Chapter 9
Carl Johnson
That night the dreams were more intense than any he had suffered yet. He found himself in a crowd, or rather facing one. Young, old, men and women, toddlers pressed close together. Smiling, cheering, staring, screaming—every emotion playing out on their sweaty faces. All eyes on him. But did they actually see him? Or were they looking through him, like he was an intangible something that was there but not there, a fly on the wall, one flower in a riotous garden, the main attraction beyond him and yet a part of him. Mouths worked, but no intelligible words came out, only a miasma of sound, a wall of white noise that Carl at first found comforting, but then turned so painfully deafening hot tears rolled onto his cheeks, burned red and glistening, and stayed there. The musty scent of sawdust filled his throat. A shrill whistle played at the edge of his hearing, low and persistent like the wind forcing its way through a loose window. A snap of leather, a shriek, a growl that grew and blended with the wall of noise. A crack of flame.
And then silence.
Followed by the squeal of Shelly’s tires. He was in the car with her again. She was yelling at him to wake up. The tightly-packed crowd was yelling. An impressive voice boomed above it: “Ladies and gentlemennnnnn … in the center ring …”
Ring.
Shelly will you marry me?
Carl had two more nightmares beyond these. At least two more.
“She’s dead, freak!” Mike Fowler shouted in one, his fists not hitting Carl but punching through the chill gray fog that somehow had become his body.
Mike’s eyes melted into the glaring headlights of a semi barreling toward him as he frantically tried to shift into reverse against all reason and experience, only to find the gears frozen, fog spurting out of the radiator.
Again. Again. Again.
The crowd cheered.
And each time, at the last second, he saw that Shelly was there with him, her body, unlike his, solid and vulnerable as the oncoming mass of metal crushed and tore her beyond recognition. Had she steered into the semi’s path on purpose?
“Wake up, Carl!” she cried.
“And in the center ring …”
In the other nightmare, he drowned, his now-solid body thrashing helplessly as he smothered in water that was impossibly thick, almost syrupy, and the last bubbles of his last breath were forced from his mouth …
From each nightmare he awoke sweating and shivering.
“I can’t take this,” he whispered to the dim ceiling. “I can’t take this anymore.”
Minutes before dawn, he threw on his clothes and was on his way. Somehow—the morning sun in his eyes?—he got turned around, got on the Interstate going the wrong way, and again found himself homing in on Shelly—what else could it be?
The entrance had been a straight ramp, not a cloverleaf, and the next was fifteen miles away. Fifteen miles closer to Roseville, fifteen miles farther from Morgantown.
“What am I doing?” Carl asked himself. “What in hell am I doing?” Even as he berated himself, he misjudged the speed of a car coming up on his right and missed the exit, costing him another twenty miles and dumping him into a detour-ridden subdivision where he managed to lose another forty-five minutes looking for the opposite-direction on-ramp.
Two and a half hours after he’d started, he passed the exit to the motel he’d stayed in the night before. One more exit, he thought, and I’ll catch some breakfast.
Breakfast was a disaster—or rather, finding the Interstate after eating was a disaster. For a Federal highway, he told himself angrily, it was pretty damned elusive. After a half-hour hunt, Carl came upon it by surprise and got going in the right direction, his jaw clenched. After that, he stopped only once more, for gas.
Even so, the sun was settling toward the horizon through layers of brilliant orange and cerise clouds by the time he neared Morgantown. He’d managed, one way or another, to stretch an eight- or ten-hour drive into more than fourteen.
His whole body was stiff and his bruises ached, but now, at last, a sign promised him Morgantown lay ten miles dead ahead. All he had to do was keep driving.
Past the sign, though, he began to feel disoriented. With each new curve, each hill, he was gripped more strongly by the conviction that these woods, these fields, were part of some ghostly overlay on the real landscape.
If he didn’t turn back, right here, right now, before that overlay was peeled back, he’d be trapped in that hidden reality, the same way he was always being trapped in his nightmares, the same way he—
Absurd! He gave the volume control of the radio a savage twist. The beat of fifties rock thudded in his bones, Little Richard singing Long Tall Sally.
That’s real, he told himself. That exists, better believe it. Carl sang along until the next tune blared: Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns’ Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu. A couple of miles later, a kid at the side of the road putting his hands over his ears made Carl laugh, bringing reality flooding back. He reached forward and lowered the volume to a comfortable level just in time to see the city limits sign.
MORGANTOWN, it said, in white letters on green—well, of course, what else?—POP. 41,387.
Carl frowned. It had been barely 20,000 when he’d left. Population doubled in eight years? He shook his head. At least it explained why things looked different—and the double-sized phone book back in the library. Ghostly overlay, indeed! Hell, even Roseville had changed in the eight years since he’d moved into the duplex, say nothing of Creighton. Stupid to think Morgantown hadn’t changed at least as much.
Still, it was unsettling, and it only grew worse as he drove on. The open fields that had flanked Route 22 as it approached the bypass had been replaced by a pair of shopping malls, complete with farm-sized parking lots and triple-screen theatres, their program boards belligerently facing each other across the highway. Toward town, where he recalled two smooth lanes of buff-colored concrete between fields of corn, stretched four lanes of potholed asphalt lined with gas stations, motels, a McDonald’s and an Arby’s and a Burger King … used car lots, new car lots, a Wendy’s, a K-Mart …
Carl made a huffing sound. All this, in just eight years?
Streetlights came on as he passed through an unfamiliar, faded residential district. In place of the soft incandescence and enameled shades he remembered was the hard-edged glow of mercury vapor, mounted on starkly plain arms that held them out directly over the traffic lanes. Well, why not? That’s what they had in Roseville. Probably didn’t even make incandescent lights anymore.
Minutes later, he discovered that downtown had changed as much as the bypass, but in reverse. One of the three movie theatres where he’d lounged in a plush seat eating Good ‘n’ Plenty candies while Flash Gordon roamed the far reaches of space on Saturday afternoons was now the Jesus Children Church, recognizable only by the old marquee. One of the others was boarded up. The third was a video store, boasting “XXX-Rated!” “Discount to members!” And the “adult” bookstore, which had been an almost invisible hole in the wall while he had been growing up, was still a hole in the wall. But it was far from invisible with a four-foot flickering neon sign having been installed over the narrow, painted-over door.
Grimy scraps of paper hunched along the gutters in a light breeze. Every second storefront seemed to sell pizza, except the pizza parlor he remembered, which was now a Japanese restaurant with the somewhat uninviting name of So Iuki. Where they found their customers, he couldn’t imagine.
The streets looked deserted. The only place with any visible customers was a McDonald’s two or three blocks south of the courthouse.
Disappointed to find the one downtown hotel converted into a shelter for the homeless, Carl headed back out of town. A flickering neon sign caught his eye as he neared the city limits: the Adler Motel. He sighed, almost in relief. Finally, a name he remembered. Even a building. More run-down than he recalled, maybe, but at least recognizable.
Ignoring the manager’s raised eyebrows as he filled out a registration form, signed his name, and offered his Visa card—at his height, Carl was used to being stared at, but he’d never learned not to notice—he carried his one small bag into the room he’d been assigned. Adequate, if dingy and stale-smelling.
He locked up and climbed back into the Mazda: he and it needed filling. Naturally, the Shell station a block away was boarded up, grass growing through the broken pavement of its drive and the sign gone, leaving unconnected wires sticking out. Funny looking, more square-cornered than he remembered. He found an off-brand discount station, gassed up, and turned toward town again, drawn by the need to find something else familiar.
The county courthouse still squatted in the middle of a grassy square in the center of town. At least that hadn’t been uprooted and plopped on the bypass. Less grass than dandelions. The elms he remembered were gone. Not much of a surprise: elms had been dying all over this part of the country as long as Carl could remember.
What was a surprise was the size of the sycamores replacing them, forty feet tall and thicker than he was. The size of the flocks of pigeons, at least, hadn’t changed. Carl drove on, aimlessly hunting something more to ease an ache he hadn’t expected to feel.
He found it at the intersection of Main and Decker: The Tip-Top Cafe.
Waiting for the light to change, he folded his arms over the top of the steering wheel. The sign looked almost exactly as he recalled it, though the red paint behind the thickly-clustered light bulbs was faded and peeling.
Still a parking lot to the east of the building. The building itself had had a facelift of sorts. Three stringy rows of glass block had replaced the big windows that had once looked out on Main Street.
Looks like a bar, he thought, disquieted. He’d eaten lunch here, how many times, in high school? Hundreds, at least.
Carl pulled into the lot and parked. Memory sparkled, with the warm glow of home: here the waitresses had known who he was. He never had to look at a menu. His bowl of chili, side of cornbread, would be waiting the minute he found a vacant stool at the big U-shaped counter. “Skinny kid like you doesn’t have the strength to wait to order,” had been the standard joke. He smiled, almost laughed, at the pleasant recollection.
The counter was gone, he found. Shabby booths lined one wall and marched in a double line through what was left of the area. Two other customers, neither too prosperous-looking, sat complacently in the booths. Carl slid into the nearest empty one. The menu, creased and tomato-stained, was shoved to the wall behind the napkin dispenser.
Chili was still listed. He ordered it, almost by reflex.
Jeez, he thought, looking at the bowl that eventually arrived. No wonder the place is deserted. They don’t even have a cook anymore, just a can opener.
Salt, pepper, the two crackers that came in a cellophane package in place of the cornbread he remembered hot and steaming, even ketchup failed to render the chili edible. Carl couldn’t choke it down.
“Something wrong?” the waitress asked, returning to fill his cup with more of the pale fluid that passed for coffee.
“Just not hungry, I guess,” he said.
She glanced at him with a wry smile that told him she thought the same of the food as he did, but she slapped his bill on the table anyway. He got up and went to the cash register, where a dark-rooted blonde took his money with an automatic, “Enjoy your meal, sir?”
He pocketed his change and started to turn away. On impulse, he turned back. “Is Thelma still around?” he asked.
“Thelma who?”
“She was the cook here. I used to live on her chili.”
The cashier’s smile faded slightly. “Can’t help you. I’ve only been here a couple years myself.”
Carl shrugged. “Not important.”
“Charlie might know, if you’re really interested.”
“Charlie? Charlie Marshall?” A hazy memory bobbed to the surface. Charlie had been a couple of years ahead of him in school, gone off to college somewhere. His father had owned the Tip-Top. Sure.
“You know him?”
“Yeah. We went to school together.”
The woman’s smile went out of shape. “Sure you did. How long ago was that?”
“Thirteen years, probably fourteen.”
She laughed. “Wrong Charlie Marshall, Mister.”
“I doubt it. His father owned this place, last I was here.”
“Oh?” The woman’s face hardened with suspicion. “Okay, mister, what’s your game? Whatever it is, you better get your facts straight before you try it again.” She slid out from behind the cash register and started for the kitchen.
“I don’t understand—”
The blonde stopped, her hands on her hips as she turned briefly toward him. “Wrong approach, Buster. I happen to know Charlie Marshall real well. His dad died over twenty years ago, got that?” She set her shoulder against one of the swinging doors and pushed through.
What the hell? Carl wondered.
Ah, Charlie fed her a line, he thought. Looking for a little sympathy, and then some, saying his dad had died that far back. Though God knows why he’d want a blowsy woman fifteen, twenty years older than him. The kitchen door swung open. The cashier was back, with a man in her wake, a grayish man in his sixties. Lines were forming in his rounded face, and his hair, what was left of it, was mostly gray. He wore a tie, but no jacket, and his sleeves were turned up almost to his elbows.
That’s him, her eyes said as she gestured in Carl’s direction.
Run!
The same cold urge he’d felt so often the past couple of weeks. Abruptly, Carl wanted to be out of here. He didn’t want to meet the man, whoever he was. The closer the man came, the stronger was the urge to run.
Run!
But he couldn’t move.
“You said you knew me in high school?” The man looked him over, head to toe, with a raised eyebrow. “Sure you don’t mean my son?”
“You’re—”
“Charlie Marshall. This is my restaurant.”
Impossible. Charlie Marshall couldn’t be a day over thirty-one, thirty-two at the outside. “Is your son’s name Charles, too?” Carl asked.
“Jerry.”
Carl felt his head shaking side to side. “Sorry.” The urge to run tugged at his knees, at his ankles. “My mistake.” And then he gave in. Spinning on his heel, Carl pushed his way through the door, and, almost running, hurried out to the street and flung himself into his car, closing his eyes while the terror ebbed. Terror? Over a small social error?
The face of the man seemed to hang in the air before him. And the face was familiar. It did look like someone he had known, but …
With unsteady fingers, he started the engine. “What is going on?” he asked himself aloud, putting the car into gear and pulling out onto Main. Only then did he begin to relax and not be afraid that at any second the man would appear next to him and grab his shoulder. Only then did he start to wonder, logically, what was going on. He retraced his route past the courthouse and turned toward the Adler. How could Charlie Marshall be in his sixties? How could Marshall’s father be dead twenty-some years? Carl remembered the father, a man in his forties at the most, joking with his customers. That was Carl’s senior year in high school. 1966. Thirteen years ago this past June.
No matter what logic he tried to use, nothing made sense. Unless someone was deliberately trying to fool him, to play some impossible elaborate practical joke, there was no way to explain a sixty-some-year-old Charlie Marshall, whose father had been dead for—what?—twenty years or so. It was as if someone had taken a chunk of his past, twisted it almost—but not quite—out of all recognition, and shoved it back at him.
He’d found a piece of his past, the first real piece older than the job with Harry, and it had dissolved into something else, something surrealistic and unrecognizable.
Like Shelly’s face in the nightmares …
Then, as he closed the motel room door behind him and slumped down into the flimsily-made cushioned chair facing the room’s TV set, he remembered why he had come to Morgantown in the first place. He remembered the lecture in Harry’s office about his substandard work, and about reviewing employee records … Harry’s comment about him not existing …
Within minutes he’d fallen asleep.
O O O
Looking north along the Nickel Plate tracks, the flames were visible, turning the early morning sky an eerie, bitter orange. The blaze had started near the blacksmith shop and quickly spread, so much for it to eat … hay, canvas, wood. A bear—the Divine Bear—reared back on its haunches and roared in anger at the conflagration.
Carl ran through the smoke, which was as thick and choking as the fog that wrapped around his nightmares. He caught images in the smoke: animals and people running frantically, clothes and fur catching fire. His heart pounded in time with his feet as his hands tried to peel back the plumes. What was he looking for?
Sarah?
Ellen?
Shelly?
Tina?
An elephant trumpeted in panic. Lions and tigers roared. The Divine Bear raged at the flames. Monkeys screamed and dogs barked, and all the while the smoke grew thicker like the fog. And despite the heat that rose through the bottoms of his feet, he felt chilled.
Sirens intruded, sounding mournful and soft amid the cacophony that played out around him. Soot clogged his throat and his eyes burned. He fought for breath and sat bolt upright.
Carl awakened to hear someone pounding the wall near his head, yelling at him to keep it down.
“I’ll call the manager!” a muffled voice barked. “Shut up!”
Carl stared at the dim ceiling, seeing it glow and fade, glow and fade as headlights passing on the highway filtered through the closed curtains.
Had he been snoring? That loud?
All he knew was that he was cold, cold, cold, and could remember only the terror and the fog and the faces that were not Shelly’s.
***