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

by Mark Reynolds

  The bone priest sprang like a snake, catching a handful of Ellen’s sweatshirt and dragging her to him as if she were nothing more than a toy, a small doll to be played with, to be dressed and undressed, to be broken and discarded.

  “NO!”

  Jack turned, and Rebreather lunged to intercept him. But Jack kept turning, feinting and running instead for the small backroom with the kitchen sink and the Gordian Knot of pipes and the main line with its large, red valve-wheel secured by a thin chain, the small metal placard warning: DO NOT TURN. Rebreather turned back instantly, but not before Jack drove the pry bar down through the chain, snapping it apart. Then Jack laid his hands upon the wheel.

  “STOP!” Kreiger shouted: to Jack, to Rebreather, to all of them.

  As the last echoes of the pry bar’s reverberant clang dissipated, the silence found Jack gripping the wheel, arms, shoulders and back poised to pull as hard as he could; whatever it took to open the main line all the way. Rebreather was standing only a dozen feet away, sword drawn, his free hand curled into a waiting claw, eager to grasp down upon something and kill it dead. Lovebone seemed mystified, turning away from Ellen with all the comprehension of a slow-witted child distracted from its plaything.

  “Let … her … go!” Jack said, as quiet and deliberate as glacial ice.

  “Now Jack,” Kreiger said, the disingenuous, tooth-filled smile returning, the slippery-smooth tone of voice that was a snake-oil salesman, a carpetbagger, a used-car pitchman selling lemons. “Let’s be reasonable.”

  “Let Ellen go,” Jack said. “Make Hyde come over with you, so that I know she’s safe. Do it or I’ll open this valve as wide as it goes, and we’ll all see what’s what.”

  “You don’t have the slightest idea what that will do,” Kreiger said.

  “Actually, I do have some idea,” Jack said. “I think you do, too. Now let Ellen go.”

  “No.”

  “Do it!”

  “Make us,” Kreiger challenged.

  Jack stared incomprehensibly at Kreiger, at the mad glint in the Cast Out’s changeling eyes, and knew he was deadly serious. Kreiger was not afraid to die; it was an outcome the Cast Out had anticipated and made his peace with. Rebreather straightened, sword held across his chest in a knightly stance, face hidden behind a visor of canvas and air filters. Even Hyde looked on unflinching, stepping a little closer to the fray, Ellen dragged along forgetfully by the bunched fistful of sweatshirt.

  “Let her go, I mean it!” But doubt was already worming its way into Jack’s heart, eating at his plan, gnawing away his courage. He had never made any sort of peace with the possibility of his own destruction. Truth be known, he never believed it would come to that. He wasn’t sure if he did even now. He hadn’t lied when he told Ellen he was a fool; a romantic, hope-filled, dreaming fool. And fools never feared death because fools believed in their own immortality … up until the moment they died. And he knew that Ellen never considered this possibility either. He knew it from the passion in her voice when she talked about them both leaving together; how the idea of any other outcome was completely foreign to her. They had been living off hope since they got here—hope, self-delusion, and impossible dreams. But that time was over, and Jack could feel the fear in his stomach, weakening his legs, shriveling his balls. Death never felt as close as this moment, and it terrified him.

  “Jack, I can smell your fear,” Kreiger said, growing sullen and impatient. “Don’t bully us with empty threats of death. Failure is death, Jack. For both of us. If we lose, we die. There is no soft-option, no consolation prize for second best. Our only alternatives now are godhood or oblivion. So turn the wheel if you want. Blow yourself and everyone else here to bits. But don’t make threats you haven’t the stones to keep.”

  Kreiger was right. Jack could feel it slipping across his skin, running down his back, the wheel gone slippery beneath cramping fingers.

  “Of course, there is one more thing you can do, Jack; one thing you have left that we don’t.”

  Jack waited, wondering if his plan was still working. He couldn’t be sure anymore. He thought with a kind of sinking feeling that he was playing into Kreiger’s hands, letting himself be made into Kreiger’s puppet, his … his construct. But how could that be? He was the Caretaker! What was happening? What? “What?”

  Not realizing Jack was talking to himself, Kreiger answered, “A soul that still bleeds.”

  Hyde yanked Ellen in front of him, still holding tightly upon her sweatshirt. Bare feet slipped out from under her as splinters of glass cut into her naked skin, sent her slipping upon trails of her own blood. She might have screamed then, or tried to, but the sound was reduced to a half-swallowed yelp of pain, a choked sob as she nearly slammed her head upon the floor. Her hands came forward only just in time to break her fall, and were immediately sliced open on shards of glass.

  “Now give me the Goddamn TICKET!” Kreiger screamed.

  “Ellen!” And without even realizing it, Jack was spinning the valve, long full turns, opening the main line as wide as it would go.

  “NooooOOOOOOO!”

  * * *

  For a moment, nothing happened.

  Jack stared down at the iron wheel, red paint worn through in places to reveal the bare metal beneath. He had opened it until it wouldn’t turn anymore…

  … and nothing had happened. Nothing at all.

  Another moment passed, the silence pregnant and uncomfortable. Jack heard Ellen, a frightened sound that wanted to be open tears, but would not break the front she tried desperately to maintain; much the way she tried to believe in him and have faith in the fact that he knew what he was doing.

  But clearly, he did not.

  Jack looked up at her, saw her looking back. Not with disappointment, though he expected it, perhaps even deserved it. No, there was only sadness, dashed hopes, naked despair. And something that might have been the last desperate moments of love—or maybe he only wished it was that.

  Nothing was happening. Nothing at all.

  Kreiger leaned upon the lightning rod, the first hint of a smirk twisting his face. “Was something supposed to happen, Jack, because if it was, I missed it?”

  Jack looked to the leader of the Cast Outs and asked, “Where do unicorns go when they die, Kreiger?”

  The Cast Out looked first at Hyde, and then Rebreather; neither seemed to have an answer to Jack’s sudden and total breakdown. Kreiger let go a long, exasperated breath. “I don’t know, Jack. Where do unicorns go when they die?”

  He looked back at the Cast Out, and for a moment—a moment only—Jack’s eyes were two different colors. “Anywhere they want.”

  And the southeast corner of the Sanity’s Edge Saloon exploded, reality sliding out from under them as a plume of white fire burst out from the very heart of the universe and extended straight up to the edge of infinity, obliterating all reality in its path.

  … the Nexus …

  THE CARETAKER

  Ellen stared helplessly at the enormous column of blazing white light impaling the world, wavering and pulsing, as brilliant as a lightning bolt, as impenetrable as the sun.

  There was no sign of Jack.

  Anything and everyone standing in the room was knocked to the floor by the concussion. Even Rebreather’s chiseled permanence was sent sprawling to the ground. The explosion knocked Lovebone into the wall, loosening his hold upon her. But even freed, she found herself unable to move, searching the column of energy desperately. No heat emanated from it; no burning flame or scalding radiation as its appearance suggested. The light was silent, no crackle of flame or pop of new burning wood. All she heard was the ringing of the explosion in her ears, and the occasional scratch or tick of debris, little more than splinters and dust falling upon the ground. And below that, almost hidden, was a kind of hum, like millions of coursing volts of electricity suddenly unleashed through every speck and fiber of the Saloon’s architecture.

  But Jack was nowhere to be seen.
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br />   She stared into the blinding white light until her eyes screamed with pain, tears running down her cheeks, but all she could make out were the tracking shapes of bright green and blue neon flares; the afterglow of the light burned into her retinas. And still she refused to look away. He destroyed himself … to save you.

  “Jack?” she whispered.

  “Get to the train!” someone shouted, a voice distant and muffled, caught in the electric buzzing of the white light, the dying ring in her ears. It could be Jack. It could as easily be one of the Cast Outs. She didn’t know.

  “Get him!” another shouted.

  Jack must be alive! She heard the pounding of feet, and thought it must be him. He was alive and running for the train; the train he told her to be on! Yes, that must be it. Jack was alive, somehow surviving the explosion and racing to get on board the train, to make good their escape. Their escape. They were leaving this place—together!

  More shouting. Meaningless sound. Slowly, the burnt image in her eyes was fading, the self-induced blindness lifting.

  Get to the train!

  It could be Jack, couldn’t it? Alive, not engulfed in a column of cold, bright energy that stabbed like a needle straight into the eye of heaven.

  “Jack?”

  Get to the train!

  She looked down at her hands, seeing the ticket still clutched in her fingers; crunched in half, wrinkled and smeared with her own blood, but there just the same. On hands and knees, she started inching towards the backdoor of the Saloon and the still-waiting train.

  And Jack.

  * * *

  Jack leaped the gap of obliterated steps where the Nexus had poured up and through, consuming all reality in its path even as it offered up its power to create it anew. He caught the splintered edge of the landing with his chest, scrambling for purchase on the polished floorboards, fractured ends digging painfully into him. He kicked one leg over and pulled himself up, collapsing on the floor for one dizzying moment, catching his breath and listening.

  The bathroom was completely gone. No half-completed architectural absentmindedness. It was simply gone. All disappeared, engulfed into the shaft of pure, mutable energy.

  It had been a simple thing, really. Turn the valve wheel and open the mainline as far as it could go. To be plain, he had just pushed this unstable fragment of reality a fraction closer to the Nexus, that stream of power from all times, all universes, and all realities that burst through the fast-beating heart of the Saloon like a thousand bolts of lightning.

  And now there was power.

  How he survived, he didn’t know, could not begin to wonder. The Nexus burned raw and enormous like a pillar of heaven, so malleable that it could make gods of mice and men. He felt it eagerly wending its way through his skin, crawling like insects itching to be free from this crude vessel of flesh. It would be there for him at a moment’s notice, eager to do anything he asked, anything he needed, anything he wanted.

  But it was too available; anyone could tap into it. Anyone.

  Below, the Tribe of Dust was coming for him.

  Good! He scrambled to his feet and started running.

  * * *

  Ellen crawled to the waiting room, careful how she placed her hands, splinters of glass cutting her knees and palms.

  And abruptly, the glass fragments became harmless pebbles upon a floor littered with sea-worn rocks. Before eyes only just freed of the disorienting retinal ghosts, she saw the shards that had gouged her flesh become rounded pebbles and sand that tumbled harmlessly from her skin, leaving inexplicable, bloody cuts as mute testament to the broken glass that was no more.

  Then the gravel became loam.

  And the loam turned to soil as black as coffee. The air was suddenly fragrant with the smells of midsummer, the sun hot and drowsy, burning the back of her neck, making the skin painful and sticky to the touch. Intoxicating and thick and…

  What’s happening?

  She recoiled as grass sprouted up beneath her fingertips, damp and lush, new blades twisting up between her fingers. Then the grass coiled together into soft fibers, its color darkening, changing—shag carpet, bright red and hideous.

  Suddenly, Ellen was afraid to look up, afraid to look into the changing face of reality. The threads of reason and logic had been plucked loose from the fabric of the universe, and everything she knew or believed in was falling apart.

  “Not so fast, muffin. You’ve got something I want.”

  Papa Lovebone! Ellen crawled faster, trying to rise up from her knees and run. She risked a single glance up, the blown-out door to the platform a hundred yards away, the distance separating her from the train stretched out like carnival taffy, the boards warped and twisting across the vast distance of the floor, the rules governing time and space, distance and motion, reality and dream, rendered meaningless by the simple turn of a wheel.

  “Well actually, you have a few things.”

  Ellen felt a wave of horror run cold across her skin, the boundaries of reality continuing to stretch as a wave of dizziness turned her thoughts into a flight of frightened starlings. Her arms collapsed, and she fell upon her side like some wounded animal on the Serengeti; a dead-to-the-world drunk; a helpless junkie on a bad trip. Walls of ornately carved mahogany dissolved into gilded Baroque styling then into arching stonework festooned with tapestries and scrolled iron. The walls melted up into vaulted ceilings, ornate mosaics cascading into oil cloudscapes giving way to vast domes with classical reliefs, religious figures in pious wonderment. Ellen could feel the shifting truth, the fixing and unfixing of worlds, cut through her sanity like a scalpel, reality reduced to a series of outfits being changed in endless succession.

  She thought she was fainting, the blood racing from her face, her eyes, her brain. The paint on the ceiling ran freely under her stare, the colors mixing and reforming into reclining nudes in pastoral scenes, dancing nymphs and fauns. And as the images frolicked in the paint, the fauns took the nymphs in wanton abandon, the scenes becoming more detailed, more decadent until the paint lost all pretense of art, transformed into animated trysts, graphic picture shows, frightening and perverse …

  “For now, I’ll just take this.”

  Her eyes snapped away suddenly, and she saw Reginald Hyde bending over her, reaching for something she held tightly in her fist. She followed his stare to the crumpled edges of the ticket he was trying to pull from between her clenched fingers.

  “No!” Her free hand tightened into a fist, striking at him.

  “Now, now, muffin,” Hyde warned, catching her wrist in one thick, meaty palm and holding it tight. “I’ll be sure to let you know when I want it rough.”

  He squeezed her wrist until slivers of pain shot white-hot up her arm, pelting her spine like rocks. She winced and sucked breath, but refused to relinquish her hold on the ticket. If anything, the pain made everything clearer, as clear as crystal, sharp and cold. Hyde’s face danced above her, smiling with a pleasure bordering upon ecstasy, his features masked by a dozen ghostly images of trapped spirits that haunted his skin, bound and driven to his will like beasts before the whip. When he smiled, it was the boar-tusked snarl of a gerrymander, the sharp-fanged leer of the Wasteland shrieker. His eyes were cast over by a thousand separate, hidden eyes: slitted, reptilian, insectile, arthropodic, demonic; all fixated and hungry. And the brutish Cast Out ruled them, directed their hunger to his will. When or where he abandoned the loose trousers and robe, Ellen could not even guess, but Hyde wore only the bound spirits and bone-pierced skin of black and indigo tattoos, tightly wound knots, demon traps, cabalistic sigils and words telling tales in dead languages of frescoed flesh moving and dancing upon his naked skin, lives lived out and ended in the obscene folds. His penis lurched and jerked at the air like a blind serpent in tattooed scales.

  Ellen started crawling backwards, shinnying across the floor and pulling at his iron grip. Small puling noises escaped her, but she wasn’t sure why she made them or how, when all she w
anted to do was scream.

  Hyde’s other hand caught the waist of her jeans and dragged her back along the floor, his legs, thick slabs of fat decorated with tales, frightening and hypnotic and strangely obsessive, straddling her like a mountain.

  “Stay, cupcake. Enjoy.” He smiled, gently playing his fingers inside the front of her jeans, manicured fingernails teasing the edge of her cleft. “I’ll bet even a construct like you can feel the Nexus flowing through your weak and shallow shell, caressing your skin, penetrating your lungs, thrusting itself deep … deep—”

  His eyes glazed with a crazed detachment, and he scooped her up as though she were no more than a piece of paper, a loose sheet from a forgotten manuscript. His meaty hands fastened about her arms, hiking the sleeves of the oversized sweatshirt up past her elbows as he held her out at arm’s length like a child speaking to a favorite doll. “We’re in paradise, sweet meat!”

  Rain splattered from the ceiling in large amber droplets, sheeting through her hair and down her face, stinging her eyes and numbing her lips. Ellen realized it wasn’t rain at all, wasn’t even water, but liqueur! Hyde, now completely insane, had turned the air above them into a raining cloud of brandy!

  The fat Cast Out opened his mouth wide to catch the spirit on his tongue and swallow it whole. Then the amber turned dark brown, sticky and sweet. Chocolate syrup; Ellen could smell it as it dripped down Hyde’s face and across his tattoos like darkening blood. Next came rain sheeting from the sky—open sky now, no more ceiling, no more Saloon; doesn’t matter anyway; nothing matters now—to wash the syrup away. Her gaze strayed to Hyde’s left shoulder, and the largest singular bone in his collection of sick fetishes: a jawbone ringed with thick, tusk-like fangs newly sewn to Lovebone’s skin with still-wet strings of fresh animal gut. Horrified, her entire body began quivering.

  Nail! The bastard was wearing Nails remains like a trophy, tying the Guardian’s spirit to the bone priest’s will! She whispered the gargoyle’s name, the sound lost as her voice retreated after her sanity down the long tunnel of her mind.