The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (26 page)

She turned the knob quietly and
pushed the door open, slowly so the glass wouldn’t rattle in the frame. She
opened it a few inches, enough to slither through, then eased it shut again. As
simple as that.

She went down the steps and across
the tracks, avoiding the edge of the cliff a little to the left. If the Frisbee
flew that way and went over … Well, she knew full well what that would mean.
Lost was lost, and anything that went over that edge was lost for good.

She gave a practice toss, the red ring wafting a slow, gentle arc that carried
it up, then up a little higher, then off to the left; off towards the Wasteland
and the trio of tents and—

“Well, hello there,” Reginald Hyde
said.

Lindsay couldn’t help but stare at
him, the enormous fat man in his strange pajamas, his smooth white skin
tattooed and riddled with bones like bizarre jewelry. He wasn’t scary, she
thought; funny-looking and strange, but not scary.

But she still knew better than to
talk to him.

“It’s all right,” he assured her. “My
name’s Reginald. But if you like, you can call me Reggie. Are you out here
playing catch all by yourself?”

“No,” she said, but that was a fib.
“Alex is coming out to play catch with me.” Fib number two.

“Is he?” Hyde asked, then stood up on
tiptoe to look over Lindsay at the Saloon, as if to suggest that Alex was
somehow hiding behind the little girl, and that was why he missed him
initially. After a moment of searching, comically shading his eyes with one
hand like a desperate explorer, he looked back at her. “I don’t see him. But I
tell you what. Why don’t you and I play catch until he comes out? I’m pretty
good, you know?”

Lindsay shook her head.

“Is that no, I’m not good at catch,
or no, you didn’t know I was?”

Again, she shook her head. Reggie
liked to talk, and when he talked, he seemed to go in confusing circles.

“Here, let me show you.”

He sailed the Frisbee ring gently
across the distance separating them, the saucer ring floating directly at her.
She didn’t have to reach or chase it or anything; if she hadn’t caught it, it
would have bounced right off her. Reggie
was
pretty good with a Frisbee.

“There,” he declared triumphantly.
“Now throw it back.”

She didn’t. She had not forgotten the
previous morning. Reggie was friends with the other two, the scary ones. One of
them shot Jack. The other threatened them and sent the monsters after them.
Reggie might be fat and silly, but if he was really as nice as he claimed, he
wouldn’t be with them. That he was made her think that Reggie was just
pretending.

“I have something for you, Lindsay,”
Reginald Hyde said, reaching behind his back. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy it very
much.”

“How do you know my name?”

He stopped, looking up into the air
somewhat uncomfortably, a small boy caught in the beginnings of a bad lie.
“Well,” and a smile spread across his face like a clown’s greasepaint. “It is
your name, right? Your name’s Lindsay?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there you have it then. You
look like a Lindsay. And I have just the thing for a little girl who looks like
the Lindsay that she is.” From behind his back, Lovebone produced a squirming,
whimpering ball of fur.

“A puppy?”

“Yes,” Reginald declared proudly. “A
puppy.”

He crouched down upon the sand,
letting the small animal wander aimlessly about in his enormous shadow. Lindsay
watched, delighted as the dog snuffled and spun around the sand, nose moving
every direction at once. It would sniff something upon the ground, wag its
tail, and pounce upon it. Only then did it seem to realize that there was
nothing there to pounce upon. Then it would reinvent the game over another
patch of Wasteland sand.

“What’s his name?” she asked.

“Whatever you like. He’s yours if you
want him.” She looked up at him, delighted. “I’m afraid we don’t have very much
food out here in the Wasteland,” Hyde continued, “and I’d hate to think of this
little guy going hungry. So you should take him.”

“You mean it? I can really have him?”

“Sure. He’s all yours. Come on over
here and take him.”

Lindsay stared at the puppy, the gap
between herself and Reggie somehow magnified. He made it a point to keep a
distance from her—or from something. There was something about that; something
about how he was staying away, and about the barrier which kept out the scary
men and the monsters in the sand.

She pursed her lips and whistled a
couple times. It was not a very good whistle, but her mouth was dry. “Here boy.
Come here.”

The puppy stopped and looked at her,
tail thumping ecstatically. But when she did not move any closer, just standing
there giving short whistles and offering her hand, the puppy turned back to the
game of attacking his own shadow.

“Why won’t he come?”

“He’s just a puppy. He needs someone
to train him.” Hyde shrugged indifferently. “You’ll have to come here and get
him. I’m sure it will be all right if you come over and go right back. Jack
won’t mind. He’s a very nice man, Jack. And you could probably train the puppy
to come and fetch and roll over. I’ll bet you can roll over, can’t you,
Lindsay?”

She nodded hesitantly, watching the
puppy play its strange little game.

“Come on. It’ll be okay. Jack won’t
even have to know. It’ll be our secret.”

She started forward. Reggie was
right. And Jack would understand. If she didn’t take the puppy, it would starve
to death. She didn’t think Jack would want that.

The distance between her and Reginald
Hyde diminished.

“I don’t suppose you happen to know
anything about where Jack is keeping those tickets of his, do you?” Reggie
asked. “It’s not for me, you understand. I was just wondering.”

The puppy was sniffing and whining at
the same time, eager to have someone to play with as the game of pouncing upon
empty dust grew tiresome. It watched her walking closer, tail wagging
furiously.

“There’s a ticket booth in the
saloon,” she answered absently. “I guess the tickets could be in there.”

“Really?” He seemed pleased,
squatting down to stroke the small dog, the animal all but disappearing in the
enormity of his shadow. “And could you, by any chance, get these tickets? Just
curious.”

“
Lindsay
!”

She stopped just short of Lovebone’s
reach, the hard sound of Oversight’s voice gluing her feet to the sand.

Reginald Hyde looked away, breathing
a low, exasperated curse.

The tall woman in black leather was
immediately behind her. “Lindsay, what are you doing out here by yourself?”

“I was…” And her answer died away.
What had she been doing? she wondered. The sharpness in Oversight’s tone had
startled her, and sent every thought from her head like a flock of frightened
sparrows. She looked down, her mind a blank, and saw the red ring still
clutched in her hands. “I was playing catch.”

Oversight squatted down beside her,
voice softening. “With whom?”

“No one wanted to play with me. Jack
is upstairs and Ellen is in the bathroom. I think she’s sick.”

“And Alex?”

“He’s talking with Mr. Quince.”
Lindsay leaned close to the woman’s ear to impart a secret. “I don’t like Mr.
Quince. He’s mean.”

Oversight nodded noncommittally. “Go
back to the other side of the tracks where it’s safe. I’ll come over and play
catch with you in a moment.”

Lindsay looked back at her,
surprised. She thought Oversight was too old for things like playing catch; too
old for a lot of things. “You will?”

“Promise. Just swear to me that
you’ll stay away from the Tribe of Dust. All of them. Don’t talk to them, don’t
give them anything, and don’t take anything they give you. They’re not to be
trusted.”

Lindsay looked back at Reginald Hyde
who smiled good-naturedly as he scratched the puppy behind its ears. “But he
was going to—”

“No, he wasn’t. He doesn’t give
anything freely. He simply hasn’t told you what it will cost. Now go back to
the other side of the tracks and wait for me. Okay?”

“Okay,” she answered glumly, walking
away. She looked back only once.

And Papa Lovebone blew her a kiss.

*     *     *

“You forget yourself,” Hyde remarked,
eyes following the little girl.

“I’ve forgotten nothing, least of all
what you are.”

“Oh, you’ve forgotten all right. A
soft place to sit, some shade and a little food that wasn’t still squirming as
you shoved it in your mouth, and you forget everything. You’d better not forget
why you’re here.”

“I told you. I’ve forgotten nothing.”

“And still you chose to care about
them. I would say that makes you stupid.”

“And what does your inability to care
make you?”

“It makes me God. But you’ll learn
that soon enough, just as Eve did. The minute you start thinking for yourself,
God drops a flaming hammer on you the likes of which you can’t even imagine,
construct
.”
The last word a slur.

“You’re not God, just a fat dabbler
in sad magicks: bone mojo, and dream sendings, and even sex juju when you don’t
get distracted and end up masturbating. If you had the Nexus, you would be
frightening, but only because you are so petty that you would reduce the
concept of God to a bland, impotent description of a self-indulgent hedonist.
You don’t scare me, Lovebone. The barrier keeps you from harming them. It
doesn’t keep me from harming you.”

“
Pleeease
! When God’s horny,
you bend over and grab your ankles. Nothing less. Do you understand?”

“Fuck you.”

“You know he’s going to win, don’t
you?”

Oversight said nothing.

“I said: you know he’s going to win,
don’t you?
Well, don’t you?”

“Yes.” But the word was so meekly
spoken that it might have been impossible for anyone but herself to hear.

“Of course you do. So I suggest you
do as you’re told because we’re going to spend a long time together in Elysium,
and if you don’t behave, it won’t exactly be a paradise for you,
construct
.”

“You stay away from the little girl,
Lovebone. I mean it. The others can fend for themselves, but you stay away from
her.”

Lovebone shook his head, bemused.
“It’s a mistake, what you’re doing.”

“And what is that, fat man?”

“You’re thinking of them as real; as
alive
.”
He stretched out the last word into a long, dangling taunt.

“They are.”

“They’re not.”

“They matter!”

“No, cutie-pie, they don’t.”
Lovebone’s expression was that of a teacher trying very hard to drum a lesson
into a very dull student—or one deliberately refusing to learn. “When I look at
them, do you know what I see? Dead things. Zombies. Gray skin, white eyes,
dropping gristle, taut strings of rigor mortis-constricted muscle and tendon.
Scarlet cinema freaks. They’re all dead, each and every one of them. As dead as
doornails and milkmen. And they don’t even know it.”

Oversight looked back at Lindsay, the
little girl standing dutifully on the other side of the tracks, leaning against
the glue-and-ad-plastered back wall of the Sanity’s Edge Saloon, watching her.
Oversight ran her tongue carefully along her teeth, deep in contemplation. For
the first time ever, her mouth was dry—and she
knew
it. She could never
go back to the Wasteland again. How could you live for even one day in Heaven
and not despair every moment thereafter without?

She drew the bone knife and extended
the blade towards Lovebone like an accusing finger. “Just leave her alone,
Shaman, or even the Nexus and your mad leader won’t be able to save what I’ll
leave behind of you. Never forget that you survived solely because Kreiger knew
he might one day need you. He protected you from the likes of the dregs, and
Rebreather, and even from me. Don’t count on that aegis forever. You’re a
lackey, just like me, so don’t ever forget your
own
place in the
tapestry,
Cast Out
.”

The term held such venom that Lovebone actually retreated a step. “Very
well, construct,” he said haughtily. “Have it your way.”

He reached down, lifting the puppy by
the scruff of the neck. “I was going to give this to the sweet meat for the
tickets, but I have no use for it, now.” Huge, dark eyes looked at Oversight,
playful and innocent and just a little bit sad.
Familiar looking
, she
thought, but didn’t know why. A pink tongue poked out between its teeth, and it
started to squirm and whimper.

Oversight reached for it, and
Lovebone’s other hand shot out, grabbing the animal’s tail and tearing it out,
one long, solid bone like something torn from a fish. The puppy emitted a
single, horrified yelp, quick agony cut short as neatly as if by a razor, and
fell apart. All that was left behind was a glom of ratty hair clots, the
mangled carcass of a lizard, and a swarm of scorpions and beetles that tumbled
across Lovebone’s arm and fell to the sand, scuttling for cover. Where once
there was a small animal, now there was only Wasteland garbage and an
excruciating smell; rotting meat; putrefaction.