The Cauldron (7 page)

The only one still there was Charlie Marshall. Not a good pal, but a real person. But he had graduated in 1936, not 1966.

“Am I going mad?” Carl pushed the door open on the warm August day. His whole life was sliding away from him, disappearing down some invisible hole, like the stars at the middle of the galaxy vanishing into that black hole he’d read about in some article this past winter.

“I don’t want to lose it,” he said half-aloud.
I don’t want to lose it.
Because who would he be, without a life to remember? A—a nothing, a gawky yellow-eyed freak—

He found his car and got into it.

“Calm down, Carl,” he told himself. It’s all some silly mistake. Bunch of mistakes. You got the wrong Morgantown maybe. Just maybe there’s another Morgantown and—

He barked with laughter before he even completed the thought. Sure, drive more than five hundred miles like a homing pigeon—well, a homing pigeon with defective radar—and end up in the wrong Morgantown.

You do need sleep.

Ah. Another memory glittered and frayed. His mother had taken him to the library to get his first library card. How old? He hadn’t been more than eight or nine. The two stories of gray granite in the usual Carnegie Library style had seemed like the biggest, sternest structure he had ever seen. They’d just moved here from … from where? From … somewhere in Indiana? Clay County?

An image of his birth certificate arose, confirming the memory but adding no detail, no picture of his home there, no memory of the school he must have attended for at least two years.

Or had he? When had they moved to Morgantown? A grade school presented itself, and an address, on the south side of Morgantown. And a teacher, Helen Gaumer, a first grade teacher. Here in Morgantown. This Morgantown or another Morgantown. In either case, they had moved to Morgantown before he started school. No wonder he couldn’t remember anything about where they’d lived before; he’d been too young.

But just in case this was the right Morgantown, he’d check out the library. See if that triggered something. He was here, after all. Check it out before going back home. If nothing else, the library would have maps. He’d look for the right Morgantown. He’d find himself somewhere.

***

Chapter 12

For several minutes, Carl sat in his car, trying his best not to think about anything, to simply sit and watch people walk by on the sidewalk. It was largely a residential area, two blocks from the school. But the business district started only two blocks in the opposite direction, the direction he was facing. One corner of the courthouse square was just visible a block into the business district; and a block beyond that was the marquee of the movie theater that had closed most recently. Another block to the right, he knew was the library.

If any place in Morgantown could prove he existed, it was the library. They had a complete run of
The Raider
, his high school yearbook, and of the
Morgantown Tribune
with its annual lists of graduating seniors, its end-of-semester honor roll lists. He remembered a reporter coming to the school to take a picture of everyone on the honor roll, and his mother’s delight at the picture in the paper the next morning.

He blinked. Unprovoked, another shard of memory appeared for an instant and then whirled away, glittering. And with it lingered a faint measure of relief. He remembered getting his first library card. He couldn’t have been more than eight or nine, and the building had seemed huge and forbidding, like a mausoleum, the biggest, sternest looking building he had ever seen. They had just moved to Morgantown from … where? For an instant a different kind of terror gripped him, a paralyzing fear that his past was being expunged not only from computer records but from his own mind as well.

Nonsense, the library would clear everything up.

Calm again, he got out of the car and fed more dimes into the meter and started to walk, hoping with a warped grin that the car would not have vanished when he returned. Towed away like his past, never again to be found.

It was too much to expect a familiar face in the library, but at least the building matched his memory, inside and out. At the checkout counter a plump, pleasant-faced woman well into middle age looked up as he entered. Her mouth opened as if to say hello, but instead a puzzled frown creased her forehead. Accustomed to double-takes, Carl hurried on past.

He found the catalog: more microfiche, not the long wooden drawers of finger-worn cards he recalled. Yes, the yearbooks were listed. Carl glanced around to orient himself. The woman at the checkout desk lowered her eyes quickly. She’d been staring. Another woman, with gray hair carefully arranged, was working at a desk near the catalog. As Carl approached, she looked up and smiled, though Carl noticed—or thought he noticed—an instant of uncertainty as she focused on him.

Am I fading away? he wondered. Getting transparent? Disappearing from the present as well as the past?

“May I help you?” The voice was soft and pleasant, and Carl wondered fleetingly what had happened to Carrie Gordon. Whenever he wanted anything in the library, he had always tried to find her to help him look. With her, it had been like a friend helping him with something rather than someone who was doing it, often reluctantly, because that was what she was being paid to do.

“I’m looking for
The Raider
for 1966. Back there, somewhere, if I’m remembering correctly.” He waved one long arm. “Right?”

“Precisely.”

Carl grinned. What relief three syllables could bring! The woman beckoned.

To his joy, she led him to exactly the room he’d pictured: long maple tables filled the center, with maple chairs pushed up to them, and bookcases lined every wall, broken only by the door and two windows. His memory fit this place.

“You said sixty-six?” she asked, stopping halfway along one wall and glancing back for his nod. She pulled a volume from a shelf and handed it to him. “Your graduating class?”

He nodded. “At least I thought it was, until half an hour ago.”

“Not the sort of thing one forgets!”

“You wouldn’t think so. But I lost my diploma while I was moving, so since I was passing through town I went up to the high school to get a printout of my records. They’ve lost them, too.”

The yearbook was wrong.

What Carl remembered was black, with gold letters. This was dark green, the date—1966—and the title silver. Not as bold as he remembered, either.

What happened to my copy? The black one? Did I lose it in a move?
He touched the crinkled finish of the cover, almost afraid to open it.
Everybody
has a high school yearbook! At least from their senior year. He’d bought one, he knew. Five dollars? No, that couldn’t be. This book was thick and would cost more than that.
Five dollars,
his memory stubbornly insisted. Well, maybe they’d had some kind of subsidy so the students paid a discount price.

He remembered the day he picked it up in homeroom, looking for his own picture, his friends’ pictures, the book delivered at the last minute from Heckman’s Binder in Winchester twenty miles away. Signing his friends’ yearbooks and having them sign his. The agony of trying to think of something clever to write. Then what? Surely he’d taken it home? Shown it to his parents? But he couldn’t for the life of him recall doing that. As if the book had vaporized when he walked out of the school with it.

And the book
had
been black. It
had
had gold letters. This one—

Inside, nothing was right. Not the layout, not the format. Pictures angled across the pages instead of sitting where they belonged. Captions were set as silhouettes: footballs, tennis rackets, even faces. Where were his teachers? He didn’t know these people. Where was that ass Kenton, who had drilled him in English for two years? Or the physics teacher, a face he remembered perfectly but couldn’t quite put a name to, or Bullis the Bull, the martinet of mathematics?

Where, for that matter, was Carl Johnson? Among the students, the only Johnsons were a Dale Johnson, who was in the class that Carl thought he belonged to, one James Johnson, a sophomore, and a Jackie Johnson, a freshman girl. None bore the faintest resemblance to Carl or to anyone he could remember.

He closed the book and leaned back in the chair. The faint sounds of the library drifted around him as he sat motionless, his hand on the cover of a book he’d never seen before in his life.

Gradually, an odd calmness settled over him as if he had penetrated to the eye of the hurricane. Or perhaps it was numbness. In the past few minutes, years of his life had vanished. And there was nothing he could do now but accept it and try to find out how it had happened.

Could it be a trick? A gigantic hoax? If it were, it would have to have been perpetrated by someone with huge resources. Someone like the government.

Or could it be his own mind that was betraying him? There were dozens of mental disorders, delusions, memory losses, that happened to people every day.

I’m in a parallel universe,
he thought. That’s it. All those science fiction stories had something going for them after all. That tunnel of gray fog was the bridge to an alternate world. Somehow, sleeping, defenses down, he’d crossed that bridge, and now—

Oh, for God’s sake! Carl slumped in disgust as a memory surfaced. Talk about making an ass of yourself! I missed picture day. He’d had the flu.

How could he forget that?

No wonder he hadn’t paid much attention to the yearbook. He wasn’t even in it, as he should have remembered that ugly little fact. The flu had kept his mug shot out of the book. But then why didn’t he notice any of his friends in the pictures?

Leaving the book on the table, he went back to the main room. The woman who had helped him was sitting at a microfiche viewer, jotting down notes. She looked up as Carl stopped beside her. “Did you find what you were looking for?” She seemed genuinely interested.

Carl nodded. “More or less. Could I see the
Tribune
? For June?”

“Of sixty-six also?”

“Yes.”

“Of course. It’s on microfilm.” She led him in a different direction this time, glancing back to ask, “You said you graduated in ‘sixty-six? In June?”

He nodded.

“My daughter graduated that year. Linda Gates. Did you know her?”

Carl shook his head. “No, I’m afraid not. It was a big class.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.” She’d taken the tension in his voice for resentment, but Carl didn’t know what to do about it. “It’s just that you
do
look familiar. I’m almost sure I’ve seen you before.”

His knees loosened with relief and shock. “I used to come to the library fairly often.” He tried not to sound too eager. “Did you work here then?”

“Oh, no. Just these past three years. But I’m sure I’ve seen you.” She tilted her head. “A long time ago, though. It must have been your father … if you look like him.”

Carl sighed. “No, not really. I don’t think I look like my dad at all.”

They had reached the periodicals room. In a minute or two the woman had loaded the microfilm reel into a viewer. “Push the lever this way for forward, this way to back up,” she explained. “This knob focuses.”

“Thanks.”

Finally he came to Saturday, June 4, 1966: the graduating class of Morgantown High. No Johnson, Carl. No Barber, George. None of his other friends. No Ascenscio. No Haimbaugh. Only names he’d seen in the green yearbook on the shelf: Selvaggio. Coleman. Ramirez. Blake. And Linda Gates, the librarian’s daughter.

The urge to run did not grip him. Now he had only a hollow feeling that his past was being stripped away from him, faster the harder he chased it. He wondered why he was not more concerned.

“Could I—” He stopped, realizing the woman might have gone back to her work, but no, she was standing a little way off, her head cocked, as if she’d known he’d need more help. Carl cleared his throat. “Could I see the December 1969 reel?”

“Of course. And if there’s anything particular you want to look up, but you don’t know the exact date, that computer screen there will give you the index. It’ll walk you through the directions for finding what you need.”

“Oh. Sorry I bothered you, then.”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

Page sixteen, it had been. Just before the classified ads. The third entry from the top—

It
wasn’t there, either.

Shaking, Carl checked the date, looked at three days before and three days after what he
knew
was the right issue. No use. His father’s obituary just wasn’t there. Of course not, he thought with bitter humor. How can the father of a man who doesn’t exist die, let alone have that fact recorded? This library was so familiar. But could he really be in the wrong Morgantown?

“Thank you,” he said, holding onto a facade of calm as he hurried toward the exit.
I should have looked up Mom’s,
he thought.
No. Because it wouldn’t have been there, either
. And then she wouldn’t have existed, either. But maybe, if he didn’t look, she would still be there. Or even if he did take just a little peek? His steps slowed.

No. He couldn’t go back and look. He had to save his mother.

The image of her face floated before him. He tried to visualize her eyes, the last day she’d waved casually at him and he climbed into the car and driven away … going to look at something, buy something. He had money in his pocket. The last time he’d seen her. Or other times, younger times, outings or angers or pride in her son—

But he couldn’t. The more he concentrated, the fuzzier the image became. Green eyes? Or blue? That faint scar, almost invisible—on her right cheek, or her left?

She lived, he mouthed. I remember the pain of losing her, so she must have lived. I remember her life. I’ve touched her, held and been held by her. She was a warm, living woman. If not in this Morgantown, than another one.

But I remember my own life, too. And … somehow … it was this Morgantown.

His heart skipped at the thought, and suddenly he was short of breath. Carl leaned against the cool library door, forcing himself to remain still, to breathe regularly until, finally, the moment of weakness passed. He realized that somewhere back in the library some part of his mind had discarded the hoax theory and had accepted … accepted what? His own insanity? The world’s insanity?

Deliberately, he formed the words mentally, mouthing them silently: “I remember my mother, her life. I remember her death. I remember my life.” But his life was slipping through his fingers like a handful of water. If the memories of his own life were false, there was no reason to believe that what he remembered of his mother was false too.

He was crossing the street and heading toward his car when he heard the scream. It was the terrified scream of a small child, and it snared his attention. Only yards away, bearing down on him at highway speed, was a car. A child screamed for him to run. For a fraction of a second, everything seemed to freeze, and he felt a jolt of panic race up from his stomach to his brain. Every muscle in his body went bone-breakingly tense, and he opened his mouth as the grill and headlights expanded to fill his field of vision, leaving him nowhere to go even if he’d had the presence to run.

There wasn’t enough time to move … only enough to realize that the crushing impact was coming and that the massive careening vehicle was—

—past him.

For an instant, there had been only swirling grayness everywhere, like an impossible fog that blanketed and muffled everything. Now the car was past him. Its brakes screeched for a moment before it accelerated again and shot through the red light at the intersection and vanished around the corner. Carl’s heart was pounding, his legs and arms felt rubbery, and the whole world seemed to be spinning around him.

“You okay, mister?” It was the child who had screamed. She was a girl of seven or eight, standing a dozen yards away, her mouth open. His eyes met hers for a moment, and then, abruptly, she looked away. A woman was running toward her from a clothing store a few doors away, and a man was standing at the corner, looking worried and ineffectual. From around the corner came the sound of blaring horns and squealing tires as the car apparently bulled its way through the next intersection.

“Are you all right?” This from the woman.