The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (59 page)

“
Now give me the Goddamn TICKET!”
Kreiger screamed.

“
Ellen!
” And without even
realizing it, Jack was spinning the valve, long full turns, opening the main
line as wide as it would go.

“
NooooOOOOOOO
!”

*     *     *

For a moment, nothing happened.

Jack stared down at the iron wheel,
red paint worn through in places to reveal the bare metal beneath. He had
opened it until it wouldn’t turn anymore…

… and nothing had happened. Nothing
at all.

Another moment passed, the silence
pregnant and uncomfortable. Jack heard Ellen, a frightened sound that wanted to
be open tears, but would not break the front she tried desperately to maintain;
much the way she tried to believe in him and have faith in the fact that he
knew what he was doing.

But clearly, he did not.

Jack looked up at her, saw her
looking back. Not with disappointment, though he expected it, perhaps even
deserved it. No, there was only sadness, dashed hopes, naked despair. And something
that might have been the last desperate moments of love—or maybe he only wished
it was that.

Nothing was happening. Nothing at
all.

Kreiger leaned upon the lightning
rod, the first hint of a smirk twisting his face. “Was something supposed to
happen, Jack, because if it was, I missed it?”

Jack looked to the leader of the Cast
Outs and asked, “Where do unicorns go when they die, Kreiger?”

The Cast Out looked first at Hyde,
and then Rebreather; neither seemed to have an answer to Jack’s sudden and total
breakdown. Kreiger let go a long, exasperated breath. “I don’t know, Jack.
Where do unicorns go when they die?”

He looked back at the Cast Out, and
for a moment—a moment only—Jack’s eyes were two different colors. “Anywhere
they want.”

And the southeast corner of the
Sanity’s Edge Saloon exploded, reality sliding out from under them as a plume
of white fire burst out from the very heart of the universe and extended
straight up to the edge of infinity, obliterating all reality in its path.

…
the Nexus …

THE CARETAKER

Ellen stared helplessly at the
enormous column of blazing white light impaling the world, wavering and
pulsing, as brilliant as a lightning bolt, as impenetrable as the sun.

There was no sign of Jack.

Anything and everyone standing in the
room was knocked to the floor by the concussion. Even Rebreather’s chiseled
permanence was sent sprawling to the ground. The explosion knocked Lovebone
into the wall, loosening his hold upon her. But even freed, she found herself
unable to move, searching the column of energy desperately. No heat emanated
from it; no burning flame or scalding radiation as its appearance suggested.
The light was silent, no crackle of flame or pop of new burning wood. All she
heard was the ringing of the explosion in her ears, and the occasional scratch
or tick of debris, little more than splinters and dust falling upon the ground.
And below that, almost hidden, was a kind of hum, like millions of coursing
volts of electricity suddenly unleashed through every speck and fiber of the
Saloon’s architecture.

But Jack was nowhere to be seen.

She stared into the blinding white
light until her eyes screamed with pain, tears running down her cheeks, but all
she could make out were the tracking shapes of bright green and blue neon
flares; the afterglow of the light burned into her retinas. And still she
refused to look away.
He destroyed himself … to save you.

“Jack?” she whispered.

“
Get to the train
!” someone
shouted, a voice distant and muffled, caught in the electric buzzing of the
white light, the dying ring in her ears. It could be Jack. It could as easily
be one of the Cast Outs. She didn’t know.

“Get him!” another shouted.

Jack must be alive! She heard the
pounding of feet, and thought it must be him. He was alive and running for the
train; the train he told her to be on! Yes, that must be it. Jack was alive,
somehow surviving the explosion and racing to get on board the train, to make
good their escape.
Their
escape. They were leaving this place—
together
!

More shouting. Meaningless sound.
Slowly, the burnt image in her eyes was fading, the self-induced blindness
lifting.

Get to the train!

It could be Jack, couldn’t it? Alive,
not engulfed in a column of cold, bright energy that stabbed like a needle
straight into the eye of heaven.

“Jack?”

Get to the train!

She looked down at her hands, seeing
the ticket still clutched in her fingers; crunched in half, wrinkled and
smeared with her own blood, but there just the same. On hands and knees, she
started inching towards the backdoor of the Saloon and the still-waiting train.

And Jack.

*     *     *

Jack leaped the gap of obliterated
steps where the Nexus had poured up and through, consuming all reality in its
path even as it offered up its power to create it anew. He caught the splintered
edge of the landing with his chest, scrambling for purchase on the polished
floorboards, fractured ends digging painfully into him. He kicked one leg over
and pulled himself up, collapsing on the floor for one dizzying moment,
catching his breath and listening.

The bathroom was completely gone. No
half-completed architectural absentmindedness. It was simply gone. All
disappeared, engulfed into the shaft of pure, mutable energy.

It had been a simple thing, really.
Turn the valve wheel and open the mainline as far as it could go. To be plain,
he had just pushed this unstable fragment of reality a fraction closer to the
Nexus, that stream of power from all times, all universes, and all realities
that burst through the fast-beating heart of the Saloon like a thousand bolts
of lightning.

And now there was power.

How he survived, he didn’t know,
could not begin to wonder. The Nexus burned raw and enormous like a pillar of
heaven, so malleable that it could make gods of mice and men. He felt it
eagerly wending its way through his skin, crawling like insects itching to be
free from this crude vessel of flesh. It would be there for him at a moment’s
notice, eager to do anything he asked, anything he needed, anything he
wanted
.

But it was
too
available;
anyone could tap into it. Anyone.

Below, the Tribe of Dust was coming
for him.

Good!
He scrambled to his feet and started
running.

*     *     *

Ellen crawled to the waiting room,
careful how she placed her hands, splinters of glass cutting her knees and
palms.

And abruptly, the glass fragments
became harmless pebbles upon a floor littered with sea-worn rocks. Before eyes
only just freed of the disorienting retinal ghosts, she saw the shards that had
gouged her flesh become rounded pebbles and sand that tumbled harmlessly from
her skin, leaving inexplicable, bloody cuts as mute testament to the broken
glass that was no more.

Then the gravel became loam.

And the loam turned to soil as black
as coffee. The air was suddenly fragrant with the smells of midsummer, the sun
hot and drowsy, burning the back of her neck, making the skin painful and
sticky to the touch. Intoxicating and thick and…

What’s happening?

She recoiled as grass sprouted up
beneath her fingertips, damp and lush, new blades twisting up between her fingers.
Then the grass coiled together into soft fibers, its color darkening,
changing
—shag
carpet, bright red and hideous.

Suddenly, Ellen was afraid to look
up, afraid to look into the changing face of reality. The threads of reason and
logic had been plucked loose from the fabric of the universe, and everything
she knew or believed in was falling apart.

“Not so fast, muffin. You’ve got
something I want.”

Papa Lovebone!
Ellen crawled faster, trying to rise
up from her knees and run. She risked a single glance up, the blown-out door to
the platform a hundred yards away, the distance separating her from the train
stretched out like carnival taffy, the boards warped and twisting across the
vast distance of the floor, the rules governing time and space, distance and
motion, reality and dream, rendered meaningless by the simple turn of a wheel.

“Well actually, you have a few
things.”

Ellen felt a wave of horror run cold
across her skin, the boundaries of reality continuing to stretch as a wave of
dizziness turned her thoughts into a flight of frightened starlings. Her arms
collapsed, and she fell upon her side like some wounded animal on the
Serengeti; a dead-to-the-world drunk; a helpless junkie on a bad trip. Walls of
ornately carved mahogany dissolved into gilded Baroque styling then into
arching stonework festooned with tapestries and scrolled iron. The walls melted
up into vaulted ceilings, ornate mosaics cascading into oil cloudscapes giving
way to vast domes with classical reliefs, religious figures in pious
wonderment. Ellen could feel the shifting truth, the fixing and unfixing of
worlds, cut through her sanity like a scalpel, reality reduced to a series of
outfits being changed in endless succession.

She thought she was fainting, the
blood racing from her face, her eyes, her brain. The paint on the ceiling ran
freely under her stare, the colors mixing and reforming into reclining nudes in
pastoral scenes, dancing nymphs and fauns. And as the images frolicked in the
paint, the fauns took the nymphs in wanton abandon, the scenes becoming more
detailed, more decadent until the paint lost all pretense of art, transformed
into animated trysts, graphic picture shows, frightening and perverse …

“For now, I’ll just take this.”

Her eyes snapped away suddenly, and
she saw Reginald Hyde bending over her, reaching for something she held tightly
in her fist. She followed his stare to the crumpled edges of the ticket he was
trying to pull from between her clenched fingers.

“No!” Her free hand tightened into a
fist, striking at him.

“Now, now, muffin,” Hyde warned,
catching her wrist in one thick, meaty palm and holding it tight. “I’ll be sure
to let you know when I want it rough.”

He squeezed her wrist until slivers
of pain shot white-hot up her arm, pelting her spine like rocks. She winced and
sucked breath, but refused to relinquish her hold on the ticket. If anything,
the pain made everything clearer, as clear as crystal, sharp and cold. Hyde’s
face danced above her, smiling with a pleasure bordering upon ecstasy, his features
masked by a dozen ghostly images of trapped spirits that haunted his skin,
bound and driven to his will like beasts before the whip. When he smiled, it
was the boar-tusked snarl of a gerrymander, the sharp-fanged leer of the
Wasteland shrieker. His eyes were cast over by a thousand separate, hidden
eyes: slitted, reptilian, insectile, arthropodic, demonic; all fixated and
hungry. And the brutish Cast Out ruled them, directed their hunger to his will.
When or where he abandoned the loose trousers and robe, Ellen could not even
guess, but Hyde wore only the bound spirits and bone-pierced skin of black and
indigo tattoos, tightly wound knots, demon traps, cabalistic sigils and words
telling tales in dead languages of frescoed flesh moving and dancing upon his
naked skin, lives lived out and ended in the obscene folds. His penis lurched
and jerked at the air like a blind serpent in tattooed scales.

Ellen started crawling backwards,
shinnying across the floor and pulling at his iron grip. Small puling noises
escaped her, but she wasn’t sure why she made them or how, when all she wanted
to do was scream.

Hyde’s other hand caught the waist of
her jeans and dragged her back along the floor, his legs, thick slabs of fat
decorated with tales, frightening and hypnotic and strangely obsessive,
straddling her like a mountain.

“Stay, cupcake. Enjoy.” He smiled,
gently playing his fingers inside the front of her jeans, manicured fingernails
teasing the edge of her cleft. “I’ll bet even a construct like you can feel the
Nexus flowing through your weak and shallow shell, caressing your skin,
penetrating your lungs, thrusting itself deep …
deep
—”

His eyes glazed with a crazed
detachment, and he scooped her up as though she were no more than a piece of
paper, a loose sheet from a forgotten manuscript. His meaty hands fastened
about her arms, hiking the sleeves of the oversized sweatshirt up past her
elbows as he held her out at arm’s length like a child speaking to a favorite
doll. “We’re in paradise, sweet meat!”

Rain splattered from the ceiling in large amber droplets, sheeting
through her hair and down her face, stinging her eyes and numbing her lips.
Ellen realized it wasn’t rain at all, wasn’t even water, but liqueur! Hyde, now
completely insane, had turned the air above them into a raining cloud of
brandy!

The fat Cast Out opened his mouth
wide to catch the spirit on his tongue and swallow it whole. Then the amber
turned dark brown, sticky and sweet. Chocolate syrup; Ellen could smell it as
it dripped down Hyde’s face and across his tattoos like darkening blood. Next
came rain sheeting from the sky—
open sky now, no more ceiling, no more
Saloon; doesn’t matter anyway; nothing matters now
—to wash the syrup away.
Her gaze strayed to Hyde’s left shoulder, and the largest singular bone in his
collection of sick fetishes: a jawbone ringed with thick, tusk-like fangs newly
sewn to Lovebone’s skin with still-wet strings of fresh animal gut. Horrified,
her entire body began quivering.

Nail!
The bastard was wearing Nails
remains like a trophy, tying the Guardian’s spirit to the bone priest’s will!
She whispered the gargoyle’s name, the sound lost as her voice retreated after
her sanity down the long tunnel of her mind.

If Lovebone heard, he paid no mind.
“You can’t tell me you haven’t ever gone searching for Nirvana in the strained
drippings of a Mojave cactus button, muffin?” he demanded, his voice pursuing
her down through the fog of crashing thought. “I can smell it on you, read its
stories in the dilated black of your eyes.” A cruel grin seized his face,
tugging the features into a demonic caricature. “Let’s say we ride the line
together, you and I, for old time’s sake.”

His thumbs caressed the soft skin on
the insides of her elbows, urging shy veins to the surface. Ellen stared in
horror, paralyzed as barbs split from beneath Hyde’s thumbnails, darting out
like unsheathed stingers, his tattooed thumbs the mottled, jointed tails of
scorpions.

“No!” she moaned, helpless,
unconvincing. “Please don’t.”

Needle sharp, the points penetrated
the soft flesh, the eager blue lines. The thick meat of Hyde’s thumbs pumped
rhythmically like twin poison sacs, and she felt her muscles tighten then go
slack. A fiery wind burned insatiably from within, traveling up numb arms
absent from the elbow down. The burning heat passed into her, burned her spine
like a dry blade of grass, and ran shrieking into her brain, heedless of the
hot trail of tears passing over blood-flushed cheeks.