The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (5 page)

“I’m Lucas,” he continued
evenly. “This is Marco.” Marco grinned at the mention of his name, showing a
mouth of dirty gums and a few ragged teeth clinging blackly to the diseased
flesh like tombstones in a forgotten graveyard. “Johnny.” He indicated a fat
man in layers of old sweat pants and sweatshirts. Johnny had been a stockbroker
before the crash. That was when Johnny lost everything he owned, and some
things he didn’t. Eventually, he found his way down here where he made a living
panhandling for pocket change and recovering half-smoked cigarette butts from
the gutter. He sometimes liked to wipe his ass with
The Wall Street Journal
,
and it always made him laugh when he did. His flesh hung heavily upon him in
sad sags of dough, he carried pouches under his yellowing eyes, and his face
was a roadmap of fine red highways. He gave Crazy Moses a half-hearted gesture
that might have been a wave, or simply a request for the waitress to bring him
his check.

After an empty moment of
silence, Lucas looked to the intruder and said, “You mentioned a couple others
what tried to escape with you.”

“Associates of mine, yes.
Relations of circumstance, their company an acquired taste, like fried octopus
or little children.”

“How’s that?” Lucas asked,
immediately regretting it. It was a mistake to get involved. Cho was right; they
should throw this guy out, and quick.

“A weakness of his,”
Crazy Moses answered, “one of many. He liked to indulge himself: sweets and
juju magic and occasionally pedophilia. Amazing the friends you make based on
circumstance and necessity.”

Crazy Moses had a way of peppering
his nonsense with intriguing tidbits, bait on a hook.

Marco passed Lucas a
bottle of wine the color of cherry Kool-Aid. He prudently wiped the top before
taking a swallow and passing it on to Johnny.

“So what happened to this
faggoty friend o’ yours?” Johnny asked because he liked to listen to people
talk, even when it was just nonsensical bullshit. His weakness was talk radio,
no matter the topic. Lucas supposed it made him feel connected, like he was
still a part of the human herd.

Fat chance.

Crazy Moses sighed,
looking into the sky as if the answers might be written in the scaly gray of
impending rain. “He went mad in the end; too many minds trapped in one brain.
Hazards of the trade. Anyway, he took a shine to a young woman, but she didn’t
reciprocate his affections.” Crazy Moses sighed unhappily. “He’s dead now.”

“Yeah?” Johnny asked.
“How’d that happen?”

“That young woman he took
such a shine to buried a gargoyle’s jawbone in the side of his skull.” Crazy
Moses shifted the staff in his hand, digging the end into the dirt as if he
meant to hold down the world with it. “He thought he could harness the spirit
of the Guardian. Instead, it burned him alive. Like I said, hazards of the
trade.”

“You’re so full o’ shit,”
said Cho.

Crazy Moses simply looked
up at him and smiled.

“Shut it, Matty.” Lucas
said. The four of them could probably take down a crazy motherfucker, but Crazy
Moses wasn’t crazy. He talked about a lot of crazy shit, but he wasn’t really crazy.
And that scared Lucas more than he liked to admit. Crazy Moses was playing a
game, and only he knew the rules. “What’s your name?”

“Goose Man,” the man they
called Crazy Moses said, “because I look after silly geese who have no idea how
important they really are.”

“Geethe ain’t thilly,”
Marco piped up, eyes dilated and hazy.

In his more introspective
and morbid moments, Lucas wondered which of his friends would pass on first:
Johnny, the aging alcoholic whose liver might outlive his heart, but probably not.
Or Marco, who could drop dead tomorrow and no one would be surprised. Cho
actually had a death wish, though he wouldn’t admit it; first one to piss off
the cops or the gangbangers, first one to start a fight. Lucas was fairly
certain Matty had AIDS, too, though again, he would never admit to it. Lucas
didn’t doubt that if he wasn’t beaten to death or killed robbing a convenience
store, Cho would fall sick some night and not wake up. Matty would make his own
death. The universe would see to Marco’s. Johnny was a coin-flip.

“Mah mother raithed
geethe,” Marco went on. “She thaid they thmart, thmart like a dog or a hoss.
They’re not thilly.”

The intruder who called himself
Goose Man nodded politely at the critique. “It was an expression; reality is
seldom conducive to literary perceptions. The fault lies with Jack because he
refuses to control this reality. I begged him to walk away, but he wouldn’t.
He’s running the show now. Look around you, gentleman, at the heaping mountains
of garbage and know one thing:
this is all … his … fault
. I would never
have made this, never diddled with painfully obvious metaphors and symbols,
self-serving, pompous and bleak. I would have gone straight to the top, to the
rawest, most pure world of dreams and shadows.” Then Goose Man thumped his
staff imperiously on the ground. “Instead, I’m reduced to guarding a woman who
can unlock the doorways between the dimensions and unzip space and time with
the ease of a horny seventeen-year-old skimming out of her jeans, but who is
completely unaware of herself. I was nearly a god. Now, like you, I’m simply a
guardian.”

“I’m thinking Cho’s
right, Goose Man,” Lucas said softly. “You’re full of shit.”

“Do you know what it is
to spend your entire life trying to find a place then spend the next twenty
lifetimes trying to escape it?” Goose Man gestured sharply. “Don’t answer that;
it was rhetorical. There’s no possible way you could know what I know; see what
I’ve seen. You can’t stay alive for two thousand years and not pick up a few
tricks. The last time I walked this Earth—well, one of the Earths, anyway—I was
a messiah. Now I’m nothing but a damn peeping tom, a voyeur, an impotent wretch
trapped outside the glass, looking in.”

“Got passed over for a
promotion once, too,” Johnny said, misunderstanding. “Went home, got
piss-drunk, and threw up. Called in sick the next three days straight. They
gave the job to some Cornell bitch ten years younger’n me so they could meet
quotas. An MBA doesn’t mean a damn thing. I was in the trenches. The job
shoulda been mine. ‘Stead, some bitch gets the job ‘cause I wasn’t born with tits,
an’ I’m supposed to feel guilty for that. Shit’s unfair.”

Goose Man only smiled, but
Lucas knew. This wasn’t about a corner office or stock options. Goose Man really
figured he was a
god
, maybe even
the
God. And the fact that he
was a bum in a junkyard really, really pissed him off.

“You been stalking that
girl from the bookstore,” Matty said with a sly look. “Hanging out on her fire
escape and staring at her while she sleeps. You’re just a perv.”

“I’m her protector, her
guardian
!”
Goose Man said, offended. “God’s a romantic and a caffeine junkie with a bad
sense of humor and no sense of fashion, so I’ve inherited the job from the
guardian I had killed.” He issued a brittle laugh that sounded only partially
sane. “But she’s the key, you understand. The one that opens every door and
every lock. That’s why I have to protect her. I wonder if he even knows I’m here.”

“Who?”

But Goose Man ignored him.
“I’ll bet he thinks he killed me. Probably has forgotten I even exist anymore.
But he hasn’t forgotten her.” Goose Man’s left hand tightened on the scrap of
paper held to his breast like a letter from a lost love, and almost to himself,
he murmured, “Oh no, he has definitely not forgotten her.”

“And you think she’s
gonna help you?” Lucas asked.

“No, definitely not. I
expect if she knew I was alive, she’d kill me herself. Put a screwdriver in my
throat or something. But she’s got the ticket to ride, gentlemen, and I have to
be ready the moment that whistle blows because when that train pulls out, I
intend to be hanging on like a June beetle stuck under the windshield wiper.”

Lucas shook his head. One
moment, coherent; the next, a babbling lunatic.

“No, she won’t save me,” Goose
Man went on. “But she’s my only means of salvation. I try to keep close to her,
keep her safe in this world so that she’ll be alive and well when Jack comes to
his senses and tries to rescue her. I’m sure he will; I just can’t tell when.
So there I am, day or night, rain or shine. I’m the goddamn postman. I watch
her when she works, when she eats, when she sleeps—”

“Seen her naked?” It was
Cho who asked.

“As a point of fact, yes,
but that’s unimportant. I’m above carnal impulses now. Until Jack saves her, I
have to save her from herself.”

“Great. You’re a liar and
a pervert.” Still Cho. “Can we get rid of this fucker?”

“Proof,” Goose Man
declared loudly. “That’s it, isn’t it? You need proof!”

Lucas tipped his head,
feeling hot, his skin starting to itch. It was time to end this. “Sure,
asshole. You think you’re the motherfuckin’ messiah, prove it. Make a miracle,
or we throw your ass out.”

Goose Man cocked his head
to one side. “What would you have me do? Wrestle the devil in a pigsty, feed
the masses with loaves and fishes, or maybe you have some gruesome notion about
poking your finger in the wounds. Well, it’s been a long time. The scars are
healed, the masses have grown fat, and Rome asserts the Devil is nothing more
than an allegorical symbol. So how do I prove to you that I am what I say?”

Marco thrust the bottle
at him. “We’re nearly out,” he grinned, stumps poking out mockingly.

Goose Man leaned his
staff against the body of an old Chrysler and accepted the bottle, frowning.
“Would it help if I told you the bottle was not half-empty, but half-full?”

“You heard the man,”
Lucas said. “Make a miracle, or get the fuck out.” It seemed as good a way as
any to end it.

Goose Man regarded the
bottle steadily then placed the paper he carried into his pocket for
safekeeping. “Bear in mind, gentleman, I’m a little rusty. The last person who
needed me to prove myself asked for far less, and served me twice as well as
you will.”

Then Goose Man passed the
bottle back, apparently satisfied. Marco took it and tipped it into his mouth,
a grin breaking across his face like he had just heard a good joke—
a priest,
a nun, and a plumber walk into a bar … —
before spraying the contents out on
the dirt. “Whadda fuck?”

Cho snatched the bottle
from him, shaking it violently. What stuck to the edges of the glass was clear;
not the dark, artificial red of cheap wine, but clear as glass, clear as…

“Water! It’s fuckin’ water!
The fucker scammed our wine!” Cho was shaking the bottle in Goose Man’s face,
screaming at the top of his lungs. “What the hell’d you do with it?”

Lucas felt lightheaded.
He didn’t want to panhandle, or hang out behind the restaurants and wait on the
Hefty sacks of food, half-eaten but still edible. He wanted to sleep. He wanted
to forget. Forget Goose Man, forget the morning, forget the half-bottle of wine
that was now only water. Forget everything.

“You had wine. Now you
have water,” Goose Man said with forced patience, the tone of a man explaining
complicated matters to small and unruly children. “It may not be what you
wanted or expected, but that’s life. I gave you magic. That’s all you asked
for.”

Then everything went to hell.

Matty smashed the bottle against Goose Man’s head, shards
spraying the fender of the old Chrysler, and Marco dove at him, fists flailing.
Then Matty and Johnny pulled Goose Man down from his throne, pummeling him.

And Goose Man did nothing. He simply allowed it to happen, as
if he expected it, even
wanted
it.

Lucas stepped forward and kicked Goose Man, limbs wooden and
out of his control. A half-hearted kick at first, the second was more forceful.
And suddenly, without knowing why, Lucas was savagely kicking the one they called
Goose Man and Crazy Moses. And Lucas was screaming. And the other three were
screaming. He had no idea why: why they were screaming, or why they were
howling like animals, or even why they felt compelled to beat the man until he
ceased to move, but only lay there like an empty sack of rags that they were
kicking, some kind of gruesome child’s game gone horribly wrong.

For his part, Gusman
Kreiger—like Goose Man, just another false name in a long list employed down
through the centuries—thought the wine a poor choice in retrospect. And as the
darkness swept over him, his final thought:
Next time someone demands a
miracle, simply walk on water; you can never go wrong with a classic
.

Dabble watched Ellen Monroe all morning. He liked the way she blinked, as
if every moment was her first, a refugee dragged suddenly into the full
brightness of day, startled and hesitant. She was concentrating: where she was,
what she was doing, what she was saying. And when she stopped concentrating,
when she disconnected herself, let herself loose in the wonderland of her own
imagination, she changed. Her every move became as graceful as a bird in the
air, the effortless glide of a fish through water.

She was unaware of his observations, of course; Nicholas
Dabble was no voyeur. He shelved books, casting only occasional glances in her
direction. Or he tallied receipts from the day before, transactions marked down
in an old-style ledger, lifting his gaze from the green lines to see what she
was doing or how she was acting. Sometimes he would pretend to stare out the
front window idly, all the while watching her reflection as she moved around
the store in a kind of quiet detachment. He was not unmindful of the fact that
she was acting differently today; a little different from yesterday; even more
different from the day before. Ellen was getting worse. And everything she did,
every task she put herself to, was a desperate and ill-conceived endeavor at
normalcy that she simply could not carry off.

At least, not well enough to fool him.

He would have lamented her case, would have felt that
uncommon—so very uncommon—twinge in his heart at her gradual decline, were it
not for one very important nuisance of a detail. A detail he could neither refute
for its sheer tangibility, nor explain. And it was that detail that stuck in
his craw, rubbing at his brain the way a piece of grit rubs at the soft tissue
of an oyster.

The book.

He could have dismissed all of it, Ellen included, save for
the book. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her. She had a good heart and a pure
soul. And as for her past, well, a part of him relished its dark side, lusted
after that seamy nature of mankind housed in her flesh, ever-present in her
mind. But an equal part of him deified the gentle nature of her soul. To come
through so much, and still believe in goodness and love and the gentle side of
human nature was a wonder.

Fools were remarkably
interesting.

That was why he took her
into his shop, took her under his wing. She worked hard and tried to be
helpful, but he honestly did not need an assistant. Never had, never would. But
while he did not need Ellen Monroe, he liked having her around. And for that
simple reason and no other, he kept her there. And sometimes, all he did was
watch her. Watch her… and wonder.

Now he had a clue to the
riddle that was Ellen Monroe, only the clue made no sense, and that hardly made
it a clue at all. Just another riddle.

Nicholas Dabble liked a
riddle only so long as he had the answer. Without it, a riddle was a mystery,
something he cared little for. Messy, hard to solve, the answers frequently
unpleasant. No closure on the last page, no rambling confession by an
unconvincing villain while an incompetent narrator served up spoonfuls of clues
to the reader, ensuring the inevitable restoration of normalcy. Normalcy was a
lie. Normal was what people thought existed when they closed their eyes, fell
asleep at the wheel, saw nothing, knew nothing. Life was not normal, not some
pocket watch you could wind up and read the hour of the day as the minutes
rhythmically ticked away. Existence was an ugly, organic creature whose mind
could not be fathomed simply by its appearance, a capricious monkey just as
likely to bite you as nuzzle your hand. To get answers, you needed an abundance
of both time and information, which Nicholas Dabble had.

But he had no answers to
Ellen Monroe. No answers to the book she carried,
The Sanity’s Edge Saloon
.

And that troubled him.

Where had it come from?
How had it fallen into her hands? And what did he actually know about her?
Once, he would have thought everything. He saw her fall into the predictable
routines of someone in her situation, and he followed her through these
routines with a careful but not overly curious eye.

And then the book showed
up, and Ellen was the one who found it, and Ellen was the one who read it, and
Ellen was the one who seemed to understand it, if only subconsciously. It was
enough to disjoint his carefully controlled world, a state of flux he could
neither fix nor abide, but which would go on and on and on. She had upset his
equilibrium.

But in spite of that, he
truly liked her.

“Ellen, when you have a
moment?”

“Okay,” she said, leaving
a box of bestsellers on the floor beside the turning rack where he displayed
them, the literary equivalent of candy at the checkout line. Nicholas Dabble
was all about giving people what they wanted, whether it was good for them or
not. “But I need to leave soon.”

“Tuesday.” He nodded. “I
haven’t forgotten.” Dr. Kohler, every Tuesday and Friday. Ellen hated her
twice-weekly sessions; hated more being late, being scolded, risking her
freedom. So she pretended otherwise. Such a delicious conundrum.

Dabble knew a thing or
two about Dr. Kohler, as well. The good doctor harbored secrets he told to no
one, not even himself. But Dabble was a disciple of human nature. He could
fathom most men with a glance, learn their most intimate secrets with a few
well-placed remarks about the weather or the Indian’s chances of a pennant. And
in the grand scheme of the universe, Dr. Kohler was essentially harmless,
though like any insect, the closer you brought the microscope, the more
frightening he became. But Dabble dealt with larger scales, greater distances
that brought people like Kohler into perspective; a minnow in the ocean. Well,
maybe more like a small leech or a fluke. Yes, definitely more like a fluke.
No, what worried Nicholas Dabble about Dr. Kohler was that he was Ellen
Monroe’s psychiatrist, and psychiatrists liked mysteries no more than he did.
Only where he was interested in resolving the mystery and leaving the vessel of
that conundrum (i.e., Ellen Monroe) intact, Kohler was more interested in
dissecting Ellen’s mind, extracting the unusual pieces, and discarding them. He
would make her scrub her own dreams with Borax and a wire brush until they were
stripped raw of everything; until they sparkled like polished bone. Ellen’s
soul would die and her heart would shrivel, and Kohler would congratulate himself
on saving another piece of walking meat with a sanitized mind and an addiction
to prescription drugs, ever pursuing the elusive state of normalcy. If Kohler
succeeded, the mystery that was Ellen Monroe, the secret she guarded, would be
lost, even to her. And
The Sanity’s Edge Saloon
would be lost as well.

He couldn’t allow that.

But could he plumb those
secrets before they fell victim to Kohler’s weed-whacker methodology? The good
doctor’s idea of delicate ministrations involved a mallet and a meat cleaver:
Delicate
work.
Whack!
Got to be careful where to cut
. Shawk!
Mustn’t hurt
her too much.
Wham!

He held Dr. Kohler in no
greater disdain than he did most people.

Simply put, he hated the
man.

“Do you still happen to
have that book with you?” he asked. “The one we can’t seem to find anything out
about?” As if she needed reminding.

Ellen nodded and turned
back towards the counter, her bag stowed below the register, the book tucked
safely towards the bottom. Dabble knew this. He knew a great many things about
her. He knew for instance that Ellen always carried the book just as a dying
man carries a Bible. And he knew that she dressed differently on Tuesdays and
Fridays; days when she had her sessions with Dr. Kohler. It was for the same
reason that she hated to be late to her appointments. But was it a conscious
act of deception? Dabble knew a great many things about Ellen Monroe, but not
everything, and that made him curious. And while frustrating, curiosity was a
powerful and addictive drug.

Ellen returned with the
book, the cover’s gloss already dulled, flakes of ink gone from the spine
streaked white with cracks. The book did not even sit flat anymore, the pages
fanning slightly.
How many times had she read and reread it?
In another
month, this once-new book wouldn’t fetch a quarter at a church lawn social.
What did she hope to find in its pages?

What do you hope to
find, Old Nick?
he
chided softly.

He took the book from her
carefully, slowly, the way a person might take something precious from the
hands of a too-small child, hoping against reason that it could be rescued.

Ellen surrendered the
book, releasing a little too slowly, reflexively compelled to hold on, to curl
back and keep the book safe. But she finally relented, trusting him.

It would be her undoing; sometimes
there simply wasn’t a good side, no matter how hard you looked.

Nicholas Dabble gently
opened the book to the inside cover, moving the pages carefully, as if working
with some two thousand-year-old text written on papyrus, and not a cheap paperback
with a small bead of glue bubbled from beneath the spine and a low-grade paper
that was designed not to last. The inside cover was naked and white, empty. He
turned a slew of blank pages, pages he would have looked to for copyright
dates, the ISBN, the publisher’s disclaimer, address, and even acknowledgements
of other works borrowed and used with permission; all the gibberish and
legalese that finds its way into a book’s first few pages and is promptly
ignored by everyone.

Everyone but him.

Only there was nothing
there to find, the pages blank as if cut and placed into the book without the
typesetter realizing that they were empty. A fluke. An oversight.
A mystery.

His confidence shriveled
as he turned another empty page, and was confronted by the title: