The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (48 page)

“You believe this is a good thing?”
Alex asked, dumbfounded. “They were executed and hung out on display like …
like … I don’t know what it’s like. It’s monstrous! They were human beings, for
God’s sake!”

“No,” Bartholomew corrected. “They
were
witches
.”

Alex shook his head, unable to look
at the sincerity in the friar’s eyes, sickened. “You’re nuts. You and everyone
in this town have gone crazy.” He gestured to the rows of dead faces, pointing
to a corpse that, by her size, could be a girl of no more than eight or nine,
one eye and a portion of her cheek gone to the efforts of a perched blackbird.
“Do you honestly believe that child was the witch who would lead the Red Knight
against your city?”

“Well obviously not her, she
confessed to—”

“Regardless! Had she not confessed,
can you honestly tell me that the Red Knight, the destroyer of your world,
would have need of a little girl?”

Bartholomew shook his head, his
expression sympathetic if condescending. “She’s a witch. You are one of the
warriors from beyond the desert, Alex. You know nothing of evil or witchcraft
or the Enemy. You see the imperfect solution of the Sons of Light, and are
horrified. And you should be. Don’t you think my heart bleeds to see such
suffering? But imperfect or not, it is the only solution.”

Their argument had drawn the
attention of passersby, people wondering at the strangely attired lunatic
shouting blasphemies. Signs were made, wards against evil, gestures of the
cross. Brother Bartholomew panned around apologetically, proclaiming, “He is
one of the gray warriors from beyond the desert, raised innocent of wickedness
by God and sent here to help us. Forgive him. His perfection clouds his
understanding of this crude but necessary measure.” He moved closer to Alex,
fingers digging sharply into his shoulder as he whispered. “Have a care, Alex.
These are suspicious times. Incautious words will get you accused of heresy.”

Alex let his anger speak for him.
“You’re all
insane
!”

Bartholomew shook his head.
“Necessary sacrifices for the greater good. To surrender would be to end God’s
Kingdom on earth for our lack of commitment. Where would our faith be then? How
empty our praises and prayers if we fail to execute as we are called upon to
do? God has laid this challenge before us, and will forgive the faithful for
those acts committed in the execution of His will just as he will punish those
who turn a blind eye to evil for the sake of convenience.”

Alex looked up, ready to speak—some
rebuke unlikely to penetrate the thick-headedness of Bartholomew’s faith—and
felt the words evaporate.

Twenty feet from where he stood,
dressed in the same white muslin shift of the hanged women up and down
Confessor’s Row, was the first familiar sight he had seen since boarding the
train at the Sanity’s Edge Saloon.

“Lindsay?”

Bartholomew followed Alex’s gaze, but
saw nothing.

“
Lindsay
?” Alex called again,
desperate for an answer, a familiar voice, anything to help make sense of this
nightmare. But her eyes would not fix upon his, as if she were trying to focus
on something that would not stay in the same place from one moment to the next.
And when she spoke, her words echoed off the brick, lending a strange
hollowness to each syllable like echoes in a great, empty hall. “Help her.”

“What?” he called back. “Help who?”

“
Help her
.”

He felt himself stepping away from the
friar, moving as if in a dream. Did anyone else hear her, or was he going mad?
Did they see her, or register the exchange between the two of them, or was she
a ghost, a vision privy only to him? And what was she asking of him. Help who?
Who would need his help, good-for-little-or-nothing-but-screwing-up Alex? No
one should need him, no one at all, no one except …

Oversight! “Lindsay, is Oversight
here?”

But Lindsay turned and ran, bare feet
slapping the wet cobblestone.

“Wait, please!” he yelled, the street’s
gristly trophies and bovine inhabitants receding as he chased her to the end of
the avenue of the gallows. No more bodies in featureless white shifts, crudely
hung angels in a sad pageant of macabre insanity, as the road Lindsay fled down
plunged deeper into the earth to a place where sunlight could not reach, the
unnatural ravine cut into Janus as if by a razor, a deep wound left behind that
promised to scar what it failed to kill.

But he could not catch up to her,
only follow, glimpses of her disappearing around each corner he turned.

Alex ducked through a narrow doorway
and felt his boot catch something on the flagstone, some patch of moss or
fungus or slick film on the wet, smoothed stone, and he crashed upon his back,
a graceless mess in a slippery, dark corner. He scrambled to his feet, more
angry than hurt, and scanned about for the little girl.

And that was how Alex learned of
things more horrific than Confessor’s Row.

Before him stood a great,
multi-tiered wall a mile long and a dozen stories high, filthy ceramic tile
gritted with neglect and filth and grime, post-industrial soot and cinders
turning its once-white surface a slippery mildew color and making each webbed
and fractured tile stand out in sharp, brittle relief. Each tier comprised a narrow
walkway of segmented alcoves like phone booths or urinal stalls, steep stairs
climbing from one tier to the next. And in each partition on every tier as far
as he could see was a person visible from the waist down, the upper part of
their body interred inside the wall, locked in a stanchion like an animal and
bricked in place. The crude muslin shifts suggested that these were the
unrepentant, the ones that Janus could not reclaim back into the fold, the ones
denied the mercy of Confessor’s Row.

For one brief moment of
self-delusion, Alex thought some master artisan of New Age macabre had settled
mannequins torsos into the alcoves along the wall as a piece of vast sculpture
meant to illustrate the dehumanization of the human soul, the colossal inhumanity
of indifference and abject dispassion that was so evident in Janus.

Then the moment passed; he saw them
moving, feet shuffling. Not mannequins or statues.
Alive! They’re alive!

A part of him wanted to turn
away—horrified, ashamed, enraged—but he could not. He simply stared in awe,
hoping that if he looked hard enough, he would understand, and all of this—the
monstrous city, its soulless inhabitants, its dead martyrs and its living
victims—would somehow make sense.

But it did not. There were no
answers, just questions screaming endlessly without succor.

Shaded like a dark secret, he could
see people moving along the narrow walkways, men in black, judges or priests or
pilgrim re-enactors in some colonial New England tourist-trap. They skulked in
solitude along the shadowy tiers, searching for something. One turned into a
shallow stall, one hand grasping the hip of the faceless woman imprisoned
there, the other fumbling with his pants before …

Alex doubled over and threw up.

On hands and knees, spine arched until
he thought it would crack, he felt the agony pour through him, wave upon wave,
muscles locked, face bulging as he tried to turn his stomach inside-out. Each
new breath caught some nuance of this pocket in hell: ammoniated urine, runny
excrement molding on cold porcelain, the stink of careless jism, the reek of
sweat distinct with terror; endless, insurmountable fear that lived forever and
without end in the cracks and dark places behind the city’s mask of white
walls. This was the belly of Janus. He’d traveled past its teeth and through
its veins until he had found himself here where Janus digested those souls that
it sucked into its hungry jaws of iron and concrete, hapless sacrifices offered
up from its walking-dead inhabitants, mendicants to its inhumanity.

Finally he collapsed, senseless and
exhausted, feeling like he could have thrown up more; thrown up until he died,
his brain exploding with blood, his heart bursting. There were things no person
was meant to witness: things that could drive you mad for considering them,
blind for seeing them, kill you for allowing them to go on unabated.

Maybe a month ago, maybe a
year—another life to be sure—he had been painting the side of a house with a
man named Raymond Gugliano. Everyone just called him Rigo; Alex never asked
why. No one ever volunteered to work with Rigo; they thought he was weird. Alex
found him perversely amusing.

‘Check it out, man,’ Rigo said from
the other end of the scaffold. ‘I was at the library yesterday, ya know?’

Rigo’s favorite hangout was the
campus library. Alex was not sure why someone who read as much as Rigo did, and
actually retained as much information as he had, was still painting houses like
a college student on summer break. He suspected Rigo never really read the
things that would get him out of this job.

‘So I was readin’ this history book
about witchcraft, and they’re talkin’ about the witch trials. You know the ones
I mean, right? Back in New England and that when America was still a bunch of
tight-assed, religious types making colonies for England and shit. There were
these two women who were convicted of witchcraft because they were found to
have a witch mark on ‘em. Bet ya can’t guess what it was?’

Alex found conversations with Rigo
oddly intriguing and tedious. ‘I don’t know, a birthmark or something?’

‘Way better ‘an that. “The inner lips
of their nether parts were judged to be too long and ill-shaped,” ’ Rigo said,
pretending to paraphrase from some higher source.

Alex stopped painting and looked at
him. ‘What?’

Rigo’s smile widened. ‘Check it out;
this is so cool. These women were held down and stripped completely naked, then
searched by a bunch of dowdy
hausfraus
who were probably secretly getting off on it. Is
that some shit or what? And these old biddies decide these two women are
witches ‘cause their labia—the lips inside their cunts, ya know—are too long to
be normal. Can you fuckin’ believe that?’

Alex understood why Rigo was still
painting houses. ‘So what happened to ‘em?’

‘Hanged ‘em. Man, an you thought the eighties
were sexually repressed. Whoa!’ Rigo chortled to himself then said, ‘Oh hey,
I’m going to the Slice o’ Heaven tonight. You in?’

Slice o’ Heaven was a strip bar half
a mile off the highway near the county line. Alex, still unable to purge the
image of Rigo’s tale from his mind, said no. ‘I’m gonna work on fixin’ up my
old man’s place.’

‘The crab shack?’ Rigo shook his
head. ‘Forget it. That place’ll never get off the ground.’

“—get off the ground.”

Face pressed against the wet stone, Alex turned his gaze to the opposite
wall of the street and the simple, unadorned brick—brick and Lindsay’s bare
feet standing only a yard away.

“She needs your help, Alex.”

“Tell me she’s not in there, Lindsay.
Please!” His eyes welled with a blur of tears that he squeezed out with the
heel of his hand, trying to focus.

“You know where she is,” the little
girl said plainly.

He knew. God help him, he knew.

“She’s where we all are: where we’re
not supposed to be. A little ahead, a little behind; a little to the left, a
little to the right. But none of us are centered. When all else falls away, the
center will hold. It’s where we’re supposed to be.”

He watched the little girl turn away
suddenly, running down the water-slicked streets to disappear. Not into the
distance, but like a ghost, its life upon earth resolved that it might shed its
non-living existence. Lindsay simply vanished, only the faint echo of footsteps
marking her passage.

“Alex, are you all right?” Brother
Bartholomew asked, coming to help him up.

Alex rolled to his back, guns drawn
and leveled on the friar before he even realized what he was doing.
“Get
away from me!”

He could no longer endure the touch
of anything that was Janus. He understood now why he was here, why he had come.
His was not the role the friar imagined, not the role foretold in sacred texts;
in that regard, not he or any living creature with a soul worth saving belonged
in Janus. Its breath reeked of pestilence, its touch death. Janus was anathema
to anything that came unwelcome into its midst, and Alex knew down to his bones
that he was not welcome in the Guardian City. Now more than ever, he was not
welcome because he knew,

(understood)

and for that, the city reviled him;
feared
him
.

“I don’t understand, Alex,”
Bartholomew implored, hands raised in surrender. “What’s wrong?”

“That you even need to ask,” he said,
rising and holstering his guns. He quickly shifted the weapons, letting them
rest more evenly across his back, over his hips, around his waist.
So many
weapons.
“All of this is what’s wrong.” His hand swept across the Wall of
Penitence, the scattering of denizens upon its many tiers come to defile and
punish the imprisoned, his arm encompassing its horrible length, its connection
to Confessor’s Row, its subtle inlets fed by every byway and artery that
coursed throughout the city. “There can be nothing right about what you’re
doing. Nothing!”