The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (21 page)

Then the lost soul turned to him,
face burned and peeling, hair tangled with dust and filth, lips locked in a
desperate grimace. His eyes saw nothing, gaze fixed upon a reality that existed
invisibly between the madness gripping his mind and the wretched sheet of paper
looping endlessly through the ancient typewriter. And through the filth and
sweat, through the gleam of madness and catatonic withdrawal, Jack saw
something even more frightening than the cloud of insanity swelling around this
person, eager to engulf anyone who stayed too long, or pondered too closely the
ramifications of fate.

It was himself!

Jack woke up, heart pounding, lungs
pulling shallow snatches of air through his nostrils, his lips held tight
against the urge to scream.
It was only a dream.

You’re sure?

He had seen himself, a madman lost in the white desert wasteland. But
what had become of the Sanity’s Edge? Of the others? Why was he alone, lost in
the middle of nothing like some mad hermit trying desperately to write without
paper or instrument, an outcast, a leper pariah, a…

Cast Out
!

It was almost dawn before Jack could
fall back asleep.

*     *     *

Within the black and maroon striped
tents, Leland caught a glimpse of the fat Cast Out—what was his name? Hyde or
something? —seated cross-legged within a circle of candles, the air pungent
with incense and scented oils thinly masking an animal stink of sweat. He was
completely naked, body glistening with oil that shimmered off the smooth,
hairless rolls of fat. It was easier now to see the bones piercing his flesh,
the tattoos mapping his skin with arcane symbols and images. The fat man
chanted softly, drool spilling unnoticed from the corner of his mouth, eyelids
flickering.

“What’s he doing?”

Kreiger offered an appraising stare
to the enormous Cast Out who sputtered on oblivious like a man possessed. “Hyde
is an accomplished dreamer. It’s one of the things I like about him. He never
overlooks the small things, the charming details: the flavor of the wind, the
color of a scream, the sound of forever. Papa Lovebone can easily dream enough
for two. Even three.”

*     *     *

Ellen was flying.

Wasps crisscrossed the blue lines
running shallow under the pale skin of her arms, itchy little insect feet
tickling her skin, their bodies striped in black and red, chrome stingers like
fine syringes, needles made of glass.

They’ll sting you.

Whole series of sharp jabs to the
inside of her elbow, along the blue lines of her hands, her arms. Lip bitten
against the pain. Rush of warmth moving up her arms. Along the blue lines. Trace
the red line. The Dreamline. Poison. Sweet, pure lightning, it lanced through
her heart and brain both at once, and lifted her up on angel’s wings. And the
next thing she knew, she was…

…
Flying!

Ellen caught the baseball
gracelessly; more difficult than it looked, but she did catch it. That was the
important thing. She looked at it in the pocket of the mitt, the leather stiff
and unworked. She wasn’t good at baseball, didn’t care to be. But Daddy liked
to play catch. He liked to lob slow balls at her, and occasionally toss them
way up in the air. Easy flies, he called them. But they weren’t easy. You ran
around staring up at the sky, always worrying that you would fall over
something, trip, or just catch the ball right in your forehead. It happened. The
ball hurt. But Daddy liked to play ball. It was the only time he liked to spend
with her. So whenever he asked, she would play catch with him.

“That was good, kiddo,” Daddy called
from across the lawn. “Now throw it back the way I showed you.”

Ellen saw her hand take the ball from
the mitt; a small hand; the hand of a girl only nine or ten, maybe not even
that. Not the hand of the woman she was, but the child she had been. Not a hand
grown long and thin, fed on junk through the small puckered scars that worked
along the veins. No, none of that. Just a child’s hand, innocent and
unblemished and undamaged. A child who does not know; does not suspect.

What’s happening?

She saw the ball flying back through
the air. Daddy scrambled to catch it. “You’re not concentrating, Ellen. Keep
your eye on the ball. This one will be a little harder.”

The ball whistled at her, and she
followed it with her eyes just like he told her, reaching out to catch it just
like he had showed her a hundred times.

The ball smacked into her mitt
and—she was certain—burned a hole straight through. The pulverizing force shot
down her arm and into her elbow, lighting it on fire. She flung the glove and
ball down, holding her savaged hand, the skin burning hot and scarlet. She was
screaming.

“That’s okay, Ellen. Try to catch
this one.”

The same burning pain erupted in her
shoulder as the next baseball hit her, and nearly spun her around. For a
moment, her tears halted, too amazed even to cry.

Another baseball smashed into her
kidney: the sharp sting, the fire flower bloom, the dizzying pain. “
Stop!
”
she wailed.

“Ellen, you’re not even trying. Here,
kiddo. This one’s right to ya.”

A spray of white against the dark of
closed lids. The middle of her forehead, that same sharp, hard crack, a nail driven
into her skull. Only this one not as painful. It just made everything …

…
black
.

She awoke to the sensation of
something tapping against her face. She tried to shrug it away, but it came
again. It felt like something small and hard bouncing off her cheek, then her
forehead, then her…

“Stop it,” she mumbled.

“It’s always about you, isn’t it
Ellen?”

Daddy?
She opened her eyes and saw him
sitting in a metal folding chair, the only furniture at all in a room of soft
canvas walls, off-white. He threw something at her, the small white thing
smacking against her forehead with a kind of
chock
sound. She tried to
block it with her hands, but they were bound tight to her sides. Straitjacket.

Something hit her chin.
Chock
.

“You never once stopped to consider
how what you were doing would affect me, did you?”

She saw the padded floor littered
with the small pills he was throwing at her.

“Why is it always about you?” he
said, more a challenge than a question.

Chock
. Another pill bounced off her
forehead.

“Stop it.” The request—it was no more
than that, no force behind it that might have made it an order—was so weak, she
wondered if she had even spoken at all.

But she had.

“Stop it? You want
me
to stop
it?” He flung a handful of pills at her—not serious, not painful; at least, not
physically. But like magic bullets, they shattered her defenses, finding their
way unerringly to her soul and ripping at it like razors. “You stop it, Ellen!
You! You want out so bad, then go ahead and start eating those pills. Do it
slowly, so you don’t throw ‘em up like the last time. Slow so you actually die.
But if you want to live, then you stop this. You stop all this nonsense.”

“Where’s Jack?” Her words were a
strained mumble through lips turned awkward and numb.

“Who’s Jack? Is he the guy who sold
you the stuff? The one you killed?”

“Nooooo.”
So hard to think. So
hard to concentrate
. “Jack’s… the Caretaker.”

“Is that what they call dealers these
days?” Gabriel Monroe became angrier.

“The Saloon? What happened to the
Sanity’s Edge Saloon?”

He grabbed her face in his hands,
pulling her straying gaze straight to his eyes, wide and feverish with rage.
“Just stop it, Ellen. Stop all this nonsense. There is no Saloon. You’ve been
talking about it ever since they admitted you. It doesn’t exist. You’re here.
Do you understand? There is no Saloon. It’s all in your head. It’s a delusion,
and the longer you persist in it, the harder this is going to be. There is no
wasteland, or dust tribe, or jack o’ lantern man. You were on drugs, Ellen. You
were so stoned you didn’t even know your own name, or what month it was. But
none of that was real. This hospital is real.”

“No. There was a train…”

“No! There’s only here.” His hands
were squeezing upon her skull, holding her painfully, refusing to let her go.
“Do you remember here? Do you? You can’t get away from it that easily. You
can’t escape just because you don’t like where you are. You’re still here.
You’ll always be here. No matter where you go inside here,” he said, releasing
one side of her face so that he could tap her forehead sharply, finger like a
dull hammer. “There’s no escaping where you really are.”

She stared, nothing making sense.
Nothing.

He regarded her glazed expression
with loathing. “Fine, I’ll prove it.” His hand tightened around the back of her
neck. “
Open your mouth
.”

Ellen woke up suddenly, muscles
stiffening like an animal ready for flight, a scream of horror and despair
ready to burst from her lips.

It was only a dream.

Or are you dreaming of waking up from
a dream, and leaving behind a reality too horrifying to face?

No
, she thought, heart slamming in her chest,
that
wasn’t real
. That wasn’t her father, that wasn’t her life; only a dream.
The Saloon was real—inexplicable, but real. And Jack was real. The Tribe of
Dust was real. But that thing before was a dream. Her father would never do
anything like that to her. He didn’t care enough about her for that. No tough
love in Gabriel Monroe. No love at all.

She wiped frightened tears from her
eyes, struggling to regain control while something beside her squirmed.

“Ellen?” It was Lindsay.

“Hmm?”

“Are you okay?”

No, most definitely not
. “Yeah. Just a bad dream.”

The little girl curled a little
closer to her. “You were mumbling and stuff. You woke me up.”

“I’m sorry.”

The little girl shrugged, still
half-asleep. “This place scares me, too.”

Ellen let Lindsay fall asleep. There
was nothing about this place that scared her nearly as much as the thought that
none of it might be real. If that was true, then who knew what reality was
actually waiting on the other side of this dream for her to wake up?

Sleep, with its threat of dreams that
were not dreams but peeks between the blinds into a world that was her true
home, did not come for the rest of the night.

*     *     *

“I want to give you something, Mr.
Quince,” Kreiger said. “Something valuable to me, but something you’ll need, I
think. And I’m going to need something from you in return. Call it a
demonstration of goodwill.”

Reginald Hyde giggled, a disturbing
sound like something hidden behind asylum walls, inhuman and monstrous and
immensely pleased. “I don’t need it,” Leland said, pulse quickening. “I’ll just
go back—”

An arm wrapped about him from behind,
restraining him while his wrist was caught in a bone-crushing grip, arm jerked
out straight, palm offered up to Gusman Kreiger. In Leland’s ear, the rasping
sound of Rebreather’s mask. And just as quick, Kreiger clamped a hand over
Leland’s mouth, silencing his protests. “No, Mr. Quince, this is important.
Realize that if I truly wanted to harm you, there would be nothing you could do
to stop me, anyway.”

Rebreather’s grip tightened like a
vice, the bones in Leland’s wrist grinding together, his chest constricted
until he thought his ribs would break. He squirmed, but might have been trying
to free himself from beneath the crushing weight of a mountain. Useless.
Kreiger stroked Leland’s upraised palm lightly, the fingers already numb and
tingling.
Should have kept the negotiations in your own court,
Leland
thought.
Stayed inside the barrier, dealt from a position of equality.
Fucked up! Fucked up
! Try as he might to close his hand, make a fist, defy
whatever intentions Kreiger had, the numbness made all sensation distant and
useless, his fingers hanging there, intractable.

Then Kreiger struck Leland’s hand,
the sorcerer’s fingernail mysteriously transformed, grown long and hard like an
animal’s talon. It sliced deep into Leland’s palm, and Kreiger’s other hand
tightened, stifling Leland’s screams.

“Shut up!” Kreiger hissed. “Your pain
means nothing. Not here, one scream in the tumult, lost to the howling winds of
Tartarus. Only life holds meaning—life and
blood
.”

Leland watched the blood spill across
his open palm, black under the night sky. Kreiger cupped his hand below the
businessman’s, the demon’s claw still visible as he gathered the falling
droplets before they could spill wasted upon the sand.