The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (16 page)

“Little dickslap probably
went home. Let’s go.”

And silence.

Relief so sudden and palpable, it felt like the first breath
of cool air after swimming under water too long, a fraction from drowning. It
happened in an instant, the spasm bursting through him like an electric surge
running straight up from his toes, catching him, paralyzed by the fluttering
sensation that rippled through his body and made him lose all control. His
hands released Cassie completely, body jerking uncontrollably as an
excruciating flood crashed headlong through him, followed a second later by a wave
of horror and bewilderment.

Cassie turned slowly,
eyes wide, and whispered, “I don’t think they’re gonna find uth, Freddy. We
win, right?”

And she was smiling, the
whole thing nothing more than a game.

The spell of the hot
afternoon and the angry meadow shattered, and Freddy’s wonderment collapsed at
once into shame and horror. Freddy saw—truly saw—what he was doing for the
first time. And he knew, as surely as he knew the moment was burned into his brain
forever, that it should never,
never
have happened. Not with Cassie—
especially
not with Cassie
. He was a pervert; an evil, dirty, perverted criminal. If
anyone ever found out—
if they ever even suspected
—they would send him
away, hate him like they hated no other. Or maybe they would strip him naked,
hold him down and cut his penis off. Maybe they would. Wasn’t that what you did
with naughty boys who diddled themselves, and looked at their naked cousin?
Castration?

“Freddy, are you okay?”

Cassie crawled out from
under him; he could no longer hold her down, not even if he had wanted to. He
felt hollow, the spent husk of a dead insect, as light as last year’s fallen leaves
and just as useless.

“Uh … yeah, I’m okay.” He
realized she was covered from knees to neck in mud. “W-we should get cleaned
up.”

He directed her to the
edge of the stream while he scuttled on up to the field and grabbed their
clothes, crawling to the edge of the tall grass, mindful of any eyes that might
still be around.
How had this seemed okay only moments before? How had he
ever imagined that he would never get caught?

He had Cassie stand by
the stream’s edge so that he could use the water to clean away the dirt,
turning her around to get her front and back. Whatever intrigue her nakedness
held for him a moment ago was arrested by the need to wash her clean, wash away
what had happened.

“You can’t tell anybody,
okay?” he said, unable to look her in the eye.

“How come?”

“It’s like a secret,
okay? Just don’t tell anybody what happened. ‘Specially not mom or dad. You
understand?”

“But we were jutht
playin’ hide and theek.”

“Just promise you won’t
tell nobody about what happened, okay? Promise me you won’t tell. Please.”

“Okay, Freddy. I
promith.”

And he hugged her, her
small body cold and wet against his own.

He used his t-shirt to
dry her off so that she could get dressed while he washed the mud off himself.
The worst was not that he knew what he had done was wrong, or even that he had
done it in spite of knowing. The worst was knowing that a part of him—
You
are evil, Freddy! Evil!
—wanted to do it again.

Just don’t tell
anyone. Just don’t tell anyone.
It repeated over and over in his head, some kind of
medicinal mantra that would make it all go away, every part of it, from the
moment his brothers invited him to play cowboys and Indians right up until now.
Just make everything go away.

But he knew that it
wouldn’t.

A part of him would forever
remember with horror.

A part of him would forever
remember with something very different.

“Freddy,” Cassie
whispered from behind him, “I want to go home.”

“Me too.”

Cassie never told anyone
about that afternoon. Neither did he. His older brothers caught hell from his
mother for ditching them, and would have little to do with him after that, not
that Freddy cared. Their approval meant nothing now; and B-B guns were for
babies. He realized that day that his brothers were the quintessential examples
of dumb rednecks bound for nowhere and getting there fast. From that day
forward, he and Cassie treated each other differently. He looked after her,
made sure she was okay, made sure that she never, never told anyone about that
afternoon or ever had a reason to.

And she never did.

Cassie died at nineteen.
No one was exactly sure how long she had been using heroin. By middle school,
Cassie had fallen in with a bad crowd: losers and druggies, future criminals
and welfare cases. Cassie dropped out at seventeen, worked a few part-time
jobs; none would last. There were a lot of boys along the way. Fiercely
protective—
not jealous; how could he be jealous?
—Freddy hated them all.
He buried the memories of that afternoon, knowing them only in the world of
half-remembered dreams and nightmares ending very differently.

But Cassie never told
anyone, and Freddy’s guilt died with her, buried along with her body in the Sunset Hill Cemetery.

Still, long after he had
repressed the memory of that ill-fated afternoon and the foolish notions of a
prepubescent boy, he still remembered one thing: there was no reward without
punishment, no pleasure without pain, no dreams without nightmares, no desire
without cost. All were simply two sides of a coin spent indifferently by those who
somehow thought a quarter would always land on heads. But he knew the truth. He
learned it one hot afternoon long ago. And that was what he remembered. That
was
all
he remembered.

Until today.

Ellen Monroe awakened that memory, her sandy hair and gentle
eyes and pouting lips, her dark past of drugs and indiscretions, her head full
of dreams, oblivious to the reality around her. She brought it all back. It
took him until today to see the similarities; vague, but there all the same,
their subtlety escaping him at first. An openness of mind. A fairness of heart.
A willingness to forget, to forgive. A propensity to escape into a world of
dreams. It took him until today to realize that she reminded him of Cassie. And
it took him until late this afternoon—after Ellen Monroe had left his office in
the rain, her dress sticking to her skin, after he had masturbated to a fantasy
about her being naked, submissive—to realize why someone who reminded him of
his little cousin, dead for more than twenty years, should interest him, even
excite him. It wasn’t until this afternoon that the memory of that long ago day
came back to him, his sessions with Ellen, the heated longing deep within his
mind, evoking a kind of self-analysis.

Not on a conscious level, no, certainly not. Like his hatred
of the boys that hovered around Cassie, examining these ideas about Ellen too
closely would be an admission, an opening of doors better left closed. So his
mind worked in secret, prodding and poking the wound until it festered and
oozed and finally ripped open, disgorging the long-buried splinter of memory,
the jagged sliver thrusting up from the stinking wound just as dangerous as
ever.

He counseled all of his
patients that the first step to wellness was acknowledging the problem. The
second was willfully seeking help. Ellen refused to admit she had a problem, so
refused to be helped. She was wrong, of course, and he would need to show her
that. Ellen had to
want
to be cured,
want
to be made sane, made
better. He would have to make her want that.
There was no reward without
punishment
. In order to conquer her demons, to recover her memory, she
would have to confront the event in her past that she was blocking. Confront it
and conquer it. But to conquer it, she would need to acknowledge it, surrender
to that reality.

It had proven a most
insightful session.

Ellen worked behind the
register until six o’clock then locked the front door, turning the sign in the
window:
CLOSED — Please come again
. Half a cup of cooling coffee in hand, she yawned and went
into the backroom marked “employees only.”

Nicholas Dabble knew all
of this because he watched her do it; watched her very closely.

She was not getting
better for her twice-weekly sessions with Dr. Kohler. Frankly, she would only
get worse until she stopped seeing him entirely, but that was a break she would
have to make on her own. Since her return, she had been more withdrawn than
usual, as if worn out, her spirit twisted dry like an old dishcloth.

A part of him thought he
should do something to help her. He knew he wouldn’t, but secretly enjoyed the
sensation all the same, this sense of involvement, of concern and empathy that
he felt towards Ellen Monroe. She was proving to be a very engaging find, and
he was glad to have
stumbled
upon her.

Are you absolutely
sure that’s how it happened?

And there was that about
Ellen Monroe, the thing he liked least. It was not the secret voice of concern
or empathy that bothered him so much—for it spoke so rarely—but the cautions
whispered from the darkness suggesting he might have lost control already; no
advice or course of action, simply fretful words about his new assistant. She
was not a threat, but a harbinger of some larger doom, the angel of Armageddon.

Still, she was charming
and fragile, ravaged by evil that somehow never penetrated her heart, her soul.
How like an ascending angel.

Yes, I expect it’s
only a matter
of
time before she attracts the wrong attention. Not unlike she did yours, old man.
How complicated will it be then?

Nicholas Dabble moved
about his shop with acute familiarity, brooding over his vast collections of
books. The inventory, a Herculean task that Ellen had set herself to as a favor
to him—
can you actually believe that she is doing you a favor?!?
—only
accounted for a fraction of the stories he had collected over the years. But
they didn’t comfort him this evening. Always the way with desire; it made you
forget what you had, and long for what you did not.

He knew a thing or two
about that as well.

He paused by the register
and breathed in the smells of the shop: the oil-soaped wood, the dust of the
slowly eroding pages, the hard tang of the inks. There was a too-sweet smell of
cinnamon and hazelnut in the air; one of Serena’s flavored coffees, Dabble
thought contemptuously. And below that, subtle and sweet, the smell of his
erstwhile assistant, her perfume, the shampoo she used in her hair, the damp
fabric of her dress—
silly goose, refusing to carry an umbrella
. But
there was something more, something deep, almost hidden in the fabric of
reality, down in the cracks where it might safely be lost, or, at the very
least, escape his notice: dried leaves and herbs, one of Serena’s
special
blends.

What would make her
give such a thing to his assistant?

If he concentrated, if he
put his mind to it, he thought he could actually hear the slow, heavy grinding
of wheels already turning.

He crossed to the back of
the store and passed through the “employees only” door like a falling shadow to
slip quietly down into the cramped aisles of books, the air in the backroom
stifling hot and thick with dust. Ellen sat on a small footstool at the far
end, staring down into a cardboard box of books he recognized at a glance:
early copies of Barker and King and Peter S. Beagle. He knew the titles and the
count by the smell of the box.

No, he really did not
need her to inventory his store; he knew what was his.

He watched her pore over
the handwritten ledger, taking books out in handfuls and checking their
quantities, logging them down. Stooped forward, eyes heavy, lids dragging
closed even as she fought to keep them open. The sweet-smelling coffee was
finished, for all the good it had done. There was a light sheen of sweat on her
neck and forehead, a small droplet wending its way across her cheekbone that
she seemed too distracted or too tired to wipe away. While he watched, he saw
her head jerk back suddenly, a violent neck spasm as she caught herself on the
verge of drifting off.

And again, he smelled
that faint undercurrent of Serena’s special blend.

Things are getting out
of hand.

“Ellen?”

She jerked at the sound
of her name, pen skidding uncontrollably across the ledger page, a sudden blush
in her cheeks. Quite fetching.

“Why don’t you go home,”
Dabble said, offering her an easy smile that suggested he had not noticed her
nearly asleep on the job. “It must be a hundred degrees back here. I’ll be
lucky if you don’t call OSHA on me.” Then he modified his tone a little,
something more sympathetic. “You look tired, and I’m guessing you’re not having
the very best of days. Why don’t you head home and I’ll see you in the
morning.”

“Are you sure?”

He nodded. “All of this
has waited this long. One more day for these old books won’t make a bit of
difference. They’re already written.”

“I can make up the time
later this week—”

“It’s all right. You’re
the best assistant I’ve ever had.” That wasn’t true, but she certainly was the
most interesting one he had had in a very long time, and that counted for
something. “You’re entitled to a night off.”

She shrugged, but he
sensed she was slowly coming around to his side. All she needed was a little
push.

“You look exhausted.” He
might have added that she looked a mess, too, her hair a dried tangle, her
dress wrinkled by the rain. He might have, but he didn’t; he found her
disheveled appearance rather charming. “I’m guessing your afternoon didn’t go
all that well.”

“No,” she said. “Not
really.”

And Dabble knew that she
was covering herself, hiding that deep wound that Kohler somehow always managed
to reopen. Maybe, he thought, she was starting to learn a thing or two about
the good doctor. Smart girl. Maybe she would leave him. Smarter still.

More sounds on the edge
of his senses—
wheels turning
.

“It’s nearly eight
o’clock,” Dabble said. “Go on home.”

After a moment of
hesitation, she nodded, folding the box’s cardboard flaps back over one another
and shoving it to one side, not that there was any extra space in the narrow
aisle. Ellen left the ledger atop the box, place marked with a paper clip, and
threaded her way back through the narrow aisles and out into the store to get
her bag from under the register. Nicholas Dabble followed her.

Outside on the street,
shadows stretched out into forever, the last red of the day beginning to fade
and darken against the buildings.

“Be careful walking
home,” he said because it was appropriate and polite, and because he always
said it to her.

Tonight, however, it
actually meant something.

“Thanks, Mr. Dabble,”
Ellen said from the doorway, looking tired, distracted. Not a wise way to walk
home alone; the streets could be dangerous for the unwary. She waved. “I’ll see
you tomorrow.”

“Goodbye, Ellen,” he replied,
hating to trade lies incautiously.

 Dabble watched over her from the doorway until she was gone
from sight then re-locked the front door and turned out the lights. Gathering
the shadows about him like the folds of a blanket, he stepped to the glass and
watched in secrecy.

After a moment, he saw two men slink from the darkness of the
alley behind
Serena’s Coffee Shoppe
, confident in the anonymity afforded
by their station. He had seen them earlier, keeping tabs on Ellen Monroe, watching
where she went and what she did. It wasn’t hard to notice them if you looked,
and they were the kind of detail Nicholas Dabble tended to notice, the kind
that tended to seek him out. He knew them the way he knew all people like them.
They picked idly through the trash per usual, but lingered too long outside his
store; he did not throw out the kind of garbage that interested the likes of
Matthew Cho or Marco Gutierrez—yes, he did know them; better, maybe, than they
knew themselves.

More wheels turning. What
galvanized these two? Dabble could not say, which in itself was interesting.
One angry and stupid and self-involved, he would end up dead in a gutter, infected
blood draining down the sewer. The other was simply unfortunate, weighted down
by all the burdens that title had to bear. So what was their interest in his
assistant? Who turned them on to her; let them know that she existed?

Wheels turning
.

Soon enough, he would
know.

Slipping back through the
narrow aisles of the backroom and retrieving the ledger, he turned to Ellen’s
last entry. By the looks of it, she had been falling asleep almost from the
start.
Poor thing
.

Curious he should feel
bad about her exhaustion, but not about her being stalked by a pair of degenerates
little better than feral dogs. Both should be tied into a burlap sack of large
rocks and flung into the river; that’s what you did with unwanted strays.

But they didn’t concern
him just now. He looked back through Ellen’s entries and found
The Sanity’s
Edge Saloon
on several lines, the author listed as Jack Lantirn, the
quantity on hand invariably one. Very curious, seeing as the only existing copy
of
The Sanity’s Edge Saloon
left his store every time Ellen Monroe went
out. And Jack Lantirn did not exist at all, never had. Like her, the book was
wholly unique and a mystery.

But what does it mean?

Still more sounds like
wheels turning, gears grinding, the clockwork of the universe rolling forward.

What does it mean?

Better figure it out
soon, old man, or you might just get caught under the wheel.

For Nicholas Dabble, it
was another sleepless night ahead.