The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (29 page)

But the four derelicts
were not here because they were ill-fated. Prosser could smell Fate a mile
away; frankly, it smelled of jasmine and honeysuckle, passion and sweat, tea
and peppermint. He knew Fate, and these four had nothing to do with her. Fate
was all over Freddy, but not these four.

Prosser paused, leaning
against the cold hard skin of the metal behemoth. There was something in the
air, something else that Fate had a hand in. And that something was very
strange. Very strange indeed. It smelled like Fate and confusion and the dead
derelicts, only it smelled like none of them directly. And there was something
else in there. Something
peculiar
.

He stood up straight and
breathed in the air, smelling that smell, that smell of tea and rose hips,
lusty sweat and burnt match heads. It was coming from somewhere above, one of
the rooms perhaps, or maybe just the building in general. And there was
something in that peculiar smell that Arnold recognized from the soles of
Marco’s shoes. He turned his head, smelling the gentle breeze, the whisper of
summer winds from across the river, from the direction of the other side, from
…

Arnold Prosser scowled
angrily. “There
is
something going on. And you thought you could squeeze
me out of it, eh, you prissy little dandy? Leave me outside with my hat in my
hands like a beggar at the palace gates?” He panned his gaze from the upper
windows of the building down into the deep ravine below, the thick turgid river
coiling around the city, squeezing it in its grip like prey in the constricting
coils of a snake. “Not likely, you prick. Not likely at all. I know you’re in
this, I know you know what’s going on, and I know you’re going to tell me.”

He stomped back into the
cab of the large white hauler, leaving behind a Dumpster full of garbage bags
and refuse; it was not his concern. The hauler’s transmission rumbled as he
urged the machine back out the narrow alleyway, foregoing his trip to the
morgue for now. He had questions, and he knew who could answer them. He wasn’t
about to be left out of the loop, to just allow things to go on behind his
back, without his approval. Especially not things that concerned him directly;
and this most certainly did, you could hardly say otherwise.

Arnold Prosser disposed
of things deemed unnecessary. This assured that the future would be forever
reserved for the living, and that the past be reserved solely for the dead. And
that allowed for the present to be a constant and orderly transition from one
state to the next. Arnold Prosser helped keep that order in the universe by
keeping it clean, and by constantly pushing it forward that the past might bury
itself under the dusty sand of neglect.

Arnold Prosser knew a lot
about a good many things.

Arnold Prosser was the
Garbageman.

For Gusman Kreiger, it was a long, slow
morning fraught with dreams.

He awoke encrusted with blood, his
clothes and skin stiff with it, the stubble on his face and chin caked and
itchy, his throat tasting like old copper from what he swallowed. He gripped
the gore-crusted lightning rod in the gnarled fingers of his left hand, his
right cupped more gently over his crotch, massaging an erection through the
threadbare fabric of his pants
.

It had been a long time since last he
dreamed. A very long time.

Kreiger slowly uncurled
from the fetal ball in which he slept, his movements tentative and exploratory,
testing each limb, each digit, each prick of nerve endings, groping the
environment that greeted these slow and methodical movements, the tortured
analysis of an alien probe. He remembered killing the derelicts and leaving
them in the garbage. He remembered making Jasper clean up after him before
setting the youth back to work on the Dream Flyer. He remembered leaving Ellen
asleep on the roof, Jack’s precious book having slipped from her fingers. He
remembered the tea.

He did not trust the tea,
did not like its smell or the smell of the brewer. There was something there,
frightening and powerful. It sent Ellen back into her dreams, back across the
water to Jack. She could not reach him yet, not physically. But she could dream
him into her mind and her own mind into his. That was a step. A frighteningly
huge step for his little dreamer. The equivalent of a pack of stick-wielding
monkeys building a fusion reactor, or sitting down at a bunch of typewriters
and accidentally reproducing
Hamlet
through random knocks at the keys.

Only it wasn’t so random,
was it?

There were plans
progressing around him. He could sense them, even if he was not privy to their
design—or their designers. He was not the only one watching Ellen Monroe, keeping
her safe, keeping her dreaming while she searched for a way back to the other
side and the Nexus and Jack Lantirn. She might not realize that was what she
was doing, but it was, most certainly. Kreiger knew and he wanted to be there
when she did, when the place between the worlds opened and Ellen went through.
He would follow her, leaving this hell behind forever. Good riddance!

Ellen would find Jack
, and with him, the Nexus.

Yes, he remembered the
Nexus, just as he remembered dreaming or the desperate urge in his loins for
something he thought he had dispensed with long ago.

Dreams don’t die for
neglect; they lay buried, even forgotten, but they never die. Not until the
dreamer dies do they pass away. Oversight could have told him that. Or maybe
she had, and he simply failed to listen.

Whether she knew it or
not, Ellen was dreaming her way out of this world. And when she left, he planned
on being close enough
to
get caught in
the
slipstream.

He had stolen the
derelicts’ dreams
—at
least those worth eating—and by stealing his way into the dream plane, had tapped
into the dreams of others, hitching a ride. He tapped Ellen’s dreams last
night, and she unknowingly sent him dreams of her own. He dreamed many things
in the small hours of the morning, concealed within the cloak of shadows he
created on the roof of Ellen’s building. They had slept together in a manner of
speaking—ignore the physical distance and limitless hatred that separated her
from him, neither here nor there—and still she did not know about him, and
never would if he could help it.

But the dreams she helped
him have had been delicious: frightening and wonderful, sublime and passionate.
There were clean tracks upon his cheeks where the blood had been washed away by
tears.

Dreaming and tears; two
things he thought himself long ago incapable of.

He woke to a horrible
sense of loss, a longing for the soul he spurned long ago. Once cast off with
the ease of an old garment, now he wanted her back …
desperately
. He
called her Oversight when he bothered to call her at all. He sent her against
the upstart Caretaker, and Jack stole her away, renamed her Ariel November, and
set her free.

The Cast Out believed
himself over it. But as with dreams, some things were more easily buried than
killed. And in his dreams, in those dark palatial hallways of his mind where he
seldom went, Kreiger sought her out. But she would not have him; he was
unready, inadequate and infirm. She had another now. She had moved on and left
him behind. He was the garment, and she had cast him off.

Cast off.

Cast out.

Once the leader, now the
last; the Cast Outs were no more. They were all gone. His Tribe of Dust was
dead, and he was the last, broken and bloody, laid low by Jack Lantirn and
exiled to this strange land to learn humility and the art of dreaming.

Gusman Kreiger stood up,
the shadows falling away around him, leaving him revealed in the excruciating
brightness of the dawn. Jasper was working with mind-numbing steadiness on the
Dream Flyer, fingers stitching furiously at the canvas of the wings. Soon it
would resemble a great bird of flight, instead of the shattered remnants of a
dead animal that it now appeared. And Kreiger would breathe life into the sorry
corpse.

Not the first time he
brought the dead back to life. The last time, they built a religion around him
… and he led them to ruination. But that was another time, another world,
another reality that was no more.

The story of your
life, old man
.

Kreiger leaned backwards, hands pressing into the small of
his back until the bones in his lower spine popped and realigned. Then he left,
walking down the stairs and leaving Jubjub Bird to his work. He needed to
borrow Ellen Monroe’s bathroom; he was covered in blood and could not afford to
waste time explaining why to a world that didn’t matter. Events were unfolding
with frightening speed. Jack might still be directing from behind the curtain,
but if he was any judge, Jack’s players had left the script behind. The
ridiculous fool was very much in danger of it slipping from his grasp and
running amok. Did he know that? Did he?

Probably. And he likely
still thought he was in control. Arrogant little shit.

Kreiger slipped into
Ellen’s apartment—locks were like keys; he had little use for either—and went
to her bathroom where he stripped down and stood in her shower, rubbing himself
down with soap. He threw his clothes in with him, letting them soak in the
runoff and ignoring the gray trails that bled away from them in diseased
rivulets.

Soon, very soon, all of this would end. It would fade as a
dream upon waking, the details blurring over time, and he might not ever recall
it again except in nightmares.

The thought struck him as
uncharacteristically melancholic. Gusman Kreiger, leader of the Tribe of Dust,
the only one to brace the Caretaker in the very eye of the Nexus and nearly
succeed in wresting control of the universe away from its holder, was not one
to be moved by doubts or wants or weaknesses such as feelings.

But the flurry of dreams
that came on with all the subtlety of a mescaline crash suggested otherwise. In
his dreams, Ariel—it was as good a name as any for her; better, seeing as how
he had never named her himself—had told him he would not go back.
Not yet
,
she said.
Maybe not ever. You are not ready. You don’t understand. You are
unworthy
.

“The story of your life,”
he said to the empty bathroom, speaking into the spray of water so that it
would clean the taste of blood from his mouth. “I should have made you respect
me.”

The haunting image of Oversight
appeared in his mind, the strong-willed young woman with raven hair and dark
eyes and sun-browned skin. She stared at him, dangerous in her black leather, a
knife sharp as a razor hidden somewhere on her person, enforcing her will on
the stupid and the careless.
You should have made me
love
you. Don’t
you understand that yet?

He turned off the water and stepped from the shower, letting
the steam rise from his scarred and naked flesh while he wrung the water from
his clothes. He pulled them back on, wet and sticking to him, and turned to
leave. He thought he would feel better—perhaps on some level he did—but a part
of him still felt slick with grime, chafed with the crust of dirt and filth.

You are unworthy
.

Kreiger walked into Ellen Monroe’s living room, wet
footprints trailing on the floor behind him to the site of the previous night’s
carnage. Outside, the beeping of a truck backing up the alley, distracting, the
sound setting his teeth on edge, churning his stomach, making his bones ache
worse than he ever remembered.

He sniffed the air, not liking the smell. Like the strange
and rampant thoughts of mortality afflicting him in the shower, like the
bizarre dreams of something lost to the past—and good riddance—that still made
him weep, he could not explain his misgivings, but nor could he deny them.

Something new had arrived, an unknown upon the arena sands.

“They’ll crucify you for this one, Jack. Mark my words.” He
stepped closer to the window, peering down into the alleyway.

A white garbage hauler was parked by the Dumpster, a man
making his way to the trash bin where he and Jubjub Bird stashed the two dead
derelicts the night before. Kreiger stayed back from the light, wondering what
the man would do when he found the bodies heaped in the Dumpster like the trash
they were.
Did you plan for this, Jack?

The lids of the Dumpster
banged open, and the Garbageman reached inside, hand finding one of the
derelicts. He jerked the corpse out by the hair …
and looked at it!?!

He did not scream or jump
back in terror. He simply looked at it as if he were examining a particularly
strange piece of rubbish, a lamp made of seashells or a colorful box of
pornography. Then the man reached back into the Dumpster and fished around
until he found the second body, pulling it free much as he had the first. Not
fear or disgust or even confusion.

Or was there just a bit
of that? The man was talking to the corpse,
arguing
with it. Kreiger
could not hear what was said, but he knew the man was speaking directly into
Cho’s eyeless face.

Then the Garbageman
dumped the corpses into his truck beside two more bodies, their worn-out shoes
and tattered pants strangely familiar. Hadn’t those worn out shoes kicked the
living hell out of him yesterday morning? When a foot connects with your face,
you tend to make a mental note of its features. It could only be Johnny and
Lucas, the Garbageman having apparently collected their bodies from Benwil’s
Junkyard. Inexplicably, the Garbageman leaned down close to the corpse’s feet,
running his nose up the sole of one derelict’s shoe, smelling it like a crazed
fetishist. He seemed to consider it momentarily before looking around, taking
stock of the alleyway, the apartment building, the distant river that rolled
sluggishly around the city like the dead coils of a great serpent. Then his
eyes started traveling up the side of the building’s fire escape, panning
slowly higher and higher, searching …

Kreiger dropped to his
knees, cloaking his mind in thoughts of inane docility. He dismissed the almost
instinctive urge to employ his magic. This one would notice; it might be the
one thing he
would
notice. Anything out of kilter—anything other than
exactly what it should be—would be discovered. And this one was someone whose
attention Kreiger absolutely did not want. He had seen enough in just the first
glimmer, the first fraction of the Garbageman’s eyes, to know. Collecting
bodies. Talking to corpses.
Sniffing their soles
.

Avatars?!? Jack, you
have gone completely insane!

He huddled below the windowsill, hugging his chest tightly
and holding his breath like a child hiding from imaginary monsters in the dark.
He could feel the Garbageman’s probing stare. It burned its way up his back
like holy fire, the walls of brick and sheet rock become silk and paper. And in
some secret part of his mind, Gusman Kreiger found himself praying. To God, the
Devil, Jesus and the Saints, the Holy Virgin, and a host of pagan deities with
which he was once familiar.
Just because you can free the cork from the
bottle, Caretaker, doesn’t mean you can command the djinni within
.

There was grumbling from
the alley, plaintive and indecipherable, and Kreiger heard the clomping of
boots, the creak and slam of the hauler’s door, the truck roaring back to life.

Kreiger was already up
and running.
I hope you know what you’re doing, Jack. But you’ll excuse me
if I don’t stick around to find out what happens if you don’t.

He bolted into the
hallway, crashing against the stair’s rail, the newel post punching hard
against his hip and nearly tumbling him down the steps. Instead, Kreiger
twisted, allowing the momentum to carry him down half the flight in a single
bound. The rest he took in leaps of four and five, each one pounding badly knit
bones. His staff flared like a raw bolt of lightning.