The Cauldron by Jean Rabe, Gene DeWeese Read Free Book Online

about witness protection. “Jail?” She said something else, but he’d missed it. He couldn’t focus his thoughts on her, on what she was saying, no matter how hard he tried. Jail. Did she say he’d been in jail or was going to jail? A clammy chill settled over him, demanding his full attention. Not the icy tingle in his veins, not the cold clean chill of rain, but something else, something as unsettling as—
    “Carl! Did you hear me?”
    —as unsettling, as terrifying as his dreams, the dreams that began with Shelly and ended with the fog and vague, terrifying memories of things that inhabited it. He shivered. The feeling that overwhelmed him now was the same one that had gripped him in his wire-tense awakenings—but deeper, stronger, impossible to throw off.
    “Don’t do this to me, Carl! Not again!”
    Shelly’s words barely registered. At the edges of his vision, where everything was indistinct, he caught a hint of motion. Swirling gray, like a thick bank of grimy fog with something sweeping through it, stirring it into misty billows without revealing its own dark shape. His scalp tightened.
    “ Say something, damn it! Anything ! Don’t just sit there like I don’t exist!” Softer: “Or maybe to you, I don’t anymore.” Softer: “This hasn’t been working. We’re not working. You don’t know who you are.”
    She looked for a moment as if she were going to slap him. Instead, blinking back tears, she turned away abruptly, grasping the steering wheel and flooring the accelerator as she threw it into gear, her face an unreadable mask.
    “ Damn you, Carl! Wake up! I’m going to make you wake up!” The car rocked and sprayed gravel as she jockeyed it onto the pavement, into the swirling mist that only he could see.
    I’m losing my mind, Carl thought as he stared ahead, straining to see the real world rocketing toward them, and instead seeing the odd fog. I am simply losing my mind. That’s the only answer.
    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, Shelly! Slow down!
    Nothing came out. The tingle and the clamminess increased to hurtful proportions, as if somebody somewhere was turning up a dial a notch at a time and he—
    Bad curve. A wall of trees rushed through the fog that wasn’t there.
    “Wake up, Carl!” Shelly gasped, the car tilting 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, drowning out the blare of the semi’s horn and whatever mindless tune had been playing on the radio. She jammed on the brakes. The wheels locked, and the car aimed itself at the truck.
    He felt the traction break, felt the car continue to 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, the swirling nightmare miasma of mist that was filled with shapes—dozens, hundreds of shapes moving, shifting, emerging as forlorn featureless shadows only to be swallowed again into the gray nothingness. He shrank back as one figure swept past, even as it pulled back from him. Shelly? Was that figure Shelly?
    In the distance was a glow, a harsh, pulsing light that sliced through the fog like a ragged knife, shriveling each shape that it touched. Terrified, Carl—
    Woke up.
    Fell, and woke up. Fell—out of the fog—and was jarred to consciousness. He turned toward Shelly. But she wasn’t there.
    The car wasn’t there.
    He was half-sitting, half-lying on his own couch in his own darkened home, as if a child had flung down a broken toy and