The Cauldron

by Jean Rabe

  The girl blinked.

  “Moving company lost a box,” Carl explained. “My diploma must’ve been in it.”

  “Oh, that’s a shame.” The brunette came to the counter. “Do you have some kind of ID? Otherwise I can’t help you.”

  Lord, now what? Was he supposed to remember a student number, too? His puzzlement must have shown, because the girl smiled.

  “School records are confidential. Driver’s license, Social Security card. Anything like that.”

  “Oh, sure.” Carl hauled out his wallet, found his driver’s license. “This do?” He extended the card and returned the smile.

  “Carl Warren Johnson? Okay. What year did you graduate? Not that I can print you out a diploma here, but we can get you something.”

  “Sixty-six. Nineteen sixty-six.”

  The young woman crossed the room to a file cabinet and took a large notebook from the top drawer. “You’re in the computer, of course. Everyone’s in the computer. But for me it’s faster to take a look at the microfiche. I’m more familiar with all these files.” She nodded toward a bulky machine on a nearby desk. “Was that January or June?”

  “June.”

  Each page of the notebook was actually a series of pockets, each holding a four-by-six piece of film. The girl pulled one of the films out and inserted it into the viewer.

  Carl waited.

  The girl frowned. “You’re positive? June of sixty-six?”

  “That’s right.” The urge to run suddenly rose in his belly, along with the cold notion of the dreams. Please, he thought. Please. By all that’s holy, be there!

  The girl shrugged as she squinted at the viewer. “Sorry, but you’re not listed.”

  “But—” He took a breath against the panic. “Impossible. I’ve got to be there.”

  Her head shook slowly as she turned from the screen to face him. “I’m sorry, Mr. Johnson. I just don’t see you.”

  “Can I look?”

  “No. Because of the other students, you know? They’re on here, too. Confidentiality. You want Mr. Peterson to take a look? He’s our principal.”

  “I—no. That’s all right. I must just have been left out. What about the computer, didn’t you say the records were in that?”

  “Give me a few moments.”

  “Please.” Carl felt the urge to run grow stronger. The same impossible urge he had felt the evening before in the Tip-Top surged over him once again, even more strongly. He clamped his teeth tight, tensing every muscle in his body, trying to drive the feeling away. He would not give in to these things. He simply would not let his past be stolen without a fight.

  Stolen …

  For an instant Shelly’s face flickered in his mind, and a chill swept over him at the thought of her vanishing along with his past.

  What is the matter with me? He thought he should be angry, not afraid. The whole mess had to be one big computer error from start to finish, compounded and multiplied.

  “Please check the computer,” he said. The tension, the strain of keeping his emotions in check, added a false formality to the words, and the girl’s smile faded into silent formality, too. She shuffled some papers and stacked a collection of note cards.

  “Follow me, Mr. Johnson.”

  As they walked through the echoing hallways, he gradually regained control of himself and, except for a lingering tension and a slight stiffness to his gait, he was almost back to normal by the time she ushered him into the computer room. The room was obviously newly refurbished from the smell and shine of everything.

  “Mr. Chambers,” she said as way of introduction.

  The man was young, probably in his twenties, with a full but neatly trimmed beard. His sleeves were rolled up beyond his elbows, and his tie hung loosely at half-mast. He shook hands vigorously, but not crushingly.

  It was only when the girl left to return to her office that Carl realized Mr. Chambers was blind. The eyes did not have the blank stare that Carl associated with blindness, but until Carl spoke again, they looked just a fraction to Carl’s left, not directly at his face. And then he saw, on a blanket in the far corner, a large golden retriever, and next to the animal a seeing-eye harness.

  Apparently noticing Carl’s hesitation and guessing at the cause, Chambers grinned, his teeth showing whitely through the blackness of the beard. “You noticed Goldie?” At the sound of her name, the dog looked up alertly, her eyes on Chambers. When no orders were given, she lowered her head again.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he went on. “I’ve been like this since birth, and in this work, it even gives me a few advantages over other programmers.” Unerringly, he reached down and picked up a stack of computer cards from a basket on his desk. “Take this one, for example,” he said, obviously enjoying the demonstration as he took the top card and ran his fingers quickly over the surface. “Samuel J. Wilts, graduated last spring. Parents, Theodore L. and Pricilla T. Wilts, 822 North Courtland, Occupation of father, pressman at Coreo Printing. Mother—but you know what I mean.”

  Carl glanced at the card. There was nothing printed on it, just the holes for the computer. “You read the holes, the same way the computer does?”

  “Not quite the same, but yes, I do read the holes.” He laughed. “The only problem is, sometimes I forget to have the information actually printed onto the card, which perturbs some of the people with ungifted fingers. But you were asking about your records?”

  “I graduated in June of sixty-six, but the girl couldn’t find any record of it in the microfiche file.”

  Chambers nodded. “It wouldn’t be the first mistake that outfit’s made. We have to send the records to a company in Chicago, unfortunately, to have the microfiche made. We’re just damned lucky we haven’t lost a whole class in the mail yet. All it would take for a couple of sheets to stick together and … bang … they lose four years of somebody’s life. Less likely to lose someone in the computer. I double-check everything. So if you graduated from MHS, you’re in here.” He tapped the input console proudly.

  “I hope so,” Carl mumbled.

  “June of sixty-six?” Chambers sat before the keyboard of the input console and, after orienting his fingers quickly, he typed a series of instructions. The machine responded with chattering noises that continued for seconds after his fingers had stopped moving. Then it began clattering again, and the paper that stuck up out of the console behind the keyboard ratcheted up. There was a single short line of type, and the machine was again silent.

  A faint frown crossed Chambers’ face. “Doesn’t sound good,” he said. “Take a look. What does it say?”

  Carl leaned over Chambers’ shoulder and read the dark, blocky all-capital letters. NO RECORD OF CARL WILLIAM JOHNSON IN CLASS OF JUNE 1966. “It says I don’t exist.”

  “Don’t get uptight,” Chambers countered. “You’re sure it was June of sixty-six?”

  “Positive.”

  “It’s almost impossible for the computer to be goofed up, but … even I make a mistake every year or two. The wrong information inputted, something left out.” His fingers darted over the keyboard again, setting off another sequence of chattering. “We’ll just ask for any Carl William Johnson, regardless of the year. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll try just plain Carl Johnson and maybe William Johnson. You’re sure that you used your full name on the records? Not C. William or some such variation? Computers are accurate, but they’re terribly narrow-minded.”

  Another rapid clatter, and the paper ratcheted up again.

  Another simple line. “Still no luck?” Chambers asked.

  “Carl leaned over his shoulder. “The same. No record.”

  Chambers was silent, thoughtfully motionless for a moment. “Which means that there is no record of a Carl William Johnson ever having graduated from Morgantown High School.” He shrugged. “But let’s not give up just yet. We’ll try a few more variations and see what we can con it out of.”

  Twenty minutes later Carl walked back dow
n the echoing hallway. Not in the computer. What the hell was going on? Omega lost him when they moved the headquarters, but the school didn’t have that excuse.

  And it wasn’t just him who had been lost, but a dozen others, everyone who had ever been his friend.

  George Barber. Good pal, though they’d lost touch when Carl left Morgantown. Not in the school records, despite the friendly data clerk ready to relax a rule or two because she saw his desperation.

  And Paul Jacobs.

  And Kenny Felts.

  All gone.

  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 sitt
ing 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?