The Cauldron Read online

  Damp, he realized with a start. Strange. But it was probably just sweat, from the nightmare. He’d awakened that way often enough the past few nights, but this time it felt different somehow.

  Getting to his feet, he was momentarily unsteady, probably the result of lying sprawled uncomfortably on the couch for hours. Switching on the floor lamp, he made his way to the kitchen, where the refrigerator reminded him he should be hungry. He hadn’t eaten when Shelly had come by.

  She had come by, hadn’t she? Returned his key?

  Or was that part of the nightmare, too?

  Must be. One of those dreams that starts out perfectly plain and simple and then gradually slides into insanity. The others had likely been the same, the dreams and nightmares, but he just couldn’t remember them the way he could this one. But if she hadn’t actually come over, how far back did the dream go? The whole day?

  He grinned suddenly. Wouldn’t that be something! Harry and his “you-don’t-exist” business just a dream. The take some time off, just his imagination.

  But no, that “felt” real. Though so did Shelly and the car and the glistening, rain-slick pavement—and the crash, which he knew was a nightmare. He was here, he was alive, case closed.

  But still …

  Shivering, he picked up the phone. Shelly wouldn’t be in bed yet, not for another half hour or so according to her routine. Just say hello, hear her voice, apologize for … everything—

  Her machine answered. Her voice, but at the same time not her voice. He left a message telling her to call him no matter what time she got in.

  Ten minutes later he tried again. Same result. And ten minutes after that.

  He’d keep trying until he got through, until her voice, her living voice, not the damn recorded one, confirmed that it had all been a nightmare. Or was she listening to his voice on the machine right now, thinking, Go to hell, Carl? Most likely, considering how he had treated her last Sunday and since. Still, by the tenth try he was getting scared.

  Where the hell was she?

  Maybe he should drive by her place, see if her car was there.

  As he reached for his car keys, he saw Shelly’s key to his place, still hooked to the plastic Rolls Royce. It lay exactly where she had dropped it when—in his dream!—she had walked in and given it back.

  Before he softened the mood and asked her to the movies.

  Before—

  A car door slammed in front of the house.

  Carl reached toward the key ring.

  Touched it. It really was there.

  The house shuddered under the impact of fists pounding on the front door. He turned the knob and staggered backward as the door burst open.

  “You bastard!” Mike Fowler charged through the door, hands clenched, elbows tight to his sides, his forearms a pair of battering rams.

  His fists caught Carl at the edge of his ribcage. Already off balance, Carl reeled, stumbling over the corner of the couch. Another blow backed him up against the far wall. Carl threw his arms up in clumsy defense, but Mike landed a hard punch to his side.

  “Mike,” he gasped. “What—”

  “She’s dead, freak!” Two fists thudded against Carl’s chest. “Shelly’s dead!” Tears streamed into Mike’s beard. “You killed her! God damn you!”

  Carl’s stomach knotted. He no longer felt the blows. “Dead?” he wheezed. “Shelly? How?”

  “Head on with a semi, that’s how!”

  The rain, the curve, the scream, the roaring engine shrieking across the hood, crumpling it into the windshield—

  All of it memory, not nightmare.

  Shelly’s final words to him: Wake up, Carl!

  No, it had been a nightmare! It had to have been nightmare! And this—red-faced, sputtering-mad Mike Fowler, was part of it.

  “Murdering bastard!” Mike chopped at Carl’s neck with the side of a fist.

  “No,” Carl moaned, sliding away from the blow with his shoulder raised to deflect it. “Not me. How could it be me? I never left the house—”

  Mike stepped back. His chest heaved unevenly. “You weren’t there, freak, but you might as well have been! The cop said she was on the wrong side of the road. Shelly, on the wrong side of the road! You think she did that by accident?”

  “Accident,” Carl repeated fuzzily.

  “No way. She was too good a driver for that. She wanted to die, freak. Maybe not consciously, but she wanted it, and you’re the one that made her want it.”

  “Mike, no, I lo—”

  “Shut up!” Unclenching his fist at the last instant, Mike shoved the heel of his hand against Carl’s chin. His head bounced against the wall. “She’s been going through hell all this week, all because of you!” He yanked on Carl’s shirt, as if to bring his face down and look at it to see what his sister might have seen. “We all told her getting dumped by you would be the best thing that could ever happen to her, but would she listen? From the moment she met you she was a different person. I hardly recognized her. You had her so screwed up—”

  “Mike, please, I—”

  “I said shut up!” One fist pulled back, trembling, then fell. “Damn you! It should’ve been you smeared on the highway, not her!” Mike stepped back and stood staring at Carl for a moment, rubbing his grazed knuckles, his chest heaving. “Stay away from us,” he said, still short of breath. “Don’t come to the funeral, don’t send flowers, don’t let me set eyes on you again. Ever!”

  Mike turned, reeling against the couch and almost falling. Catching himself, he shoved through the screen door so hard it slammed against the outside wall.

  “Ever!” he shouted over his shoulder, half sobbing. “Ever!”

  The engine of Mike’s TransAm roared. The tires shrieked against the pavement. Carl felt his legs go weak. His back still against the wall by the kitchen door, he slid slowly down the wall until he was sitting sprawled on the floor, his ribs aching.

  Wake up, Carl!

  Shelly’s words kept repeating as the sound of the TransAm faded into the distance. Wake up, Carl! over and over, sometimes in Shelly’s voice, sometimes in his own, sometimes in Mike’s.

  At last the phrase turned almost soothing, like a mantra. Something softened the words, something began to seal them off, to build a muffling barrier around the pain. Finally, still slumped against the wall, the front door open to the coming dawn, Carl slept.

  ***

  Chapter 7

  Sometime between nightmares, Carl pulled himself off the floor and onto his bed. That was where he found himself, fully clothed and soaked once again in icy sweat, when he woke to full daylight.

  He stretched, wincing as a sharp pain gripped him just below his ribs. Stiffly, trying not to make any sudden moves, he sat on the edge of the mattress and unbuttoned his shirt to figure out what was hurting. The purple marks of knuckles on his left side puzzled him for a moment.

  Mike beat me up, he recalled fuzzily. But why? Something to do with Shelly?

  He shook his head sharply, trying to jar the memory loose. No good. He finished stripping and headed for the shower.

  When he emerged, he felt better, or at least cleaner. And the bruises seemed to be less tender. He pulled on jeans and a pocket T-shirt. Walking barefoot through the living room to the kitchen, Carl noticed the open front door. Frowning, he shut it.

  And remembered. He’d had that nightmare, and Mike had come bursting in to tell him Shelly had been in an accident—

  Something about a semi—

  Carl shivered, and then gasped, his stomach suddenly a churning knot of pain and nausea.

  It had all been real, not a nightmare!

  Shelly. The accident. Mike. Every bit of it had really happened!

  But how? He couldn’t have been with Shelly at the movies and asleep on his own couch at the same time.

  Could he?

  He shook his head violently, sending his thoughts skittering back through the week from hell. His own inexcusable behavior with Shelly. Ha
rry and his “you-don’t-exist” crap! That was what had started it, when—

  No!

  Once again he jostled himself, as if the motion could jar his mind—and maybe the whole world—back into normalcy, the way a thump on the side of a recalcitrant television set could sometimes restore the picture.

  “I do exist,” he muttered angrily. “Just feel these ribs!”

  The enormity of Shelly’s death settled on him and sapped his strength. His throat grew tight and he struggled to catch his breath.

  Dear God, Shelly!

  He closed his eyes and his chin dropped to his chest.

  Why couldn’t that have been a nightmare, the part about Shelly and the semi, her brother coming over and pounding the living crap out of him? Why did that have to be the real part? How could he have gotten home? Hadn’t Shelly drove to the theater?

  He shuffled back to the bathroom and threw up in the sink.

  “Shelly. I’m sorry.”

  Would she live again in his nightmares? He brushed off that thought, cleaned the bathroom and dressed. He walked from room to room like a zombie.

  Get your mind off her, he told himself. Think about something else. Anything else.

  His thoughts drifted back to work and Harry. He’d have to prove his existence somehow—to Harry if he expected to keep his job, and to himself if he was to have any chance at a normal life.

  Normal life? he asked himself angrily. After what happened to Shelly last night, a normal life? Shelly. Dear God, Shelly. He couldn’t push her all the way out of his thoughts.

  A pang of hunger gripped his stomach for a moment, as if to remind him that, normal life or not, he had to eat and replenish what little bit he’d puked up.

  He pulled a packaged sandwich out of the freezer, unwrapped it, and shoved it into the microwave. Bacon, eggs, and cheese on what passed for a biscuit in the frozen food industry. While he was at it he zapped a mug of water for instant coffee.

  Shelly would be appalled, he thought as he set the food on the kitchen table. Always after him to eat a decent breakfast.

  But Shelly was dead. This time the pain of her loss didn’t accompany the thought. There was, he realized detachedly, virtually no emotion at all now, except for a puzzled curiosity. It was if he’d been given a shot of emotional Novocain.

  “Shelly’s dead,” he said aloud, as an experiment, and then, “I know that.” But the words still didn’t bring the return of the appropriate pain, or at least very little of it. Intellectually, he knew he should still be suffering and feel full-force the raw, exposed-nerve agony of a migraine, but in reality it more resembled a dull headache.

  Was he in shock?

  Was that the answer?

  The agony lives in my nightmares …

  Blinking the sudden, senseless thought away, he decided he was definitely in shock, all his normal emotions muted, smothered. That was how shock worked, wasn’t it? It enveloped you in a protective cocoon, without which you couldn’t function.

  He took another bite of the sandwich and stared blankly out the window over the sink. The clouds were thinning, bits of sunlight bursting through here and there. The storms of last night, the storms that had killed Shelly, were—

  What the hell had happened last night? He’d had that dream, not like the recurring, surrealistic, fog-shrouded nightmares, but bedrock real, right up to those last few seconds when—

  It wasn’t a dream. It was real. Every moment of it. Had he been in the car with her? Had he somehow found his way home after the accident?

  He shook his head sharply at a pain that suddenly stabbed through him, but then, in an instant, it was gone.

  “Shelly came over to give me back my key,” he said, as if reciting a book report in junior high school. That part had to be right. The key was on the bookcase, wasn’t it? He’d seen it, just before Mike burst in and took after him. Suddenly unsure, Carl got up and looked. Yes, it was still there.

  But he couldn’t have been in the accident. He would’ve been as dead as Shelly. Even if he had miraculously survived, thrown from the car onto the cushioning grass of a roadside pasture, he couldn’t have gotten back here.

  So, obviously, somewhere between the time Shelly left the key and the time he awakened from the nightmare, he had fallen asleep. Probably before the part about seeing the movie. Maybe Shelly had suggested it—he felt as if their conversation had been friendly—and he’d said no, as he usually did. And had she decided to go by herself? Or had she simply left? Maybe the whole thing about the movie was only his imagination, part of that same nightmare.

  Carl went back to the kitchen for the coffee. I loved her, he thought. Didn’t I? And, little as I deserved it, she loved me.

  He froze, an explanation for the nightmare leaping into his mind, whole and logical. She really had loved him. And in her last moments, her mind had reached out and touched his. He’d never believed in psychic powers, had even made fun of believers at times. But at the same time he’d always wondered about it, wondered if, hidden among the countless charlatans, there really was something to it. Every family had at least one story about how a dream presaged the death of a friend or relative.

  Shelly had seen the semi coming. She had realized in those final instants that she was about to die. And, somehow, their minds had momentarily joined. A bond between them had existed, had still existed no matter how badly he had treated her, and it had made the joining possible. He’d not been at the theater or in the car with her … how could he have been and made his way back here? He’d actually been asleep, his skeptical conscious mind no longer a barrier to contact, and Shelly’s mind had reached out and—

  That had to be it. A momentary joining of minds in the shadow of imminent death.

  Satisfied with his reasoning, still apparently protected from the emotional onslaught he knew he should be experiencing, he turned his attention to his other problem: Harry and his wild accusation. And his own plan, such as it was, to dig out the truth of his previous employment history. He glanced at the kitchen clock. Just past nine. The library would open in less than an hour.

  O O O

  His first surprise at the library was that the Morgantown phone book was at least twice as thick as he had imagined it. The second was that not one of the people he’d remembered working with at Omega or Garland was listed. And Garland itself, just as Harry had said, was nowhere to be found.

  Carl sat frowning at that absence for a couple of minutes. Hard to believe that a company that big would go under without making the news, but here was the proof laying on the table in front of him.

  Omega was listed, but at a different address. Everybody’s moving these days, Carl thought. A touch of paranoia accompanied the idea: nothing was making it easy to prove that he was who he claimed he was. He could almost believe it was planned that way.

  Maybe Garland was still there, under a different name. Companies do change names. Or get taken over by competitors. He could drive down and look. What was it, five hundred miles? Six? Too far to bother, just to prod some jerk in Personnel at Omega into making their computer remember him, or to go looking for a Garland plant that for all he knew had gone out of business or moved to Florida seven years ago.

  Carl wrote Omega’s new address on the back of a call slip and shoved it into his T-shirt pocket. A letter would do for that. Nothing else he could do here. Might as well go home.

  The Roseville Tribune—delivered three or four hours earlier on Saturday than on weekdays—was on his doorstep when he pulled into his driveway. As soon as he stepped out of the car, he heard the phone ringing through the open kitchen window. Carl picked up the paper, opened it out, saw the headlines about Shelly’s accident, glanced at the story and folded it up again. Except for a momentary feeling of disorientation, almost dizziness, the grisly picture of the crumpled car did nothing to sharpen the dull ache that was still the only apparent result of her death. By the time he let himself in, the phone had stopped.

  He was mildly
surprised to find messages from several friends on his answering machine. Two from Dave, the second one apologetic.

  The phone rang again. Harry this time.

  His embarrassment over Harry’s awkward sympathy was the strongest sustained emotion Carl had felt that day. Don’t, he wanted to say. Don’t waste your emotions on me. The pain I should be feeling just isn’t there. It was fleeting, too fleeting. Something was shut off in him, he thought as he hung up. Still in shock, obviously.

  But it had to subside at some point. What would happen then? Would the grief that had kept its distance suddenly blindside him an hour from now, a week from now? In the nightmares? And would he be able to stay away from the funeral? He knew he should not. Despite Mike’s warning, he should be there, if only to search for the missing pain.

  If he was still in town.

  Carl let out a breath he’d been holding. Mike wouldn’t hesitate to use his fists again, even at his sister’s graveside. Why make trouble? Shelly wouldn’t have wanted a scene. Besides, his ribs were sore enough as it was. Why not stay home? Why not miss the funeral? Why not cave to Mike’s furious warning? Because it would be the wrong thing to do … if he was still in town.

  The phone rang again. At the other end would be another solicitous friend trying to find words for undeserved sympathy. Taking on Omega in person—or just escaping Roseville—began to look like a good idea after all.

  What was five or six hundred miles, after all?

  O O O

  Half an hour and a half dozen more sympathy calls later, Carl had thrown a few clothes into the same battered suitcase he’d carried with him from Morgantown eight years before. The Mazda still needed gas, he remembered, and he pulled into the first station he came to. It took a quarter gallon more than it was supposed to hold. Close call; he’d been riding on fumes.

  Extracting the money from his wallet, he was startled to see that he had only a twenty and four singles. Odd. He could have sworn he had three twenties the last time he’d looked, paying for lunch Friday.

  Better get some cash, Carl decided, pulling out and heading toward his bank. Lucky they’d started having Saturday hours a couple years back. With a single check, he took his account down to the minimum balance and stuffed the bills into his wallet.