The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (19 page)

“Yes.”

That surprised her. “So why do you
trust him?”

“I never said I did.” Leland replied,
sipping from his newly poured scotch. “But the fact is Jack will fail. He has
good intentions, but he doesn’t have what it takes. I’ve made my entire life on
eating people like Jack for breakfast. Don’t think of him as a friend. Think of
him as someone with a very difficult task he’s ill-equipped to accomplish; a
task that your life depends on. I don’t doubt he’ll try; he’ll try harder than
anyone. But in the end, his efforts will fall short. He’s a dreamer. He thinks
that big ideas are all he needs. Well he’s wrong. Kreiger will send us back
because he has no reason not to. It’s no skin off his nose one way or the
other. He just wants this place, though I can’t see why. We’re academic. So we
can help him and go home, or we can stand in his way and piss him off. Either
way, he’ll get the Nexus. The only difference is if we don’t help him, he’ll
have no reason to help us, and every reason to simply run us out into the
desert to die. You saw those things out there. Do you doubt for a minute that
they would be picking our meat from their teeth inside of a day? Ask yourself
this: can you afford to put your faith in Jack? Can you? How long do you think
any of us would last out there in the Wasteland?” He shook his head, resigned
to an apparent and inevitable truth, the hypocritical deacon lecturing an
initiate on the evils of sins he has engaged in himself. “No, much as I like
the upper hand, and have built my whole life on taking it in every situation, I
can see the writing on the wall. Jack’s days are numbered, as are anyone’s who
stands by him. We can strike a deal with Kreiger that he’ll honor because he’s
a businessman at heart. He’ll get what he wants for little or no fuss. And so
will we. Think about it, and you’ll see that I’m right.”

She wanted to respond, but was afraid
it would sound something like what Jack had said, only with less conviction. As
much as she hated to admit it, Leland Quince might be right. Jack was a friend—
maybe
more; maybe, but then again, probably not
—but he could well fail. And if he
did, for no lack of trying, they would all die in the Wasteland. She swallowed
and said nothing.

“Are there any more bedrooms up
here?” Lindsay called down from halfway up the steps.

Ellen turned, wondering how long the
little girl had been there, how much she had heard. “I don’t know,” she
answered, thinking back on her earlier tour with Jack. “I think just the two.”

“Only two bedrooms,” Leland started
towards the stairs. “This just keeps getting better.”

*     *     *

Jack sat in the deep leather chair
watching bubbles float up through crystal blue water upon the
Jabberwock’s
screen; the screen saver came up automatically whenever ten minutes passed
without his touching the keys. He listened quietly to the exchange below, his
intention to work foiled by a complete lack of inspiration.

The profound absurdity of it all was
not lost on him either. The others’ existences had been rendered into little
more than scripts he was expected to knock out and send off, words become DNA
in some literary gene vat from William S. Burrough’s strange tales of
Interzone. Abandon rational thought.

He absently flicked at the mouse,
setting his screen back to the minuscule work he had been piecing together.

Dabble’s Books
, a small cobblestone shop on the river fronting Main
Street, just across from
Serena’s Coffee Shoppe
, specialized in all
manner of books from the newest best sellers to signed copies by Salinger and
Camus. The proprietor, Mr. Nicholas Dabble, a fastidious gentleman of lanky
proportions who was described, both aptly and somewhat expectedly, as bookish,
prided himself on his ability to find rare and eccentric manuscripts; whatever
his buyers were interested in. Mr. Nicholas Dabble, who despised nicknames like
“Nick” or “Nicky” or, worst of all, “Nickel,” as if he were some old-fashioned
movie hoodlum, had a knack: whatever you needed, Nicholas Dabble could find. He
never said how, and few asked. All that mattered was that he found what his
buyers were looking for. Perhaps the only other remarkable thing about Mr.
Nicholas Dabble was his eyes. Though old, they were still as bright and
penetrating as slivered emeralds.

Dabble breathed deep the
smell of the old shop, dusty paper, dry wood. It was the smell of a place where
a myriad of small insects made hosts of the entire dwelling and everything
within, their lives beginning and ending inside the confines of the brick
walls, a microcosm of life and death going unnoticed by everyone, its
ramifications unknown, save for a vaguely old smell in the air which some
mistook as time and antiquities. In a sense, the insects belonged to the
proprietor of
Dabble’s Books
, like every other story under its roof, and
he relished the thousands of lives which existed all around him, literary and
insectile both, all owned by him, body and soul, shelved and tended with care
because they were his, and no one else’s. His.

Some said Mr. Nicholas Dabble
was the devil. Not a devil, but
the
Devil, Beelzebub, Satan, the one and
only. By and large, he paid such remarks no mind.

Dabble crossed the store,
floorboards smoothed by countless waxings over countless years, protecting the
wood against the countless feet of those who browsed, perused, and lingered in
his world. His only assistant, a young woman, sat at the register reading one
of the new releases because the afternoon was slow. She stared avidly at the
pages, her smooth forehead occasionally creasing with interest. She was pretty,
but too interested in books to notice. One of those young women who lived
vicariously through printed words, Emily Dickinson their role model as they
rued the lack of Romeo lovers who could fend off brigands and scoundrels,
defend a woman’s virtue and honor both, shower her with money and roses and
romance, bring her to multiple orgasms in a suite in Paris or Rome, and never
once forget to put his underwear in the hamper. Well, she was young. There was
hope she might still outgrow it before she spun away her entire youth on
fanciful notions of Never Land. Say what you will for reality; however gross,
it had its appeal.

Dabble cleared his throat to
get her attention. “…

That was as far as he had gotten
before it simply died off, a labored endeavor that might be of profound
importance, or might just as easily go nowhere. What was the assistant’s name?
He knew and did not know at the same time. What he knew was not real, just his
own wanton fantasies. And those made for labored storylines. Only here in this
place, this world, this fractured corner of a much broader reality than he had
ever before dared to dream, fantasies had a place and a purpose. Maybe.

Or maybe it was just worthless
drivel, nothing he could make anything of.

No, that wasn’t true. He wanted to
make something of it, but he couldn’t decide how. And therein lay the problem.
Dabble wasn’t a main character, just a fleshed-out incidental, someone who
walked through the scene to add color and life and distraction; he was the
bit-part actor polishing glasses and steins behind the bar at Rick’s Place.
So,
what’ll ya have?

He wasn’t sure. He had no answers.

Maybe Kreiger was right after all.
His head still hurt like hell.

“I found another blanket,” he heard
Lindsay say. It sounded like she was searching the closet; sleeping
accommodations were inadequate.

Out the large window facing the front
of the Saloon, he could see Alex standing out upon the ocean of white. The young
man was staring up at the sky, hands jammed into his pockets. What he was
thinking, Jack could not guess.

Below, Leland Quince claimed the
small guestroom; in spite of everything, sleeping arrangements somehow seemed
important.

There was no time for this. They
needed to go home, and Jack was the only one who could do it. Kreiger could
probably do it, too, but Jack doubted the Cast Out would honor any deal once in
possession of the Nexus. Leland was wrong about Kreiger. The Cast Out wanted
the Nexus and nothing else. He would sacrifice everything to that end to get
it. He had known that Nail would kill the dregs he sent across the line, but he
sent them anyway. The Cast Out was well versed in the necessity of sacrifice.

No, Jack was the only one who could
get them out of here. If he failed, they would all die…
and quickly
.
Outside the protective perimeter—how he had made that, he still had no
idea—they were all just meat to a starving Wasteland.

And Leland Quince argued over sharing
a room.

No, that was unfair. The businessman
wanted the tickets; arguing was simply a means to an end. He believed he could
negotiate a deal that Kreiger would be forced to honor, sending them home in
exchange for a clean, bloodless transfer of control. To him, money and deals greased
the wheels, made life easy, made sense. Kreiger wanted the Nexus and was
willing to send Leland home to get it. Leland wanted to go home, and didn’t
care if Kreiger had the Nexus or not. It seemed like an equitable trade. But
Leland Quince did not understand the Nexus; not the way Jack did. He did not
appreciate its power, its magnitude. Kreiger had sown the arguments amidst the
bait, wedges driven between the various inhabitants of the Sanity’s Edge
Saloon, deliberate manipulations to force Jack to yield, out of frustration or
anger or just plain exhaustion. Kreiger was playing them like marionettes—and
the residents of the saloon seemed only too eager to dance to the jerk of
strings.

He couldn’t hide up here much longer.
He needed to learn about the others, so his stories about them would be right.
Both the Writer and Kreiger alluded to the stories fitting the people they were
intended for; he couldn’t simply fill in names as he went along, an overworked
casting director looking to fill last-minute roles. He was creating the role
that would be filled; he couldn’t do otherwise. Maybe that was how the Cast
Outs failed in the first place? Maybe they let their own desires overshadow
their charges’ needs? Was that why the Nexus rejected them, cast them out into
the Wasteland to join the rest of the living dead?

No answers, only speculations.

Jack saved the file he had created
and went out on the roof, climbing up on the false front. Out here, he could
not hear the goings-on of the second floor, not Leland’s arguments, or Ellen’s
and Lindsay’s exploration. He saw Alex staring in silence at the emptiness.
Perhaps he thought he was protecting them from whatever he imagined was lurking
just beyond the barrier. Or perhaps he was only protecting himself. No matter.
From up here, Jack had no idea what Alex was thinking or doing or saying. From
up here, he could almost believe Alex was just another stranger who meant
nothing more to him than the majority of the other seven billion people
inhabiting the earth—wherever that was relative to here.

Nail crept up beside him, unaware of the new Caretaker’s
misgivings. Jack reached out and absently scratched under the creature’s
muzzle, the fur course and thick. Nail leaned into his hand, a contented growl
in his throat, one foot beginning a half-hearted thumping. “You deserve
better,” he murmured to the small gargoyle. “I’m sorry.”

Nail stared at him without
comprehension, self-doubt not a concept within the Guardian’s grasp. Then he
nuzzled Jack’s shoulder with his snout, hopped down and wandered away.

Alone again, Jack thought as he
watched the emptiness.
Naturally
.

*     *     *

As the sun sank into the horizon,
they all trickled back to the main room, drawn by some mutual understanding, a
sense of the dinner hour. Jack found Ellen and Lindsay pumping coins into the
candy machine. Ellen stared uneasily at the chewed hole in the waiting room
wall, refusing to turn her back on it. Lindsay seemed unconcerned. Alex
rummaged behind the bar and in the refrigerator, his search yielding a brick of
mild cheddar, a half-stick of pepperoni, and a box of Ritz crackers.

“I don’t suppose you happen to have
any change on ya?” Alex asked as Jack came down the stairs. “I’m nearly tapped
out.”

Jack dug into his pocket, and pulled
out a dollar and sixty-five cents, mostly in nickels and dimes. “All I got,” he
said, placing the sad offering on the bar. “Check the coin returns, or maybe
under the porch boards for change that might have fallen through.”

“Can’t hope for much from that,” Alex
said. “This place doesn’t look like it gets a lot of foot traffic.”

“The Saloon operates on a set of
contrived principles,” Jack said. “What you need doesn’t just appear; it weaves
itself into the existing reality. Food is in the vending machine or the fridge,
blankets and clothes are in the closet. That’s why it isn’t as simple a matter
as just sending all of you home. I have to construct a reality around each of
you.”

“How are you going to do that if you
don’t know anything about us?”

Jack shrugged. “I’ll have to learn.”

“Are you sure that’s how it works?”
Ellen asked, emerging from the waiting room ahead of Lindsay. Both were laden
with snack bags of chips and nachos, a few candy bars, and a shrink-wrapped can
of tuna fish with rye crackers.