The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (18 page)

Bad fucking mojo
.

Kreiger flung the tea
over the roof’s edge then placed the empty cup back on the ledge. Let her believe
she finished it off, or that it spilled. He didn’t care; he had other fish to
fry. “Just try not to touch him,” he warned. “No telling what will happen if
the two sides touch before the planes intersect.”

She shrugged ignorantly,
revealing the fallen book, the only copy of Jack Lantirn’s
The Sanity’s Edge
Saloon
. “I keep meaning to read this,” he said softly to no one, “but I
never seem to find the time.”

He turned towards the
stairs, ghost-silent, opening the door, descending. “But there are other
matters to attend to tonight. Don’t get up. This shouldn’t take long.”

Then Gusman Kreiger faded
back into the folds of darkness, leaving Ellen alone on the rooftop. She
stirred only once, attuned to a final whisper that floated hollow and empty
from the shadows.

“
Smells like someone
needs to take out the trash
.”

Streetlamps came on,
lighting the world outside the office of Frederick Kohler, Doctor of
Psychiatry, in a faded orange-sodium glow, nightlight of the new urban sprawl.
He sat in the growing darkness until he could no longer make out the details of
the photos and records scattered upon his desk. Then he turned on a single desk
lamp, the shade a self-indulgent lozenge of bright green on brass. There amidst
the collected history and jumbled pictures of Ellen Monroe’s past was the
photograph of his high school graduation, of Cassie and him, a forgotten memory
from another time. Cassie was fifteen then, the photo intended as a testimonial
to his nurturing qualities, his familial nature, an artificial means of
breaking down the barriers his patients erected against him.

That was what he told
himself, and he almost believed it—would have believed it—until the day Ellen
Monroe was referred to him.

Now he wasn’t sure.

So much time spent
creating realities within our own mind, a means of looking at ourselves, at
others, at the world. After a while you started to believe it, the
self-delusion, the fabrications, the world through a glass darkly.

And now that world-view
was starting to fracture, the rose-colored glasses cracked, the pressure behind
them threatening to blow everything apart. There were questions; questions that
demanded answers. Was Cassie a long-buried incestuous desire, or just the
lingering feelings of a first encounter with his sexuality, a child’s clumsy
efforts at understanding his world? Were these feelings obfuscated by his cousin’s
untimely death, guilt making him imagine a relationship between them that did
not actually exist outside the confines of his own mind? Maybe nothing was as
he remembered it. He thought there was a bond between them, an inseparable tie
forged from circumstance. But maybe he was alone in this. Maybe Cassie had
simply forgotten it the way children forget events they perceive as
inconsequential.

And maybe she died before
she was able to explore the ramifications of her childhood.

Everyone was shocked by Cassie’s
death; everyone but him. Cassie always had a gleam of self-destruction in her
eyes. Heart on her sleeve, panties balled up in her pocket, she had a
reputation as early as seventh grade. In his lifetime, Frederick had only been
in three fistfights, all of them defending his little cousin’s honor. He lost
all of them. And on each occasion, Cassie had told him he was silly to fight
for her and that the boys were only teasing him, and meant nothing by it. Then
she would hug him and hold a towel of wrapped ice against his black eye or his
swollen lip. Cassie was not interested in having her honor defended, and Freddy
was finally forced to surrender to that fact though it burned like a white-hot
brand. Boys would come to see her, standing on the porch wanting nothing more
than quick, uncomplicated sex. Not even a friend, Cassie was just an easy fuck.
None of them cared about her. Never had. Never would. And Cassie didn’t care
either.

But Freddy cared. His cousin
was a jag of steel turning in his belly, his every move afflicted with pain.
How
much of her life, how much of her death, was your fault, huh Freddy? Were you
the one who first turned her on and turned her out? Was your idiot curiosity,
your perverted, preadolescent lust, what sent her down that road, her body a
ticket to instant approval and acceptance, false love?

Or was that afternoon
significant only to you?

No answers, only questions. He worked them over in his brain
until they were raw and bleeding, the afternoon turning to evening, evening to
night.

He left for college on an
academic scholarship, and Cassie dropped out of school shortly thereafter.
Rumor was she became pregnant, and his aunt quietly slipped her away to get an
abortion. He didn’t bother finding out if that was true. He only wondered how
much of it was his responsibility? How much should he have known?

When his father called
him that afternoon in late October and told him in a dry, husky voice that
Cassie was dead, his first emotion was something akin to disappointment, a page
of his past behind him, lost forever. There was something more, though,
something repellant:
relief
. With Cassie’s death, his shame died also,
unconfessed and perhaps unremembered, but hopefully not unforgiven. And as they
lowered Cassie into the ground, he lowered all the dark memories of her down
also.

That easily, they were gone. And for twenty years, life was
good.

Then Ellen Monroe came
along, carrying with her one too many things that reminded him of a cousin he
had tried hard to forget. And with her resurrection, Cassie brought back the
secret shame of little Freddy Kohler, the repressed circumstances of their relationship.
And Kohler knew his life would never be the same.

There was no love
without hate, no desire without cost.

And what he thought was
most disturbing was his efforts to win not only Ellen Monroe’s trust, but her
interest. He understood its nature now, and it horrified him; his deviance was
not gone like some relic from the past, but a buried desire that had not
withered and died for lack of attention, but festered and swollen. Ellen Monroe
was a substitute; no matter the similarities, she was not his cousin. As a
patient, a relationship with her was unethical, but not amoral.

And wasn’t she just a little bit interested. The perfume, the
teasing glimpses of bared skin. What would she look like with her dress hiked
up over her hips, panties twisted around her ankles? Would she look like Cassie
if Cassie had grown up, developed a woman’s curves?

No! Tomorrow he would contact Gabriel Monroe and recuse
himself as Ellen’s therapist. He would work on getting her reassigned to
another. Dr. Chopra, perhaps?

It was all for the better.

Dr. Frederick Kohler had no way of knowing that the decision
had already been made for him.

Free will is an illusion; some matters are in the hands of
fate.

*     *     *

Serena paced about the
small shop, wiping up coffee stains and spilled sugar.

Ellen was the key though
she’d mistaken it for the book the girl carried, always kept close like a Bible
or a lover’s keepsake. But the book was unimportant, a portent of things to
come. Ellen Monroe was the event the sign foretold, the book like the colors in
autumn leaves, not significant in and of themselves, a distraction, a sign of changing
seasons, the coming of winter and eventual death.

Serena paused, intrigued
by the unexpectedly cryptic train of thought.

But was it accurate?

She lifted the teapot
from the hot pad—both cold for hours—and stopped. There on the table was the
prescription Ellen Monroe had come in with this afternoon. Now perfectly
flattened and heated until the paper turned crisp, it lay there like freshly
ironed linen, apparently forgotten.

Serena carried the teapot
and pad over behind the counter and placed both near the sink to be washed.
Then she poured herself a cup of tea, another of her special blends, but one
very different from the one she had given to Ellen. She took the cup back over
to the table and sat down, the damp rag forgotten for the moment in favor of
the crisply flattened prescription slip.

Perhaps it was better
forgotten. This was not the solution to Ellen’s dilemma. Not when Ellen was
walking around with something as fantastic as a book that did not, could not,
should not exist. Kohler was not incompetent, simply a narcissist trying to
vicariously resolve his own dysfunction and failing miserably. He was in over
his head and would likely drown. Serena did not much care, but she worried that
he would drag Ellen down with him.

That would be calamitous.

She placed the cup of tea
down beside the prescription slip. Perhaps it was better that the thing be
forgotten here, that it be “accidentally” thrown away. Perhaps it was a matter
of fate.

Yes, perhaps it was at
that.

*     *     *

Unburying the past began
as little more than the kicking over of stones in a field, and rapidly became a
vast and horrific excavation of black and oozing earth. And each layer that he
scraped away brought another to life, like clawing an old scar till it bled
afresh.

His skull hot and
feverish, Frederick Kohler felt the first subtle pricks of the headache begin
to edge into his frame of consciousness, swaying him from his personal
distractions. Sweat had developed on his chest, beneath his arms, down his
back. His feet were cold, toes numb. The muscles in his abdomen, shoulders and
arms had tightened to the point of quaking, his left hand stroking vigorously.

One last time,
he promised.

In his mind, images mixed
and cavorted insensibly: Ellen Monroe mostly, but sometimes confused with
Cassie. Sometimes young, sometimes grownup; sometimes together, sometimes
alone; innocent and free or bound in a straitjacket, eagerly awaiting his
ministrations.

Snatching short gasps of
air over chattering teeth, he felt the first pins of the headache insert
themselves in earnest, only to be revealed as nails.

*     *     *

Serena looked across the
street at
Dabble’s Books
. The store was dark, but there was a light on
in the floor above.
Nicky’s home away from home
. She looked at the
window more closely, but could not see past the blinds.

How like him to love his
secrets.
Useless things.
But that was Nicky. He loved to know things,
all things. He kept information like a squirrel storing nuts for the winter.
Only Nicky never forgot what he knew, never misplaced anything, never didn’t
know something.

Except who really wrote
The
Sanity’s Edge Saloon
.

And perhaps that was why
Nicky kept Ellen on, an assistant he didn’t need performing an inventory he had
no use for. Nicky knew everything about everything within his store, his own
personal, private world. Everything, except for Ellen Monroe and the book she
carried with her, and the secrets she kept hidden upon the back pages of her
soul. He knew everything but that. And she didn’t doubt that it gnawed hungrily
at his heart.

As it eats at yours?

She grimaced, but thought
the annoyingly reasonable voice might be correct. She too had been caught up in
the story of Ellen Monroe, the sign of things to come. And that was what
bothered her the most. There were too many things going on just now, too many
players getting involved. And it probably wouldn’t stop here. It would keep
getting more muddled, the situation becoming less clear, the number of parties
involved growing more numerous until Ellen Monroe finally left.

Or the universe tore
itself apart.

She reached across the
table and accidentally tipped over her cup, sending a puddle of hot tea across
Dr. Kohler’s prescription slip.

*     *     *

Frederick
knew, even in his distraction, that
he had lost control: of the situation, of
himself
. He felt his heart
banging inside of his ribcage, breath reduced to ragged gasps, head consumed in
a dull, throbbing ache that was starting to feel like needles pushing out from
behind his eyes. A migraine, maybe. His head and body were sweating rivers, but
his hands and feet felt ice-cold. His legs and arms quivered with the strain,
with the unrelenting need in the blackest part of his brain to both satisfy and
deny a crazed hunger, a perverse desire, a diseased fantasy he was fighting
equally as hard as he was promoting.

In the cinema show in his
mind, structure succumbed to pure sensory overload, an amorphous fantasy of
naked flesh and limbs intertwined, throbbing and pulsing. Ellen moaned, the
straitjacket pulled up around her waist, wet with desire—
harder, doctor,
please!
She bucked in orgasm as he tightened his hold, pulled her down,
re-buckled the straps until they cut the skin—
let’s play a game.
Cassie?

No pleasure without
pain. No freedom without control.

Frederick
squeezed out tears of desperation
and horror, ecstasy and pain, as he embraced these visions with all of his
heart. He was standing upon the edge … nearly there …
almost…

And then he burst.

*     *     *

Serena watched
indifferently as the hot tea spilled over the prescription, blue ink running
from the paper, bleeding out in long filmy strands that dissolved in the
diffusion of tea, one of her special blends.

Maybe it was for the
best.

*     *     *

Pain both instantaneous
and unimaginable tore through Frederick Kohler’s brain. He opened his mouth to
scream, and managed only a gurgling choke, his throat locked tight around his
final lungful of air. What he thought of as pins or even nails exploded,
someone trying to tear his skull apart from the inside out with a sharpened
railroad spike. His vision collapsed from the edges, leaving him in darkness,
blood pouring through ruptured capillaries to blind him. A brushfire wave
blasted through his skin, the cinema show instantly and suddenly aborted, his
dark fantasies lost before the overwhelming terror. His heart beat so fast,
each thump indistinguishable from the last. His right hand seized the arm of
the chair, fingernails biting into the leather while his left hand died halfway
to his temple, a belated effort to assuage the pain. His penis pumped emptily
in the air, his efforts spilling across his shirttails and down his belly,
forgotten.