The tail stopped as if privy to her thoughts, her doubts, her terrors, and suddenly became interested.
Ellen nearly tripped dragging Jack from the room, her feet tangling with his as she fled into the main part of the Saloon. The ticket booth remained, as did the bar and its four stools. But the Wurlitzer was gone along with the table and chairs, coins scattered across the floor where the table once stood, the enormous pickle jar broken into jagged shards. Why was this happening? Why now? Why so suddenly? And beneath the questions, a concern too frightening to voice: what if it didn’t stop? What if it all disappeared one piece at a time, like a child who has grown up, grown too old, and is now removing furniture from a child’s dollhouse, each piece carefully wrapped in a sheet of tissue paper and put aside; put away? What would happen to her and Jack? Would they eventually find themselves in an empty building?
Or an empty desert?
Or were they destined to be … put away.
Alone.
She fought back tears of panic. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Not like this. No one was supposed to need her, rely on her. Her father could tell you; you couldn’t rely on Ellen for anything. She couldn’t be trusted, and you needed trust from people who were depending on you.
Jack trusted her, but Jack was a fool. He was just as extreme as she in the lengths he would go to escape reality, and just as foolhardy.
What scares you most, Ellen Monroe? That Jack might use the last ticket for himself and leave you behind forever, or that he might actually sacrifice his own life to save yours, a useless chemical-junkie fleeing reality at every turn. You belong here with us, Ellen. The memory taunted her. She had not answered then, could not answer now. Maybe there was no answer. Or maybe the answer would remain hidden until the final moment: Who lives? Who dies?
“Like you care one way or the other,” she whispered, Kreiger’s face japing at her memory. “Just so you get the damn Saloon.”
She wiped fiercely at her eyes, frustrated tears leaving her half-blind, angry and afraid and ashamed. There was no time for this. Jack needed her.
She led him upstairs, his feet occasionally cooperative enough to manage the steps; other times, she had to step up and pull him up after, so much dead weight. She dragged him to the bathroom, sweat trickling cold and oily down her spine, her shirt sticking to her skin. She very nearly dropped him into the large claw-footed tub, only just managing to catch him and keep him from cracking his skull on the edge of the porcelain as he slipped backwards.
You should be better at this. It’s not the first time you’ve had to carry someone too wasted to know where he was or how he got there. But while she knew that was true, she could not remember exactly when that time was, or who the person might have been. It all seemed so long ago, so distant; a million years and a billion miles separating this moment from that time before. That was all it was now, really: before. Nothing but the past, ancient history; before.
She let Jack slide down into the tub, the white porcelain making his skin look rusted and jaundiced, almost alien. She stroked gently at his forehead, brushing hair back from his face. He almost looked peaceful. When she drew her hand away, her fingers were stained with a dun-colored sweat. She stared at it in wonderment, inhaling the fragrant aroma of Christmas and coffee shops and Egyptian mummies, ginger and cinnamon and sandalwood and muslin. A shiver ran through her as she tried to fathom what it was that Jack had been doing to himself these past few days.
And what it was that she needed to do now.
She began deliberately untying his sneakers and pulling them off his feet. Then she removed his shirt and pants, placing them in a pile. They smelled spicy and pungent, in need of washing. When he was down to his underwear, she started running a bath, warm, but not too hot. Through it all, Jack never woke up.
She found a washcloth and towels on the floor where the brass frog had been, gone now like so much else. She wet the cloth with cool water from the sink, and knelt beside the tub to wipe at Jack’s face. She wrung the cloth out twice before being able to clean away all of the cinnamon-colored sweat and dried blood. For his part, Jack floated peacefully, unaware. She sluiced water over his hair, smoothing it back until he started to look a little more like the person who greeted her that first morning, a cup of coffee in one hand and a glass of water in the other. He still had dark circles under his eyes, but they would require more time to fix.
A luxury not at their disposal.
She pulled the stopper on the pale, rusty water, and left Jack asleep, face resting against the cool edge of the porcelain while she went downstairs to get a cup of coffee. There was nothing missing when it came to the great, brass coffee machine that sat atop the bar. Coffee mugs, sugar, creamer. It was all there, ready and waiting for the Caretaker; the table was gone and so were the chairs, but there was a spoon to stir the coffee with. What was it Jack said about the Saloon? Everything he needed.
She found the refrigerator empty save for a small bottle of orange juice. She took it upstairs along with a cup of coffee, unsure if he would want either. But she would insist he drink the juice first. She placed both on the nightstand in the room she shared with Lindsay, and went back to the bathroom to get Jack. Leland Quince’s room was bare to the four walls, an empty room in an abandoned house left behind long ago. They were ghosts now, she and Jack; ghosts forgotten in a ghost town saloon.
She wrapped a towel around his shoulders to keep him warm, and used another to towel him dry before helping him to the bedroom, feet shuffling methodically as she coaxed him along. The bed was still open from this morning. No one thought to tidy up unmade beds before leaving. That was a job for those left behind.
She got him out of the wet underwear, a little embarrassed and surprised for it, and pulled the covers up around him, squeezing his hair lightly with the towel to try and get it as dry as possible. It would have to do, she thought, touching his forehead lightly.
His eyes flickered open then, lidded and unfocussed, washed-out green, the whites bloodshot, the one dark red and painful-looking. “Ellen?”
She smiled nervously, glad he was conscious, but afraid of what he might say, afraid of the questions he might answer. “I’m right here, Jack.”
“I’m sorry,” he murmured sleepily.
“For what?”
“I tried to finish yours.” He closed his eyes, the crease in his forehead returning for a moment. “I wasn’t … it wasn’t ready. It had to be good. Perfect … or it wouldn’t work.”
She shushed him gently. “It’s all right, you can finish it later. Rest now. I brought you some juice.”
“Later,” he whispered, fatigue dragging him back. “It wasn’t ready.”
“It’s okay,” she insisted. “Try and rest.”
“I wanted it … I wanted you … to like …”
His eyes closed and he was asleep again.
Ellen stayed beside him for a while as he slept, drinking coffee, thinking. Did Jack have a plan? Kreiger didn’t think so, but the Cast Out was a psychopath and a liar who manipulated the truth with as much facility and indifference as he manipulated people. But she wasn’t certain she couldn’t trust him either. Kreiger was smart enough to sew truth into his lies and make them that much more believable. He was a sorcerer/insurance salesman; an arch-mage wizard of the ninth circle corrupted into a carpetbagger, or maybe a vacuum cleaner pitchman. Was he lying? Probably. Was everything he said a lie? Probably not. Jack seemed to know what he was doing, and for all she thought that understanding the rules of this dream park/nightmare ride was an impossible feat, she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, he’d sent four of them on their way.
But that still left only one ticket and two of them. How was Jack going to free them both?
Or had that never been part of Jack’s plan?
Nail stood beside her, staring, eyes dark and content. The madness had passed out of him, just as it had passed out of the Caretaker. Or maybe it had simply run its
course and fallen back asleep, dormant like LSD, waiting for that inexplicable moment of flashback to burst free.
Ellen kissed Jack lightly before turning to leave: a small thing, really, just concern. She told herself that was all it was. Then she took the gargoyle’s extended hand and together they left.
Please have a plan, Jack, she prayed. Send us home.
* * *
Kreiger stared at the Nexus for a long time, studying its shape, the idiotic disguise it wore to please the current reign of Caretakers, buffoons more interested in syntax and connotation than the evolution of their souls. Like primordial amphibians, they refused to leave the slime, to rise up and take hold the ring of destiny. Halfway to walking upright, and the writers turned indecisive, their courage gone flaccid as they wallowed in the sea with the fish. Idiots. Incompetents.
Gods.
His eyes turned to the tracks, the glistening steel running to forever. The barrier draped down over the Nexus like a birdcage, safeguarding the fragile canaries from the rough and hungry jaws without. The barrier bent out over the edge of the cliff, the dividing line between scraping sanity and pure, unadulterated madness, and he could not risk one of his remaining allies upon so foolish a venture. Once over the edge, there was no guarantee they could ever make it back. And if by some remote chance they did, their mind might be so far gone as to make them useless.
That only left the other way. The way out and back to the real worlds.
Kreiger turned a calculating stare upon Reginald Hyde. “Gather together all manner of your magic. Any stray mana, mojo, talismans, or souls you find, I want bound to your will for the very moment when
(… if!!! …)
the barrier collapses. The time of an easy, bloodless transfer is gone; this will be a knockdown, drag-out, no-holds-barred battle to the last; winner take all. Our pretend Caretaker has somehow found a measure of steel in himself,
(… and if I catch that bitch, I will make her spend forever screaming for my forgiveness!!!…)
and will not go quietly. Our only chance of escape lies in crushing this pretend god the moment the opportunity presents itself. He must be broken, quickly and irreparably. No coming back. No sideshow Lazarus tricks. Gone and forgotten.”
Hyde nodded vacantly, eyes distant and glazed. Kreiger suspected he was losing the fat dreamer. The once-playwright, poet and pedophile turned bone priest and juju-sorcerer was drowning in his own hopelessness, on the edge, looking over, falling off. But Kreiger needed him just a little longer; long enough to gain access to the Nexus … and not a moment more.
It would have to do.
He turned to Rebreather, the man’s frame a statue of gray menace against the bone-white sand. “If that fifth train runs down that track and we are not on it, I do not expect we will see the next day’s sunrise.”
The tall Cast Out nodded thoughtfully, a simple gesture that spoke volumes to their particular straits. The mountains were gone. A quarter of the dregs had collapsed overnight, carcasses now reduced to dried bones and papery skin burning under the new day’s sun. There was little mana left for trickery or staging. The backlash of Kreiger’s desperate gamble to steal the focal lens of the Nexus was now being felt. Unreplenished, waiting on the desperate, happenstance jolts that sparked here and there throughout the cosmos, they were slowly dying, a colony of lepers left alone to rot. There was only one train left that could be summoned; one way left out of hell. It was their last chance; their only chance. Endgame.
“If we are to catch that train when it comes, we must move very fast,” Kreiger continued, his voice dropping to a cryptic whisper. “Or we must slow the train.”
Rebreather’s head turned, glass-covered eyes expressionless. The leader of the Tribe of Dust was staring grimly at the rails leading off into the distant tracts of white Wasteland, that ephemeral road back to reality countless parsecs from this place on the edge of dreams and madness. Time unwound between them, long and agonizing, spinning out in greater and more fearsome arcs until the white wizard voiced the unthinkable.
“Rip up the rails!”
THE FACES OF JANUS
Janus was a cancer, a malignancy of brick and mortar, steel and iron, progressing with rapid, senseless misdirection, pushing outward from all sides even as the black interior was buried within; smothered; necrotized. It boiled forth without direction, the only requisite to bury, push outward and conceal what lay behind. It was a blanket of patches stitched badly over patches, a tatter of scars partly healed then torn open again. An architectural abomination, a trembling glom of listing towers and narrow archways over roads and alleys interconnected by hallways, tunnels, stairs and gates to form a Minotaur’s maze that long ago outstripped the beast’s primitive instincts, leaving it trapped in some forgotten cul-de-sac to starve and die. Inhabitants ventured forth like foraging rodents adhering to ways well-known and safe, pathways passed from one generation to the next like family secrets and grandma’s china. In Janus, it was enough to know where you were and how to get to the few places you needed to go. Anything more was hubris. A wise man could claim to know six distinct ways to travel from the Court to the Wall; a liar might claim to know seven.
The inhabitants of Janus had greater concerns. Everywhere, there were signs. The rain would not fall on the fields. The wind blew forever from the north, scouring the earth until it was dust. Animals fell to disease, bodies rotting where they stood. And then there was the Day of Dead Birds. Witches were surfacing throughout the territories; one would prove key to the End of Days, but which one, no one knew. The Red Knight was coming, and Armageddon would follow.
According to the Third Book of Revised Prophets and Revelations, Armageddon would erupt in a city of gateways, and Janus was named for the two-faced god, guardian of portals and gateways.
* * *
Oversight awoke to a rope tied around her neck, a man dressed in black tugging on one end, repeatedly shouting move as if she was a willful dray. What happened since her capture in the swamp, she could not recall, only that she was now in a hay-strewn animal cart crowded with a dozen other women, only the chains on their wrists and the rope around their necks in common, lashed one to the next like a line of cattle for market.
The man in black jerked sharply on the rope, pitching Oversight against the splintered planks, straw reeking of animal dung. One of the women started moaning.
“Quiet back there.” More annoyance than anger. “And you. Come or be dragged!”
Oversight moved stiffly, old bruises now sore and swollen. The drizzle of rain left her soaked and shivering, teeth kept from chattering only by force of will, her jaws clenched to the point of aching as her world was reduced to the most primitive needs, the most basic discomforts. She had ruled the Wasteland for centuries, a savage queen in exile, a dark angel cast from heaven, afraid of no one—except Kreiger, but that was different. And while she never loved the Wasteland, she understood it. She may have walked its bone-colored dust for eons, but she never crawled.
How the world turns.
The Caretaker had recreated her reality, meddling with things meant to last forever, subverting the eternal to suit his whims. On hands and knees for no more reason than to convince strangers not to hurt her. Such was Jack’s desire; such was her sentence.
A thick-gloved hand snatched the collar around her neck, yanking her from the cart. Splinters ripped at the hem of her skirt, gouging red trails into her knees as she fell to the ground, the hard shock of stone jarring every bone in her body, awakening earlier pains and leaving her momentarily stunned. Don’t move; maybe it won’t get worse. A foolish notion, but one she hadn’t the will to act against. She simply lay there, staring through a curtain of her own hair at the approaching guard, his boots stamping the stone. She drew herself tighter, steeled against the kick she prayed wouldn’t come.
Instead, she felt herself pulled up by the rope around her neck, choking as she was dragged to her feet and held up like a broken doll. Sticky webs of unconsci
ousness shrugged from her mind, reason making her situation frighteningly clear. The manacles were too tight, the drenching cold still lingering in her limbs to turn her fingers numb, her hands cold and nerveless, as brittle as ice. Were she freed from her bonds this very moment, she could not escape. Not like this.
“On your feet!” someone barked. “Eyes on the ground!”
A line was forming, victims of the city’s perverse sense of law and papal doctrine. No one spoke; no one moved; no one looked at anything but the cobblestones at their feet.
Hungry.
Cold.
Helpless.
Frightened!
Why are you doing this to me, Jack? A vestige of Wasteland arrogance and anger kept back the tears, but it was hard; maybe the hardest thing of all. Please, Jack. I don’t want this. Not this!
She glanced sideways at the surrounding alley, a narrow cut between two monolithic buildings crisscrossed with chains, cables, catwalks and bridges that stitched the air overhead like a badly sutured wound; spider lines trapping a crevice in the rock. Cold and rain-slicked, every stone, brick and tile cracked and blackened, once-pale seams now dark pen-strokes of weathered mold. Everywhere iron jacks, steel pins, props and buttresses, slipshod devices and ramshackle constructions to keep the surrounding buildings, long out of control, from collapsing upon themselves. And far away, too high to glimpse without drawing her captor’s wrath, a gap of sky, clouded and dark with the onset of night.
A man in a priest’s collar and small-framed glasses stepped from an inconspicuous door, his black uniform cleaner, more ornate. “Pending your appearance before the Court of Fathers, you will be incarcerated at the expense of the goodly people of the guardian city of Janus.” He looked the prisoners over, tongue working the inside of his mouth as if trying to remove an unpleasant film from his teeth. “You should beg their forgiveness for your wickedness and your dealings with the Enemy, and be thankful for their compassion. You are undeserving.”
The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Page 40