The Cauldron (14 page)

Or am I?

***

Chapter 22

Melusine

She watched the shipkeeper pace at the edge of the navigator’s tank, his long tunic grazing the tops of his feet and making a ghosting sound.

The central core of the liaison pulsed as she edged her fingers in deeper and felt energy threads twist around her hands and creep up her wrists. She felt the liaison tremble, each reverberation a word coming from the navigator inside his tank.

The liaison—whether a construct or a living being, Melusine did not know—thrust an image into her mind, a continent of the blue-green world they orbited.

So much water
, she thought, and not for the first time.

“Yes, the world is more water than land,” came the navigator’s reply.

Melusine did not like that all of her thoughts were so open when she was connected through the liaison. She was thankful that the shipkeeper continued to pace, electing not to join them through the liaison and to only listen to her spoken words.

“Despite all of the water, in my travels there I have not yet encountered it.” There was relief in her voice. “I’ve only touched the ground and their great buildings of steel and glass and—”

“Your progress?” the navigator prompted again.

She continued to watch the shipkeeper, studying him with the intensity of a lover, but not feeling quite that depth of emotion. Admiration, perhaps, idolization with a measure of the fondness that comes from working together. Her mood was always better in his presence, and she suspected she inadvertently shared her feelings about the shipkeeper to the navigator, though he respectfully made no mention of it.

“You thought you were close?” the navigator asked. “To our quarry?”

“I sensed a nearness, yes, navigator, to the Bright One. During my latest merging, I felt his strong presence.” She looked over her shoulder to the augmentor, with its coiling threads. She tingled at the thought of using it again. “But whether that sense was because the Bright One had visited the same place I stood, I couldn’t say.”

She also wanted to tell the navigator that they’d been through all of this earlier and that her answer wasn’t going to change. “I was close, but I wasn’t close enough.” And her borrowed host had been oblivious to what she’d been looking for; poking through the host’s mind had yielded nothing. The borrowed senses had recorded myriad images for her to dissect—and she had done just that after her return to the ship, coming up with no new information.

“I am ready to try again.” The augmentor’s threads writhed in anticipation.

The shipkeeper made a humming noise in the back of his throat and paused, looking down into the tank’s lone window. He touched a slender red-gray finger to the glass.

“You will get closer this time,” the shipkeeper said.

She nodded. “I feel certain of that. I get closer with each walk.” Walk was the term she used for her ventures into another’s body. Through the liaison she felt the navigator tremble.

The shipkeeper squared his shoulders and met her gaze, effectively pinning her in place. “Then you will take care.” His voice and expression showed the concern of a father. “Great care, Melusine.” There was a hint of worry in it, too.

“I know that the Bright One will be pleased to see me, having been away from his people so long. And I will find him. He might—”

“Expect violence,” the navigator warned. “You should be prepared for that. You must be careful. Indeed, Delphoros has been away enough years that he might want to stay on this planet.”

She let out a long breath. “Our kind—”

“Does not fight with each other,” the navigator finished for her. “I know. But you might have no choice. Delphoros must return to Elthor.”

“No, we do not fight amongst ourselves.”

“You should be prepared nonetheless, Melusine. Delphoros might want to stay, and—” the navigator paused. “There are things of which you are not aware.”

She made no reply.

In the silence that cut between the three, Melusine detected the comforting murmur of the ship’s heart and let its pulse drift up through the souls of her feet. She broke the shipkeeper’s stare and glanced down, seeing her reflection in the dome lid of the navigator’s tank. Withdrawing her hands from the liaison, she sensed there was something the navigator had not told her as well.

Melusine had seen the shipkeeper and the navigator engage in hushed conversations through the liaison that ended when she entered the chamber. Were they keeping something from her? Yes, the shipkeeper had told her as much. But what?

“Yes, I will take great care.”

She urged the threads of the augmentor to twine in her hair, pressing into her scalp and opening her mind to the world below. Melusine searched for a new host that would get her closer still to the target. A different one that would have a different perspective.

Hours ago her host had been a … she searched for the word … librarian. Such a complex brain the elderly woman had, and Melusine marveled at its myriad thoughts, though she did not care for the sluggish way the form moved. The woman had been vaguely aware of her, and so Melusine stayed only long enough to catch glimpses of people scurrying from aisle to aisle. The Bright One was not among those people, but he had been there. The navigator had sensed them.

Whatever ability allowed him to use
otherspace
somehow cloaked him from her … at least for the moment. Perhaps if Delphoros entered
otherspace
yet again the navigator could better pinpoint his location. That would help Melusine finish her task. The shipkeeper said that Delphoros might want to stay on this planet. He might have forgotten how wonderful and peaceful Elthor is. She would remind him, and she would rescue him and bring him home.

Her mind touched others that offered a glimpse of her quarry, a cook at a diner, a waitress. But again nothing more than a hazy visage floated before her. A man oddly named Harry, who lacked an abundance of hair. She touched mind after mind until …

She drifted farther from this town and looked elsewhere. Melusine discovered an angry mind that knew of her quarry. It was so focused that it was effortless to slip inside. This host thought of little else but her quarry.

Turmoil!

A cacophony of sound and images and emotions flooded her, made all the stronger by her concentration and the augmentor. Never had she managed to insinuate herself so thoroughly before, and it took all her focus to separate the aspects of her host’s very being.

Grief was the strongest emotion, so powerful a sob caught in her body’s throat. Tears welled in his eyes/her eyes, drying on his cheeks/Melusine’s cheeks in a chill wind that whipped all around. The host’s hair was buffeted by the wind, strands of it lashing at their shared face, cutting his vision/her vision. The wind danced across his hands that were clutching something so tight the knuckles had turned white and were growing numb.

His thoughts churned like a dangerous storm.

Where was this host?

Images and sensations battered her.

Was he aware of her?

Yes! He was trying to break free. His hands gripped even harder. His eyes narrowed, cutting her vision. His foot pressed down, on something, and the wind whistled ever-stronger around him/her.

Where was this host?

From the niche she occupied in his mind, she tightened her hold and spread outward. She was too close to finding Delphoros to give up. No matter the consequences of this host being aware of her, she pressed her mental attack, driving down his will and superimposing her own. She sensed that by overpowering this host she could close the distance to the Bright One.

With a concentrated thrust she slammed him to the background, taking full control. It was her hands that gripped a wheel, her foot that pressed down on a pedal, her eyes that cried, and her hair that fluttered wildly.

She was in a vessel, a car, she’d learned the term from a previous host, a fast one that caromed down this road, shifting from one side of the pavement to the other, wheels dangerously hanging on the edge and spitting gravel.

Another car came at her, honking, the driver shouting something she couldn’t hear as she swerved to avoid striking him. Her borrowed heart pounded in her chest and her borrowed throat tightened. She sucked in great gulps of air that were tinged with the scents of leather and exhaust.

She could help maneuver a ship in space, but this primitive vehicle was beyond her … for the moment. She dug into his thoughts, sorting through a maze of mental pictures and years, demanding that he release the skills she needed to pilot this car. He fought her, just as she fought with the wheel and the speed and the wind, swerved to avoid a dog, then winning and plucking the knowledge from the recesses of his angry mind.

Easy, she decided, as she eased up on the pedal and found that the car slowed in response. Forcing her borrowed body to relax, her heart slowed and her breathing became regular. Melusine wiped the tears from her eyes and pulled off on the road’s shoulder. Her host had been driving across the countryside. In the distance she saw the outline of a city.

Melusine leaned back in the seat and turned the key, cutting the engine.

“Who are you?” She didn’t have to ask the question aloud, but she did so to hear the sound of her host’s voice. It was rich and pleasant. “Mike,” she answered. Then she probed deeper.

Mike, brother of Shelly.

Shelly, lover of … Carl Johnson.

Her host’s emotions swirled around the two. Love for Shelly, hate for Carl. The image of Carl Johnson became clear, so detailed and real that it was as if she were looking right at him, like he was in the same room with her.

Yellow eyes.

“Where is Carl Johnson?” Melusine asked. “Where is Delphoros?”

She probed so deep that she inflicted physical pain to her host.

“I don’t know,” she answered herself. But in that instant she knew with all certainty that she could find him.

She had a name
and
a face. The same face she’d half-glimpsed through other eyes.

And she had her puzzle pieces … the cook, the waitress, the librarian, this Mike, and the woman who she had employed before … Jerrah Foxxi, who she favored but who fought her. These individuals all had been with Carl Johnson, the Bright One, and through their scattered perceptions had caught suggestions of him. But this … this was more than impressions and suggestions. And now she knew for absolute certain what the Bright One looked like and sounded like. She would use Jerrah Foxxi again and again until she was nested deep inside—after a rest in the rejuvenation pod.

She was very close now. Morgantown. That was where she found the librarian, and where she had nudged Jerrah Foxxi, and where she would find the Bright One. Morgantown. The word thrummed in her head.

M o r g a n t o w n.

Morgantown.

MORGANTOWN.

Melusine released her hold on the host and leaned against the console of the ship as the augmentor retracted its threads. Her scalp burned. So tired! She’d exhausted herself physically and mentally with her foray into her host’s mind.

She turned and watched as the shipkeeper withdrew from the liaison. “The Bright One is Carl Johnson,” Melusine reported. “I know for certain now. And I know what he looks like. I have no doubt. I am very close.”

“That is good.” The shipkeeper drew his lips into a thin line. “An Alzur ship is drawing near. We must keep the Bright One from our enemy.”

***

Chapter 23

Carl Johnson

The fog was wispy at first, like the mist that hung over a farm field at dawn, clinging to the cornstalks and fighting the rising sun that threatened to chase it away. But it didn’t burn off, it only got thicker, and Carl futilely tried willing it away, knowing full well he was in another damnable dream.

He’d stretched out on one of the beds in the rented cabin, intending to nap an hour or two before dinner, shut out Jerrah’s complaints, and forget about Ellen and Morgantown for just a little while. He wasn’t so much physically tired as mentally exhausted, and his plan for a brief escape with a nap had instead led him into this trap.

So don’t fight it
, he thought.
Not this time. Let it happen. Get it over with. Go with the dream.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so traumatic if he didn’t resist, and maybe it wouldn’t last near as long. He felt himself sink deeper into the pillow and he inhaled the flowery scent of the detergent it had been washed in.

Go with the dream, let yourself forget.

And at the same time, force yourself to remember.

There were flashes in the mind-fog, like bulbs going off from an old-style camera. He imagined he heard the “pop pop pop” they would have made as the shutter was clicked. The pillow case’s detergent scent was replaced by something he couldn’t name, something that had an astringent pong to it, not completely unpleasant, but discomfiting, maybe the odor of the burned flashbulbs.

In the fog he had a new name: John Miller.

Don’t fight this one, he repeated. Just let it play out. Forget and remember.

He knew with all certainty that it was a memory he chased, not a nightmare. Memory of a true past, sharp and real. The only nightmare was in the knowledge that he had lived another life.

He saw himself as if he stared into a mirror: John Miller, looking just the same as he did now as Carl, same eyes, hair a little different—shorter, shirt pressed … shirt the same one as in the picture in Ellen’s photo album. Only this John Miller didn’t stay two-dimensional like in the photograph. This one moved and breathed, appeared in color rather than black and white, and when this John Miller held his hands in front of his face, it was Carl staring at those fingers. There was a wedding ring on his left hand.

Then Carl/John blinked and the fog turned solid and formed shapes—people, though too indistinct to recognize, all of them moving. Carl/John moving, too, with Ellen. He had her hands in his, and he was turning to music; they were dancing close. He could smell her perfume, Chanel No. 5, her favorite. Her dress was long, voluminous and striking her at mid-calf, periwinkle and ivory, the folds making a barely audible swishing sound as she followed his lead.

“Beautiful,” Carl/John said. He lingered on her flawless face that had been touched by only a hint of makeup. He bent close and brushed his lips across her smooth forehead. The tempo picked up, but he and Ellen continued to sway slowly, not caring about the beat, craving the nearness and the heat of each other.

This dream wasn’t bad like the others, perhaps because he wasn’t fighting it and was instead playing along. In fact, John enjoyed it, gently encouraging it to continue. Happy? For the first time had one of his dreams made him happy?

The music came louder. The tune? He couldn’t quite place it, and there were no vocals, but it had the feel of one of those old big band numbers. The music fit her dress, and his thin tie and slicked-down hair. The next tune had an anchoring rhythm and featured a clarinet, a swing piece he could almost put a name to. The following were even more familiar:
Red Sails in the Sunset, I’m in the Mood for Love, Begin the Beguine
, and
Harbor Lights
. He and Ellen—his wife—danced to all of them.

The dream was more a recollection than anything else, he realized. Too vivid to be anything but a memory, a piece of his past.

Forgetting and remembering all in the same instant.

And if he was indeed John Miller, why wasn’t he dead, drowned like Ellen said?

The fog.

Carl/John picked his way through its wispy tendrils, the big band music fading and the sense of him dancing to it replaced by the rocking of a boat. He was alone on the lake, casting into a slight breeze with a yellow jointed jitterbug. It had weed guards on the treble hooks so it wouldn’t snag against the lily pads: he was fishing for bass on the early edge of sunset, wanting to bring one home that Ellen could fry for dinner. He could practically taste it.

And then he was indeed tasting it, the flesh delicious and practically melting against his tongue. He was sitting at the table, across from her, savoring each bite and listening to her talk about all their cabins being full and booked through the end of August. Summer at their little resort was at the same time busy and pleasurable.

The memories came faster now: directing renters to the best spots for bluegills, pulling the speedboat for teenagers learning how to water ski and sometimes getting an anxious feeling when he was on the lake—but nothing he couldn’t deal with, cookouts with Ellen and friends, trips into town to buy her a new dress.

It was raining in the next recollection, and the fog was hanging close to the ground, making it hard for him to see the road he drove down. Carl/John was thinking about a boat. He had a wad of money stuffed in his back pocket, having just come from the bank. Oscar was going to sell him one, marked the price down if he brought cash instead of writing a check. Carl/John didn’t really need another boat; he had a 1935 Chris Craft Triple that he’d bought used, a small rowboat for fishing along the shore, an old pontoon he was going to get around to fixing up to use for parties, plus an aluminum boat to go with each cabin, and the little speedboat for the water skiers. But Oscar’s boat was twenty-four feet long, custom made, all wood with a covered cabin. You could sleep on the lake with it if you wanted. Green upholstery, with a trailer. Oscar had only taken it out a handful of times before he decided it was too big and too much work. It would be wrong to let a gorgeous boat like that fall into disrepair, sinful really. Carl/John figured it would only be right to polish it up, put it in the water at the resort, rent it out maybe to recoup some of the cost.

Ellen wasn’t crazy about the idea, but she’d only protested once, and that attempt had been relatively feeble. God, but he loved her, and if she’d objected a little more he would have told Oscar no. Ellen knew he wanted the wood boat. She was busy polishing the bar and doing inventory on their cases of beer when he left. He should have kissed her goodbye. It wasn’t like him to leave without kissing her, but he was in such a hurry to get to Oscar’s.

In the dream/memory the rain was coming harder now, rat-a-tat-tatting like machinegun fire against the hood of his pickup. So fast and thick like a curtain, this downpour. He leaned forward, chin over the top of the steering wheel, fingers so tight on it his knuckles had gone white, eyes narrowed to find the road through the water and the fog. The fog … it didn’t make sense that there would be fog in a storm like this, not in the early summer with the temperature hovering in the high seventies, kissing eighty.

They’d sit in Oscar’s garage on vinyl lawn chairs until the rain eased up just a bit, talking and drinking orange soda. Then he’d hitch that wood boat and trailer up to the pickup and happily go home.

Maybe he should have waited this storm out, but he worried that Oscar would change his mind about the boat or the price, and once Carl/John had a notion in his head it festered there.

There was water all around him now, the memory fast forwarding. He was on the banks of the river, water sloshing around his ankles. The rain … it had rained not only today, but in the two previous days as well, swelling the river and drenching the crops, making a neighbor’s bean field look like a rice paddy. Oscar’d kept the boat on its trailer under a tree near the river. The river had risen to surround the trunk, and the men joked that in a little while they wouldn’t need the trailer, the boat would be floating and Carl/John could motor it along to the resort. The motor would be extra, though, only forty dollars—practically a steal for the horsepower and condition.

Then Oscar slipped when he stepped to the back of the boat to show Carl/John something about the motor. Oscar let out a “whoop,” cursed, and started flailing as he was swept past the tree and out into the river.

Carl/John didn’t hesitate, though anxiety tugged at his gut with each step. He waded out, arms stretched far, water around his waist now, fingers brushing Oscar’s before the men were pulled apart and pulled under. Carl/John took in a mouthful of river water and tried to spit it out but only managed to suck in more. His clothes were lead, pulling him down, the undercurrent grabbing at him, and no matter how hard he kicked he wasn’t rising toward the surface. Instead, he sank faster, his chest tightening as his lungs starved for oxygen.

Dying, drowning—just like Ellen had said when she sat across from him at her little kitchen table. His fingers were curled around the coffee mug, just like the tendrils of fog were curling around the legs and arms of the sinking John Miller. The gray of the water became the gray of the fog, which persistently tugged at him.

Don’t fight it, Carl thought. Don’t fight anything about this dream, this horrid memory.

The fog thickened and filled his lungs. He floated on it now, the tendrils buoying him to the surface. Except it wasn’t the surface of the river, it was some place or force quite alien. The fog—or whatever it was that masked itself as fog—continued to pull him, through space and time, depositing John Miller into the life of Carl Johnson, and into a cubicle.

O O O

“Rush job,” Harry said. “Terrel Systems is swamped with the stuff they’re doing for some new Air Force program, so they’re farming out a lot of their industrial manuals, most of which are due day before yesterday. Which means if we turn this one around fast, there’s a good chance they’ll be sending us a lot more.”

Fragments of other memories came at him, falling down like specks of pepper from a shaker.

O O O

Shelly will you marry me?

O O O

“And that marine radio pamphlet you did Monday—” Harry leaned back with his arms behind his head. “Marston called this morning and chewed me a new one. Said there were damn near as many typos as there were words. And a few downright goofs in the technical stuff, Carl. We can’t afford that.”

O O O

Shelly will you marry me?

O O O

Grabbing a bottle of 7-UP, Carl 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.

O O O

Shelly will you …

O O O

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 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, faintly some cleaning product that had been used on the carpet, and roses—that would be Shelly’s perfume.

Shelly …

The movie finished, 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! Slow down!

Bad curve. A wall of trees rushed through the fog. The car lunged 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 and jammed on the brakes.

“Wake up, Carl!”

Her car headed straight for the monstrous semi.

The wheels locked and he felt the traction break, felt the car 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.

O O O

The fog had saved John Miller from drowning.

It had saved Carl Johnson from a fatal car accident.

How many other times had it saved him? How many times had he used the dreamtime … he put a name to the fog now … to escape death?

How many other lives—and “deaths” or almost-deaths—had he experienced? How many times had one life faded and another grown in its place?

It seemed the fog created a new life, that the pain and disorientation from a death was not permanent. But it was a permanent loss for the people he left behind, like Ellen when he had been John Miller. And while the fog had apparently wiped his memory clean of his previous life, it had not wiped her memory; she still grieved for her drowned husband.

Slowly, as if pulling himself from a sucking pit of quicksand, Carl—John—whoever he truly was dragged himself out of the morass of pain and fleeting memory. Even as he opened his mind further, letting the present in once again, his newly recovered past still clung to him with its bloody claws.

Who was he?

He had been Ellen’s husband, he knew that for certain.

He also had been …

***