The Cauldron

by Jean Rabe

  Pictures!

  That’s it! Pictures! Yes! He remembered! In a Sunday supplement he’d found when he was unpacking boxes a month or two after the move. A Sunday supplement from some big city paper—Chicago? Cincinnati? That particular issue had featured Morgantown! A homey portrait of a small Midwestern town, just the sort of thing they ran now and then to let their big city readers know that small towns and small town values still existed in America. The paper had been three or four months old at the time, he remembered, so he’d had it for a while. Sure—he could’ve had it when he woke up and he could’ve used it, subconsciously, to generate a new life and—

  Abruptly, the castle he’d been building—his mind had been building—in thin air began to crumble. Pictures in a newspaper wouldn’t account for created memories of his parents, for the house he thought he’d lived in or Jim Denton’s picture in the yearbook or an aging Charlie Marshall or where the yearbooks were kept in the library … or the girl whose face in one of those yearbooks had driven him into uncontrollable tears.

  Unless …

  Desperately, he tried to recreate the paper, the pictures, and the articles in his mind. Could Charlie Marshall, as a local businessman, have been pictured? Could the girl—Ceecee?—have been included? Maybe she had done something of note later in her life but she had died and that yearbook picture was the only one available and—

  My god! Just listen to me. Talk about grasping at straws! This is as absurd as … as thinking I came to the wrong Morgantown. As absurd as … as …

  Even as he struggled to find a suitably absurd comparison, the need for it faded. The Sunday supplement with its dozens of pictures and thousands of words about Morgantown retreated.

  Still flat on his back on the bed, he shook his head. Where the hell had such a ridiculous pipe dream come from? There had never been such a paper. Had there?

  But if not, why had he been able to see it so clearly, why had he—

  Madness?

  No. I am not mad!

  God! It was back! He remembered the front page, the pictures, even a caption under one of the pictures, a caption with Charlie Marshall’s name in it, Charlie grinning at the camera.

  A caption—and a picture of Charlie standing proud in front of the Tip-Top—that hadn’t been in that Sunday supplement the first time he had remembered it.

  Stop it!

  His fingers clenched on the frayed bedspread, almost ripping it as the two memories pulsed in his mind, alternately fading and brightening like a movie screen with two projectors trained on it, first one image dominating, then the other.

  Stop it!

  Whatever, whoever, is doing this to me, stop it!

  The articles, the pictures, all faded. The memories remained, but he knew they were sham, something his mind had conjured up. Completely imaginary, not like his real memories of growing up in Morgantown … memories that had at least some basis in reality. Like Charlie Marshall.

  A measure of ease returned with the thought. Charlie Marshall. He existed in the remembered Morgantown and the real Morgantown. He was far older than he should be, but he existed. And he owned the restaurant Carl remembered Charlie’s father’s having owned. It was as close a match between memory and reality as he had found so far.

  Damn you, whoever you are, he said angrily to the thing in his mind. I’m not giving up!

  Charlie Marshall was the next place to look.

  O O O

  The Tip-Top was almost deserted as Carl entered: one lone customer was at the cash register. The black-rooted blonde of the evening before was gone. Charlie Marshall—call him that—was behind the counter chatting with the man as he paid his bill.

  “Sorry,” Marshall began. “We’re closing.” He stopped, his smile fading as he saw Carl.

  “I’m not hungry,” Carl said. “But I’d like to talk to you, if you’ve got a minute.”

  Marshall nodded slowly. The customer, a middle-aged man in a mechanic’s grimy work uniform, glanced at Carl. His eyebrows went up as he pocketed his change. “Gotta be on my way anyhow, Charlie,” he said, sketching a wave. “See ya.”

  Marshall had sucked in his lips, squinting at Carl. Now he folded his arms and leaned on the counter. “Still think you knew me in high school, sonny?” he asked.

  “No—no, I—obviously I was mistaken.”

  Grinning, the man chuckled. “Unless you got a pipeline to to the fountain of youth, damn right. You got me mixed up with my kid, that’s all. When were you there?”

  “I graduated in sixty-six.”

  “Mmm. Jerry didn’t even overlap you, then.” Marshall straightened. “Graduated in thirty, myself. You weren’t even born yet.”

  “You know a Jim Denton? Graduated sometime around you?”

  Marshall’s eyebrows hitched up a fraction. “Been doin’ some research?”

  “Sort of. Do you know who he is? Does he have a son named after him?”

  “Jim Denton?” Marshall’s smile disappeared. “He joined the Navy, same as me. But he stayed in longer and ended up on the Niblack.” He rubbed his chin. “Ship attacked a German U-boat in April, before our official involvement in the war. Near Iceland. Paper said the Niblack was escorting a convoy to England. Jim died during the attack, April if I remember right, 1941.”

  All Carl could do was shake his head slightly. He knew the name. Knew it meant death, not just for Jim Denton. A battle before the US formally entered WWII—

  The silence thickened. Coming here had not been a good idea.

  “Come siddown,” Marshall said, gesturing toward the nearest booth with his head. “Tell me why you came here.”

  Carl swallowed away the heaviness. “I, uh, I’ve been trying to look up some people I, uh, my father knew, but I’m not having much luck.” Carl folded himself into the booth, on the outer edge of the seat. He wanted to tell this man that maybe he was losing his mind, but he kept the words inside.

  “Just visiting, then?”

  “Yeah. Staying at the Adler.” Carl glanced at the doors to the kitchen. He heard water spraying hard into a metal sink on the other side, two people chatting over the noise. “I thought I remembered this place, but I guess not.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought you had a counter, you know? Kind of U-shaped, with stools. I remember those stools, red leatherette tops and metal sides, chrome with sort of stripey ridges in it and black paint in the cut-in parts.”

  Marshall stared at him. “You remember that? We haven’t had the counter since, oh, since the early forties. Remodeled the whole place by ’fifty. Everything but the sign.”

  “Weird, huh?” Carl said, sorry he’d spoken. “Maybe my father told me about it.”

  “And Annie says you knew Thelma.”

  “Not really. Just her chili. Or I thought I did.” Carl’s lips twisted. “Thought it was the best chili I’d ever eaten.”

  “Could have been, if you’d been around to eat it. Weird, all right. Haven’t thought about her in years. Your father go to school with me, you think? Your grandfather maybe?”

  Carl shrugged.

  “Same name as yours? Carl, was it?”

  “No. Warren.”

  Marshall grasped his chin in his hand, rubbing at a day’s growth of whiskers. “Warren Johnson, huh? Can’t place the name. You look like him?”

  “Not really. I don’t think so anyway. He was shorter. Normal looking, I’d say. And dark.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Several years ago.”

  “Sorry.” Marshall pinched his mouth together again. “You don’t look like him at all? ’Cause, see, I have this feeling I’ve seen you before, but not really you, know what I mean?”

  “Do you know Mrs. Gates, at the library?” Carl asked, feeling a pulse of renewed hope. “She said almost the same thing.”

  “Sharon Gates!” Marshall smiled and leaned back in the booth. “I don’t see much of her, just around town now and then. Nice girl. Sharon Kelley when I first met her.
But she married Tom Gates while I was at sea, had a kid by the time I got back.”

  “I wonder …” Carl shook his head. Too much of a coincidence.

  “If Sharon and me saw you, or somebody who looked like you, when we were together somewhere?” Marshall finished for him. “You are pretty distinctive-looking … hey, yeah.” Marshall brightened. “Now I remember. Sharon and me and Tom, we used to go out to the lake to swim. That’s where it was. Tallest, skinniest character I ever saw in my life, outside a basketball court. Yeah, that’s it. He looked a lot like you—at least from a distance. He must’ve lived there a while, too, I remember seeing him in town after I got out of high school, now that I think on it. Maybe in the cafe, eatin’ Thelma’s chili, for all I know.” He grinned. “See? All it takes is thinking about it long enough and everything falls into place. You’ve really scratched my curiosity, I don’t mind telling you.”

  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. An
d 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