The Cauldron (10 page)

The chills, the electrical tingling, the fog closing in—were they warnings that he was about to die? Like the “auras” that warned epileptics of approaching seizures? Or were they simply a prelude to whatever insane power he called up to escape? A power that made garden variety ESP seem tame and logical by comparison? A power that let him move from one place to the next in a heartbeat?

And what made him think the power was his? Like he suddenly had some wondrous ability like a comic book superhero? Or that something otherworldly had chosen him to repeatedly save? An angel on his shoulder?

He shuddered at the sudden image of something huge and amorphous reaching down and snatching him out of the way of death the way a human might snatch a helpless kitten from the jaws of a mean dog. Something that lived in a world of icy fog and swirling, featureless manlike shapes …

Totally senseless.

More likely, he was indeed losing his mind.

Attempts to kill him.

Twenty-some years of his life vanished from records.

The icy fog.

He was curious and flustered, but he did not panic. No screaming, clanging panic. Why wasn’t he terrified? Why was he just intensely inquisitive? Shouldn’t he be shivering with fear?

If I could just talk to somebody about this. Really talk to them …

A wave of loneliness swept over him. He was alone, had always been alone. Even with Shelly, he had been alone. He never could have talked to her about this. About the nightmares, maybe, eventually, but never about this. To his mother? Would he have talked to her?

His thoughts shied away from remembering her. He felt an ache, the same ache he’d felt looking at that picture this afternoon, and a pang of guilt. Guilt?

Again, his thoughts veered away. If only he could talk to Shelly! But she was gone, just as …

Just as …

Frowning, he tried to complete the thought, but whatever it was had slipped away, too long dead to be remembered. Like the first twenty-odd years of his life. Carl lay on the bed where someone had tried to murder him, not worrying about it, not afraid the man would return, not even afraid of the fog that had saved him, thinking only about that loneliness.

Eventually, he fell asleep.

***

Chapter 15

Navigator

Something most unusual was happening: despite the heightened vigilance of that portion of his mind that never completely released—never
dared
release—its hold on
otherspace
, the navigator was lost in a dream.

His dream was one sometimes granted the elderly, in which youth, however illusory, returns, however briefly. As if awake, he strolled along a white path through a blossoming field—a park?—with his favorite sister. Although she was older than he, they were adult enough to be of equal height: not long, then, before his exaltation, well before he had first embarked into
otherspace
.

How beautiful she has become
, he thought. Her graceful, gliding step made her seem almost to float along the white stone surface of the path.
Elegance
was the concept to describe her. Long, slender neck loosely encircled by the crimson ribbon of lineage, pointed chin beneath a small firm mouth, broad brow, and her lovely eyes, only a hint of their luminous gray-yellow showing through the shadowlids, translucent against a sun riding high in the pink-tinged sky.

“Are you sure?” she asked, turning to gaze at him. “I have heard it is no easy life.”

“But the honor!” he protested.

“Oh, honor, yes,” his sister agreed, as if honor meant nothing. “There is honor, I will grant you that.”

“And there are so few of our people—fewer now than ever before—who have the ability to undertake this, dear sister. I am able, and so I must. Only a scattering of us have the sight.”

“Yes,” she said sadly. “You are One Who Sees.”

The sun warmed his face and chest. The breeze that fluttered his sister’s crimson ribbon ruffled his own wiry curls and played with the loose fabric of his clothing. His feet pressed firmly upon the solid ground.

I did not know
, the navigator thought, half waking. He wondered idly what the woman Melusine looked like, whether her face resembled his sister’s as her liaison-filtered voice resembled that long unheard, so beloved voice. But the thought was the merest ripple on the surface of his consciousness. He sank back into the dream.

“You are happy,” his sister said, and he ignored the question in her tone. “Or do you undertake this
only
out of duty … because there are so few with the sight left?”

“The honor,” he told her again.

He woke more fully then, and became aware of the liquid prison in which he floated, never to walk or feel a breeze again. The dream faded into a shimmering memory. He had not questioned his happiness, had not once thought in those terms, for most of a very long life. Now he lay in the liquid, eyes closed as they almost always were—even the elixir that kept the terror of water at bay was not
that
effective—and wondered:
If I had it to do over again …

The liaison awaited his words. He had none. He should report those odd thoughts to the shipkeeper, should let the shipkeeper try to define their source and extirpate it. Instead, the old man hugged the memory of his sister walking in the red-gold sunlight to himself, hugged it and cherished it silently until, abruptly, it was driven from his thoughts by a burst of energy in
otherspace
so concentrated and intense it made not just his mind but his entire body pulse in response.

In that instant, a thousand cycles of conditioning focused his entire mind on
otherspace
.

And he saw it. Not the burst of energy, which had lasted less than a heartbeat, but the imprint that it had left behind. It was deep within the world’s
otherspace
halo, in all likelihood on the world’s surface. And tiny. But so intense! Even now the imprint blazed like a pinpoint beacon, and—

A second flare! From nearly the same location, this one as intense as if the entire transition energy of a ship had been concentrated in a hundredth of the area! No one, no one had such power, not even the legendary Delphoros, who’d been lost so long ago. Unless Delphoros had become stronger.

The navigator waited patiently, but the flare did not come again. As if his senses had been rejuvenated by energy from the flares, another imprint, this one not a single spot but a trail of some length, pulsed brightly for a moment, attracting the navigator’s attention. Caused by the same being, in another time and another place? Or was it a different signature?

For a long moment, he studied that thin trail, resisting the implications, repelled by the thought of betraying a being he had, until this moment, believed to be only a legend. Delphoros, like him, was a navigator. Was this truly Delphoros on the world below?

Melusine had shared some of the reports on the legendary navigator: that he believed the living ships they all flew on to be fellow creatures with a right to their own destinies rather than animals to be exploited because they could travel through
otherspace
.

Delphoros had contended that the shapes in
otherspace
were also creatures, and that traveling through
otherspace
might disrupt them. Despite Delphoros’s beliefs, he had navigated—though there were rumors he was more forced into the ranks rather than recruited. Had there been an abundance of navigators, one as pacifistic—no, pathetic—as Delphoros would have been overlooked. But there weren’t enough navigators then, practically none left now. In fact, only two left working now, himself and a navigator belonging to the enemy.

But Delphoros could revitalize Elthor’s navigators. He could be bred, and his power and abilities passed to future generations. Delphoros, if he truly lived on the world below, had to be retrieved.

The navigator wondered what Delphoros’s missions had been that sent him through
otherspace
to this part of the universe. Perhaps it was in the records Melusine had studied. Certainly it was no longer important, so many years passed. And there were records she was not privy to …

What had caused the ship to crash? And how could Delphoros have escaped the confines of the nutrient tank to travel on the world below? He could not have survived in the tank for this long.

He had to be traveling outside of it.

Ah, to be outside a tank.

Dismissing his musings, which the navigator considered irrelevant to his task, he reached out to the liaison to make his report.

***

Chapter 16

Melusine

At last!
Melusine exulted.

She forced herself to be calm, lest she betray her presence to the host she just slipped into. But it was difficult to contain her excitement. For more than two cycles, with only brief, necessary respites in a rejuvenation pod, she had been striving toward this goal: access, not just to the senses, but to the innermost thoughts of a host. This one was the familiar female she had discovered earlier, the one who smoked strange things that muddled her senses.

At last, suddenly and without warning, she had felt the very shape of the woman’s mind shift, letting her settle into a niche that fit as closely and certainly as any restrainment pod.

Sounds, seemingly coming from massive, moving images projected onto the far wall of the near-darkened room her host sat in, suddenly became words, words that her host—and now
she
—recognized and understood.

A movie … her host thought something about a movie.

Melusine listened, puzzled by the sense behind the words. Within moments the words ceased. The images on the large wall, of two beings similar to the one she now inhabited, pressed their naked bodies against each other and—

The world jumped.

Melusine tightened her mental grip on her host, afraid she had become aware of her presence and was trying to break free—and with that very action
made
her aware. Her entire body quivered and stiffened, her attention suddenly diverted from the moving images. Her glance darted from side to side.

The world swayed. A voice shouted silently in her mind:
Melusine!

Her host twisted in the seat to scan the other beings scattered throughout the room. She felt a prickling sensation:
water,
polluted
water,
emerged from his skin!

Melusine!
the voice came again. The shipkeeper! The voice was coming not from around her host, but from inside the ship. She was being called back!

Filled with regret, she released her hold on the host. The room, the moving images, everything disappeared in an instant, to be replaced by the gray translucence of the restrainment pod. Even before the pod began its retreat, she could feel the augmentor’s countless tendrils reluctantly withdrawing from her scalp.

The shipkeeper, hands deep into the liaison glow, turned his head to look at her as the pod slithered downward. “Look!” he said, returning his attention to the liaison. “He exists! The Bright One exists! The navigator found his energy.”

For an instant, the words were alien and unrecognizable, as if her brief experience of that other language had robbed her of her own language.

“He exists, Melusine!” the shipkeeper repeated. “The Bright One exists!”

Her heart pounded as her mind made the adjustment and the meaning of the words penetrated.

“How—” she began, but the shipkeeper raced on.

“We have confirmed that there is a navigator on the world below. He has exercised his power! He has moved through
otherspace
! Our own navigator has charted his paths! We are now certain!”

Melusine’s eyes went to the liaison. The full globe of the world they hovered near had been replaced by a barely curving segment of green and brown with only dots of blue. Near one side was a glittering speck of pure white. Near the other, a pale streak of gray.

For a long moment, she only looked. “But surely he has no ship?” she said, bewildered. “The distress signal received on Elthor, it said his ship had crashed.”

The shipkeeper swallowed. “The navigator tells me the Bright One apparently has no need of a ship. He can travel through
otherspace
without one.”

Another silence as Melusine studied the image, trying to gauge its scale and failing. But to travel any distance, even the most minuscule, to be able even to enter
otherspace
unaided—

She turned to the navigator, starting to speak, and belatedly remembered to thrust her hands into the liaison. “Are you certain, navigator?” she asked. “Did you
see
him do as you claim?”

There are no certainties.

“It is certain enough for me,” the shipkeeper said harshly, turning his face to Melusine. “Are you prepared to carry out your part of the mission?”

Melusine looked again at the image in the liaison. “It cannot be him!”

“Cannot be whom?” the shipkeeper asked, in a cold tone that told her he knew perfectly well whom she meant.

“It cannot be Delphoros—can it? After all this time? No, surely it is only his descendant. Or no, with this world’s strong glow, more likely a native.”

“That is for you to determine, not I.” The shipkeeper regarded her coldly. “The council believes Delphoros still lives, and is here. Otherwise we would not have been dispatched to this world. We have Elthor’s only remaining navigator with us; the council would not lightly risk him on such a long journey as this if they did not believe. Confirm that, if you are able, that the Bright One is here.”

She shivered, earning another cold-eyed scowl from the shipkeeper. Forcing herself to appear stoic, she turned from the liaison toward the waiting, eagerly writhing augmentor.

***

Chapter 17

Carl Johnson

Carl first noticed the girl as he was eating breakfast in the Embers a few blocks from the motel. Short, probably five-two, she seemed thinner than she actually was because of loose-fitting faded jeans and a man’s black cotton workshirt two or three sizes too big. A pack was slung over one shoulder. Despite a round, strong-featured face, she looked a little vulnerable, like a lost child as she stood just inside the entrance peering around the room. Still, her air of diffidence and confusion held Carl’s attention for several seconds before he went back to his bacon and eggs.

When the hostess showed the girl to a table a few feet from Carl’s booth, she moved around it and sat facing him, then snatched up the menu and concentrated on it with a frown. Carl glanced at her from time to time as he lingered over his second cup of coffee and scanned the newspaper he’d gotten from a vending machine in the restaurant foyer.

Ready to leave, he found the girl staring at him—or at least she averted her eyes in the quick, nervous way people did when he caught them staring.

She ought to know better,
he thought: probably she’d been stared at often enough herself. Brunette, with hair cut short and shaggy, hazel-eyed, she wasn’t beautiful in any conventional sense, but she was certainly a woman to look at twice, like a young, road-company Anjelica Huston. As he was paying his check, Carl saw that she was looking at him again, quick little glances from under lowered lids as she hurriedly spread jelly on the thick triangles of toast the waitress had just brought her. Repressing an impulse to see what she’d do if he waved at her, he pocketed his change and left.

He climbed into the Mazda and jammed the keys into the ignition, but stopped before the automatic turn of the key to start the engine. His plan when he’d checked out of the Adler had been simple: grab breakfast and take off for home before another junkie burglar with better aim took a shot at him. But now, with the actual start of the drive only a twist of his wrist away, he felt uncertain. As if he’d forgotten something.

Going home and laying his cards on the table with Harry, hoping that either the nightmares would go away or he could learn to cope with them—surely that was the sensible thing to do. Wasn’t it?

Was it? Excuse me, boss, but you were absolutely right, I don’t exist … at least not before I came to work for you. Shall we just forget it? Or shall I make an appointment with a half-dozen shrinks? Would Harry buy that? Could he buy it himself? Sweep it all under that proverbial carpet?

But what could be left to do here? Conduct a house-to-house search for someone who might remember him? Take out an ad in the Morgantown paper?
Do you know this man? REWARD for info leading to—

Sure, Carl. He snorted. Real smart. Go public. Why not call the tabloids while you’re at it? They’d give you front page headlines, not just a cheesy line or two buried in the classifieds.

Still … wasn’t there
something
more he could do before totally writing off the first twenty-some years of his life? After all, there were a dozen tantalizing hints that he
had
once lived here, despite the newspaper articles and employment records that didn’t exist, despite the neighbors who said they’d never seen him before. Maybe he should check courthouse records. Or dig deeper into the
Tribune.
Work up the nerve to look for his mother’s obituary, for instance. Or Omega’s.

There’s an idea. Find out what happened to Omega: Had it died? Changed names? Never existed at all? That was an avenue he hadn’t taken even one step on.

“Mister?”

Startled, he looked toward the voice. The girl from the restaurant stood beside the car, leaning over awkwardly and squinting in at him. She smiled unevenly and asked, “Are you going into town, by any chance?”

Like the flip of a coin, the question decided him. “Matter of fact, yes. Need a lift?”

“Yeah. If you don’t mind.”

“Not a bit. Hop in.” He reached across and unlocked the passenger-side door as she scooted around the car. She shot him a nervous little grin and skidded onto the seat.

“Thanks,” she said.

With the girl in the car, her backpack nestled between her shins and both their seatbelts fastened, he glanced at her again. Her eyes weren’t hazel, he saw from close up. More of a light brown with the faintest greenish cast near the center, rather attractive.

“Don’t see many hitchhikers anymore,” he remarked.

“Oh, I don’t usually—That is, I—You know how buses are? It was just pulling away when I—I was going to walk, but—” She made an odd little shoulder twitch, absurdly helpless looking. She obviously wasn’t used to doing this sort of thing, he thought, wondering idly what had prompted her to start now.

“Don’t they always,” he said, starting the car and twisting in his seat as he backed out of the parking space. “And it’s always an hour before the next one shows up.”

For a block or so, neither of them said anything. Out of the corner of his eye, Carl could see the girl still glancing at him with half-lowered lids, as if afraid to look at him directly, as if she were working up the nerve to speak. Or act. Belatedly, he remembered a news item a few weeks before about a family traveling in Florida who’d been robbed, the husband killed by a hitchhiker. As he made the turn onto Main, she cleared her throat.

“This sounds dumb, I know,” she said, the words coming out in a nervous rush, “but, I—your eyes are exactly like my Aunt Kitty’s.”

“Kitty for Katherine?” he asked, when she didn’t go on.

The girl laughed, still nervous. “No, Kitty because her eyes are that same yellowy gray, like a cat’s. Her name’s Toini, really,” she said, spelling it when he arched his eyebrows in a question.

“Toini? Never heard that one before.”

“It’s Finnish. She’s a Finn. My uncle met her when she was in New York working for the U.N. Yellow eyes are common in Finland, she says.”

“Are they?” A brief, idiotic pleasure rose at this unexpected but useless clue to his past—or his ancestry, at least.

She nodded. “You two are the only ones I ever saw with eyes like that, though. Are you Finnish, by any chance?”

“I don’t think so. My name’s Johnson, Carl Johnson.”

Her mouth pursed as she considered his name, apparently as an intellectual exercise. “Swedish,” she pronounced. “Lots of Swedes in southern Finland, my aunt says. They intermarry, of course, so you could have gotten your yellow eyes that way.”

“Think so?” Carl noticed that she hadn’t offered her own name. He didn’t ask. She was sounding more hectic, more nervous with every sentence. Was she high? Like the murderous burglar? Or that Florida hitchhiker? Did he detect a hint of pot? He grimaced inwardly. He’d be glad when she—and whatever she had in that pack—were out of his car.

The conversation hobbled on with long pauses on both sides until they were moving through downtown Morgantown. The girl didn’t seem to want to get out, despite her obvious uneasiness. One more good reason to have a destination. A block from the library, Carl said, “I’m going to the library. That close enough to wherever you’re going?”

“Oh. Sure.” She drew her knees up slightly, as if she had to gather herself together before she could move. “You can drop me off anywhere. The library’s fine.” The Mazda was barely parked before she released the seatbelt and leaped out as if escaping.

“Thanks a bunch,” she said though the open window. “You—uh, you be careful, huh?”

Be careful?
Carl watched the girl walk away. Four or five steps on, she stumbled over a seam in the sidewalk, caught herself, almost dropped the knapsack, half-turned to look over her shoulder, and tripped again, this time over her own feet. She darted one last glance over her shoulder and hurried away.

She’s the one better watch her step, Carl thought.

O O O

In the library, Carl headed straight for the microfilmed newspapers, determined to look up his mother’s obituary.

But he didn’t. His fingers were touching the February, 1970, reel when he realized he still didn’t have the courage. Or the sense.

Okay. He’d start with Omega. The computer screen told him how to choose the index he wanted, and how to search for an entry once it was called up. Carl was oddly relieved that the display was green on black: at least he wouldn’t have to fight the shivers of looking at a fog, even if it wasn’t
the
fog.

Under Omega Corporation, he found a number of listings, and decided to start with the one for January 22. The headline looked promising: LOCAL COMPANY LAYS OFF 200. Sign of a failing business, maybe, and 1971 was the year he’d left Morgantown … or thought he had. He remembered looking at his own individual layoff notice months later, plain white rather than traditional pink … unless he’d dreamed that. His hands had been shaking as he read, wondering what to do next. First Omega, then Garland. Where else in this town could a tech writer—

Carl gave himself a shake. More Sunday supplement memories? Pulling the January reel of the
Tribune
from the shelf, he took it to a viewer and followed the instructions Mrs. Gates had given him yesterday.

The grainy images streamed across the screen in a blur as he cranked toward the 22nd, not even the boldest headlines registering in his mind.

Until the January 13 edition.

In general, the newspaper looked familiar, and he remembered some of the national stories and a few of the statewide ones. There’d been the Jackson State shootings, and in June Cambodia was in the headlines, not to mention then-Vice President Agnew and one of his periodic wars with the press. But the local stories were something else. The only one he remembered was the series concerning the town council and their running battle with the mayor, and that, he recalled, had gotten statewide coverage after a few months. It was not a matter of not remembering the other stories, until he saw them in the paper and was reminded of them. He simply didn’t recall anything about them. To make matters worse, he couldn’t think of any local stories at all from the time period that he should have lived here. But at least, he noted, the mayor was still named Sawyer, and the leader of the city council was still named Drake. Those things hadn’t changed.

He looked at another day. Two or three pages into it, he stopped, blinking.
What?

Frowning, he cranked the film backward.

And stopped at the front page, his breath catching in his throat. Spread across six columns was a picture. Blurred flakes of snow and a concrete bridge railing in the foreground, a woman being dragged from the icy river water in the background. In Washington, DC, the headline blared and the photo caption elaborated, an Air Florida 727 had crashed into the Potomac, killing seventy-eight people.

He recognized the headlines, the picture, the story, remembered them vividly. This was
not
, he knew, another Sunday supplement memory, but a real memory: no wavering, no uncertainty about its truth from moment to moment, only the rock solid feeling of reality.

But none of it, he realized an instant later, had anything whatsoever to do with him or even with Morgantown. This was something that had happened a thousand miles away, in a place he had never even visited.

But as he stared at the nearly-decade-old images, he remembered something else. Something about himself, something with that same rock-hard edge of reality, but something that also resurrected the icy fog of the nightmares and set it brushing at the edges of his mind.

As far back as grade school, disasters like the 727 crash had been the markers in his life. Where others pegged their lives to birthdays and Christmases and family trips, he had somehow pegged his life to events in which human lives were lost.

Worse, when the disasters had been big enough, the loss of life great enough, he had known they had happened—no, had known that
something
had happened—before he heard or read about it in the news.

As if being nonexistent isn’t enough, now I’m psychic, too?

What a thought! Entirely too many tabloid headlines read in the checkout lines. “Get real,” he muttered aloud. The spoken derision at least diluted the chill.

But did not banish it altogether.

Nor did it stop the memories. Unsummoned, they continued to drift into view. At least a dozen times, life had seemed to … what? Pause? Something like that. The world had gone still. Each time, he’d known that, somewhere, violent death was claiming more than its usual share. Not where. Not how. Just that it was happening, and that he would probably hear about it on tomorrow’s news.

As if he could sense the lives winking out.

The waters of a lake in Cameroon had quietly released a cloud of carbon dioxide and suffocated three thousand sleeping people. Carl, facing the screen of his computer half the world away, had sat with closed eyes for at least five minutes. Exactly as he had when that cloud of poisonous gas overwhelmed Bhopal, or the earth shifted to bury tens of thousands in Iran or floods claimed thousands in Bangladesh, or … or …

He looked through the reels of decades-earlier papers. Headline after headline of disasters catching his attention. February, 1940: CIRCUS HOME BURNS; LOSS ESTIMATED AT 150 THOUSAND. He read: In one of the most disastrous fires to strike Rochester in many years, the winter quarters of the Cole Bros. Circus was gutted, causing between $150,000 and $200,000 damage. Elephants and horses were set loose on the city streets.

May, 1950: WRECKED CHICAGO TROLLEY IN WHICH MANY DIED.

December, 1957: LEWISHAM TRAIN DISASTER LEAVES NINETY-TWO PEOPLE DEAD.

July, 1965: KANSAS AVENUE MELAN BRIDGE COLLAPSES, CARS AND CONCRETE TUMBLE INTO THE WATER.

Disaster after disaster, he could recall clearly … even though he hadn’t yet been born when many of them had taken place.

Carl shook his head, trying to force the remembered electrical chill from his mind, just as he must have done before. But he couldn’t. Now that the memories had returned from their exile, the insane events of the past few days—the nightmares, the fog, the impossible escapes from certain death, each accompanied by an excruciatingly intense version of the same chill—wouldn’t allow him to banish them again.