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

by Mark Reynolds

Jack shrugged uncertainly. He didn’t want to believe it was true, didn’t want to believe that Ellen, Alex, Lindsay, and even You-Can-Call-Me-Sir-Or-Mr. Quince were nothing more than imaginary fragments of characters that would fade away from disinterest, or that his very existence depended upon him not allowing that to happen. They were more. Hell, they were no different than anyone else he had ever met. What did it say about everything he had ever known? What could he trust to be real? “I don’t know why we’re all here. I don’t know how we were chosen,” Jack explained, patience giving way to exasperation. “But we’re here now, so let’s try to work together so that we can all get out of here.”

  “We already know how to get out of here, Jack,” Leland said. “Just give Kreiger the tickets, and we can all go home.”

  “No!”

  “Then send us home yourself,” Leland challenged.

  “I will.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Leland’s scotch exploded against the wall in a wet flurry of glass and ice. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Jack! You don’t know! You’re in charge, and you don’t know. Our fate is in your hands, and you don’t know. So give me one reason why we shouldn’t consider Kreiger’s offer?”

  “He won’t honor it,” Alex said.

  The businessman turned. “And you think Jack will be able to send us on our way, keep us safe from those monsters?”

  “I think … I think he’ll try,” Alex said, words chosen too carefully.

  “I don’t doubt he will,” Leland replied diplomatically. “Jack will try. But will that be good enough? We’re being asked to trust our lives to his good intentions. Jack will try; Kreiger will succeed.”

  This time, Alex said nothing.

  “Let’s be practical. Jack will try to send us home. Kreiger will send us home. Jack doesn’t know what he’s doing. Kreiger has been doing this for a long time. I don’t believe for a minute everything Kreiger said, but I know what I saw. Does anyone doubt Kreiger could send us home if he wanted to?”

  “Why would he want to?” Ellen asked.

  “For the exact reason he said. The tickets mean nothing to him. We mean nothing to him. It’s just as easy for him to send us home as not. We’re simply standing between him and his precious Nexus, and I say we let him have it. It’s nothing to me. I didn’t even know what it was an hour ago. I only want to go home. What about the rest of you? Does anyone else want to get the hell out of this place?”

  “This isn’t open for discussion,” Jack declared firmly.

  It was exactly the opportunity Leland had been waiting for, and the businessman pounced. “So there it is. This isn’t about us at all, is it Jack. This is about you and this place. Maybe Kreiger and his associates aren’t the power mongers you paint them to be. Maybe you’re the control freak, the megalomaniac. Just because we met you first, that doesn’t necessarily make you the good guy.”

  “Kreiger is not getting the Nexus and he is not getting the tickets,” Jack stated flatly. “This isn’t about me or you. This is about a maniac controlling the source of creation. I’m the Caretaker. The protection of the Nexus has been entrusted to me, and so long as that office holds, no Cast Out shall re-enter the Sanity’s Edge Saloon.”

  “And I’m telling you again, you have no right to choose,” Leland argued back. “We’re all people. We all have lives on the other side of this insanity. Some good, some wanting, but they’re our lives, not yours. I, for one, want to get on with mine. Your truck with them is your business, Jack, not ours. Do what you like, but you have no right to involve us or make us suffer for your invented principles.”

  Leland turned to the others. “You don’t like me and I don’t really care. I don’t honestly like any of you very much either. But we have an opportunity to escape this place. I’ve seen too much this morning to allow myself the luxury of believing that this place isn’t real. Maybe it’s some kind of Twilight Zone reality; I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. But I don’t need to understand it to know that we can all die here. Those three out there are completely insane. You don’t need to tell me that. But they’ve promised to send us wherever we want to go if we help them, or destroy us if we resist. They control everything outside of this building. Jack controls the saloon. That’s it. End of story. We’re all prisoners living on borrowed time, and our savior is the goddamn bartender.”

  “Would you just shut up,” Ellen grumbled.

  “Someone has to be the voice of reason, and it obviously isn’t going to be him. I say we vote on what to do with the tickets.”

  “We’re not voting,” Jack said matter-of-factly. “This isn’t a committee or a board decision. Majority rule does not apply. The fate of any one of you is shared by all of us. All of the tickets must be completed or none of us will live through this, and if even one ticket falls into Kreiger’s hands, then everything is lost. Kreiger’s testing us, looking for the weakest link. But once he has the Nexus, all deals and promises will fall by the wayside along with all of us. He killed the Writer; he’ll do the same to us when he has what he wants. I won’t allow that to happen. There isn’t a choice here, not for any of us. Not you. Not me. Not even the Tribe of Dust. Only inevitabilities. We do what we have to do, and live or die as a consequence. That’s all there is.”

  Though heartfelt, Jack knew his speech fell on deaf ears. He’d just drawn a second line in the sand, and these four were now trapped in the middle, a no man’s land between warring trenches. He started up the stairs. “If we’re going to get out of here, I have to get to work.”

  * * *

  Ellen watched him go, watched Leland storm about in frustration. No one wanted to be controlled, railroaded towards the future, manipulated like characters in a book.

  She had no desire to return to her old life. The Sanity’s Edge Saloon was strange, but it was also quiet and distant and non-judgmental; she could easily spend the rest of her life here. What did the Saloon care what she was on the other side of reality? It was the magical djinni, its services available without reservation or judgment. No matter what she did before, it didn’t matter here. But back in the world—back in the place Leland Quince was so desperate to return to—it mattered a lot. Back there was a doctor with his own ideas about a drug regimen, about rehabilitation, about burning out the bad part of her, cauterizing her free-will and sterilizing her soul. Back there was the vague inklings of something done while riding the Dreamline, something bad, something involving Lenny and his fumbling, junk-sick hands crawling over her breasts, ragged nails scraping her nipples, slithering down her pants, … and a screwdriver, yellow plastic grip slick with blood, so much blood…

  She shivered as if from some desert wind, or the chills of a bad trip, heroin comedown, the shattering end of a mescaline ride.

  “Ellen?”

  Lindsay was staring at her expectantly. “Hmm?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, sure. I was just—” Just what? Just remembering the fact that she might have killed someone on the other side of reality? Just remembering that her father had her committed to an asylum? Just remembering that as early as this morning, she was going out of her mind? “—tired of listening to them argue.”

  Lindsay nodded, her expression serious.

  “Did you need something?”

  The little girl leaned closer, whispering in her ear. “Where’s the bathroom?”

  Ellen stifled a smile. “Up the stairs, first door at the top. Be careful of the floor.”

  Lindsay nodded, not bothering to ask after the aforementioned floor, and trotted up the stairs.

  When she was gone, Alex walked over. “Do you think, back in the real world, Lindsay’s really … ya know?”

  Ellen lowered her head. “I’m trying not to think about it.”

  Leland was back behind the bar. He’d found a new glass, and was filling it with ice cubes. “Probably,” he said.

  Alex looked at him darkly. “You’re an
asshole.”

  “It doesn’t make it any less true,” he replied.

  Alex shook his head, walking away. “I need some air.”

  “I’m right, you know,” Leland Quince said. “About Jack, too.”

  Even their brief meeting had left Ellen with an indelible impression of Gusman Kreiger; the man was a sociopath. If he seemed reasonable or rational, it was because it served his ends to be so. And when those ends were met, his transformation would be both instantaneous and horrific. Dealing with Kreiger was like handling poisonous snakes; being bitten was inevitable, and that first bite would end the battle of wills forever. “You know Kreiger’s probably lying,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  That surprised her. “So why do you trust him?”

  “I never said I did.” Leland replied, sipping from his newly poured scotch. “But the fact is Jack will fail. He has good intentions, but he doesn’t have what it takes. I’ve made my entire life on eating people like Jack for breakfast. Don’t think of him as a friend. Think of him as someone with a very difficult task he’s ill-equipped to accomplish; a task that your life depends on. I don’t doubt he’ll try; he’ll try harder than anyone. But in the end, his efforts will fall short. He’s a dreamer. He thinks that big ideas are all he needs. Well he’s wrong. Kreiger will send us back because he has no reason not to. It’s no skin off his nose one way or the other. He just wants this place, though I can’t see why. We’re academic. So we can help him and go home, or we can stand in his way and piss him off. Either way, he’ll get the Nexus. The only difference is if we don’t help him, he’ll have no reason to help us, and every reason to simply run us out into the desert to die. You saw those things out there. Do you doubt for a minute that they would be picking our meat from their teeth inside of a day? Ask yourself this: can you afford to put your faith in Jack? Can you? How long do you think any of us would last out there in the Wasteland?” He shook his head, resigned to an apparent and inevitable truth, the hypocritical deacon lecturing an initiate on the evils of sins he has engaged in himself. “No, much as I like the upper hand, and have built my whole life on taking it in every situation, I can see the writing on the wall. Jack’s days are numbered, as are anyone’s who stands by him. We can strike a deal with Kreiger that he’ll honor because he’s a businessman at heart. He’ll get what he wants for little or no fuss. And so will we. Think about it, and you’ll see that I’m right.”

  She wanted to respond, but was afraid it would sound something like what Jack had said, only with less conviction. As much as she hated to admit it, Leland Quince might be right. Jack was a friend—maybe more; maybe, but then again, probably not—but he could well fail. And if he did, for no lack of trying, they would all die in the Wasteland. She swallowed and said nothing.

  “Are there any more bedrooms up here?” Lindsay called down from halfway up the steps.

  Ellen turned, wondering how long the little girl had been there, how much she had heard. “I don’t know,” she answered, thinking back on her earlier tour with Jack. “I think just the two.”

  “Only two bedrooms,” Leland started towards the stairs. “This just keeps getting better.”

  * * *

  Jack sat in the deep leather chair watching bubbles float up through crystal blue water upon the Jabberwock’s screen; the screen saver came up automatically whenever ten minutes passed without his touching the keys. He listened quietly to the exchange below, his intention to work foiled by a complete lack of inspiration.

  The profound absurdity of it all was not lost on him either. The others’ existences had been rendered into little more than scripts he was expected to knock out and send off, words become DNA in some literary gene vat from William S. Burrough’s strange tales of Interzone. Abandon rational thought.

  He absently flicked at the mouse, setting his screen back to the minuscule work he had been piecing together.

  Dabble’s Books, a small cobblestone shop on the river fronting Main Street, just across from Serena’s Coffee Shoppe, specialized in all manner of books from the newest best sellers to signed copies by Salinger and Camus. The proprietor, Mr. Nicholas Dabble, a fastidious gentleman of lanky proportions who was described, both aptly and somewhat expectedly, as bookish, prided himself on his ability to find rare and eccentric manuscripts; whatever his buyers were interested in. Mr. Nicholas Dabble, who despised nicknames like “Nick” or “Nicky” or, worst of all, “Nickel,” as if he were some old-fashioned movie hoodlum, had a knack: whatever you needed, Nicholas Dabble could find. He never said how, and few asked. All that mattered was that he found what his buyers were looking for. Perhaps the only other remarkable thing about Mr. Nicholas Dabble was his eyes. Though old, they were still as bright and penetrating as slivered emeralds.

  Dabble breathed deep the smell of the old shop, dusty paper, dry wood. It was the smell of a place where a myriad of small insects made hosts of the entire dwelling and everything within, their lives beginning and ending inside the confines of the brick walls, a microcosm of life and death going unnoticed by everyone, its ramifications unknown, save for a vaguely old smell in the air which some mistook as time and antiquities. In a sense, the insects belonged to the proprietor of Dabble’s Books, like every other story under its roof, and he relished the thousands of lives which existed all around him, literary and insectile both, all owned by him, body and soul, shelved and tended with care because they were his, and no one else’s. His.

  Some said Mr. Nicholas Dabble was the devil. Not a devil, but the Devil, Beelzebub, Satan, the one and only. By and large, he paid such remarks no mind.

  Dabble crossed the store, floorboards smoothed by countless waxings over countless years, protecting the wood against the countless feet of those who browsed, perused, and lingered in his world. His only assistant, a young woman, sat at the register reading one of the new releases because the afternoon was slow. She stared avidly at the pages, her smooth forehead occasionally creasing with interest. She was pretty, but too interested in books to notice. One of those young women who lived vicariously through printed words, Emily Dickinson their role model as they rued the lack of Romeo lovers who could fend off brigands and scoundrels, defend a woman’s virtue and honor both, shower her with money and roses and romance, bring her to multiple orgasms in a suite in Paris or Rome, and never once forget to put his underwear in the hamper. Well, she was young. There was hope she might still outgrow it before she spun away her entire youth on fanciful notions of Never Land. Say what you will for reality; however gross, it had its appeal.

  Dabble cleared his throat to get her attention. “…

  That was as far as he had gotten before it simply died off, a labored endeavor that might be of profound importance, or might just as easily go nowhere. What was the assistant’s name? He knew and did not know at the same time. What he knew was not real, just his own wanton fantasies. And those made for labored storylines. Only here in this place, this world, this fractured corner of a much broader reality than he had ever before dared to dream, fantasies had a place and a purpose. Maybe.

  Or maybe it was just worthless drivel, nothing he could make anything of.

  No, that wasn’t true. He wanted to make something of it, but he couldn’t decide how. And therein lay the problem. Dabble wasn’t a main character, just a fleshed-out incidental, someone who walked through the scene to add color and life and distraction; he was the bit-part actor polishing glasses and steins behind the bar at Rick’s Place. So, what’ll ya have?

  He wasn’t sure. He had no answers.

  Maybe Kreiger was right after all. His head still hurt like hell.

  “I found another blanket,” he heard Lindsay say. It sounded like she was searching the closet; sleeping accommodations were inadequate.

  Out the large window facing the front of the Saloon, he could see Alex standing out upon the ocean of white. The young man was staring up at the sky, hands jammed into his pockets. What he was thinking, Jack could not guess
.

  Below, Leland Quince claimed the small guestroom; in spite of everything, sleeping arrangements somehow seemed important.

  There was no time for this. They needed to go home, and Jack was the only one who could do it. Kreiger could probably do it, too, but Jack doubted the Cast Out would honor any deal once in possession of the Nexus. Leland was wrong about Kreiger. The Cast Out wanted the Nexus and nothing else. He would sacrifice everything to that end to get it. He had known that Nail would kill the dregs he sent across the line, but he sent them anyway. The Cast Out was well versed in the necessity of sacrifice.

  No, Jack was the only one who could get them out of here. If he failed, they would all die… and quickly. Outside the protective perimeter—how he had made that, he still had no idea—they were all just meat to a starving Wasteland.

  And Leland Quince argued over sharing a room.

  No, that was unfair. The businessman wanted the tickets; arguing was simply a means to an end. He believed he could negotiate a deal that Kreiger would be forced to honor, sending them home in exchange for a clean, bloodless transfer of control. To him, money and deals greased the wheels, made life easy, made sense. Kreiger wanted the Nexus and was willing to send Leland home to get it. Leland wanted to go home, and didn’t care if Kreiger had the Nexus or not. It seemed like an equitable trade. But Leland Quince did not understand the Nexus; not the way Jack did. He did not appreciate its power, its magnitude. Kreiger had sown the arguments amidst the bait, wedges driven between the various inhabitants of the Sanity’s Edge Saloon, deliberate manipulations to force Jack to yield, out of frustration or anger or just plain exhaustion. Kreiger was playing them like marionettes—and the residents of the saloon seemed only too eager to dance to the jerk of strings.

  He couldn’t hide up here much longer. He needed to learn about the others, so his stories about them would be right. Both the Writer and Kreiger alluded to the stories fitting the people they were intended for; he couldn’t simply fill in names as he went along, an overworked casting director looking to fill last-minute roles. He was creating the role that would be filled; he couldn’t do otherwise. Maybe that was how the Cast Outs failed in the first place? Maybe they let their own desires overshadow their charges’ needs? Was that why the Nexus rejected them, cast them out into the Wasteland to join the rest of the living dead?