The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (32 page)

“You forget yourself, Nicky,” Serena remarked coolly. “Arnold may have questions that I can answer, should I choose, but it was you who tried to
hide Ellen from him. And it is you who will be held accountable. Make no
mistake; it is you standing on the gallows this day.”

“You know what he will do with her,” Dabble said, turning and
moving a step away. “She upsets his order, his
precious universal harmony
—

“Be careful the tone you use in that regard, Nicholas,”
Serena warned.

“—And he has only one means of restoring that balance. You
know as well as I, he is an unimaginative animal, single-minded of purpose and
brutal in execution. And you also know what the impact will be on this world if
he is allowed to do this.”

And there is that, she thought. If Arnold does what is in his
nature to do, he will not restore the harmony to the universe as planned.
Instead, it will be shaken so savagely as to be unrecognizable. His efforts to
rectify the situation would rebound on him a thousand-fold and end in
catastrophe.

“You are correct that Arnold’s methods are too …
indelicate
for this situation,” she conceded. “In trying
to fix things, he would only make them worse by such a degree as to make all
that has gone before seem trivial. This situation requires subtlety, a trait
not in Arnold’s nature.”

But subtlety was Serena’s
handmaiden, and Nicholas knew that. Serena hated him just then, not for what he
did, but for being right about doing it, about manipulating them all into this
situation; she hated being bested in her own arena. But if she could not hold
Arnold Prosser to blame for doing what was in his nature to do, she could
hardly blame Nicholas Dabble for the same. He was a manipulator and a conniver,
a keeper and user of secrets, but he was true to himself.

Serena let out an
exhausted sigh. “It seems that we are at odds with one another, and only disaster
will come of it. We should meet to discuss this, all three of us, before it
gets completely out of hand.”

Nicholas looked
surprised; this was not the outcome he had been hoping for.
Good
, she
thought. If he imagined he could get away with causing all of this then
slipping quietly back into the shadows, he was very much mistaken.
You put
your hand in this, Nicky,
she thought.
Either gnaw it off, or stay for
the duration.
“You’ll have to make yourself available. I’ll let you know
when.”

“And Ellen?”

“Leave that to me,” she
said reproachfully. “You’ve done quite enough already.”

Serena turned away,
already gathering the threads in her mind, putting them straight, weaving the pattern.
It had been there all along; it was simply a matter of putting the pieces in
their proper place … before time ran out.

Arnold Prosser spent the morning retracing his steps, a tack unfamiliar
to him. As a rule, he never visited anyone or anything more than once. But
something was amiss. Secrets were being kept from him.

And for that, there would be an accounting.

Traveling to Benwil’s
Junkyard, he wandered the car body mausoleums and trash pile barrows:
headstones and markers, testaments to things gone, a useful life exhausted, a
shell cast aside, forgotten and buried. What was of use had been taken away, what
remained behind suitable only for compost.

But the derelict’s refuge
offered nothing. He was not surprised; as a rule, you can’t take from the dead.
But the place did have a most peculiar smell, one he was starting to recognize.
It was there beneath the garbage and the stink of rusted metal that set one’s
teeth on edge and reminded the tongue of old pennies. It was the smell of
something that did not belong. Not something touched with tea and peppermint
and jasmine; he knew where that came from now, even if he wasn’t sure why. Nor
was it something tainted with dust and sulfur; again, he knew but not why. No,
this was something entirely different, something clean and out of place. It was
the same smell he caught back where Matty and Marco were laid to rest, the
former with his eyes scooped out.

What was it about that
place? That old stick, Dabble, he knew what was going on. Serena, too, but it
was her prerogative to know things, after all—and change them too, if she saw
fit.

But not Dabble. He was
meddling where he didn’t belong, and now death was involved. Four derelicts
already fading from the memory of a world that barely knew them and didn’t care
anyway, and Freddy—the world not knowing was all that kept his memory safe. But
something else was involved, tangling the threads, muddying up the waters,
pissing in the soup. He had to find out what, and lay the matter to rest.

He couldn’t go back to Dabble
now. Serena neither. Both were hiding secrets, and nothing would be learned for
pressing. Now if
he
knew, that would be something he could bargain with.
But until then, he was pissing in the wind, and telling himself it was raining.

That left the apartment
complex—or something from there, to be more precise. Its smell tainted the
derelicts and Serena’s coffee shop and Dabble’s little bookstore; subtly
different each time, but always there. It was even on Frederick Kohler, caught
in the grooves of his fingertips.

Or was that the
connection?

“What was getting’ you
off, Freddy?” he wondered, sidling down the alley where Matty and Marco were
found. There was a glimmer of something, something out of place, and it was
strong here, very strong. This was the key, an epicenter radiating shockwaves
outward, shaking Serena and Dabble until they saw fit to lie to him. Add that to
four derelicts laid out alongside the late Dr. Kohler—who was neither as good nor
as noble as he pretended to be—and what you had was something that didn’t
belong.

Freddy didn’t fit with
all this, but somehow he’d been involved anyway. And his involvement got him
killed?
What were you thinking of when you blew a pipe in your brain,
Freddy?

He threw the hauler into park and killed the engine before climbing
down from the cab and walking around to the back. He grabbed the body of the
late Dr. Frederick Kohler from inside—newly liberated from the morgue; they
could have it back when he was done—and pulled it forward by its feet. He
looked long and hard at Kohler’s face, the muscles still rigid with death, face
a rictus of pain, anger and unassuaged guilt. Two more days and the muscle
tissue would break down in earnest, the rigor mortis would loosen, and his
features would go slack; Freddy would finally appear to be at peace with the
world and his maker.

Death was not entirely
without its mercies.

Placing his thumbs below
the corpse’s eyes, Arnold dragged the lids down and peered closely. The
aneurysm was both sudden and severe; thickened blood vessels fractured the
whites, a dim redness clouding the pupils.

“Lucky ya didn’t blow yer
head up, Freddy,” he said, searching the doctor’s eyes for that last bit of
sight, the final imprint upon the nerves before his system shut down, its
message unseen, unacknowledged, unknown. Necromancers talked about it. Gypsies,
too. Sometimes they got lucky, guessed right.

Arnold Prosser was neither a gypsy nor a necromancer. He was
the Garbageman. He never guessed. And he always got it right.

“What were you gettin’ your peckah all worked up for, Freddy,
huh?” Prosser asked the dead body. “Not daydreamin’ of ‘er. Too long ago, too
long forgotten. There’s something else what’s in there, somethin’ what ‘wakened
Cassie’s ghost for ya, I’m bettin’. Come on diddler, what’re you hiding back in
there?”

He turned the face in his
hands, trying to catch the image in the right light, to see into Kohler’s eyes
and down the road of his soul. He stared deeper, and seconds stretched away
into minutes. Then
hours
. The sun climbed and the shadows shortened. The
metal of the hauler warmed then turned hot, and sweat dripped from Arnold
Prosser’s face, neck, and head, long stains darkening his back and chest. But
all he saw for his efforts, all he could determine from Kohler’s lifeless eyes,
was a skinny strip of a girl or a young woman. He saw her longish hair, the
curve of her back, the line of her neck. Sad eyes looked at him from within
Kohler’s dead orbs, but that was all. The image was fading, and Prosser could
make no sense of it; none whatsoever.

Grabbing the corpse by
the ankles, he flipped it head over heels into the hauler. “Miserable fucker, ya
got nothin’ ta tell. Yer whole goddamn life could be written on a fuckin’ fortune
cookie slip. Might as well ‘ave died when you was ten. Ya ain’t changed a lick
since.” He snatched the lever and sent the lid of the hauler grinding down with
a loud, hydraulic whine. “Fuckin’ useless.”

Prosser stamped towards
the hauler’s cab, angry with the corpse, angrier still with himself. Someone
was having a lark at his expense. He wasn’t sure whom, but he was sure of one
thing; Dabble knew. Serena, too. Serena he could forgive—he always had, and he
always would—but Dabble would give him answers. The stupid prig might not think
so, might think himself safe in his little castle of paper and brick, but he
was wrong. Dead fucking wrong!

Prosser climbed into the
cab and slammed the door, the hauler coming to life with a loud, disconcerting
roar. It was time he paid a serious visit to Nicholas Dabble. Time he showed
the miserable fuck what was what. No more pissing around. Time to give the devil
his due, so to speak.

“Fuck with me, will ya? I
don’t think so. I got some questions that you’re gonna answer if I ‘ave to
reach down your scrawny neck and tear ‘em out by the roots. You don’t screw
with me, Dabble.” He gunned the engine, the hauler snarling and belching thick
clots of oily smoke. “You don’t … screw … with … ME!” each word punctuated with
an angry snarl of the machine’s engines, a sound like grinders rending bone and
tissue into paste. The sound made Arnold smile, a wicked grin that would dry
the courage from a hero’s heart like rain upon the desert, and he started
forward into the road, a perfunctory check to the left for traffic before
pulling out.

And what he saw caused
the smile to fall from his face, jaw dropping, eyes wide. The hauler lurched suddenly,
the engine choking and going dead.

He’d stalled it!
It was indeed a morning of firsts
for the universe.

Arnold Prosser sat
stupefied, his truck dead upon the sidewalk, dashboard alight with red
warnings, bumper leaning precariously into traffic.

Someone honked at him,
but he failed to notice.

Another car skirted his
front, the driver giving him the finger. He failed to notice that as well.

He opened the door of the
hauler and climbed out, forgetting even to set the brake. He could not get his
head past what he was seeing.

Down the sidewalk, not
thirty feet away, was the same strip of a girl he had seen burned into Freddy’s
eyes, the one that sent Freddy across the void and smelled of bookstores and
coffee shops and inexplicably dead derelicts.

And he had no idea who
she was!

*     *     *

Ellen Monroe walked out the front door of her apartment
building, hurrying to get back from lunch. Mr. Dabble had been acting peculiar
today—more so than usual. She thought he might need her; not for work or for
any reason she could exactly put a finger on. But because he had always been
there for her, offered her a job when she needed one, no questions asked or
judgments rendered, she thought it only right that she be there for him.

Ironically, if Ellen Monroe
did not return to the bookstore that afternoon—if she had never come at
all—Nicholas Dabble’s life would have been substantially improved. But she had
no way of knowing.

“Excuse me, miss?”

A stocky bald man in
coveralls and work-boots clopped towards her, body drenched in sweat, the set
of his mouth turning his expression from open astonishment to outright anger.
Behind him, unnoticed, an empty garbage truck slowly rolled out across the
sidewalk and into the street.

Ellen felt an edge of
fear creeping over her, a flush rising in her cheeks, her hastily eaten lunch
curdling in her stomach.

“Yeah, you!” the man
barked. “I need a word with you.”

“I … I have to get to
work,” was all the excuse she could come up with. The man looked too clear-eyed
to be high, and sounded too coherent to be retarded. But he might well be
insane: senses needle-sharp, perspective twisted, his world a reality viewed
through carnival glass and funhouse mirrors. She had met one or two in her lifetime—at
least, she thought she had—and wasn’t eager to go back there.

Of course, there was
always the chance that this guy with the sweat-soaked coveralls and the stink
of garbage preceding him was just an asshole wondering if she would give him a hand
job for twenty bucks.

Not waiting to find out, she
turned to go.

He was beside her at
once, hand clamping around her arm just above the elbow and spinning her about
to face him. Her lower arm went instantly cold, the pins-and-needles sensation
of a deadened limb, and she was almost overcome with his smell: body odor, raw
garbage, stinking breath as he pushed himself close to her. Around her, people
passed by in a mindless stream, giving them space, maintaining a distance that
would prevent involvement.

“Didn’t you ‘ear me? I
said I needed to talk ta you.” He pulled her close, his eyes dark and piggish,
course hair pushing from beneath his collar and sleeves. When he jerked her arm,
she nearly stumbled; no more than a flick of his wrist, but it felt like being
caught in the gears of a machine, absolute and merciless. He leaned close,
nostrils flaring. “I can smell ‘im on you!” he said accusingly. “And ‘er, too!
I can smell ‘em all!”

She was only shaking her
head, unsure what kind of answer he expected. His remarks were insensible,
dangerously and unpredictably insane. “I … I don’t know … what—”

“Who the hell are you?”
he demanded, staring into her eyes.

Ellen felt a part of her
stiffen like iron. Distantly, she thought of something, something she had witnessed
and read about time and again in Jack’s book while she stared into the man’s
eyes, frightening and crazy and deep as midnight. She remembered Oversight and
how she struck down the Dust Eater, blinding him in one eye. If she did the
same, it might distract the man long enough to get free of him and run, that
was all—

“Speak up girl,” he said,
shaking her, holding her arm as though she was a five-year-old caught pinching
candy in a drugstore. “How’d you get ‘ere? Did you cross the sand, or swim the
sea? Eh? Tell me!”

She drew strength from her
memories of the woman from the Wasteland, beautiful and deadly. It was this
that gave her the will to pull free from the queer little man with his bald
head and his too-dark eyes that were confused and angry and …

…
frightened!

She returned his glare,
uncertain why the sight of her should make him crazy, but not caring either.
She took a step back, her reply—the only thing that came to mind—was like a
thin layer of ice. “You smell. And your truck just rolled into the street.”

It was true; the hauler
was now quietly resting in the middle of the road, blocking traffic in both
lanes. Horns were honking. People stepped from their cars. Some pointed at the
truck. A few pointed at him.

Then she simply walked away, and did not look back. She
arrived at
Dabble’s Books
a few minutes later and would gladly have put
the matter behind her forever.

Fate, however, had something different in mind.