The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (57 page)

But Jack would never see Ellen Monroe
again.

Only one of them could leave on the
train. If she stayed behind with him, they would simply die together. There was
no way that they could both leave together; both leave the Saloon behind; both
escape
.

Well, there is one way …

It isn’t ready yet!

No, it was ready; it simply wasn’t
sensible. It was a deviation from the rules, a mad stab into the dark abyss,
ignorance the only shield, like a blindfold while walking a tightrope to
protect yourself from the fear of falling. It was a terrible gamble on a great unknown,
the odds too improbable to calculate, too frightening to consider. And if he
lost, he lost everything.

He should simply send her home and
stay behind, let her go on living …
without him
.

… without him…

Jack shook his head. Who was he
kidding? Who had he ever been kidding? He was no Caretaker, barely capable of
taking care of himself. He was no ruler of reality on however limited a scale
you chose to argue. He wasn’t even a writer, and that was all he ever dreamed
of being since he was just a child and books held such wonder for him, books
that were the pure escape, the brief flight of fancy with an easily foreseeable
destination, the safe look over the edge of madness.

And look how far over that edge you
are now.

He was always missing that one key component:
courage. Not something inspired like standing before your enemy unafraid, but
the real, unglamorous courage of taking the unsafe path, of being willing to
sacrifice the comfort of the known for the possibility of success—or failure!
—with the unknown. The simple courage to chase a dream, to leap from the edge
of a cliff because until you did, you would never know whether or not you could
fly.

He had leaped once …
and landed
here
. The question was whether he could leap again, throw himself into the
uncharted territories of unreality, or try desperately to throw himself
backwards, away from the call of new possibilities; back into a world he at
least understood, even if he loathed it.

He breathed in the aroma from the
coffee one more time, the subtle spice more noticeable now, more

(
… Christmas eggnog)

discernible
.

He set the mug down and pushed it
away. Ellen was right … about this, at least. There were things she didn’t
know—
should never know!
But about this, she was right. He couldn’t do it
this way, couldn’t repeat what had happened to him days ago. And there was no
reason to, except that he was afraid; afraid of the possibilities he might have
opened with that last manuscript, not the least of which being its utter
failure. He never questioned the stories that flowed out of him while
experiencing the “awakening” of Oversight’s blood. And it was under that same
fugue that he had put Ellen’s story to print as well. And he didn’t question
it. He was simply afraid of it; afraid of its implications; afraid it had been
too much a wish of his own and not enough in line with the workings of the
Nexus. The Nexus rewarded the writer; it did not suffer the fool.

Ellen should leave. Jack knew that.

And he should stay behind. Jack knew
that, too.

It was the only way to guarantee that
it would work.

Unless you were to…

No! There was only one way that was
certain. And Ellen could never be allowed to know this. She was a dreamer who
believed in happy endings and justice for those who deserved it and six
passages on five tickets. She would try to discourage him from this course, but
he was not prepared to see her die for dreams or for her faith in him.

Jack started up the stairs, knowing
what he needed to do; knowing that it had to be done now before any more time
passed; before the barrier shrank any further, lost its cohesion and collapsed
like an old soap bubble. There was still time to change the last manuscript,
make it safer, its outcome more certain. He had to do this now. The time of
self-delusion was over. It was time to acknowledge his responsibilities, the
extent of his potential, and, yes, his limitations. The Saloon was not some
judge, not some cold and critical entity evaluating his work with a stone heart
and a cruel eye. It was a reflection of himself. The Saloon knew the very best
he was capable of, just as he instinctively knew, judgment unfiltered by ego or
social consequence. And when his work was wanting, it knew as well …
just as
he always knew
.

Jack walked easily through the long shadows and dark turns of the Saloon
like a blind man wandering with practiced ease through his own home. In a way,
perhaps, he was exactly that. So much of the Saloon had never changed because
so much of the Saloon was exactly how he liked it. Jack turned into the master
bedroom, failing only to notice the discarded pieces of clothing upon the
floor.

He did not miss Ellen sitting on the
bed, her knees drawn tightly to her chest, staring at him.

“Jack?”

He started at the sound of her voice,
feeling like an intruder caught in the act, trespassing where he did not
belong. For the first time since they met, it seemed like Ellen was actually
watching him; not simply waiting passively while he moved about the Saloon and
did his thing, but actually paying attention to what he was doing, perhaps even
knowing
what it was he was attempting. He felt suddenly as if she were
staring over his shoulder while he wrote.

There was an awkward pause while he
tried to make his mouth work. What came out was less a word than a sound.
“Hmm?”

“Can you really get both of us out of
here?”

He hesitated before answering. “I
think so.”
Not yet a lie, not really, no
.

“Because if you can’t, I don’t want
to leave.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t send me away.”

“Wh-what would make you think I was
planning on sending you away. We’re going to get out of here. Both of us.”
Now that’s a lie, isn’t it, Jackie boy?

“There’s only one ticket left. You
and I both know that. I don’t imagine there’s a lot of flexibility here because
if there were, the tickets would hardly matter. Not to you, not to me, not to
Leland or Oversight, and certainly not to the Tribe of Dust. But they do, don’t
they?”

He nodded slowly. “Yes, they do. But
I think there’s a way.” Though he heard himself say it—knew there was a grain
of truth to it—he still could not convince himself of it. And he wondered how
he expected her to believe what he could not.

“Good, because if we can’t both get
out of here, then I don’t want to go back at all,” she said. “I don’t want to
spend the rest of my life remembering …” Her voice trailed away as if searching
for a conclusion that wasn’t there, and settling upon emptiness.

“We’ll get out of here,” he promised.
“Both of us.”

Liar, liar; pants on fire.

There was another awkward moment of
silence, of unfinished thoughts and speeches lapsing into the past as forgotten
opportunities and regrets, marked only by the endless tick of the clock.

“Jack?”

“What?”

“I love you.”

He felt the breath catch in his
throat, elated and destroyed both at once. One hand groped slowly for the iron
railing of the helical stair.
Why?
he wondered against the rising
bitterness in his throat.
Why, when she knows as well as I that phrase has a
way of opening a long and distant road that is cut short by the very
circumstances that brought us together in the first place.
The barrier was
going to collapse if he postponed her departure any longer than was absolutely
necessary. He could feel it, taste it like copper and electricity in the air.
His time, the so-called trial period, was coming to an end, and the Tribe of
Dust was waiting just outside.
We’re so sorry you didn’t win, Jack, but we
do have some lovely parting gifts for our runners up …

Only this wasn’t a game. If Ellen
stayed, they would both die. And he couldn’t go with her. One train, one rider.
It was that simple. Before, he thought maybe he could make her understand; now
he was certain he could not.

“I told you this morning that I
couldn’t send you back to reality because I wasn’t finished with your story. Do
you remember? I told you it wasn’t ready.”

She nodded slowly, her face
unreadable in the encroaching darkness. He took a deep, shaky breath like a man
entering into a confession, afraid his courage would fail him if he didn’t
finish in a single breath. “That wasn’t entirely true. I didn’t put your ticket
through because I didn’t want you to leave. I didn’t want you to leave here. I
didn’t want you to leave me. I love you, too.”

“Then stay with me,” she said, almost
a request, almost a plea.

“I shouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

Because Oversight told me the reason
Kreiger failed was because Kreiger fell in love with her, lost sight of what he
was doing, lost control. Do you see how this is the same? Do you see how I’m no
different than he was? A Cast Out. There are no cheaters in this game
.

But Jack did not say what he was
thinking—could not, though it was true. “I … I have to get to work. I have to
get you—I have to get
us
out of here before it all falls apart.”

“Can’t it wait until morning?” she
asked, her voice a whisper on the verge of disappearing.

“Maybe.”
No! Dammit! Don’t be
stupid!
“But I don’t think so. Oh, hell, I don’t know.”

“Then stay with me tonight.”

The offer was more than tempting. It
was something he had wished for at least a hundred times in the last week. Only
not now. Not when things were so desperate. “What if the barrier collapses?
What if …” he swallowed uncertainly, his throat half-choked with something like
dust and fear. “What if I fail?”

“Are you absolutely certain you’ll
succeed?” she asked gently.

It might have been a snub, a cruel retort worthy of Leland Quince or
Gusman Kreiger or any one of his many critics. But from her, it was simply a
question. Was he certain of what he was doing? Was he any more certain of it
than of anything else? The answer came with quiet resignation: “No.”

“Then stay with me. Whatever it is
that needs fixing, fix it in the morning.”

“And if I can’t?”

“Then we’ll have tonight. Is that so
bad?”

No, no it wasn’t. He didn’t want to
die, and he didn’t think Ellen did either, but did it make any more sense to
waste what time they had left together on some desperate scheme that might not
amount to anything. He could try to revise Ellen’s story throughout the night,
but the outcome was no more certain than if he simply left it alone. The story
was complete, a long shot he capitulated over; too desperate. He could revise
it, make it more sensible. The only real difference, of course, would be his
place in it.

Or he could leave it alone.

Exhausted by the possibilities, by the worry his own fears lent him, he crossed
the empty darkness between them and sat down on the edge of the bed. Shadows
played across Ellen’s skin, strands of night-blackened hair spilling across her
shoulders and hiding her face. He reached out to touch her arm, fingers raising
bumps across her flesh, sending a shiver through her frame. She leaned into his
kiss, her lips parting his, her tongue touching his own. Her fingertips found
the back of his neck, her skin burning against his as her fingers combed into
his hair, trailed down along his back, and started to work his clothes apart
until their bodies pressed naked against one another.

And while they made love on the edge
of madness and forever, the clock ticked softly in the darkness, permanently
counting away time’s inexorable passage.

HIGH NOON

And the decision was made.

As the sun crested the endless
expanse of naked sand, the barrier came in contact with the Sanity’s Edge
Saloon. Its edge touched the top banister of the unfinished stairway, the
furthest point from the center of the Saloon that was the heart of the Nexus.
For just a moment, it shimmered in the new day’s light; ornamental glass; a
fragile soap bubble.

Then it burst, and the barrier was
gone.

*     *     *

The first off-key clang jolted him
awake, cutting through sleep’s peace with a sound like a rusted clapper on an
ancient copper chime. Jack sat up, heart thudding uncontrollably, breath locked
in his throat as his eyes flicked around the room, searching for the source of
the noise while knowing exactly where it would be found.

The tall clock chimed again.

Beside him, Ellen turned away
sleepily, pulling the blankets close around her naked skin to hide from the
disturbing sound.

But there could be no hiding from
this. He had been hiding all along, and reality had finally found him.

Again the bell clanged. The clock’s
insensible face had, for the first time, come to a consensus: all five hands
pointed to thirteen. In this strange unreality of untime and insanity, it was
thirteen o’clock, some netherworld version of midnight or high noon.

By the fourth dull-edged clang, Jack
was leaping from the bed, scooping his clothes up off the floor and tugging
them on. “Ellen, get up! We’ve got to go!”

She raised herself up on one elbow,
looking at him blearily in the twilight. The clock rang again. “Jack? What’s
going—?”

“No time. Get up and get dressed. We
have to get out of here right now. Hurry!”

“But—”

“Now!” Jack grabbed his sneakers and
ran for the spiral stair, Ellen staring after him from the bed, confused. He
paused for a moment, the iron steps cold against the soles of his feet. She
didn’t understand and he had no time to explain. There was time enough only for
blind faith and maybe hope. Maybe not even that.

“Ellen, please,” he said, struggling
to keep his voice calm, keep the hysteria from turning his request into a
scream. “Get dressed. We have to get out of here.”

Then he charged up the steps.

The Jabberwock was already on, the
screen a waiting page, blank and empty. Half of the books and magazines from
the shelves were gone. As was the wastebasket, the Jabberwock’s printer, the
stereo. The plant had shriveled to a yellowing stalk of wispy, weed-like leaves
tangled together into witch hair; there was no life in the Wasteland save that
which came from the Nexus. Plants required living soil, drawing life from
static surroundings, unlike the dregs and vermin roaming the
Wasteland—sloth-like bottom-feeders preying off one another. When a plant
exhausted what was available, it died, doomed by the very nature of its existence.
The Saloon was nearly empty. The plant, unnoticed and ignored, was dead.

Below, the clock kept chiming. He had
lost count, but no matter; he knew what time it was. It was time to go.

Jack snagged the blue folder from his
desk, taking out the entire stack of typed pages that was the last manuscript,
Ellen’s ticket home, and jamming them into the pneumatic tube. Some of the
sheets slipped from his shaking fingers, wafting across the desk to land upon
the floor. He snatched at them, stifling an urge to scream.
There’s no time
for this. No time for anything. They had to go!

He scooped every last page up in
double-fistfuls of paper, thrusting them into the brass and copper tube
suspended from the wall, which eagerly sucked them down with a distracting
shuuuup!
noise. Turning too quickly, he knocked the pot out of the coffee maker, and it
shattered on the floor. Something in his head said this should matter.
Something else said that while it should, it did not.

He pulled on his sneakers, not
bothering to tie the laces. No time.

On the Jabberwock’s screen, the
familiar gold ticket floated. He reached for the
ENTER
key and hesitated, staring down the brass rabbit hole where the pages
had disappeared. It all depended upon this. The world balanced upon events
happening like a scripted page.

But how could it? How could any of
it? Especially when others didn’t want it to.

That was the key. What they wanted.
What he couldn’t let them have. Jack glanced around quickly then closed his
eyes, concentrating on something he needed, something that wasn’t there …
but
should be
.

In the lower right corner of the
keyboard, a hot swelling in the plastic bubbled up before flattening and
hardening, the surface turning from bone to brown to bright red. Small black
letters rose out of the new key’s surface:
ICE
.

He pushed the
ENTER
key followed by the new red key, and turned away,
broken glass skittering from under his feet as he raced towards the iron stair.
Already words were streaming across the screen, sentence after sentence funneling
into the Jabberwock and down through the Saloon’s machinery that coiled tightly
around the Nexus of all realities.

Jack averted his eyes from the far
wall as he left. The bookcase was gone, only bare wall where it had been
seconds earlier. Every book, magazine, trinket, and collectible in the room had
disappeared—the cost of the new red button.

Nothing lasts forever.

“Is everything okay?” Ellen asked.
She was pulling the baggy sweatshirt on as she moved to meet him at the foot of
the stairs. “I heard something break.”

“Nothing important,” he said, and
hoped it was true. In his absence, the bed had also disappeared.

“Jack? Is this … is this the end?”

He was shaking his head as he led her
to the stairs and down. “I don’t know. I just don’t—”

His voice died away as he looked out
the window at the infinite stretch of Wasteland behind the Saloon. Ellen bumped
into him, her hair still tangled from sleep, her face open confusion, and was
about to ask what made him stop when she saw for herself, her hand leaping up
to his arm, holding it for support, for simple human contact. Neither spoke or
moved; they only stared.

Out on the vast, white sands, the
last remnants of the Tribe of Dust stood shoulder to shoulder, gunslingers in a
spaghetti western ready for the shootout with the sheriff, high noon in the
O.K. Corral. Their backs to the sun, they were walking shadows, portents of
destruction and death. Their approach held Jack spellbound, and he knew what it
was that made birds freeze beneath the baleful eye of a hunting snake. He might
have stayed frozen until they walked out of sight and into the backdoor, but a
sudden scream from across the abyss, a piercing whistle, familiar and shrill,
broke the spell.

The last train!

Jack started down the steps. “Ellen,
come on.”

When she didn’t respond immediately,
he reached up and took her arm, pulling her. “Ellen! Come on!”

She tore her eyes from the
approaching Cast Outs, following him down to the first floor. It was completely
empty but for the solitary ticket booth and Alex’s pry bar. It lay upon the
floor, the forgotten tool of a thief who’d pilfered the Sanity’s Edge Saloon of
all of its belongings, all of its
reality
. There was an outline on the
floorboards, a dark place where the bar once was, but nothing else. Once crowded
with furniture, the room seemed enormous now, and Jack felt like an intruder, a
trespasser in someone else’s private residence. They didn’t belong here, and he
knew by her expression that Ellen felt it too.

In the empty room, the ticket booth
stood apart, surreal, ready for the next patron to step up to the window and
buy a ticket; the lie of normalcy.

Another burst from the belly of the
train, a banshee’s scream cutting through hesitation like a razor.

“The last ticket’s over there,” Jack
said. “Go check it.”

“Where are you going?”

Jack knew she was terrified, that she
was starting to suspect something more was going on than he had led her to
believe. “I want to grab the pry bar,” he said. “For a weapon. Just in case.”
Then he gave her a gentle, reassuring kiss. “It’ll be okay.”

“We’re leaving together,” she said
firmly.

But he had already turned away,
pretending not to hear.

Ellen hesitated a moment then ran
over to the ticket booth. On the edge of the counter, a single ticket poked
halfway from the wire mesh window like bait in a trap. She picked it up
cautiously, as if the paper might be coated with acid, or poison from the skin
of a frog captured in the Orinoco Valley. But it was only a ticket; a single
ticket.

Passenger’s
Name:  
ELLEN MONROE

Departing:  
THE SANITY’S EDGE *

Destination:  
HOME

Time:  
NOW

* This ticket is good for one passenger only
on the above listed train, is non-transferable and non-negotiable. This station
is not responsible for any lost articles or luggage.

Ellen looked at the ticket, reading
the same few lines over and over in disbelief. She looked to the ticket booth
as if it were playing some cruel trick, and it answered her wordless accusation
by slamming the shade down across the window, the words
SOLD OUT
in bold, black script on the shade.
She felt her hands start to tremble, her mouth open, wordless mumbles as she
tried to figure this out; make sense of the insensible; find the piece of
information that she seemed to be missing. But though she reread the words on
the ticket until tears blurred them into obscurity, searching in vain for
loopholes or clauses, she still came back to the same inescapable conclusion:
Jack had lied.

The train’s whistle screamed again,
and she flinched even as anger tightened every muscle in her frame, tears of
rage burning her cheeks. The train was coming; there was no turning back now,
no changing what was set in motion.

“What did you do?” she screamed.

Jack stared at her wordlessly from
across the Saloon, the pry bar in one hand. He did not look away, only holding
her gaze apologetically. “This is how it has to be.”

“No it doesn’t!” she screamed back.
“You made it this way. You’re the one who’s making everything happen here.”

“It’s not as simple as that. There
are rules—”

“
Fuck the rules!
This place
doesn’t have rules any more than dreams have rules. Jack, you have to come with
me. You’ll die if you stay here. Just get on the train with me. It can take us
both; take us wherever.”

“But —”

“No. You said we were leaving. Both
of us.”

“It can’t be that way.”

“I won’t go without you.”

“Ellen, please.”

“No, Jack. Not this way. Come with
me, or I stay too.” She swallowed desperately, the very words choking her.
“Whatever happens, we’ll get through it so long as we stay together. But you
have to get on the train with me. Please!”

He was looking at the ground, shaking
his head.

“Please!” she said. “It took me too
long to find you. I can’t lose you know.”

He pumped the air with the pry bar as
if tapping ghost nails into an invisible coffin, his eyes lost in thought. She
thought he looked like someone trying to reconcile a matter between the heart
and the head—and failing.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll try.”

She smiled, and Jack wondered if he
would ever again see anything so beautiful.

Then the Tribe of Dust burst into the
saloon,
literally
.

*     *     *

The backdoor blew inward, slivers of
glass spraying the waiting room and the Saloon’s lacquered floor in a fan of
tiny, shimmering flecks. Ellen jerked back, nearly striking her head against
the corner of the ticket booth, the doorframe sparing her from the rain of
glittering shrapnel. Reginald Hyde’s tattooed mass blocked the shattered
doorway to the platform, the spikes of bones and talons and fangs bursting from
his illustrated skin like the spiny carapace of some monstrous insect. He
stared, eyes red-rimmed and crazed, only dimly aware of his surroundings: the
emptied Saloon, the broken shards beneath his naked feet. The only emotion upon
his face, that which might have expressed the last fragment of sanity he
possessed, was wonderment.

The large window behind Jack
shattered in a rain of glass fragments and splintered window frame,
Rebreather’s boots thundering against the planks as he straightened himself, a
tall, granite mass eclipsing the light.