The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (31 page)

Prosser’s eyes shifted suddenly
away from the teacup in his hand, flashing sideways at the proprietor of
Serena’s
Coffee Shoppe
. His stare tightened, closing down upon her like a hand, the
glare of a cuckold who has caught his faithless mistress in the earliest parts
of a lie. “Well, you might say it is a bit unusual, yeah. I’m not saying it
don’t happen, mind you. It happens all the time, what with the random nature of
the universe and all. The point is these unscheduled pickups ain’t all random;
they’re tied together somehow. Five unscheduled pick-ups in one day and they
all share something in common. I’m sure you can appreciate how that kind o’
thing is … rare.”

“Yes. Your schedule is
fairly routine otherwise, or so I imagine.”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that. Routine. But vital. The
orderly disposal o’ all things is a necessity without which the universe would
collapse. And the basis of order is the removal of the junk that is no longer a
part of that perfection. You know what I’m sayin’?”

“Absolutely. Order is a
more difficult state to achieve than most credit it.” Serena took a polite sip
of tea, furrowing her brow as if giving the matter a great deal of thought. In
truth, it was basic sensibility, the harmony of the universe, the balance of
fate. To say it was second nature was an understatement akin to suggesting that
breathing was second nature. It was ingrained into the very fabric of her
existence. But Arnold Prosser did not know her that well. “Order is art in its
own right. Most don’t appreciate that.”

Prosser brightened
visibly at her remark. “Yer right. Yer exactly right. It is an art. It takes a
supreme architect, an artisan o’ the highest caliber ta maintain order in
chaos, creating a sense o’ harmony in a state o’ perpetual decay. Any asshole
can make a mess…” His voice faltered, forehead and neck reddening. “I beg ya
pardon, Serena. I didn’t mean to offend.”

“You didn’t,” she said,
smiling politely. “I like a person with a passion for their vocation.”

Arnold
beamed. He looked as if he were
about to comment, but instead said nothing.

“I imagine, given your
proclivity for realism and order, that you are no fan of Jackson Pollock.”

“Pollock? He still
alive?”

“No, he’s dead.” Serena
smiled politely, not surprised by his query. “He was a modern impressionistic
painter who used large canvases and splatters of paint to impart emotion
without form or structure.”

“Oh, him. Don’t much like
his stuff. Like a flock o’ pigeons took a shit on his canvas.”

Serena’s laughter was
like musical notes. “Oh, Arnold, I do like you.”

Arnold Prosser smiled a
bit uncomfortably. “Heh, about that…” His eyes darted quickly about the room,
alighting on anything but the shop’s proprietor, her smooth forehead, her
auburn hair. Nervously, he lifted his teacup and finished the contents in one
long, even swallow. And no sooner had he done it then he realized his mistake
and regretted it. Sullenly, he stared down into the empty cup, its features
dwarfed by his large fingers, nothing left behind but his own private regrets.

“Can I get you a second
cup?” Serena asked, knowing what his answer would be.

“No,” he said, then
somewhat belatedly added, “But thanks. I should really be getting to my rounds.
I’ve got some things I gotta sort out over the next couple o’ days.”

He rose awkwardly, the
teacup and saucer still in his hands. He looked distractedly at them then
hurriedly placed them down. “I meant to ask you, Serena. What do you know about
Frederick Kohler?”

Serena stiffened, feeling
the hair on her neck prickle.
If he doesn’t know, at the very least, he suspects
.
“A psychiatrist. Local. He works uptown. Some of my customers speak of him.”

“Do they?” Arnold asked, voice edged with that dangerous potential she had sensed earlier. “He died
last night.
Unexpectedly
.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Massive cerebral
aneurysm while jerking off in his office. You heard anything about that?”

“You’re the first one to
mention it,” she said, then thought that maybe she had selected her words too
carefully. “Why do you ask?”

“It’s probably nothing
really. I’m just trying to figure out the connection between an uptown shrink
and four junkyard derelicts, also unexpectedly dead. But nothing you’ve heard,
eh?”

“No, Arnold, I can’t say
as I’ve heard anything about that.”

Prosser nodded, but his
eyes remained curiously fixed, not shyly ducking away like before.
He
doesn’t know, but he knows that
you
know
.

“I’ll show myself out,
Serena. Don’t trouble yourself further.” Arnold Prosser turned suddenly and
headed towards the backdoor. “I’ll be in town for a couple of days while I
resolve things. I hope I can see you again.”

“I look forward to it,” she lied.

The door closed behind
him and she was left alone, standing perfectly still, listening to the garbage
hauler grumble down the alley and back onto the street like a lumbering
dinosaur. She listened as it disappeared then she listened deeper: soft voices,
hidden sounds, turning wheels, spinning gears, the pluck and strum of a
thousand, thousand tiny, tightly woven threads.

Serena walked the cups and saucers back behind the counter
and set them beside the sink. Then she picked up the phone and called the
Riverside Dreamery, canceling tomorrow’s dairy delivery. Business was slow, she
remarked, being summer and all, but could they bring her usual order the day
after. The woman at Riverside Dreamery said it would be no problem and wished
her a good day. Serena offered a simple good-bye.

She didn’t like to lie unnecessarily.

Then she removed all the milk and cream from the
refrigerator, took their containers to the sink, and opened each one in turn,
pouring their contents down the drain. When she was done, the only cream that
remained was what sat in the lone pitcher on the serving station. This she
placed by the large front window where it sat in the sun for the rest of the day.

Jack migrated to the edge
of the junkyard past an enormous skeleton half-buried in the sand, only the skull,
shoulders, ribs and spine still visible. It might have belonged to some kind of
whale or aquatic dinosaur, or maybe something entirely unknown. He wasn’t sure,
and it didn’t really matter anyway.

He ventured across the
remains of the railroad tracks, ties splintered with time, rails bent and
rust-pitted, twisted apart where Kreiger and the Tribe of Dust had nearly
succeeded in derailing the train—the operative word being
nearly
; their
efforts proving both exhaustive and fruitless. It didn’t matter. Not then. Not
now. Reality’s machinery would not be derailed; it adapted and moved forward,
leaving a wake of fools and corpses. The once endless rail that ran from the
open stretch of madness across the Wasteland and back into reality had fallen
into disuse and decay.

The Wasteland would
reclaim it eventually the way it reclaimed everything. The skeleton. The
tracks. Everything. Soon. Very soon.

Jack sat cross-legged
atop the hood of an old Chevy Impala, the sky-blue finish faded and eaten away,
burnt through to the white primer coating by the relentless Wasteland sun, its
surface now soft cumulous clouds on a sky of metallic blue. Bare metal on parts
of the hood glinted through like deep wounds. Jack sat there with his computer
on his lap, using the shadow of the Buck Rogers rocket to shade the screen. The
rocket was good for that, but little else: a carnival ride, or maybe just a sad
roadside attraction.
Ride the rocket for twenty-five cents.
A
distraction, but no more.

Things were moving very
fast now. It would not be long.

The windmill clacked
behind him, catching the wind from the unbounded chasm of madness and dreams
that lay to the Café’s north side, the place of dead roads, the place where the
sidewalk ended, where the last pretenses of the real world fell away to
imagination.

For a moment, a sad
strange moment of silence when the only sounds came from the wind and the songs
playing over and over in his own head, Jack felt the sting of tears. Loss and
despair, maybe, or the cautionary tears of guilt:
Are you doing the right
thing? What right do you have to do what you plan? You are not a god, and she
is not your salvation. You are Jack Lantirn. She is Ellen Monroe. Nothing less,
and nothing more.

Or was that the point?
Maybe that was all there was. Man and woman. Mortality. No more illusions of
forever in paradise. Maybe there was only reality at the end of all this,
sensible and plain, solid and consistent. Maybe that was all there ever was.

He pushed the heels of
his hands into his eye sockets until the pain was replaced by another, one more
physical in nature and more easily assuaged. When he took his hands away, the
pain ceased and his vision cleared.

Then he placed his
fingers on the keys and let them do their work.

*     *     *

“I can’t believe I forgot my lunch,”
Ellen said.

It was not the first time she had made
the same complaint. Nicholas Dabble thought she might be trying to find a
rationale through repetition.
Good Luck
.

“Are you sure you don’t mind me going
home to get something to eat?”

Nicholas Dabble sat on a stool in the
corner of the store pretending to pore over ledgers and paying Ellen only half
of his attention. In truth, she held his complete and undivided notice of late
in everything she said or did. Already she had apologized three separate times
for having to leave him to go get some lunch, as though his world was empty
without her, would cease to exist the moment she left.

As if that isn’t exactly what you’re
afraid of, eh, old man?

“I assure you, I’ll be
fine. Your lunch hour is your own. Frankly, I should count myself lucky that
you are kind enough to spend it here at all.”

“Maybe I could get
something real quick and come back,” she suggested, and Nicholas
knew that it was his dour expression,
his morning-long frown and pinched face, that generated such concern.

Ever since the
morning—since the arrival of the Garbageman—he had been out of sorts. And his
Ellen, his Ellen with a secret, with the heart and soul of Mary and the body
and mind of something a little more earthly, was empathetic for him. The
fucking irony of it would have made him laugh to piss fire except he wasn’t
feeling very funny just know. No, not very funny at all.

“Get yourself some lunch.
I’ve managed this place by myself long enough. It won’t kill me to manage it
alone for an hour today.”

But it might well kill
you to keep her around for too much longer, isn’t that what you’re thinking?
The game’s stepped up a notch, and suddenly the stakes are a lot higher than
you originally dealt in for. Am I wrong? Am I?

No.

“Okay, then,” she said.
“I’ll be back shortly. Do you want me to pick you up anything?”

He forced a smile in her
direction, her sweet, dreaming eyes that seemed eager to please—too eager.
What
is she hiding from me? What has happened? What is going on that I am not aware
of?

You mean what else?

“Thank you, no. Have a
good lunch, Ellen, and I’ll see you in a bit.”

Ellen Monroe nodded
back pleasantly before pulling the
door shut behind her. In the ensuing silence, Nicholas Dabble tried to remember
exactly when things had gotten so far out of hand.

There was Ellen Monroe,
of course. It had all started with her and that ridiculous book of hers, his
sweet Ellen with her pure heart and her impure body, and her twice-weekly
appointments with Dr. Frederick Kohler, another page in the story. Kohler had
been busily working out his own Freudian dysfunction, all the while harboring
deep-rooted issues of guilt and pleasure over his long dead cousin—yes, he
knew; Nicholas Dabble knew a great many things that most thought were secrets
hidden in the darkest corners of their hearts. Any shrink worth his salt would
know the actions of the child he was then could not be revisited by the man he
had become, not for lessons to be learned, or pleasures to be regained. But
Kohler didn’t see that. Kohler was causing Ellen quite a few problems; he was
perhaps even getting out of hand with her. You could hardly say it wasn’t
crossing his mind.

But events were moving
very fast; things were changing.

Dr. Frederick Kohler was
dead.

Ellen—
his sweet Ellen
—was
dreaming again, a wayward spirit with a renewed sense of purpose and direction.
Dangerous thing, that. Sooner or later, she would realize what she was truly
about, and where she needed to be. Or maybe she already knew, the notion
clutching at his chest with something akin to heartburn, were the idea not so
completely preposterous.

The derelict they called
Mumbling Shepherd, the one who stalked Ellen from the first moment Dabble set
eyes upon her, had gone into hiding, abandoning his rounds and secreting his thoughts
away, making the bookstore owner wonder if he had ever truly known this
strange, secretive derelict at all.

And the smell of tea,
rosehips and mint, both secretive and alluring, pervaded everything. Serena’s
hand was in this.

Damn her!

And the cherry on top of
it all, Arnold Prosser, the Garbageman, back in town, offering up his usual
diatribe about universal harmony and order, this time with five unscheduled
pick-ups that were all somehow connected. Connections were Serena’s area of
expertise, not his, so what started with himself and his little secret had
grown suddenly and irrevocably beyond his scope and reach, snatching up players
all along the way like a raging torrent crashing headlong through a dry
riverbed. Prosser. Serena. Kohler. The derelicts. Mumbling Shepherd—who was
obviously more than your run-of-the-mill schizophrenic wino. And there in the
middle was Ellen with her strange book by her mystery writer who did not exist
and whose soul had no taste but who was nevertheless connected to all of this.
She walked without a care in the world, a carefree spirit moving as if one with
the wind. And yet she was inextricably tied to every thread in his universe, her
every move entangling him more and more, a hapless insect in a spider’s web.

Damn her!

It was pointless to note
that he should have jumped off when he had the chance. The train was moving too
fast now; his only option was to hang on and ride it out.

Stewing over possible
futures and the chance that he might not figure in them, Nicholas Dabble was
startled by a light, purposeful knock at his backdoor.

*     *     *

Serena waited until noon,
until Ellen Monroe left to get the lunch she had forgotten to make for herself
that morning because she overslept, lost in dreams of Jack Lantirn.

Her special blends never
failed to do as they were intended.

She crossed the street and discretely circled behind the
bookstore, her calm belying the urgency of her visit. This was something best
kept between them, something that required
subtlety
. Nicky would
understand.

The door opened, and Nicholas looked at her, his expression a
mix of relief, disappointment and resignation. If there was surprise at all, it
was fleeting, and ran from his face before she could completely register and
relish the sight.

Not that she took any pleasure in this visit. She had allowed
things to move of their own accord for too long, and events were now in danger
of flying out of control.

“How long did you think you could keep her from him?” Serena
asked pointedly, dispensing with greetings and polite rhetoric, both. And that
bothered her more than anything else; the spiral of chaos was forcing out grace
and subtlety. It was unbecoming and it would have to end. And Nicky would help
her, willing or no.

“Come inside,” Nicholas Dabble replied. “We can talk about
this.”

She scowled, mostly because he expected it, and stepped past
him as he held the door. She walked forward into the store-proper then waited
for Dabble to catch up. He still had not answered her question, and she was not
about to let him off the hook. There must be some act of contrition to
demonstrate that he had knowingly and stupidly engaged in this foolishness.

He was not alone in this
, she reminded herself, and
felt the furrow in her brow smooth slightly, making way for her own shame. It
was for the sake of this that she was allowing him to atone, to make his
confession, to free himself from the burden which, by rights, she could allow
to sink him like the millstone that it was. Arnold Prosser would not be
deterred in this matter; at least, not easily.

Besides, she liked Nicky; she liked the harmony and
consistency he leant to her reality, even as he fought to overthrow these very
principles. Change was inevitable, well she knew, but it saddened her all the
same to see it brought on by something not of her own devising.

“When were you going to tell me about Ellen Monroe?” she
asked.

“I didn’t think there was anything to tell,” Dabble said,
hands fidgeting like restless rodents. “By the time I learned otherwise, I … I
thought you would have already known.”

Clever, Nicky, but not good enough
. “I might ask why
you bothered working so hard to keep from me that which you assumed I already knew.
That would be a fair question, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I would say it was rather harshly worded—”

“Do not complicate matters further with your dissecting of
the truth, Nicky. You and I both know what has happened, and we both know the
consequences. I don’t discount my part in all of this. I was aware, and still I
chose to allow it to follow its own course. And now Arnold is in town.”

“I had hoped that this would be between him and me, and that
no one else need get involved.” His eyes searched the floor, embarrassed by the
admission.

“Oh, Nicky. Hope?” Serena shook her head gently. “You should
know better than anyone the folly of that emotion. Is this what she’s done to
you? Is that why you keep her? Because she gives you emotions you’re incapable
of? Do you lick them off her like a lover’s sweat, or does this actually ooze
from your own pores.”

Dabble raised his eyes, indignant. “Do not judge me for that,
Serena. You have not the right. I may have been wrong to try and keep her,
certainly for trying to conceal her when I knew what she represented, but I am
not wrong about her. Let us be very clear on that matter. She is a conundrum,
and you know it as well as I. You have felt it. You have tasted it. Do not lie
to me and pretend otherwise. I can smell your handiwork in this soup as well.”
Serena turned a little; not much, but enough to let Dabble know that she had
conceded a certain validity to his claim. “So now Arnold Prosser is here, and
he is asking questions about things that have tromped into his domain, and you
and I are both to blame for not having acted earlier. Is
my
assessment
of the situation fair?”