The Color Out of Time Page 4

  "I was struck at the time,” he told me, "and now the more I consider it, the clearer her look’s meaning becomes. Because there was no anger or vindictiveness in it, or even consciousness of the other campers. The woman was simply afraid, deeply frightened. And at the very last—it was what snagged the impression in my mind, I think—I saw her sweep her eyes over the entire scene—water, shoreline, hills. It was the place as a whole that frightened her.”

  "Seeing a nine-foot carp in the water—and we can assume they actually saw it, I think— would be pretty frightening.”

  "No, it was that and more, Gerald. One confrontation with an unusual animal doesn’t leave that deep and engrossing kind of fear, not after a whole day has passed. I think she saw the color, and became aware of the aura, perhaps saw it concentrated in the animal, and afterwards was able to perceive its general diffusion.”

  "Good. I remember feeling that their leaving was a distinct over-reaction to their boy’s misadventure. If we take the inference as sound, then we have both color and aura being manifested just about when the rangers fell sick. Since they’ve always drunk the water, its sick-making properties had a sudden onset. Perhaps the color and the aura, then, at least at their present level of intensity, have also had a sudden onset. Against this is the fact that giantism, unnatural motility, feebleness appear strikingly in other life forms, and such characteristics argue long periods of contamination, a matter of months or weeks at the least.”

  "That gives us an endemic condition which has lately, within the last week or so, begun to—”

  "Yoo hoo! Good morning, professors!” Mrs. Gregorius, perhaps feeling apologetic about last night’s slight coldness, waved to us from their boat. She wore a blouse and shorts of a striking, not to say alarming, floral pattern. Her chubby husband, in matching trunks, waved too and held up a picnic hamper, comically pantomiming its great weight.

  "Little outing!” he called. We smiled and nodded and called out inane encouragements. Mrs. Chatsworth appeared from the hold under an extravagantly wide-brimmed straw hat and waved a smoking cigarette at us, ordering us to join them at once for “a wonderful picnic with plenty of beer," and telling us our regretful excuses were so much bull. Presently the convivial four—three of them already at the card table while Mr. Gregorius piloted— cast off. Their boat, the Venturesome Gal, swung out onto the lake in a smooth, lazy arc.

  We worked with our notes awhile longer, but soon felt we had exhausted the resources of recall and speculation. It was time to undertake the exploratory work we’d set ourselves. Our aim was a second tour of the lake, this time from just offshore, with the purpose of simply adding to our stock of observations.

  In truth, we had a second purpose that we spoke less of. It was in preparation for this latter that we put in at the first secluded cove we came upon. Here I unpacked, oiled and loaded my pistol, a .357 magnum revolver, while Ernst did likewise with his Enfield. Despite my profound disturbances of recent days, the act of strapping on my harness—I have an arrangement that lets the gun ride just below my left armpit—struck me with a powerful sense of the ludicrous and melodramatic. I made some joke about what schoolboys we were with our lethal toys, but Ernst shook his head, refusing to smile. It irritated me

  "You can’t deny it’s foolish," I told him. "The two elements simply don’t go together. What has an environmental aura to do with a concrete, single . . . form, or animal, such as might climb a wall or be hit with a bullet?”

  "The mere fact you say that shows me your intuitive conviction is precisely like mine: the two phenomena have to do with each other, are somehow related, different though they seem in their natures. They are aspects of one and the same evil. Deny that if you really believe otherwise.”

  “The melancholy, infuriating fact is, my friend, that I do not believe otherwise. And I have other bizarre convictions. I think, for instance, that Arnold was not just sick from drinking the water. I think he looked the way he did because whatever it was that climbed up that wall had been feeding on him."

  I am not sure how Ernst took that confession—I know that I terrified myself with it, in spite of my humorous self-defense. Ernst only nodded, letting the thought hang over us through the long, sunlit silence. “Guns feel appropriate now,” I said after a while, "but also futile.” We poured ourselves three inches of bourbon each. Homo faber, Man the Maker, has wrought in his time many marvels, but few have made so many glad as whisky has. We opened chasers of icy brown beer and sipped them as Ernst swung us out upon our circuit.

  Landlocked bodies of water can possess a mysterious element of personality that the sea, in its universal sprawl, lacks. I have always loved mountain lakes, and have had a lifelong acquaintance with more than a few. This one was like none I had ever known. In that long afternoon’s tour of its every cove and inlet, my feeling, for the first time, was not one of discovering the character or ‘‘face’’ of the lake. Rather, it was as if we were exploring the contours of an immense mask, a vast deception. The water’s gold and blue, the sky’s flawless, blazing emptiness, the slopes velvet-lush with the forest's infinitude of greens—all this splendor had an almost nauseating vividness, a poisonous tinge of exaggeration, falsity. Meanwhile, beneath the fair surfaces—under the water, within the trees—we heard and felt incessant restive energies. The water’s spasmodic lurch and chuckle, the forest’s buzz and rustle, made the air rumorous, and time and again we seemed to catch furtive bursts of speech, spates of half-deciphered obscenity, sniggerings, or foul, swift allusions to unspeak- abilities beneath on the lake-bottom where a long-drowned forest rotted.

  The hours unrolled. We drank a good deal, and felt it less and less. For all we sensed, we actually saw nothing. We spoke more and more briefly, and finally, not at all.

  But just as the sun was touching the hills—we had covered a good two thirds of the lake’s rim— Ernst burst out:

  "Just look at that color! The intensity! Look at it. The farthest thing you could imagine from that other color. And yet this must be one of the ugliest days I have ever lived through!”

  "Do you hear something?” I asked him. "Listen.” I was at the wheel now, and I throttled down. In the absence of our own noise, a small, harsh sound came chopping over the lake’s emptiness. Then, at the same moment, we both saw the little whiteness—perhaps a mile off—speeding toward us from the opposite shore.

  In a few moments more, I identified the cause of the sound’s initial oddness.

  "It’s going full throttle straight across the waves—hear the extra roar at each trough? Yes, see how it's just hammering right through?” The evening breeze had raised a gentle pattern of two-foot waves out in the lake’s center, and the pilot of that boat was charging athwart it without seeming to care about the rough ride he must be having.

  "Looks like he’ll curve in upshore from us,” Ernst said.

  "He’s not slowing at all! It’s the Venturesome Gal, see?”

  "Why isn't he slowing?”

  As the craft charged into the smoother waters of the perimeter, and picked up speed, it must have been moving at well over thirty- five knots. It seemed not so much guided, as to be following a set trajectory, as if Mr. Gregorius, or whoever piloted it, were holding the rudder at a fixed position and accelerating to the maximum.

  "He's not going to stop!” Ernst cried. I swung us out and sped toward where the Gal was aimed. Well before we reached her she plunged at full throttle from our view, and into a cove upshore. A second later we heard a grinding and splintery crash, and a bit after, the gargle of snuffed engines.

  She was gutted against a granite outcrop which had spiked the bows and held her fast. The afterwash of the impact had drowned both motors. I brought us in gingerly, as near as was safe. The Gal's plunge had taken her over a good ten yards of dangerous shallows, however, and I had to put in a short distance away from her. I had no sooner nosed up to the bank than Ernst leapt ashore with the Enfield.

  "One at a time, Gerald! We have a duty
to be cautious.”

  I had to moor our bow and anchor us astern to keep our engines away from the steep granite shelf of the bank, and I did not argue with him. As I worked I watched him make his way to the Gal, calling our neighbors’ names as he went. Silence answered him, and he clambered over the nearest gunwale. The latter was tilted up, obscuring my view of the boat’s topsides. I heard Ernst, as he dropped aboard, grunt with shock. Long minutes passed, and then I heard him cry aloud. I had just secured us, and I jumped ashore. I was not halfway to the Gal before Ernst reappeared. He was unharmed, but visibly appalled. He grasped my shoulder with his free hand, and glared into my eyes. His face was bloodless, dry-lipped, and his voice scarcely his own.

  "You must see it too, Gerald. We are both Watchers, maybe the only fully alerted witnesses. We must know the Enemy. So look on its work. Go look. It is unspeakable.”

  I climbed aboard. The reeking mess that clogged the afterdeck was a tangle of inanimate objects, and yet the whole spoke of human agony with a hideous, instantaneous eloquence that a jumble of actual corpses could scarcely have surpassed. The card table had been torn from its footings in the deck, and shattered; the chairs were tortured knots of metal tubing; the deck was garishly smeared with guacamole and bean dip, crushed potato chips, abundant glass shards and puddled whisky—and with other, more pitiful and repulsive substances as well. For regurgitated food, and excrement, were there to testify to helpless, prolonged struggles, and poor homo sapiens in the last extremes of panic and desperate pain. Last of all did I distinguish more particular remnants, like fragments of those simple, genial personalities we had known so little: a pair of rhinestoned glasses, a gaudy zori sandal, a halter top with a glaring floral pattern.

  When I had stood gazing for a long time, Ernst’s voice came up to me from the shore: "Look in the cabin, Gerald!” And so I went forward, cringingly through the feculent debris. And looking in, I saw the navigator where, thrown from his seat, he lay on his back along the narrow cabin floor.

  I must say here that I have, in a long and not inactive life, seen more than my share of the grim, lethal miseries to which flesh is heir. Yet I was not then prepared to face what I saw, and I can scarcely now support the anguish of recalling it. The bright floral print shorts that the navigator wore were as they had been that morning, but they were the only thing about Mr. Gregorius that was. For as to his body, once so glossy and softly sleek, there was now only such a seamed husk as a spider leaves of a worm, a leached and shriveled bag that once had held a fat life. Mr. Gregorius was a blackened, cheesy residue of flesh upon a skeleton of chalk—for just as easily as chalk, the bones of that hand snapped as the thing, struggling to rise, leaned on it.

  Yes! It moved! That face, that twisted charcoal mask—its cracked jaw stirred, the black, dehydrated lips stretched and snarled to bring words from the pithless shaft of the throat. It moved and strained to lift itself even while its fingers snapped with the slightest pressure, and its eyes were no more than lumps of blind, snotty tissue, dry as raisins in the shrivelled sockets. The blasphemy! That such a thing should stir, and feel, and know!

  I here declare for any man to read what my next act was, and I feel myself safe from prosecution by anyone with a human soul still active in him. I drew my revolver, and then and there administered a speedy balm to Mr. Gregorius, poor, luckless man, casual traveller in an unsuspected hell. What had his writhings and gibbered pleas availed him against the remorseless gluttony of those inconceivable jaws? Two slugs—in breast and temple (my hand was steady to the need!)—extinguished his last, feebly guttering awareness of the nameless violation that had been worked upon him.

  At Ernst's alarmed shout, I floundered dizzily off that accursed craft. His eyes turned a horrified question upon me, and I said, with what remained of my voice: "He was still alive!"

  Though my friend’s shock was profound, he mastered himself sufficiently to get us aboard our boat and pilot us swiftly out to open waters, while for a long time I sat slack and dazed, in a growing paralysis, feeling as if I had just, with those two bullets, slain forever all Sanity, all Peace left in the world.

  VI

  We went out onto the middle of the lake and drifted there. We shared more bourbon, not speaking. Dark fell, and deepened, and though we struggled so long in silence, still we could not accept what we had witnessed—could not allow that it had happened, and go on from there. At last Ernst said: “It’s no good resisting and denying! It was reality!”

  "Yes," I said. "And we should have gone below, in case the other three were down there. But I couldn’t do it—not then, nor now.” "Neither could I. No. But I noticed they had the stern-line out, trailing a broken branch in the water. They were moored somewhere. The ... Enemy struck. I think Mr. Gregorius was in the cabin when it did, because all the cabin glass was broken, as if by something trying to get in. It got in. And it fed. But maybe it couldn't get its victim out. The other three on the afterdeck, once they were stricken, they would be easy to drag off the boat. Perhaps as the Enemy was doing this, intending to return for its more firmly lodged victim, Gregorius managed to start the engines and tear loose.”

  I was nodding agreement even as I gaped with disbelief at the delirious images our speculations presented to us. "Sane inferences, or stark madness? I swear I can’t tell, Ernst! Every thought feels like lunacy, yet it has to be lunacy to deal with this at all. A thing that feeds on horror! That’s what it is, what it must be. That its victims should still live after such fearful depletions and inner damage— it's propping up their lives as it feeds! Feasting on their anguish just as much as on their bodies. It is a thing that knows, chooses, relishes . .."

  "And the aura,” Ernst said, "the color—they are part of it somehow. They breed anguish in the mind even when the body is untouched.”

  We had more whisky. Speaking out had crystallized our horror, and now both will and purpose began to be revived in us. Helped by the liquor’s heat, and no more than a spark at first, anger kindled—I felt it gratefully at the center of my heart, thawing the cold dread out of me. Presently we arrived at a plan of action.

  The search for the Venturesome Gal's fatal anchorage must wait till daylight. The courier, who was due at any time after dark, could help us set it in motion, and meanwhile, before he took them off, we wanted to speak more closely with the two rangers, Arnold especially. For it seemed almost certain to us now that he had suffered direct contact with that which had wrought the afternoon’s horror, and we urgently wanted any hint available of its aspect and nature.

  Perhaps I will cause no surprise by saying that a certain disparity existed between what Arnold had suffered, and the fate of the Gregorius party—and that this disparity had a hideous suggestiveness that much occupied us as we steered for the rangers’ pier. Last night the Enemy had fed far more lightly, and fled the approach of two men. Today it had ravaged four at a stroke, and had exhibited a hellishly total gluttony.

  We had expected some difficulty in making out the rangers’ house, which had been so scantly lit the night before. In fact a veritable signal fire pinpointed the pier for us while we were still well out upon the lake. The shred of bright orange flame appeared to be on the pier's foot, and for this reason we feared it was an accidental blaze. But as we drew near, we heard a frantic motor-roar, followed by a confused sound of crashing vegetation. After a moment a pair of headlights came on at a crazy angle amid the trees below the embankment of the rangers' yard. We sped up to the pier, and hurried ashore.

  It was a bizarre—even a diabolically comic— convergence of confusion, for even as we ran toward the flame we heard another vehicle swing into the yard and brake with a startled skid. Its door squeaked and banged. And then we had reached the fire.

  What we at first took to be the jutting ends of the timbers that composed the fire had almost immediately ceased to seem so. They were too suggestively shaped. They were in fact two arms, and two legs. The air was heady with gasoline. We reeled near and gaped
upon the black, scabbed trunk that was the fire’s core. A horn began to sound—a shattering noise across the lake’s quiet. Still we could not take our eyes away from the cracking, spitting stump amid the flames.

  "Gerald! Look at the hands!”

  The mere turning of my eyes in obedience to my friend's harsh whisper brought—with new horror—understanding. Several inches of unscorched sleeve and cuff remained on each forearm—yet the wrists and hands protruding from them were blackened, split and twisted in a manner that would have suggested severe burning to anyone who had not seen what we had seen scant hours before.

  "Harms,” I said. "He did what I did. We’ve got to leave here now, Ernst, and bring help. Organization ... weapons.”

  "We’ll follow the courier out."

  The horn sounded again. The fire seemed to threaten nothing, and we left it burning and ran round the house, into the yard. The courier— for so the park service truck in the yard’s center declared him to be—stood at the brink of the yard, beaming his flashlight down upon the other truck, Harms’. It lay on its side amidst the broken saplings below. Harms was in the cab, one arm flapping dazedly at the door, to free himself, and the other blaring on the horn with fury at the courier’s immobility. Ghastly comedy! So the courier’s trance would have been in the face of the old man’s impotent fury—had it not been for that same face’s aspect, its broken, bulging lips, its seamed and dryly pulsing throat! That face was very nearly as bad as Arnold’s had been the night before, and in the flashlight beam it was— contorted by toil and fear—like a living gargoyle’s.

  The courier, a slight and youngish man, started tremendously as we came up to him, for we, foolish in our own alarm, surged out of the dark at his sides without hailing him. We were later to learn that his aid had been enlisted in the evacuations of the bus disaster’s victims; he had gone sleepless all the previous night, and had during those hours seen some mangled unfortunates quite near at hand. At the time, however, we felt that his near-panic— such indeed was his state—was adequately accounted for by the sudden vision of Harms’ face.