The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (27 page)

It was time to get to
work. Today promised to be another beautiful day in the Wasteland. Just like
yesterday. And the day before that.
And the day before that.
An
identical ribbon of days and nights of unending sameness, and him trapped on
the Mobius strip for
all
time like a character from a Greek tragedy of Hell whose torment was considered
too ambiguous to be of use as a parable.

Nothing will change
until you change it. Nothing.

Jack swallowed a mouthful
of the coffee, cracked his knuckles, and placed his fingers to the keyboard. It
was not the first time, of course, but it was the first time he would do it
where it was actually a beginning. No more setting it up. No more fooling
around with characters and motivations and subplots and baselines. It was time
to begin.

Jack sent his fingers
across the keys, tapping out words to the screen.

The morning sun
slanted across the rooftop, the stone surface misting gently with the new day’s
warmth. Ellen Monroe noticed neither the cold of the stones beneath her nor the
heat of the rising sun against her face. She was still lost in her own dreams…

The
morning sun slanted across the rooftop, the stone surface misting gently with
the new day’s warmth. Ellen Monroe noticed neither the cold of the stones
beneath her nor the heat of the rising sun against her face. She was still lost
in her own dreams…

Her
own dreams …

In that
world that did not exist, that time both forever ago and as recent as the last
words she had read before falling asleep, Ellen remembered something. Not
something Jack had written. Not something that existed as words on a page. This
was not a recollection reinforced by his book, but a memory from that world
in
spite
of Jack’s book. Something happened at the Sanity’s Edge Saloon that
Jack did not know about, had never written down, had never imagined.

But it
was real all the same. And she
remembered
it.

Jack had
retreated to the top room of the saloon, secluding himself away to write. He
was angry and exhausted, bereft of inspiration and betrayed by half of the
people he was charged with looking after. The others, those who did not openly
doubt or despise him, were suffering a crisis of confidence. He was to be their
savior. He was supposed to protect them from the lunatic mystics and monsters
of the Wasteland, and free them from this strange purgatory. But Jack didn’t
know what he was doing, and the monsters and madmen outside the saloon—the ones
they knew they shouldn’t trust—were sounding more and more like the voice of
reason in a maelstrom of insanity.

Jack
would fail, and they would all die.

Ellen
wanted to believe in Jack, but just then, with everyone in the saloon
distrustful of one another and the tension a palpable haze that magnified every
sound, darkened every shadow, stole the taste from the water and stifled the
air, she wasn’t so sure. No one wanted to talk about how Alex and Leland tried
to kill one another, one for the love of the mysterious woman from the
Wasteland named Oversight, the other for the chance at free will, the
businessman willing to sacrifice all of them for Kreiger’s promise of control
over his own destiny. Lies, but Leland gambled all the same, and allowed one of
Kreiger’s creatures into the saloon: the Dust Eater. Just part of Kreiger’s
plan to stop Jack, to run him down in an ever-tightening trap until all of the
exits were blocked, all of the avenues exhausted. Then the Cast Outs would take
over the saloon, rule the Nexus, and recreate reality after their own twisted
dreams.

Jack
sought the advice of her, Oversight and Lindsay, but she had none to give. She
left Jack despondent and desperate. What Oversight told him after she left, she
never knew; not until she read it in Jack’s book.

But Jack
didn’t know everything.

Ellen
fled to the one place no one would follow: the bathroom. It was the only door
in the entire saloon with a lock. Ironic because the room itself was only
half-complete, the ceiling and most of the walls missing. Even a patch of floor
in the far corner was gone, leaving exposed lathe and empty sky. But here she
could escape, and Ellen was nothing if not accomplished at escaping her
problems. And she distrusted the desert sky less than the others in the saloon
just then.

Since
that morning when Jack began writing, Ellen had retreated here several times:
occasionally to think, but mostly to escape. She sunk down in the tub, the
large, claw-footed antique brimming with water, small wisps of steam sucked
from the surface by the desert air. She had been here almost an hour and would
gladly stay longer, but the water was starting to cool again, and she had
already replaced it once. Eventually, one of the others would want to use the
bathroom and the mutual freeze-out would not hold long against the proposition
of venturing outside to pee.

She rose
from the water, the desert air already stealing the moisture from the surface
of her skin. Behind the tub was a large brass statue, an anthropomorphic frog
with its front legs outstretched, a large towel neatly folded and waiting on
its flippers. Very ridiculous. She stepped carefully from the tub, the tiles
slippery beneath her feet, and planted the towel squarely over her face,
pressing the thick cloth against her eyes and holding it there while a pleasant
sinking rush went down through her body, her skin tingling and cool under the
gentle desert wind.

When she
lowered the towel, Oversight was standing directly in front of her, her face
barely a foot from her own.

Ellen
jumped and felt her feet slip, the towel dropping from her hands as her fingers
scrambled for purchase and found none.

Oversight
caught her arm, supporting her easily and allowing her to regain her balance.
And for a moment, the two women faced each other across a chasm of differences
that had narrowed to inches. Ellen looked back at Oversight, her perfect
features, smoldering eyes and raven hair; her dusky skin smelled faintly of
sandalwood and musk and vanilla, exotic. The woman’s skin-tight leathers were
still permeated with the dust of the Wasteland, the bone-colored sand
saturating the creases and seams, making her somehow more ethereal, a mix of youth
and newness with something ancient and eternal, a dark goddess from a dead
mythos, Heaven’s lost angel.

Ellen
tried to speak, her lips forming questions, too many at once:
How did
Oversight get here? Had she jumped from the rooftop above? Then why hadn’t she
heard her?
But nothing emerged except her intent, and a mystified
expression. She was never more aware of her own nakedness.

“I
understand what he likes about you,” Oversight said plainly, a smile touching
the edge of her lips.

The hand
upon her arm was strong, supportive, but not allowing Ellen to distance
herself.
Would you want to if you could?

“But I
wonder,” Oversight continued, “if you do?”

The
dusky woman’s free hand came up, lightly touching Ellen’s temple, brushing back
a wet strand of hair. The caress of her fingertips sent a thrill through
Ellen’s skin that turned electric as Oversight’s fingertips trailed down her
cheek and around her neck. She felt a tingling sensation race down her spine,
acutely aware of the intoxicating scent of Oversight’s skin, overpowering. And
when her fingers slid gently behind her neck, drawing her closer, Ellen did not
resist, did not want to.

She felt
her lips press to Oversight’s, losing herself in the aroma of the other woman’s
skin, more powerful now that she was pressed tightly to her, locked in an
embrace. Any hesitation slipped away, Oversight weaving her fingers into
Ellen’s hair, and she returned the kiss with equal fervor.

Oversight’s
steadying hand came away from her arm, sliding up across her shoulder, thumb
playing along the gentle ridge of her collarbone before the splayed fingers ran
trails down across her damp skin, pausing momentarily—maddeningly—on the swell
of her breast, Oversight’s palm brazenly rubbing the nipple, making it even
more sensitive.

Ellen
had never experienced anything like this before—had never even considered
anything like this before. She harbored no secret desires, no fantasies
unfulfilled about a woman’s touch over a man’s, but there was no denying
Oversight. Ellen’s hands hung limp, her elbows bent and frozen in the same
position she had adopted to save herself from slipping and falling. Now they
waited, motionless, permitting Oversight to lead her.

The
dusky woman’s lips parted, her tongue running hungrily over Ellen’s lips, the
sensation weakening her knees.

This
is crazy. Last night, Oversight killed the Dust Eater; slit its throat after
smashing its eye socket with her bare fist. What am I doing kissing her?
Letting her kiss me? Touch me? Making me want her?

Oversight’s
fingers stretched down across Ellen’s ribs to the flat of her belly, thumb
catching lightly in her navel, the rest of her hand turning slowly around it,
nails lightly grazing the flare of her hip before descending further, closer,
maddening
…

Oversight
broke their kiss suddenly, stepping back to release her hold over Ellen, cheeks
flushed with desire. But her eyes were completely rational, her smile calmly
reposed. Ellen may have lost control, but Oversight gave no impression of the
same; the pleasure may have been mutual, but the abandonment of reason was not.

Oversight’s
tongue slipped from her lips, licking quickly at the taste Ellen left behind of
herself. “I always knew your lips would be soft,” she said.

Then Oversight
turned and made two quick steps to the little there was of the bathroom’s far
wall before stepping over it and dropping from sight. Ellen heard the dull thud
of Oversight’s boots striking the ground, and nothing more. She was alone
again, feeling even more vulnerable than before, no answers, only questions.

Jack
never knew. He had not written about this moment because he never knew it
happened.

But it
did. And Ellen remembered it. This was not some memory borrowed from Jack’s
book, or lost in the shadowed halls of her self-induced amnesia. This she
remembered. A true memory that proved she was not crazy, that she was not
making this all up, that she had been there and it had all happened.

The flaw
in her logic was apparent though she never saw it; a tribute to her dreamer’s
nature and the sincere desire to believe in what could not be. Not ever.

Dr. Kohler
was wrong. Everyone was wrong. And she was right. They simply did not
understand.

And she wasn’t crazy. She
didn’t need to get better because she had never been sick. Jack was real. And
she would find him again.

Strange, the revelations
one has in those last moments before waking, and how real they can seem.

Even if they are not.

That suddenly, the dream
ended.

The door behind Ellen creaked
loudly then slammed, waking her and leaving her confused, blinking as she
looked for the familiar features of her room that were conspicuously absent:
where
was the alarm clock, the nightstand with Jack’s book, the comforting shadows
and amber light of morning?

Then she remembered, a
flurry of sensations greeted upon still-waking nerves: blue sky, brisk air, the
sticky confinement of slept-in clothes. Answers followed in a flood of recall:
following electrical cords up to the roof, Jasper Desmond’s grand project,
Serena’s special tea, falling asleep while reading Jack’s book …

…
Dreaming
…

Jack was real, as sure as
the earth beneath her feet and the air in her lungs. Not some invention of her
imagination or a character in a cheap paperback, he was real. Kohler was wrong.
They were all wrong.

Jack had saved her from
herself, from the slow poison of self-neglect she’d inflicted upon her person.
Before him, disinterested in her own state, her soul paralyzed and dying, she
paid no attention to her own slack-jawed expression, failing sight, slowing
heartbeat. Her callous disregard was a mask hiding wounds that had never
healed, and she was slowly bleeding out. Somewhere deep inside, a part of her
could not stop screaming.

But Jack changed all of
that.
Even when he was
weak or inattentive, distracted by his own miseries, she could still take
strength from him.

And now he needed her. He
needed her to save him, to rescue him from that world upon the dream plane,
that place of self-imposed exile where he lived both as a refugee and a
prisoner, his pain self-inflicted. Ellen could not allow it to go on. His
penance was served; whatever crime committed long ago absolved. If it was in
her power to save him, she would.

But the dream plane was
like the world beyond the looking glass: an ephemeral double-life unfolding
each night as she closed her eyes and defying her upon waking. Knowing Jack was
real, knowing he needed her help, did not make reaching him any easier.

“M-mm-morning, Ellen,”
Jasper said, navigating the
litter of discarded tools and plane scraps. Beyond his greeting, he took
no special notice of her. Maybe he didn’t see anything unusual about a person
spending the night on the roof.

Ellen craned her neck around
the brick wall of the stairway to watch Jasper as he yawned and stretched, body
lean and black against the rising sun, a dark spirit of creation’s dawn going
about his unfathomable task. He found tools and supplies in the chaos of the
rooftop with the ease and familiarity of a witchdoctor fashioning a totem, and
applied both to the ongoing construction of his flyer, all without benefit of
plans or directions.

Ellen climbed stiffly to
her feet, arching her back until the bones popped with a deliciously satisfying
sound before picking up Jack’s book and the empty coffee mug—she did not
remember finishing Serena’s tea, but was not surprised to find it gone—and
slipped down the stairs.

Her apartment was
unlocked. In her distraction, she had apparently left it that way all night.
This did not surprise her either.

She stared in cautiously
and the rooms stared back at her, silent and empty, windows standing open, the
morning breeze fluttering the curtains like the slow, graceful movements of
membranous sea creatures caught in the subtle currents of an otherworld ocean.
Everything looked perfectly normal, perfectly ordinary.

She supposed she ought to
count herself lucky she wasn’t robbed; an unlocked door was an invitation to
even the most inept of criminals. What had she been thinking?

Thinking’s not really
your strong suit, Ellen. It never was. You’re a dreamer.

She quickly set herself
to her morning routine. She had slept later than she realized, too many
sleepless nights and hard mornings finally catching up with her. She wasn’t
late—not yet, anyway—but if she wanted to be out of her apartment on time, to
Serena’s on time, to work on time, she could not afford to daydream.

She undressed and climbed
into the shower, trying not to think about dreams of swimming in a nighttime
ocean, of talking cats and ghost ships, and memories of a time before now, a
hospital that she could not exactly remember and hoped to God was not real.

But for a brief moment,
she had been close to Jack. She had felt it. As close as the ocean and the sky;
separate, but forever touching.

Be that as it may,
reality was what you woke up to, the world outside of your head, the place
where imagination stops, where normalcy draws that line in the sand that it
refuses to allow dreams to cross. Reality was not a choice. You pull against
the rubber band only so long before it pulls you back. And she had certainly
stretched it to its limits on more than a few occasions. It was an easy thing
to live in your dreams when there was nothing outside of them, no demands, no
responsibilities, no pressures of any sort. No boss to fire you, no landlord to
kick you out, no utility companies to turn off your water or your electricity,
no one calling on the phone or sending you a jury summons or a pre-approved credit
card. Free from responsibility, dreams were the place where everything was
exactly as you wanted it to be.  But it was all internalized, looking outward
by staring into the mirror. That was what life had been like at the Sanity’s
Edge Saloon for that one day that she and Jack had been alone. No spoilers or distractions,
just her and Jack and a morning of pancakes and coffee.

It had taken her too long
to realize that she loved him, that she cared more about him than a kind
stranger or a benefactor or a friend of circumstance. And by the time she
realized how much he meant to her, their time was over, the Saloon depleted,
the magical barrier that protected them drained and collapsed. The Cast Outs
fell upon paradise like a swarm of locust, ransacking Visigoths come to tear
down the garden gates, shit in the fountains and pee on the rose bushes.

Jack had fixed them—fixed
them for good—but at such a cost. The Saloon was annihilated, Jack left behind
in the wreckage, and Ellen spun across time and space, imprisoned in a world
that disavowed all knowledge of the existence of Jack Lantirn and that other
place, that perfect place that lived because of dreams.

Steam rose from her naked
skin as she stepped from the shower like an elemental newly born from the
primordial sea. She quickly combed and dried her hair then went looking for
something to wear.

It all came back to the
Sanity’s Edge Saloon. Her existence hinged on that one point, the one everyone
insisted wasn’t real; the one that seemed at once a dream, and, at the same
time, as real as any part of her life. Parts of her time there were difficult
to remember—the way it was difficult to remember the details of an hour out of
your day from a month ago, sixty minutes of life spent with little or no
accounting for its passage. But for all its unreal quality, her time in the
Wasteland was easier to recall than her past, which she knew of hardly at all
and only in flashes; flat unemotional moments without context or meaning. Her
entire life before the last couple months, before those lost days of missing
time at the Sanity’s Edge, was reduced to flickering recollections like a dream
upon waking, suffering the passage of time: nuances lost, meanings forced,
imagination filling in holes or deliberately overlooking them. Frankly, she
remembered her dreams with more clarity than her entire history, that missing
life that wandered lost somewhere in the dark recesses of her mind. It was
wrong by every standard of sense or sanity. What could you really say about a
world reduced to an abandoned way station on the edge of a bottomless cliff
along an endless railroad line where the owner was a writer manufacturing
reality and the place was guarded by a furry gargoyle who sometimes spied on
her in the bathtub?

Then there was her most
recent foray into the dreamworld. It seemed no less real than her time in the
Sanity’s Edge Saloon, her time with Jack and the others, her recall just as
perfect, every sensory image as vibrant as right here, right now. The salty
taste of sea water, the cold night air against her nakedness, the feel of the
dolphin’s skin against her own: smooth and wet, resilient but not hard, warmer
than she might have guessed.

But for all its detail,
it was a still only a dream, distinguishable from waking reality. Or so she
thought.

Maybe all of this was Jack’s
doing. Maybe all of this—her job, her shrink, her boss, her apartment—was the
myth, the dream within the dream, the storybook read before bedtime about a
mixed-up girl desperately in need of a good and trusted therapist with a lot of
prescription slips? Maybe the true fantasy was the belief that she had actually
freed herself from the Wasteland? Maybe she was just as trapped—in every sense
of the word—as Jack, only less able to see the cage for the bars?

Remember the hospital
bracelet, the broken glass behind the wire, the blood?

Maybe you’re just
losing your mind … again.

Pulling on a loose pair
of cotton pants and an oversized denim shirt, she went to the kitchen for some
breakfast. She dropped two slices of bread into the toaster, and turned to her
refrigerator for juice. There was time for that; there just wasn’t time to
over-think every aspect of her life. That kind of activity took forever, the
empty passage of underutilized time while safe in the comfort of her apartment,
all the inherent bliss and ignorance of mother’s womb. Nothing bad happened
here, her retreat, her personal way station between the world at large and the
dreamworld that was no further away than the sleepy comfort of a soft couch and
a cozy blanket.

It was tempting: lie
down, close your eyes and surrender to the dreams. Instead, she picked up her
bag with her copy of
The Sanity’s Edge Saloon
safely tucked inside, and
headed for the door, already digging out money for her morning coffee.

Normalcy was an easy
enough skin to slide into. Why should she want talking cats and ghost ships
sailing the sea of everlasting night? Wasn’t an assistant in a bookstore good
enough? Normal enough? What was it about a normal job in a normal place with a
normal apartment in a normal neighborhood that made her fight so hard against
it?

Maybe, just maybe,
normal is a
lie
.
Maybe there’s more to it, more to everything. Normal may be the fiction to the
dreamworld’s reality.

She locked the door
behind her and followed the snake of electrical cords down the stairs, missing the
dark streak upon the landing; a forgotten smear of now-dried blood, remnants of
the previous night’s violence.

In the foyer at the
bottom of the stairs, she noticed a corner of paper poking from the bottom of
her mailbox. It might have come yesterday and been missed in her distraction,
her eagerness to retreat to the safety of her apartment, though it was hard to
imagine now.

She dug out her mailbox
key and unlocked the small brass door to find a postcard of a roadside café,
the kind found along Route 66 somewhere in the Nevada desert from a time when
red and aquamarine neon, chrome surfaces, and checkered tiles were neither
quaint nor nostalgic, but simply a bright sign of the times. Other elements
seemed more contemporary: the neon sign that promised
HOT COFFEE ALWAYS
, or the simple fact that it was a
café and not a diner or a drive-in. The name of the café blazed red atop a tall
tombstone of polished steel over the doorway of this piece of contemporary
nostalgia left abandoned in the bone-colored sands of some nameless desert:
The
Edge of Madness Café
.

Her hands were shaking,
memories unearthed as if by a backhoe, some as new as last night, as this
morning, as a dream that faded upon waking.

She knew this place, had
been there in her dreams! And she would find Jack there because a talking cat
named Podak told her so.

Forget how or why, she
had stumbled upon a fragment of the truth, proof that this was not all
imagined, not all the wily machinations of a divided personality. She had
dreamed of this place in a dream that seemed more real than life. And now she
was looking at a postcard that proved it was not just a dream.

Jack had sent this! She knew
it even before turning the card over.  The postcard had been delivered during
the night by whatever unearthly means carried something as delicate as reality
across the vast reaches of insanity and dream that separated the two of them. The
postmark was faded and incomplete, no indication of where it was sent from or
when, addressed simply to Ellen Monroe in the same hasty script as the message
scrawled on the last page of Jack’s book. But more than what the words
said—brief and imprecise—was what they represented that made Ellen’s heart beat
faster, her breath run short.
All of it was real!
This was proof she
could hold in her hands, not easily dismissed like an authorless book, or
dreams of a lover that did not exist, or even memories she knew but could not
prove. This was real. This was tangible. This proved everything.