The Cauldron (9 page)

Not for me,
Carl thought.

“Yeah,” Marshall repeated, pleased with himself. “That’s who you look like.”

Unsaid between them, the existence of this man, his resemblance to Carl who did not resemble his father, played out its suggestions. To cut them short, Carl said, “You think he might still live there?”

“All I really remember is, he was the tallest, skinniest guy I’d ever seen. Just like—”

“That’s all right,” Carl said. “There are some things worse to be called than skinny. I’m used to having people notice.”

“I know, but—Anyway, that’s when it was, long time back. Be old as the hills by now.” Marshall shook his head. “And a hermit, to boot, he’d have to be. Sure haven’t seen him around town. Possible, I s’pose, that he’s still there, but I can’t say.” His leg started to jiggle, jiggling the table. “If he’s out at the lake, I could miss him easy. Don’t swim anymore. Last time I went out there would have been the summer before the flood.”

“Flood?” Carl took a slow, trembling breath. A wave of fear had hit, as cold as any of the nightmares. His feet shifted involuntarily.

Marshall nodded. “Long time back. Flash flood in the forties, few miles north of here. Guy from around here was killed in it, two, actually. So it sticks in my head. Miller, his name was. James Miller, John Miller, Joe. Something like that. Didn’t know him, myself. And the other guy was Oscar Pinno. His name I remember ’cause my wife and his wife were cousins.”

Miller.

He’d worked with a Miller, once. Hadn’t he? Or was that just another name from the nightmares?

Charlie Marshall cocked his head. “You’re sure you don’t look like your father? I don’t s’pose you have a picture of him on you.”

“No.” Not on him, not anywhere, Carl realized. Why didn’t he have a picture of his father? Or of his mother?

“Well.” The restaurant owner shrugged. Both men got to their feet. “Guess we’ll never know. Good luck to you, sonny.”

“Thanks.” Carl shook the offered hand. Under Marshall’s intense gaze, Carl went to the door, feeling bleaker than ever. Behind him, the three rows of booths were still in place. Had been for thirty years.

***

Chapter 14

He returned to the Adler and sat on the edge of the bed, his hand resting near the phone on the bedside stand. Eventually he turned away. There was no one he wanted to call. Mike? To ask about Shelly’s arrangements? Had Mike cooled down and would now accept him at the funeral? Shelly, somehow, seemed part of a different world, one in which he was no longer fully in contact. And Harry … what was the point in calling Harry? What could he tell him? That Harry was right? That he didn’t exist? At least not in Morgantown records. Or perhaps he’d tell Mike that he was losing his mind.

If someone were covering up his existence, for whatever insane reason, it would have to be the government. Every base had been covered … high school yearbooks, newspapers, courthouse records, his old neighbors … everything.

Carl had not been able to locate a single person he had known in high school, or anyone who had been his friend after high school. Using a city directory, Carl had found the names of the people who lived in the house he thought he had grew up in, and the names of everyone else in the same block. He remembered some of them, or thought he did, and when he called they said they’d never heard of him or his parents.

With some help from a friendly clerk in the Register of Deeds office, he had found that the current owners of 1727 Jefferson had lived there for more than a decade. Their name was Siegel, and the records showed they’d purchased the house in 1966 from a Howard Winsauer, who’d owned it for the previous dozen years. Some of the neighbors had remembered him because of the extensive flower beds he had lining the property.

In the entire time Carl had been on this mad search in Morgantown, he had come across only one name that he recognized: Charlie Marshall at the Tip-Top, a man who was too old to fit a teenage memory.

O O O

As always, he woke in a cold sweat. But this time was different: this time, he wasn’t screaming. He was holding it in, clutching the tangled sheets, staring at the sporadic neon glow from the roadside sign filtering in through the drawn drapes next to the bed, listening to his own rasping breath and pounding heart. This time, new and unfamiliar fragments of the nightmare had survived the panic of waking.

They were sparse and vague, but at least there was something.

A woman’s face, one whose features remained constant. Whose? Mom’s? It had been someone who looked like her, but he was having the same trouble of the day before. In trying to pin down the image, he merely drove it further away. Each feature he tried to peer at more closely only became more distant, as if fearing his scrutiny. He lay still, holding his breath with the effort of recalling that face to mind. No use.

And where? A building, huge, impossible, filled with endless twisting corridors and countless rooms, a building—or had it been a complete city? No.
Just the high school
. Just the high school, those long hallways that looked so strange this morning, inflated by fear. But the thought didn’t sit right. It brought no recognition.

There had been another building, a house this time, an ordinary house, but not one he could remember ever having seen.

That face …

And another face, one that at first seemed harsh and gaunt like his own, but then seemed only slender and graceful.

He shuddered. Mainly, though, he remembered only the darkness, the fog and the cold; the dim shifting grayness filled with misty, swirling shapes that swooped at him, seemed real for an instant, and were gone. God, the cold, the same cold he had awakened with so many times. It was a cold that touched not just his skin, but penetrated through his body. It was the same kind of cold that he felt when the car had almost run him down today—

—that had gripped him just Friday night, when Shelly was killed. While she was dying.

Shelly. That must be why he’d broken down in the library, sitting with his long legs crossed on the cool brown tile floor. The girl in the old yearbook had fleetingly reminded him of Shelly—something of her expression Friday night, when he’d suggested the movie. His grief had broken through.

Hot tears ran down his face. He wiped them away with the sheet.

My grief is finally real, he thought. It’s the rest of my life that’s slipped its moorings and drifted away from the solid shore.

As he lay there in the flickering silence of the room, his mind went back, for the first time, to what had happened that morning. Not to the growing evidence of his nonexistence, which was all that had occupied his thoughts until now, but to the speeding car.

It dawned on him that his escape, which he had somehow accepted and forced out of his consciousness, was obviously impossible. One instant, the car had been no more than two or three feet away, coming directly toward him, moving at least fifty miles an hour. The next instant, it had been past him.

He had been directly in its path, he was positive of that, and the driver had made no effort to avoid hitting him. And yet …

It was as if the car had passed directly through him, as if his existence in the present was no more substantial than his existence in the past. And then, shaken, half in a daze, he had left the walkway without a backward glance. And the memory of a chilling, swirling gray limbo that had suddenly enveloped him and then, just as suddenly, vanished.

In the hours since then he’d not really thought about it.

Had it happened it all?

He shook his head, rocking it heavily back and forth in the pillow.

“I have to trust my own mind.” Without that trust there was only chaos and insanity.

All right, it happened, the speeding car, he thought. Take that assumption for granted. Had the car actually passed through him? It was like the driver had tried to hit him. What did the grayness have to do with it? And the cold?

A different kind of chill, one born of fear, crept into him. Why had the driver tried to run him down in the first place? Going at that speed, on a city street, that didn’t happen accidentally.

So it had been intentional. But why?

From somewhere came an obvious answer: to keep him from discovering the truth about his past.

The corollary: if he wanted to stay safe, he should abandon his search and move on. Besides, he had already done just about everything he could think of here. He had checked all the records, talked to people who should have known him or his parents, people who had lived on the same block. So, other than simply wandering around Morgantown looking for familiar faces and landmarks from his past, there was little more that he could do. The logical thing was to move on, ignore the whole affair, especially the driver that had tried to run him down.

Three quarters of his life had vanished with lost records.

Someone had tried to kill him.

And he escaped death in a way that was impossible—through a bank of cold fog.

Carl pulled the motel’s musty blanket tighter and turned onto his side.

O O O

No nightmare this time. He just woke with a faint electrical tingle on his skin. Relaxed despite the chill, Carl opened his eyes.

And froze as he saw that the door was open a crack, a sliver of parking lot visible beyond it. A shadowy figure bent over his suitcase on its little stand in the alcove that passed as a closet. The window curtains had been pulled back so the single naked bulb in the parking lot gave the intruder enough light to make a hasty search. As Carl watched, the thief abandoned the suitcase with a sniff and started on Carl’s pants, suspended from the clothes rod along with a couple of his shirts and a dozen empty hangers.

Carl didn’t think he’d moved, but the man snapped upright. He turned. The dim light glinted on his fist, on his impossibly long forefinger.

Oh, shit, Carl thought. The bastard’s got a gun.

Very much in control, the still-shadowy figure walked to the side of the bed and he held the barrel very hard against the hollow of Carl’s temple and said something. A question. Carl sorted the meaning out from the obscenities: “Where’s your money?”

“Wallet.”

“And credit cards! They in there, too?” Carl’s eyes were held sideways by the gun, but he heard the grin in the voice.

Carl could feel the figure’s muscles tense as the fingers began to squeeze the trigger. At the same time, his own muscles tensed, and an obscure corner of his mind wondered: why does this man want to kill me?

The air was suddenly clammy. Fog swirled at the edge of his vision. Carl managed to nod silently.

“So where the shit is it? Credit cards? Money?”

“Pants.” The clammy coldness turned into a tingle, the same tingle he’d felt Friday night, but it was building faster this time. The fog was thickening, closing in.

“Don’t screw with me, man. Ain’t no wallet in those pants.”

“The shelf.” A twitch of his hand, the gesture sweeping through the fog, not touching it, not disturbing the shapes that now swam in it. “Maybe I left it on the shelf.” The tingle was becoming unbearable.

The thief backed up, never taking his eyes off Carl, and patted along the shelf above the hangers. The hand reappeared a moment later holding the wallet. The thief grinned, several bad teeth visible even in the dim light.

“Thanks a lot, pal, but you shouldn’t’a woke up.”

Through the thickening fog, Carl saw the man extend his arm straight out in front of him, holding the gun as if he were at a target range. The tingle, now a raging electrical storm confined to his body, climbed toward a peak as the man’s hand clenched over the gun. Carl felt his body twisting,
being
twisted as the tunnel of fog collapsed in on him, blotting out everything except shapes that moved in the fog. People? He plunged helplessly into it—

—was enveloped in icy, shimmering grayness, and then—

The gun cracked. The muzzle flashed. But Carl wasn’t in bed. He was on his feet, half concealed behind the open door of the room. Limp with shock, he grabbed the doorknob for support as he felt the tingle begin again, saw the fog racing inward from the edges of his vision.

The thief turned toward him. The gun swung wildly. “Holy shit!” the man breathed, his eyes leaping upward, his hand shaking as he jerked the gun up toward Carl’s chest. No buildup this time. The electrical storm within him started at its peak, the fog chilling, smothering. Carl gasped. Like a hooked fish, he was jerked violently into the fog filled with the shapes of people and was—

—thrown out. Collapsing bonelessly to the floor on the other side of the room, Carl heard the second shot, saw the second flash.

The thief spun, gaped at him with pop-eyed incomprehension changing to terror, stumbled backward, dropped the wallet, and rushed from the room. Outside, a car door slammed and an engine snarled.

Still chilled to the bone, Carl managed to get to his feet.
What did I just do?
he asked himself.
Whatever it was how did I do it?
The cold was the cold of his nightmares, but—A nightmare? Was that what it had been, a nightmare, masquerading as waking up? He shivered. Had he dreamed the thief?

Am I awake now?

On rubbery legs he got to the light switch and flipped it on. From there, he could see the singed black hole in the pillow, the spatter of powder burns around it. Somebody pounded on the door of a nearby room. He stared at the hole.

“Everything all right here?” A man stood in the still-open door. The night manager.

Carl nodded toward the bed. “Guy shot at me. Burglar. Missed, thank God.”

“Yeah?” The manager came into the room, rubbing at the two-day stubble on his chin. “A burglar? What the hell happened?”

Carl pointed at the pillow. “I woke up and saw him going through my stuff. Guess he heard me move or something.” Feeling winded, he took a breath. “He asked where my wallet was. I told him, and he—just—shot.”

“Shoulda had better sense than to open your eyes, pal.” The manager noticed the wallet, still on the floor where the gunman had dropped it. “Or anything else,” he said, sounding disgusted. “Better to let them get away with what they can get away with. These days, they’d as soon shoot as say good morning. You want me to call the cops?”

Carl shook his head.

“Okay. Wouldn’t do any good, anyways,” the manager said, sounding relieved. “Never catch him. They’re everywhere, especially in this neighborhood.” He looked at the hole in the pillow and shuddered. “You’re one lucky son of a bitch. Where’d the second shot go? I heard two.”

“Back there,” Carl said, his finger jerking in the direction of the opposite wall. A hole had been drilled in the plasterboard just above the top of the door. The manager frowned at it. “High,” he said. After a moment Carl realized that he’d diagnosed the state of the thief.

“No cops, and the room’s on the house,” the man said. “You want a fresh pillow?”

“Thanks.”

Five minutes later, with an undamaged pillow under his head and the door’s security chain fastened, Carl lay back and tried to make sense of the senseless. Friday night, he knew now, had been no dream. Everything, from Harry’s “you-don’t-exist” to Mike Fowler’s beating, had been real. He’d been through it all. ESP had nothing to do with it. He’d been in that car with Shelly … they’d been to the movies, and then he’d been in the car, and he’d escaped being crushed by that semi exactly the way he’d just escaped two bullets.

Twice—no, three times counting the speeding car from earlier today—he had been in mortal danger. Three times he had escaped.

But how?

That was how he had escaped the speeding car downtown, wasn’t it? Had he simply “moved” from in front of it to behind it without going through the intervening space? Was it teleportation?

Whatever had happened, it wasn’t his doing, not his conscious doing at any rate. Something, some deep-seated reflex, had taken over his body, like you’d snatch a hand back from a flame before it could send a message of pain to the brain. So some unknown reflex had snatched him—his entire body—out of danger.

Someone had deliberately tried to kill him—twice—the speeding car downtown, the thief moments ago. Were they related? Was someone out to get him? Like a contracted assassin? If that was the case, they wouldn’t give up. There’d be another attempt coming. And, if there was, would he be whisked to safety again?