The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (60 page)

She felt the floor press up against
her back as the poison burned her brain like white-hot fire. Not like the
Nexus, not cool and brilliant and silent; this was bursting, frightening
colors, blazing hot, and ringing louder and louder and louder and…

“
Oh … God
…”

“… No.”

White light burning her eyes.
Trapped. Pinned. Arms, legs, chest immobilized! Suffocating! Something hard was
caught between her teeth. She opened her mouth to scream and it was pulled
away, stealing her scream with it.

“There. I’ll bet that’s better.” A
woman’s voice. Adult. Doting. Mothering. Inexplicable.

“Jack?”

“Who’s Jack, honey?”

“My … my friend.”

“There is no Jack, Ellen dear. He’s
only in your mind.” A kindly face interposed itself between Ellen and the white
light. A woman. Hair pulled back. Stiff white uniform collar. The air thick
with an antiseptic smell, sterilized; iodine; alcohol.

 “No. He’s … r-real.” Her protests
weak, petulant.

“Hi Ellen. It’s Dr.
Chaulmers.
You
remember?”

She turned, a new face entering the
white light. His lips smiled comfortingly, a practiced gesture betrayed only by
the condescension in his eyes that he could not hide. She knew him from
somewhere … somewhere…

“Where’s … Jack?” So hard to catch
her breath.

“Jack doesn’t exist, Ellen. He may
seem real
here
.”
He reached out and tapped a fingertip against her forehead as if explaining
something to a young child. “But there is no Jack o’ Lantern person, Ellen.
There is no goose-man. There is no saloon on the edge of nowhere—”

“Sanity!” she corrected, her voice a
desperate croak. “The Sanity’s Edge S-saloon.”

“I know it seems real, Ellen, but
it’s not. Your mind is constructing these people and places and making you
believe they’re real to distract you from the true reality surrounding you that
it cannot cope with. But they’re not real.”

“They’re real! They are!”

Dr. Chaulmers looked at her dubiously
then glanced overtop of her to the woman in white. “It’s not uncommon for them
to hold very tightly to their fantasy worlds,” he remarked, as if Ellen had
transformed into furniture. “She won’t let go easily.”

Then the woman stepped forward. “Open
your mouth, honey.”

“But they are re—”

A thick, rubber guard was jammed
between her teeth, wedge over her tongue. She tried to push it back out, but
someone else, someone unseen, was already pulling a strap tight under her jaw,
locking the bit in place. She tried to rear her head, free herself, but she was
still pinned down. Even her head. Warm tears burned her cheeks, fear turning
each breath into a hitchy whimper through flared nostrils.

Dr. Chaulmers returned. “We’ll go
again on three. I want you to take a deep breath and hold it, Ellen. On three.
One.”

She was desperately trying to shake
her head and failing, no deep breath but panic-stricken gasps.
Don’t let it end this way, Jack! Not
this way!

“Two. Deep breath, Ellen.”

Head thrashing side to side,
something attached, fixed to her temples. Something …
bad! Stop oh God please stop this
stop this stop this for the love of—

“Three.”

Sanity and reality burned out in a
sudden, blue-white flare of brilliant agony.

*     *     *

Jack drove his elbow through the
glass door of the grandfather clock just as Rebreather bounded into the master
bedroom. The giant Cast Out did not clamber gracelessly over the edge as he
had, but simply leaped the gap like some preternatural monster.

Even more graceful, Kreiger levitated
upon a cushion of air like a risen messiah. In one hand, he gripped the
lightning rod, the metal blazing white-hot, an electric-blue that hissed and
sparked with power. He gazed about himself dreamily, disinterestedly, as if
looking at and
through
everything to what was hidden, to what might be;
Kreiger was an artist finding the form within the unshaped clay.

Jack dug his hands into the
clockwork, the guts of counterweights and chains and small tools, and pulled
out a spearhead with a long, curved hook welded to the blade. It reminded him a
little of an old farming tool, the kind you saw on an antique store wall, no
indication of its purpose. But it was a weapon, a gladiatorial blade from some
poorly made, martial arts film, something he had seen numerous times and only
now appreciated.

Taking the strange hook in one hand,
he jerked it out, springs and gears tearing apart inside the clock and
clattering to the floor along with nearly a dozen feet of strong chain—very
useful; very
necessary
. And at the far end, the other counterweight: a
loaded flintlock pistol. He was not surprised by this, though once he might
have been. He understood now. The only question remaining was how much of this
was he actually doing, and how much of it had he actually planned so very long
ago?

Pistol in hand, he turned and dropped
to one knee in a fluid motion just as Rebreather rounded the spiral stair. He
squeezed the trigger, heard the crack of the hammer followed by an
ear-splitting explosion, the air suddenly pungent with the sulfurous smell of
black powder. Rebreather’s left knee erupted in a spray of bone splinters and
red, the giant Cast Out collapsing with a horrible scream as the leg gave out
from under him, the agonized sound from behind the mask barely human.

Still holding the spent weapon, Jack
risked a single glance at Kreiger, but the levitating mystic only stared down
at him from the air, a condescending smile upon his lips, an unholy, white fire
blazing behind the pupils of his changeling eyes. “You really have no idea what
you’ve done, do you?”

Jack didn’t answer, Rebreather’s
tortured howls the only sound in the void between the Caretaker and white
wizard. Further away, Ellen was screaming.

Kreiger’s smile broadened, white fire
spilling from the cracks between his shark’s grin. He extended the lightning
rod until the tip touched the wall, solid wood rippling like water on a pond,
the wave spreading outward, further and further. And where the wave passed,
reality changed. Simple wood planks became parquet floors strewn with oriental
rugs. Tapestries and gold-framed paintings appeared upon the walls, dark wood
wainscoting and deep Burgundy wallpaper. Already the dimensions of the room
were changing, stretching out, expanding; as if to say the Saloon was under new
management and was currently undergoing a brief period of renovation.
Please
pardon our dust
.

The pistol collapsed in Jack’s hands,
falling apart into time-withered wood and rust-pitted metal. Jack’s time was
ending, his reality being rewritten. And Gusman Kreiger was coming into his
own.

Jack turned, leaving behind a room he
did not recognize for the last vestige of familiarity: the Stairway to Heaven.
He gripped the bladed hook tightly in his hand and fled, the looped lengths of
chain rattling like the crimes of an ancient and forgotten haunt.

*     *     *

Kreiger watched, an indifferent god,
as Rebreather propped himself up upon his sword, blood soaking the left leg of
his pants, the shredded hole revealing the blown-apart edges of flesh and fractured
bone. Hate drove the Cast Out onward, foregoing the pain to follow Jack up the
dead end of the Stairway to Heaven, leaning upon his sword like a cane.
Rebreather was a pitbull with the taste of blood on its teeth, a shark gone to
frenzy in the froth of the maroon-stained sea.

Kreiger shrugged and opened his arms
like an angel ascending, and glided up along the large, ornate, brass stairway
that was once a spiral of simple iron before he enabled it to aspire to
something better. He had other things to do. Other fish to fry. Other worlds to
tame.

Gusman Kreiger stood in the middle of
Jack’s writing room, staring in a kind of bemused wonderment and disgust, the
power of the Nexus entrusted to the hands of a child dreamer, an acolyte of the
imagination, a mere infant.

The Nexus was pouring through the
Saloon, careless thoughts running rampant like children in a park. A strange
plant writhed in the corner of the stair, vestiges of Jack’s lingering control,
his influences run amok. The plant, whatever it was once, now resembled a large
Venus flytrap, broad leaves pawing at the edges of the brass rail, vine-like
tentacles reaching over, reaching for him. Some of the panes of glass in the
nearby window had been broken, runners poking through the jagged holes. Books
piled up on the floor, stacks growing from beneath like bubbling fountains. A
coffee machine formed from the very desk itself, its shape torn up from the
surface. Coffee was brewing, pouring down into a glass decanter, spilling over
and across the desktop in steaming streams. In one corner, a pneumatic tube
gaped; metal features fashioned obscenely to resemble a woman’s labia, brass
and copper turned living flesh.

“Oh, Jack,” Kreiger thought ruefully.
“Under other circumstances, you and I might have been friends.”

He dismissed the notion with a curt
shake of his head, walking directly to the Jabberwock, Jack’s personal
interface with the Nexus. Writers were such self-limiting, uninventive
dreamers. For two thousand years, he waited for this moment. Two thousand years
spent brooding, planning, scheming, hating … well, mostly hating. Hate kept him
alive when others grew tired and perished. Hate kept him alive when others
turned careless and the Wasteland devoured them, body and soul. Hate was his
pillar, his rod of iron, his Word to his disciples. It was hatred towards the
previous Caretakers that brought Rebreather under his control; hatred that held
Papa Lovebone in line; hatred that made him, Gusman Kreiger, the most powerful
creature to walk these lifeless sands in aeons.

And at last, he would taste the
fruits of his ambitions.

He sat down in the chair, hands
caressing the armrests, the soft, warm skin almost living, so luxurious the
comfort. Jack’s manifestation of his connection with the Nexus—a crude
computer/word processor of all things—waited upon the white wizard, the
Jabberwock’s empty screen staring back at him like the eye of God. Keys
beckoned his stroke, their symbols limiting, obtuse and primitive … but
functional. Once the Nexus was completely his, he could dispense with it
altogether. It would be a simple thing then. As simple as pie.

He gently placed his fingers upon the
bone-colored keys, feeling them, feeling the warmth that ran through them. They
were the vertebrae running along the small of a lover’s back, delicate and
known. He caressed them unhurriedly, savoring the luxurious texture.

“I am home,” he declared softly.

In some ways, Jack let him down. For
all his fire, Jack had surrendered surprisingly quickly. True, Jack never stood
a chance, but he hardly knew that. Dreamers like Jack seldom saw reality for
what it was. And after so many feints and jabs in their week-long duel, after
the calling of the trains when Kreiger suffered his first moment of actual
doubt, a hollow gouge in his innards that still made him cold to think about,
he thought Jack would go down in death, not turn rabbit and run. He was almost
disappointed.

Almost.

Kreiger’s fingers thrummed the keys,
lines pouring out upon the screen in a dizzying display of text; words
stringing into sentences; sentences stringing into paragraphs. With blinding
speed, the story began to unfold. Everything he had been storing up over all
this time, waiting, countless centuries of writing and rewriting every single
word over and over in his mind until it was perfect; perfectly described and
perfectly committed. And now it simply poured out of him and into the Nexus.
After so very, very long, he could release it all as it was meant to be.

Kreiger’s fingers halted their manic
dance as a boxed message appeared suddenly on the Jabberwock’s screen:

VIOLATION

UNAUTHORIZED USER

INTRUSION
COUNTER-MEASURES ACTIVATED

A red button on the keyboard,
obliquely labeled
I C E,
started blinking, and a small card spat out of the computer, landing face-up on
the keyboard, a short note typed on it.

“Beware the
Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite,
the claws that catch!”

— Lewis Carroll

Kreiger stared at the lines, an
unfamiliar sensation running through him. Some last ditch effort of Jack’s, he
wondered? Would it turn to dust once Rebreather finished breaking the
Caretaker’s spine, or tearing his still-beating heart from his chest? Or was
this some failed warning, a vague aspect of the capricious nature of the Nexus?