The Cauldron (3 page)

Chapter 4

Melusine

Transition
!

For six heartbeats, then ten, Melusine’s body continued to exist. She could feel her pulse, could feel the chill that always came with transition, could see the afterimage of the ship in the nothingness of
otherspace
, an afterimage that proved her eyes still existed—for those few heartbeats.

Slowly, while she still had the choice, she released her hold, and let her mind float free.

Her body was gone.

And her sanity, once again, remained intact.

Transition, she thought for what must surely have been the thousandth time, was like coming to the borders of death, where heart and breath have ceased but consciousness somehow still lingers … except that, when the transition is complete, consciousness remains trapped, hovering on that fragile icy border of oblivion until
emergence
and a return to life.

She waited.

And the images began.

Faint and distant at first, they swept down on her with alarming speed and power. Within moments they were swirling around her like nightmarish scraps caught in a soundless whirlwind.

She resisted, remembering how, during other journeys, she’d been able to remain aloof and objective. She’d even been able, now and then, to shut her imagined eyes and blot out the terrifying images altogether.

But not this time.

After only a moment’s suspension, the whirl of images bore down on her with frightening intensity, coalescing into a smothering cloud that pressed relentlessly inward until she had no room to erect even the flimsiest of defenses and she felt her imagined body be
coming
the images, becoming grotesque parodies of what it had been—what it
must
have been—before this journey’s first transition. Mossy fur clogged her skin, became scales that sloughed off and were blown away by a hot, dry wind, leaving her wriggling along the sand, a chitinous carapace her only protection against predators swooping out of a sky boiling with clouds and jagged lightning—

If only she could do as those not of her calling did! If only she could simply lose consciousness at the point of transition and regain it, unscathed, at
emergence
! If only—

Desperate, Melusine cast back for her
real
memories, memories from growing up in time-and-space. In past journeys, when all else failed, she had been able to cocoon herself in those memories, to erect at least a rippling veil between herself and the clamoring images.

But on this journey, into the very fringes of the
dark domains
, time-and-space had never seemed more distant, her memories of it more uncertain. Her very
mind
felt on the verge of being absorbed.

Given a mouth, given lungs, Melusine would have screamed with terror, but all she could do was wait and endure. What sort of domain were they passing through, that it had such power? Had they entered the
dark domains
themselves?

A new anxiety forced itself upon her. What of the navigator? His mind was exposed directly to
otherspace
. Surely he would be suffering even more than she. Suppose his sight was taken from him! Suppose he lost control! Suppose without his guidance the ship should emerge in a part of time-and-space so alien that none could survive! Or, worse, could survive only in a form that would make them wish they had perished! From somewhere in her treacherous memory there appeared tales of travelers who had returned from the borders of the
dark domains
with neither their minds nor their bodies fully restored. She had even heard tales of navigators who—

Emergence!

The ship—and all of time-and-space—blossomed into existence around her. Her physical body was still several unfelt heartbeats away, so she could not see, could not hear, could not feel, but she
knew
. She always recognized the instant of
emergence
. Time-and-space, even to the isolated mind, could never be mistaken for
otherspace
any more than a crowded room, even in utter darkness, could never be mistaken for an empty and echoing cavern. Traveling through normal space was too slow, voyages taking generations. But
otherspace
, traveling through it bent the rules.

Melusine waited, consciously stifling the instinctive commands her mind sent to an as-yet-nonexistent body, so that when physical being at last enveloped her she gave only the smallest gasp and shivered for only an instant.

The restrainment pod quickly shaded from gray translucence to perfect transparency, continuing to support her as her body reacquainted itself with the gravity-like force the ship provided. Finally, the ship was satisfied with her recovery, and the pod parted and was reabsorbed.

Above her, hovering out of reach until summoned, her augmentor rustled its tendrils as if in anticipation. Watching it with a kind of affection—simply because it was familiar?—Melusine wondered whether, as alien as the notion felt, the creature gained some kind of pleasure from its work. She shuddered. Perhaps, like her, it was simply greeting its own body on emergence, or perhaps it hungered for the touch of a living creature other than the ship.

To her right, Melusine heard the rasp of the shipkeeper’s breath. Far older than she, older even than the navigator, he must find these journeys near unbearable. A faint thrill of new fear went through her. Should the shipkeeper die, who would keep the ship in hand? If she died, he could fulfill her role, but there was no reverse in the matter.

Almost against her will, she turned her head toward him—and felt a rush of relief. The shipkeeper’s restrainment pod, though still nearly opaque, was smoothly gray, not the black-blotched dead tissue that would surround a body that had failed to reunite with its returning mind. When the ship determined he could stand on his own, the pod would be reabsorbed.

Reassured, she looked away. As she did, the amorphous glow of the ship’s liaison brightened above the navigator’s reservoir, calling for her attention.

Stepping over the concentric irregularities that were all that remained of her own restrainment pod, Melusine looked directly at the liaison, at the central core of brightness—and realized, as it dimmed, that her shadowlids had returned. A fierce hope possessed her. She looked down. The silvery white tunic of the guild fell gracefully to brush the tops of feet—
true
feet, if not yet entirely her own. The fabric skimmed the lines of a tall, lean body, also not quite her own, but at least one she welcomed. No unsightly bulges, no dwarfish folds, nothing to make the fabric cling unnaturally.

Eagerly, she brought her hands out through the gold-rimmed armslits of the tunic and felt a small pang of disappointment. Two of these fingers had an extra joint. Or was she misremembering these small details of her original form? Journeys—and this journey in particular—could well affect her memory as well as her form, Melusine suspected. But these fingers
were
long and slender, with neither the thick webbing nor the patches of congealing slime that had so repulsed her at the last emergence.

She pressed her palms against her face and felt skin that was warm and soft over blessedly solid bones.

A mirror
, she thought wistfully, although she knew perfectly well the ship had none.

The liaison pulsed insistently. Glancing toward the shipkeeper, Melusine saw that his restrainment pod was finally beginning to thin and withdraw. Through the remaining translucence she saw that his tunic fell over a body of normal lines, that his face was once again smooth and unfurred, real skin with no shimmering protective sheath like … like … she couldn’t recall, and quickly ceased trying. And his color was good, a pale reddish gray. It was not like … she wouldn’t try to remember that, either.

Reassured, she stepped closer to the navigator’s reservoir and looked into the murky fluid that surrounded and supported him.
Like a womb
, she thought, and not for the first time. He looked like himself. To her surprise, his eyes were open, protected only by his newly-returned shadowlids. And the ship had reabsorbed the breathing mask he had required during the last few emergences, leaving even less trace of its existence than it had of the restrainment pods. The navigator’s internal structure, then, must also be returning to normal. His chest rose and fell with ponderous regularity, his long-ago-altered lungs drawing sustenance from the oxygen-laden nutrient liquid.

Raising her hands, Melusine thrust her fingers into the liaison. The central core pulsed again and extended a thread of concentrated brightness that twined itself around her fingers and crept up her wrist. At the same moment, another portion of the liaison dimmed. A globe appeared in the void, brown and green with clouds of white and vast expanses of blue. Melusine stared at it a moment and shuddered. Surely the blue could not
all
be water?

The world we have sought is at hand.
The liaison trembled with the navigator’s message, coming through that one bright tendril.

“Are the people here as similar to us as our own appearance suggests?” she asked aloud. The liaison shimmered, sending her question to the navigator.

That does not affect our purpose.

As she had known it would not. “The
dark domains
you saw in our path—have we passed them by? Is that why we have been so nearly restored? We are beyond them?”

The navigator stirred slightly, enough to induce minuscule waves on the normally glassy-smooth surface of the nutrient fluid. Melusine almost stepped back; it was the most she had ever seen him move. The liaison darkened in patches. The shift of light drew her gaze to it again.

We are all but within their borders.

“I do not understand.”

Nor do I.

Melusine waited, but the navigator said no more. They’d passed through so much dark matter, a greater concentration than she’d ever seen before. The matter fed the
dark domains
, Melusine knew, perhaps because its nature attracted and soured the things that live in the domains. Did that birth evil, or merely amplify it, she wondered. Or, perhaps, the matter only injured souls.

She stared again at the world that floated within the liaison’s glow. It had faded to near transparency, as if the navigator lacked the strength to maintain it. Because the
dark domains
were so near? Did they drain his energy? His will?

Troubled at the idea, she wondered what kind of beings could possibly inhabit a world that existed in a place like this. No matter that their physical appearance approximated her own, their minds almost certainly did not.

And it was their minds with which she must soon deal.

She took a breath to calm herself, and then glanced over her shoulder to see the augmentor coiling and uncoiling its myriad, thread-thin tendrils, as if impatient to begin its work, to reestablish the link that would bind them more closely than any lovers. Her scalp tingled with a mixture of revulsion and eager anticipation.

***

Chapter 5

Carl Johnson

Carl jerked awake. Sweating. Shivering.

“Carl?” Shelly stood in the doorway. Both joyful and terrified, he staggered to his feet.

“I—I didn’t think you’d be home yet,” she said, biting nervously at her lip. “I was returning your key.”

“Oh.” Disappointment. Still, there was a sense of relief.

She balanced on the threshold a moment, lips parted, staring sideways at the floor. “Carl, what happened last Sunday?”

“Happened?” He shook his head. “Nothing happened.”

“That’s exactly what I mean!” Shelly dropped her apartment key onto the bookcase just inside the door. It was still on the Rolls-Royce key ring he’d bought as a joke. Somewhere inside, he winced. She stared at a framed print on the top shelf, faux Egyptian papyrus with a scattering of hieroglyphics running around the edges and the sideways face of one of the gods. There was a mix of other Egyptian knickknacks in front of the books below it: a paperweight pyramid, a dog-headed man the height of a troll doll, and an ankh etched on a chunk of marble. “One minute we’re talking about getting married someday,” she went on, “and the next thing I know—”

She blinked hard and set her hands against her hips. “The next you’re out the damn door! ‘So long, see you, I’ll give you a call!’ Thirty seconds after I said ‘wedding,’ you were just gone!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Can’t we at least talk about it?”

“I—” Stepping toward her, he bumped into the coffee table, almost knocking over the by-now-warm bottle of 7-Up. Hastily, he snatched it up. “Come in. Sit down. Please.”

“Well, that’s something.” She crossed to the sofa and lowered herself onto it, watching him out of the corner of her eyes as he walked the few feet to the kitchen, set the bottle on the counter, and returned. Swallowing, not meeting her pale brown eyes directly, he folded himself into the matching chair set at an angle to the sofa. A flicker of anger hardened her normally soft features for a moment, but then she took a closer look at him. “You look awful. Are you all right?”

“Sure, I’m fine.”

“You don’t
look
fine.”

Should he tell her about the nightmares? And if she mentioned them to her brother? One thing he definitely didn’t need was Mike Fowler’s opinion. About
anything
.

A silence settled over them. From somewhere out on the street a car door slammed and a dog barked. A radio played, some bluesy tune, and then it cut to a deafening commercial and began to fade.

“Have you been eating?” she asked finally.

The constant question from every woman he’d ever known, starting with his mother: the first thing that entered their minds seemed to be an unquenchable urge to fatten him up. He shook his head, too late aware that it made him look angry. It was just that he didn’t want to be questioned.

But this was
Shelly
!

He managed a sheepish smile. “Sorry, it’s been a rough day. You want to go get a bite? Right now? Then maybe we can drive over to Creighton and see one of those old movies you’re always wanting to see.”

“Really?” Her eyes widened in surprise. “Tonight?” She grinned. “Do you know what’s
on
tonight?”

“No. I haven’t checked the paper.”

“
Three Smart Girls
, that’s what! The first picture Deanna Durbin ever made! You couldn’t have picked a better night to give in.”

A warm feeling, queasy but pleasant, took hold of him as he remembered their first encounter with the movie. It and some other movie from the thirties had been on the late show one weekend, and when he’d mentioned it to her he’d gotten a lecture on how good Durbin’s movies had been and a warning that there’d be dire consequences if he ever let her miss one again.

“Your car or mine?” he asked, grinning as he saw she was already on her feet and heading for the door.

“Better make it mine,” she said. Shelly pointed at the Egyptian print on the bookshelf. “What’s it say?”

“Huh?”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you, but I keep forgetting. The hieroglyphs. What do they say? Do you know?”

“Somebody told me once, probably where I bought it. Something something something
heh aha
something,” he said.

“
Heh aha
to you too.” She gave him a goofy grin. “I love this movie.”

Encouraged by her sudden enthusiasm, he bent to kiss her forehead and took her hand. “Let’s get moving. I remember what you said you’d do last time.
Heh aha
.”

They piled into Shelly’s old Chevy and took off. The inexplicable queasy/pleasant feeling lasted the whole thirty-mile drive to Creighton, even through a hurried meal at a Wendy’s a few blocks from the Golden Oldies theater. He felt better than he had since Sunday afternoon. Shelly seemed to have forgotten—or decided to temporarily ignore—his weird behavior, and she hadn’t mentioned marriage again. Superficially, at least, she was her usual self, buoyant and eager.
Since we took her car, she’ll have to drive me home
, he thought with a schizophrenic mixture of happiness and apprehension as he sank into one of the theater’s red plush seats and inhaled the scents of the place: the buttered popcorn that wafted from a couple a few rows behind them, the musty-fusty funk of the cavernous room itself and the anonymous but ever-present carpet cleaner.

And roses.

That would be Shelly’s perfume.

And Shelly herself.

The movie started.

And everything changed.

One second he was mildly euphoric, thinking that maybe, just maybe, the nightmares were losing their hold on him, that he would soon once again be capable of rational action, and he could have a normal life with Shelly. The next second, as a supposedly Swiss lake filled the screen and the teenage Durbin’s soaring soprano filled the theater, he found himself engulfed in the same mixture of terror and helplessness that gripped him each time he struggled to pull free of another nightmare.

This is crazy!
he told himself angrily, wincing as he realized he’d bitten his tongue to keep from screaming.
I haven’t even been to sleep!

Somehow he managed to sit quietly, gripping the arms of the seat like an airline passenger whose plane has just been hit by a powerful downdraft. It was all he could do to keep from hyperventilating. It
had
to be the movie, he told himself, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t close his eyes. Behind his eyelids, he knew, the nightmares waited, no longer confined to the realm of sleep but ready to overwhelm his waking mind.

“Are you all right?” he’d remembered Shelly asking him.

No.
“Yes,” he said.

Gradually, however, the panic subsided, leaving an eerie, directionless fear that turned every shuffling foot, every cleared throat, every whisper or crinkle of candy wrapper into an icy assault. He felt Shelly turning cold beside him. Maybe he didn’t love her; maybe he only loved the thought of spending his life with someone, dreading always coming home to … no one. Was that what held him back? That he didn’t truly love her?

If she pressed him again, he knew that nothing would keep her questions unanswered now.

Was he all right?

No.

Did he love her?

I don’t know.

Could he tell her the truth?

Did he feel anything?

O O O

Carl braced himself as the screen went dark and the house lights slowly brightened.
How long
? he wondered yet again. How long before she worked up the nerve—or the anger—to demand answers? Answers that made sense? Answers that she
deserved
?

How long before, unable to answer them, he simply had to walk away?

Entering the lobby, he saw he had gotten another minuscule reprieve:

He could barely see the marquis for the sheets of rain.

“No reason for both of us to get soaked,” he said. “I’ll make a run for the car and bring it around.”

“You don’t have to—” Shelly began to protest, but he had already snatched the keys from her hand and was plunging into the drenching rain, easing his taut muscles with his long gangling strides, his head ducked low to keep the rain out of his deep set eyes.

As if on cue, Shelly’s car came into sight half a block ahead, just an instant before the rain, with a last theatrical rattle on the sidewalks and cars, stopped abruptly and completely.

Smiling at the freaky coincidence, he noticed—or imagined—that Shelly, coming up fast behind him was smiling, too, just as she had earlier when her mood had done a complete about face at the mention of old movies.

Without thought or hesitation, he gave her a wave and hurried toward the car so that by the time she got there, he was prying open the rusty and squawking passenger side door with a sweeping bow worthy of any bedraggled Dracula.

But he had been right. A bit of momentary silliness wasn’t enough. She smiled, almost grinned at his efforts, but this time her eyes remained a painful mixture of anger and sadness that he couldn’t face.

His eyes fixed on the dash, he silently wedged his long legs under the wheel as best he could, fumbling for the lever that would send the seat back.

He felt Shelly watching him and wondered how long the silence could last.

Finally, still without a word from either of them, he started the car and pulled out onto the nearly deserted Central Avenue, and when they left the town behind, no other lights shared the road, only an occasional flash of lightning to indicate the storm hadn’t died, only outpaced them. Then, as they crossed the county line and the road began to cut through the hills that stretched all the way to Roseville and beyond, they caught up to the rain and discovered that the storm had intensified rather than faded. Carl reached forward and turned the wipers up as fast as they would go, but the right one only produced smears. For a mile, then three, then five, the only sounds were the rattle of the engine as it took the upgrades and the noisy but increasingly useless scrape of the wipers.

“What happened back there, Carl?” Shelly said abruptly, her eyes darting between his face and the “Roseville—15 Miles.” sign.

“What do you mean, what happened?”

“You know what I mean! Back in the movie. You were stiff as a board through the whole thing, like you were facing an impatient firing squad rather than the closing credits of a fifty-year-old movie you sort of maybe didn’t quite despise.” She shook her head. “If that’s how you react to something you once
liked
—I swear I could hear your teeth grinding when the singing didn’t drown it out.”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry!
Damn
it, Carl! Sorry doesn’t cut it. Just tell me what the hell is going on? Are we done? Are you dumping me? You were acting weird Sunday and you’re acting even weirder now! What’s happened to you this week?”

“Nothing much.”

“Are you seeing someone else? Are—”

“I’m not dumping you. I’d never—”

“Carl.” He heard her take a deep breath. “Look, if it
is
about getting married—fine. Say so. Say you can’t handle it. Just don’t leave me hanging this way.”

He recoiled at the mixture of anger and hurt that filled her voice, an echo of the voices in his nightmares. “I just didn’t enjoy the movie as much as I thought I would.”

“Like hell! You crawled into your own little universe back there and slammed the door behind you. What
is
it? Tell me or—”

“Or … I don’t know!” he flared. Harry’s inquisition all over again. “I haven’t been sleeping very well. That’s all.”

“Oh?”

“I … that’s all. If there were anything else, I’d tell you.”

And he would, he thought, trying to calm himself as she shook her head and sniffed angrily. The one person in the world he should be able to talk to was Shelly Fowler. But how could he talk about something he didn’t remotely understand himself? And the one person in the world he didn’t want to hurt was Shelly, but here he was hurting her anyway and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.

She maintained her stiff silence for another mile as the lightning receded into distant flickers far to the east, leaving behind a steady rain like a drumbeat on the roof of the car.

He felt a touch on his arm, but gentle as it was, he twitched nervously. “
Why
aren’t you sleeping?” she asked softly, the words barely audible over the rain. “Are you sick? Is that it? Do you have some sort of—”

“Not that I know of.”

Another long silence fell. She gently stroked his arm. “I know your parents died young.” Her voice was strained. “I know you’ve never wanted to talk about them.”

“It’s not—”

She pushed on. “All you’ve ever said is that they’re both dead, but you never said how they died.”

“They just died,” Carl said, more sharply than he intended. The uneasiness he’d felt so often since Sunday night was growing again, with the strange almost-queasiness. Like waking from one of those—

“Was it something … hereditary?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I told you, I’ve been short of sleep this week.”

“But why? There’s always a reason.”

He was silent, rounding a wide curve. Ahead, the hills would become steeper, more heavily wooded, the curves sharper and almost continuous. He yawned. A wave of sleepiness came over him, and the road flickered and shifted beneath the headlights.

“Carl! Watch out!”

He felt the tires hit the gravel beside the road, realized he was dangerously close to the ditch, yanked the steering wheel over. The rear wheels drifted. He was fighting the steering wheel, sliding, almost across the road. Finally he got straightened out, in the left lane. Shuddering, weak with relief, he steered into the right lane and slowed. The rain had picked up again.

“You better let me drive,” Shelly said, swallowing nervously. “Before you kill us both.”

“Might not be a bad idea, you driving,” he mumbled, heart pounding, arms trembling as he pulled onto the berm. “Here, you slide over and I’ll get out and go around.” Bracing himself against the cold rain, Carl shoved the door open with his shoulder and climbed out. A sudden tingle, not from the rain, caught at him as he crossed through the headlight beams. A prickling tingle that touched every part of him like an electrical charge.