The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (64 page)

Preview of The Edge of

Madness Café

Read on for a preview of the next
book in the saga of
The Sea and the Wasteland
:
The Edge of Madness
Café

The Sea and the

Wasteland: Book 2

THE EDGE

OF MADNESS

CAFÉ

DREAMS AND
REGRETS

Ellen woke with a start,
throat holding back a scream; sleep no escape from the torments of a reality
gone slowly insane. The madness invaded her dreams, filling her head with
memories of times that never were, people she never knew, a world that did not
exist. Sadness and despair.

She’d left him behind.

Sins lost in the jumble
like so much of her past, displaced in the blackness she loosely termed her
memory and revived in the darkness as nightmares.

Outside her window, the
storm made the light from a street lamp waver, sliced apart by the blinds and scattered
across her bedroom in flecks of fairy light. Covers pulled up around her chin,
her eyes examined each piece of darkness in turn, nightmare-induced fear
dissipating slowly into a kind of featureless embarrassment. There was nothing
there, of course. Nothing extraordinary. No monsters or apparitions, no
psychopaths or leering madmen invading her apartment, watching her while she
slept, restless eyes twitching with dark imaginings and diseased ruminations.

No, the room was entirely
normal. The only monsters she kept inside her head, and there was no protection
from them. Like creatures stalking the edges of the light, always there, always
waiting.

That was the way madness
worked.

Ellen switched on the
light by her bed, the soft glow driving back demons and shadows alike.

For a time at least.

The clock beside her bed
read 5:26 AM; too early to get up, and maybe too late to fall back asleep.
Maybe.

Beside the clock, a
dog-eared book, the spine creased,
the cover worn and frayed at the corners from being read and re-read—how many
times, she could no longer remember.
The Sanity’s Edge Saloon
. On the
very last page was a hand-written note signed with a drawing of a jack o’
lantern.

A message from Jack.

It had been nearly two
months since she’d seen him last.

Actually, it would be
more accurate to say it had been nearly two months since she
thought
she’d seen him last; according to her court-appointed psychiatrist, Jack
Lantirn did not exist. Jack Lantirn, like so much of her memory, was little
more than an elaborate fabrication, the results of severe manic depression and
drug abuse that left her on the brink of suicide, susceptible to the suggested
reality of fiction.

The Sanity’s Edge
Saloon.

She had read the book
over and over since that day, the day he left her the message, the day she saw
him standing across the street from the bookstore like a man waiting for a
train. He had been watching. She hadn’t known it then, but afterwards she was
certain. Watching her; watching
over
her. The book was Jack’s autobiography
and fantasy, a mirror of his madness, his twisted reality bound together into a
loose collection of words and paper. And somehow she was an element of his
insanity, a fellow traveler on his journey to the edge of dreams; cast in the
role of friend, confidant, maybe even lover—yes, probably lover, too—she
followed him through his mad tale until, suddenly and inexplicably, she found
herself here, this staid, stable, unimaginative life.

And that was where it all
started to get strange.

According to absolutely
everyone, Jack Lantirn did not exist; simply a character in a book by an author
of the same name; an author no one could identify. She asked her boss down at
the bookstore what he knew about
The Sanity’s Edge Saloon
, and Nicholas
Dabble said nothing; strange because the proprietor of
Dabble’s Books
possessed an almost supernatural talent for information. He cataloged the
entire store in his head; not just titles and authors, but every word from
every page. He seemed, in fact, to know everything about anything, a living
warehouse of information and utterly unconcerned with the profundity of it.
When she pressed him as to why he did not do something more interesting with
his gift, he replied that information was both inherently useless and boring,
and that it was only the application of information that piqued his interest.

So it was to her
amazement and his that Nicholas Dabble knew nothing about
The Sanity’s Edge
Saloon
. The single paperback copy had arrived mixed in with a distributor’s
shipment a couple months ago. It did not appear on the packing slip, and the
shipper, when she called, had no record of the book whatsoever: not just of
sending them a copy of the book, but even of its existence. The publisher’s
shipping agent, after fifteen flustered, fumbling minutes on the phone, finally
declared that Ellen was obviously mistaken as to its origin.

The book, like its
author, should not exist. There was no explanation as to how it fell into her
hands that day, the day she had last seen—correction;
thought
she had
last seen—Jack Lantirn, her friend and lover—
or imaginary friend and lover
—who
may or may not exist. But the book was real, and that counted for something.

Didn’t it?

She slipped out from
under the covers and padded softly about the apartment, her bedroom too hot and
stuffy to be comfortable. The windows in the other room were open, and the
breeze against her naked skin felt good, reminiscent of something else,
something before, something not entirely in concurrence with this reality.

The lines between sanity
and madness had blurred, the boundaries between real and imaginary neither hard
nor fast. They were like lines in the sand, or chalk rubbed on the sidewalk;
easily smudged, easily
erased
.

But since no one else
seemed to notice, unless the whole world was going crazy, she was losing her
mind. Again.

And she wasn’t sleeping
very well lately, either.

She stepped easily
through the sparsely furnished
rooms, easterly windows pale with eventual dawn. Naked in the secrecy of
darkness, she thought back to that other life, or maybe that life she lived
only in her head, … or in someone’s head, leastwise. The breeze against her
skin reminded her of the Wasteland and the saloon. And that reminded her of
Jack.

Jack
. Her flawed hero, her noble fool,
her guardian and protector and…

…
Caretaker
.

There was something
there, but like everything else, it was slippery, twisting from her grasp. Her
memory was like a stream, facts like fish she was pulling out with her bare
hands, only to have them wriggle loose and get lost again in the icy waters.
Jack haunted her thoughts and tormented her dreams, his very presence a
recrimination.

She’d left him behind.

As for that time
before—before Jack and the Wasteland and the Saloon and everything else that,
so she was told, were simply properties of her imagination—she remembered even
less. All of her life before that day in the bookstore was meaningless, her
past like words on a page written in a language she did not understand. She
knew bits and pieces, but it seemed to exist without any personal significance.
Just words on a page.

The back window of her
apartment looked down into a narrow ravine of trees. Obscured at the bottom, a
thick river ran like a gray, greasy snake, surrounding the town in its coils.
She knelt down, folding her arms on the sill and resting her head. The dreams
were incomprehensible; what she remembered made no sense, and what she forgot
drove her from sleep on the verge of screaming.

Jack had sacrificed
himself, and for that, she was saved.

But for what?
Court-mandated therapy sessions twice a week, random drug screenings, a
mediocre job at a bookshop, no friends, no family, no one at all who cared
whether she lived, died, went to the park, or went insane. No one …
except
Jack
. Night after night, he lived on in her dreams, flickering
recollections of places beyond the written page, as though they existed in her
memory before reading them in his book, his tale of overdone metaphors,
fragments and run-on descriptions.

Then there were things
she knew only from what she read, having not witnessed them herself—
assuming
she had witnessed anything at all
. She never saw Rebreather fall from the
stair outside of the saloon; she was already on board the train, the train
meant to take her and Jack out of the Wasteland and back to reality. Only Jack
didn’t make it, and Rebreather didn’t die in the fall. The raging lunatic
charged from the smoke of the destroyed Saloon, body broken, limbs bloody and
dislocated, driven solely by madness and his hatred of Jack. He dragged him
down, and the train left them behind, Ellen its only occupant.

And then she was here,
awake from the dream, the book ended. Survivor’s guilt. She had escaped. Jack
had not.

Ellen wiped absently at a
tear that seemed to have found its way down her cheek, its trail cold in the
breeze. So frustrating, living a life that did not exist. But where was the
harm in it, really? She had no past, no memory of before the Sanity’s Edge
Saloon. That was what she couldn’t get through to Dr. Kohler. What was the point
of living solely in the now, in this reality grounded on real people and real
things and real places, when she had no memory of any of them? It was a waste
of time, the effort to attach meaning to the meaningless.

The dreams were
more than willing to give her
everything she needed, everything significant and tangible and real…

… except permanence
.

She stood up carefully,
feeling light-headed and insubstantial, like she herself was caught in a dream.
Pulling a quilt from the back of a chair, she wrapped it around herself and
curled up to watch the sky slowly brighten, scalloped shells of gray and white
clouds overtaking the dark simplicity of night. After a time, the wind turned
cool and damp, and she fell back asleep to the patter of rain against the glass,
her dreams more pleasant in the hours of predawn, the world caught between the
infinite possibility of night and the boundaries of the waking day.

*     *     *

Outside, a figure in a
battered overcoat watched the windows on the back of the apartment building
where Ellen Monroe lived. He watched her move like a ghost through the rooms,
watched her nakedness with a kind of trembling awe zealots afford visions of
the Madonna. But he knew her better than
that; a savior maybe, but pure of neither body nor mind,
simply of heart.

But oh, what a
difference that could make.

He watched her, her
confused expression and winsome look framed by distant, high windows looking
out over endless expanses of reality already made. He saw the tear upon her
cheek; could smell it from all the way down here in the alley, picking its
fragile scent from out of the rot of neglected garbage, the sticky odor of late
summer grass and leaves, the acrid smell of wet asphalt.

The rain spattered down
upon him, and that was a wonder also, but one whose novelty had worn thin. The
changing weather rubbed at his bones, aching scars that would never fully heal.

But despite his
discomfort, he watched Ellen Monroe; watched
her closely; as closely as a lover, or a father, or the
penitent man seeking redemption at the foot of the Virgin.

Soon
, he thought—maybe a prognostication;
maybe a
prayer.
Soon
.

He turned and shuffled
away with the night, the crooked staff of tarnished copper and iron tapping
away at the sidewalk, knocking out a fading rhythm like the ticking of an old
clock.