The Color Out of Time Page 8

  As we had half foreseen, Nugent had proved an efficient, if inadvertent, promoter of the Enemy’s aims. It was as if he had been used, and then destroyed, for, indeed, we might have returned in four days rather than five, had we not, the previous morning, detoured to visit Nugent’s widow. But though the harm that wretched man had done was great, it was less deeply disturbing than the Enemy's “luck" in another regard. The thing had a second unknowing aid, and while Nugent had been hypnotized by horrors, exhaustion and—ultimately—contamination, this other man was simply a vacationer who had appeared at precisely the wrong moment, and whose action was one of spontaneous helpfulness.

  We traded looks, our eyes confessing discouragement and dread. A burst of amplified speech reached us: “Back inside there, Buddy!”

  It seemed to come from a raft several hundred yards offshore, on which a group of men sat round a table, and to have as its object a child who had swum outside the line of colored floats. The bullhorn blared again, this time with a different voice:

  “Is that you, Bobby? You mind your bottom now, boy!” Laughter and cheers greeted this from the other young bathers, and a woman with an infant on her hip waved to the raft from the shore.

  Ernst said bitterly: “All so congenial! So pleasant! What more could that damned thing ask for?”

  “Where is the feeling of the place?” I put the question in sudden confusion. “Is the aura still here, very very dim? Or is it gone and am I only remembering it?”

  It struck Ernst too then. We had previously found the aura muted here, but now it hovered at the very threshold between perception and recollection. Miss Harms answered before Ernst: “No. There is a different feeling from last time I was here. Just oh, so faint. Wait a minute.”

  She approached the nearest tree, and gingerly applied her ear to its trunk. She went rigid, and, almost at once, recoiled violently, and then stood looking with a kind of agonized enthrallment at the tree. Her eyes filled with tears, and she turned away.

  Ernst and I did as she had done. As soon as my flesh touched the bark, it was as if I had just inclined my ear to a tiny, leprous mouth that spewed loathing and obscenity into my inmost brain. No simple obscenity of word, but a foul, murmurous energy, a festering busyness deep in the gnarled giant’s substance. It was neither thought, vibration, nor odor, and yet was endlessly suggestive of all three, and with this came that black despondency, that decaying of the will, that we knew to be the withering breath of our Enemy's nearness. We too recoiled.

  Miss Harms turned back to us, wiping her eyes with her fingers. "I'm sorry,” she said. "To know that feel again. Danny's farm was alive with it that night. It was what turned me coward on my friend. It’s what all my life I’ve prayed to meet again, so that I could do better. We're going to kill this thing—” She interrupted herself with a sudden thought, went back to the tree and pressed her hand against it. Her revulsion clenched her jaw, but she kept the contact, and spoke on as one who takes an oath 'upon' something: “We are going to kill it. Not let it ripen and flee of its own power, for then it's won. But rip it out of the earth. Tear it up root and branch, and send it screaming, send it mortally wounded, back where it came from.”

  Oddly, this little rite encouraged us. We all smiled.

  “Let’s go to the rangers’ house for a look around,” Ernst said. “Then perhaps we can bring the boat back here and borrow those men’s bullhorn to make an announcement to the beach."

  We moved the cord and the airtanks from the trailer-bed, locked them inside the cars, and set out on foot. Our talk revolved mostly around Nugent, of whose brutal end we had so lately learned. The danger in which he had helped to place well over two hundred souls (for so we reckoned the number of campers to be) could not move us to hate so wretched a victim of circumstances and of his own rigidity of character, an all-too-human failing, to be sure.

  Nevertheless, I have seldom witnessed such vindictive stubbornness as Nugent's in this entire matter. He had seen both Harms and Arnold. Yet I think precisely that ghastly vividness which should have conveyed conviction, overtaxed his nerves and swung him round to what was, at bottom, hysterical denial. It was reasonable to object that the lake could not be the disease-vector, because we had admitted that nothing like this disease had appeared among the campers, who swam in it. But since only the rangers drank the water, however wet others got in it, it could not absolutely be ruled out, and this Nugent did until “proper tests” should be run. He claimed to have been "goaded” into exceeding his authority in warning off the campers, and toward the end of the interview was even denying that he had warned them to leave, and insisted that he had only issued an "advisory statement” to them.

  As soon as we had left the station, Nugent had called his superiors, and forcefully presented his views along with his report. He volunteered to check on the camp and see to securing the rangers’ house. If all seemed well he would collect fees from any new arrivals, otherwise leaving the campers as he found them, and then hasten back down to the nearest county hospital with a sample of lake water for testing. The harassed official, grateful for Nugent’s initiative, shared his view about the water. It was, after all, but lightly treated before being drunk in a dozen cities and towns, and he was unaware that any ill effects had appeared in those quarters. He gave his employee ready assent.

  Nugent, spent though he was, would have started back that same afternoon, but the deputy insisted on his guidance in the investigation he was obliged to make of our report, and his superior had ordered him by radio to man his post until relieved, and postpone the journey until the next morning.

  Deputy Furness, especially on the day of Nugent’s death, showed a generous willingness to respond to Miss Harms’ daily telephone inquiries, once she had presented him with her urgent concern to know all that bore on her brother's death. The picture of Nugent’s state emerging from these reports was filled with pathetic irony for us, though the deputy, not unperceptively, saw only a kind of "battle fatigue” in his associate.

  Nugent was hvpervocal during the drive up, appearing to have slept little. They went first to the rangers’ house. Here one glimpsed the man’s controlled hysteria in his petulant insistence that, first of all, they raise Harms’ truck—" ...restore Park Property, which is State Property, which is your duty to protect as well as mine, Officer.” When Furness had restored the young man's sense of proportion, and pointed out the inadequacy of their own vehicle for the task, they went to inspect Arnold’s body. They found only ashes, teeth and charred bone! This was no more than we had foreseen, but to add to the anguish of it, Nugent—who had seen the body extinguished— expressed no surprise, and blithely opined that it had been imperfectly smothered, then, after we left, re-ignited by the breeze off the lake. All too evidently, his relief at being spared a second view of that atrocious corpse obliterated his critical judgment. Only a painstaking re-drenching in gasolene and re-firing, could have so reduced the bulky cadaver we had blanketed and left that hideous night.

  The ashes were collected. The house yielded only the evidence of two occupants gravely ill, and powerless to maintain domestic order and hygiene. The pair set out on the lake in the Park launch to collect water samples and look for the Venturesome Gal.

  They toured the whole perimeter and found no disabled craft, though they met many an able one piloted by campers who looked healthy enough. Nugent insisted on taking a series of samples from various points, and each time he drew up a sample, he drew up a cupful for himself and drank it down, with the pretext of determining oddities of flavor. It was the most transparent kind of aggressive bravado, a pointed ridiculing of our fears. He filled his canteen from the lake, and later, when they had returned to the house, made a pot of coffee with water from the same source.

  Near the end of the day the pair had gone to check on the campers. Nugent throughout adopted an "objective” attitude that, in our view, amounted to a criminal dereliction of responsibility. Americans, when in large leisure congregations,
have the odd capacity of being very congenial without being very communicative. It appeared that the abortive nocturnal announcement (and Nugent never identified himself as its perpetrator) had caused some people to leave straightaway, and some to remain fearing a prank, but in doubt, while others, whom the announcement hadn’t reached, were unaware of the incident altogether. To those who asked, Nugent replied that there was a rumor of contamination, that this was precisely why he had come up, but that until there had been an official test, the Park saw no reason to think that the lakewater had hurt the health of the two rangers, who had, admittedly, been taken "ill." In all this his manner conveyed that slightly supercilious assurance which "technos" find most effective in subduing the vague doubts and fears of "lay” persons.

  Furness, as was no doubt proper to his position, left these matters to Nugent’s jurisdiction. He had to concur that everyone looked healthy, and all was orderly. There had been no fewer than a dozen newcomers that day, balancing the nocturnal departures of two nights before. Nugent collected the fees, and the pair drove back down from the mountains.

  By the following day, the third since Harms’ death, Nugent was on his way back to the lake, alone, and fiercely triumphant about the hospital lab's completely negative finding with regard to contaminants in the water, an eventuality that disappointed, though it did not surprise us. He had stopped in on Furness on his way up, presenting a feverish and gaunt aspect. He meant to check again on the campers, and try to create some kind of volunteer organization for fee collection and other matters. This was the last time Furness saw Nugent alive. The rest of his information came from phone conversations with his widow, and his superior.

  Nugent had found that, "by a great stroke of luck,” precisely the volunteer self-policing he had envisioned for the campers had occurred spontaneously. A family named Hargis had arrived the previous evening. Mr. Jeffry Hargis, a large, personable and outgoing man, had, upon learning the situation, gone round and brought together a sort of quorum of heads-of-families. An impromptu fees-collection committee was formed on the spot. When Nugent had arrived he found (as we did two days later) one of Hargis’ five teenage sons in the toll booth. The lad solemnly handed him the registration stubs of seven new entrants, along with the corresponding sum in cash.

  Late that day Nugent called his superior and reported confidently—not to say euphorically—that the "tragic and confusing situation” at the lake had been “resolved.” With Mr. Hargis’ mediation, litter-patrol and boating- safety committees had been established, and lesser responsibilities allocated on a round- robin basis. In sum, because of this "outstanding degree of citizen involvement,” the Department could look for a stable situation at the lake until replacements could be managed for Harms and Arnold. Nugent himself would stay the night at the rangers' facility and see to a thorough housecleaning, and then would return to the Park Headquarters the next day with the lab report on the lakewater.

  The manic exhilaration of that frightened and—by now—severely exhausted man was all too evident to us. Even his employer told Furness he had been worried by Nugent's "excited manner.” This no doubt encouraged the Deputy in his judgment of succeeding events as being the product of accumulating emotional stress. He had no suspicion of a different and more dreadful explanation—one which did not fail to occur to us.

  Nugent did not spend the night at the rangers' facility. He appeared on the doorstep of his own home shortly before dawn, to his wife’s great amazement. He had telephoned her just after nightfall from the lake, all ebullience, to report his plans and ask after the children. The time factor alone was startling, for even had her husband set out as soon as he hung up, he would have to have driven at remarkable speeds to have managed the trip before morning.

  But his condition was her overwhelming concern. He was, quite plainly, in a state of severe shock—ambulatory, even hyperactive, but glassy-eyed, and uttering delirious gibberish. Almost at once he began to insist that they and both their small children must be bathed, that it was a measure of the extremest urgency.

  When the poor woman had wrestled with this obsession for a while, she learned, to her horror, that he meant bathed in boiling water, for their water, he said, was poisoned, and must be boiling to be "pure and safe for the children.” Her anguish and alarm may be imagined. She was compelled at one point literally to struggle with her husband, but she succeeded finally in forcing a tranquilizer on him and getting him into bed. He slept, an emaciated fanatic who trembled in his doze. She was convinced he needed a doctor.

  Hers was unable to come, but he telephoned a prescription for one of the new, potent hypnotics into the Nugents' pharmacy. She took her husband’s pick-up and plunged into the morning traffic. There was a wait for the drugs, and that plus the driving time kept her away from home for more than an hour. When she returned she found the family van gone, the house deserted, and a note for herself:

  Dear Connie-bear:

  I have cleansed the children. They are cured now, they are saved! The secret is to innoculate them with the poison but after it has been cleansed and purified. But now they are safe. Thank God. Oh thank God! It won’t have them now. It won’t get them. But I’ve got to hurry and take them to the hospital now. I will see you soon.

  Kisses

  Daddy-bear

  (Don’t be afraid. I’m going to protect us.)

  After staring with sick surmise at this pathetic document, Mrs. Nugent called the police and the highway patrol. The officers had scarcely received her call when they received that which reported Nugent’s death. His van had tail-ended a truck on the freeway. A huge faggot of reinforcing-steel protruded from the truck’s trailer-bed and this, punching through the van’s windshield on the driver's side, had all but obliterated the head and shoulders of Andrew Farley Nugent. His son and daughter, aged two and four respectively, were not harmed by the impact, for both were snugly strapped into the toddler-hamesses attached to the seat-back. Dressed in their “going out” clothes they were, in any case, past harm. For, prior to being dressed, both had been subjected to a scalding baptism that had spread its hideous 'purifying' effects over most of their bodies. Mercifully, the autopsy established that both had been throttled before their subjection to this rite.

  X

  "All right,” I said at length—we had almost reached the rangers’ house—“he saw something. Saw it, snapped, and bolted, and drove like a demon out of here. So what would support this, if we’re right?”

  “The lights would be on,” Miss Harms said. "It was dark already when he talked to his wife, and he would have seen the thing after that.”

  And indeed, the porch and inner lights were on, but as it happened, such indirect evidence was not needed to confirm our theory. The living-room furniture had been pushed to the walls, and a trash can brought in and half filled with garbage, but a pile of sweepings lay uncollected on the center of the floor. And in the upstairs bedroom that Arnold had occupied, we found a pail of dirty water and a mop lying in the stain of a dried puddle on the floor. The window was open.

  "Out that window is where he saw it,” Miss Harms murmured. "Listen. If I watch here and you search out there, I can guide you so you stay in the area that the window would have framed off for him.”

  This proved an excellent stratagem, because once we had checked the open, obvious ground near the waterside for clues, and found none, we had to enter the trees and underbrush surrounding the yard. Miss Harms’ shouts kept our search focused exclusively on the probable spots, and after a quarter of an hour, Ernst found a grimly suggestive object.

  It was a steel key-ring, the large kind that plant maintenance men often carry, and it had a number of attachments. There were several aluminum end-wrenches in metric calibrations, and a small tube-patch kit in an aluminum box. But most disturbing was a bizarrely damaged knife appended to the ring by a steel eyelet. It was a Buck knife with a six-inch locking blade. The blade was unfolded, and the whole implement was partially melted, while
the horn of the handle was charred and blistered.

  We signaled to Miss Harms, and she joined us. When we had passed the find back and forth, she looked from one to the other of us. "They found a melted-down lantern by the well where Randy Simes was dragged down, Danny’s older brother. Was this lying near this tree here? Someone—someone who was in danger, could get right up into the branches by grabbing hold of that one there.”

  It was a lucky thought, though we could not glad of the insights it yielded. For up in the juncture of the trunk with a major bough, we found two other things, more hideously eloquent than the first. The most pathetic was a large, dried puddle of the ejected contents of a human stomach. That it was human, and not the product of some afflicted animal, was proven by the second item, a smashed and twisted pair of wire-rimmed glasses snagged in the crotch of the bough.

  We went down to the pier, boarded our boat, and had a drink. It did not cheer us much, but it helped. We poured another. I looked questioningly at my friends, and their looks assented I should speak it for us.

  “He, or she, had probably made camp before coming over. Even if he had just got in that evening, the stomach contents argue that he settled down and had dinner before coming here. No cyclist would load his belly up that way while he still had strenuous mountain-pedaling to do. Why he came here I can’t guess, nor whether he left or brought his bike. If he brought it, it’s under the lake now. But if he left it, it might be enough to get the campers alarmed.

  "Anyway, we can infer that the victim saw his attacker when he was almost at the door of the house, and that the thing probably came from around this side of the house, boxing him into the yard. Why else would he flee across it, and into the trees, instead of back up the road, where he could escape so much faster? So the thing probably emerged here, which is also where it devoured Arnold.