The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (37 page)

He twisted another two pages into a
tight little roll, loading them into the pneumatic tube, pushing until the
suction caught. He shook away the fleshly image with a violent shake of his
head that left him dizzy, vision spotted with stars, a thin trickle of blood
from his nose. He wiped at it absently, fingers red and tacky. The image was
too H.R. Giger, machine transforming to flesh. David Lynch. William S.
Burroughs.

Madness.

No, awareness. Reality was too vast
for such small concepts; too much was possible.

The drop tube spread obscenely.

He squeezed his eyes until the stars
exploded.
It’s just a pneumatic tube.

When he cracked his eyes, the brass
lipped orifice widened, eager to accept his offerings, to have his tribute
thrust deep into her—

“No!” He dug the heels of his hands
into his eye sockets.
Keep a grip. Don’t fall off the edge!

When he opened his eyes again, the
vacuum tube was just a vacuum tube, just brass and copper fittings. A large cat
with red and white candy-striped fur sat atop the Jabberwock, looking at him with
a huge grin, enormous teeth, flat and straight and unnaturally human. “We’re
all mad here,” the cat said gently. “I’m mad. You’re mad.”

Mad
!

Stay on the edge and don’t fall.
Whatever you do, don’t fall. You’re too far out now to stop yourself if you do.
And it’s a long way down.

After a while, the cylinder stopped
returning. He simply tossed half-rolled sheets into the aperture of the vacuum
tube, smiling as they disappeared from sight. A while after that, the stacks of
paper, words chicken-scratched in red over the neatly typed print, started to
fall unnoticed to the floor. A while after that, he stopped bothering to pick
them up. He knew where they would go. He knew what they said. He needed no
vindication from the gaping literary machine that smiled at him through brass
lips, smiling lips, lips that resembled … Never mind. They would all flow down
eventually. Eventually.

He typed on, and on, and on.

Sing for you soul, Poet.

Reality dissolved and reformed around
him, a myriad of dream and nightmare images he was blind to, aware only of the
words playing across the screen inside of his head; the word made flesh; the
word made real; the
Word
.

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

*     *     *

Ellen waited all day before looking
in on Jack … or trying to.

No one in the Saloon said anything
about what they thought Jack was doing up in his room, but it was apparent that
Oversight’s earlier observation was correct: Jack was writing. If the nuances
escaped them, even if the broadest understanding of the premise eluded them,
this one simple fact seemed clear: Jack was the Caretaker and the Caretaker
wrote the stories that would become their realities. If he was writing then
that was what he was supposed to do, and they were content to let him carry on
until he decided otherwise.

The mood in the Saloon turned somber.
Food was scrounged from the bar and the small refrigerator and the machine in
the waiting room that buzzed and hissed more violently than before, the light
inside having taken on a sickly greenish cast. But no one seemed very
interested in eating anyway.

Ellen felt like she was attending a
wake, everyone gathered together for comfort and solace, but no one bothering
to speak. They simply waited, automatons to the grand puppet-master that would
plug them back in, or take up their strings and make them dance. Whether it was
true or not—and she was not altogether sure she understood what was true—Jack
had convinced them that their lives depended upon what he wrote. And like
zealots following Christ’s one-donkey show, they believed.

But Jack wasn’t Christ. No water to
wine; no feeding the masses on loaves and fishes. He would not knock the devil
into a pigsty, and he would not raise the dead from their graves. And if Jack
died, he would not transcend death three days later. He would simply rot.

She worried for him. When was the
last time he ate something? The sun was setting, but Jack kept on typing, only
brief gaps in which he seemed to shuffle about the room at the top of the
Saloon, grumble strange, insensible soliloquies and requests to no one, or drop
things on the floor with dull, riffling thuds.

And still, no one wondered after him.
No one cared if he was hungry or thirsty or exhausted. They all simply waited.

And
waited.

Lindsay had curled herself into one
of the chairs, sleeping peacefully; no one spoke, leaving her undisturbed. Mr.
Quince excused himself as the light outside faded, the sky an enormous bruise
fading to black. He bid a perfunctory goodnight, his tone distant and unaware.
A moment later, they heard his door upstairs close softly.

Ellen waited a while longer, fancying
she could still hear the sound of Jack’s furious typing. Outside
, the windows looked into blackness,
no light left in the sky to overcome the dim yellowed bulbs inside the Saloon’s
great room, the large windows throwing back darkly faded reflections of
herself. On the bar was a sandwich from the vending machine, still sealed in a
cellophane triangle; it was tuna fish, and was apparently no one’s first
choice.

“I’m going to take this up to Jack,”
she said, hopping off the barstool.

“If he was hungry, he’d come down,”
Alex remarked, an answer more exhausted than considered.

Ellen gave him a chilly look, and
turned to go up the stairs, sandwich in hand. Nothing else was said.

The maddening thrum of typing
persisted, a red usher’s cord newly draped across the iron stair, a small sign
reading: “No Unauthorized Personnel Permitted Beyond Rope.”

“Jack?”

No answer but steady typing.

“Jack, I brought you something to
eat. Can I come up?”

Nothing. Only typing, its constant
rhythm breaking, slowing for a few seconds before pressing on.

“I’ll just come up and leave it for
you, if that’s okay?”

She reached out to unhook the rope,
but it wouldn’t yield. She pulled on it a little harder, but the hook
stubbornly refused to budge. It felt like it was welded tight to the stair
frame, unyielding, no admittance, not now or ever.

“Jack, please let me come up,” she
asked, rattling the usher’s rope furiously.

Nothing.

She stared up at the room above, the
more hesitant typing wafting down with the music, a repetitive progression of
the same song playing over and over. He must have heard her, but was trying to
ignore her; to keep typing.

She started over the usher’s rope—less
a barrier than a polite way of saying, please don’t come in—when a soft thump
on the stairs above startled her, and she found herself looking up at Nail. The
gargoyle stared down with eyes glistening red, the baleful glower of a demon
beneath the furrowed shelf of his brow. Nail’s fur was standing out in thick
tufts all over his body, lips curled to display his already menacing tusks, a
frightening snarl warning her back.

Ellen felt her muscles freeze, her
blood go like water, her body immobilized by the blood-curdling rasp in the
gargoyle’s throat. She heard herself whisper the gargoyle’s name, but that was
all she could manage.

In the room above, the typing ceased,
a respite in the constant harmonics of the universe. “No one can come up,” Jack
said, his voice distant, undirected. Did he even know it was her down here, or
did he simply know that
someone
had tried to come up?

“Jack, it’s me. Ellen. I … I brought
you something to eat. Tell Nail to let me up.”

There was a pause in which neither
Ellen nor the gargoyle moved even a hair. From above, music played softly on.
There was no other sound.

Then: “I have to do this, Ellen. I
hope you understand.” His voice was so distant, so unfocussed, she thought he
might be tripping. He sounded the way she knew she sounded sometimes, back when
she rode the Dreamline. You answered to multiple realities unknown to others
around you. Disoriented. Confused. Eager to go back, back into the dream, back
to where things made sense.

“Jack, please.”

“No one comes up,” Jack repeated,
already leaving her; already retreating back into that other world.

Nail’s grip tightened on the iron
stair, muscles tensing. Slowly, Ellen retreated, eyes never leaving the
transformed gargoyle. He was different, more fearsome, somehow a reflection of
what was happening to Jack.

But what was happening to him?

Ellen swiped at angry tears, leveling
an accusing stare at the Guardian. She defiantly placed the sandwich on the
steps and walked away to the other stairs. She entertained no ideas of circumventing
Nail and gaining entrance through the topmost door to confront Jack. What would
she say to him, really?
Jack, I had to come up. I … I—

No. Better to leave it this way. Jack
didn’t want her with him; better to be alone. And the top stairway was the only
place.

Behind her, the typing started up
again, its manic pace careening ahead as if there had never been an
interruption. Words floated down, unheard. “Not yet, but…
soon
…”

Nail carried the tuna fish sandwich
upstairs.

*     *     *

Beneath a starless sky, Reginald
Hyde, who was called Papa Lovebone, awoke from a nightmare and would not stop
screaming. Finally, Gusman Kreiger coaxed him to silence, slapping the fat
necromant unconscious.

Farther away, at the very edge of the
Wasteland, the low gray line of distant mountains dissolved into fog and faded
away, leaving the horizon as flat and abrupt as two overlapping pieces of
paper.

TICKETS, PLEASE!

After two days and two nights, the
Saloon fell silent.

Over the last forty-eight hours, Ellen
eventually found it possible to sleep through the din of music drifting down
from above, the rhythmic race of fingers across computer keys, its consistency
transformed into white noise: wind through leaves, surf rolling against the
shore.

And suddenly it stopped; silence like
rain in the desert.

For two nights she had not dreamed,
her sleep easy and unbroken. Now she stared around the darkness, a strange
sense of panic as she scanned the silent room, shadows slow to give way under
the gentle press of first light.

A dead silence had fallen over the
world, no sound save the erratic ticking of the tall grandfather clock and the
pounding of her heart. For just a moment, she had been on the verge of a dream.
She was on a train staring out through the smeary glass of the last car as it
pulled away from the station, the world outside engulfed in the smoke of
dreams, impenetrable. And from that smoke she knew something horrible was
coming, something terrifying beyond imagination. But she couldn’t look away, and
she couldn’t stop screaming, fists pounding the filthy pane webbed with cracks,
smeared in widening stains of blood.

The dream startled her awake, and she
realized that the Saloon had gone quiet, the calm before a storm, the eye of
the hurricane. Jack had stopped typing. The music had stopped playing.
Everything turned still.

Ellen climbed out of bed, careful not
to disturb Lindsay who slept beside her, and padded softly across the
floorboards to the base of the iron stair. The usher’s rope was gone. From upstairs,
only gray twilight and the faintest noise like breathing: deep, slow, regular.
Ellen started up the stairs, the metal cold against her feet, listening for any
sign of the gargoyle. But Nail was nowhere to be seen. There was nothing to
stop her from entering Jack’s world.

Dimly illuminated by the growing
twilight, Ellen saw that the door was open, the breeze blowing gently,
skittering a couple loose pieces of paper across the floor, riffling the pages
of the opened books that lay strewn about the room, rifled as if by someone
looking for something that could not be found—or was never there in the first
place.

And the entire room smelled like
Christmas. It was the only way to describe it, a seasonal aroma of spices like
nutmeg, gingerbread and cinnamon, of peppermint and cloves. But that nostalgic
air was infused with the unmistakable odors of coffeehouse espresso, sweat, and
the dust from a library of old books newly disturbed. The aromas were so
pungent she could almost see them, filmy wisps of vapor hugging to the edges of
the room like wary ghosts.

Jack lay on the floor, curled in exhausted sleep, hands balled into
tight, agonized fists. He looked pale and worn, a dark crust of long-dried
blood under his nose and smeared on his clenched hands. His hair stood every
which way, and even as he slept, she saw him flinch with small spasms of
unrelenting energy, the startled expression upon his sleeping face of someone
caught too deep in a dream to escape on his own.

Behind her, Nail snored loudly.
Looking at the gargoyle, she saw his eyes crack open, black and watchful. Then
they closed again, the gargoyle returning to his slumber.

On Jack’s desk, a litter of pages,
difficult to read, the print size and fonts changing without purpose, painful
to the eyes, echoes of the unbalanced mind behind their existence, mad
creations of a mad god. The paper migrated towards an old pneumatic tube bolted
to the wall near Jack’s printer, an ooze of loose leaves that shuffled into the
mouth of the tube. A single page hung suspended from the open lip, flapping
gently, unable to seal the vacuum and force itself down. She did not remember
the pneumatic tube, did not remember the oddly artistic folds of metal
surrounding the opening, suggestive of something less mechanical than
biological, almost …
sexual.

On the Jabberwock’s screen, a single
ticket rendered in gold, the image unimaginatively labeled,
TICKET
. At the bottom of the screen, a singular message:
“Press
ENTER
to send.”

Scattered around the desk was the
evidence of Jack’s labors: a paper landscape littered with coffee cups, most
empty. One lay on its side, broken. Still another held the remains of some
slippery substance, a kind of fungus or slick of pond scum. Pages marked with
dried or drying coffee stains, with ruddy splats that were definitely
not
coffee (too red), blops of curdling cream, crystals of granulated sugar, the
dusty remnants of a melange of spices, the origin or combination impossible to
know.

“What have you been doing, Jack?” she
wondered softly.

On one side of the desk, an island of
order in the chaotic sea of pages and coffee debris, a thin, blue binder, a
Post-it on the cover reading
The Last Ticket Home
. Ellen cautiously
flipped it open, flitting through several pages. Unlike the others, it was
perfectly sensible, no convoluted print, no wild ramblings, no misspellings or
incoherent lines. Ellen stopped on a passage, squinting in the dim light.

“Has it ever occurred to you that this is all just a delusion?” she
asked. “Maybe you’re a desk clerk at a Travel Lodge who’s forgotten his
prescription, the one you take to control your manic-schizophrenia. And now
you’re hacking out a bad novel on an old Smith-Corona, jumped up on coffee and
LSD and the mad visions in your head.”

“I’ve considered it,” he remarked dryly. “The question is, have you?
Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that
you’re
the one who’s trapped within
your own head, and me and all the others here, we’re all just delusional
flights of your own twisted fancy while you wait for some doctor to finish
taping electrodes to your temples so he can fry you up like an egg?”

“Yes.” It was a defiant reply, but without the conviction of truth.

“Why would we both have a delusion of another delusional person?” he
asked rhetorically, as if that somehow proved his point. “This has to be real:
us, this place, all of it. We just spent our lives never realizing or wanting
to admit that this side of reality existed.”

“You’re not proving this reality; you’re simply justifying your own
lunacy. The argument doesn’t hold.”

The notebook was snatched from her
hands.

“You’re not supposed to read this,” Jack growled, exhaustion draining his
conviction. “It’s not… it’s not ready yet.”

She felt her reply—apology,
complaint, explanation, whatever—die in her throat, and could only stare at
him, amazed and a little frightened.

Jack swayed unsteadily, the blue
notebook gripped in one hand, the other locked tight, trying and failing to
unclench. They were swollen and red, the muscles in his hands and wrists
cable-taut, the fingernails chipped and split, bleeding. His eyes were
unfocused; red holes underlined with dark circles, his face holding the gaunt,
empty expression of exhaustion and chemical dependency. One of his eyes was
abraded, the cornea gone bright red and bloody. The other was pale, its color—
his
eyes were green … weren’t they
? —washed out, drained. She wasn’t entirely
sure he recognized her. His stare suggested he might still be half in the
dream-state. A shiver coursed through her, the air suddenly and noticeably
cold.

“Jack?” she said, trying not to
startle him. He looked like a sleepwalker, or maybe a strung-out Dreamline
rider. Did he know what world he was in? Did he care? “Jack, it’s me, Ellen.”

Eyes blinked, tried to focus, failed.

“Jack, are you all right?” It was a
silly question because the answer was obvious. He was exhausted, stretched to
his limit, a frayed cord over a chasm in danger of snapping at any minute, the
tattered ends left to drift uselessly out of sight. “Let me help you.”

She didn’t wait for his reply, but
put her arm around his waist, guiding him to his chair. His skin felt clammy,
slick with sweat suffused with the chemicals and concoctions he was ingesting,
his entire body saturated, junk spilling out through his pores. No rancid smell
like someone asleep in their own waste, rank with unshowered opium sweat. She
knew what that smelled like, had woken up next to it in that time before, that
time that slipped further and further away until it seemed inconceivable now.
Jack’s smell was different, more ancient, more like …
Oversight
.

He placed the blue notebook on the
desk, hand overtop it. Behind them, Nail turned alert.

“Help me put these pages into that,”
Jack said, some of the coherency returning to his expression as he gestured
limply towards the pneumatic tube. “All accept what’s in the blue notebook. I’m
not … it’s not ready.”

Ellen obediently started collecting
the sheets, trying to arrange them, but Jack only shook his head. “Just stuff
them in,” he said. “That’s all that matters. All it needs.” By way of example,
he picked up a double-handful of pages and jammed them into the message tube.
The papers were immediately sucked away.

He turned his attention to the
screen, leaving Ellen to finish clearing up the pages on his desk while Nail
offered a pile that, in Jack’s urgency, had drifted unbidden to the floor. Jack
peered at the screen, leaning close then pulling back as if trying to manually
focus his eyes; as if he could see something more than the image of the golden
ticket displayed on the screen. Finally he nodded, satisfied.

As the last of the pages disappeared
with a whispery
soosh
, Jack pressed
ENTER
.

*     *     *

Gusman Kreiger waited, the lightning
rod resting across his knees. To his left, Rebreather stood in silence, a gray
statue jutting from the desert, as inexplicable as the lonely stone gods of
Rapa Nui, later called Easter Island.

Their explanation was more sinister
than anyone guessed, but it was not a story he was fond of retelling; past
indiscretions made him maudlin.

To his right, Reginald Hyde sat like
a lump on the sand; the corpulent hedonist dozed fitfully, once-jovial features
now haggard and worn, the pleasant rolls of flab now hanging weights, stones
about the fat man’s neck.

The Caretaker was up to something. He
had shut Lovebone out, dreaming dreams of his own that shielded him and the
others from Lovebone’s manipulations. Hyde had not slept well since, afraid of
something that lay inside of his mind—or the Caretaker’s, take your pick. Only
this morning had Hyde seemed to find some sort of inner peace, falling into a
fitful doze after two days of unrest.

That bothered Gusman Kreiger. It
bothered him even more then when the Caretaker embarked upon his newest
endeavor two mornings before, the morning he killed the Dust Eater. Something
had changed, and Kreiger did not know what. Worse, there was no way he could
find out. The accursed barrier and the twice-accursed Guardian kept him and his
away. Oversight, though inside, was a non-factor; a gamble tried and lost.

When the stakes are all or nothing,
you roll the dice.

He chewed ruefully upon the inside of
his cheek. The loss of the Dust Easter he could accept. But the loss of
Oversight might cost him more than he could afford.

Water under the bridge, spilled milk;
call it how you like.

And now the Caretaker had changed
tacks again, leaving Kreiger with another mystery; too many for his liking, but
he had come too far, the roads back now closed to him, his options narrowing.
He had hoped otherwise, but always knew it would come to blood.

The whistle from across the chasm of
madness cut through Kreiger’s mood like a blade, and for one horrified moment,
he saw himself as a pig stretched out for a heaping bucket of slops only to
feel the farmer’s knife across his throat, feel the hot splash of his own life
bursting across his neck and face.

The train’s banshee wail startled
Hyde from his sleep with an almost girlish squeal. Rebreather turned his head
to the chasm, face inclined in a kind of wonder.

The trains were coming!

Kreiger was on his feet, eyes wide,
staring at the tracks, blackened reflections of the indigo sky. He turned to
the others and saw only vacant expressions, and cast an accusatory glare at the
Sanity’s Edge Saloon and the hateful creature sheltered therein.

The trains were coming!

In a rage, Kreiger propelled himself
towards the Nexus, hands curled into claws, face twisted into a snarl of
bestial hatred. “
Caretaker
!”

The Cast Out slammed headlong into
the barrier, air shimmering as if he was a pebble against a sunlit pool,
insignificant and small. Where his hands contacted the silver air, the skin
immediately darkened, blistered, smoked.