The Cauldron (18 page)

Chapter 30

John drowned in the late forties, and Carl had been John. That made Carl effectively in his sixties, somehow having survived the plunge in the swollen river and ending up working for Harry near Milwaukee.

But he didn’t look sixty. He looked at best half that.

“I drowned,” he said, glancing down at his hands. For a moment he marveled at the way he accepted this new and bizarre past that had, in effect, sprung full-grown from his head. “Which means, that I’m just a few years older than Ellen.” He glanced at the corner of his bedroom, which was in the direction of the lodge. Pain and guilt welled up once more. “But she looks … old.”

Carl thought he was being foolish, but he locked his bedroom door anyway. He turned the latch as quietly as possible. Did he want Jerrah to think he hadn’t locked it? That he trusted her and so left it open? That he wasn’t concerned about her warning that some force in her head wanted to kill him? He pressed his ear to the door, heard her running water at what passed for the kitchen sink.

“Nuts?” he whispered. “She thinks
she’s
nuts. This whole thing is nuts.”

Jerrah had called him her friend. He wasn’t being much of a friend to leave her out there, pacing, thinking, talking to the something in her head. He wondered if he should have mentioned his “foggy bolt hole,” which had allowed him to escape death at least twice … the accident with the semi and Shelly, drowning in the river when he went to look at that boat. No, three times … that speeding car in town that had tried to run him down. What if Jerrah’s ‘it’ was a denizen from the fog? Was that possible? Something from his phantom realm come to track him down? Why would it want to kill him? Had he trespassed in the fog and angered it? Would it prevent him from using the bolt hole again? Would it snare him in his dreams? Or would it be exactly like Jerrah said … would it use her to kill him?

“There is no ‘it.’”

He slipped off his shoes and padded to the window, for whatever reason trying to be quiet. Pressing his face to the glass he looked out at the lake. It was a sheet of black satin that stretched as far as he could see, a nothingness that reflected only a piece of the moon. Craning his neck and looking up, he saw wispy clouds covering the rest of it. Only a faint scattering of stars was visible. When he’d come back from Ellen’s he thought he’d smelled rain coming. He stood there for long minutes, watching the clouds thicken and multiply. Ozone like rust in the air, even with the window shut. Lightning so close he heard air rip and sizzle for the barest instant before a crash that shook the room.

He remembered storms from long ago that had lashed the lake, lightning—pink, green, white—just like he watched now, illuminating clouds and snapping to earth against the far shore. The lake glowed in the flickering light, beaten pewter under the rain that had started to fall. As Carl watched, a small branch sailed away from a wind-whipped tree and scuttled along the dock. He had a sudden fear for the huge willow tree beside Ellen’s house. But a part of him knew it was pliant, and that it always managed to survive. He recalled a lightning rod that he—that John Miller—had banded to the chimney.

Carl felt around the window frame and found a hook-latch. It had been painted along with the frame and so was stuck in the “open” position. But he worried at it until he freed it. He swung it locked and tested that it held. Wouldn’t be much security, he thought. All someone had to do was break the glass to get in. Still, that would make more noise than simply opening the window, give him a little time to act.

I’m being silly,
he thought.
I’m the one who’s nuts. There’s no ‘it’ visiting Jerrah and making her do things.
No one was going to break into his tiny bedroom at this run-down resort at the outskirts of Morgantown.

And yet that very possibility caused him to nudge the small nightstand in front of the door … just in case Jerrah … or ‘it’ managed to knock the door open.

I really am nuts.
Carl picked up his shoes and carried them to the bed, sat them on the floor and then edged them underneath it. He heard a soft scraping sound as he pushed them.

“What?” He peered under the bed. “What the hell?” The bedroom light was a low-watt bulb, but it was just bright enough so he could see a knife. He pulled it out and stared at it, a thousand thoughts twisting through his mind.

He could storm right out into the other room and confront Jerrah.

And tell her what? That not only is she insane, she’s dangerous.

He could grab her by the arm and take her into town, park her at the bus station and wait with her until the next ride came—and make sure she got on it. Get the nutcase a hundred miles away from him.

He could leave.

Maybe that was the best option. He could wait until he was certain Jerrah was asleep, and then he could tiptoe out of the cabin and drive back home, visit Shelly’s grave, tell his boss he didn’t need any more “leave” from work and that he was fit to return. Beg to return. Yeah, he should do that. Leave Morgantown and nutcase Jerrah, leave Ellen who might have been … still might be … his wife. Stop trying to ferret out his muddled, mysterious past.

Maybe get some psychiatric help.

A lobotomy, he wryly thought. That’d pretty much solve everything.

He returned to the bed and sat on it, springs squeaking and mattress sagging under his weight. The bed was old, like this resort, and like he was feeling right now. He had to do something about Jerrah, didn’t he? She was like a cavity in a tooth; she wasn’t going to just go away on her own. But should he pull that particular tooth out of his life this very moment?

Sleep on it.
He grabbed the sides of his head and swung around, stretching out.
Sleep on it. Sleep on it. Sleep on it,
he thought. Maybe things will be better in the morning.

Maybe Jerrah will be saner.

Maybe he’d offer to take her to the highway so she could hitch a ride or drive her to the bus stop in town … take her anywhere so that she couldn’t come back to pester him.

Or should he keep her close?

His head pounded, the pain coming out of nowhere and feeling like a relentless blacksmith swinging a hammer. He closed his eyes and saw only a charcoal darkness, the light he’d failed to shut off keeping out the utter blackness. He made no move to get up and turn it off. Nor did he undress. If he managed to fall asleep, he intended to do so fully clothed.

“Nuts. Nuts. Nuts,” he whispered.

Soft, he heard a gentle rumble of thunder.

Ooooh-weee-oooh oooh oooh oooh, a loon on the lake cried. Ooooh-weee-oooh.

Rain pattered against the window.

The rain made for good “sleeping weather,” Ellen used to say. Or had some other woman or wife in his life said that? Ellen hadn’t changed, physically. Older sure, but she was the same woman he had married. He recalled that in the winter months the cottages were left vacant, the tourists a memory, and it was only the two of them. There had been some winters he had worked as a janitor in the high school … the one he thought he’d attended in the sixties. He remembered treasuring the evenings the most, when it was just he and Ellen, reading, listening to the radio, or simply talking.

What was real? What had been distorted? What had been displaced and blended by time?

He listened for more thunder, instead hearing Jerrah pacing across the floorboards in the other room. The rain seemed to let up a little.

Carl clamped his teeth tight, the pain he fostered in his jaw competing with the headache.

How much of all of this was real? Any of it? Was he really at this run-down resort, run by someone he still might be married to? Or had he descended into some hellish madness? Had he fabricated this place and Jerrah? Was he caught in one of his fog-induced dreams and was actually back in his own bed waiting for the alarm to go off to rouse him for another day of work?

The rain whispered against the window, and the loon called once more before falling silent. Carl continued to mull over his options while he heard Jerrah pace in the other room.

Was she ever going to bed?

She was too real to be a nightmare?

Exhaustion eventually grabbed him, and he slept despite his worries and the headache. Dreams came quickly, and he embraced them, his subconscious willing them into crisper detail and pushing away the misty fog that curled around shapes and images that felt both familiar and foreign. The dreams, which once terrified him, were a welcome escape.

***

Chapter 31

In his dreams he heard someone talking in a tongue he couldn’t at first place. But Carl concentrated and picked through the accent and words, translating everything.

The man who stood before him looked older than Carl knew him to be. He had a red-blonde drooping mustache and a funny cap, spider-web wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and liver spots on hands that he constantly wrung. His clothes were voluminous and looking like something a patron at a renaissance fair would wear. Carl looked down and saw that he was dressed in something similar, though shabbier.

“It bends light. Do you understand, Esbiorn?”

Esbiorn. Instantly Carl remembered the name, an Old Norse one that meant “divine bear,” and that he’d went by that name … when? How long ago? Four hundred years?

“Yes, I understand, Master.”

“It must be huge,” the mustachioed man stated. Carl tried to recall his name. “This structure, to bend the light from the stars.” The man padded to a tall, narrow window and leaned on the sill. Carl/Esbiorn followed him.

“Dark matter,” Carl/Esbiorn said. “That is its name.”

If the other man had heard the label, he gave no indication. “You cannot see it with a telescope, so subtle it bends the light. It is colossal in scope.”

“Two thousand times the size of this galaxy,” Carl/Esbiorn quietly supplied.

“I have studied these stars so long and so often they are imprinted on my very eyes,” Tycho said. That was his name—Tycho. “And this shape, this—”

“Dark matter.”
Otherspace
.

“Is a structure that you can only see by realizing how it distorts the starlight. I study the stars and their light, how it stretches … and how it bends around that colossal mass. The mass is the largest, where the greatest distortions are. Do you understand?”

Tycho was far ahead of his time, but Carl/Esbiorn was somehow much farther beyond this man that he was apprenticed under.

“This matter must have gravity,” Tycho went on. “And that gravity changes the path of the light shed by the stars. So while the stars themselves are not affected by the structure, the images of the stars appear imprecise to us here … if you know how to look. Most astronomers would not notice this distortion.”

“But you are not most astronomers, Tycho,” Carl/Esbiorn said. He pronounced it Ty-go and spoke in a Danish accent only slightly less thick than his master’s. “You are a genius.”

Tycho dismissed the compliment with a shrug of his narrow shoulders. “Gravity, that mutual attraction of everything for everything. Could we only know the temperatures, dear Esbiorn, of the gas between the stars, we would know how much gravity is squeezing this … dark matter. And we would thereby know just how much of the matter there is in space. I would like to know that, Esbiorn, how much of it there is, exactly
what
it is. But I fear that will elude me in my lifetime.”

The Dane nobleman Tycho Brahe lived in the mid to late 1500s and was recognized in his lifetime for his astronomical and alchemical work. Carl wondered how he’d become the man’s apprentice.

“Ah, Esbiorn, I believe that when the universe was like you—young and impressionable—it was smooth like a lake on a windless day. And as it aged, its various features became more organized … planets whirling around suns, stars gathering themselves into clusters. Millions of stars, Esbiorn.”

“One hundred billion in this galaxy,” Carl/Esbiorn said.

In the folds of his mind, Carl could smell the tallow of the candle at Esbiorn’s small desk, and the mustiness of his stone-walled room, the coolness of the floor against the balls of his feet.

Where had he gone after working for Tycho? Where and when had he been before that?

Carl dismissed the memories of the astronomer and searched through the recesses of his mind, people and places, unbidden images coming to the fore—an elephant, two, three, and horses, pretty girls in colorful costumes, march-like music coming from a calliope. His senses wrapped around the calliope music, the smell of sawdust, the whistle of a ringmaster, the belly laughs of clowns.

The screams of clowns.

The shrill screams woke Tina and Petey. They were in her trailer, curled around each other on a narrow bed, the sheets damp from the heat of their bodies. The clowns in the neighboring trailers were hollering, one of them pounding on the door.

“Wake up, Petey! Fire! Wake up!”

Petey struggled into his jeans as Tina dropped an overlarge T-shirt over her. They tugged each other outside into what could have passed for the pits of hell. Flames were everywhere—animals and people, the clowns who’d alerted them running through the smoke. Some carried buckets. An acrobat tried to control a frightened camel.

“Started at the blacksmith’s!” a juggler shouted as he stumbled past.

Petey’s eyes smarted, and he rubbed at them with his free hand; the other was wrapped around Tina’s trembling fingers. Through the smoke he saw people spilling out of the mess hall where they must have been eating an early breakfast. If it was dawn, he couldn’t see it for the rosy haze of the fire.

“We have to get out of here,” Tina said in Ellen’s voice.

“C’mon.” Petey knew the winter headquarters grounds by heart. He didn’t need to see things clearly to find his way. If the fire had started in the blacksmith’s shop, they would head in the opposite direction to safety.

The fire was as colorful as the tents and decorations he and Tina hurried past. Panicked, they had not bothered to look for their shoes. Bits of gravel and slivers from poles chewed into the bottoms of Petey’s feet, but he didn’t let the pain slow him. The air was desert-hot, despite it being winter, and it was filled with so much sound that Petey was practically deafened. The cries of animals and people, the crack of the fire spreading from canvas to canvas to wood and across brittle grass. Faintly, he listened to sirens.

“No.” Petey stopped. He couldn’t just run. That would be selfish. They weren’t terribly far from the cat barn. It also contained the tanks for the seals and hippos and the quarters for some of the elephants. He had to help save the animals. “This way. We’ve got to get Freida out.”

Flames licked up the side of the horse barn, fed by hay and straw, too engulfed to try to enter. He could smell burning flesh and pictured the beautiful pale horses dying. Past that was an office building, made of brick it was so far not touched by the conflagration. The adjacent circus wagons were not so fortunate. Petey had helped repaint ten of them; he knew they would be a total loss.

Tina kept pace, hopping over tent posts and discarded tools, reaching forward even as he did, fumbling with the catches on the cat barn, covering her face and trying to breathe. Within heartbeats they had it open. The smoke had seeped in somewhere, and the world was hot, gray, and angry and filled with the sounds of terrified animals. The stench from burning flesh and the fire was oppressive. The catches on the cages were oven-hot, but Petey and Tina worked them open and stepped aside as the great cats bolted. Then they released the elephants.

The animals thundered away. Petey and Tina started on the seals next. They would give their last measure trying to save as many animals as possible. Then he would pull her through the icy fog—and take the hippos with him—when there was no more hope, whisking all of them away to another life.

As Ellen and John.

Carl remembered where he’d seen Ellen’s picture in the newspaper; in her pretty circus costume, she’d been listed as one of those lost to the great fire of 1940, her body never recovered. Except she hadn’t been lost, he’d saved her.

He could still hear the cries of the animals and the crack of the flames.

As clearly as he now heard thunder and the angry patter of rain against his window.

Through it he heard pounding on his bedroom door.

Carl’s eyes snapped open, and he shook off all thoughts of Tycho and the divine bear and the stars and elephants.

Carl’s scalp tightened. “Jerrah?”

No response, but with the lightning flickering continuously, he saw the knob move, saw the door shift as it was pushed against the bolt.

“Jerrah?” He cleared his throat. “Is that you?”

Still no response.

The knob rotated half a turn and held still.

Carl went softly to the door and pressed his ear against the thin panel. Nothing was audible over the storm that still lashed the cabin.

“Jerrah?” Had the “it” come back?

He pressed his ear against the door again. Still nothing. “Jerrah, is something wrong?”

The knob turned sharply again, and the door rattled against the bolt, startling him back from the door, but whoever was there said nothing.

“Jerrah?” he repeated. “Is that you? Is something—”

“Wrong? Yes, something is wrong,” Jerrah said, her intonation eerily flat. “Something is definitely wrong. I cannot open this door.”

“You told me to lock it,” Carl said.

“I did? Well, unlock it. Open this.” It certainly was Jerrah’s voice, but it came muffled through the door. The nightstand was still against it, and Carl saw the knob continue to twist and turn and the wood shake as she pounded on the wood. “I said open this.” A pause. “I need to talk to you.”

“It’s late, Jerrah. We both need to sleep.” He paused. “How about I drive you to the bus stop in the morning?”

“Open this door,” she repeated. “Open it now. I want to talk. That is all. Talk.”

“I can hear you fine from where you are,” Carl answered.

There was quiet for a few moments, just the sounds of the storm intruding. Then came a loud “wham!” that shook the door and rattled the nightstand. Jerrah had found something heavy and was using it to try to batter the door down. Maybe one of those metal-legged kitchen chairs, Carl thought. The hinges groaned and pulled with a second “wham!” Jerrah was going to defeat the door.

Carl looked to the bed, thought about pushing it against the door. Then he looked to the window. In the pale yellow light from the overhead bulb the rain resembled shimmering snakes racing down the pane.

Another “wham!” this one splintering some of the door, and Carl raced to the window and struggled with the latch. The window caught as he tried to open it; too much paint had been applied around the edges too many times, acting like cement. He finally worked it up just high enough so he could squeeze out when the nightstand fell over and the door broke open. Jerrah stood in the frame, eyes wide and pupils enlarged, lip curled up and head cocked at a funny angle. It was an expression Carl had never seen on her before and one that he might have thought comical, like out of some bad horror movie. Except it genuinely terrified him.

“Come in,” Jerrah said. “You will get sick out there in the rain.” After a moment she straightened her head. “Just want to talk.”

“I’ll bet.” Carl saw a knife in her hand. Too late, she tried to put it behind her back to hide it. “I’ll bet you just want to talk.” He slipped the rest of the way out the window.

“Come back!”

He’d not put on his shoes, and the gravel base around the exterior of the cabin bit at his feet through his thin socks, reminding him of his flight from the burning circus. The rain came at him sideways, almost hurtful in its intensity.
A helluva storm for a helluva night,
he thought, as he backed away from the window and hoped … what … that the dark would hide him from Jerrah?

Carl’s heart thrummed, and the headache he’d lost in his sleep returned full force. His throat tightened and his mouth went instantly dry—despite all the water everywhere.

“Water.” He’d considered rushing to the lodge and waking Ellen, having her call the police. But instead he ran toward the lake, his ungainly gate slowed by sticks and rocks that jolted him with pain. The ground trembled in time with the thunder’s rumble, and he thought he heard Jerrah hollering at him, but he wasn’t sure.

He wanted to see if she was chasing him, but he didn’t want to waste a precious second turning around to look. Carl could see shapes, but barely, trees looking like ink smudges against a charcoal backdrop that brightened momentarily when flickers of lightning shot through it. But he knew where the lake was, straight ahead from his bedroom window, and within heartbeats his feet were slapping against the sand. Then the water was swirling around his ankles and his knees, and his pace was slowed by the push of the lake and the muddy bottom that grabbed at him.

He slogged out farther, until the water reached waist-high, then he turned and looked to the shore, drawing ragged breaths and holding his side that ached from his burst of exertion.

Jerrah was on the shore, knife in front of her, the blade glistening silver from the water and lightning flashes.

“Come back!” she shouted. She said something else, but her voice was lost in a boom of thunder. She made no attempt to come into the lake after him. In fact, she stayed well back from the edge of it.

She looked small, rain plastering her hair and clothes to her like a second skin. Her posture reminded Carl of a zombie from one of the B-movies he’d seen at a matinee. She motioned with her free hand.

“You will get sick,” she called.

“And I’ll get dead if I come out of the lake,” Carl muttered. Louder: “Jerrah! Snap out of it!”
It
, he thought. The ‘it’ she’d mentioned had come back, hadn’t it? Louder still: “Who are you?”

Jerrah edged a foot closer and shuddered when lightning and thunder jarred the ground.

“Who are you?” Carl repeated.

“I am not Jerrah,” the figure said.

***