The Cauldron Page 3

  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.

  ***

  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 becoming 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?”