The Cauldron (2 page)

Chapter 2

Harry looked up from a clutter of papers on his desk and wiggled his fingers in a close-the-door gesture as Carl ducked his head and stepped inside.

“Something wrong, Harry?” As if Carl didn’t know. One day’s work, if that, for five days’ pay this week. And Harry ran one of those proverbial tight ships.

“That’s pretty much what I was gonna ask you.” His boss smiled as he waved Carl into a chair, but his eyes were serious.

Carl took a careful sip from his coffee as he sat. “I’ll get the Terrel job done,” he said defensively. “I’ll stay late tonight, come in tomorrow if I have to.”

“I don’t doubt you would, Carl. But why should you have to give up a Saturday? Any other time, you could’ve done that garbage in your sleep. Two days, tops.”

And he’d been on it three. Already.

Carl averted his eyes, felt his heart accelerate. “Sorry.”

“And that marine radio pamphlet you did Monday—” Harry leaned back with his arms behind his head. “Marston called this morning and chewed me a new one. Said there were damn near as many typos as there were words. And a few downright goofs in the technical stuff, Carl. We can’t afford that.”

“I’ll fix it.”

Harry waved a hand dismissively. “Brenda already did it. Listen to me, Carl. Everyone’s entitled to an off week once in a while, ’specially when they’ve had as many good ones as you have. But this week is more than off; it’s a dead loss.” He tempered the words with an upward twitch of the corners of his mouth. “Personal problems? Anything I can do to help?”

Carl shook his head. “If there was, I’d tell you.”

Silence, except for Harry’s fingers tapping one of the few bare spots on the desk top. Then he leaned forward. “Whatever it is, Carl, you can tell me. It won’t go outside this cube. And it won’t make any difference between us.”

Carl shrugged uncomfortably, a mixture of fear and irritation gripping him. “I’ve been having trouble sleeping, that’s all. Haven’t gotten more than a couple hours a night, if I’m lucky. Plays hell with my concentration, I guess.”

“I’ll say. Ever have this trouble before?”

“Not that I can remember.”

“Have you seen a doctor? You’re only thirty. You shouldn’t be having this sort of trouble.”

“Doctor!” The coffee in his hand twitched, almost slopping over the edge. Carefully, he pushed a stack of papers aside and set the cup on the edge of Harry’s desk. “It’s just the sleep, Harry, the insomnia, whatever. I’ll be okay. And I’ll get the Terrell thing done next week. Promise. I know you need it so they’ll come through with—”

“Look, Carl,” Harry interrupted, “you know I don’t mess with anyone’s personal life. But if there’s something you want to tell me—something you
should
tell me … Like I said, it won’t go anywhere, and it won’t make any difference.
I
promise that.”

Carl swallowed and discovered that his entire body was tingling, as if he’d come down with a full-fledged case of the flu without a single warning symptom.

Or had been thrust back into his nightmares without even having to go to sleep.

“If I had something to tell you, I’d tell you,” he said honestly. “But I don’t. I’m just short of sleep, that’s all.” He started to stand.

Harry sucked in a breath and waved him back into the chair. Carl slowly re-folded himself into it, feeling a surge of cold course through his veins.

“I didn’t want to say anything, Carl, but it looks like I’m going to have to,” Harry said. “First, one more chance. You’re sure you don’t have something to tell me? About before you started working here, for instance?”

Catching his jaw about to sag, Carl stared. “What’s to tell? Everything was on my application—”

“Everything?” Harry held up a smudged, dog-eared sheet of paper. His full name, Carl William Johnson, was on the first line. Age 22—which he had been, then, when he first applied here. Height, 6’5”, weight 150—still about the same, and he was still being offered home cooking by almost every new acquaintance he made. Single—which he could change if he’d get himself straightened out and Shelly didn’t come to her senses first. The Morgantown address he had lived at for the year after his father died, until he moved here, to a suburb of Milwaukee. The date of his graduation from Morgantown High School—1966. His parents, Warren and Ellen Johnson, both deceased. No next of kin.

A long silence, while Harry’s eyes locked with his. “I called the places you said you’d worked, Carl. Back then, before I hired you, I called them.”

I’ve been working here eight years. Why bring this up now?
Carl’s heart skipped and his head started pounding, as hard as when he woke up from one of his nightmares. “And?” he managed.

“For starters, Garland didn’t exist. The other one, Omega, existed, but as far as they were concerned,
you
didn’t exist. They’d never heard of you.”

“That’s crazy!” Memories flickered past. The hum and clatter of the old Selectric he’d scrounged from another department. That redhead with the long legs at the next desk. Gus, the supply clerk with a new bad joke every day.

“That’s crazy,” he repeated. “Garland maybe went out of business, they were having a really hard time, which was why I left after two years, but Omega—” He shook his head. “That’s crazy! You did your checking in the right state, didn’t you? You didn’t look for Morgantown in Ohio or Iowa instead of Indiana, did you?”

Harry scowled. “I couldn’t find any trace of Garland. Omega’s personnel department claimed there were no records of you.”

“Two years there, too. They must have gotten my name screwed up.” Carl licked dry lips. “Spelled it wrong, or something.”

“First thing I thought of,” Harry said, shaking his head. “Tried every Johnson-Johanson-Jonson variation in the book. But it wasn’t just the name that was missing. Nobody remembered
you
—and you have to admit, a six-foot-plus perambulating skeleton with blonde frizz for hair, not to mention yellow eyes, wouldn’t be all that easy to forget.”

“But you hired me. Why hire me if you thought I was lying?”
And I’ve been working here eight years!

A ghost of Harry’s grin returned. “You know the kind of ragged-edge outfit I run around here. And the way you translated that sample engineering spec I gave you—Hell, I handed it to you cold, and inside half an hour you handed me back something even a management dimwit like me could understand. No goofs, nothing left out. How could I afford
not
to hire you? I didn’t care squat that you’d never been to college. And I’d never checked your references then, only now because we’re updating records, putting them all on the computer, and I want to dot all the Is and cross all the Ts, not just for you, but on all the employees. But you’re the only one with these … discrepancies.” He rolled his shoulders.

“So maybe you weren’t who your birth certificate said you were,” Harry went on. “So maybe you hadn’t done exactly what you said you’d done, exactly where you said you’d done it. Maybe you did time somewhere for stealing a car. So what? I know the knack when I see it. And for eight years now my profit margin on the jobs you’ve done has been damn near double what I get from anybody else. Couple of those big jobs that first year made the difference between keeping going and folding up the tent. I put it out of my head—whatever ‘it’ was. Until now. Harry, the company’s investors are going through the records. Gotta clear this up.”

Carl swallowed hard. “Never been in jail, Harry. I would have remembered getting arrested. I’m not hiding anything.”

“Well, something is off. So if ‘it’ is serious, if ‘it’s’ causing problems here and now—the way I’m scratching to make payroll, I need to know. So if you’re ready to talk about it, now’s the time.” He paused. “Even if you’re not ready to talk about it, now’s the time.”

The urge to bolt from the room almost lifted Carl out of his seat. An uncomfortable silence settled between them. Finally, Carl broke it. “It’s not that I don’t want to talk about something, Harry. There just isn’t anything to talk
about
. I didn’t lie on any of those forms.”

“You’re saying you lost one company and another one lost you? Personnel computers and department heads both?”

“Hell, Harry, I don’t know!” He clutched the rough cloth arms of the steel-frame chair. “All I know is that I worked at Garland for most of two years, for Omega once, too. Not long at Omega, either. I was moving around a lot back then, transferring in the companies, and I think I was still on probation with at least a couple of the departments when I left. So maybe I didn’t get into their permanent records.”

“Maybe.”

Harry’s drawled skepticism made Carl’s mind shy away. He heard his own mouth racing on, “Big places like that, you know how well the honchos get to know the peons. They don’t. First time they lay eyes on you is when they hand out the ten-year gold tie tack.”

“Maybe.”

“You know it, Harry! You’ve said as much yourself. You said that’s one reason you went into business for the investors here, to get away from all the bureaucratic crap.” Carl swallowed hard again. “I’ll
get
the Terrell job done, I’ll stay late tonight if I have to. No overtime.”

“Screw the Terrell job! Look, Carl, I’ll be honest with you. I don’t
care
who is lying or even what they’re lying about. What I care about is the effect on you. As an employee
and
as a person. And from the way you’ve been twitching ever since I brought the subject up, I’d say that you’re scared shitless about
something
.”

Harry rested his folded arms on the desk. “So here’s what’s going to happen. You’ve got a lot of vacation time coming, and you’re going to take some. Starting now, right this minute. You’re going to use it to get things straightened out, I don’t care how. Go back and find Garland or find somebody at Omega who remembers you. Get a physical—our medical plan will cover it. That’s one thing I
don’t
cut corners on. See a shrink if you have to, or try one of those detox programs, if that’s it. A prescription for sleeping pills. It’s all covered. Or tell the jerk at the witness relocation program he screwed up with your background. Tell him it takes more than a store-bought birth certificate and a couple generic job references to fake me out. Just do whatever it takes, okay? Come back in two weeks, three if you want.”

Carl nodded, stunned at this sudden ultimatum, yet weak with relief.

“And if there’s anything I can do to help, just ask,” Harry added, more softly. “Anything at all. Okay?”

Carl nodded again. “Sure, Harry. I will.”

“Okay, then. Now get the hell out of here. Give Dave the Terrell junk and clear out until you’re ready to come back. You’ve got my home number, right?”

Carl’s head bobbed as he took a deep breath. “Thanks.”

“Anytime you need to, call. I mean it, Carl.
Any
time.”

Carl shuffled slowly back to his cubicle. He put the specs in order, added the half dozen pages of notes and a printout of the boilerplate introduction—literally all he had to show for the past three days—and walked around the partition to Dave Hatcher’s cubicle. “Lucky you.” He dumped the collection on the table behind the other writer. “You get Terrell.”

Dave spun around in his chair, eyes wide. “You weren’t kidding? He
fired
you?”

“Not quite. At least not yet.” Carl took his jacket from the shared coat rack and slung it over his shoulder.

Dave came out of his cubicle to intercept him in the aisle, still looking surprised and now a little frightened. “What happened? What did he tell you? Are layoffs coming? What did he say?”

Carl tipped his head as he turned to walk out of the office. “Say? He says that I don’t exist.”

***

Chapter 3

An inexplicable pang of sadness shot through him as he’d shuffled past all the desks and out the door, waving to the other tech writers as he went. On the sidewalk he faltered, puzzled. Why on earth should he feel bad about leaving this place? It was only temporary, a vacation and a chance to clear his head while at the same time clearing up his record.

Before he got to his car, the feeling had vanished, leaving only a trace of confusion in its wake.

At home, Carl went straight to the warped and scarred oak desk he’d brought with him when he moved from Morgantown two states away. In the third pigeonhole from the left, a crystal-clear image told him, were two envelopes full of check stubs from Garland and Omega. He’d assembled them for his income taxes one year, but when it turned out he hadn’t needed them after all he of course had swept the whole affair under a mental carpet and never thought of it again.

Until now.

Annoyed at his own forgetfulness and remembering a dozen other similar lapses running all the way back to grade school, he hurried to his desk, almost stumbling on the frayed throw rug Shelly had given him to wipe his shoes on after the freakish snow storm that had, somehow, been totally missed by every TV weatherman in the state.

Beginning to relax, he emptied the pigeon hole, gratified to see there were enough loose papers and ragged envelopes to cover a decade, never mind a single year.

Minutes later, his annoyance and relief turned into a growing nervousness. The check stubs weren’t there. The envelopes he’d been certain contained them were simply empty. The others were filled with stubs, all right, but they were all from the paper mill that handled Harry’s payroll.

“Damn,” he said softly, leaning back in the chair. Where had he put them? He hadn’t imagined them. He’d touched them. He’d tucked them away.

He started at the far left and searched all the pigeonholes again, all the drawers, every possible crack.

And did it all again, this time reading each and every piece of paper and writing down the dates of every pay stub, wondering if the cut-rate outfit that did Harry’s payroll had screwed up in some way, getting his records mixed up with someone else’s, which of course was even more ridiculous than being completely forgotten by people he’d worked with for years.

After two more tedious searches, he gave up and accepted the inevitable: There
were
no Morgantown stubs, just an assortment of odds and ends from his eight years here: clippings, postcards from co-workers on vacations, long-expired cents-off coupons, paid-up utility bills, unsorted and unverified bank statements and canceled checks, pictures from last year’s neighborhood block party, souvenirs from his drive through New England a couple of summers ago. Every single item was from the past eight years. There were no old letters, no old pictures, no canceled checks, no bills, nothing from Morgantown. Nothing from before he’d moved here—

It was like his life had started only eight years ago.

Without warning, a memory surfaced, erupting into his mind like a pocket of air bubbling up through the otherwise placid surface of a lake.

Suddenly, he felt like a total fool. All the Morgantown records had been stuffed in a single box—the box the movers had lost! How could he have forgotten?

“The movers. Of course.”

But no, that was impossible! He had rented a trailer and loaded everything himself! Hadn’t he? He’d been going to hire movers, but a look at his bank account had changed his mind, and it wasn’t that far of a move, Indiana to Wisconsin.

Squeezing his eyes tightly shut, he shook his head vigorously, as if to bully his mind into behaving itself.

And he remembered.

It had been an
earlier
move that he’d rented the trailer; the time when he’d just relocated across town and hadn’t
needed
to hire a mover. A trailer and a couple trips were all it had taken, not like when he’d come up here, from two states away.

Satisfied his recollections were in check, he stood, the missing box and the careless movers fixed firmly in his mind.

But what now?

Call somebody? Call who? Someone at Omega or the non-existent Garland? Fat lot of good that would do. He didn’t remember the titles or names of anyone in authority, let alone the number for the department responsible for screwing up personnel records.

He glanced at his watch and realized with a shock that it was past four. He’d wasted more than six hours in his idiotic search, which meant it was past closing time in Morgantown’s time zone even if he did know who to call.

No, there was no point in calling, no point at all. A better idea would be to call some of the people he’d worked with. Yeah, people who’d remember him even if he had been forgotten by—or never even been entered in—the damn computers. He could probably find a Morgantown phone book at the library.

Tomorrow.

The library closed at five on Fridays, and he wanted to spend a little time there. Besides, the phone rates would be lower on Saturday. Relieved to have a plan, Carl went to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and stared sightlessly into the brightly-lit interior. A few wisps of mist formed as the cold drifted out around the warped door of the freezer compartment into the humid air of the kitchen. Unexpectedly, he shivered.

Grabbing a bottle of 7-UP, he slammed the refrigerator door shut and pulled the opener from its magnetic mooring near the top of the door. The cap came loose with an unusually loud warning hiss, and he was just able to get the bottle to his lips to catch the fizz before it spilled over.

Back in the living room, he flipped on the TV. Nothing worth watching, of course, not at this time of day. None of the stations he could get would have any news for another hour, at least. Maybe someday the town would get around to approving a cable contract, but until that unlikely day he was limited to what he could get with the ancient rabbit ears perched on top of the set.

Funny to be home this early, he thought, a touch of uneasiness returning, setting the skin on his back a-tingle. Turning the volume down to a low murmur, he crossed to his threadbare couch, set the bottle on the stack of
Time
magazines on the coffee table and sat, sprawling with his head against the cushion. The flickering, nearly silent images of some soap opera followed by a Gilligan’s Island rerun seemed to calm him for some inexplicable reason. Soon he was yawning, his eyelids drooping, and, to his own surprise, he found himself actually looking forward to the fog-filled dreams that most certainly would plague him again, as if some part of his mind saw them not as a threat but as a haven.

***