The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (23 page)

And to her amazement, she
could;
she could see it in her mind
! She nodded.

“Good,” Podak said. “Now
hold that picture in your head. Keep it whole and perfect and intact. And when
you are absolutely certain that you hold it in unwavering perfection, pick up
the lantern—the one that looks like the sun—and throw it as far out into the
night and the sea as you can.”

“But what about—”

“Forget about everything
else,” Podak admonished. “It is of no consequence. I asked you to throw my
lantern out into the sea, and I want you to do that while picturing the morning
sun in your mind. Fix the image until it’s perfect, then throw the lantern
away. It will lead you to Jack.”

She looked at the lamp a
moment longer, trying to hold in her mind a strange amalgam of a hundred
different sunrises coalesced into a single image of one sun not unlike a ghost
ship’s lantern, then threw it as far out into the open air as she could. The
lamp splashed into the sea, the pink glow floating down…

… down …

…
down
.

“That ought to wake him
up,” Podak whispered.

Ellen watched the light
reduce to a small glowing speck deep beneath the surface, more imagined than
real.

“Now follow the light,”
Podak said, “and you will find Jack.”

“Just like that?”

“No. Before you can go
forward, you must go back. Over the side, down through the water, back the way
you came. The rules haven’t changed, Ellen Monroe; you’re simply becoming more
aware of them. You can’t find Jack this way, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, but
the light will show you where he is, and how to find your way back to him when
you’re ready.”

“Why can’t I go to him
now?”

“Because you’re not
really here,” he said.

“What
?”

“You’re
dreaming, Ellen Monroe. You know this.
You’re sleeping on the rooftop of your apartment building, just like you said.”

“But …”
This can’t be.
It can’t. This is too real.

“How do you know when
you’re dreaming?” Podak asked rhetorically, eyes alternately narrowing and
widening as he watched her intensely. “You travel without moving, flying
through the air, talking to the animals while they talk back to you. And at no
time do you think this abnormal.” Podak blinked. “You are dreaming.”

“This isn’t real?”

“Dreams are just another
reality less understood. We wander through them like tourists, staring
incredulous at everything while understanding nothing. Alice never wondered why
the Cheshire Cat spoke to her, or why the white rabbit was pressed for time.
She was too young and had not yet learned to resist the temptation of alternate
realities. Were she older, she would have been more entrenched in her own sense
of reality, her existence crystallized into a shell from which her mind could
no longer escape. She would have gone mad. Or maybe she did. It happens to
everyone eventually when they try to escape. You either find your way out, or
you lose your way forever.”

“You said you could help
me find him
,” Ellen
said, focussing on the distant red speck under the water, the boat caught in
the dead calm.

“Strictly speaking, I am
helping you … out of
my
reality. A dream is nothing more than a small
hole cleared through a murky window used to gaze upon a kinder world outside
the walls of our own existence. You have been staring through the glass so long
that you have forgotten where you are and why you are looking at green lawns
and distant forests beneath an azure sky.” Podak’s eyes widened, twin moons
stealing all light from the world of the night sea. “Do you remember what is in
back of you, Ellen Monroe?”

The hair on the nape
of her neck rose, her flesh gone cold, shivering as she turned, the world not
what it was before. Cornered by cream-colored walls, floors of chocolate
linoleum, high ceilings of caged-over lights, she was trapped, her face pressed
to a wired-over window of translucent glass, murky and impenetrable save for
the hole smashed through the corner, shards littering the floor. She was
wearing a bathrobe, and one of her hands was covered in blood running freely
down her arm, concealing the information on the plastic wristband. Through a
stray shock of her own hair, she saw people running towards her dressed in
white, skin the sunless, bleached color of the dead, veins bright and blue
along their sickly flesh, a cold, parchment-thin camouflage over the metal
substrate, servos and cables of their robotic substructure, eyes glimmering
red. Behind them, others sat in chairs, leaned against walls, waited with waxy
expressions like puppets without masters, meat awaiting the saw. The air was
thick with the cloying stench of chlorine, a frail mask over the stink of urine
and stale, unwashed skin. Farther away, a man in a white coat, gray hair, a
goatee, was moving towards her, lost behind the angry, snatching hands of dead
white flesh, his eyes kind if regretful, green behind wire spectacles. Before
being yanked from the corner and crushed against the floor, she saw a tag on
his coat, an ID badge on a clip: Dr. Podiliak of the Drummond-Moen Mental
Institute.

Then the patients were
screaming. And Ellen was screaming. Mouths agape, slack-jawed, drool running
down in thick slobbery lines. And everyone was screaming all at once. All
screaming. Screaming!

“Stop screaming!”

Ellen crouched in the
prow of the
Dreaming Moon
, the world of the night sea and the ghost ship
and the endless ocean of the dead snapping instantly back into place. Podak was
in front of her, his expression regretful. “Ellen, please stop screaming.”

Behind him, all around
the deck, the crew of dead souls were screaming with her, a terrible howl
raised up to the moon, shattering the calm.

While Ellen willed the
sound dead in her throat, the memory was not so easily silenced. “What was
that? What was I seeing?”

The restless spirits went
silent as well, and Podak’s voice was a haunting whisper in the dark. “Out
here, all things are possible and nothing is inevitable. Reality is our own and
we make it where we choose, but only if we choose to do so. Relinquish that,
and your reality falls to the whim of others. Time is a construct, a consensual
delusion. It is at once your enemy, but equally irrelevant.”

His words wove in the air
like a spell, and Ellen watched breathless as the wooden planks and railing
about her grew pale and rotted, chains rusting to dust, lines and rigging
shredding to fibrous wind, then nothing. The two trolls stooped under the
weight of their own bones, faces wrinkling, hair turning gray, beards growing
until they collapsed beneath their weight, falling to the deck and shattering
into puddles of ash.

Both Podak and Ellen
remained unchanged, eternal.

The cat’s lamp-like eyes
blinked, and the world of the
Dreaming Moon
was as it had been a moment
before, untouched, safe in its immortality.

“What did you do?” she
asked, barely aware of the tears running from her eyes.

“I showed you what you
are denying. The worlds of your reality are closer than you think and not all
as well known as you believe. We are eternal, you and I. But we can become lost
in our worlds if we are not careful. Turn back and you could fall into your old
reality forever. I can show you how to find Jack, but I cannot bring you to
him. Were our realities to collide, neither would survive. I would lose my sea,
and Jack would lose his mind.” Podak’s eyes flicked out at the water then back.
“This is as close as I go, and as near as you have ever been. Go. Your reality
interferes with mine.”

“That sounds like an
argument a crazy person would use,” Ellen said, no longer sure what to believe.
If she couldn’t trust Podak for what she didn’t want to hear, could she trust
him for what she did?

“Fine, then consider that
my reality is interfering with what you perceive as
your
reality. Now
you’re the one who’s crazy.” He paused thoughtfully, then added. “To each his
own. Reality is simply what you make it. Nothing more.”

“That still makes us both
crazy.”

Ellen draped the towel
over the rail before climbing up and over the side, heels balanced on the edge
of the forward deck. Below her in the night-black sea, the small beacon glowed
with a dull, wavering red, less a morning sun than a plane’s running lights
glimpsed from the ground far below, or the light of a distant, dying star.
As if the world had turned upside-down
.

She steeled herself,
looking back once at Podak. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m not
helping you,” the cat replied brusquely. “I’m helping me. I carved out this sea
back before the sands washed over the Sahara and the rivers still flowed above
ground, and I want to keep it. You and Jack are rocking the boat, and I hate
getting wet. By the way, when Ishtar descended into the underworld, she was
forced to disrobe as she went, symbolically stripping away her defenses for the
sake of love. Eve came upon the scene naked because she was innocent, an
existence outside of social mores. If you try to push the two symbols together,
however, it becomes simple exhibitionism, and the message of the innocence of
the eternal soul is usually misconstrued as a pubescent sexual fantasy. Remind
Jack the next time you see him.”

“What does that mean?”
Then Ellen shook her head. “Never mind. Just tell me how I’m supposed to find
him?”

“Start by waking up. You
will never find him on the dream plane so long as you remain outside of it. You
have to come here, and that means that you have to start by finding your way
back to that other world where your body lies sleeping. Follow the beacon down
to the rooftop. The next time you come here, the beacon will lead you to Jack.
Stay focused, or you may find yourself in the corner of the Institute’s day
room in a puddle of crimson, blood pressure too low to resuscitate.”

“You know what’s
happening, don’t you?”

“Of course,” Podak
confessed. “But I don’t have the answers you’re looking for.”

“Can you tell me
anything?”

“You are alive, Ellen
Monroe, but not as alive you think. Jack Lantirn makes you live and you are his
reason for living. You are a sad pair of codependent pseudo-phantoms, and you
deserve each other. I wish you well. But mostly, I wish you well away from me.”
His eyes narrowed to unsettling slits, and while impossible for a cat to smile
wickedly—or at all—somehow, in the darkness, Podak managed the feat.

The image of her hand
covered in blood still haunting her—the plastic wristband, the small hole
smashed through the glass, the garden beyond—Ellen let go and fell into the
sea.

*     *     *

Podak watched her descent
as a fog drifted across the water’s surface, the marsh-green glow of witch
light casting a pall upon the boat, stealing Ellen Monroe from his sight. A
light wind rippled the fabric of the
Dreaming Moon’s
sails, and Podak
knew that Ellen was gone from his world forever, the ship’s deck clean of every
living thing but his two hobgoblins. Both looked about in astonishment at the
empty planks where fish had been only moments before.

The living had no place
in this sea.

“Speak to them gently,
boys, and they can be reasonable,” he said. “There’s no need for force.”

He stared down through
the water a little longer; eyelids within eyelids snapping open and closed and
open again as Podak followed Ellen Monroe’s silvery form down through the depths
and out of his world, her shape no longer visible to the mortal eye.

“From now on, Jack, keep
your dreams out of
my
sea.”

*     *     *

Ellen sank like a stone,
the sea growing strangely lighter as she descended, the ocean depths
brightening like the night sky at dawn, first light making the world over in
pale sky and shadows.

But upside-down.

The red light was closer, the ocean floor a sea of empty
sand, a curious building like an aquarium decoration sitting alone in the
middle of nothing, forgotten. The red lantern had snagged atop a tall radio
antenna in a junkyard behind the small building, what she began to realize was
a roadside café mismatched to an auto garage. She sank down upon the rooftop,
the red lantern in easy view.

This
is what you get for taking advice from talking cats aboard ghost ships; you’re
now back in your own world of the senseless and the insensible. Fetch the
Thorazine; Ellen’s finally back where she belongs.
She tried to look at her
hand, look for the blood, the plastic wristband.
What happened? Did you slit
your wrists again, or did you try another escape and fail?

Again?
What do mean, again?

You
never left us, Ellen. Never. Now take your meds like a good girl, and stop
fighting the orderlies or we’ll have to tie you down again. You don’t want us
to tie you down again, do you, sweetie? No, of course you don’t?

Too tired to fight, she
fell asleep on the rooftop and slipped into a dream within a dream, blanketed
only in the warmth of a reality that could not exist.