[Abe Sargent]

The Colour Out of Space Synopsis


If you don't want spoilers, move to the next post.


This story open with the narrator, employed by a company building a dam nearby, doing scouting of the area that will be underwater. The reservoir built by the dam will be used for drinking water for Arkham.

One area roughly five acres in size is called the blasted heath. Here nothing grows, everything is grey, and things feel odd. The area around the heath is also odd, but to smaller degrees. After passing through, the narrator stop in Arkham to inquire as to what happened. They tell him it happened in the 1880s, and don't listen to Ammi, a man who lived there and rambled about it. Of course, our narrator seeks out Ammi, the last person living in the wide valley, and gets the story.

In 1882, a meteorite falls to Earth at Nahum Gardener's estate. scientists from a local university arrive to take samples, and the meteorite is completely odd and unusual. It's shrinking, it remains hot, and most tests on it show it to be inert. However, when shining light into a fragment under study, scientists note that it gives off light of various colours, including some that are unreal.

they come back a few days later to get another sample, and while chipping it, find a globule of a plastic/glassy substance. It glows of the same strange unknown colour as was shown, and one cracks it with a hammer. It breaks, and loses its coloration. They try to find another globule to take with them, but fail, so they head back to do more research. After these samples shrink away, they return to the farm to find that after a night of thunderstorms in which lightning hit the meteorite six times, i has completely disappeared.

Over the next few months, more and more disturbing things occur on the farm. Animals are acting queerly, fruit is much bigger, but tastes awful, and so forth. Slowly, over time, more queer things occu.r

Eventually, trees sway at night, plants grow, turn grey, and die. But the most unusual thing is that many plants and animals turn a shade of the unnatural colour and then grey and are destroyed. People in Arkham won;t put stock into these "superstitions." Eventually, animals start dying, and the humans living on the farm are affect. They begin to go mad, and soon, one dies and then another.


At last, almost a year after the fall of the meteorite, Ammi heads back to the farm to check on the family. He finds Nahum in a crazy, mad mood, and his wife locked away and changed. Vapors of the colour brush past him, and the wife, dead, head downstairs to Nahum. Nahum begins to decay in front of Ammi.

Ammi leaves to tell those in Arkham of the death of the Gardeners. Officials arrive at the farm to investigate. They find Nahum and his wife as described by Ammi, greyed and decaying.

They begin to explore the farm for the lost tow children, scour the well. They find two skeletons there. That night, while still investigating, everything begins to coalesce. Glowing plants, trees, swaying, and more turn into bright lights exploding with a range of colours like that of the meteorite, and the farm begins to erupt in that light and miasmas form. Eventually, all fo the light combines and shoots off into the night sky, leaving earth.

A giant popping is heard, and the farm and trees collapse. Ammi notices another wave of the colour on the farm falling into the well, and believes another entity is sill down there.

We slide back to real time, and our narrator mentions he won;t drink any of the water from the new Arkham reservoir.