The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (7 page)

A stray breeze raised a small whorl
of dust, but nothing more. He saw a post to one side, its top crisscrossed with
signs, directions to destinations scrawled with clumsy imprecision, places like
the Wastelands, Dreamline, Wonderland, the Moon, Mercy Street, and the Street
of Broken Dreams.

The more he saw of the Sanity’s Edge
Saloon, the more it reminded him of a thing plucked out by its roots from some
other place, a thing not quite alive, but perhaps alive once, like a fossil or
the forgotten shell of a sea creature. The image that kept popping into his
mind was of a cocoon caught inside of a child’s killing jar, the worm dead, its
house left behind, pinned to a wax display board; a board that resembled an
endless desert wasteland with only a single rail connecting it with any world
outside of its own. He imagined that if some great hand shook the world—a world
in a glass bubble—it would start a flurry of artificial snow swirling
liquid-like from the sky.

Cascades of great crystal helices
like strands of DNA collapsing under the onslaught of some new viral strain.
His own words, ridiculous and
poetic, echoed back at him. How easy to fold his fiction into this place.

He returned to the main room, hoping
he might find answers among the Saloon’s artifacts. In the corner near the
waiting room was a narrow green booth caged in chicken wire from waist-level up
with a door on one side and a sign on the front that read
TICKETS.
Alongside the ticket booth was a
Wurlitzer half-blocking a window overlooking the great chasm, small bubbles
traveling up the inside tubes lit in orange and bright green. A red light on
the Wurlitzer’s console blinked at him, an unplayed song. Jack scanned the
titles quickly, not really reading what he was staring at, and tapped the
button before turning his attention to the rest of the saloon. Behind him, the
Wurlitzer started spinning through its stacks of old vinyl 45’s.

In the middle of the room, a
green-felted poker table, cementing the saloon’s western motif. Not the real
west, but one of those off-kilter periods of time straight out of the
Twilight
Zone
, props determined not by history but fictional necessity.

From the jukebox, Eric Clapton’s
signature guitar riff led into the throaty lyrics of “White Room.”

God, he wanted a beer! He could
imagine nothing better than an ice-cold bottle of Corona with a wedge of lime sticking
out. The signs on the building promised, but looking at this place, he had his
doubts. He’d be lucky to find water.

A loud peal of laughter, high and
hysterical, startled him. Even more surprising was the discovery that it was
his own, a laugh like no sound he had ever heard coming from his own lips.
Suddenly, he didn’t care if it was an ice-cold beer or a glass of hard water
dredged up from some deep well with a reluctant, rusty hand-pump, he just
wanted something—anything—to drink.

And strangely, on the heels of this
desperate craving, the urge to pee.

Jack walked unsteadily from the poker
table to where four red-leather stools lined up before an L-shaped bar,
abandoned and coated in a fine layer of powdery dust, the desert’s slow,
inexorable effort to conquer the Sanity’s Edge Saloon, take down the last
building and drag the entire world into the nothingness that existed everywhere
else but here. He walked behind, ears pricked for the first indications of
someone approaching; someone who might misconstrue his curiosity and confusion
for thievery; someone who might be carrying a shotgun.

Below the bar, he found a toaster
oven, a hot plate, a variety of beer and shot glasses, a few odd plates and
bowls, and even a cardboard box of mismatched flatware. There were bottles of
liquor—less the stock of an actual bar than someone’s liquor cabinet,
sufficient for entertaining and personal consumption. Below a pair of tarnished
beer taps, neither apparently hooked up to anything, he found a small
refrigerator. When he opened it, a waft of cold fog fell out to reveal shelves
empty but for a single bottle of Corona and a lime wedge sitting on a plate.

Again, that high, strange laughter.

Jack clamped his mouth shut against
the lunatic noise, and ogled the contents of the refrigerator in wonder, cold
air gushing out over him where he crouched. He had wanted a Corona and a lime,
but what were the odds that the last thing inside the refrigerator would be
that, really? A part of his mind was shrieking uncontrollably, that last nail
in the coffin of his once-understood reality, while another part was busy
remembering an old
Star Trek
episode, one of the originals that you
could still catch on some of the more obscure cable networks, where the
Enterprise crew was stranded on a planet that read their minds and immediately
manufactured their wants and desires. Somehow, that seemed relevant.
Personally, he would not have manufactured a deserted western world with
little, if any, amenities, and where the first song off the jukebox was an old
Cream hit, but the appearance of the one thing he wanted most of all only a
moment ago seemed more than a little coincidental.

Take the beer. Take the lime. Drink
it and be done with it and be glad that you aren’t trying to find that rusty
pump in the back where the water is fifteen arm-breaking minutes from being
drawn to the surface, and probably a sure source of botulism. Don’t look a gift
horse in the mouth?

This time, Jack chose to listen. He
took the Corona and the lime from the refrigerator, and he was happy.

He fished around for a bottle opener,
but gave up after a couple fruitless minutes of searching. If there was one in
the Saloon, it wasn’t behind the bar; so much for life duplicating an old
Star
Trek
plot where he got everything he wanted…

Wait, didn’t the Writer say something
about that; about the special place and how it would give him everything he
needed … and some things that he wanted.
He wanted a Corona and lime, and found both. He also wanted
a bottle opener, but he didn’t really need one. He could just as easily knock
the cap off on the edge of the bar like he learned to do in college—just one of
the many skills that he routinely left off his resumé.

Curiouser and curiouser, Alice. But
hadn’t you better be searching for that white rabbit?

He popped the top on the bottle and
sent the cap flying off somewhere to disappear just as the song was ending on
the jukebox. He dismissed it and jammed the wedge of lime down into the
bottle’s neck, and took a drink.

It was the most satisfying experience
he could have imagined, marred only by a sense of urgency in his bladder.
Well,
you found a drink. Now find a bathroom.

A set of stairs led up out of the
main floor, turned a sharp corner, and disappeared from sight. There was also
an open doorway leading under the stairs to a utility room, little more than a
large closet with a deep sink and dish rack on one wall, a complex tangle of
plumbing on another, and a door leading outside. A mop, broom, and bucket
leaned in one corner amidst the jumble of plumbing, some pipes enormous, others
no bigger in diameter than his little finger, copper and iron and stainless
steel coiled and twisted and jointed to one another in a conceptual artist’s
plumbing fantasy. A large red wheel was mounted on a twelve-inch pipe running
floor to ceiling, a small plaque hanging from the wheel by a chain with a
tantalizing warning:
MAIN
LINE
—
DO NOT TURN
.

He glanced out the backdoor, but the only thing behind the Sanity’s Edge
Saloon was the desert and the railroad tracks stretching away into nowhere.
Above the door was a small, peculiar addition like a room pasted upon the
finished structure, and frankly, what he could see of it suggested that the
glue-job had not been all that satisfactory; small pieces along the edges
appeared to be breaking away. He decided to look upstairs.

As it turned out, the bathroom was
the first door at the top of the stairs, the strange add-on that he saw from
below. Its open door was thick and stately with a brass lock plate and frosted
glass transom, but it looked as if some nether world giant had cleaved half of
the bathroom away with an axe: most of the ceiling and the opposite wall were
gone along with some of the floor. A claw-footed tub kept one appendage perched
precariously out in space where the tiles had broken away beneath it, and anyone
using the toilet could freely wave to passengers on the train.

Jack weighed his need to pee against
his fear of plunging through unstable floorboards and possibly being killed. In
the end, necessity won out over caution.

He moved slowly, testing each step
along the way, but never heard so much as a groan or squeak. He made one final,
self-conscious look around then allowed himself to relax. It would have been
impossible for someone to stare into the bathroom without being seen
themselves. And the view from the second floor revealed that the desert went
even further than he had imagined, an endless expanse of flatness running to
the horizon in all directions, … except, of course, in the direction of the
large cliff, and that was on the other side of the building so he had no idea
what advantage height would have on seeing what might lie beyond … or below.

He finished and retrieved his Corona,
then opened the medicine chest over the sink. It was attached to part of the
missing wall, one corner floating over empty space, lathing strips visible
beneath missing patches of plaster thickly painted in white. Behind the mirror,
he found some basic amenities: toenail clippers, a small pair of shears, a
straight razor, an old-fashioned jar of lather, a bristle brush, a box of
Band-Aids and a tube of antiseptic ointment. On the edge of the sink was a
glass. Not a bit of it appeared to have ever been used, however. As if all of
it was waiting for him.

He looked more closely at the missing
sections of floor and wall, the exposed lathing strips and underlying studs. He
had assumed damage, but realized that this was actually
planned
. No
giant had cleaved the bathroom into an open sun porch; the builder had simply
ceased parts of the project along the way, abandoning pieces in various stages
of completion. All of the exposed studs were neatly cut, the lathing strips
unbroken, ragged only by virtue of being abandoned during construction. Even
the tiles surrounding the hole in the floor, the tub’s foot dangling over it
like some pale reptile slithering up from the dark earth, were neither chipped
nor cracked. The more he looked at it, the more Jack became convinced that the
bathroom was simply incomplete, the designer having pushed it along from the
door outward, not in stages, but in complete advancements like the spreading of
a mold patch. And then, without rhyme or reason, construction stopped.

In the corner behind the door was a
large, seated frog made of brass, his wide-open mouth holding a washcloth and a
new bar of soap in a small dish. Its outstretched hands, turned up in a
curiously anthropomorphic act of supplication, held a set of clean white
towels.

All the accommodations of home
, Jack mused.
And none of the
familiarity
.

The next door along the hall hid a
small, corner bedroom, perfectly plain and incapable of answering any of his
questions. The last doorway opened into a large master bedroom with lots of
windows and a set of French doors leading out to a narrow, roofed balcony. A
tightly spiraled iron stair led up to the third floor, a red velvet usher’s
rope cutting off access with a tiny sign reading simply, “No Unauthorized
Personnel Permitted Beyond Rope.” He glanced up the stairs then decided to
leave its exploration for later.

In the far corner of the room stood a
large bed draped in filmy curtains, an homage to the gothic romance-novel. In
another corner hung a basket chair, the inside cushioned with dark-blue satin
pillows. Up against one wall was a large crate secured with iron chains and
locks, a message stenciled on the side reading “Arctic Expedition, June 23,
1823.” Atop the crate was an enormous metal birdcage still containing the bones
of some former captive: a multi-legged creature with a long tail, a broad flat
skull and wings. Jack found an unusual grandfather clock with thirteen numbers
on its face and five functioning hands; hours, minutes and seconds ticked
inconsistently along with a fourth hand shaped like a crescent moon and a fifth
resembling an off-center brass boot. Through the glass case below the face, he
saw a strange collection of counterweights on blackened chains: a claw hammer,
a flat-head screwdriver, a bottle opener, an old flintlock pistol, a sharpened
sickle, and even a hook and blade like some kind of martial arts weapon.

On the far wall, a small sign reading
Heaven pointed up another set of stairs that worked their way up the back wall
of the saloon before switching back on themselves, turning outward though there
was nothing
outward
to turn upon! The stairway hung out over empty
space, losing steps, risers, and banister spindles as it worked its way ever
higher towards nothing. The top, such as it was, simply ended; like the
bathroom, the materials were seemingly exhausted before anyone could complete
wherever the stairs were leading to. The stairway to heaven led to nothing but
a three-story drop, its reality fading out of existence one piece at a time.