The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (19 page)

Dr. Frederick Timothy
Kohler did not relive his life in those brief seconds before the massive
hemorrhage claimed him as folk wisdom promised. He had only a moment for a
single disjointed recollection that burst through his fear in a kind of crystal
clear recall. The memory was of a seven-year-old Cassie hastily dressed beside
a shady summer stream, strangely serious as she said, “Freddy, I want to go
home.”

Me too.

Cassie dissolved,
replaced by Ellen Monroe. Then Ellen dissolved too, leaving him nothing,
nothing at all, only darkness.

*     *     *

Serena picked up the
sodden paper, tea pouring away with most of the ink. What had not bled away remained
an indistinguishable blur, a clouding of blue stain against white paper. It was
almost serene.

The proprietor of
Serena’s
Coffee Shoppe
ran her rag through the spill then crossed to the counter,
discarding the slip without a second thought. She wrung out the dishrag, the
blue tinge of ink not even visible. Then she carried the pot of tea back to the
table, righted the cup, and refilled it, not giving the incident another
thought.

*     *     *

Far away from reality,
Jack Lantirn reached across the emptiness and turned off one of the many
television monitors surrounding him. It was late and he was tired, the desert turning
cold with nightfall. He decided to turn in.

Besides, the screen he
had been watching had gone dead.

Asleep on the roof, Ellen
dreamed.

Naked, she stepped to the
building’s edge. She did not remember getting undressed, or even where she left
her clothes, so she was quite sure that she was dreaming. In addition to her
clothes, Jasper’s flyer and all of his tools were gone. Like her, the rooftop
was bare.

What use reason in
dreams?

Before her, the sun broke
the horizon, rising upon a world different than she remembered. She should have
been able to look down and see the side of the building, the alleyway of broken
asphalt and weeds, garbage spilling from the enormous Dumpster. And past the
alley, the treed ravine littered with debris dragged inexorably down by
gravity’s hand: discarded tires, a car so rusted and disfigured that its
identifying features were lost, a broken couch, a one legged chair, garbage
bags picked open by scavengers, their contents robbed or scattered. And at the
very bottom, the thick gray river slowly winding about its course, the
inevitable end of all that gravity dragged from the slopes as though by some
titan’s hand.

But that wasn’t what she
saw.

Below toes gripping tight
to the capstone edging was a world of clouds billowing and shifting, gray-blue
and cottony and limned with the blazing whiteness of the newly risen sun. The rooftop
was suddenly thirty-thousand feet up as though balanced upon the wing of a jet
plane soaring east.

This must be a dream; that’s
the only explanation.

Isn’t it?

The clouds churned and
boiled, edges rippling in ever-changing expressions of soft gold and searing
white. They called to her.
Come and fly. You remember, don’t you, Ellen? You
remember how to fly?

Yes.

The
Dreamline?

Yes.

The wind blew at her
back, sending shivers through her stomach, the thrill of possibility. She
stretched out her arms, hands arched upwards, fingers splayed like wingtips.
Yes, she remembered; she remembered very well.

Are you certain this
is a dream?

The question swam out of
the darkness. If she wasn’t dreaming, if she was caught in the grips of a
delusion or a hallucination or the fleeting after-effects of some long-ago
hallucinogen stored away in the cell walls of her brain tissue, then she was
actually standing naked upon the roof of her apartment building preparing to
execute a swan dive into the pavement. Wouldn’t Dr. Kohler get a big laugh out
of that? How he would gloat over her then, ego fattened on the proof of her
insanity. And there would be no arguing his point, no more chance of freedom.
She would be back in an asylum, medicated, her body too doped up to struggle,
her head too mushy to think, her mind too dead to dream. Oh, that would give
Kohler quite the thrill, seeing her like this, delusional by all appearances
and suicidal as well.

It might thrill him in
other ways, too
.

The sky darkened, left
her cold.

Are you sure you
remember how to fly? It’s not too late to turn around, forget it all. Being
normal isn’t so bad, is it?

Somewhere across the
endless expanse of open sky and weightless clouds, across the distant river winding
itself around the town like the coils of an oily serpent, the poisonous river Styx, was a small place on the edge of dreams and madness. And trapped there like a
forgotten refugee of an unremembered war, the only person who ever truly
mattered to her.

Jack
.

He was waiting, waiting
for her to come back to him, to free him, to save him as he had saved her. If
no one believed her, so what? It wasn’t impossible to be right and the rest of
the world wrong was it? Unlikely, but not impossible.

She could run, hide from
Kohler and her father and whomever they siced on her. Go underground. Follow
the white rabbit, turn away from normalcy, be free. Wasn’t being normal its own
kind of drug, anyway? An easy thing to get used to, generous and gentle,
apathetic and drowsy, the lotus flower of the sane, the soma of the masses.
You’re taught to accept it, to embrace the comforts of a job you don’t like so
that you can pay your bills, keep a place to sleep, buy food from the market,
and collect some possessions along the way that will own you as much as you own
them. Get happy, get married, have kids, get old, buy a cemetery plot and pass
away. Normal and acceptable.

But she had to save Jack.
She was the only one left who believed in him.

You remember how to
fly, don’t you?

Ellen looked again into
the vast landscape of clouds drifting below her like the sea, stealing reality
from the world. Jack was out there somewhere, lost, waiting.

She felt herself fall into the air,
away from the shores of normalcy.

And then she was flying.

The clouds embraced her, coating
her skin with dew as she descended, falling further and further until there was
nothing but shadows, gray on white, a fog clinging to her skin and soaking her
hair in jeweled droplets. The mist became rain and the shadows turned to
darkness, deep indigo shades. Somewhere along the way, the sky became the sea,
and she was gliding through the water, unconcerned about how she would breathe,
only where she should go. Above her, bright azure blue; below her, midnight.

Silver fish glimmered
passed like sun arrows off chrome, a pair of dolphins herding them. Prawn and
squid formed opposing angles, a curious aquatic ballet of layers and directions
intersecting and missing both at once. She looked down, her body floating naked
in the unbounded deep, hair a cloud of flowing strands adrift like the tendrils
of a jellyfish pulled gently with the current, the ebb of the tide, the draw of
the moon. She was a nereid, perhaps; some genus of sea nymph existing nowhere outside
of dreams and the imagination.

What mattered anything
outside of dreams? Here was here. Now was now. You are what you are, so do what
you are supposed to do.

She must find Jack.

Ellen turned towards the
surface, the water above her bright, cerulean blue, and sailed up the face of a
cliff formed from the night-blue waters like an edge to the ocean, a deep-water
trench that cleaved the earth for miles in all directions.

Above her she saw a face
staring down. Nothing but darkness at first, a silhouette suspended out over
the edge, something bright like the moon looming over its shoulder. As she drew
closer, features came into focus, urged into familiarity.

Jack!

He stared down into the
water, hands clutching the edge of the sea, fingers grazing the surface. His
face was unburned, eyes neither blind nor dead as her nightmares warned. A
smile touched his lips, but there was a trace of sadness in his eyes, as if he
was holding back a secret.

Ellen reached out …

… and found the edge.

They were of different
worlds, separated by sea and sky. She tried to kiss his lips through the skin
of the night-sea, tried to feel the warm press of his fingertips against her
own, but felt only the ocean’s membrane. She could not break the surface, could
not burst up into his embrace, or reach her arms around his neck and drag him
close to her, pressing her naked body tight against his warmth. His eyes held a
look of resignation, of sadness, as if he understood, had even expected this.
He pressed against his side of reality, but could not pass through the surface
of the water, each trapped in bubbles of their own existence like a pair of
fish in separate bowls, pressed to the glass in an effort to reach the other.

They might just as well
be separated by a million miles, by the endless parsecs of non-reality that
gaped between her apartment on the edge of a slow river, and Jack’s desert wasteland
on the edge of madness. The seemingly flimsy barrier of water and air was as
impassable as the unimaginable billions of miles of pan-dimensional space that
separated them.

Jack’s not really here,
Ellen; this is only a dream. You know that. This is self-inflicted torture, nothing
more; a variation of your nightmares. That isn’t Jack, just a representation,
an invention of your own mind while you struggle with your insanity, containing
Jack in a part of your head and making him stay there, both accessible and
unreachable. Jack doesn’t really exist.

No! Jack was real! The Wasteland
was real! She was not crazy and she was not wrong; not about Jack or the
Sanity’s Edge, at least. He was still there, alive, alone and trapped in the
ruins and the Wasteland, waiting for her to find him. Crazy or not, Jack was
real.

Then the net she had not
seen closed around her, dragging her away.

She tumbled end over end,
swept down into the billowing envelope of fine mesh as it skimmed along,
drag-lines pulling it faster than she could catch up, every effort she made at
escape only catching her deeper inside, dragging her further and further out to
sea.

And she was not alone, the
water a jumble of bright, tropical fish, every imaginable color of the rainbow,
some larger than herself, others smaller than her little finger. A host of
bottom creatures and debris sifted down: crabs and prawns, mussels and sea
horses and barnacle-crusted oysters, sharks the color of thunderheads and jelly-bodied
squid. As the net tightened, they crashed together in a desperate explosion, attacking
the edges for the way out that was not there. And down at the very bottom of
the net, a scraped-together collection of jetsam: a ship’s masthead, an anchor,
mismatched flatware and broken crockery, an assortment of shells and coral of
all shapes and sizes. The sea was not as bottomless as she assumed. She caught
glimpses of shining objects; maybe coins or pearls, maybe only broken bits of
shells and beach glass. It was a beachcomber’s paradise, a pandemonium of
fool’s gold.

Her hands walked the edge
of the net, desperate to find any tear or hole, but the material proved both oily
slick and strong as steel. And with each wasted moment, more and more creatures
were brought tighter and tighter together, the water churning in a cloud of
frenzied obscurity.

Gravity reasserted itself
as the edges of the net were hoisted clear of the water in a sodden mass of
thick, folded silk. Ellen felt herself slip to the bottom along with the rest
of the sea-going catch, swung high into the night—
hadn’t it been day only
moments before?
—and dropped unceremoniously into a pile. Fish flapped and
writhed against her in a panic of tormented sea flotsam. A shark, black on
turquoise tiger-striping, snapped at anything in reach, and Ellen scrambled to
avoid it along with a flopping manta ray whipping its tail-spike erratically at
all encroachers. She slipped about in a rough pile of oyster shells and
sandpaper scales, scraping her skin.

Are you sure you’re
dreaming?

And then she was free,
finding safety on a wooden deck awash in brine, the world bright with the white
glow of lanterns brought to bear upon her. At the edges of the light, sailors
worked the rigging, methodical and slow, deliberate actions that suggested
animatronics, wind-up workers performing programmed duties, marionettes and
meat puppets executing their tasks, repetitions they could perform in their
sleep, or even in death.

Two short, stocky men
approached, their bodies gnarled and twisted, faces hidden by the glare of
their lanterns as they investigated her presence on the ship’s deck, a
struggling nereid beside a pile of angry fish. She shaded her eyes against the
light as one of the men leaned in close and squinted.

“What the hell are you?”