The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (22 page)

“Ellen?”

Podak was speaking, but
she barely heard him. She was looking at the strange sailors who waited about
the deck, stock-still. Why hadn’t she noticed it before? The trolls possessed a
quality of life, one she could sense but not fully explain, but the sailors
were different. The pallor of dead fish, their features appeared haggard and
indistinct. They seemed to be waiting for something, but she wasn’t sure what.
Orders, maybe, or perhaps simply attention; marionettes waiting on the shelf
for someone to pick them up and pull their strings. Looking at them brought
them into focus, clarified their features as if she were seeing them through
the lens of a telescope slowly being turned towards clarity. But when she
glanced away, they blurred on the periphery of her sight, as if her attention
was what made them real, gave them substance. And without her, they became as
distant memories, fading.

“Stop playing with them,”
Podak scolded.

She jumped, startled.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean … I’m not sure what I was doing, but—what’s wrong
with them?”

“Nothing is wrong with
them, Ellen Monroe,” Podak said patiently. “They’re dead.”

She could not think of an
appropriate response.

Podak tilted his head as
if Ellen were the most curious of things he had ever seen. “You really have no
idea, do you?”

“About what?”

The cat fell silent for a
moment, considering the side of the boat, the night sea, the dark sky. Ellen
had an inspired flash that Podak was thinking of what—and what
not
—to
tell her, constructing a narrative of truths and hastily editing pieces of them
away. No lies, simply omissions.

“Every night we cast our
nets,” Podak began slowly, “dragging the night sea for the ghosts of the dead.
Piotr, Simon, and I constitute the only
living
crew aboard the
Dreaming
Moon
. Both of them are afraid of me because I command the dead. They are
even more afraid that I will catch their souls upon their deaths, enslaving
them as I do the sailors you see around you. In exchange for my pledge to see
their souls safely to the other side, they serve me without question. We find
the relationship mutually beneficial.”

“You enslave souls?”

“It’s what cats do,” he answered in a whisper. “We capture
and we enslave the souls of the dead. We have done so since the very
beginning.”

“But…” She wasn’t sure
what she wanted to say, what question to ask, what point to raise. She was remembering
a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge called
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
.
She had stumbled across it one afternoon at the bookstore. The poem was long,
and towards the end began to lose her interest, but the ship in the poem, its
crew damned and the voyage surreal and nightmarish, reminded her very much of
this boat, a boat also damned, manned by the dead and trapped in a silent sea
of freezing mist and green witch light.

Or had she imagined those
details?

“Frankly, I am a bit
surprised that you can see them at all,” Podak said, sitting on the low rail
separating the decks. “The living seldom see the dead, and vice-versa. Their
two worlds are asynchronous, contradictory, and unharmonious. Ghosts are
trapped in the past while the living tend towards the present and, on rare
occasions, the future. The only ones who see the dead clearly are cats, those
already dead …” He turned, eyeing her curiously. “
And you
.”

“What does that mean?”

“Probably nothing,” he
lied. “Tell me where you were and in what direction you were going before you
found yourself here.” Podak’s eyes narrowed, the gold intruded upon by a thin
filmy membrane sliding sideways across them. “Or did you lose your way
altogether?”

“Do all cats steal souls?” Ellen asked, ignoring Podak’s
question.

The cat’s lids lifted,
regarding her impatiently. “No. All cats steal babies’ breath. They
control
souls. And no, I don’t imagine Snowball and Mr. Socks stash collections of dead
souls away, folded up under the couch beside their rubber mouse and that lost
ball of yarn. I have about as much in common with a house cat as you have with
a howling, ring-tailed lemur. Be that as it may, please tell me how you found
yourself here. A paradox is an amusing thing until you actually catch one and
drop it naked upon the deck of your ship. Then it has the unfortunate knack of
unbinding the fabric of the reality you have worked so hard to create. Now what
were you doing before you came here?”

“I fell asleep, I think.
I’m pretty sure I did, anyway. I was drinking some tea and reading a book on
the roof of my apartment building. I guess I fell asleep. I thought all of this
was a dream.”

“Probably,” the cat
murmured, eyes blinking alternately. Then he turned his lidded gaze out towards
the boat. “Dreams are the halfway-point between the world of the living and the
world of the dead, a convergence of the actual and the imagined, reality and
fantasy. It is the river between what is and what is not. But that only
explains why you see the dead. It does not explain why you’re here. You are
more than a simple dreamer, Ellen Monroe. Tell me, what were you dreaming of?
You were drinking tea and reading a book. You fell asleep. Where did you go in
your dreams?”

Ellen found Podak’s voice
soothing, his tone compelling. A part of her still did not trust him, but
neither could she resist telling him what he wanted to know. “I was looking for
Jack.”

Ellen did not miss the
way Podak’s tail jerked at the mention of the lost writer. “You know of him,
don’t you?” she said, not fooled by Podak’s placid expression of disinterest.
“You know something about him. Can you help me reach him? He needs me. He needs
me to find him.”

“Does he?” Podak asked
angrily. “Does he need you as much as you need him?”

“Yes … I think so. I
don’t know, really. Please help me. Tell me what you know?”

“There are a great many
things I know, and very little I will tell you,” Podak answered sourly,
deflecting further petitions. “One thing I will tell you, however, is that I
wish I had ordered Piotr and Simon to cut the lines before bringing you on
board. The fish
are
your fault; they don’t belong in my sea and neither
do you. Every moment that you remain, the edges of my existence crumble away a
little further, and if too much of it breaks apart, everything I know will collapse
and disappear, forgotten by everyone, including me. And where will I be when I
have forgotten myself?”

“Are you afraid of me?”
she asked, incredulous.

“I’m afraid of what you
can do; what you are.”

“I won’t hurt you, I
swear. I just need to find Jack.”

“You may not intend any
harm, Ellen Monroe, but by design you can do little else. Jack has punched a
hole through the world. How could he expect anything less?”

Podak jumped from the
rail and started walking towards the front of the boat. “Very well. If we’re to
survive this, you’ll need to follow me and do as I tell you. I think I can
guide you back before you cause any permanent damage. Bring that lantern with
you. We’ll need it.”

Ellen hurried after him,
lantern in hand as she skirted the motionless souls that followed Podak’s
movements with flat, dead stares.

“I might have known this
had to do with the Caretakers. Always meddling. Always after what they can’t
have,
shouldn’t
have. Witless conjurors. All skill and no wisdom, they
expend all their energy trying to get into what they spend the rest of their
existence trying to get out of. Ungrateful, self-absorbed, self-indulgent
neophytes. And now they’ve caught me up in their insanity as well.”

“I’m sorry,” Ellen said.

Podak stopped, turning
his head to regard her with his enormous lamplight eyes. “Don’t be sorry for
me, Ellen Monroe. You’re just as caught in this as I am.” Then more loudly, he
said, “Simon, bring the ship hard to port. We’re heading back the way we came.
Piotr, man the sails. Do the best you can with the wind she gave us.”

The two stopped what they
were doing, looking confused as Podak took a seat on the prow, as stiff as a
masthead figurine. The mid-deck was still littered with old shells, fry,
scuttling crabs, an octopus suckered tightly to the planks, and a
barnacle-encrusted anchor that proved too heavy to scoop over the edge.

Podak sensed their
indecision without even looking. “Forget the fish, boys. Once she’s gone, I
expect they’ll go with her. Now man the sails and the wheel while there’s still
a sea to sail in.”

Ellen stared at the back
of the cat’s head, the stiff, bristly fur and long ears with narrow tufts of
wiry hair. “Are you like him, Podak?”

“Like who, Ellen Monroe?”
he asked, tone suggesting he knew perfectly well whom she meant.

“Are you like Jack? Do
you create the reality in which you exist? Does it live for you and only you?”

“All of us create a
reality that exists solely unto ourselves,” Podak said, and sighed. It was a
strange sound coming from a cat, even given that Podak was not, in any sense of
the word, an ordinary cat. When he spoke again, his voice had turned sad. “But
we are of a kind, your Jack and I. We are each building a world out of our own
dreams and imagination and trying to live in it, our own personal house of
cards. It is a precarious life, and its balance is easily upset. I wanted to
believe you were random, but you are not. I wanted to believe you were his, a
trespasser into my world that I could easily dismiss. But you are not that
either. You are more. And reality has ever had an untidy effect upon my world,
pulling out its stitching, unraveling its seams, leaving it so much loose,
empty cloth.”

“I’m sorry,” Ellen said,
not exactly sure what she had done, or even if it was anything that she could
have prevented. But there was no mistaking the regret in Podak’s voice.

“It’s all right, Ellen
Monroe,” Podak said. The enormous skulls lashed to either side of the ghost
ship rocked gently against the hull as the vessel listed into a hard turn,
thick chains scraping and knocking against the wood, the sound against the hull
a hollow raven’s rapping at a chamber door. “This isn’t your fault. You are
only doing what you must, what you are supposed to do. I only regret that I was
the one who found himself in your way.”

“Is there anything I can
do?”

Podak released a series
of hitchy squeaks and rasps that Ellen realized after a moment was the cat’s
version of laughter. “You’ve done quite enough already, Ellen Monroe. You don’t
belong in the world from which you came. You never did, and you should get out
of it quickly before it ensnares you forever. Or you tear it to shreds. But you
don’t belong in my sea, either. The reasons are the same.”

“So where do I belong?”

Podak turned his head,
eyes wide. “You belong with Jack. In his world. In his reality. The more
important question is where does
Jack
belong, and when will he figure
that out?”

Podak turned away and
said nothing more, the boat sailing on in silence, no sound but the flapping
canvas, the cut of water about the prow, the creak of ropes straining against
pulleys and masts while the lobster
pots and whale skulls thumped against the wooden hull.

“Drop sail, boys,” Podak
ordered finally. “We’ll coast the rest of the way. I need a moment with our
stowaway.” Gliding along the rail, he moved up beside her. “Look down over the
side, Ellen Monroe.”

She did, seeing only the
glossy blackness of the night sky reflected on the sea, the blue foamy surf cut
by the prow. If there was anything beneath, she could not see it. It was hard
to believe how brightly lit that world once seemed. “I’m sorry, I don’t see
anything.”

The nictitating membranes
snapped once then twice across Podak’s lamplight eyes. “Curiouser and
curiouser. Take the lantern and place it between us on the rail. Be careful not
to let it fall over the side.”

She did as he instructed,
and Podak said, “Now look into the light. The frosted lens makes the color very
subtle; bright enough to see, but not bright enough to boast about.”

“I suppose,” Ellen said.

“Look more closely,” the
cat said, tone almost hypnotic. “Don’t you think it resembles the sun in the
morning? Those first misty minutes of full dawn when the sun has finally risen,
the morning haze still clinging to the sky, turning its light dull and fiery
orange? Can you see that?”

“I guess—”

“Look harder.
Concentrate. You want to get out of here, don’t you? You want to see Jack
again?”

“Yes.”

“Then first you have to
see the morning sun in a boat lantern. Think of that first quarter of an hour
after dawn when the dog days of summer are past and the mornings are cool and
easy and good for sleeping and dreaming. I’m guessing you’re familiar with
dreaming. Think of the languid sight of the sun as it changes the entire color
of the sky. Not the burnt out blue-white pale of an August afternoon, but the
soft pink of a summer morning when the world is still silent, the realm of
mourning doves and laughing crows and dead milkmen of a bygone age. In the east,
the sun is shining, but not brilliant; a penny left in the coals of a campfire,
easy enough to look at without imprinting itself upon your sight. Easier still
to hide outside the curtain of closed lids, the world of dreams still at your
disposal with their promise of escape to better things, things ungrounded,
unbounded by rules or reality or sense or sensibility. Do you see the sun in
the lantern?”