The Cauldron Page 4

  “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.

  Lightning about to strike? He’d read somewhere that the accumulating charge in the air could raise the hair on your arms.

  Scared, he hurried to fold himself into the passenger’s seat and shut the door. With the bench-style seat forward for Shelly to drive, his knees barely cleared the dash. He felt the warmth where she had been sitting. He looked toward her, saw that she was watching him, as if reluctant to put the car in motion. Or reluctant to give up her prying questions.

  Her pale brown eyes looked dark in the dim light reflected into the car.

  “You know, Carl,” she said hesitantly, “this past week I’ve realized something. My brother’s a jerk most of the time, but even a jerk is right once in a while. I really don’t know much about you. You never talk about anything that happened before you moved here.”

  Swearing silently, because he had no idea how to reassure her, Carl slumped in his seat. Whatever he said now, her brother Mike would insist he’d made it up.

  “You can talk to me, you know that,” she went on. “Why do you keep shutting me out this way?”

  He sighed. “I don’t mean to.”

  “I thought you loved me. You said you loved me.”

  “I do, Shelly.” Did he? “It’s just that I—” The tingle came again.

  Not just his skin. This time it formed inside him, first in his chest then through his stomach and into his legs, pushing out into his arms and hands, as if his heart had suddenly begun pumping not his own warm blood but some icy, alien solution that was trying to freeze him from the inside out. This couldn’t be a prelude to lightning. Could it?

  ***

  Chapter 6

  “Mike thinks you must have been in jail,” Shelly said. “You weren’t, were you, Carl?”

  “Jail? Huh?” Hadn’t Harry implied that? And then he’d made a crack about witness protection. “Jail?” She said something else, but he’d missed it. He couldn’t focus his thoughts on her, on what she was saying, no matter how hard he tried. Jail. Did she say he’d been in jail or was going to jail? A clammy chill settled over him, demanding his full attention. Not the icy tingle in his veins, not the cold clean chill of rain, but something else, something as unsettling as—

  “Carl! Did you hear me?”

  —as unsettling, as terrifying as his dreams, the dreams that began with Shelly and ended with the fog and vague, terrifying memories of things that inhabited it. He shivered. The feeling that overwhelmed him now was the same one that had gripped him in his wire-tense awakenings—but deeper, stronger, impossible to throw off.

  “Don’t do this to me, Carl! Not again!”

  Shelly’s words barely registered. At the edges of his vision, where everything was indistinct, he caught a hint of motion. Swirling gray, like a thick bank of grimy fog with something sweeping through it, stirring it into misty billows without revealing its own dark shape. His scalp tightened.

  “Say something, damn it! Anything! Don’t just sit there like I don’t exist!” Softer: “Or maybe to you, I don’t anymore.” Softer: “This hasn’t been working. We’re not working. You don’t know who you are.”

  She looked for a moment as if she were going to slap him. Instead, blinking back tears, she turned away abruptly, grasping the steering wheel and flooring the accelerator as she threw it into gear, her face an unreadable mask.

  “Damn you, Carl! Wake up! I’m going to make you wake up!” The car rocked and sprayed gravel as she jockeyed it onto the pavement, into the swirling mist that only he could see.

  I’m losing my mind, Carl thought as he stared ahead, straining to see the real world rocketing toward them, and instead seeing the odd fog. I am simply losing my mind. That’s the only answer.

  He stared at the windshield, at the wipers sweeping back and forth. He tried to scream at Shelly, Be careful! But nothing came out. The sounds he desperately wanted to make were sucked into the fog, the gray swirling mist that was now a tunnel with billowing walls collapsing in on him. But he was in a car. Shelly was driving—Slow down, Shelly! Slow down!

  Nothing came out. The tingle and the clamminess increased to hurtful proportions, as if somebody somewhere was turning up a dial a notch at a time and he—

  Bad curve. A wall of trees rushed through the fog that wasn’t there.

  “Wake up, Carl!” Shelly gasped, the car tilting as she tried to follow the curve and stay on her side of the double yellow line.

  Lights swept across Carl’s eyes. Around the curve came a huge semi, hogging the middle of the road. Shelly screamed, drowning out the blare of the semi’s horn and whatever mindless tune had been playing on the radio. She jammed on the brakes. The wheels locked, and the car aimed itself at the truck.

  He felt the traction break, felt the car continue to skid, felt the tingling ache become an explosion of pain as the gleaming chrome bumper of the truck rode up the hood of Shelly’s old car and he was pitched headlong into the cold gray fog, the swirling
nightmare miasma of mist that was filled with shapes—dozens, hundreds of shapes moving, shifting, emerging as forlorn featureless shadows only to be swallowed again into the gray nothingness. He shrank back as one figure swept past, even as it pulled back from him. Shelly? Was that figure Shelly?

  In the distance was a glow, a harsh, pulsing light that sliced through the fog like a ragged knife, shriveling each shape that it touched. Terrified, Carl—

  Woke up.

  Fell, and woke up. Fell—out of the fog—and was jarred to consciousness. He turned toward Shelly. But she wasn’t there.

  The car wasn’t there.

  He was half-sitting, half-lying on his own couch in his own darkened home, as if a child had flung down a broken toy and walked away. The blank screen of the television set faced him silently in the faint glow of the streetlights that filtered in through the curtained windows.

  Had the movie never happened?

  The drive to Creighton?

  Shelly? Beautiful Shelly driving and angry at him, justifiably angry for his treatment of her?

  Carl rubbed his icy hands together.

  He glanced at his watch. Nearly eleven.

  Well, that was something. Apparently he’d slept more than five hours before the nightmare got him. And this time he remembered all of it, not just the fog and the creatures that swam through it endlessly!

  It had been about Shelly, the nightmare, the real Shelly, not one whose face appeared for only a moment before dissolving into that of a total stranger. In his dream she had come over, he couldn’t quite remember why, and they’d gone to a movie up in Creighton, an old musical comedy he’d seen a long time ago.

  For some reason the movie had upset him, but he couldn’t imagine why. His stomach jumped as he remembered Shelly confronting him about it, and the hellish way it had all ended.

  The semi—

  Shaking his head and closing his eyes against the remembered image, he could only think how completely real it had all seemed. He could hear the blare of the semi’s horn, see the shadowy cab, the glistening, rain-spattered bumper as it bore down on them, crumpling the hood of Shelly’s car like so much tin foil. He quaked, rubbing his sweaty palms along his pant legs.