The Color Out of Time Page 9

  "So Nugent was upstairs, beginning to mop the bedroom. I would guess his eye was drawn by a cry. First he would have seen a person sprinting in panic across the yard and into the trees. Then he would have seen the pursuer. It must have been swift. We can assume our cyclist to have been a vigorous person, but he didn’t get very high into that tree before it pinned him down. That pathetic knife! How big was the enemy? Six days ago, your brother said it was bigger than Arnold, a fairly large man, and I am terribly certain that it has fed since then. In fact, the one thing I find I can’t imagine in this, is how Nugent got away himself!”

  Miss Harms shook her head. She had crossed her arms, and was chafing them with her hands. “No, Dr. Stembruck. The thing’s mind comes with its poison. If a man or a woman has taken the taint of it, that's as much as to say the enemy has opened an eye within them. I think it understood Nugent, knew it could send him off with his tongue too scrambled by lunacy to be a danger. It didn’t mind letting him die far off and out of the way. Because it feeds at a distance. Remember what Mrs. Nugent said about the 'sucking poison’?” It had been a harrowing moment in our interview with that brave and honest-natured woman. Her grief had periodically shaken her, against her will to aid us with calm, and clarity of information. Only her understanding that we sought a physical cause of her husband’s acts—a chemical or contaminant whose agency might bring his atrocities back within the bounds of comprehensibility—had steeled her against a pain that so plainly seared and Pierced her. But this particular act of recollection seemed most agonizing of all for her. It was one of Nugent's most incessant ravings. Its feverish repetition had clearly become for the poor woman a kind of epitome of the whole nightmarish struggle with her husband. "It’s a sucking poison,” he kept saying. "It dissolves you inside. It dissolves your intestines, and dissolves your ideas, and it sucks them and sucks away. But I know what to do! Yes, I know, I know what to do.”

  Mrs. Nugent had said that these last words-— "I know what to do”—had a curious emphasis: "He sounded like he was being told what to do, and was saying, ‘All right! All right, I'll do it!'"

  Now our eyes acknowledged to Miss Harms that we understood her reference. She went on. "These murders and suicides, these freeway smash-up deaths, they’re food to it just as flesh is. Any horror and pain, any violation and destruction of life, that it can be the cause of, that's food and fulfillment to it. I don’t believe it fattens on those deaths, I think it needs the flesh as well for that. They’re more like entertainment, or a delicacy....”

  We fell silent. I reflected that the hideous whimsy of her comparison was borne out by the flamboyant nature of the “tragedies” whose rate had continued high throughout the county for the last week, and which typically involved —it had begun to appear—people who were unstable and marginally adjusted to begin with. From the trees crowding the shore there came a deep susurration. It was a long moment before I realized that there was no breeze blowing, not the slightest.

  Suddenly we were all on our feet, listening tautly. That the trees were stirring with their own power, with an almost pitiful palpitation like fear, or pain, was now undeniable. But this was not all. We felt what I can only describe as a menacing tension in the water under our craft. The lake was in no way agitated, yet my footsoles prickled, as if they were nerve-linked to our keel and I felt through them the silken scramble of something hastening toward us through the deep. "Look out there!” Miss Harms shouted. “Quick and take hold of my hands!”

  A short distance beyond the pier's end, perhaps twenty yards from us, the water had taken on a smoldering glow. This intensified steadily, and we realized that the submerged luminescence was slowly drawing nearer both to the surface, and to our craft. Its color was that same diseased radiance that had begun our involvement in the madness of recent days. Its form? It seemed to be a jumbled skein of cables, a chaotic net woven of a viscous, gelatinous matter that was, while imbued with that hellish color, semi-transparent as well. I found that I had taken Miss Harms’ hand even as I was telling myself to dive into the cabin for the Enfield. She did not grasp my hand, but pressed into it one of the “elder signs,” while Ernst received the same from her. She wore her own by a leather strap round her neck, out I had not known she had ours on her Person. Clasping the stone, I stood in mortal fear, as rapt as a fleeing animal paralyzed by headlights. I watched Miss Harms’ movements dazedly, as if a strange inevitability lay in them—as if the making of our fate lay completely with her, and not in any effort of my own.

  She pressed both hands against the talisman at her throat, and cried out with harsh, shocking power several phrases in a language utterly strange to me. It was a grunting, booming tongue that seemed it would tear her throat in the utterance. As she spoke, I felt a sensation of power, a silvery current of strength, flow into my right hand from the stone I held.

  The sunken web ceased its advance. Something like a shudder of languid recoil went through it. As eerie as the object itself was this responsiveness in it. To see such a thing touched and turned by mere language was to see a terrifying bridge of thought connect us with it—or with what lay beneath it if, as appeared, it was more a contrivance than an animate being. I paused, I say, and a slow, liquid torsion stirred it. Never have I felt so strongly the sensation of being scrutinized, without the least conception of what it was that watched me.

  And then the luminous jumble recommenced its rise, though it no longer advanced toward our boat. Just as its glowing loops broke the surface, the whole web underwent a complex convulsion, an eversion, which brought deeper cords of the uncanny reticulum boiling up to the surface. And snared within these upwelling toils was the sprawled and naked form of a man.

  Nightmares seldom borrow the precise image of our waking horrors, but that soul-wrenching vision, in every detail, has foamed up into my dreaming view a hundred times since that afternoon. Sunlight ought not to fall on such a shape! And yet it did, in a heartbreaking, golden abundance! Did his waxen, coagulated eyes register any of that sweet light? For indeed, the face moved as if it scanned the sky. Did he wish perhaps to call out to the splendid sun—as pitiless in its way as the thing that tortured him? For indeed, the jaw, from which lakewater ran, worked, as if to scream, or speak. Did his brain beneath the tattered scalp (a cheesy turf from which large clumps were torn)—did the brain know the damage of the body, experience its fractured, mummied limbs, its gangrenous and fissured loins, its muddy, sodden lungs? For indeed his body, throughout its length, fought and twisted with feeble desperation.

  But then we saw a worse thing. For then we saw the webbing shift its hold on him, the ropes of luminous slime taking him here and there, complexly, puppet-wise, until, after a moment, that unspeakable remnant of a human being began a helpless, comic little jig, and seemed to dance within the snare of its unearthly agony!

  Rage, beyond anything I have ever known, unshackled me of fear. I turned for the cabin, hut Miss Harms was already emerging from it with the Enfield. But swift and expert though her movements were, she had not yet taken aim when the hellish net was pulled beneath, and that wretched dancer plucked from the reach of our deliverance.

  I do not clearly remember the following moments. I believe I shrieked curses over the water, as did Ernst and Miss Harms. Tears followed for her, and for me a kind of stupor, which lasted till Ernst put a glass of whisky in my hand.

  We drank, and gaped at one another and, gradually, began to talk again. We found that something had changed between us, felt a new bondedness, as if those instants of shared fury had fused our lives.

  "It taunted each and all of us,” Miss Harms said. "Taunted, but didn’t attack—because it felt a power in us. We're the enemy to it now, too. I don’t think it felt the signs until I called on mine, and maybe some of its mockery came from fear or surprise, if it knows such things. But there's a likelier reason: it's gotten very strong, it’s fed itself up to readiness. Thank God we’re ready too. You call me Sharon now. Ernst? Gerald? Good. Strap
on the elder signs please. From now on you mustn’t have them off your arms.”

  Her first act in our days of preparations was to fit one talisman for her throat, two others in stout wrist straps for us, and the fourth in a little leather grip for the hand. It was this last that we were pledged to cast into the well of the drowned Simes farm. Our feelings toward these stones as we put them on now were far less ambivalent than they had been.

  We had another drink, a more cheerful one, and Ernst said, after savoring it: "You know, my heart was ice, a dead thing, when I saw that... spectacle. The whisky warms me somewhat. The fellowship of both of you—you, my honored friend, and you, dear Sharon, so much braver than we were!—this warms me too, far more deeply. But I think that what warms me most of all, what will give me the strength to dive down to that thing's lair, is hate. Absolute, consuming hate.”

  He looked at us, and our eyes did not dissent.

  XI

  A short while later, we cast off and swung out onto the lake, under an afternoon still blue and glorious. We had resolved to make an appeal to the beach at large after borrowing the card players’ bullhorn. We would stress an undetermined degree of danger, and announce that the assault of some "animal” of unknown type might have been involved in the recent illness of the rangers, above and beyond the contamination factor.

  We went without real hope. Nugent had told everyone who asked that "the lab” had given the lake a “clean bill of health,” and he was a neat, official-looking young person in a Park uniform. We were unconventional oldsters, two of us bearded, and all lacking Park uniforms. We were officially contradicted on the point of contamination, then. And what tokens of 'animal attack’ could we offer? We seemed to remember leaving the big storage can Harms had used on Arnold still half full of gas, and now we found it empty, and queerly dented, as if pinched by some powerful, awkward implement. A dented gas can and a melted knife. Not persuasive. We had entertained hope of an abandoned cyclist’s camp as well, but since our vision of the enemy's sardonic knowingness, we had begun to think differently. The victim, possessed and invaded with such hideous completeness by the alien, could surely yield it explicit guidance in the 1 task of erasing any traces that victim had left of himself.

  But it was precisely our growing sense of the Enemy’s finesse of manipulation that moved us to play Cassandra to these heedless sojourners, despite the sure unpopularity of that role. We must at least make an effort, if only to make peace with our own painful apprehensions on behalf of these aquatic frolickers, for we knew them to be like trout in a stocked pond, just as surely fished-for, just as helpless and doomed if hooked. We rounded the last jut of shore separating us from the beach, and swung in toward that far crescent of bright sand containing in its broad parenthesis the busyness of the vivid boats, floats, and bathing suits. The card game appeared still to be in progress on the raft, and so we made for this.

  "Think of that night after you left," Sharon said abruptly. "A certain amount of confusion from the people who pulled out—packing-up noise, motors, headlights. Anyone who woke up next morning and found their neighbors gone wouldn’t wonder much. People who were tent-camping and left their cars in the lot— their whole kit and kaboodle could be dragged into the water by something big enough to drag a man down from a tree, and probably getting bigger each time it fed. And anybody that took their boat out early that same morning—if they didn’t come back, most of the people they docked near would just assume they’d trailered their boat and pulled out and they just hadn’t happened to see them go.”

  Her thoughts were only too plausible. The inclined ramp down which boat trailers were backed to be loaded was at the opposite end of the beach from the docking floats and, though visible from the latter, still removed enough to lie on the periphery of attention for the people docked there. As for the campsites amid the shoreline forest, there were perhaps thirty off either tip of the beach. The sites nearest the beach—broader berths amid the ancient, crowding trees—were designed to accommodate vans, motor homes, and the like. But the sites at the two extremities of the developed area were "walk-ins” without vehicle access, and were rather more densely screened by vegetation from the adjoining plots, offering fairly private spots for dying.

  But even as these reflections fed our urgency to warn the campers, we were drawing near the raft, and I was feeling ever stronger premonitions of failure. For the gathering round the card table presented, to one with an anthropological perspective, certain classic features that all but promised a negative reaction to our effort.

  Briefly stated, a poker game involving some twenty men was in progress on the raft. Here were what must have been all the camp’s vigorous male adults—no youths, no older men—sitting around the altar of a particularly American masculine ritual. And though these men presented a variety of postures, all conformed to the “macho” gestalt. Amid several ice-chests, containing many beers, they pursued a self-exhibitingly energetic involvement in the game, and sent many boisterous messages ashore with the bull-horn or in shouts to their audience of women and children ashore.

  I confess I have no love for these solidarity rituals of the tribal "male club.” Where more enlightened laws do not forcefully supervene, these vestiges of the tribal nucleus become sources of power and potential harm, inasmuch as they are the political base of the simplest kind of warlord, competent to police a village, stage a raid, conduct a gang-rape, or lead a lynching.

  If these reactions seem remote from the situation, they were not entirely so. There was a distinct accent of menace about this spontaneous ritual communion among a group of chance neighbors in a wild place. The energy of fellowship ran raw and high. The group’s self-approval was strong, and all were exhilarated by the whole triumphant improvisation they were starring in. The intoxication of exceeding the law in dramatic, colorful unison (gambling remains illegal throughout the state) lent a feverish air to their hilarity.

  No sooner had I decided that this group must have a leader, than I picked him out: a large black-haired man, the one from whom the others solicited the bullhorn, and to whom it was always returned. He called it to himself now as we drew in, and hailed us for the beach’s amusement:

  “Ahoy, campers! You are violating the territorial waters of the official game! Gambling at your age! I'm ashamed!”

  The man’s voice had a radio-announcer’s authority, mellow and supple, and in his use of it, deftly blending taunt with geniality, he showed an expert public manner. In a few words he had reaffirmed the tabu status of the rite we impinged on, entertained the beach, warned us off, and at the same time kept himself in character as a jovial fellow. The very unison of the twenty flushed and humorous faces aimed at us from around the table testified to the man’s power to direct the flow of group mood. Certainly there was nothing unique about our age in the camper population. We were a bit more unkempt than the norm, probably more “forward” in posture and manner, and we were unaccompanied by younger persons, whose association confers the legitimizing role of grandparent on the “senior citizen.” But this man—and surely it was Mr. Jeffry Hargis?—had, with his magically amplified voice, defined us for the whole camp. We were oldsters, odd oldsters. It showed in the gamblers' faces, and I even heard from the beach, in the inimitably distinct tones of a six-year-old:

  “Eeee-yew, Mommy! They’re old!”

  I smiled and waved to the man as Ernst expertly hove us to alongside the raft. "We're sorry to disturb you,” I said. "I have the unpleasant task of warning you of a potentially dangerous contamination in this lake. In fact the ranger who spoke with you, Mr. Nugent, was—”

  From my first words the black-haired man looked at me with a new, guarded alertness, and now he cut across my words with the lash of his electronic voice: "Uh-oh, another one! It’s plague time again folks! Whoops! The lake is killing us all and we just don't notice it! I don't know about you, but I'm getting out just as soon as I see Bob’s raise here!”

  This seemed to spark amuse
d conversation among the adults ashore, and the children’s laughter was of the boisterous kind given to established jokes. This then was the meaning of the man's alertness. The topic of infection had remained sufficiently alive among the campers to necessitate his becoming its official debunker. With Nugent’s support he had clearly been able to establish a definite "antialarmist” climate of opinion on the matter.

  "Excuse me,” I insisted. "This is urgently important. We think that besides potential sickness, some kind of animal is involved that is... not native, that has penetrated into the lake environment—”

  Again the bullhorn: "Environment! The magic word! Environment! Campers, attention. Attention, please! These fine gentlemen and this fine lady would like to talk to you about the environment.”

  There was more glee from the beach, smiles from onlooking mothers. Environmentalism had seemingly been linked with "alarmism” about disease. Sharon came forward: "Mr. Hargis, will you please lend us your bull-horn? We'll just make our brief announcement and go away again.”

  His only acknowledgment of the name was not to dispute it. It was a tactical error at this point to petition him for his electric power- fetish. When Sharon put out her hand and offered to step aboard the raft to get it, Hargis made an extravagant pantomime of refusing us the instrument, hugging it to himself and waving us away, to the entertainment of his table-mates.

  There was no mistaking in Hargis a very gifted—one almost felt professional—manipulator of people. While his heavy musculature, his deft and battered-looking hands, exerted a kind of tacit domination within the little “warriors’ clique,” he was in manner an expert "good buddy,” peppering the others with friendly witticisms that each was clearly flattered to receive. From this club, this fine- tuned instrument of emulative subordinate personalities, Hargis could elicit whatever note of ridicule he wished to direct at us or our message. I had the sense to stop playing in his court, and signaled to Ernst, who backed us off and turned us in toward the beach.