The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (36 page)

Slowly, Jack was beginning to
understand.

The caffeine knifed into his empty
system with the speed and grace of a rocket. The tremors in his hands
persisted, worsened. His gaze flittered sightless.
Do something
, he
thought.
Do something
!

On the computer screen, a new line of
words, white on darkening blue:
WHEN IN ROME…

He knew how to complete the phrase,
but what did it mean?

—FEED YOUR HEAD—

A fragment from a song, or was it
older than that?
Do you remember what the dormouse said?

—ONE PILL MAKES YOU LARGER—

The Jabberwock had never been
anything more than a machine before, an inanimate object no better than a
toaster or a candy dispenser. But now it was communicating with him. Or had he
simply lost his mind?

—WHEN IN ROME—

Nail gently pried his hands from the
empty cup. The gargoyle perched upon his desk, tail trailing absently across
the empty notebook, the unused pens, the writer’s roost waiting with a kind of
pathetic eagerness to be used lest it fall to ruin and waste. Nail poured more
of the dark black coffee into his cup, stirred in a heaping teaspoon of sugar—spilling
much of it upon the desk—and some cream from a silver pitcher Jack hadn’t
noticed before. He watched the Guardian with a kind of fascination, feeling as
if he was watching a dog that had learned a new trick … or perhaps had known it
all along and simply never let on. Nail placed the cup back at his elbow, and
climbed down. The song on the CD player looped over.

—EAT ME, DRINK ME—

He sipped the coffee, growing more
accustom to the rich, strong aroma, the chemical kick at his nervous system,
the shockwaves sent through his solar plexus. How young was too young to have a
heart attack?

That depends on what you took.

Slap in the face. Hard! “Try to stay with me, Jack. I need to
know what you were taking. Okay?” — Slap! — “Come on, Jack.” Squeak of the
gurney wheels.

There by the keyboard, a small pill,
like an aspirin only larger and bright blue. It did not surprise him, not
anymore. He simply wondered how long it had been there, him failing to realize.

—FEED YOUR HEAD—

He looked from the pill to the screen
and back. Was the pill an allegorical key unlocking his mind, a symbol to his
imagination? Was this the way to get at the power of the Nexus, or simply a way
into madness? Was he crossing over, becoming one of the Tribe of Dust, one of
the mad things wandering the Wasteland forever, searching endlessly for a way
back; back to a place they had dismissed years ago with disdain, and now sought
anew with the fervor of the damned?

Or was that simply pretentious
foolishness? Was that the key to the Nexus? Madness? Insanity? The limitless,
unbounded reality of the lunatic dreamer?

—WHEN IN ROME—

The tremors in his fingers and hands
progressed upwards, infiltrating his arms then his legs.
Do something!
Anything!

Or you’ll die.

He picked up the small blue tablet,
examining it with fingers a hundred yards long and stretching out four miles in
front of him. “Is this what you want?” he asked, ears stuffed with cotton,
voice tinny and small.

There was no reply, the Jabberwock’s
screen empty and dead, as blue and unrevealing as the open sky. The cursor
blinked at him absently, caught on the periphery as he considered the pill, its
pulse as annoying as the thrum of bored fingers.

You’ve accepted the Saloon’s reality,
Oversight told him.
Now
you have to accept its
unreality
as well.

Still no answers. There were never
any answers.

They won’t come from out there. There
are no answers outside. Only in here. Nothing else matters. Nothing else is
with you forever, from page one to the last page turned. That’s where the
answers are.

The Writer’s words came back to him;
words he’d told himself a dozen times or more since this all began, but had
never truly understood:
Anything you need.

Anything
.

He placed the pill in his mouth and
swallowed, chasing it with coffee.

“Okay,” he told his fingers, placing
them upon the keyboard and letting them dance. “Let’s get started.”

Outside, the sun was rising, light
slanting through the large pane of glass to fall against the right side of his
face. A new day was beginning.

*     *     *

Ellen sat at the bar and stared at
the ticket booth across the room, the curtain pulled down: sold out. She had
seen Lindsay to bed—a ridiculous chore, the little girl more than capable of
going to bed on her own. Oversight was simply trying to get rid of her, to
speak with Jack alone. She almost refused, a part of her not trusting the two
of them and their secrets, but for some reason she felt like she understood
Oversight, like they had walked similar roads with nothing more than a change
of the scenery. But this understanding did not extend to trust or friendship.
There was something dangerous in the woman from the Wasteland, something she
shared as well. She saw it when Oversight killed the Dust Eater, an echo of her
killing Lenny.

Jack was probably in no real danger;
she doubted Oversight would harm him. But that did not necessarily mean she
would not
hurt
him.

Ellen nursed a cup of black
coffee—for some reason, the sugar bowl was missing—and gnawed glumly at a Fig
Newton. She hoped the cosmic vending machine guy would show up to empty the
change bin and restock the candy bars. She wanted to ask him about why things
were disappearing.

Or would he simply take the machine
away like the gumball machine and the basket chair and the obscene frog. There
always seemed to be a little more in the candy and Pepsi machine, but for how
long? What would run out or disappear next, and why? Was the sugar bowl
missing, or misplaced? She didn’t know. She doubted anyone did, not even Jack.

But he should. Under other
circumstances, he might, and that fact gnawed at him. So what if she and the
others didn’t know, so long as the Caretaker knew. But Jack didn’t; the
Caretaker didn’t have a clue and he knew it. And they knew it. And it ground at
his soul like broken glass.

Ellen saw Oversight pass by the large
front window with no idea how she got there. She watched her sit down on the
porch beside Alex, the tops of their heads visible over the window’s edge. No
doubt they had some things to talk about.

After a few minutes, Ellen walked out
on the porch, neither Alex nor Oversight bothering to look at her. “Where’s
Jack?” she asked.

“In his writing room,” Oversight
replied, looking pale in the new light.

“What’s he doing?”

Oversight swallowed the last of her
soda and set the can down beside her, answering softly, “Writing.”

*     *     *

It had all kinds of names: the
groove, the roll, the wave. You could be in it, on it, or riding it. It made no
difference. In the end, all the names were the same, just as what it did and
why were always, always the same.

Jack simply thought of it as being
on
the Jag
.

It was a complete submersion into
another reality; that point when your fingers flew across the keys, knocking
out words as quickly as they flashed into your mind. He knew everything in that
state, knew every character as well as he knew himself: where they lived, what
they did, why they read the books they read and ate the food they ate. He knew
the taste of soft-boiled eggs, the smell of attic books, the shape of clouds,
and where all secrets were hidden and why. He knew everything the way he knew
his own world, that other world that felt so distant and so insipid and so
intrusive when he was on the Jag, that ragged blade-edge he ran overtop, a kind
of macabre dance between two connected but disparate realities.

And his hands did their little trick
all the while, a dance of their own, ideas pouring through him like the energy
of a thousand realities, all different times and places funneling through the
eye of a needle, a Nexus, a single focal point.

And his hands did their little trick
all the while, a dance of their own, a violent flurry of letters turned into
words turned into sentences turned into paragraphs that rolled on and on and
on. Pages turned and still he ran, riding the wave, slotted in the groove, a
bullet rifled from the barrel at the breakneck speed of hyper-reality.

He was on the Jag.

Finally, he understood.

Madness, but not madness. The new
reality and the old reality, all one and the same, so long as you learned to
accept. Unfettered; unchained; unbound; soaring to heights only the dreamer
could know. No rules. No preconceptions. There was only the dream, the life
aching to be actualized. Rules existed only for the dead, their minds like sodden
clay thumping wetly inside ponderous skulls, their bodies rotting and pitted
and ravaged by the worms of slow death, maggots that sniffed out the stink of
adherence and dead-eye servitude to rules that begat no master save mediocrity.

Wasted.

Not him. Not anymore. He understood.

I’m flying!

And his hands did their little trick
all the while, a dance of their own …

*     *     *

Lindsay was sitting on the edge of
the bed tying up her sneakers when Ellen rounded the corner. “I thought you
were still asleep,” she said.

“Jack’s making too much noise.”

Ellen tipped her head towards the
spiral stair, music filtering down from above along with disjointed muttering
and a persistent thrum like the rattle of a broken fan on a defective cooler,
one promising to break down or burn out. It sounded like frantic, steady typing.

“Is that Jack?” she asked.

Lindsay nodded and hopped to the
floor. “He’s been doing that for a while. He’s getting faster.”

Faster?
Ellen thought. Was that even
possible? “Do you think we should get him some breakfast?” she offered,
realizing her tone sounded strangely desperate.

“I think he wants to keep writing,”
Lindsay said. “I think he was waiting for inspiration. Now that he has it, he’s
trying to write it all down as fast as he can.”

“Where did he get inspiration from?”
Ellen asked, forgetting that Lindsay was only seven.

The little girl shrugged.

Ellen glanced around the room. “What
happened to that big birdcage that was in here, the one with the skeleton in
it? I thought it got knocked all over the floor.” There was
a dark circle
on the old wooden crate where it
once sat,
the wood less
damaged by time. But for that, there was no sign of the cage or its unfortunate
occupant; both had simply disappeared.

Lindsay shook her head as she slid past
Ellen and stopped in front of Leland’s door. “Mr. Quince, we’re getting some
breakfast. Did you want some?”

“No,” he said, head turning but not
quite seeing them. “But … thank you.”

Upstairs, the vibrant clatter of
computer keys went unabated.

*     *     *

Jack wrote through the day. At his
elbow, cups of coffee in various stages of consumption, the cooling liquid
silted or floating with pollutants: powdery spices, grounds and steeped leaves,
scent of nutmeg and poppy tar. Stacks of books sprouted about him like fungus,
open to passages or pictures that caught his interest, less research than
random inspiration.

He felt separated from himself. Not
the out-of-body mythology—looking back and seeing himself from a distance—this
was more subtle; the impression that his consciousness was slipping a little to
the left, a little behind. He stared out through the eyeholes in his world, but
was sliding a little further back with each passing second.

Words tripped across the bone at
breakneck speed, and he clung for dear life.

The printer hummed softly with each
new page. He gathered them up, looking them over before sending them on by
rolling them into a short tube and placing them into a large brass pipe in the
corner behind his desk, a recreation of an old-fashioned pneumatic tube. He
wasn’t sure where he was sending them, only that he needed to do it to complete
the tickets. He understood.

Labial folds of machine-formed brass
flanged the narrow opening. He pushed the small tube into the hole, pushed
harder until it disappeared with a pneumatic sigh.

Rub the small knob a the top; she’ll
like—

He shushed the impudent notion and
kept writing. A moment later, the small tube returned, popping out of the
narrow tube as if eager to be filled again.