The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (53 page)

You can’t always find
your way home, but at least you can find your way back.

Ellen carefully
wrapped the book and compass back up in he crisp brown paper, and tucked it
into the back of her jeans. Then she climbed out of the booth, leaving the Edge
of Madness Café behind.

*     *     *

Chin resting upon her
arm, Ellen stared out the back window of the pickup. They had not yet left the
curb, and already she was feeling miles away from this place.
Was it really
this simple? Could they just drive away?
The last time they tried to leave,
it nearly cost them their lives. And now they were simply driving away.

Behind them, Kreiger stood with his back to the edge, the
worn-down heels of his boots inches from the void. The Cast Out—only that
wasn’t really right anymore was it—had abandoned his cook’s apron, somewhere
finding a long, ash-and-dust-colored coat instead. The same color seemed to
have infected his shirt and pants, as if he had formed himself from the very
Wasteland itself like some kind of elemental spirit, an avatar of dust and bone
and death. His hair hung in lank strings of gray and cotton-white, and his eyes
bored down upon her, one as blue as the distant, empty sky, the other as green
as a cursed emerald from a Middle Eastern fairytale. He was smiling, hands
clasped behind his back, watching them leave.

Jack turned to her, his hand on the gearshift. “Is there
anything we’ve forgotten?”

“Probably,” she answered, unable to look away from the crazed
wizard behind them, wondering why seeing him standing there like that should
seem familiar. Wondering what it was he had given her, these strange tokens or
totems or bits of his mad mojo, and what he had meant by what he said. His face
revealed nothing: no secrets, no lies. Nothing. He was unreadable. “But maybe
it’s for the best.”

Jack leaned over and kissed her gently on the temple. She turned
to him, and they kissed. “We’ll be okay,” he said, and Ellen believed him.

She continued to stare out the back window as Jack started
driving down the long, endless road, watching the signs turn illegible with
distance. When they disappeared, all she was left with was the side-wall of the
garage and its sun-faded advertisements, painted there in the hopes that
passersby along the road—of which there were none; never had been, never would
be—might read them. An ad for Osiris Coffee featuring a large blue-black scarab
on a bright orange sun. Another sign, something dredged from the fifties and
designed for the tourists vacationing in their American-built cars, showed a
smiling cartoon sun shining down upon a quaint New England beach resort,
black-lined letters asked:
Do you know the way to Shell Beach?

She did not.

Below the sign, just around the corner of the garage from the
antique gas pump, sat a worn statue of a three-headed dog, one head looking
towards her, the other two looking to the left and the right. She did not know
what this meant either. And still sitting in the sand across the street from
the diner was the dream flyer, the one she had used to travel back across the
river and the empty chasm of clouds and nothingness, the night-black sea of eternity.
It was all growing smaller, growing more distant, fading.

Ellen watched out the back window until the Edge of Madness
Café was reduced to a shady speck in the distance, a tiny mote that might
easily be nothing more than sun spots in her eyes, a mirage created by the
heat.

Then, finally, it was gone.

Only then did she realize she was crying.

*     *     *

Gusman Kreiger, leader of the Tribe of Dust, the last of the
Cast Outs and the first to ever force his way back into the Nexus, watched the
red truck as it pulled away and started off down the road towards distant realities
he did not know. He had an almost overwhelming urge to raise a hand in goodbye,
but suppressed it by gripping his hands tightly behind his back. He waited
until they were too far away to see his face, to see his lips move and wonder
what he said.

“Goodbye, Jack. Under other circumstances, we could have been
friends.”

But of course, that reality and this one were dozens of lines
apart, and would not be recognizable except by the most adept. He himself could
have seen it, of course. Jack? Maybe. Anyone else? Certainly not.

And as Jack left, the door closed behind him. And the way was
forgotten.

It was almost done.

Gusman Kreiger remained where he was, feeling the edge just
behind his back, tucked up against the bottoms of his boot heels, beckoning.

Not yet. No, not yet.
Like Jack, he had no reason to
take the last step—
or was it the first step?
—in that direction just
now.

Like Jack
. How delicious was that comparison.

When he was sure the truck was too far away to see, too far
away to want to come back, he turned his gaze to the strange amalgam of
cinderblocks, neon lights and chrome trim. And like a dream, the Edge of
Madness Café faded and disappeared, taking everything with it. Only the single,
needle-straight tower remained. The focal lens. The Nexus. It was eternal; its
shape might alter, but it would never simply be dismissed. As for everything
else, it was gone. Even the roadway Jack and Ellen had left on. There was only
barren sand as far as the eye could see, an endless expanse of bone-white
desert below an endless blue sky.

And the dream flyer. Kreiger kept that. You never know when a
good dream flyer might come in handy.

But everything else he wiped away. It was time to start
afresh. No more preconceptions. It was what stifled the artists who had been
trouping here for centuries, one after another, each one taught the other’s
mistakes so that he could repeat them to his own successor. A long line of
cosmic errors and paralytic thinking that culminated in trials and tests and
tickets for what was never meant to be withheld save by the person who thought
themselves unworthy of its blessings. Jack had broken all of that apart,
revealed what had been forgotten so long ago that even Kreiger himself had
succumbed to the amnesia, selective loss of detail, the blindness of distant
time. Algernon was an idiot; the only thing the myopic imbecile had actually
done right was to find Jack Lantirn. Kreiger himself had similarly been a fool;
the only thing he had done right was to push Jack to the very edge of reason,
forcing him to the limits of his own mind.

Once there, Jack had finally realized the truth: there were
no limits save those he imposed upon himself. And so he broke free.

And now they were all free. Free to start over. Free to start
again.

Behind him, something clawed its way up from below the edge
of reason, pulling itself hand over hand into the solidity of new reality. When
it gained the plateau, it straightened, standing nearly half again as tall as
the magician, something resembling a demon of legend, Icelandic mythology,
stout and powerful and horrific. Huge horns sprang from its forehead, thick as
a rhino’s tusk, and flanked by a smaller, sleeker pair that curled up behind them.
Its mouth was a gaping maw of thick teeth and enormous fangs, its brow a ledge
that hid its blackened eyes beneath a permanent scowl. Its hands were large and
clawed. Its feet and legs resembled the base of two trees that had quickly
tangled together into a powerful knot, muscles like boulders, sinews like steel
cables. Coated from head to toe in a coarse, dark hair that spared only its
enormous genitalia and blackened penis, it leaned towards the magician,
lowering its head until its gaze was level with him, hot breath snuffling in
and out.

“I was wondering when you would show up,” Kreiger remarked,
not bothering to look at the horror vomited up from the chaos beyond the edge
of reason and sanity. He knew what the creature was, and he was not afraid.

What did the Caretaker have to fear from the Guardian?

At Kreiger’s feet, a small scarab, blue-black as the
night-dark sea, skittered across the Wasteland sand. He saw it and nodded,
pleased.

“I think this time I will call myself Ozymandius.”

*     *     *

Ellen tried to stay awake as they drove down the endless
ribbon of sun-baked asphalt. But it went without saying that the scenery did
not change; infinite plains of gray-white dust the color of old bones and milky
clay. The truck’s radio sounded old, the reception weak and a little scratchy,
as if they were just on the fringe of the station’s range. She liked the songs
well enough, a pleasant mix that she thought she recognized from Jack’s
collection, songs from his jukebox, songs they had listened to endlessly over
the last few days. She listened to them as the truck hummed along the strip of
dark gray towards the horizon, lulled by the gentle sound, the cool flutter of
scentless air through the open windows that cooled her faced and knocked and
tossed strands of hair about her head.

Her hand played with the wind, riding it up and down with
gentle shifts of her fingers like the rudders on a plane, or the tail of a
dream flyer.

They spoke idly at first, but there was no common ground, or
too much of it. Ellen could not ask Jack where they were going. She understood
that she would find that out in due time, and nothing would come from wondering
before it was done. Eventually, conversation lapsed into silence, ever-longer
gaps in their remarks that stretched out into forever like the highway.

The truck’s bench seat proved remarkably comfortable, much to
her surprise; well broken in, the vinyl polished smooth by time and wear,
yielding and kind. And the sun warmed her through the glass, making it hard to
stay focused, to keep her eyes open.

Ellen tried to stay awake. But like a child trying to stay up
late, the more she tried, the more she found her eyes drifting shut, her chin
drooping down to her chest, her head lolling to one side and the relative
comfort of the seatback.

Somewhere in the vast expanse of limitless possibilities
separating madness and reality, Ellen Monroe drifted off into her own dream
plane.

The truck waited on the roadside ahead, the air smelling of
hot metal and baking rubber thick with diesel. She didn’t run up to it. She
wasn’t in a hurry. She’d been walking a long time; a little longer wouldn’t
make a difference.

Coming up to the cab past the long trailer of pale aluminum
skin, she found the passenger door already open. Inside, a man in a plaid,
short-sleeve shirt and a mesh-back ball cap with an oil company logo looked
down at her. “You need a lift?”

Ellen looked back, sunglasses hiding her eyes. The sun was
bright, and staring into the dark cab was like looking into a cave. But she
could see him well enough to know what she needed to know: the gray hair
trimmed close to hide the baldness, the open expression, the eyes blue and
squinted down against years of glare. The only thing hidden behind his gaze was
the same sad secrets that everyone hid away, so afraid they might come to light
that they stared like timid woodland creatures and begged you to accept them at
face value, and to please not look any deeper.

Whatever. He wasn’t a threat.

Besides, she carried a knife on the inside of her right boot
in case she was wrong. She’d nicknamed it Nail. “I’m trying to get to the
ocean.”

An amused smile pulled at the man’s face. “The ocean, huh?
What’s at the ocean?”

“Something not the desert.”

He offered a faint chuckle. “Fair enough.
Doing a long haul to City of Industry. Climb in. Name’s Lyle.”

She didn’t offer her name in return, but she did climb into
the cab, dropping her duffle bag between her feet. It wasn’t really that heavy
anymore. Like any journey, you lost things on the way. All that was left was a
few clothes that smelled of long days on the road, a strange compass she didn’t
know how to use, and three books: one she had read over and over until the
paper started to wear and the spine to crack, another she had never read but
which she knew as if its tale was her own, and a third she refused to read,
ever
.
She also carried a small tin on a string around her neck, the kind that
peppermints came in. It was rubber-banded shut to keep the contents from
spilling: a fine powdery dust as white as bleached bones.

She’d lost everything else, but these things she managed to
keep.

The driver dropped the vehicle into gear and rolled back out
onto the empty highway after a quick look in the mirror. He took a moment to
get the truck back up to speed, secreting glances as he shifted gears. She
knew. First he looked at her shape, a little too thin from the road, but all
right to look at. Then the sunburn on her arms and face, the way her eyes moved
away from his gaze. Then he looked a little closer, catching sight of the pale
lines on her hands, inside her wrist, the thin white scars. Maybe too close.
Then he would look away, the fiction in his head already writing itself: what
she was, what he could be, and maybe … maybe …

She knew. She was a world-class escape artist. She knew all
too well.

“You look like you been hiking a long time,” Lyle said, a
desperate effort to start a conversation she refused to pursue.

“Yes.” She noticed he didn’t ask her name. Maybe he liked to
keep things anonymous; plausible deniability of the soul. Or maybe he was
regretting having stopped at all.

“Huh.” He sounded disappointed; perhaps he’d expected more.
“Well, you’re lucky I came along when I did. You’re about a million miles from
nowhere.”

“No,” she said, offering a quick glance out the front before
looking away. “Not so far as that.”

He seemed to think on that for a moment. Or maybe he was
waiting for her to say something more, elaborate on her remark. No, not her
job; she wasn’t the storyteller in this tale.

“You traveling all alone?”

To that, she would not answer, her face kept to the passenger
window, eyes hidden from view as she watched this world roll by. Her hand found
the small tin inside her shirt resting atop her heart, her legs reflexively
tightening on the duffel bag at her feet, reassuring herself it was there, not
stolen or missing or somehow smaller by even the smallest degree.

And she started to cry again.

Strange, those things that are lost along the way.