The Colour Out of Space

Chapter 1: The Surveyor and the Blasted Heath

My work took me west of Arkham, into hills where the valleys held forests older than the farms. The city meant to build a reservoir. I was there to measure the land before the water covered the roads, empty houses, and shadowed hollows.

People warned me before I set out. They spoke of an evil place and of strange days, but Arkham had a long memory for witch stories. I thought I was being offered another inherited superstition. The country itself soon made that explanation less comforting. Even in morning light the wooded ravines seemed unusually dark. Abandoned cottages stood beside a road that people no longer used, some intact, others reduced to chimneys and sinking cellars. No one seemed eager to reclaim them.

Then the road brought me to the blasted heath.

Five acres of grey desolation lay open between the trees. It might have been the aftermath of a fire, except that no young growth softened it. Fine dust covered the ground without appearing to drift. At the edges, trees sickened or stood dead. Across the old road were the fallen bricks of a chimney, cellar stones, and a well. The vapour above that black opening seemed to interfere with sunlight in a way I could not comfortably explain.

I crossed because my business required it. Returning, I chose the longer southern road. By twilight I found myself wishing the sky would cloud over, though I had no reason to be afraid of stars.

In Arkham that evening, I learned that the heath belonged to no ancient legend. The catastrophe had occurred in the eighteen-eighties. A family had died or disappeared; my informants avoided precision. Everyone advised me not to trust the stories of an old man called Ammi Pierce. He was the one remaining neighbour who would discuss the matter, and his mind, they said, had never recovered.

The next morning I knocked at his worn cottage until he answered. I began with questions about the survey. Ammi proved better informed than I had expected, and followed the proposed boundaries readily. His own house would remain above the water. He showed no sorrow for the valley to be drowned. Rather, the prospect relieved him.

That gave us our opening. His voice lowered, and he began telling me what he remembered. At times he wandered. I had to bring him back to a date or event, and his recollection of scientific language was uncertain. There are gaps in the story I received, and some of its connections are mine. What follows is not a laboratory report. It is the account of an old man who had watched his friend's household disappear, retold by a stranger who had already felt afraid of the place.

Before the strange days, Ammi said, Nahum Gardner's farm had been a pleasant and fertile property. Its white house stood where I had seen the chimney stones. Nahum was about fifty, a friendly, hardworking farmer. His wife and their three sons lived with him: Zenas, the eldest; Thaddeus, fifteen when the changes of the following spring began; and the youngest, Merwin. The Gardners and Pierces exchanged visits. There was nothing remarkable about their life until the stone fell.

It happened in June 1882. Explosions sounded overhead at noon, a white cloud appeared, and smoke rose from the wooded valley. By evening the town knew that a large meteor had buried itself in the ground beside Nahum's well. Nahum came to tell the news, stopping at Ammi's on his way.

He did not know he had brought the first news of the end of his world.

Chapter 2: The Specimen That Refused Its Tests

Three professors from Miskatonic University went to Gardner's farm the following morning. Ammi and his wife accompanied them. They found a brownish mass standing above torn earth and scorched grass near the well. Nahum insisted that it had already become smaller. The professors replied that a stone could not shrink.

Yet this stone behaved very little like a stone. Its heat persisted overnight. Nahum had seen it glow in the darkness. Under a geologist's hammer it proved so soft that the men gouged out their specimen instead of breaking off a clean chip. They borrowed a kitchen pail to carry it. On the way back, Mrs. Pierce remarked that the fragment appeared to be dwindling and was scorching the vessel beneath it. The scientists wondered whether they had taken as much as they thought.

By the next day uncertainty had become excitement. The professors stopped at Ammi's house on another journey to the farm and described what their laboratory had failed to do.

They had heated the substance and tried standard chemical tests. It gave no expected gases. Powerful heat did not make it volatile. It was malleable, magnetic, and luminous in darkness, but acids and other solvents scarcely seemed to affect it. Its weight diminished all the same. Most disturbing was its appearance through a spectroscope. The instrument showed bright bands unlike the colours in any normal spectrum. Calling them colours was already an approximation: language assumed the very familiar categories that the specimen defeated.

The tests had ended with the remaining chips in a glass beaker on a wooden shelf. In the morning neither glass nor fragment remained. There was only a burned mark. The men discussed an affinity for silicon and other possibilities, but explanations were not discoveries. They could name the materials that had disappeared, not the process that had removed them.

At the farm they could no longer deny Nahum's observation. The mass, roughly seven feet across on their previous visit, was now scarcely five. They cut deeper for a larger sample and uncovered something different inside: the curved surface of a glossy sphere, about three inches across, embedded in the surrounding matter.

Its hue resembled one of the strange spectral bands. It seemed hollow and brittle. A professor tapped it firmly with his hammer. A small pop followed; the sphere vanished without releasing anything they could see. It left an empty round cavity. The men supposed there might be more spheres, but drilling found none. Their fresh specimen answered no more questions than the first.

That night a thunderstorm came. Nahum saw lightning strike the meteor's place six times within an hour. In the morning there was only a rough pit beside the well. Digging recovered nothing. The professors examined the site, verified the disappearance, and returned to the fragment they had protected in lead. It persisted for another week and then was gone too.

No useful residue survived. In time, even the witnesses found the vanished material difficult to believe in. But for a while newspapers and visitors made Nahum a minor celebrity. He spoke of the meteor with some pride, and the farm returned to its ordinary work.

July and August were hot. Nahum brought hay from his ten-acre pasture across the brook. The labour tired him more than usual, but he attributed that to advancing age. When the orchard fruit began growing larger and more plentiful than ever, it appeared that the year might compensate him handsomely. He ordered additional barrels. The disappearance of the meteor was behind him; the harvest was ahead.

For the moment, everything that people could measure or carry away had vanished. Everything that mattered was still there.

Chapter 3: The Beautiful Poison

The harvest broke Nahum's hope at its first taste. Apples and pears had grown enormous, their skins shining with a promise the orchard had never made before. But the flavour beneath was bitter and sickening. The smallest mouthful left disgust that would not pass. Melons and tomatoes were spoiled in the same way. The display of abundance was a complete crop failure.

Nahum concluded that the meteor had poisoned his soil. Fortunately, much of the other planting lay farther uphill, away from the house. He could still work those fields. A damaged season was terrible, but it was not yet the ruin of the farm.

Winter came early and cold. Ammi visited less often, and each visit found a quieter household. The Gardners complained vaguely of poor health and uneasiness. They attended church and neighbourhood gatherings irregularly. Nahum seemed especially troubled by tracks in the snow. They were recognisably the tracks of ordinary woodland animals, yet something about the impressions or their arrangement contradicted what he expected.

Ammi listened without much concern until he was driving home past the farm one moonlit night. A rabbit bounded across the road. Its leaps were wrong: too long, too disturbing for either driver or horse. Ammi restrained the frightened animal and thereafter took Nahum's stories more seriously. The Gardner dogs, meanwhile, seemed to have lost the courage to bark.

In February, boys hunting nearby shot a woodchuck whose shape and face so unsettled them that they abandoned it. Their report could not be examined; only the frightened story travelled. Horses shied at the Gardner property, and rumours collected around these scattered experiences.

Early in March, swollen skunk-cabbages pushed through the ground ahead of the usual season. Their shape, smell, and hue seemed unfamiliar. People drove past to see them. Remembering the spoiled fruit, several farmers took the question of poison to the university.

The professors visited but drew cautious conclusions. Such plants were always odd-looking, they said. A mineral from the meteor might have affected the soil and would presumably wash away. Animal tracks, frightened horses, and speculation belonged to country gossip. The scientists stayed away thereafter. Only much later would one recall how closely the spring vegetation's colour resembled the meteor's spectrum and its hidden sphere.

Nahum's trees budded early. Thaddeus claimed their branches moved on windless nights. The whole family developed a habit of listening, sometimes as if their awareness had drifted halfway elsewhere. They could not say what they expected to hear. Nahum carried unusually coloured flowers to a newspaper editor, hoping for attention, but received a mocking article instead.

In April the orchard blossomed in impossible hues. Familiar wildflowers became unfamiliar presences. Ammi and the Gardners remembered the sphere inside the stone. Nahum avoided planting near the house but kept working his distant pasture and upland ground. Perhaps, he hoped, the strange vegetation would draw the poison out.

Neighbours now avoided the road and the household. The boys still had school, but their mother had little escape from the gathering isolation. Thaddeus suffered badly from what other children said about the farm.

May filled the property with oddly moving insects. At night the Gardners watched in every direction without knowing what they sought. Mrs. Gardner saw the maple branches shift against the moon when there was no breeze. Later, a travelling salesman reported that the grass, leaves, and flowers glowed in the dark. He had even thought a detached patch of light moved near the barn.

Bad milk improved when Nahum moved his cows uphill. But the grass soon began to grey and grow brittle, just like the flowers. The apparent beauty had been a beginning, not a recovery. Ammi was almost their only visitor now, and even friendship did not keep him from making his visits shorter.

Chapter 4: The Rooms Above the Stairs

When school closed, the Gardners were effectively cut off. They sometimes asked Ammi to run errands in town. Their bodies weakened, their attention wandered, and their ordinary work continued without much purpose. Outsiders spoke about them, but few came to see what those words concealed.

In June, near the anniversary of the fall, Mrs. Gardner began screaming about disturbances in the air. Her descriptions had actions but no definite objects. Things fluttered and changed; something was taking from her; something was fastening onto her. She seemed to hear impulses that were not quite sounds. At first Nahum let her move around the house, unwilling to send her away. When the boys grew frightened of her behaviour, he locked her in an attic room.

By July she no longer spoke. She moved on all fours. Nahum thought he could detect the same faint luminosity in her that he had begun to recognise in the plants. This was his observation, passed through Ammi's memory, and I cannot test it. But the fear it brought to the household was plainly real.

The horses had already stampeded in a night of terrible struggling. When Nahum opened the stable, all four escaped. A week passed before they were recovered. They were so changed and unmanageable that each was killed. Ammi lent a horse for the haying, but it would not approach the barn. The men hauled the wagon by their own strength rather than force it closer.

Around them the great growths of spring became grey, dwarfed, and brittle. Zenas cut down the distorted flowers in the yard. The insects died, including bees that had abandoned their hives. By September much of the vegetation was breaking into dust.

The family's meals grew poor and irregular. Ammi, on a rare visit, noticed the taste of the well water. It was neither an ordinary smell of decay nor simple saltiness, but it was plainly wrong. He urged Nahum to dig another well uphill. Nahum did not act. Months of strangeness had dulled his ability to resist the next strange thing. He and the boys kept drinking from the old supply.

That September Thaddeus went out with a pail and returned without it. He screamed, laughed, and whispered about colours moving below. Nahum allowed him to wander for a week, then shut him in a room opposite his mother's when he began stumbling and injuring himself. Their cries passed across the attic hallway. Merwin, whose closest companion had been Thaddeus, imagined a language neither he nor anyone else should hear.

The animals died at much the same time. Poultry turned grey. The pigs first grew unnaturally large and then became brittle, breaking down while still alive. Cattle suffered peculiar shrinking and collapse, followed by the same greying. A veterinary surgeon from Arkham could not explain it. They had not all eaten the poisoned plants; some had been kept in the closed barn. The dogs disappeared one night, and the cats had already gone. By harvest, no livestock survived.

On October nineteenth Nahum came to Ammi with news of Thaddeus's death. The attic door and barred window had remained secure. What Nahum buried resembled what had been left of the animals. Ammi and his wife tried to comfort him, then Ammi reluctantly accompanied him home. Merwin sobbed hysterically. Zenas stared and obeyed instructions without seeming to understand their meaning. A weak cry answered from upstairs.

Three days later Merwin disappeared. He had gone out late with a lantern and pail for water. Nahum heard a scream from the yard, but when he reached the door there was no boy, no lantern light. He searched through the night. At dawn he found twisted, partly melted metal beside the well: what remained of the lantern and bucket.

He could think of no reason to tell neighbours who avoided him or city men who had laughed. He asked Ammi to look after his wife and Zenas if they survived him. Nahum believed some judgment had fallen on them, but could not imagine what he had done to deserve it.

Chapter 5: The Well and the Witnesses

More than two weeks passed without news. Finally Ammi mastered his dread and went to the farm. No smoke rose from its chimney. Grey leaves covered the ground; vines broke from the walls; the bare trees seemed to lean in attitudes that made him uneasy. The quiet was worse than the cries he remembered.

Nahum was alive, lying weakly on a kitchen couch. The room was bitterly cold. When Ammi shivered, Nahum called to Zenas for wood, then asked whether the additional fuel had made him comfortable. The fireplace remained empty. No boy had answered.

Questioned gently, Nahum said Zenas was in the well, living there. He could give no useful account of his disappearance. When Ammi asked about Mrs. Gardner, Nahum seemed surprised by the question and indicated that she was present. Ammi understood he would have to find her himself.

He took the keys from beside the door and climbed to the attic. Only one of its doors remained locked. Inside, a small barred window admitted little light. He withdrew for breath from the terrible air, then returned. In a corner he saw what had become of Nahum's wife. She had suffered the same greying and collapse as Thaddeus and the animals. Yet some movement remained.

Ammi screamed. At that moment something appeared to cross the window, showing strange colours, and a cold, damp current brushed him. Of what followed in the room, he would say almost nothing. His account implied that he ended the remaining suffering. Whether that interpretation is right, and precisely what he did, I cannot tell. He locked the door again and came downstairs with a heavy stick he had taken up there.

Before he reached the kitchen, he heard a thud and a cry that seemed cut short. Dragging followed, with a sound that suggested suction. The staircase itself began to show a faint light along the old wood. Outside his horse cried out and bolted with the buggy. Then came a splash from the direction of the well.

Nahum was no longer on the couch. He had somehow moved toward the passage, or something had dragged him there. Ammi could not decide. His friend's body was breaking apart, but he still managed a few last sentences.

It was the colour, Nahum said. It lived in the well. It burned without ordinary heat, drained living things, and had arrived within the fallen stone. He connected it to the shattered sphere and the flowers of spring. He thought there might have been other spheres, like seeds. Zenas had never come back from getting water. Nahum said the thing wore down the mind before taking the body, and that knowing danger was coming did not give them the power to leave.

He still asked after his wife. His speech ceased as the collapse completed. Ammi placed a checked tablecloth over the remains and escaped out the back, through the pasture. From the house he had seen that no stone was missing from the well's rim. His runaway buggy had not knocked one in. Something else must have made the splash.

Ammi reached home, found his frightened wife and returned horse, then went to Arkham to report the family deaths. Questioning forced him to return with three officers, the coroner, a medical examiner, and the veterinary surgeon. They arrived around four in the afternoon. Ammi wanted them gone before dark.

Even these experienced men were shaken by the attic and kitchen. Samples from the remains would later produce the meteor's unknown spectrum at the university, then lose that property within a month. But that evidence belonged to an investigation still ahead of them.

For now they questioned Ammi about his nervous glances toward the well. He admitted Nahum had feared something there. They insisted on emptying and searching it immediately. The water was unusually low. Below lay the partly skeletal remains of Merwin and Zenas, together with a deer, a dog, and smaller animal bones. A man descended with a pole and found porous, bubbling mud through which he could feel no solid bottom.

Twilight overtook the search. The men brought lanterns indoors and began comparing explanations. Poisoned soil, contaminated water, disease: each might account for part of it. None made the entire history intelligible. While they talked, the coroner looked from a window and saw a pale beam beginning to rise from the well.

Chapter 6: The Colour That Did Not Leave

Ammi recognised the beam's hue. The sphere within the meteor had shown it. So had the flowers. That very morning it had passed before the attic window. He could not say why an impression seen by daylight and another shining at night were unquestionably the same to him. That was part of the wrongness.

The horses tied outside began struggling. When a driver moved toward the door, Ammi held him back. He repeated Nahum's final belief: something had come with the stone and fed on life, growing stronger in the well. This was a frightened man's interpretation of a dying man's words. Yet the light in the yard was strengthening while he spoke.

A detective drew their attention upward. There was no wind. Even the small weeds and wagon fringe remained still. But the high branches of the trees were twitching and reaching against the moon. When clouds covered the moon, the branches did not disappear. Tiny lights tipped them, all sharing the hue that rose below.

The beam became a flow. It seemed to pour from the well toward the sky, shapeless yet active. Later the witnesses disagreed about the forms it suggested. No single description held what they thought they had seen.

The veterinary surgeon barred the front door. Light spread into the well-sweep, nearby sheds, and beehives. The old wood of the farm was glowing, though the visitors' vehicles were not. The medical examiner wondered aloud whether everything organic that had long remained there was affected. The man who had probed the well feared his pole had disturbed something below the mud.

Two horses tore loose and took the wagon away. Ammi's horse remained tied outside, screaming until it fell motionless among the buggy shafts. There would be time to bury it the next day, if any of them survived to see that day. In the darkened sitting-room, the floorboards, door frames, mantel, and furniture were beginning to shine.

Ammi led the men out through the back. They avoided the front yard and the well, passed the luminous barn, crossed the brook, and stumbled uphill into the pasture. Only when they reached open ground did they look back.

The whole farm was shining. Trees strained upward, their branch tips lit. Bright threads ran along the buildings' ridges. Above everything, the unnameable colour rose from the well, reaching and changing without settling into any form they understood.

Suddenly it shot straight upward. It left no trail. Through a round opening in the clouds it vanished toward the stars, where Ammi's gaze found Cygnus and the Milky Way. Below, the farm broke apart in a burst of unnatural light and fragments that followed the departing brightness. Most of the party later called it an explosion. Ammi remembered cracking and tearing wood instead.

Darkness covered the valley. A violent wind came up, and the witnesses decided not to wait for another view. They turned toward the north road and Arkham. Ammi asked to be escorted into his own kitchen rather than left to cross the woods alone.

He had seen something they had missed. While the others turned away, he had glanced back once. A faint remaining portion of the colour lifted from the devastated farm, then sank to the place the greater mass had left. It had not escaped. It was still below.

The next morning three men returned. Of the buildings and vegetation, almost nothing remained except chimney bricks, cellar stones, mineral debris, and the well's rim. They removed Ammi's dead horse and returned the buggy. Five acres had become the grey desert I later crossed. Nothing has grown there since.

Forty-four years passed before Ammi told me this. He had never returned to the farm. Neighbours claimed the damaged ground widened slowly, perhaps an inch each year. They spoke of altered colours in spring, odd winter tracks, uneasy horses, and people who suffered dreadful dreams but could not make themselves leave. These are stories, not measurements. I have no surviving professor to question and no complete investigation to consult.

I do not think Ammi deliberately deceived me. Neither can I separate all he remembered from all he feared. I know only that the heath unsettled me before I heard his tale, and that the sunlight around its well had not looked right.

I returned to Boston and resigned from the survey. Soon the valley will lie beneath water. I hope it will be deep. I will not drink the new supply, and I do not wish to revisit Arkham under the stars.

Before the work begins, I mean to ask the chief engineer to watch over Ammi. His cottage is outside the reservoir, but there is a question no boundary on my map can answer. He has had forty-four years to leave that country. Why is he still there?