The Cauldron (23 page)

Scents of smoke, rain, the sodden ground, and fear filled Carl’s senses. Pale yellow-orange tendrils of light shot through the thick clouds and came to ground where the flames continued to grow. The tendrils looked like lightning, but they had a different smell, and there was no accompanying thunder. Despite the driving rain, the fire grew. There were two smaller fires yards beyond the first, and Carl realized that lightning strikes were not responsible for any of the fires.

“My ship,” Jerrah said. “It fired on us.”

The largest flames lashed up from what had been the lodge, the smaller fires the cabin Carl had rented and his car.

The ambulance had been struck, too. Its red light flashed once more, and then went dead. Carl knew there would be more sirens and flashing lights soon, as departments responded to the absent paramedics.

“Charlie,” Carl said. “He’s gone.”

“Along with whoever was inside his head,” Ellen said. “And the paramedics.” Her voice was flat, eyes black pinpoints glued on the flames destroying her property. “No, maybe Charlie got out. See? See that man over there?”

“Too thin to be Charlie,” Jerrah said. “Maybe it is someone from the ambulance.”

“Maybe he’s hurt. We should help.” Ellen stumbled to her feet and started toward the figure, but Carl grabbed at her leg and held her back.

“Wait.” He squinted into the rain and picked through the shadows. Outlined by the flames from the lodge, a tall, slender form turned toward them. He wasn’t from the ambulance, Carl somehow knew, and he was indeed way too thin to be Charlie.

Carl jumped to his feet and raced toward the figure, bare feet slamming into rocks and twigs, the pain competing with the ache from the knife wound. He heard Ellen and Jerrah coming after him.

“Stay back,” he croaked. But they didn’t pay attention.

The figure reminded Carl of himself, tall and thin. When the lightning flashed he saw something glint in the figure’s hand.

“The shipkeeper!” Jerrah shouted. “It is the shipkeeper, and that means he has brought the ship here.”

Through
otherspace
. Carl winced at the realization.

“We must talk to him!” Jerrah called.

“Like hell,” Carl cut back. He closed the distance to the figure, which looked human, but was not. Carl leaped forward, grasping at the glinting object, which the form had already started to raise. It was like a gun, some part of Carl’s memory knew that, but it would deliver much more damage than any gun found on Earth. Carl touched it, jerking it from the shipkeeper’s shocked grip. For an instant, Carl’s hand vanished, and it felt as if it had been plunged into a bucket of ice water. He’d effortlessly reached into
otherspace
to toss the weapon there. A second later his hand reappeared, minus the weapon, and Carl tried to get a grip on the figure itself, but lost his footing and hit the ground.

The shipkeeper stumbled backward, his gaunt, skeletal face fully visible to Carl for the first time. He regained his balance and ran into the darkness, away from the flames. Jerrah and Ellen reached Carl and helped him up.

Carl trembled, weak from everything he’d been through in the past many minutes. The ground, cold and damp against his feet, seemed to writhe, but he knew it was only his own dizziness.

In the distance he heard an impossible hissing whine that made his teeth hurt. Jerrah’s face was tipped up, dimly illuminated by the flames, her expression terror-stricken. She touched his hand and mouthed, “The ship.”

Fragments of scenes flickered through his mind—a control room, bare except for a chair the shipkeeper sat in and a half dozen controls on a panel. Through an opening behind the chair was a tank, the navigator’s, a tank like he used to live in. He saw himself on a sterile table, gradually losing consciousness while machines and people gathered around him. A face appeared in the memory, his mother’s. She hovered over him as they worked on his body to ready him for the tank. Then her visage distorted as she retreated, leaving him with a profound loneliness that intensified as he began work as an Elthoran navigator.

“Hey, you there!” Two men from one of the other rental cabins approached, the one in the lead hollering to them. Softer, there were more sirens, three or four from the sound of them. Firetrucks. “We called the fire department. You there … are you all right?”

“We have to get out of here,” Jerrah said.

“No,” Ellen’s voice cracked. “Carl, you’re hurt, and—”

He grabbed the women again and took them into
otherspace.

***

Chapter 38

There was the achingly familiar sensation of being submerged in ice water and the never ending gray of
otherspace
. More shapes clustered around them, also gray, but darker, appearing as silhouettes, a susurrus of voices he couldn’t quite make out.

Shelly?

Sarah?

He’d had the sensation before of the shapes trying to communicate.

Ellen shivered against his chest, face pressed into his neck; her breath the only hint of warmth here. Jerrah’s hand was firmly in his. She was talking, but he couldn’t hear her over the hissing-hush of everything else.

He steered them for a time through the shifting, unfocussed grayness, countless drifting, darting shapes billowing around them. His own consciousness, formless here in the gray, spun like a cloud of smoke as he moved. He could see nothing solid, and yet there was a sense of frozen forms pressing against him like a textured wind.

How long he floated, he couldn’t say. He wasn’t sure if time was measured here. One of the foggy shapes followed, and Carl thought he ought to understand what it was saying. But he heard it as white noise. It came closer still, hovering like a ghost yet staying an arm’s length back.

Carl recognized something about it. Were he alone here, he might have tried in earnest to communicate with it.

“The next time,” he said, first in English, then Danish.

Then, slowly, like a man easing himself toward the edge of a cliff, Carl drew himself back to the real world. This time there were no sudden movements or abrupt shifts. Instead, the
otherspace
grayness seemed to break up and drift apart like clouds, and in the open spaces there appeared, flickering at first, pieces of earth.

He willed himself, Jerrah, and Ellen back to Earth, the chill fleeing from his bones as he fell, half onto a soaked patch of grass, half onto a rain-slick piece of asphalt that stretched from a small rest stop.

“Are you all right?” Jerrah’s voice had a thick tremor, and worry colored her face. Her hands trembled. She’d been more fortunate and had fallen entirely onto the grass. “Are you—”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine.” This from Ellen, who was picking herself up. She’d fallen on top of Carl, his body cushioning the impact. “You’re still bleeding.”

Carl was, but not as badly as before. His fatigue had fled, and he was left with only a vague sensation of pain from where Jerrah had stabbed him. It was his foray into
otherspace
that had mended him—that always mended him and saved him from death. How many times had it saved him? There was a healing property to
otherspace
, as if he’d been dipped in Earth’s fabled Fountain of Youth. It was why he looked the same—incarnation to incarnation—Esbiorn to Petey to Carl. It was why Jerrah looked younger, and Ellen, too … neither of them yet realizing. But they would. Ellen would especially notice a measure of youth recaptured.

Ellen appeared to be in her early forties now, the wrinkles gone from her face and the color rich in her hair, her face fuller. Had he stayed in
otherspace
longer would she have retreated to the form he’d first known her as … Tina? Should he—no he dismissed that thought as quickly as it had come. He’d never purposefully used
otherspace
to regain years; it had been a vehicle for preserving his life. Unwittingly used before this latest foray.

They were illuminated by the glow from a lone light post at the edge of a small parking lot. Carl had been here before, a rest stop along the drive to Morgantown. But he’d been here during the day, when the sky was clear and he could see everything easily. It was still raining, the sky black as ink except when lightning flashed. The light from the one post wasn’t enough to cut the darkness.

“I’m fine, Ellen,” he repeated. He turned to Jerrah, his face hard. “I’m fine and I’m staying here. On Earth.”

She blinked, as if his words had suddenly forced her back into touch with reality, and her eyes darted away. She hesitated, and it seemed for a moment that she would turn and run, but Carl reached out and grasped her arm firmly.

Her mouth moved, as if to speak, but she said nothing.

“Who’s in there? Jerrah? Someone else? Something else? What ‘it’ is inside your head? Melusine? You called yourself Melusine—”

“Yes, I am still Melusine,” she said finally. “Jerrah is here, too, but I’ve suppressed her. Like I said, I am not the one who tried to kill you. That was—”

“—the shipkeeper,” Carl finished. “Yeah, I remember, Jerrah … Melusine. The previous ‘it’ inside of Jerrah’s head called itself a shipkeeper. And that’s who we just escaped from.”

“Melusine?” Ellen brushed Carl’s shoulder, eyes darting between the two of them, questions flickering on her unlined face. “Can this shipkeeper find us here? How did you find us? Find Carl?”

“Delphoros sent a distress signal. We came in answer to it. Simple, really.” Then Jerrah made an odd motion with her head, almost as if trying to rid herself of a stiff neck. She spoke, softly, in a language Carl had not heard for centuries. He missed some of it, not clearly recalling the words. But they had a disquieting familiarity, and he eventually mentally translated. “I am a seeker on the ship above, Delphoros-who calls himself Carl. We truthfully came here in response to your distress signal. But it seems the signal was sent a very long time ago, that somehow space had distorted the time, and our ship …” She closed her eyes and grimaced, as if the words were coming painfully. “I think we were lost in
otherspace
for a while, that time distorted for us, too. I think we’ve been gone from Elthor … I don’t know how long. I think it has been a long, long time.”

She fell silent a moment, listening, her head tilted slightly to one side. Her frown deepened, and she spoke again. “You are—were—a pilot, a navigator, One Who Sees. And you have been here—on this planet—for far longer than I have been alive. And I have lived a long while.”

“Centuries,” he said.

“Your ship obviously crashed here,” she said. “The signal from it was automatic. We believed you had crashed only one hundred and fifty years ago, but now we believe that yes, indeed it could have been centuries.”

Because I forced it to crash, a piece of his recollections shouted.

“And it automatically sent a distress call to Elthor. It just took … too long to reach us. And us too long to respond. In all the time in between, you lost yourself on this planet. You became one of them.”

Carl realized he had adapted to Earth, retaining his tall, Elthoran form. A wry smile surfaced. He was still too dense to swim, which was why he drowned in the river when he went to buy the boat from Oscar a lifetime past.

“They’re much like us, humans,” Carl said in the Elthoran tongue. “If they weren’t, I wouldn’t have been able to fit in so well for so long, eh? But I’m not wholly human. I’ve been stranded—shipwrecked. Most amazing of all, I’m accepting all of this as fact. Like so many other impossible things of the past many days, I’m accepting it because it feels right.”

And because—

Because, from somewhere in the darkness, from some other as yet unseen corner of his mind, from some central personality, there was a sense of calmness spreading over him. Somewhere in the darkness within him, something had begun to stir and to move slowly toward the light. His hands tightened on Jerrah.

“You remember the crash, don’t you?”

“Some of it,” he answered. He spoke English now, realizing he’d been rude in front of Ellen. “I remember who I was, what I was.”

“What you still are,” Jerrah said. “When you saved us from the lodge. Ellen, me, yourself, that was
otherspace
you took us through.
Otherspace
you took us through again just now. You’re our hope, Delphoros, you can navigate through
otherspace
again and again. You’ve a long life ahead of you. We’ve a ship, and with you we’ll search for Elthor’s colonies. The ship will certainly land soon, near here. I know our navigator can sense you, and—”

“Why not use your navigator to search for Elthor’s colonies? You already have a navigator. Why do you so badly need me?”

“But he is old, Delphoros. We need you. No one’s mind is as strong as yours and—”

“I’m not leaving.”

“You could be our last chance!” There was rising excitement in her voice. “You have a duty to your people, your race.”

“Didn’t you hear him?” This came from Ellen. “He said he’s not going anywhere with you.”

Jerrah looked defiant. “You don’t understand, Delphoros. You could well be the last chance we’ll ever have to move so fast through space,
otherspace
. Besides the navigator on the ship above, and the navigator the Alzur must have … as far as I know you’re the only one with the gift left alive.”

“Impossible!” But he knew it wasn’t. His memories were out of date, he’d been gone centuries. There were only a few navigators remaining when he’d undergone his training. In those centuries since, the rest could have all died out. His heart leaped joyously at that. With no more navigators, dragging ships through
otherspace
would come to an end.

A car pulled into the parking area a few yards away, its headlights hitting the concrete building and reflecting on the rain puddles. A man got out and stretched, then two boys followed, their eyes falling on Carl and his two companions. For a long moment they stared at him, then the boys turned and ran toward the bathrooms, and the man walked to a small water fountain, seemingly not caring about the rain. Several minutes later the trio was back in the car and on their way.

“Melusine … why did the shipkeeper try to kill me? If I’m so powerful and necessary, why did he want me dead? I thought you were supposed to take me to Elthor.”

The question stunned her, but she caught her composure. “It was a mistake, what the shipkeeper tried to do.” Her eyes flickered down at the asphalt, admitting the lie. “The shipkeeper needs you … all that’s left of our race needs you. We cannot travel fast to unexplored regions without you. We cannot access
otherspace
without navigators. This world—there might be potential navigators here. Our own navigator thought there might be two using
otherspace
on this world. Two beings navigated through
otherspace
, no other explanation for what we detected.”

He’d taken Tina through
otherspace
during the circus fire. And she’d become Ellen. That would account for two. Had he taken others through all the years? “Again, I tell you, there is one with you. Correct? A navigator? Even if he’s old. In truth, you really don’t need me.”

“And again I tell you, he is old. There is little travel left in him. We need—”

“I don’t think it was a mistake, the shipkeeper trying to kill me. It seemed pretty deliberate and calculated, if not clumsy,”
and primitive
, he added to himself. “He’s not sane, is he?”

“Perhaps his mind is scarred. But he can be reasoned with. He is a keeper, intelligent, wise. He is in charge of our ship. You must—”

Headlights came closer, a Plymouth Duster missing its front bumper. It angled crookedly in the small parking lot. The driver staggered out, belching and weaving his way toward the men’s side of the rest stop, plowing through a deep puddle he could have stepped around.

“We need to stay on the move,” Carl said, eyeing the car. It was maroon, save for its front driver’s side fender that was black and dented. Rain pattered against the hood. The driver had forgotten to turn the headlights off, and they shone across the asphalt and the thin sidewalk that split and circled the small building. Carl hurried to it and looked in the window; the drunk driver had left the keys in place. “Come on.”

Carl got in and moved the seat back to accommodate his long legs.

“Hurry!” He spat the word. “Ellen, let’s get out of here.”

Ellen nudged the passenger seat forward and slid into the back. “Why don’t you just … zap us away somewhere … through that magic fog?”

He didn’t answer that.

Jerrah stood there, looking indecisive.

“Come or not,” Carl said, reaching over as if to close the passenger door. “In half a second I’m going to—”

Jerrah hurried inside and slammed the door, dripping water everywhere and making herself look small and wilted in the seat. The car smelled of stale beer and cigarettes, and Carl rolled down his window despite the rain coming in. He was quick to pull out and get on the road.

“The drunk shouldn’t be driving anyway,” he said as mild justification for the theft.

He expected at least Ellen to say something about him stealing a car, but she had her head canted back on the seat, eyes closed, maybe trying to wish all of this away. She still hadn’t noticed she’d lost some of her years.

The engine was a high-performance V8, Carl could tell by the way it revved. A low-end muscle car with bucket seats that made it feel like he was sitting in a hole, it maneuvered well enough, but the tires were in bad shape, lacking enough good tread to solidly grip the slick road. Its instrument panel showed a tachometer, and a speedometer that went to 150. He spent several minutes getting used to the feel of it and its column-mounted three-speed manual transmission.

He headed southwest, farther away from Morgantown, a feeling of relief creeping in that he was on the move. It might be more difficult for the shipkeeper to find him this way.

So he was and wasn’t Carl Johnson, and had and hadn’t been John Miller before that. False identities, both of them … all of them … Petey the Clown, Esbiorn the Divine Bear. The identities were tiny islands surrounded by centuries of mystery.

How many centuries? How far back did the memories go? Gold mining. Witch trials. A fragment zipped past of him hunting bison with a bow and arrow. And there was something much earlier.

I’m not even human, stranded, shipwrecked on Earth for—what?—hundreds of years? Longer? He believed it all, and everything Melusine had said, something told him it was true. The memories of his being Delphoros and of training to be a navigator, his body having been altered. A nightmare—but a real memory.

“How many lives have I lived?” he asked Jerrah. “How long have I been here?”