The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (37 page)

And Ellen he left to her
dreams.

*     *     *

It began as it always
did, the repetition of a path worn over time, a rude verisimilitude, a feeble
attempt at imitating a life Ellen Monroe had not lived, … but might one day.
Again she stood on the roof’s edge, looking down an impossible distance into a
thick, swirling bank of clouds that hid all reality from her: the building, the
city, the thick coils of the surrounding river all displaced.

It must be a dream.

Her feet bare, toes
curled over the edges of the stone, her body a naked cross, the stance of a
diver preparing to make a leap of faith. The cold against the soles of her feet
made them ache, and the chill wind boiling the clouds below her raised
gooseflesh across her bare skin.

Only a dream.
Otherwise the wind would tear her
from this precarious stance and fling her into the air like a scrap of paper.
Just a dream. Dream wind. Dream roof. Dream Ellen.

So jump,
she thought.
It won’t get any
easier than this.
The thing about dreams is how easy it is to change the
rules; reality is seldom so forgiving, but dreams are all about forgiveness. As
is Jack. And Ellen knew that somewhere, far away from this place and this
world, Jack waited for her. Each needed the other desperately, a codependence
that should have been worked out in therapy, but wasn’t, and now they were all
each other had. And what he expected of her, she still wasn’t sure. She
wondered absently if she would ever know for certain.

You’ll know. When you
find Jack, you’ll know.

She leaned forward,
gravity doing the rest. The world fell away beneath her, releasing her into the
air, entrusting her to fate. Sinking into the thickening clouds, she felt them
slow her descent. One moment falling, the next drifting, until finally she was
flying through the ether with the practiced grace of a bird taking wing. She
knew where she was going this time. No more distractions, no sea creatures or
night-fishing cats or ghost ships, no long slow forays across the Wasteland,
looking through windows upon times past and times that never were. She knew
where she needed to go.

Would he be expecting
her?

She moved with the speed
of thought, the speed of dreams, the clouds becoming ocean, falling becoming
flying becoming floating. Bubbles curled gently along her skin, the caress of
ghost fingers against her back and neck. Gravity somersaulted, her descent now
a climb towards the surface, directions meaningless. Ahead of her—below her? in
front of her? over her?—a light separated itself from the watery darkness,
growing larger, brilliant and alluring, spreading across her field of vision,
both blinding and beautiful.

Reaching into the light,
she felt the world fall away around her like a thin liquid membrane, a mantel
of water drawn up from the surface as she pushed higher and higher into the
air. Finally it surrendered, falling like old skin, releasing her just as the
wind and clouds had released her.

She stood upon sand as
fine as dust, brilliant white and warm against the soles of her feet. Sunlight
blazed down upon her, agonizingly bright, forcing her to squint and shield her
eyes. Where the wind once turned her skin to gooseflesh, the heat now made her
body prickle with pinpoints of sweat. She was standing upon the edge of a
junkyard, its features never quite there, objects appearing and disappearing,
existing on the periphery then disappearing when she turned her attention on
them, shimmers of heat, indistinct or nonexistent, hallucinations, ghosts.
There was a defunct amusement park ride shaped like a tall rocket ship, its
metal surface stripped of most of its paint by the sun, the sand, and the wind.
Lobster traps were left lying about, soul cages empty and waiting to be thrown
back into the sea. A windmill turned lazily, neglected gears and rusted shafts
squeaking softly. The bones of an enormous dinosaur, or perhaps a whale, lay
half-buried in the sand where the creature rested for its final time. Chevies
and Fords from the era of classic muscle cars lay abandoned, decaying, ruined
hulks rusting into powder and memories. A red pickup sat in the shade of the
Buck Rogers rocket, the paint old and faded, the truck’s skin bruised with
dents, blemished where the sun had burned through to primer and even bare
steel, a wound rubbed raw and painful. But it looked roadworthy, as if someone
had cared for it. The axles were raised to accommodate heavier tires, the kind
of truck a teenage boy would like before he discovered girls. Powerful saurian
legs replaced the back tires, the gate descending into a stout lizard’s tail;
moving through the dream, she did not find this unusual.

She saw someone sitting in
the truck’s bed, hunched over something on his lap. The sun, brightly reflected
off the whiteness of the sand, the bare metal of the rocket, the web-fractured
windshields of the derelicts cars, blinded her, eyes tearing as she strained to
make out the features of the person in the truck, the details of his face. But
she didn’t really need to see him to know who it was. She had felt it from the
moment she laid eyes on him, a tingling in the base of her spine, a deep thrill
in her chest, an urge in her throat to laugh or cry without knowing which one
or why.

Jack!

He sat cross-legged in
the truck bed, writing on his laptop because it was what he did, what he was
best at, what he was born to do. He wrote while he waited, and he waited for
her.

She stepped towards him, joining
her shadow into his own. But when he spoke, there was no trace of longing; his
tone was simple conversation, polite interest about matters of little or no
consequence, as though they had last spoken only that morning and not months
before when they were torn from one another.

“I understand you’re
going to a tea party,” Jack said, looking up.

“Yes. Serena invited me.
She’s very nice … but strange.”

Jack simply nodded. “Fate
can be that way.”

She waited for him to
elaborate, but he never did, saying instead, “The problem with living in the land
of the dead is that eventually death comes and asks you for your papers. He
can’t abide the living in his realm. Stay away from the Garbageman.”

More insensibilities.

“You shouldn’t stay too
long,” he added. “It only makes it harder.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t go.”

He looked up, his face a
mix of emotions. Ellen turned slightly, hands held behind her back, displaying
herself. “Or maybe you could come back with me.”

“Neither would work,” he
said sadly. “You and I aren’t really here. You’re alone in your apartment. I’m
alone in the Wasteland. It just happens that we’re both asleep and dreaming;
our dreams are sharing a seat on the bus. But you’re still back in your bed,
and I’m still here.”

“So we should make the
most of the time we have,” she suggested.

“It’s an illusion,” he
answered.

“It’s a dream. Why should
it end?”

“Because it never truly
began. The river still stands between us.”

“As wide as the
night-sea,” Ellen replied, beginning to understand.

Jack nodded.

A moment passed, empty
and silent. It was a dream filled with a dream’s limitations, a dream’s
inconsistencies. More than that, it was filled with hers. Jack was not really
in front of her; she was in her head, the only place where Jack truly existed.
He did not speak to her; his voice spoke out of a recording of the past, or
some concoction of him that she invented. But he wasn’t really here.

“Jack?”

“What?”

She held her hand out to
him. “Touch me.”

She could not mask the
desperation she felt, what she was sure must show through on her face.

“It won’t be real,” he
said.

“Please. Try.”

He looked up at her, and
she held him with her eyes. He put the laptop aside, slid out of the truck and
stood before her. “This will only make it more difficult.”

“Please.”

Then he reached out to
her, fingertips touching lightly as though afraid she might vanish, might melt
away into water or transform into a bird and take flight. She felt a spark leap
between them, sharp and sudden and strangely compelling. Her hand jerked, and
Jack’s caught it instantly, fingers lacing into her own to hold her tightly.
Caution fell away, landing like brittle glass on the hardpan before her naked
feet. Jack pulled her close, a desperate sweeping gesture that was both
frightening and compelling in its urgency, its insistence, its insatiability.
His arm tightened about her waist, pressing her body to his, pressing her lips
to his. The spark, pure ecstasy; blue-white pleasures arcing through her mind,
wiping away reason and doubt.

This is only a dream.

She held him tightly, her
face pressed against his warmth, her eyes closing against the tears of relief,
of ecstasy, of horror, that were quietly lost to the desert air of a world that
did not exist, the world melting away, everything melting away with a final
fleeting thought.

Only a dream.

*     *     *

Kreiger turned the last
page, saw the hastily written note and drawing, and knew from the pen strokes
that it was the Caretaker’s handiwork. After a while, you learned to spot these
things. It was a simple read; a simple tale for a simple mind. Mildly
compelling—
unless, of course, one was there
. Then it was a gross
misinterpretation of the facts with a bias favoring Jack’s narcissism.

But he was beginning to
understand.

The Sanity’s Edge
Saloon
was little
more than a modern effort at the Greek parables. Jack had layered it in genre
tripe, some self-indulgent religious metaphors, and enough vulgarity to make it
seem contemporary, but it was Aesop’s fables less the talking animals. Jack had
gone to considerable lengths to teach each of his charges a small lesson before
helping them move on: Alex Foster, Leland Quince, Oversight who was now Ariel
November—
what a hopeless romantic
—and Ellen Monroe.

And now Jack was even
trying to teach
him!

What an insufferable ass.

But then, he had never
met a writer—not once in all his considerably long life—who was not.

I’ll bet I could teach
you
a lesson,
Jack.

Kreiger rose from his
perch, moving across Ellen’s bedroom like a shadow. He placed
The Sanity’s
Edge Saloon
down on the nightstand, returning it to the kitty-corner
position Ellen left it in before falling asleep; details mattered.

Then he reached for her
throat, the lunatic’s staff gripped tightly in his other fist. Hand just off
her windpipe, he felt the warmth rise from her skin, breath moist as it brushed
the hairs along his flesh, a contrast to the hard metal and electric pulse of
the staff in his other hand.

“I could
kill her, Jack,” he whispered. “You
know that, don’t you? I could strangle the life from her, and there’s nothing
you could do to stop me. That would screw you good, wouldn’t it Jack? Screw you
eight ways to Sunday.”

And you as well
, a reasonable voice admonished.
All
the while he tries to save her, when in truth, she’s his salvation. And yours, too.
Can you stand the irony?

Actually, no. It ate at
him like cancer, gnawing his pride with harsh rodent teeth. But he was
beginning to understand.

“I’m not that petty,”
Kreiger conceded, drawing away to regard Ellen as she slept. Her eyes moved
rapidly with dreams, her breathing fast, her body fitful. “Does she know her
place in all of this, Jack? Did you tell her? Does she even know what she means
to you? Or what she is, and what she needs to do?” He shook his head
disapprovingly. “Or is she simply in love?”

He intended to leave
then. He meant to step away, to move back from the bed and Ellen’s sleeping
form, retreat through the shadows to the safe hollows in the universe. But he
did not. He stayed where he was, staring at her, wondering if he could actually
have done it. After all this time as her protector, a zealot prostrate before a
sacred statue, searching her marble features for a sign, could he really crush
the life from her, his sweet Ellen. Once, certainly, but now…

He was beginning to
understand.

Damn you, Caretaker
, he thought.
He’d pried into Jack’s book, learned
his mind, learned his secrets. And what did he have to show for it? “I cast off
my soul a long time ago, Jack, just as you did. Only I’m not so foolish as to
try and arrange a reunion.”

Ellen Monroe dreamt on,
oblivious.

“
Don’t even think about leaving me
behind, Caretaker, or I will kill her. Then you can learn to live with the
memories of everything you lost.” His fist tightened upon the staff. “As I
have.”

The night did not reply.
Perhaps it did not hear; or perhaps it simply did not care.