The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (41 page)

It was time to return to
Jack.

Ellen started the Dream
Flyer forward, hands on the levers, grips stolen from bicycle handbrakes. Pedaling
proved effortless, the wings pumping faster as the flyer gained momentum, closing
with the edge of the roof. She pulled back lightly on the hand throttles and
felt the nose of the Dream Flyer start to pull up as the tail’s rudder
responded. She quickly leveled it out, wanting to take full advantage of the
short runway. The wings flexed in the middle, reducing their drag on the lift
then locking as they pumped downward, getting a full scoop of the air beneath
them.
Better lift, lower drag
, Ellen marveled.
Even Da Vinci
neglected that feature
.

The Dream Flyer hit the
plywood plank and for one moment, she saw only the swirl of gray and white
storm clouds before her, the wide open sky, the limitless possibilities, the
opportunities granted through flight.

Then the front tire—a
converted racer from Jasper’s cannibalized bicycle—dropped off the end of the
board, and the flyer fell like a stone.

Forgotten was the
powerful pumping of the wings, the noise of the wind past her ears that existed
only a moment before. Now there was only her heart in her throat, the rise of
her stomach into her chest, and the dizzying vertigo of sudden descent. From
open cloudscapes to dark and distant forests, the tangle of tree limbs
descending down the ravine into the turgid, brown, oily river panning further
and tighter into concrete and asphalt and the litter strewn alleyway directly
below. Pulled by the weight of its single passenger at the vehicle’s tip, the
Dream Flyer plummeted.

Maybe this wasn’t such
a good idea
, she
thought.

In that same instant, another thought.
So much easier to
fly with mescaline. Or PCP. Or Ecstasy. Or LSD. Right now, I’m not feeling
overly choosy. No, not right now
. It had been a long, long time, but she
had not forgotten; dreaming was easier with the right tools.

And behind both of those thoughts, one phrase shouted over
and over:
This is crazy! Crazy! Crazy! Crazy! Craz—

As the tire tipped off
the edge, Ellen felt herself pedaling harder, a kind of desperation that made
the wings flap faster, pumping desperately at the air, fighting gravity’s grip.
At the same time, Ellen pulled back desperately on the throttle arms, if only
to distance herself by a few more inches from the ground fast approaching. Her
mouth was open, but no sound came out, the wind forcing itself down her throat,
filling her lungs, and she didn’t know whether to scream in terror or
exhilaration.

But the ground—

Forget the ground.
It’s time to leave. This world cannot hold you. It cannot hold you.

“I’m coming, Jack,” she
said.

Or maybe she only thought
she said it.

Above the roar of the
wind past her ears, past the giddy sensation rising in the pit of her stomach,
Ellen heard a strangled scream coming from behind her, a single inelegant
syllable stretching out into infinity.
NoooooooOOOOOOOOOO!

Or maybe she only thought she heard it. Because at that
moment, both Ellen Monroe and the Dream Flyer disappeared, winking out of
reality with the inexplicable swiftness of dreams upon waking.

Gusman Kreiger tried very hard not to
lose sight of Ellen Monroe.

He did try.

He waited outside the bookstore all
morning, keeping a careful eye on the coffee shop across the street and the
whereabouts of its owner. Ellen almost saw him as she left to meet with her—about
what, he had a pretty good idea.

The proprietor of the coffee shop was an
avatar, a fact Ellen was unaware of. Just as she was unaware that her boss was
also an avatar. As was the man who picked up the garbage. The avatar calling
herself Serena was, in every sense of the word, a goddess upon this earth. A
goddess who ran a coffee shop in a small, jerk-water metropolitan, nameless and
average and unidentifiable in every other way except that Ellen Monroe—Ellen
Not-Of-This-World Monroe—lived here along with three—
three!
—avatars.

Just another breach of realism in Jack’s absurd pseudo-reality.

The bookstore owner and
the garbageman arrived at the coffee shop moments later, less a social
gathering than a meeting of combatants, each sizing the other up, their hatred
of one another palpable. Kreiger melted down into the shadows, joining himself
to the sidewalk cracks, the garbage stink, the raucous cackle of distant crows;
not so much invisible as beneath notice. A useful trick against avatars that typically
ignored minutia, themselves superior to the small details existing around them.

There were exceptions of
course. Kreiger suspected the coffee shop owner was just such a one. Details
were her
forte
, and the depth of her expertise strained imagination.

One avatar was dangerous.

Three was apocalyptic.

Good old Jack. Count on
him for a big finish. Unrealistic, but that was part of his style—or lack
thereof. Kreiger felt it, Jack’s subtle and not-so-subtle alterations, pushing
at the rules over and over until normal became abnormal. Ellen might not
realize who or what they were, and the others that walked around this city—the
walking dead, tertiary characters, bland objects of no identifiable
value—likely could not see what they were either. But he was not fooled by
appearances. He knew what they were, and why they were here. He could read that
far ahead, even if others refused to.

So he waited, watching
Ellen Monroe and listening to the universe. The time was fast approaching, a
storm the likes of which this fragment of reality had never seen.

The streets were empty,
all other constructs having fulfilled their purposes.
Please collect your
check on the way out; we’ll let you know if your services are required again
.
And soon Ellen would leave, returning to the Sanity’s Edge Saloon—or whatever
had taken its place since Jack blew the Saloon apart. It was now or never.

Yes, he had tried very
hard not to lose sight of Ellen Monroe.

He knew the exact moment
when everything went wrong, felt the tightening in the bands of harmony
surrounding him, a tension about the universe that made his teeth ache, his
ears pop, his stomach turn hollow. He looked up at the sky, grit and dust
peppering his face, a piece of worn paper stuck against his leg, fluttering in
the stiffening wind. A raindrop struck his cheek.

And just like that, the
universe passed him by.

He leaped to his feet,
camouflage abandoned, and expended a small portion of the staff’s energy—most
was needed for the trip back to Oz—catapulting himself straight into the air
and across the street to land nimble as a jackdaw atop the windowsill of the
coffee shop’s second floor, balanced on the toes of his boots. Face to the
glass, he peered inside, the lightning rod crackling with brilliant blue
energy, exotic and new and raw as the birth of the universe, the unveiling of a
new reality.

Ellen was gone!

The second floor
apartment was empty. No coffee shop owner. No bookstore owner. No Garbageman.
Not even an apartment! He could see all the way to the back wall, a single huge
room that was empty of everything but the ravages of time. Walls grimed with
the passage of years turned to decades, gray and indistinct, blending almost
seamlessly with the fuzzy, pale gray of the floor, thick with dust so deep that
the original surface was now gone, its color or composition lost beneath the
layers of neglect and disuse. Festooned with cobwebs and littered with rodent
droppings and the dry husks of dead insects, the second floor of the coffee
shop revealed itself to be nothing so much as completely ordinary and
completely empty. This was no meeting place of three avatars and his sweet
ticket home, his Ellen Monroe; at least, not in this facet of reality.

It was the Kansas City
Shuffle, and he the hapless rube.

He’d intended to follow
her as she fled ahead of the storm, pursuing her in the dream flyer. While his
mind might be broken, Jubjub Bird was still an accomplished dreamer, and where
Ellen Monroe was going, only dreams could carry you. But she was the necessary guide,
the pathfinder, the keeper of the keys and the doorways. Without her, he would
lose his way in the clouds, or simply remain trapped in the Mobius strip of
this reality.

Only Ellen was already
gone!

He turned from the empty
room, eyes the color of blood and glowing like twin suns. Around him, empty
shops and abandoned streets, a dead town that had served its purpose like old
roses or a used condom, a shell outgrown by a land crab and abandoned in favor
of better lodgings. That was all this place was now: garbage, an abandoned
shell forgotten in the surf.

And he was trapped in
it!

He saw Ellen’s footprints
below, bright blue against the fading world. She had slipped out the back,
fleeing towards home—her
real
home.

He dropped to the
sidewalk, reading his doom in the dark splats of rain against the concrete, and
started running, worn boots slapping cement, coat flapping raggedly, a
scarecrow caught in a windstorm. He ran straight up the middle of the empty
street, no concern for cars or the notice of pedestrians. All were gone. He was
caught in a pause, the point when the swinging pendulum stopped and fell back
the other way. He and Ellen were living in that single fractious moment, that
almost forgotten time between now and now; that point when the world that Jack
invented and the world he invented it from were as close as they would ever be.

He charged Ellen’s
apartment building, shattering the plate glass door; there was no time to lose.
He had to get to the flyer, had to follow Ellen or be imprisoned here forever.

Shrugging away fragments
of glass—this world could not harm him any longer, but it could trap him; trap
him
forever
—he leaped up steps, five and seven at a time, denying the
agony in his bones, body wracked and broken by circumstance and vice then
pushed to its limits by desperation. But he still saw Ellen’s trail, the
lightning rod leading the way as he charged upwards. He need only reach the
flyer; Ellen would do the rest. She would leave and he would follow.

It was a good plan,
elegant for its simplicity.

Only he hadn’t counted on
Ellen stealing the dream flyer. No, he hadn’t counted on that.

He slashed open the door
to the roof, the staff shredding it like paper, just as the nose of the dream
flyer—
his
dream flyer, built for him by
his
dreamer,
his
Jubjub Bird!—slipped over the edge of the building and dropped from sight.

Lunging across the gravel
rooftop, screaming after it—after her—he thrust his hands out as if he might
catch it—catch them both—and pull them back. “
NoooooooOOOOOOOOOO
!”

The effort, like his
scream, was wasted.

And as he stared over the
edge, one hand clutching the lightning rod, the other empty air, he could see
it, the point where Ellen left this world and found her way into the other: a
shining pinprick in the fabric of reality already going away.

He hadn’t counted on
Ellen Monroe taking his only means of following her; no, he hadn’t counted on
that.

“Flyer’s flyin’.”

Kreiger turned to find
Jubjub Bird standing behind him, fixated on the same point as him, that place
where this world and the next merged and met if only for a moment, the gateway
between this reality and the one beyond. The young man looked bleary-eyed and
excited. “It’s flyin’. My flyer’s flyin’.”

Why
have you forsaken me? Have I not done everything you expected? Everything you
wanted? You may not have planned on me, but you sure got your use out of me. I
looked after her. I protected her. I kept the world at bay while she discovered
herself, unveiled this reality for what it was. Wasn’t that what you wanted?
What you needed?

Or is
all of this fulfilling some sick, desperate sense of cosmic irony for you?

Gusman Kreiger crawled to his knees, noticing for the first
time since the bookstore that he was in tremendous pain. Flecks of glass clung
to his skin, his face and neck speckled with blood. His lungs burned. His bones
felt broken, joints pulverized. His last and only chance to escape was a
million miles away, putting parsecs between them with every passing
millisecond.

And some retard was gibbering the obvious at him.

“I expect you’ve noticed
that your flyer is flying without you,” he declared sourly.

“My flyer’s flyin’.”

Going where only
dreams and dreamers can follow
, the Cast Out thought desperately as he climbed to his feet,
leaning heavily upon the charged lightning rod, not as a talisman of unique and
unrivaled power in this world, but as a trusted cane to a cripple. He fixed
Jasper with a stare both critical and calculating.

“Tell me, Jubjub Bird:
can you fly?”

The boy looked mildly
surprised by the question, and shook his head. “Jubjub Bird can’t fly, no,
Jasper can’t fly, not at all, not at all. But the flyer can fly. Jubjub Bird
saw, and he knows. The flyer can fly. Yessir, Goose Man, the flyer can fly. But
Jubjub Bird, he can’t really fly, no—”

Kreiger interrupted
quickly. “Can you flap your arms like a bird?”

Jubjub Bird instantly
began pumping his arms up and down. Ridiculous!

Kreiger felt a raindrop
strike cold against his cheek, and knew the storm had come to wash this reality
away, taking everything and everyone with it. The final page turned. The cosmic
end. Will the last one out please turn off the lights?

“It’ll do.”

The wizard snatched
Jasper Desmond by his shirt and threw him from the rooftop after Ellen Monroe
and the departed dream flyer, holding tightly to the boy’s T-shirt that he
might be carried over the edge as well, the staff pressed between them like
lightning in a bottle. The wind as they fell was a freight train in his ears,
asphalt screaming towards them.

It had to be now.

It had to be here.

For reasons too obvious
to mention, Gusman Kreiger knew that he would never get another chance.

“Now …
FLYYYYYYYYY!
”