in reach. We saw the biggest vehicles toppled and hammered to pieces, tents smashed till they emitted an infernal music of shouts and groans, the death-cries of those who still slept—or had sought to hide—within. One great oak lifted a truck and camper into the air where half a dozen boughs grappled it, crushing its frame like a styrofoam cup. From its buckled- out rear door a young woman half-emerged, and hung screaming for help, her waist still pinched by the wreckage. Her husband was on the beach, and he ran toward her, reaching up-for her hands, which hung almost in his reach. As if with conscious malice the tree paused an instant while their hands clawed the air to join, and then it gave the camper another squeeze of machinelike power. The death agony straightened the woman’s body like a galvanized limb, and then she slumped, and blood drizzled from the sleeve of one slack arm like water from a rain-gutter, drenching the husband. He roared, leapt upward, and ended his life in the branches' murderous entanglements.

  Now any further tenure of the shore, of this bit of suddenly demented earth, was beyond the power of the panicked crowd. They stampeded onto the docking-floats or straight into the water. And Hargis, who had sat as a dreamer on his air-mattress, a stunned audience to the violation of reality as he knew it, now awakened. In the mass terror he surely saw the opportunity of renewed control. He could lead them still if he led them in the direction their terror drove them. He brought his bullhorn up.

  “Everyone aboard his craft! Everyone! Take anyone aboard that doesn't have a boat. Help each other out and once you've cleared the docks follow my boat onto the lake. Orderly and careful! Orderly and slow! So we don’t foul each other up. Everyone aboard his craft!”

  We could do nothing here, and the time had clearly come for the performance of what we could do. Ernst gunned us toward the open water. As the shore dropped astern of our raft Hargis's image dwindled much faster than his voice did. He named some of his cronies as deputies and began to make an efficient process of the gathering up of each boatless family and the loading of them aboard different craft. Under his supervision the campers should at least reach the open waters in safety, whatever degree of safety might await them there. We soon lost sight of them round a bend in the lakeshore.

  The location of the old Simes farm was several miles from the beach in a large inlet on the lake’s northern side. We had old survey maps and had been able to compute the exact distance between the site and certain landmarks among the hills around the lake, and by triangulating on these we arrived at a spot about a half mile off-shore. Our contour map indicated that the depth at this point was a bit over a hundred feet. When we had dropped anchor Sharon said:

  “If you allow for being a hundred feet up in the air, that's just about how Dutchman's Nose used to look from the Simes's front yard.’’ She pointed to a stark crag in the ridge of hills. “Dear God, more than forty years it’s been. I was almost cheated of my revenge, cheated by time, but now at last it's come.”

  We started the generator, fed the lights over the side of the raft, submerged them, and turned them on. The potent shafts of light stabbed down through the deep blue like blades.

  We donned our wet-suits, and Ernst arranged on his shoulder the coil of wiring for our charges. We had the light cables rolled up on drums which with a tug we could turn ourselves. Lastly we arranged a signal-cord attached to a bell. We had worked out a directional code in numbers of rings so we could cue Sharon if a change of position was needed to keep the raft more or less directly above us as we searched for the farm. I took up the bang-stick, and Ernst the fourth stone talisman, and we were ready.

  We said good-bye to each other then, just in case. Sharon took our hands. “Ernst. Gerald. I’ve always thought of myself as a watcher at the threshold. Mr. Lovecraft called himself that, and he told me that I would be one too, and a good one. But he always said that there were also mankind’s natural sentinels. They could be anyone, he said—man, woman, child. All such people have in common is that they are watchful, they know how to listen to their world with all their senses, and they are alert to the aura of Those Outside. And any other watcher should be glad of their help when it offers by chance. I hoped Hazzard would be my sentinel, but his belief was too weak, and the Enemy took him as it would most, because he had no alertness to his own heart—he had no talent for believing what his own mind whispered to him. Only when it was in him, and feeding off him, could he believe... But even while my planning and preparing was mocked by the Enemy, my luck was giving me my allies, giving me you two. May God be with us all.”

  There was nothing more to say. We all embraced, and then Ernst and I went over, down into that silence which we filled with the steady roar of our own breathing. We hauled on the light-cables, paying out thirty feet or so, and then began to move down them, hand over hand.

  XV

  Sharon had watched the little turbulence of our descent for no more than a few minutes when, from around the distant curve of the lakeshore the entire flotilla of recently launched campers appeared. In on disorderly jostle, every craft on the lake came edging toward our position.

  They were a good mile and more distant, but were making fair time, and one boat was conspicuously in advance of the rest. As Sharon watched she soon made out that this was Hargis’s boat. The man himself stood in the prow with his bullhorn, while one of several cronies on board with him piloted.

  We ought to have expected this. In the general panic we, with our two warnings, would appear to those people to possess some possible clue to the madness that had just descended on them. Hargis would be quick to see the necessity of pursuing us if he was to keep the group in hand. It seemed likely that he intended a pretty rough handling of us. As the doom-sayers we were, in the popular mind, also the doom-bringers. Excellent scapegoats. It seemed to Sharon highly improbable that they would tolerate our explanation, or allow us to pursue our admittedly bizarre mission. When they were within two hundred yards Hargis spoke through the bullhorn. "Ahoy there! You people have got some explaining to do!” Sharon
almost smiled, thinking of the times we had tried to explain, and this man had prevented us.

  She went to the rack in the cabin and got down the Enfield. It had to be used now, as it would not be possible to have the same effect with the rifle once the mass of boats got close enough to surround our position. She aimed carefully for the wide, bright mouth of the bullhorn, and squeezed a slug into it at well over a hundred and seventy-five yards. The explosive squawk with which the bullhorn died made an impression on the other boats, as did the sight of Hargis’s big frame pitching backwards from the bow and knocking down the man at the wheel. The boat slewed around, kicking up a wall of spray and threatening to capsize. Sharon kept firing—carefully selecting her targets—while they righted the boat and reversed her course. She destroyed their cabin's windows, splintered their wheel and disabled one of their outboards, emptying the clip after them.

  She reloaded the rifle and then took up her binoculars. The whole cluster of boats was retiring, though she saw that Hargis was on his feet again. His jaw was bound in some kind of bandaging, and he leaned on the shoulder of another man, but the imperative gestures he made toward his boatmates displayed to Sharon Hargis’s continued mastery of the rest. He took a chair once he had got the man of his choosing at the wheel. His boat—moving more sluggishly now on one engine— rounded the outskirts of the flotilla, and as it circled the other boats, Hargis’s lieutenants shouted instructions at the pack through their cupped hands. The upshot was that the pack retired perhaps half a mile, and regrouped.

  Sharon, while remaining alert to the bell of our signal-line, set herself to studying our pursuers through the binoculars. All the boats had stopped, but it was an uneasy pause, for the agitations of their engines had left the water queasy, and now they drifted into one another, jostling on the lake. Hargis’s boat was making its way from one to another of the pack, and his men were calling some inquiry as they passed near each vessel. One of their inquiries bore fruit; Hargis’s boat edged near, gunwales knocked, and a rifle was handed across to Hargis’s lieutenants. After this his boat resumed its quest among the subject flock.