The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (17 page)

From deep within the
shadows behind the coffee shop, Gusman Kreiger watched the derelicts slither
from the alleyway to follow Ellen Monroe.

It was his fault, he
knew, speaking glibly of her value. In their ignorance, they assumed it was a
value they could fathom, one that could be calculated in base tangibles like
the street value of uncut heroin. After beating him senseless and leaving him
for dead—their mistake was not making certain—they began to conceive of how to
determine that value, how to hunt it down, secret it out, divvy it up and make
it there own. What they would do if they acquired it, the single most powerful
and wondrous thing in this universe, was impossible to imagine because their
desperate stupidity allowed for possibilities that strained credulity. If
Kreiger was any judge, they would probably slap her around, possibly rape her,
and finally sell her off for a case of malt liquor and a dime bag of hash.

But he was admittedly
jaded. Just because he was healed did not mean he had forgiven them; such piety
was the stock and trade of another, and he had stopped pretending to be him a
very long time ago.

But perhaps it was in him
to save someone this one time.

Perhaps.

Or should he allow fate
to take its course? Maybe this was meant to be. Maybe this was Jack’s way of
breaking from the past, ending a dalliance that he could never hope to bring to
fruition. Perhaps this was simply the eccentric Caretaker’s way of coping, of
putting his past away so that he could move on, move forward, start afresh.

A crooked smile teased
the corner of Kreiger’s face, privately enjoying his own jest. No, not Jack.
The hopeless romantic, the loving fool, the sentimental idiot equally as
tormented by the past as he was in love with it. Just as he was in love with
her. Kreiger had not forgotten their last encounter when he’d breached the
Saloon, he and Rebreather and the necromancer, Papa Lovebone. They had finally
made it to where no Cast Out had stood before: the heart of the Nexus, the
center of reality, the apex of all times, all worlds, all universes that ever
were or ever would be. And the only thing that stood between them and the
control of the Nexus was Jack, an ignorant, misplaced, would-be writer whose
only reason for being here was that he didn’t have any better place to be, and
whose only reason for staying was he was too stubborn to admit that he wasn’t
as good as he had always hoped. His defeat should have been easy, his death an eye-blink.

But Jack defied him.
Kreiger remembered the desperation with which the young Caretaker had crashed
all of reality a fraction closer to the Nexus, like stripping away the plastic
insulation from a high voltage line and grabbing hold. The rush was
instantaneous, power for the taking. In that moment, Kreiger saw everything he
ever wanted, worlds opening up before him, universes splayed out at his feet,
supplicants to his will and whim.

Blinded by possibilities,
he never saw it coming, never saw how carefully Jack had orchestrated the
pieces and set it all in motion. Kreiger thought himself the master, but was,
in fact, the puppet. The Caretaker said dance, and he hopped and skipped a
fool’s jig. Lovebone was killed. Rebreather, too. Kreiger escaped only by the
barest fraction, fleeing into exile, a prisoner in a world that mocked him at
every turn.

And all of this, Jack had
done for the love of one fair-skinned, small-breasted ex-junkie who couldn’t
cope with reality any better than he could. No, Jack had not forgotten Ellen,
and he
would not forsake
her. And he would most certainly not leave her to the likes of Marco and Matty.

If he does forget her,
if she should fall to the likes of those miscreants, then you are surely
doomed, old man. Without her, there is no way out. If he does not love her, you
will be trapped here forever, a prisoner for all time, your life an everlasting
mistake repeated over and over and over until the end of all existence.

Maybe this was Jack’s
plan after all.

No. He knew what he
needed to do. It wouldn’t be easy to find, not easy at all. If it was, it
wouldn’t be here.

He started
along the back wall of the coffee
shop, the one with the pragmatic owner, her every move as graceful as it was
purposeful. It wouldn’t be here, but it wouldn’t be far away. This was out of
sight, on Jack’s periphery. He probably didn’t think about it more than once or
twice, enough to know that the pavement was old and hard, cracked and shot full
of tufts of grass and weeds. The walls were unadorned brick. A serviceable
alley, to be sure, but not one Jack thought much about. No, not at all.

What he was looking for
was not easy to find. Like trying not thinking about an elephant, the very act
renders the effort useless.

Kreiger crouched down
near a grated vent along the foundation, his knees cracking audibly, the pain
twisting his face into an angry grimace. He struck the grate with the base of
the stolen staff, the twisted metal of the lightning rod ringing off the rusted
steel, sparking against the screws and shattering them like brittle glass. He
pulled the grate aside and reached deep into the shadowed recesses to a place
too dark to see, too silent to hear, too distant to touch, too ephemeral to
taste, too plain to smell. What he was looking for wasn’t easy to find, but he
knew he would find it. He knew it was here. Jack was good, but he wasn’t that
good.

No, he wasn’t that
good.

And there, past the point
of the senses where the world existed only as a conceptual abstract, a notion
of rules ungoverned by tangibility, he found it.

Reality’s edge.

“Did you think you could
fool me,
Jack? I was
there
. You had three days, not seven. There wasn’t enough
time to cover all the details, cross the t’s and dot the i’s. Why, the paint’s not
even dry.”

Hand curled into a talon, Kreiger rent the very fabric of the universe
apart.

For a moment—one moment only—the world resisted, gathering its rules
about itself in defiance of the white wizard’s will. But it was not enough, a
flimsy shield of fog and lights and little else. After a moment, the world
surrendered to Gusman Kreiger’s power, and he tore it back, revealing the reality
beneath like paper shredded from a wrapped package, raw and exposed.

Yes, Jack was the Caretaker, and he was good. But he wasn’t that good.

Gusman Kreiger, mad mystic and two-thousand year old messiah of a world
that never was, pulled himself inside of Jack’s reality through a tear in the
universe …
and the way was made open before him
.

Ellen had no recollection
of the walk home. She remembered Dabble giving her the night off, shooing her
out of the backroom. Had she fallen asleep? She didn’t really remember. Despite
the coffee, her eyelids had grown heavy, her thoughts starting to wander.

She remembered
dreaming, remembered seeing Jack
point to the ground, asking:
“Where do you think those wires go?”

Mr. Dabble’s voice
answered, reality snapping back into place with the suddenness of breaking
glass. There was no Jack in this world; it was only a dream.

She caught glimpses
of dusk between the buildings as she
walked, the sun blazing a coppery orange like a penny left in a fire. She
ignored her mailbox and walked up the stairs to her landing, holding tight to
the rail for support. Maybe Dr. Kohler was right after all. Maybe she just
needed some rest. She never felt so tired.

Maybe he was right
about a lot of things. Maybe you’re crazy. Maybe you should be on medication.
Maybe you just don’t want to admit it.

Serena had likewise
suggested sleep. Why did she believe the woman at the coffee shop over her own
doctor?

Um … because you’re
crazy.

Entering her apartment,
she went straight to the shower, eager to wash away the smell of the bus ride
and the inventory and her session with Dr. Kohler. He knew her too well, what
buttons to push and how hard. Serena was right about one thing; he was
dangerous and untrustworthy and her best interests were not his.

Spoken like a true
delusional. A professional tries to help you, but you see only treachery and
deceit. You’re paranoid, you know that.

She stepped from the
shower, wrapped herself in a towel, and left the day’s clothes behind in a
pile. Between the rain and the inventory and Kohler, they were all in desperate
need of washing. She detoured through the kitchen, put some water on to boil,
and headed to the bedroom where she found a T-shirt and some jeans to wear. She
finger-combed her hair, not overly concerned with the results; she probably
wouldn’t be staying awake long, anyway.

It wasn’t until the
constant din of noise on the roof stopped that she became aware of it in the
first place, looking up as the world turned suddenly quiet, the only sound the murmuring
of water in the tea kettle.

One thing you learned in
an apartment was how to tune out others around you; how to transform
conversations heard through heating vents and thin walls into white noise; how to
disregard voices, and the comings and goings of strangers. A skill developed
over time, the gradual failure to notice the things around you. You became a
sleeper moving though a dream, nothing shocking you because nothing was really
shocking; just a strange twist on a novel television plot. But sometimes you woke
up. Sometimes you noticed things because they were gone, the white noise turned
off, dead silence, an uncomfortable void begging to be filled, eager to suck
someone into its maw and make them the source of another’s white noise. And
sometimes, the silence foretold of things to come, the calm before the storm.

“Jasper, I told you to
come down here,” Rose Marie shouted from their shared landing, picking up where
she and Ellen left off that morning. “That means now, mister. Come on.” Ellen
heard footsteps on the stairs. “You been up there all afternoon and all
evening, too,” Rose Marie continued; what protest was offered, if any, Ellen
was unaware. “Now I want you to get washed up and get ready for bed, and that’s
final.”

She tuned them out again
as the door across the hall from her own slammed. What could Jasper possibly
have been doing on the rooftop all that time? she wondered. Was he the source
of the noise before it stopped?

The whistle on the kettle
let out a worrisome mewling that quickly built in volume and pitch. Ellen scooped
the teapot off the burner to silence it, and poured boiling water over a spoonful
of the dry, powdery leaves and herbs that was Serena’s special blend. She
retrieved Jack’s book from her bag and was about to curl up with it on the sofa
for the umpteenth time while the tea steeped when something else occurred to
her; something she had noticed and dismissed in her eagerness to get home, to
get herself inside and safely away from the world at large.

Where do you think
those wires go?
Jack’s
senseless question, a moment of dream without context that she dismissed as
meaningless.

Only now she knew!

Ellen took the book along
with her tea to the hallway, looking at the loosely woven rope of extension
cords wending their way up the switchback of stairs starting in the basement—she
had seen that when she came in—and proceeding straight up and out of sight. She
could see a thin slice of orange sunlight in the blackness at the top of the
stairs; someone had left the door to the roof open.

What had Jasper been doing
that he needed so many extension cords, and what was the connection to her dream?
Where do you think those wires go?

Behind her, the door to
her apartment was closed but not locked. Outside, a pair of derelicts paced the
gathering shadows.
White noise; someone else’s problem, not mine; forget it.

Ellen pushed open the
door at the top of the stairs and stepped out on the roof, the pebbly surface hard
against her bare feet. She followed the twist of yellow and orange electrical
cords towards the back edge of the building facing the gorge and the river far
below. Half a dozen tools lay where they were dropped, plugged in and ready to
resume work on Jasper’s project.

And what a project it
was.

Rose Marie boasted that
Jasper was clever with his hands. It seemed the kind of charitable remark a
grandmother would make, and Ellen never placed much stock in it. Apparently,
she should have.

Jasper’s project had an
almost organic appearance, the combined elements of an ultra-light aircraft
with parts that were the sole property of creatures born naturally to flight. A
thin skeleton of lightweight metal tubing connected great bat-like wings and a
long, streamlined tail. Canvas in need of stitching lay draped over the
skeletal metal like folds of skin, a fallen pterodactyl or a dead condor,
frozen in its moment of takeoff and left behind on the roof of an apartment
building to slowly decay. At the front of the beast was the sparse cockpit,
nothing more than a bicycle seat and a backrest set just ahead of the great
wings, a pair of foot pedals and hand levers—both cannibalized from a
bicycle—the only controls to speak of. Loose cables and bracing wires littered
the area around the motionless flyer like fallen gristle from a lifeless
creature gradually rotting down.

All around lay the
forgotten and discarded remnants of Jasper’s master creation. Ellen traced the
shape with her eyes, trying to see ahead to the finished work. She thought the
flyer would actually pump its wings when it was done, relying not upon a
manmade propeller or jet engine, but the seemingly simple and bewilderingly
complex method of aerodynamics employed by birds for millions of years. She
also felt certain that it would work. This thing would fly, anywhere, any
distance, the sky’s the limit. She was as certain of it as she was of Jack
Lantirn and the Sanity’s Edge Saloon. It had the detailed craftsmanship of a
dreamer lost to his cause; an elegance, even in its unfinished state, that
Jack’s writing had; a quality driven by desperation and dreams and a strangely
undying belief the dreamer had in his own abilities.

Ellen placed the book down
upon the roof’s edge along with the cup of still-steaming tea, and turned her
attention to the flyer. Amidst the tools scattered pell-mell beside castoff
fragments of tubing, cable, wire and canvas, Ellen found a black magic marker.
Jasper used it for drawing lines upon the canvas, hash marks for cutting and
stitching. She walked back to the flyer’s tail where the narrow backbone of the
plane widened abruptly, both the broad flat tail and the vertical rudder
composed of splines webbed over by the dull canvas to resemble a fish’s tail.
It reminded Ellen of a
Yes
album cover, of childhood fantasy posters of
air whales and flying fish and Jules Verne-type crafts that resembled aquatic
animals more than machines.

Ellen wrote a single word
on the broad surface of the rudder with the magic maker:
DREAMLINE
.

She stepped back to
admire her handiwork, amused by the suggestion of a relationship that probably
did not exist.
Aren’t you the clever girl
. A powerful word, Dreamline
,
her general descriptor for all the drugs she once used, all the
psychoactive hallucinogens she took to escape this reality. She picked it up
from a song, though she couldn’t exactly remember who did it. The drugs were
like tickets, tickets out of reality, tickets aboard the Dreamline. And it was
on board the Dreamline that Ellen had first been transported to the Sanity’s
Edge Saloon.

And now she was ascribing
those characteristics to a troubled youth’s lunatic sculpture being built upon
the rooftop of her apartment building with pieces scavenged from a junkyard.

She tossed the marker back into the scatter of tools and
parts where it quickly disguised itself, just another lost detail in the sea.
Then she retrieved her tea and the book, carrying them to the wall of the
stair’s outbuilding and sitting down against the brick, still warm from the day’s
heat. She traded her gaze between the faded sunset that had dimmed to
mist-shrouded reds and purples, and the single word she had written on the tail
of Jasper’s flyer.

Dreamline.

Everything contradicted
itself: good and bad, rain and sun, mad and sane. Reality, it seemed, was
deliberately breaking down in front of her, mimicking her confusion, her
indecision.

Maybe you’re the one
breaking down. Maybe you’re projecting. What makes more sense: all of reality
breaking down around you, or you breaking down in a sea of normalcy?

Maybe Dr. Kohler was
right.

She took a drink of
Serena’s tea, savoring the taste as she opened the book to the part about
Jack’s and her first morning together when they shared each other’s company
over a breakfast of pancakes and hazelnut-flavored coffee. It was the summation
of their entire relationship: a pleasant interlude in the midst of overwhelming
chaos. She started reading, drinking Serena’s tea so it wouldn’t cool before she
finished it.

Half of the cup still
remained as sleep stole over her with the ease of night. The book slipped from
her hands, riffling closed upon the gravel roof as the day caught up to her,
and she surrendered, head leaning back against the still-warm bricks, eyes
slipping closed.
Only for a moment,
she thought.
Only a moment.

And then she was asleep.

*     *     *

Those same rooftop shadows
quietly disgorged Gusman Kreiger from the shallow folds in reality where he
hid. He emerged suddenly and quietly, a stir in the darkness that took shape in
the imagination and was actualized; a shuddering upon the dream plane rooted in
nightmares.

It was coming back to
him. The power. The worlds were drawing closer together, would pass in fact,
and soon. And when they did, someone who knew how, someone who knew the secret
way of dreamers, might cross the distance between them. He had done it once before
in that reality of so long ago. He could do it again.

Probably.

Unless this is all a lie
, an ominous voice in his head
thought.
Unless Jack is dead or insane, and Ellen Monroe abandoned to her
fate here in this godforsaken reality where even the dust is exhausted by its
own existence. And if that’s true, then your cart’s hitched to a dead horse
that you’re whipping and screaming at while it does nothing more useful than
gather flies. You might have been mistaken about the signs, Crazy Moses,
Mumbling Shepherd. Yes, you might have at that. And if you are mistaken, Goose
Man, if Jack really is dead or beyond helping sweet, little Ellen Monroe, then
you are doomed, supremely and absolutely fucked.

No! He wasn’t wrong! Jack had bested him, and if Jack could
beat him, Jack could beat the Nexus. And Jack would never forget Ellen, and he
would never abandon her. And so long as that was true, there was still a way
out. There had to be. There simply had to be.

He had seen the signs.

Kreiger crossed the roof
like wind in the desert, a silent wraith standing over Ellen, staring intently,
watching her eyes move and dart beneath closed lids.

She was dreaming.

“Don’t tell him I’m
here,” he whispered, brushing a stray lock of hair from her face. “Let’s keep that
secret a little bit longer.”

Her only response, a
sleepy moan; Kreiger took it as acquiescence. Lifting her half-empty mug, he sniffed
cautiously at the contents, twilight transforming it to an inky blackness, tealeaves
swirling faintly below the surface. He squinted, not liking what he saw. Things
were moving more quickly than expected, new players entering the arena. He was
not alone anymore; perhaps he never truly was.