The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (10 page)

Yes, he could do great things with
the Nexus. A never-ending world of limitless ecstasy could be created. It was,
in fact. But he could not master the power to the sufficient and highly
subjective determination of whatever demanding entity seemed to oversee it, and
the Nexus rejected him.

And so Reginald Hyde joined the ranks
of the Cast Out.

He sat at a draftsman’s table, the
surface unfinished particleboard that smelled of wet wood and damp glue,
cast-iron frame pitted and flaking, on the verge of collapse. The Wasteland
sucked the life from everything, even what lived beneath it. Only the Nexus was
immune. The Nexus was the focal point, the optic nerve to the eye of existence.
And the new Caretaker stood at the center of this blind spot, and for all the
power available to him, he would never see them coming.

Hyde’s naked buttocks swelled over
the rickety stool that looked to the same sad fate as the draftsman’s table,
corroded and ready to buckle. Words held it together, but for how long he could
not say. The only guarantee in the Wasteland was that eventually the Wasteland
would win. Until then, Hyde would indulge his pleasures, none around to decry
his immodesty, or stare with revulsion at the rolls of doughy flesh that
spilled down around him as if he were a thick candle stub of tallow slowly
melting beneath the unyielding flame.

Naked and secure, Hyde carefully
threaded the bone of a bat’s wing through the flesh of his left shoulder,
piercing the skin with a quick thrust, sharp pain and a small spurt of blood.
He had already threaded over three-dozen bones collected from dead Cast Outs,
Wasteland creatures and even a shrieker he had clubbed to death years ago when
it inadvertently discovered his hideaway. The bones laced up both sides of his
enormous belly and flanged out from his upper arms, shoulders, and even his
nipples. Those last had been exquisitely painful, and in the Wasteland,
anything exquisite was like anything pleasurable: you took it wherever you
could and for all it was worth.

The bones would help him, he knew, as
surely as he knew that Rebreather was mad and Gusman Kreiger was not God, but
as close as a man might come without exploding in holy fire. Lacking the ink to
construct tattoo cages, he bound the bones to his flesh in the old way, binding
the spirits to his person, their power to his will.

A war was coming. He would need all
the power he could muster if he was to help Kreiger. He knew the white wizard
was about to throw himself against the Caretaker of the Nexus. He felt the bend
in reality this morning, the force of Kreiger breaking free of this world,
leaping into the other for that brief moment like a fish lunging from the water
to snare an errant fly.

The old Caretaker was likely dead,
his protégé defenseless. Kreiger was orchestrating a coupe against Heaven, and,
God help him, Reginald Hyde wanted to be beside Kreiger when he went at the
gates. The loyal would be rewarded, brought into the Nexus that was theirs by
right. And once back in the Nexus …

The very notion sent shivers through
his flesh … but not like before. There was no power; simply exhilaration at the
thought of a return to the pleasures of a reality more like a dream:
the
silken touch of satin, the sugary smell of
crème brûlée
, the first
tingle of absinthe on the tongue and lips, the delicate, rose petal texture of a
young girl’s labia—never again so soft, especially after puberty—the air of
fine brandy so strong and sweet that a teacupful could jeopardize a young woman’s
virtue, the scent of perfume dabbed discretely between a virgin’s breasts, her
flesh untried and untainted, ripe and ready as a berry upon the vine…

He thrust another bone through a fold
of flesh in his upper arm, the pleasure so sharply punctuated that he became
instantly erect. The bone was a fang from a rock viper, needle-sharp and
deadly, an excellent talisman.
Good juju!
It made a soft pop before
whispering through his skin with a sound like paper cutting the thumb of the
one that turns the page. He remembered pages like he remembered paper, though
he had seen neither in decades. He had tried time and again, but its creation
eluded him. The bone was the substitute. It told the story of the creature he
extracted it from, so the story
was
the creature. To possess the bone of
the creature was to possess the story of the creature, and to possess the story
of the creature was to possess its essence, its soul. The bones were totems,
strong talismans to wield against the new Caretaker.

Hyde wiped the blood clean with the
soft pad of his thumb, and licked it daintily. In another reality, the details
of which he tried hard to forget over his many years of exile, his penchant for
bone totems earned him a nickname: Papa Lovebone.

Or perhaps there had been other
reasons for that name. He no longer remembered.

Well, no matter. It would not be long
now. He wondered idly if the new Caretaker would be a man or a woman.

A woman as Caretaker. To fall, to be
broken by Kreiger’s army, to
succumb
…

The image brought another explosion of pleasure from his loins, brief and
unexpected and wonderful. Already, horn-black centipedes milled hungrily
beneath the rickety stool, feasting upon his previous inspiration.

Oh yes! Good juju!

*     *     *

Elsewhere, one stared at the edifice
called the Sanity’s Edge Saloon from a distance of miles, eyes slitted against
the intense sunlight, pupils become pinholes in orbs of milky white.

It was not one of the Cast Out. It
was an animal, not unlike the Wasteland dregs but for one fundamental
difference. Dregs were born of the dust and would die in the dust, random burps
of energy coursing the Wasteland to the Nexus, and their demise was of no
concern to anyone, not even themselves.

But it had a soul, and would live
beyond the timelessness of the Wasteland. It waited only for Judgement Day when
all the undead would die for good, and all the souls would be freed. It waited
for that day when its soul would be freed at last from the Wasteland, a
hellbound spirit rotting forever in Purgatory. It waited because God had told
it to; it
believed
because God had told it to.

It was the duty of the faithful to
execute God’s will.

It squatted low to the ground, gangly
and bent as a cactus, though such things did not grow in the dead soil of the
Wasteland. Its skin was burnt and flaking like the rotted leather binding of an
old, mistreated book, but beneath that skin ran iron-hard muscles as spare as
wire cables. Its broad hands and feet were well-suited to the sand, its head
oversized, powerful muscles running along its mouth and neck bulging like a
child with mumps, or the swollen expression of someone whose jaw was recently
shattered with a steel truncheon.

It stared at the distant building,
the polished metal tracks running from the distant horizon off into the
emptiness that was absolute madness. It had considered simply leaping into that
madness, but did not. It was tasked with watching that which God called the
Nexus, a holy place, so God had told it. And that holy place was
possessed
.

When the demon that possessed God’s
Nexus left, it was to tell God.

And when the demon returned, it was
to tell God.

It did that now as it watched the
iron worm blur across the track, faster than thought, sliding to a stop in
front of the building, no sound of protest from the wheels. It let out a low
moan, the note so deep it might have been mistaken for a slow breeze. A human
might even miss it altogether, below their normal range of hearing, or confuse
it for an insect rubbing its wings. But the dregs and the other animals of the
Wasteland would hear and they would know.

And, of course, God would know. God
knew everything.

It did this for almost an hour,
watching with eyes slitted against the sun as the interloper wandered about the
building, moving in and out, passing before the darkened glass of the windows
and the open doors. It watched as the interloper—
not the same as the one who
had inhabited the Nexus before, which was unusual, yes, very unusual
—relieved
itself, and it lusted for the water that would be wasted. There was always so
much water in the Nexus.

After an hour, it went silent. All
who would know knew. All that remained was to wait.

This one did not have a name for God
had not seen fit to give it one. It was the prerogative of God to do such
things just as it was the duty of those like it to follow and obey; never to
question, but simply to live each day in thanks for the bounty of the life
given unto them.

It thrust a clawed fist into the
powdery sand of the Wasteland, sinewy arm burrowing all the way to the elbow,
and extracted a handful of packed earth that might have contained naught but
two drops of ancient water, and perhaps, if it was lucky, the mashed remains of
one of the dark centipedes.

It did not really matter though. The
creature jammed it whole into its enormous maw, the sizable back teeth working
upon it with a maniacal fervor as if they somehow hoped to grind the Wasteland
soil into something even finer than powder.

No, God had not seen fit to give it a
name. So it had named itself.

It was the Dust Eater.

*     *     *

Since the whistle and the dead
droning of the Dust Eater, others had come. Dregs. Many of them. An army as
still as the dead.

Oversight sat upon the rock shelf,
keeping her distance. She gave Rebreather her back, but kept her ears tuned to
his approach, a bone-knife in her hand. The bone once belonged in the thigh of
a Cast Out who, though clearly a failure by virtue of his sentence, had thought
himself superior to her, and able to bend her to his will. She had broken his
spine—not once, but five times. He was dead after the second, but his skeleton
made an excellent object lesson to any Cast Out or dreg that thought her free
for the taking.

Like the Dust Eater, she knew herself
superior to those misfires of reality. And even if Kreiger could not weave a
stable existence for her—Kreiger, who could not even come up with a name for
her because he was too busy forcing the Nexus to masturbate his ego—she knew
her own worth. She had almost been free centuries ago, and if Kreiger won his
battle with the new Caretaker and retook the Nexus for his own, she might yet
get a second chance.

The single greatest injustice of the
Wasteland was its inability to slay its own. The Cast Outs who came here, from
other worlds and other times, were sentenced to walk the Wasteland for their
failure, and eventually be consumed by the sun and the sand and the random
freaks that walked this hell. Those same freaks would live and die as dictated
by the Wasteland. But not so those like her and the Dust Eater, a crazed
animal, but one with whom she shared a great deal. They were unfinished, and
would continue to exist so long as no one finished them.

Because it would not be hell without
the tortured souls.

In the distance, the hollow lowing of
the Dust Eater, a ghostly sound like wind over rotted stumps. Unlike the Cast
Outs who tried so hard to forget a life they could never regain, she
remembered: cool wind and Spanish moss and the hollowed boles of swamp-rotted
stumps that caught the rain water and turned it magical; all part of a failed
life, a reality that Kreiger promised to make for her before revealing his inadequacy
to the task. Now he shaped reality with no more truth than a common street
magician.

Nothing like what the Caretaker could
do.

So Kreiger marshaled his forces,
seeking to take the new Caretaker down before he could establish himself, learn
the defenses available to him. And she would help. Not because she loved him,
or worshipped him, or even because she wanted to. She would help Kreiger for
the unspoken promise of another chance at cool wind and Spanish moss. If it was
right to obey ones parent and ones God, then she owed him allegiance as both.
He was an inattentive father, and an inadequate God, but he was all she had.

Mostly, she kept her back to
Rebreather so that he would not see the tracks made through the dust upon her
face. Not from pain or the sting of his rebuke—she had endured worse—but for
the memories of an existence lost.

Some things were worth the water.

Some things were worth anything.

HOUSE RULES

Jack continued searching the horizon,
but saw only desert, a vast emptiness that would not be denied. It lay in all
directions for as far as the eye could see, a wasteland of sand and dust
straight out of science fiction:
Mad Max
or
Dune
.

Only this wasn’t fiction.

The wind from the desert offered a
distant lowing. It made him uneasy, the disquiet lending credence to his
otherwise baseless suspicions that the shimmering speck in the distance was not
just some reflection off a scrap of metal or glass turning absently in the
wind, a forgotten derelict of no importance.

Someone was out there.

The Writer had said there were others.

Jack climbed down from the landing
and crossed the flat roof to the strange singular room as though drawn to it.
While out of place both architecturally and stylistically, there was something
about this room that felt comfortable, even familiar. The notion was
misguided—he was hard-pressed to imagine a place more alien—but the sensation
was undeniable.

Pushed into a corner as if forgotten
was a short gargoyle; apparently gothic suited the predominantly western motif
no better than Victorian. Too bad; he rather liked the statue, its mouth agape
with fangs, canines like upward sabers. The squat guardian totem had thick legs
and enormous arms, a saurian tail, and small dragon wings folded close against
its back. The stone was perfect, unweathered by sand or wind, so detailed Jack
could make out the lines of fur, the knobs of flesh, and even the scales of its
skin. The carved-fur body and horn-crested scowl was too bestial for the newer,
smooth-skinned gargoyles, and its visage was likewise too inhuman for anything
old. The impression was more …
demonic
. At its foot was a jackstraw
collection of bones heaped around the clawed toes like sacrifices before an
altar … or something cast aside in an animal’s den.

Jack’s first thought was of the bird
feeder in his backyard when he was growing up. The squirrels would climb into
it and feast on the birdseed. It didn’t matter how high a pole his father used,
or what methods he employed to discourage them; the squirrels always found a
way. They would climb in, crack open the sunflower seeds, and feast until the
feeder was empty, the husks tossed aside until the base was transformed into a
hill of empty, black and white shells, useless food scraps left by the wayside.
The bones around the gargoyle’s feet resembled a discarded meal; droppings left
behind by ravenous consumption, crumbs falling from the jaws of a contented
predator.

—
Nail
—

The sound startled him, a disruption
of the overwhelming silence. He didn’t even hear the word so much as it
popped
into his mind. One moment, empty curiosity as he stared at the gargoyle; the
next, a simple word whispered harshly into his brain, bypassing his auditory
nerves altogether:
Nail
.

He looked uneasily at the gargoyle,
tucking both hands safely into his pockets and away from the large teeth. The
eyes stared back with a smooth, milky quality, and the stone countenance
studied him as though possessed of a deeper understanding, the stare of an old
dog that knows how to lull a person inside the reach of its chain.

Jack decided to explore the small room, the one that felt so familiar but
seemed so out of place, leaving the gargoyle alone for the time being.

*     *     *

He found the room small and cluttered
and strangely homey, one windowless wall dominated by an enormous bookshelf,
every inch crammed with books and magazines, no apparent rhyme or reason to
their placement, simply dumped pell-mell upon the shelf as if by some
lackadaisical librarian towards shift’s end. A ladder extended up the bookshelf
and into the rafters where it met with a trapdoor in the ceiling, presumably to
the widow’s walk he’d noticed from outside. The iron stair from the bedroom
below took up one corner of the room, blocking access to an enormous potted
plant with great sweeping leaves and a peculiar blossom resembling the jaws of
a colossal Venus flytrap. Jack half expected it to move when he entered, or
perform a Broadway musical—neither would have surprised him.

But the plant only sat there, silent
and motionless, only a plant after all.
Just because you’re losing your
mind, doesn’t mean the world has to.

The other half of the room was raised two steps on a platform occupied by
an L-shaped desk with an Elite typewriter and a stack of paper in front of a
high-backed, black leather chair. Casting about, Jack saw a filing cabinet
under the desk, empty, one drawer cracked open to reveal only dust and a few
old paper clips. To one side, a coffee maker, a Post-it note pasted to the
front reading:

Jack,

As
promised. Good luck!

The
Writer

So there it was. This was not a
mistake. There had been no mix-up, no wrong station. This was the place! This
was the Writer’s promised “special place;” the place he planned to take Jack to
before missing their train this morning.

Jack felt his stomach sink at the
hastily-penned note, caught between exhilaration at having uncovered a portion
of the riddle and sheer horror. This
place
was what the Writer was
talking about?
This
place was the special place in need of a carefully
selected caretaker?

“This place is a hole in the wall!”
Jack shouted, unsure whom he was shouting at, or even why he was shouting at
all. He had been promised a special place, a place where he could be a real
writer. What he got was
nowhere
, Purgatory on Quaaludes, a place to
redefine the meaning of boredom. “You stranded me in the middle of nowhere!”

No sound from the Saloon. No answer
to his recriminations. Within the small room, even the wind was silent.
Emptiness. Nothing. It mocked him, taunting him with answers it refused to
give.

He turned … and did a double take.

There had been a turntable in the
corner near the door when he entered, a collection of antique vinyls on a rack
beside it, some so old they were actually
seventy-eights
. He hadn’t
really taken any interest in it—antiques bored him—but now it was gone! In its
place was a CD-Player, the kind he would have owned back in the real world—
not
to be confused with this place. He even saw a small shoebox containing half a
dozen CD’s; CD’s he would have called his favorites, not that anyone should
have known. All that was missing were speakers.

But they’re right there in the
corners, Jack.

He stared up in amazement at the
once-empty corners in the ceiling where the stereo’s speakers were now securely
mounted. They weren’t there when he had come in, of that, he was certain.

Jack started to back-pedal absently,
and nearly went backwards down the stairs. He hung tightly to the rail, gaze
passing stupidly around a room where reality was not the same as it had been
only seconds ago.

On the desk, a remote control for the
stereo.

That wasn’t there a moment ago!

He squeezed his eyes shut, keeping
them closed until a spray of bright, blue-white stars exploded upon his mind’s
eye. But when he opened them, the stereo was still there along with its
wall-mounted speakers and its remote control for adjusting volume and track
selection. The archaic record player and its collection of old vinyls were
gone—gone as if he had simply imagined them.

“You’re losing it, Jack,” he said
through clenched teeth, each word spoken slowly and clearly, as if somehow
hoping to press the message home by sheer force of will, a spell he was
ill-equipped to cast.
None of this was here before. You didn’t just imagine
the old record player. You looked up at the walls at least three times, and
never saw any speakers. None.

But they are there now. Along with the CD’s. And on his desk,
a—

He stopped himself, realizing he was
already thinking of the place as
his
. It went beyond passing familiarity
or a sense of squatter’s rights, the way a bum owns the alley where he sleeps.
He was already accepting the idea that this was the place he was supposed to
be, that he was the caretaker per the Writer’s directive, and that this
place—impossibly, improbably, unbelievably—was his. Shouldn’t he sign
something: paperwork, release forms,
something
?

And even if he did, how would that
explain what was happening. He was a caretaker—nothing more—for a quirky,
abandoned saloon. That was all.

Right?

Things don’t just happen because you want them to.

Or do they?

He hated the silence of a moment ago,
silence eerily filled with desert wind and strange, imagined words like
telepathic sendings. He wanted to hear voices, or the clatter of neglected
shutters on squeaking hinges, car tires on hot blacktop … or music.
Hating
the silence that seemed only to feed his unease, he wanted more than anything
else to hear music, some distant radio or the jukebox from downstairs.
Something. But the only thing to listen to up here was a ridiculous antique
with a scratchy collection of vinyl records, all older than he was. It would
have only made him feel worse.

But now he had a stereo and several
CDs …
just like he wanted
.

This is nuts, Jack. You know that.
This is nuts, and so are you if you think for one minute that anything you’re
thinking actually happened. There has to be an explanation.

He threw the CD player a wary look then started down the spiral stair.
Maybe the beer was making him light-headed. Maybe he’d suffered a mild
concussion from the train. Or maybe it was heat exhaustion. Anything was
possible. Maybe he had simply overlooked things; things he was now seeing for
the first time.

Or maybe you’re going insane.

And that was when he heard it, the
distinct and entirely unexpected sound of a ringing telephone. He didn’t
remember seeing a phone when he arrived. Not anywhere.

Nor did he recall speakers and a CD
player with a remote control…

Rinnnnng
.

He hurried down the steps, knowing the call was for him. He didn’t know
why he knew this, but the same way he found the Corona and lime in the
refrigerator, he knew the phone was someone trying to reach him, and he had to
hurry.

Rinnnnng
.

Wherever the phone was, when he found
it, the person on the other end would be asking for him. Forget that
he
didn’t even know where he was, much less how anyone else should know to reach
him here, the phone would be for him.

Rinnnnng

He rounded the iron stairs, listened
to the distant ring, then charged out into the hall and down to the first
floor.

Rinnnnng

He scanned about the saloon quickly,
searching for anything that might explain the presence of a sound where there
shouldn’t be one. And there, affixed to the wall beside the bat-wing doors, as
big as life, as clear as day, was a payphone that definitely had not been there
before. He had walked through those doors twice, and would certainly have
remembered that. A means of contacting the outside world was not something you
overlooked when you were lost.

Rinnnnng

But it couldn’t have been there
before! It couldn’t!

Jack crossed the room and yanked up the receiver before it could ring
again. “Hello?”

The reply came back, tinny and
distant as though from the bottom of a mine shaft, the ocean floor, the sunless
depths of the Mariana Trench; words whispered through a thirty foot length of
pipe: “Hello, Jack. How are you getting along so far?”

It was the Writer!

*     *     *

“What the hell’s going on?” he
shrieked.

“I missed the train,” the Writer
said. “I’m sorry.”

And Jack knew immediately that the
Writer was lying; not on the face of what was said, but something behind it. He
had no idea how he knew this or why, but he did. The Writer was lying—and not
very well—to cover a
bigger
lie.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m helping you to become a writer.
That is what you wanted, isn’t it? I thought we discussed this yesterday
morning over raspberry-mocha lattés.”

“Are you crazy?” Jack screamed. “What
am I doing here? And where the hell is
here
?”

“Calm down, Jack,” The Writer said,
his voice gentle and firm; it was the same tone Jack’s father used when Jack
was just a child and still afraid of the dark. “I know everything must seem
very … bewildering, so I’ll do my best to answer your questions, but we don’t
have much time. Phones are not actually allowed in the Saloon. In fact, there is
no contact at all between the Edge and this world—or any world for that matter.
This is an exception due to extenuating circumstances. I’m telling you this
because I need to explain a few things, and I need you to not interrupt.”