The Color Out of Time Page 3

  We looked at each other, each waiting, I think, for the other to deny what we both so clearly felt. “We must look in on the other ranger,” I said at last. My voice came out feeble and silly. I did not want to go up those stairs. I regretted our whisky, all lavished on Harms, and then remembered my hipflask, and found it still half full of brandy. We drank, and then Ernst pulled his flashlight from his belt.

  This seemed wholly natural, since the idea of groping against the dark walls of the stairwell or hall above for a lightswitch filled me with loathing. The entire house, each plank of it, had, in the last few moments, taken on a shuddersome, nauseating quality. The place was unclean in the fullest sense of that ancient mystic concept.

  We started up the stairs, but before Ernst had even turned on his flash we checked ourselves. For we saw, edging the upper steps, a distinct haloing of unearthly color, and this all-too-familiar taint seemed to pervade the hallway above as well.

  Slowly, slowly we ascended. The cold increased. The stench, if only stench it was, grew sharper, and eerily through it the radio’s wiry little voice fed us a hot tip about record discounts in a distant city. We reached the head of the stairs, and saw one doorway—the nearest—more heavily haloed than the others.

  Its door was half open, and the radio’s voice issued there. We froze where we stood.

  For there had come a muffled stir from the room, and it was, quite definitely, a stealthy noise. It was followed by a sound, as of the shifting of some lax bulk, then a faint creak of springs, and then a soft moaning sound—a man’s voice, that was. And then, still fainter, but most dreadful of all, there was a small, wet noise as of a lapping tongue or, perhaps, some species of suction. And though in those instants I found no imaginable interpretation of what we heard, nevertheless it sent a freezing rush of horror through my entrails. At my side Ernst cried out in a voice cracked with fear:

  “What are you doing? Who are you?” He switched on the flashlight. A big, muscular beam of white light annihilated the dark of the hallway.

  We heard then a startled cry—again from a man’s throat—and an indescribable flop and shuffle followed by a swift, whispery movement. The boards of floor and wall creaked within that room—which still we did not dare approach by the smallest step—and there followed a sense of something departing it. A painful coughing began. This purely human sound unlocked our limbs. We rushed inside. A shirtless man lay half-off the bed, one hand trailing on the floor. The window by his bed was open, and the starlight showed him to have an extremely bad skin condition on neck, torso and arms. It suggested an advanced stage of Harms’ affliction. Here the hundreds of interconnecting fissures of the epidermis were in many places shockingly deep. The coloration showed, in our flashbeam, an unusual blackish tint. Altogether the impression was of something not unlike the patterns silt takes, drying and cracking in a desert wash after the spring rains.

  I confess that our repulsion was great enough that we did not wish to touch him. We gripped the blanket’s edge and gently rolled the man onto his back, centering him on the bed. His face was less seamed and scored than the rest of him and his eyes were fully open, though unfocused. Once he had got the taste of our brandy on his tongue, he willingly took several more swallows. We laid him back, and he subsided almost at once into a doze.

  His breathing was steady and unobstructed, so we covered him, closed his window, and went back downstairs. We found the telephone in a room just off that in which Harms still slept, and our ensuing session with this instrument was so desperately frustrating that I came near shouting with rage. Ernst and I refused to speak to each other of the most uncanny of our recent impressions. Instead we, in effect, transferred all our sense of alarm and urgency onto the business of telephoning for medical aid for the two rangers. At the outset, our call to the operator produced two words, swiftly uttered by the latter: “Hold on!” Nearly a full ten minutes passed before she returned and a series of transfers, broken connections, renewed waits and further transfers began—a procession of infuriating confusions that was to last nearly an hour. The entire Park Regulatory Organization was in convulsions. Ernst and I in turn had fragmentary conversations with four different people, a certain “acting assistant sheriff’s deputy” being the one who was able to speak to us with the fewest interruptions. We learned that we could not have called for help at a worse time.

  Less than an hour before, every vehicle and employee at the Park’s disposal, along with every mobile medical aid in its possession, had set out for a remote valley in the Park’s outer reaches. In this far stormier segment of the vast, mountainous preserve (it is the state’s largest) a wind-caused accident had plunged two buses filled to capacity with two troops of Boy Scouts down into a ravine. The survivors trapped within the wreckage faced death as soon as a thundershower should raise the level of the stream in which the bus was wedged, half-submerged. Summer rainsqualls were common in the area and that sector of the park faced a fifty percent chance of showers before early morning.

  Thus the man’s brusqueness was perhaps forgivable when, after I had reiterated the rangers’ symptoms, he snapped: “Look. Are they dying?”

  “Well, it’s serious, but I can’t say certainly if they’re dying, I don’t—”

  “Then for God’s sake clear the line and wait for the courier. You said he was coming tomorrow. We’ll get a message to him to get there ahead of time if possible, OK? It’s that or drive them out to Hammer Falls yourself. I can’t do the impossible.”

  It is unlikely we would have insisted much beyond this point. Futility, as if it were a cold miasma we breathed in from the house itself, had created an almost physical sickness in both our stomachs. But if we had had any further perserverance in us, Harms himself would have aborted it then, for he walked quite firmly into the room, evidently much refreshed by his sleep.

  “Here now, that’s a Park phone, you give it to me now.” He took the receiver from me. ‘‘Who’s this?” he asked, and, after a moment: “Well this is Harms, and we can wait just fine. I was asleep, and these campers here got worried we were bad off. That’s right, we’ll come down with Nugent. No emergency here, nossir!”

  Harms’ sharpness seemed primarily aimed at the notion that he or his partner were in danger, for he was quite amiable with us as he walked us back out to the porch.

  “I’m obliged for your trouble—but you can’t go making things look desperate when they don’t be. I’ll look after Arnold till Nugent gets here. I feel better. You got more whisky? It helps.”

  “Take the rest of my brandy. We’ll bring by more in the morning.”

  “I’m obliged. We re sick all right, but it ain’t anything unnatural, nor anything an ordinary doctor can’t fix up in no time, just some bug or other is all it is.”

  IV

  On our walk through the lambent dark of the forest, we were much occupied by an odd emphasis in Harms’ last words.

  “Of course he’s very much concerned not to seem an old invalid to his employers, a codger’s touchy pride so to speak,” I offered.

  "Yes but what about his words? 'Unnatural,' 'ordinary.' We mentioned nothing about the ... bizarre side of it all. He’s strongly denying something he’s felt. And indeed, how could he not feel it?”

  I hesitated before answering. "You know I got the feeling it was even more specific than that. I mean precisely because one can feel it so strongly, his stubbornness and certainty are striking. Caught unawares by such emotions and physical symptoms, most people would grasp at aid. It’s as if he’d been warned, told something. He’s affected, yes, but not amazed enough somehow.”

  "Unless we’re simply seeing the depressive effects at work in him, the insidious inertia.” As we neared our boat Mrs. Gregorius waved a fat arm and yoo-hooed us: "Oh professors! Come on and sit down with us now! We have some nice beer. And potato chips. We’ll teach you to play Hearts!” She and her companions drank only cocktails but early on they had seen us drinking beer and somehow formed the impre
ssion that it was all we drank.

  I bowed. It pleased Mrs. Gregorius to think us European in consequence, I suppose, of our being professors, so I tried to be continental with her, as this incidentally made it easier for us to keep our distance. "That is an extremely tempting invitation,” I replied, "but two old—foggies, I believe you say?—two old foggies like us must get our sleep.”

  "Oh bull! You come on now, it’s good beer!” This was Mrs. Chatsworth. The Chats worths were lean midwesterners. She was always saying "Oh bull!” followed by loud sociabilities: "Oh bull! You play twice as sharp as I do, I just had a lucky night!” She wore glasses with rhinestoned frames, though in fairness to her it should be said that they were only moderately rhinestoned.

  I felt we must make some gesture in response to their repeated invitations. At the same time I think that, in the weariness of our long, harrowing day, I sought a simple lightening of our burden, a sharing of the darkness with these temporary neighbors of ours. I saw, from a slightly alarmed movement of all four, that they believed for a minute I was coming aboard. I merely put my hand on the gunwale and spoke in a more courteous proximity:

  "We do appreciate your kindness, but in fact we’ve had a trying day. We’ve just been with the park rangers. Did you know that both of them are quite ill?”

  "Is that a fact?” said Mr. Gregorius. The others blinked. Sickness. And instantly we understood that they didn’t want to hear about it. Fat Mr. Gregorius—even heavier than his wife—had liverish cheeks and probably high blood-pressure too. Mrs. Chatsworth had such a severe cigarette cough as to be probably pre-carcinomic, while her husband, quietest of the group and kidded for being its heaviest drinker, presented, to my thinking, a distinctly jaundiced aspect pointing to some hepatic disorder. Thoughts of disease, of the body’s inexorable erosion, were precisely what they were fleeing by coming here. Their awkward silence, their almost palpable hostility to the news, caused me to frame a much feebler suggestion than that I had been about to venture: "Yes. Help is coming for them. But we hope there is nothing . . . unhealthful about the lake— perhaps some slight taint in the water?” "Oh bull,” said Mrs. Chatsworth, but with none of the friendly tone she usually gave these words.

  Her husband, a bald man with rake-thin limbs and a small pot stomach, said: "Oh hey now. Whole cities drink this water. You gotta know it’s OK. Maybe they picked up some bug.” And they all turned to trade anecdotes of flu bugs with each other, giving me their shoulders.

  As we gathered gear and provisions from our boat, I felt an upwelling of exasperation. "Damn it, Ernst! Others must feel something. They’re thoughtless, they’re heavy drinkers, never alone with the lake; or they’re not observers, younger, stronger—yes, yes, yes! It still doesn’t explain it! The poison about this place is just too strong—or too distinct anyway, too foul to be unnoticed. I mean out of a hundred and fifty other people there can’t be only two who ..."

  “We can only think what we’ve been shown how to think. We’re the only ones who have confronted this thing in its full intensity and learned to define its impact. And now, even at lower intensity, it is still, as you say, perfectly distinct to us. Nevertheless, Gerald"—and here my friend leaned closer and lowered his voice— "I believe we’re feeling the same thing. If only by the slightest degree, I think it’s stronger now, stronger than when we sat here after our hike.”

  We shouldered our gear and, probably to the surprise of our neighbors, set out once more for the highway. We were exhausted; every limb of us felt wrenched and drained of force, and yet we almost double-timed as we approached the limit of the lake’s aura, so grateful to our spirits was the concomitant dwindling of dread. We found, across the highway, a grove sheltered from the night breezes. In my brief instants of consciousness after bedding down, the clean air of that grove was like a balm, and the scent of its untainted trees, a heady wine.

  We woke with the sunrise. So pure was the morning, and so light were our hearts, that the prospect of re-entering the lake's unclean proximity seemed insurmountably loathsome and difficult.

  "We must finish up here. I won’t be chased off by this thing!” Ernst’s outburst reflected my own unspoken wish to flee the place entirely. From the vantage of our night’s "detoxification,” the lake seemed far more hellishly repellent than at any time before.

  "So let’s make a morning’s run of it,” I said, "and get our blood up for the job.”

  We cached our gear where we’d slept, changed our boots for our lighter shoes, and set off, carrying the pair of canteens and the fifth of bourbon we’d brought for Harms.

  We ran first out the highway for about a mile, then doubled back and plunged at full stride past the tollbooth and down the road to the rangers' house. The ploy helped, and perhaps too there was some diminution of the aura at this hour. But an ugly residuum was undeniably present. A sudden souring of mood and upsurgence of painful or grief-filled recollections, an almost physical sense of menace, a cringing of the flesh—these our momentum and the aeration of our blood dimmed, but did not efface.

  Harms answered our knock with a promptness, and displayed a smiling, showy pep that told us he had been watching for us. His face was probably no worse than before, but seen in natural light, it had more power to shock. The whisky pleased him, but he was noncommittal about using only the water we’d brought, and changed the subject. "I feel just fine. Arnold's took some oatmeal and coffee—skin looks bad though, I’ll say that. Well by Jesus, is that the spider you were talking about?” The obese black widow was still sprawled out in its web, for its perch a yard above the door was still in shadow. “My my that is a big one! You wait here and watch this.”

  He ducked inside and after a moment returned with a .22 pistol. Scarcely seeming to aim, he fired, and the huge bulb of the spider’s satiny abdomen burst like an exploded bubble. Harms winked at us. "Going to be just fine, and much obliged," he said. He returned inside, and closed the door.

  We had run almost out of the yard, when Ernst said: "Look!”

  The upper side window, Arnold's, was open, and Arnold stood gaping out of it at us. That side of the house took the morning sun directly. Arnold’s fissured, scabrous chest, and peeling face, looked profoundly repulsive in the light’s merciless clarity. We waved. He only stared. And his eyes, dreadful and white-rimmed in their fixity, were a perfect enigma, for they presented either idiot vacancy or paralyzed horror, I could not for my life determine which.

  "Do you see marks on the wall?” Ernst asked me suddenly out of our rapt silence. "From his windowsill—there—on down in a diagonal down to the wall's lakeside, lower corner?” Ernst’s voice might have been some magic incantation, so completely did it transport me from that place and moment, back to the dark staircase of the night before. And as my eye traveled the line he described, a prickling horror traveled up my nape. The marks were not distinct—scarcely more than abrasions of the weathered siding. It was the sequence of them, so damnably coherent though its units were so vague, that made me smell the stench, and feel the queasy, waiting darkness of that moment before Ernst’s light-beam had demolished the strangling shadows. We had taken advantage of the phone call’s hiatus, and not spoken of it since. Now I said: "We felt something leave that room, did we not? Wasn’t that precisely the feeling?”

  "That was precisely the feeling.”

  I looked at my dear friend of twenty years. His biting, black eyes, snowcapped as it were by the shaggy brows, were almost humorous. I said to him in an awed tone:

  "We’re mad, Ernst.”

  "As march hares. Remember the Najal myth of the Watchers? The watchers-against-evil? The ‘men whose thoughts are prepared’? It’s been given to us to be such men, Gerald.” "We must have breakfast, and a drink, and we must talk.”

  Ernst nodded. "We must have eggs and Canadian bacon and biscuits, and then several large whisky-coffees, and we must talk. We must prepare.”

  V

  We built a small (and illegal) fire at our highway-side
camp, and ate like wolves. For our Irish coffee it was necessary to return to the boat, where our whisky was, but a new energy and objectivity had entered our mood, and we did not find it difficult to walk back, having devised a clear agenda for ourselves once we should arrive there.

  First, I set up my portable typewriter, while Ernst made and spiked the coffee. Then, our spirits buoyed by generous infusions of this beverage, we set to making fieldnotes of our entire six days at the lake. We used the technique we had developed for the few archaeological "digs” we had accompanied, strictly as amateurs of course. I wrote a wide-spaced first draft, in discussion with Ernst, and then he went over it and interlineated additions.

  This process brought formerly disregarded things to mind. The very first day one of the children had energetically run up and down the docks. His Daddy had run over a fish, a carp he thought it was, in a shallow cove at the west end of the lake. The fish, he swore, had been a third the size of the boat. "Just like an old log! Like we just woke it up by hitting it! It went off real dazed. Mom said we must've knocked it silly!”

  His family had left the following day, largely due to the derision his tale roused among other campers. A nickname was circulated for the boy, who had a nasal voice and gawky posture and was not the type of boy who is automatically popular among adults. They had called him "Big Fish”—he had pouty lips that were rather fishlike. We even remembered the Chatsworths and Gregoriuses chuckling over the matter. The wretched youth awoke such obstreperous ridicule from his peers with the naive energy of his boasting, that there followed tears, scufflings, and the Fish family’s departure the next afternoon. Ernst recalled catching a glimpse of the mother's face at the window of their car as the family pulled out.