The Color Out Of Time by Michael Shea

Author:Michael Shea [Shea, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2014-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

IX

Five days later, near noon, Sharon Harms' stout old Buick followed our Dodge up the last miles of mountain highway to the lake. She towed, on a rented trailer-bed, a powerful generator, coils of heavy electric cable, and air tanks. In the trunks of both vehicles we had distributed other gear: wetsuits, aqualungs, explosives, two large underwater lights, a specially modified "bangstick" (a weapon one might describe as a diver's rifle), ammunition, an inflatable life-raft, provisions, and whisky, not to mention a number of smaller items.

Although our mustering of this gear had so exasperatingly absorbed us, involving us in drives to more than one distant metropolis, we had remained informed, by telephone, of the progress of affairs at the lake. Thus we were prepared for what we found, though preparedness did not prevent the situation's eerie impact on us. The camp was open—a stolid, shirtless teen-ager manned the tollbooth. He took our money and tucked the registration tickets under our wiper blades with a practiced air. We drove in on the access road and heard, long before we could see the water, the busy, rejoicing clamor of children. We found the parking lot full of glossy, bright-colored vehicles—fuller than we had seen it at any time during our previous stay. We parked and walked to the beach, pausing while still among the huge, old trees that bordered it. We saw just such a sunny, sportive vista as menthol-cigarette advertisements are made of: the great amphitheater of green, and golden blue; the vivid, careening little boats with their exuberant, insect noise of distant motors; the children, thick as locusts on the water's fringe, their racket as steady and shrill as crickets' din.

It will not seem strange that this specious panorama possessed, for us, a mute, deep horror, and sense of falseness. Though our sun-struck, breeze-washed senses swore the opposite, we knew that what we beheld was a miasmic cauldron, a sink of putrescence and remorseless murder. And the spectacle's very energy and populousness added an extra degree of terror to that which our personal experiences generated. For all this happy, oblivious traffic was the fruit—and fruit indeed it was to the lurking hunger here—of a bizarre sequence of circumstances seemingly designed for the ultimate benefit of our Enemy. To see things so propitious for this unspeakable entity, this furtive psychivore, gave me that feeling that comes in nightmares, when the Evil, nearing fulfillment, begins its inexorable acceleration.

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

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