The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (14 page)

“I don’t want to go back there,” she
interrupted.

Jack nodded uncertainly. “Okay. Well
there’s a Pepsi machine outside on the porch.”

“Any chance I can find some clothes?
Maybe that fit a little better than these?” she asked.

“Uhm, maybe. I guess we can take a
look upstairs.”

“Would you mind?”

He shrugged, leading the way to the
second floor. He took a mouthful of coffee as he walked. He would have
preferred cream and sugar, but was afraid to ask her to wait while he got some,
and carrying it occupied his hands and gave him an excuse to stop speaking
before he poured out a stream of nervous babble in an endeavor to maintain a
lopsided conversation. She was pretty, about his age if he was to guess, and
had quickly managed to get under his skin. And maybe that wasn’t such a bad
thing. There was something familiar about her, too; something he couldn’t quite
put his finger on.

“So what happened here?” she asked, looking in the bathroom
at the half-completed walls, the missing ceiling, absent floor tiles.

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “It was like that when I got
here.”

“There’s a lock on the door, but half
the walls are gone. Kind of contradictory.”

“A lot of things here seem to be.” He
crossed the tiles to the other end of the bathroom, and she followed, looking
out over the vast wasteland that stretched away into forever. “I don’t think
privacy will be a problem, though.”

Ellen shaded her eyes and stared out
into the distance before nodding and retreating back into the hallway after
Jack. “I don’t suppose I could get some of that coffee?” she asked as they
walked into the large bedroom.

Jack looked down quickly at the
half-empty cup. “I started drinking from this one already,” he said
apologetically. “I can get you a fresh cup if you’d like.”

“That one’s fine,” she said,
gesturing absently to his. “If it’s alright?”

He shook his head, yes, and passed
her the coffee, taking the empty glass in exchange. There was something about
her acceptance of the entire situation that intrigued him. Or maybe it was
simply her company in a very lonely place. “There might be some clothes in the
closet,” he suggested.

Jack wasn’t sure what she would find
or whether it would even fit, but after a few minutes digging through the
closet on hands and knees, Ellen reappeared with a gray sweatshirt, blue jeans,
and a pair of cheap tennis shoes. She was holding one of the sneakers against
the bottom of her foot, sighting it for fit. “Is it all right if I borrow
these?” she asked.

“Sure.” It wasn’t as if anything she
found would have fit him. It wasn’t even his.

“Good.” She started to pull the
drawstrings on the pajama pants then looked up at him self-consciously, as if
realizing for the first time that he was there. “Uh, would you mind turning
around?”

Embarrassed, he nodded and turned
away, dutifully staring out the open French doors. But the saloon’s silence,
disturbed only by the arrhythmic ticking of the clock, left him only the sounds
behind him, the sound like shifting feet on hardwood, the maddening rustle and
slip of fabric that intimated what Ellen was doing. He could not help but
imagine, and felt himself blush for it.

“You can turn around now, Jack,” she
said.

For clothes scavenged from what was
probably the hamper of a disappeared and completely deranged writer—who
subsequently claimed to be deceased—they were an astonishingly good fit. The
sweatshirt was baggy on her, the jeans a little loose, but she seemed
comfortable enough in them. She was sitting on the floor tying her shoes, which
appeared to fit perfectly.

“You look nice,” he said, then wished
he hadn’t; it was a stupid thing to say.

But Ellen only shrugged
indifferently, her attention shifting to a bookshelf by the closet and its
array of curios. “Is that a real saber-toothed tiger skull?”

He followed her gaze, realizing he
had never paid much attention to it. When he arrived, he had been more
interested in the room at the top, the room where he could write. He had never
really gotten around to exploring much of the rest of the saloon. “I don’t
know.” Then, against his better judgment, he said, “You know, for someone so
insistent that this isn’t real, you’re certainly acting like this is real.”

She seemed nonplussed. “How else am I
supposed to act?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just didn’t
think—

(
that you’d be embarrassed about
changing your clothes in front of someone you believe is nothing more than a
drug-induced hallucination
)

—you would be thirsty or cold or
anything. You know; if it’s just a dream.”

“You have to treat dreams the same as
reality, Jack. You never know when a dream will end and a hallucination will
begin.”

“You have a lot of experience with
those?”

“Yeah,” she remarked, still seemingly
uninterested. “You don’t act like most of my hallucinations.”

“I’m not a hallucination!” he said,
realizing it sounded more angry than intended. “Sorry. This place is real. I’m
real. This isn’t a dream you’re simply going to wake up from. You have to
accept that?”

“Why?”

“Because if this was a dream, I’d
have answers to your questions. Instead, I know no more than you do. And if
this really is a hallucination, then you’re probably still in a padded room
talking with imaginary people while an intern shaves circles in your scalp
where the electrodes will go. And you still wouldn’t need a change of clothes
because you’re not really here.”

Ellen said nothing, her gaze focusing
on some point a million miles away, haunted. And Jack remembered belatedly that
she arrived wearing a straitjacket and scrubs, and mentioned a hospital. Maybe
this place was a reprieve for her, the reality behind her worse than he could
imagine. And maybe—hopefully not, but maybe—his remark hit too close to home.

“I was wrong, Jack,” Ellen said
abruptly, her voice hardening. “You are
exactly
like all of my other
hallucinations. You’re an asshole.”

They stared at each other across the
empty space, each measuring the hurt they had inflicted upon the other.
Finally, Jack turned away. “Just forget it,” he grumbled.

He started up the spiral stair. “I’ll
be up here trying to write if you need me. There’s food behind the bar and in
the waiting room if you’re hungry. Help yourself to whatever you like. I don’t
think the monster you saw earlier will bother you.”

Ellen called after him, “Why is it so
easy for you to believe in something totally inexplicable, but so impossible
for you to accept that all this might just be in your head?”

He looked back, and saw beneath her
challenge a very genuine interest in his answer, a search for truths that
eluded her, had perhaps always eluded her.
Join the club
. What he wanted
to say back to her was,
If I’m right, then you’re not alone somewhere, crazy
and arguing with a figment of your imagination. I believe that you and I are
real and that this place is real because that’s all I have left to believe in.
Without that, I’m lost.

That was the truth and he wanted to
tell her that. But he didn’t. He didn’t think she would understand. Instead, he
said, “I don’t know. Maybe because I’m an asshole.”

Then he turned and went upstairs.

*     *     *

Ellen didn’t believe Jack was a
hallucination or a dream, but she wasn’t yet ready to accept this reality; not
that easily.

The memories of the hospital—neither
so distant nor blurred by this recent sidestep of worlds—could not be
dismissed. What if the Sanity’s Edge Saloon and its passionate, misinformed
caretaker were little more than byproducts of having electricity blown through
her temples in an ill-conceived effort to burn the madness from her brain?
Maybe Jack wasn’t real? But then, maybe she wasn’t real either. Maybe she was
just an internalized representation of herself…

…
whose hair smells like puke.

She swallowed the last of Jack’s
coffee and walked over to the foot of the spiral stair. She heard the sounds of
someone battering away at a keyboard, fingers tapping out words, stringing
together sentences. Was Jack a writer? Well, a caretaker for an abandoned
saloon in the middle of the biggest, emptiest desert in the entire universe
certainly had few responsibilities and plenty of time to pursue other
interests.

Especially when the only people getting off the train at this
particular junction are bitchy lunatics in straitjackets.

“Jack,” she called up the stair.
“Would it be all right if I used your bathroom to clean up?”

The answer came back with forced
disinterest. “Sure.”

“Thanks.” Under less outlandish circumstances,
she might have found his behavior amusing. Like a puppy, he was eager to please
and easily hurt by anyone not responding to his good intentions. But
here—wherever and whatever here was—Jack was simply good-hearted … and naive.

As were many of her drug-induced
hallucinations, champions and angels intent on helping her. The rest were sick,
demented fucks. She considered Jack part of the former, but it only reinforced
her original supposition: this was all in her head, a ruptured embolism in her
imagination, and she was quickly bleeding out.

She locked the door behind her—old precautions from a prior reality—and
started running a bath in the old-fashioned tub. She found an extra toothbrush
in the medicine cabinet behind the mirror, brand new and still in the package,
and brushed the taste of stale coffee out of her mouth. That was the thing
about coffee; five minutes after you were done, it tasted like you swallowed
sour milk. She never understood people who craved it; of course, she never
understood people who craved anything. All she craved was an escape, a way out;
any means to that end, regardless of what it was, elicited her interest.

She stripped down and climbed into
the steaming tub, affording only a cursory glance at the emptiness surrounding
her. Sand and sky, a vast expanse of nothing, the sole occupants her and a
naïve caretaker named Jack.

She’d hurt his feelings. She should
have known better, deliberately prodding him about his grasp on reality.
Personal experience had taught her early on that most people were particularly
vulnerable in their perceptions of their own normalcy.

Ellen allowed herself to sink down
below the surface until she was completely submerged. Jack was okay. And this
place
did
feel like reality, strange though it may be. The water was
hot. The tub was slippery. There was verdigris embedded in the crevices of the
brass. And her hair smelled like vomit, a detail she certainly would have left
out of even the deepest, most intricate hallucination or drug-induced psychotic
episode. Even now, her lungs burned from holding her breath.

No, this had to be reality. A side
seldom seen—like the dark side of the moon—but real just the same. The Saloon.
Jack. The emptiness that stretched for a million miles in all directions. All real.
Welcome to the Twilight Zone, Ellen Monroe. Sorry the conductor lost your
luggage. Look in the closet if you need a change of clothes, and there’s an
extra toothbrush in the medicine chest. Madness, my dear. Sweet, sweet madness.
But do feel free to stay awhile. Make yourself at home.

She burst up through the surface of
the water, blowing out a burning lungful of air in a misty spray, and wondered
if she would ever figure this out. She felt clear. No fatigue, no jitters, no
head-spins. No crawling or writhing parasites slithering just under the skin,
their torment encouraging you to claw off your own flesh. No, she wasn’t coming
down and she wasn’t flying. She felt …
good
. Not a high kind of good,
but a clean, sober, calm good. It was a feeling she remembered from a long,
long time ago; a time before all the drugs and all the problems with her
father; a time when her mother was still around and things seemed … simpler.

She even felt hungry.

But if she wasn’t high, how did she
explain this place? she wondered, pulling the stopper on the drain.

Towels were left on the splayed,
webbed hands of a small statuary frog sitting in the corner like a dog doing a
trick. An unusual row of horns ran up the frog’s nose to form a crest upon its
head while its gaping mouth held a pair of washcloths and some soap in a
mother-of-pearl dish. Ellen stood up, steam rising from her skin, and arched
her back until she heard the soft, satisfying pops of her spine shifting back
into place. Then she took one of the towels from the frog’s raised hands to dry
herself, and discovered the metal frog’s other unusual feature: an enormous,
brass erection.

She was startled less by the frog’s
extra appendage—little more than a puerile joke—than her own embarrassment by
it. She drew the towel close around herself, listening suspiciously to the
silence.

But no one was there. She was being
paranoid.

Far across the desert, eyes slitted
against the blowing sand, the Dust Eater observed the movements of the naked
woman, less a person or an object of desire than a presence; a
second
presence
. Now two occupied heaven.
It turned and raced across the
hardpan, gangly legs carrying it with frightening speed towards the master; he
would want to know what was happening.