Edge of End (14 page)

Malcolm remained cagey, sitting
somewhere behind me in one of the corners of the cafe. I hadn’t
paid any more attention to him; I never even turned around to look
at him. I was too busy smoking and musing, my mind wandering
elsewhere. My eyes followed only the clouds of smoke that wafted
about lazily in front of my face. I was in a world of my
own.

“
This fuckin’
sleeplessness,” Malcolm muttered. “I’ve missed dreams, the real
ones,” he went on muttering to himself.

His words made me think about sleep.
With everything frozen in time, I had lost my desire to sleep, eat
or drink. I could exist without food and water. A soul didn’t need
those things to survive.

“
It’s torturous, you know,
having no sleep at all.”

I swiveled around on my chair. He was
sitting on the floor in a corner leaning against the wall with his
coat wrapped snuggly around him. He gave me a half smile as our
eyes met. “At least the drinks help me to abate the pain of
sleeplessness. They are like alcohol. They turn your brain off and
disconnect you from reality.”

“
They summon visions,” I
reminded.

“
Visions come regardless
of drinks or no drinks, Jonathan. Thinking like you’re doing now
will lead you to having more visions, and you’ll never realize
quite how you find yourself amidst them. They just come, and
they’ll always come, as long as you’re here.”

I blinked my eyes and lowered them for
a short time. Finally, when I looked back at Elizabeth, she was
watching me meditatively, listening to us in silence.

“
What are we going to do,
Jonathan?” she hissed, her throat hardly letting her speak. “Do you
have a plan?”

“
Yeah, sure. We’re going
to the light and getting out of this godforsaken place forever,” I
said forcefully.

“
We?” Malcolm broke into
the conversation. “There is no we, Jonathan, there is only
you.”

“
What do you mean?” I
asked as both Elizabeth’s and my gazes turned towards him
inquisitively.

Malcolm heaved a silent sigh, took out
his right hand from under his coat and stretched it out towards me,
“Give me the pack.”

I tossed the pack of cigarettes to
him. He lit one, looked from Elizabeth to me mournfully and blew
smoke out through his nostrils again.

“
Malcolm, why only him?”
Elizabeth was running out of patience.

“
For starters my dear,
you’ve already entered your house,” he began explaining airily.
“You’re the prisoner of the town now–it won’t show you the
exit.”

“
But I’ll be able to see,
I’ll lead her,” I cut him off arching my eyebrows in
frustration.

“
You might,” Malcolm
agreed as he inhaled the cigarette smoke. “But you have to admit
that she’s too weak to make this trip, Jonathan. If you hadn’t
broken into her house and helped her get out, she would’ve still
been sitting in her house with her torturous dreams and visions,
her mind trapped in blackness and disconnected from
reality.”

“
Or that monster would
have already torn me into little pieces, hah?” Elizabeth added. I
saw her eyes welling up.

“
I doubt it,” Malcolm
said. “That powerful monster likes to visit young girls and ladies.
I guess you understand why.”

“
Great. Sex is everywhere,
even in hell,” I answered back sardonically.

“
It’s not like the sex you
were used to on Earth. The monster likes the softness of women,
sexual games, and, in the main, sucking their strength.”

“
Like the barwoman?”
Elizabeth asked.

“
The demons suck your
soul, that monster sucks power, it makes itself stronger,” Malcolm
stubbed out his cigarette on the floor and hobbled up onto his
feet. “I’ll be honest with you Elizabeth. You’re a nice woman, you
have good manners and I have no clue what the hell you’re doing
here. Yeah, I could admit you don’t belong here, but then, I don’t
know what you did back in your life, why you were sent into this
town. You can find the answer in your visions, but,” he raised his
forefinger into the air, “One thing is more than clear–you made a
big mistake going into your house,” as Malcolm talked, he limped up
to the bar and took a hold of his bloody drink again. “Now your
power is too weak. You’ll only slow Jonathan down,” he poured the
drink into a tall glass as he talked. “There are a lot of things
out there that aren’t going to let you pass easily.”

“
I can handle the dogs and
the monsters,” I butted in quickly.

“
Those dogs are a piece of
cake, Jonathan,” Malcolm lifted his glass and took a sip, then
exclaimed “Tastes like a shit, but it’s a useful drink. Are you
sure you don’t want one?”

What was so useful in that noxious
drink? I wondered as I shook my head no; Elizabeth didn’t answer
Malcolm, just remained still, staring at the old man who had been
openly discussing her future.

“
Okay,” Malcolm headed
back to his corner, holding the glass in his right hand. “Jonathan,
you’ve got a chance to find the way out, but only one chance. Think
about it very carefully. Are you ready to run the risk and vouch
for Elizabeth?” He was talking as if we were alone, he didn’t even
acknowledge her presence. “If not, then it’s better that you make
the trip alone, just you. Otherwise neither of you are going to
leave this hell-hole. Mark my words.”

Malcolm’s one eye looked
piercingly into mine. Somehow he was sure that I would leave
Elizabeth behind. Somehow he could see through me and that I was
ready to sacrifice her to get out of the
town
myself, alone. The question was
whether I was such a heartless creature.

“
You aren’t going to leave
me here, are you?” Elizabeth’s whisper broke my eye contact with
Malcolm.

I blinked nervously and looked up at
her miserably. Her eyes saddened as she tried to read my
expression.

“
We’ll make it somehow,” I
said with great uncertainty, my voice fading.

“
Nobody has ever worked
this out,” Malcolm put his two cents worth in as he got comfortable
again on the floor. “As far as I can remember, it’s never been
done. It’s impossible.”

He emptied his glass and lowered it to
the floor and, then he took another cigarette and lit up. He threw
the pack back towards me that I caught in mid-air with one
hand.

“
Of course, it’s not up to
me to make the decision, it’s yours, Jonathan,” he said hardly
rolling his tongue in his mouth. The drink had made him speak
slower and he was slurring like he had been drinking heavily all
night. “The rules here are different, you know, made by the devil,
you can’t outsmart it; that’s indestructible. We’re like poor
creatures–ants, seeking the hole that’ll lead us back to our nest,
to our queen. For a lot of us, the winter has come, and the snow
has covered the holes. The door’s been closed right under our
noses. There’s only one open hole, Jonathan,” he paused and then
quickly continued, “And only you know the way to it.” He began to
stutter. His last few words were difficult to make out. He was
losing control of his tongue.

Malcolm began to doze off. His head
tilted while the cigarette still burned between his fingers. I knew
he wasn’t asleep because there was no sleep here, it was more like
a drunken slumber.

I looked at him and recalled when I
had met Malcolm for the first time, and he had offered me that
fucking drink. He was off his head, leaving me alone with
Elizabeth.

I turned my gaze from him and looked
cautiously into Elizabeth’s mournful eyes. Their natural sparkle
had faded. It looked to me like her soul was close to dying, right
in front of my very eyes.

I rose and walked across the café
toward Malcolm.

“
Hey,” my voice was barely
whisper that wouldn’t work its way to Elizabeth and would be lost
within the wailing of the storm. I knelt down in front of the old
man and waved my hand before his eyes. He gave me no sign, his eyes
glazed to the floor, his breath suspiciously calm, almost absented.
But he couldn’t be dead, he was already dead.

“
Is he asleep?” Elizabeth
asked.

“
Don’t know,” I shrugged
and stood up slowly. “Rather feeble.”

Elizabeth let out a mournful sigh.
“You think he can hear us?”

“
No. At least I didn’t
when I had the drink.”

“
Should we trust him? You
know, he doesn’t look right in his mind and he may have made up
this entire story about, you know, being in coma back on Earth and
the light and the hell.”

“
Why would he?” I asked
rather myself than Elizabeth.

“
Just look at him,” she
narrowed her eyes. “He’s a junkie. You say you lost your
consciousness after having a glass of one of these drinks.” I
nodded obediently. “Think about it, maybe he and that woman just
drugged you. You don’t know how long Malcolm has been here and used
these drinks. He may have been drugging himself all the while and
have had hallucinations which led him believe in his crazy made-up
story.”

“
We both saw the dogs and
the monster in your house,” I said padding toward the nearest
window. My back to her I went on in a hushed voice, “And the
soul-eaters.”

“
They still can be a part
of an experiment,” Elizabeth pressed on.

“
Maybe,” I muttered under
my breath. I placed my hand on the window, bent forward and pressed
my forehead against the glass trying to see anything moving in the
storm.

“
Look,” Elizabeth spoke
again. “We feel pain, we breathe, we have heart beat. Why does soul
need all these?”

“
We don’t eat and don’t
drink,” I reminded.

“
Maybe we will,” she said
hopefully.

“
Okay,” I gave up looking
out as I could see nothing but tons of sand hovering in my sight.
“Dead or not, we can’t go back to the entrance. There is no way,
only the desert. So we have to head for the light. Malcolm may be
right about the passage.”

“
You’re just saying that.
You do believe we’re dead,” Elizabeth realized. I did, being dead
answered many questions. “So, if that’s what you think, the light
is our only salvation. Through the town and through the monsters we
have to work our way to it.” Having no answer from me she looked at
me solemnly. “There are no we anymore, aren’t there?”

I expected her to look
off, but she pierced her eyes in mine. Malcolm had been clear–with
her I had no chance to reach the light and get out of the
town
, go back to life. I
couldn’t say that to her straight away.

Why had she been sent
here?
I wondered. It just didn’t add up.
Or maybe she could have been someone else and had been acting
sweetly to deceive me. Oh, yes, we all know such women; they can be
great actresses sometimes.
What if she
uses me to find her way out?
Unreasonable
thoughts and ideas were swimming about in my mind, but in a place
like this you really do begin to think the unthinkable.

I moved off the window and approached
her, sitting on the chair next to her, and took her hand in
mine.

“
What do you dream about?”
I asked my voice low and weak. “The visions, I mean.”

She sighed. “The same bathroom,
blooded water streaming toward me.”

“
That’s all?”

“
Once or twice I happened
to be in a glade nothing but endless grass in my sight. The sky is
dark, cloudy and I stand there clad in black dress watching the
dream through black veil on my face.”

“
Are you
alone?”

“
Yes. Absolutely,” as she
said the corner of her mouth twitched, and she pulled off her hand.
Then she asked, “What is your story?”

I told her about the gloomy alley and
the running man, leaving out the black-haired woman who named me
‘Jonathan’.

“
You think you killed that
man. That’s why you’ve been sent to here?” she said.

“
If I killed him, I
sinned,” I took a deep breath. “But you see nobody, you’re alone in
that glade. It’s kind of confusing.”

“
Maybe I didn’t kill
anybody, but I could sin anyway. I could be a bad wife, a bad
mother, anything.”

She didn’t look me neither of them.
But still it might be a very clever act of her. Leave her or hold
her close? Wondering my eyes traveled over the café and rested on
the door behind the counter.

“
I wonder where that door
leads to.” I thought aloud.

Elizabeth seemed to come back from her
thoughts and looked to the counter.

“
Sure you wouldn’t want to
know,” she murmured.

“
Why? Maybe that’s where
we should go.”

“
Go after a demon?” she
raised her eyebrows in surprise. “According to Malcolm’s saying
she’s a soul-sucking-demon. I doubt you find the way out of here
behind that door, rather you find something like morgue for souls
where she keeps her dinner,” she chortled saying that. “It might
lead directly to hell. You enter and it’s all over, your body is
dead back on Earth, your soul is sucked up into the hell
forever.”