The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (6 page)

By Jack Lantirn

A story he did not know.
An author he had never heard of. The knee-jerk response was to blame a
production error. There were probably a couple hundred books just like this one
out there in the hands of unsuspecting booksellers and distributors, all of
them suffering the same lack of initial information. There was likely a
shipping supervisor desperately trying to recall all of these sad, nameless
bastards of mass-production, and maybe a quality-checker with a written
admonishment in his or her HR file, or perhaps even dismissed outright. But he
doubted it. When called, the distributor did not know of the book, had never
heard of it, could not find it by name or author. And more importantly, Dabble
himself had never heard of it, could not find out about it. That was what made
his blood run cold, his heart skip a beat.

This book should not
exist.

It had never been
written, its author never born. It was an anomaly that mocked him, and made him
wonder—not for the first time—if something was coming. Something important.
Something bad.

Ellen fidgeted, hands
alternately smoothing and bunching the pleats of her dress, her eyes never
leaving the book; a strung-out junkie watching her fix cook in the hollow of a
bent spoon, a look not foreign to her. He was making her nervous.

On a whim, he tested a
hypothesis. “Ellen, could I borrow this? I’d love to read it, if you wouldn’t
mind?”

She hesitated, telling
him everything he needed to know; she would never let him have the book. Never.
“I guess it would be okay.”

She was lying, of course.
He could read it on her face, hear it in her tone. It was not okay. It was
anything but okay. But she would need an excuse now, some means of bringing it
back into her hands without sounding obsessive or insane.

“But I need it this
afternoon. Dr. Kohler asked to see it.”

And there was the second
lie. Dr. Kohler was an imbecile, the link between Ellen Monroe and the book
having escaped his feeble understanding. Fabricated reality and delusion
reinforcement would be Kohler’s complete analysis of the book, and nothing
more.

A woman browsing the
front of the store stumbled against the box Ellen left near the counter. It
scraped across the floor as the woman dramatically flailed her arms for balance.
Dabble’s gaze fell across her, read her in an instant, and dismissed her.

But for his own purposes,
he feigned concern. “Goodness!”

Ellen turned sharply, her
attention momentarily distracted. “Are you all right? Let me help you.”

As she crossed towards
the front of the store, Nicholas Dabble ran his thumbnail down the inside edge
of the title page, slicing it as neatly as a razorblade. That fast, the page
was folded in his fingers and vanished up his sleeve. Then he walked to the front
of the store, book in hand.

“Why would someone leave
a box there?” the woman complained. “I mean, anyone could fall over it.”

Dabble knew her; she
frequented the store, poring over the romance section. Hair in a kerchief, peacock
blue overcoat, yellow slacks struggling to contain the trunks of her legs, she
was some kind of ridiculous bird; a ridiculous, squawking bird. “I could have fallen
and broken my hip. Why would anyone be so irresponsible?”

“I’m so sorry,” Ellen said,
but Nicholas Dabble knew her apology went unheard. The woman was into her
spiel, the one she reserved for the assistant manager of the supermarket who
would not honor an expired coupon, or the young retail clerk who failed to find
the hand lotion she required, or anyone younger than she, anyone for whom hope
has not died. “I thought I was only going to be gone a moment,” Ellen said, “and
I left the books—”

“It was my fault,” Dabble
interrupted crisply, holding the book out to Ellen. “Go on or you’ll be late.
It’s my store. I’ll take care of this.”

The old woman turned a
wrinkled face to him, jaw painfully narrow and lined, lips drawn into a pucker.
He read her instantly, and knew she had not been kissed in many years, and had
not enjoyed it much when she had. She liked cakes and pudding better; chocolate
most of all.

“Go on,” he said again.
“Everything will be all right.”

Ellen nodded, mouthing a
thank-you to him that the old woman did not see, then grabbed her bag from
below the register and left. She placed the book safely down inside and
quickened her pace, dress flouncing nicely as she turned towards the bus stop.

Nicholas Dabble returned
his attention to the bird woman. “You should go now.”

“That young woman is careless,”
she insisted. “She has no regard for the welfare of others. Why, I could’ve fallen—”

“But you didn’t,” Dabble replied
matter-of-factly. “You could have been hit by lightning, but that didn’t happen
either. You could have married Richie Moynihan, who fancied you since junior
high; you disliked him because he was fat and already losing his hair by
eighteen, and thought you could do better. But you didn’t. You could have
finished college, gotten a job, married and had children, grandchildren, all to
help distract you from the emptiness in your soul. Or you could have been hit by
a garbage truck and killed. Best not to dwell on what could have been.”

The old woman stared back
at him, a tic causing her mouth to flinch on one side, her face trembling, eyes
glassy and wet, swimming. She seemed about to say something, but all that came
out was a small puff of air.

Nicholas Dabble turned
away. “If you need anything, I’ll be in the back.”

*     *     *

The backroom of
Dabble’s
Books
was storage, narrow aisles of steel shelves stacked floor to ceiling,
artificial walls erected from cardboard boxes of books. Dabble threaded the
cramped aisle-ways, sidestepping a short ladder from the last inventory. Unnecessary.
Inventory was a task for those who did not know what they had, and Dabble knew
everything there was to know about anything within his store. He knew how many
of every copy of every book by any author was under his roof, down to the exact
location, the date it was received, and the story it contained. He knew his
store the way one knows a lover, knows her likes and dislikes, the places to
touch that will bring her pleasure, the features she thinks are pretty (whether
they are or not) and the blemishes she works to hide. Nicholas Dabble knew
everything in his store in that way, and he reveled in the fact that here, if
nowhere else, he was God. He knew the paper mites that attacked his stories, and
the insects that dined upon each aspect of his collection of books, from the
glue in the spines to the fiber in the pages. And he knew the spiders that
feasted upon these insects, great milky-bodied creatures that stalked the
shelves and rafters and cracks of
Dabble’s Books
, laying snare lines or
lying in wait to pounce. And he knew of the mice—there were twelve, give or
take a few to misadventure or simple fecundity—living in the walls, their turds
left behind like fingerprints, who ate the spiders and scratched at the wood
and, yes, chewed upon his books.

He bent his head and
listened, hearing the shop door open, the creak of the hinges and the click of
the latch. He heard the lumbering steps of the old woman as she left, grumbling
to herself, empty and pointless. He had read it all in her face in those few
seconds of their encounter, and it was neither unusual nor interesting, a
tedious story, dull and trivial, and it made him sleepy. He was glad it was
gone.

So very different from
Ellen Monroe and her story, the bright soul hidden beneath sullied flesh, the
warm heart buried inside a jaded mind. But there was more to her, a mystery of
sorts, a riddle of the human condition. And that was a mystery he enjoyed, one
he would like to explore.

Nicholas Dabble could not
remember now exactly why he hired Ellen Monroe. The circumstance behind his
decision seemed to have been diluted with the passage of time until he could no
longer pinpoint exactly why or how it happened. And that alone was extremely
unusual. But he was prepared to dismiss even this as simple malaise, a boredom
that prompted his memory to wander, and perhaps encouraged him to alleviate his
doldrums by hiring a new employee that might prove a distraction, though
nothing more.

Whatever the reason, he
had placed a help wanted sign in his window. And before the end of the morning,
Ellen Monroe had worked her way into his life.

Nothing had
been the same since.

Barely an hour after the
sign was up, Ellen Monroe stood before his counter asking about the position.
She had no experience as a cashier, had never worked in a bookstore, and had no
prior job history or even a reference beyond her psychiatrist. But she had a
winsome look, a waifish figure, and wide eyes that suggested an innocence that
Dr. Kohler seemed to indicate—between his saccharine assurances—was not fully
representative of her past. Dabble liked that. He also liked her answer to his singular
question: “Why do you want to work in a bookstore?”

“I like books,” she
answered. “They’re like people. They begin and they end, and everything that’s
really important happens in between. They have a kind of life about them. I
know that’s strange, but when you read a book, for a short while anyway, you stop
being a part of your own reality and become a part of theirs.”

She said she lived just
down the street, and could work evenings and weekends if need be, so he hired
her on the spot.

Nothing had been the same
since.

At first he found it
amusing that she was seeing a psychiatrist whose name he could find stamped on
the base
of any given
urinal or piss-stained toilet in any public restroom. At first. Now he thought
it suspicious.

Not unlike her walking in
the very day he decided to hire someone, Daisy Miller fresh off the turnip
truck. Like Kohler’s name, it seemed convenient, contrived. Had she landed on
his doorstep due to his plan, or had he posted the help wanted sign due to
hers?

It sounded like the
meddling hand of fate, and frankly, he liked to keep his affairs well clear of
that meddlesome bitch.

But fate could be clever,
sometimes. She could wheedle her way inside your head, and make you think it
was your own idea. She
was cunning, that one.

And maybe she had eyes
that were a little winsome.

And nothing had been
the same since.

Dabble crossed to a
narrow alcove with a nondescript door; wood panels painted several times over,
cracks revealing the colors of underlying layers. Behind the door, a stairway
leading both up and down. He walked up to the second floor, unfolding the title
page as he went. He did not worry about leaving the shop unattended. He would
not be gone long, and no one ever stole from Nicholas Dabble. Some rules did
not need to be explained. You did not stare at the sun, you did not swallow
liquid bleach, you did not perform
fellatio
on a .38 unless you really
meant to kill yourself, and you did not cross Nicholas Dabble.

For himself, he was quite
comfortable with his relationship with this reality.

The second floor of
Dabble’s
Books
was, room by room, a contradiction. Some were empty, minimalism to
the nth degree, the plaster stripped away to reveal bare lath, a substructure
of wires and braces and plumbing, the only design the flowered pattern of water
damage; faded roses colored in rust and gray. In these rooms, the floors were
naked wood littered with clots of dust, dried husks of long-dead insects, and
rodent spoor. But other rooms were the opposite: immaculately finished in
oil-rich wood and oriental carpets, furnishings of dark oak and walnut, blood-red
leather, sumptuous velvet tapestries. These rooms were appeals to the need for
creature comforts, the air fragrant with sweet tobacco, tea waiting to be poured
from silver, drunk from cups of bone china, while a decanter of fine, aged
brandy waited for that later hour. But the decadence was hidden by books, such
that it was all these rooms were: reading rooms. Books of every type and
description were shelved from floor to ceiling, covering every inch of space.
They were stacked so high on the tables that the wood bowed visibly, the legs
straining. The carpets had even sprouted books, erected into crude stumps
without rhyme or reason like nature’s ironic vengeance:
you can’t cut down
books to make trees
. But there was nothing else. Austere privation or
cluttered opulence, the only possession Nicholas Dabble kept was books.

Books were like people,
and he liked to collect them.

Dabble moved from one
room to the next, each time pausing and staring at the page he had stolen from
Ellen Monroe’s book, the title page of
The Sanity’s Edge Saloon
. He
considered it in each room, working the page over and over in his mind, trying
to find the pigeonhole that eluded him; the one that would allow him to file
this away and let it be forgotten, instead of becoming an obsession. And with
each empty endeavor, each failed attempt at understanding, he would move on to
the next room.