He wasn’t sure if she believed him, but he hoped she did. And he hoped she wouldn’t ask any questions; he wasn’t ready to explain his secrets. Not yet.
She stepped away from him and walked over to the train, getting on board. She turned briefly, waving to the others before proceeding into the darkness. The metal door slammed shut suddenly, and the train burst from the station like a bullet, a blur of metal, the fleeting gleam of speeding chrome.
That fast, the little girl was gone.
The next train jerked in front of them, a blur that made it appear seemingly out of thin air. A blink of the eyes, and you might think it was the same train, only subtly different, transformed, altered but not replaced. This train was an old iron locomotive, the passenger car dark red, the windows concealed behind drawn curtains. The door opened of its own accord.
“Oversight,” Jack said, looking at her expectantly.
She walked not to the waiting train, but to him, studying his face intently. She was only a few feet away, but the look saw across miles of distance. “You can’t escape now, Caretaker,” she said softly. “You have doomed yourself.”
“Algernon found a way out,” he answered softly.
“But he never told you how. And no one in the Wasteland ever knew his secret. You have condemned yourself to an eternity trapped in this place, the Tribe of Dust at your throat until the end of time.”
Jack had no answer to that.
“Why are you doing this?”
“I didn’t understand before. Now I do. I owe that to you. This is the least I can do.”
“And the most.”
No, he thought, her sentiment acid in his mind. I have certainly not done the most. But he only looked at her evenly, betraying nothing.
“Thank you, Jack.”
He nodded, a forgetful, dreamy gesture, and found himself drifting away as they stood here speaking. Keep it together, a part of him thought fiercely. And remember the details. “Leave your knife,” he said. “It won’t be of any use to you where you’re going, anyway.”
“Not much use to you here, either,” she said, distrustful but appreciative, a belief that he knew what he was doing, knew what he had done. Even if she could not fathom his intentions, she had to trust him; there was no other way.
She placed the blade of bone into his open hand, and stepped aboard.
The door slammed shut, and Oversight was gone.
The next train screeched into its place in a shower of sparks, rain dripping down the greasy steel as if it had rumbled all night through a bad piece of film noir, the City of Dreadful Night. The door slid back noisily on worn tracks thick with globs of grimy soot, the oily sweat of gray rain and caked grease oozing from the pores of the train’s aluminum skin.
“Alex, get in.”
The young man stopped in front of him, hesitating before the open door. “Why did you do this?”
So very tired. “I did what I had to do. Just … just remember. Remember everything … everything! Or everything I did will be for nothing, and you’ll never see her again. Remember, remember, the lady of dark November. Mind the gap.”
Then he pushed Alex, hard, letting him stumble over the lip of the doorway and fall upon the floor. “Give this to her when you find her.”
He tossed Oversight’s knife through the door just as it slammed shut. Then the train bolted from the station with a banshee scream that drained instantly to silence as it vanished down the rails like the others before it.
An old subway car stood in its place, the outside walls painted with frescoes of city gibberish, gang signs and spray-painted pseudonyms. “Mr. Quince.”
The businessman approached, florescent lights buzzing and flickering inside, revealing the abandoned seats, a discarded newspaper, wads of gum stuck to the floor beside stains of still-wet spittle. An empty bottle of cheap wine rolled absently towards them, stopping with a soft chink as it struck the doorframe.
“Where are you sending me?” Leland asked.
“Not so far that you won’t recognize where you are, and not so close that you can ever go back to where you were. This is day one of your new life, Mr. Quince. Happy Birthday.”
The businessman’s face seemed to fracture momentarily, resembling in that one brief moment a windshield smashed by a rock, or impacted with a human skull: fractured and useless and irreparable. And that fast, the impression was gone, and Leland Quince rose back to the surface of himself. “For all your posturing, you’re no better than I am. There is no moral high ground. Not with you. Not with anyone. Well, go ahead; send me to some shit hole. I don’t care. I’ll fight my way out. You watch and see. You don’t run me, Lantirn. Nobody runs me.”
Jack stared at him, exhaustion keeping his eyes from focussing, making them burn; and the one with the scratched cornea hurt like a bitch. “I’m sending you to a better place than you were planning to send me. Believe me or don’t, but I’m giving you the one thing I didn’t give the others.”
“What’s that?”
“A choice.”
Mr. Quince said nothing, unsure what to make of Jack’s remark.
“That’s right,” Jack pushed on. “Here’s your big chance to prove me wrong. You have a choice. It won’t be easy, that I promise you. But the others are driven towards their destinies. I’m giving you and you alone the opportunity to decline yours.”
“Why?” Quince asked, genuinely perplexed.
“Because it’s what I am. In your world, I would never fit. Too weak, too concerned with the interests of others, too interested in my own dreams and not interested enough in my own reality. Someone gave me a choice and I took it. Now I’m giving you the same. It’s not a gift. It’s not appeasement. I don’t expect salvation for it, or to receive any gratitude from you over it. I’m just being who I am. Now get on the train, Mr. Quince.”
Stone-faced, the businessman reached for the handrail, saw a questionable smear on the metal, and decided against it. Instead, he simply stepped across the threshold and would not look back at those left behind. The train burst from the station and blinked from sight, leaving Ellen and Jack alone to stare out at the empty Wasteland.
They waited there on the platform for a few silent seconds, neither speaking. Then they waited a little longer. But there was only the tracks stretching out to forever in both directions, shrinking lines of bright chrome speeding away into the wide, empty blue, and streaking across the dead, white desert.
And across the empty tracks, so close Ellen could see the anger in their eyes, the Tribe of Dust glared. They appeared out of the empty sand, the high noon stare of gunfighters weighing their opponents across the open distance—what they called the killing ground—and she was reminded of how little she wore, exposed to their fury. Her hand tugged self-consciously at the hem of her shirt, trying to stretch it down. “Jack, why isn’t—”
Before she could finish her question, the ticket in her hand turned as light as air, as brittle as ash. A breeze touched it, and it yielded up to the winds and became dust. A startled squeak found its way out of her throat, but nothing else.
“It’s not ready,” Jack murmured as the flakes drifted to the platform and fell through the cracks.
She turned to find Jack leaning against the Saloon wall, sagging downward, eyes already closed. “But what about us?” she asked
Bergman’s question from Casablanca, and as if Jack seemed to be reading it in her mind, seeing the silver screen scene that her question had suddenly starting running inside of her head, he smiled absently, perhaps believing himself already dreaming, and answered: “We’ll always have pancakes.”
Then he fell over, silenced.
“Jack?”
She knelt beside him, touched his shoulder. Nothing.
“Jack?”
But he wouldn’t answer, or wake, or even move. She risked a glance over her shoulder, hoping against reason that the Tribe of Dust would have tired of the spectacle and gone away. Instead, they were close enough that she
could see Kreiger smiling, a fiendish leer that sapped her remaining strength.
“Jack?”
ONE: THE NOVEMBER WITCH
The door slammed shut, and the train bolted from the station, throwing Oversight against the wall.
Then through it.
For a brief moment, she was aware of the solid surface against her face, of pain in her shoulder and arm where she hit. Then she passed straight through, the wall of the train turning to liquid.
Oversight lurched back, struggling to right herself, push herself up. But the ground slipped beneath her fingers; soft as jelly, it offered no support. She thrashed desperately, terrified she would run out of air as she tried to stand up, not drown! Her face burst from the surface, coughing and choking upon water already half-swallowed.
The train! Where is the train?
(What train?)
Water all around her, so prevalent it saturated the very air. She pushed a drenched mop of hair back from her eyes, but the world remained hidden in darkness. Not a darkness she was accustomed to, but a black darkness shaded and concealed and bereft of the cold comfort of the Wasteland’s ever-present moon. The world had become shadows, indistinct shapes jutting from an imperfect landscape as black as coal tar, forms revealed in coy shimmers hinting to dangers hidden below their surface.
And so wet! She felt the water against every part of her, dripping down her face, even falling from the sky. It was rain. She remembered the word, thought she might even have experienced it once long ago, but the memory was faint, and knowing a thing was nothing like experiencing it. She ran her tongue across her lips, the touch of the air cold and clean, sweet almost; an absent flavor that was new to her. Is this what rain feels like? She sat back on her heels, aware she was actually kneeling in water. How could there be so much water that you could kneel in it up to your waist? Where had the Caretaker sent her?
She stood slowly, the earth soft beneath her naked feet. Mud. Another long-ago memory. So many years, so many hundreds of years, but it was all coming back, memories from a distant place, a long ago time.
It squished between her toes, and she wondered what happened to her boots.
(Left behind. Hurry! Before they find you!)
Where had that thought come from?
Eyes adjusting to the darkness, she saw rising trails of mist, an open clearing, gray murky light reflected by the water to create a seamless plain of indigo around a lonely and decaying stump. She started towards it, eyes tracking the noises surrounding her, whistles and buzzes and grunts. But for the random hiccups of creation, the Wasteland was dead. Not so, this world. It breathed life from every pore and crevice, the trees closing around her, spreading across the sky to seal away the stars behind a canopy thick with vines and creepers and Spanish moss.
Epiphany. Everything was different, including her. Even her clothes were different. Gone was the dark leather Kreiger crafted for her, clothes he envisioned her wearing always. In their place a dress, long and flimsy, a wide belt that bound her waist right up to the bottom of her ribs, and a vestment more for fashion than warmth. Plastered to her skin and colored in mud, the clothes felt strange, impractical, revealing. Without her knife and the familiar feel of tight black leather, she felt vulnerable, naked. She was shivering.
You are afraid.
Ridiculous! She had never been afraid. Not of anything. Never!
But never before had she been given something. Something she had wanted. Something she had wished for. Something she could lose.
And she knew this place; knew it from distant, nearly-forgotten memories, a flimsy bridge joining two pieces of her life separated by eons. The Caretaker had sacrificed his only way out to give her exactly what she wanted most.
“Jack,” she whispered, lips trembling, unable to continue.
Rainwater shimmered in the natural bowl formed from the center of the old cypress stump.
“Jack.” No matter how often she repeated it, the word sounded empty, no measure of her gratitude, incapable of expressing what burned in her soul. She crossed to the stump, looking into the water in the bowl, and knowing instinctively what it was, what she could make it do. She was beginning to understand.
(There’s no time. Hide! Quickly! They found you before, they’ll find you again!)
More meaningless thoughts, but insistent; glimmers of her new reality, maybe? She leaned over the stump, speaking words she knew though she had no idea why, hands dancing graceful gestures over the surface. She did not know how she knew these gestures, how she knew these words. They were simply known; she was beginning to understand.
Blue witch light shimmered from the water in the stump, giving her light and drawing a fleet of moths to bat and duck about her as she knelt in the shallow water, placed her head upon folded arms, and wept. Tears of joy. Tears of relief. Frivolous, she knew; a waste of water. But maybe water didn’t matter so much here. Maybe it might never matter again. Maybe that was an old rule from an old world from which she was finally free, the gates of purgatory opened for the lost souls that would find heaven in the simple magic of stump water mojo, or a bayou of gnarled trees and Spanish moss.
“Thank you, Jack.”
She never heard their approach.
Hands like iron locked about her. She tried to jerk free, to slip from their hold as centuries of Wasteland survival came back in a heartbeat. But this world was not the Wasteland. She could not account for the wet tangle of her dress—so different from the second-skin of black leather—or the mud that offered no purchase. She was used to fighting on dust, fighting in her second skin, fighting only one enemy.
The hands doubled, caught around her ankles and legs, forcing her back down, down into the water, down below the surface. Above her, a crowd of faces staring with emotionless eyes, features gritted with determination. They might have been wrestling a cow for branding, or working a stubborn piece of foundation. Or perhaps her torment was simply of no concern to them.
“Jack!”
She was screaming the Caretaker’s name, but did not know why. What good would it do? No good! No good at all!
Then the water covered her, forcing its way into her nose and mouth, down her throat. Panic smashed through her brain like lightning as she saw the very real possibility of something that was, before this moment, distant and inconceivable: her own death. Her efforts became simple desperation, eager only to breathe, to not drown, not die!
Why, Jack? Why?
She was pulled up suddenly and forced to her knees, her hands bound tightly behind her back, trussed up like an animal, old illusions shattered. She believed herself impervious, but the Wasteland did not make her immortal; it simply made her forget. She was no longer in the Wasteland, and there were things to be afraid of; things she would have known if she had but remembered what centuries under an otherworld sun made her forget. In the Wasteland, she had always been alone, a different kind of cast out. She had forgotten what dangers others posed to the outcast. Even in the promised world beyond purgatory’s gates, the predator ever lived off the prey.
“Jack, help me,” she pleaded softly.
A leather-clad hand struck her across the face, and she felt desperate tears draw back for angry ones.
“Silence!” her attacker shouted. “No dark spirits will come to your aid. Tell me of the others. Your accomplices? Where are they?”
She stared uncomprehending, and the man struck her again. She felt the hot sting, the trickle of blood from her nose, the salty, sickening taste upon her lips.
“I asked you about your accomplices, witch. Tell me!” And he raised his hand again.
Oversight flinched, terrified and ashamed, desperately shaking her head, no.
“Very well,” her interrogator nodded, a moon-pale face visible under the black cloak and tricorn, a baton on his belt rattling a collection of shackles. Around his neck was an assortment of holy medallions too numerous to count, metal glimmering in the night. All of the men surrounding her had large, red cro
sses emblazoned upon their chests. “You are hereby charged with conjuration, your actions implicating you as a witch, and a servant to the Red Knight who presages Armageddon, and is the enemy of all that is right and just. You are under arrest, and will be detained until you can stand trial before the Court of Fathers.”
Oversight was shaking her head. Why? Why had she been sent here? What had she done? Why did everything—the darkness, the water, the men, everything! —scare her? She had never been afraid before. Never! But the world had changed, and so had she. And it would never, never go back.
“Don’t do this, Jack! Please!”
A blow struck the base of her skull like lightning, a terrific spray of pain followed by numbness, darkness closing around her. She fought briefly against it, but the world was already spinning out from under her, the blackness growing, swallowing her whole.
Bound and unconscious, Oversight was taken inside the walled city of Janus.
TWO: MESSENGER
Lindsay walked to one of the seats, the aisle spotless, the red carpet springy and clean. Everything about the train was new: the seats brightly polished steel, the velvet cushions thick and comfortable, the carpet unstained, unworn. As if the train rolled off the assembly line that very morning and screamed into the Sanity’s Edge station, she its first passenger.
To her right, she saw Jack and the others staring blankly at the train, waving at a place she no longer was. Their movements appeared slow, and for a moment, looking through the golden glass at them, the scene reminded her strangely of looking at fish in a tank. She raised her hand to wave back, forgetting that they wouldn’t see her through the reflective glass.
Then the train started to move.
Outside, the others seemed to freeze, locked in eerie poses as if the fish bowl they seemed to be in had frozen around them. Their hands were stuck in waves of silent good-byes, sad expressions carved on immobilized flesh like unwavering statues.
Lindsay looked away, and the station was left behind, the featureless landscape passing by, blue on white stained by the golden hue of the glass to become a world of green sky over a golden earth.
The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Page 35