If Lovebone heard, he paid no mind. “You can’t tell me you haven’t ever gone searching for Nirvana in the strained drippings of a Mojave cactus button, muffin?” he demanded, his voice pursuing her down through the fog of crashing thought. “I can smell it on you, read its stories in the dilated black of your eyes.” A cruel grin seized his face, tugging the features into a demonic caricature. “Let’s say we ride the line together, you and I, for old time’s sake.”
His thumbs caressed the soft skin on the insides of her elbows, urging shy veins to the surface. Ellen stared in horror, paralyzed as barbs split from beneath Hyde’s thumbnails, darting out like unsheathed stingers, his tattooed thumbs the mottled, jointed tails of scorpions.
“No!” she moaned, helpless, unconvincing. “Please don’t.”
Needle sharp, the points penetrated the soft flesh, the eager blue lines. The thick meat of Hyde’s thumbs pumped rhythmically like twin poison sacs, and she felt her muscles tighten then go slack. A fiery wind burned insatiably from within, traveling up numb arms absent from the elbow down. The burning heat passed into her, burned her spine like a dry blade of grass, and ran shrieking into her brain, heedless of the hot trail of tears passing over blood-flushed cheeks.
She felt the floor press up against her back as the poison burned her brain like white-hot fire. Not like the Nexus, not cool and brilliant and silent; this was bursting, frightening colors, blazing hot, and ringing louder and louder and louder and…
“Oh … God…”
“… No.”
White light burning her eyes. Trapped. Pinned. Arms, legs, chest immobilized! Suffocating! Something hard was caught between her teeth. She opened her mouth to scream and it was pulled away, stealing her scream with it.
“There. I’ll bet that’s better.” A woman’s voice. Adult. Doting. Mothering. Inexplicable.
“Jack?”
“Who’s Jack, honey?”
“My … my friend.”
“There is no Jack, Ellen dear. He’s only in your mind.” A kindly face interposed itself between Ellen and the white light. A woman. Hair pulled back. Stiff white uniform collar. The air thick with an antiseptic smell, sterilized; iodine; alcohol.
“No. He’s … r-real.” Her protests weak, petulant.
“Hi Ellen. It’s Dr. Chaulmers. You remember?”
She turned, a new face entering the white light. His lips smiled comfortingly, a practiced gesture betrayed only by the condescension in his eyes that he could not hide. She knew him from somewhere … somewhere…
“Where’s … Jack?” So hard to catch her breath.
“Jack doesn’t exist, Ellen. He may seem real here.” He reached out and tapped a fingertip against her forehead as if explaining something to a young child. “But there is no Jack o’ Lantern person, Ellen. There is no goose-man. There is no saloon on the edge of nowhere—”
“Sanity!” she corrected, her voice a desperate croak. “The Sanity’s Edge S-saloon.”
“I know it seems real, Ellen, but it’s not. Your mind is constructing these people and places and making you believe they’re real to distract you from the true reality surrounding you that it cannot cope with. But they’re not real.”
“They’re real! They are!”
Dr. Chaulmers looked at her dubiously then glanced overtop of her to the woman in white. “It’s not uncommon for them to hold very tightly to their fantasy worlds,” he remarked, as if Ellen had transformed into furniture. “She won’t let go easily.”
Then the woman stepped forward. “Open your mouth, honey.”
“But they are re—”
A thick, rubber guard was jammed between her teeth, wedge over her tongue. She tried to push it back out, but someone else, someone unseen, was already pulling a strap tight under her jaw, locking the bit in place. She tried to rear her head, free herself, but she was still pinned down. Even her head. Warm tears burned her cheeks, fear turning each breath into a hitchy whimper through flared nostrils.
Dr. Chaulmers returned. “We’ll go again on three. I want you to take a deep breath and hold it, Ellen. On three. One.”
She was desperately trying to shake her head and failing, no deep breath but panic-stricken gasps. Don’t let it end this way, Jack! Not this way!
“Two. Deep breath, Ellen.”
Head thrashing side to side, something attached, fixed to her temples. Something … bad! Stop oh God please stop this stop this stop this for the love of—
“Three.”
Sanity and reality burned out in a sudden, blue-white flare of brilliant agony.
* * *
Jack drove his elbow through the glass door of the grandfather clock just as Rebreather bounded into the master bedroom. The giant Cast Out did not clamber gracelessly over the edge as he had, but simply leaped the gap like some preternatural monster.
Even more graceful, Kreiger levitated upon a cushion of air like a risen messiah. In one hand, he gripped the lightning rod, the metal blazing white-hot, an electric-blue that hissed and sparked with power. He gazed about himself dreamily, disinterestedly, as if looking at and through everything to what was hidden, to what might be; Kreiger was an artist finding the form within the unshaped clay.
Jack dug his hands into the clockwork, the guts of counterweights and chains and small tools, and pulled out a spearhead with a long, curved hook welded to the blade. It reminded him a little of an old farming tool, the kind you saw on an antique store wall, no indication of its purpose. But it was a weapon, a gladiatorial blade from some poorly made, martial arts film, something he had seen numerous times and only now appreciated.
Taking the strange hook in one hand, he jerked it out, springs and gears tearing apart inside the clock and clattering to the floor along with nearly a dozen feet of strong chain—very useful; very necessary. And at the far end, the other counterweight: a loaded flintlock pistol. He was not surprised by this, though once he might have been. He understood now. The only question remaining was how much of this was he actually doing, and how much of it had he actually planned so very long ago?
Pistol in hand, he turned and dropped to one knee in a fluid motion just as Rebreather rounded the spiral stair. He squeezed the trigger, heard the crack of the hammer followed by an ear-splitting explosion, the air suddenly pungent with the sulfurous smell of black powder. Rebreather’s left knee erupted in a spray of bone splinters and red, the giant Cast Out collapsing with a horrible scream as the leg gave out from under him, the agonized sound from behind the mask barely human.
Still holding the spent weapon, Jack risked a single glance at Kreiger, but the levitating mystic only stared down at him from the air, a condescending smile upon his lips, an unholy, white fire blazing behind the pupils of his changeling eyes. “You really have no idea what you’ve done, do you?”
Jack didn’t answer, Rebreather’s tortured howls the only sound in the void between the Caretaker and white wizard. Further away, Ellen was screaming.
Kreiger’s smile broadened, white fire spilling from the cracks between his shark’s grin. He extended the lightning rod until the tip touched the wall, solid wood rippling like water on a pond, the wave spreading outward, further and further. And where the wave passed, reality changed. Simple wood planks became parquet floors strewn with oriental rugs. Tapestries and gold-framed paintings appeared upon the walls, dark wood wainscoting and deep Burgundy wallpaper. Already the dimensions of the room were changing, stretching out, expanding; as if to say the Saloon was under new management and was currently undergoing a brief period of renovation. Please pardon our dust.
The pistol collapsed in Jack’s hands, falling apart into time-withered wood and rust-pitted metal. Jack’s time was ending, his reality being rewritten. And Gusman Kreiger was coming into his own.
Jack turned, leaving behind a room he did not recognize for the last vestige of familiarity: the Stairway to Heaven. He gripped the bladed hook tightly in his hand and fled, the looped lengths of chain rattling lik
e the crimes of an ancient and forgotten haunt.
* * *
Kreiger watched, an indifferent god, as Rebreather propped himself up upon his sword, blood soaking the left leg of his pants, the shredded hole revealing the blown-apart edges of flesh and fractured bone. Hate drove the Cast Out onward, foregoing the pain to follow Jack up the dead end of the Stairway to Heaven, leaning upon his sword like a cane. Rebreather was a pitbull with the taste of blood on its teeth, a shark gone to frenzy in the froth of the maroon-stained sea.
Kreiger shrugged and opened his arms like an angel ascending, and glided up along the large, ornate, brass stairway that was once a spiral of simple iron before he enabled it to aspire to something better. He had other things to do. Other fish to fry. Other worlds to tame.
Gusman Kreiger stood in the middle of Jack’s writing room, staring in a kind of bemused wonderment and disgust, the power of the Nexus entrusted to the hands of a child dreamer, an acolyte of the imagination, a mere infant.
The Nexus was pouring through the Saloon, careless thoughts running rampant like children in a park. A strange plant writhed in the corner of the stair, vestiges of Jack’s lingering control, his influences run amok. The plant, whatever it was once, now resembled a large Venus flytrap, broad leaves pawing at the edges of the brass rail, vine-like tentacles reaching over, reaching for him. Some of the panes of glass in the nearby window had been broken, runners poking through the jagged holes. Books piled up on the floor, stacks growing from beneath like bubbling fountains. A coffee machine formed from the very desk itself, its shape torn up from the surface. Coffee was brewing, pouring down into a glass decanter, spilling over and across the desktop in steaming streams. In one corner, a pneumatic tube gaped; metal features fashioned obscenely to resemble a woman’s labia, brass and copper turned living flesh.
“Oh, Jack,” Kreiger thought ruefully. “Under other circumstances, you and I might have been friends.”
He dismissed the notion with a curt shake of his head, walking directly to the Jabberwock, Jack’s personal interface with the Nexus. Writers were such self-limiting, uninventive dreamers. For two thousand years, he waited for this moment. Two thousand years spent brooding, planning, scheming, hating … well, mostly hating. Hate kept him alive when others grew tired and perished. Hate kept him alive when others turned careless and the Wasteland devoured them, body and soul. Hate was his pillar, his rod of iron, his Word to his disciples. It was hatred towards the previous Caretakers that brought Rebreather under his control; hatred that held Papa Lovebone in line; hatred that made him, Gusman Kreiger, the most powerful creature to walk these lifeless sands in aeons.
And at last, he would taste the fruits of his ambitions.
He sat down in the chair, hands caressing the armrests, the soft, warm skin almost living, so luxurious the comfort. Jack’s manifestation of his connection with the Nexus—a crude computer/word processor of all things—waited upon the white wizard, the Jabberwock’s empty screen staring back at him like the eye of God. Keys beckoned his stroke, their symbols limiting, obtuse and primitive … but functional. Once the Nexus was completely his, he could dispense with it altogether. It would be a simple thing then. As simple as pie.
He gently placed his fingers upon the bone-colored keys, feeling them, feeling the warmth that ran through them. They were the vertebrae running along the small of a lover’s back, delicate and known. He caressed them unhurriedly, savoring the luxurious texture.
“I am home,” he declared softly.
In some ways, Jack let him down. For all his fire, Jack had surrendered surprisingly quickly. True, Jack never stood a chance, but he hardly knew that. Dreamers like Jack seldom saw reality for what it was. And after so many feints and jabs in their week-long duel, after the calling of the trains when Kreiger suffered his first moment of actual doubt, a hollow gouge in his innards that still made him cold to think about, he thought Jack would go down in death, not turn rabbit and run. He was almost disappointed.
Almost.
Kreiger’s fingers thrummed the keys, lines pouring out upon the screen in a dizzying display of text; words stringing into sentences; sentences stringing into paragraphs. With blinding speed, the story began to unfold. Everything he had been storing up over all this time, waiting, countless centuries of writing and rewriting every single word over and over in his mind until it was perfect; perfectly described and perfectly committed. And now it simply poured out of him and into the Nexus. After so very, very long, he could release it all as it was meant to be.
Kreiger’s fingers halted their manic dance as a boxed message appeared suddenly on the Jabberwock’s screen:
VIOLATION
UNAUTHORIZED USER
INTRUSION COUNTER-MEASURES ACTIVATED
A red button on the keyboard, obliquely labeled I C E, started blinking, and a small card spat out of the computer, landing face-up on the keyboard, a short note typed on it.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”
— Lewis Carroll
Kreiger stared at the lines, an unfamiliar sensation running through him. Some last ditch effort of Jack’s, he wondered? Would it turn to dust once Rebreather finished breaking the Caretaker’s spine, or tearing his still-beating heart from his chest? Or was this some failed warning, a vague aspect of the capricious nature of the Nexus?
Kreiger’s hands returned to the keyboard … and the jaws of the trap sprang shut.
* * *
More white light. Ellen blinked repeatedly, consciousness slowly pulling apart the gray veils surrounding her as reason sifted an explanation from the insensible images. The white light the reflection of sunlight through dusty train windows, diffused and brilliant, igniting the chrome skin of the waiting train so that it blazed down upon her like a …
Images flashed up from moments before: a doctor, a nurse, a medical procedure, strapped down, confused, suffocating, some kind of treatment, things attached to her temples, sticky and itching, going on three. (Bad!) Two. (Very Bad! Please stop!) One. (NooooOOOO!)
But everything was different now.
Or was it that nothing had ever really changed?
Her head lolled to one side, staring upside-down at the platform beyond. Her arms lay like dead flesh over her head, limp and unresponsive as though her veins were running with liquid gold, warm and exquisite. Her eyes rolled further and she saw her left hand clenched into a fist around a crumpled piece of orange-colored paper, wadded and wrinkled. A tremendous weight pressed down upon her, pinning her down even as she inched her way across the floor, empty, worm-like struggles amounting to nothing. Dimly, she was aware that reality at the Sanity’s Edge Saloon had stepped out upon the fire escape for a smoke; what stayed behind was chaos personified.
Her eyes rolled again, the only movement her deadened flesh would allow, and she saw Reginald Hyde straddling her waist, fattened haunches resting upon her thighs, pinning her. His tattooed skin was pressed so close that she could smell his sweat, read the confused hieroglyphs and disturbing images inscribed upon his living flesh. Black pictures and words and vague symbols swirled and moved, dancing with the ghost images that stirred over him, captured indigo spirits enslaved to his will. Hyde was indifferent to both them and her, amusing himself with his own distractions.
Her sweatshirt was pulled up, Hyde’s hands running course as sandpaper across her belly and exposed breasts. He leaned down to her, his tongue urging from between his lips, the surface covered in blisters like the bumps on the back of a toad. Toad skin could be dried and crushed then smoked for a quick ticket on board the Dreamline; she had heard of such things, but never dared try it. That was madness. Pure insanity.
So what was this, then?
Her eyes widened in terror as Hyde bent forward, leaning towards her open mouth, her motionless lips, tongue sliding obscenely over his teeth. The image of toad skin had transferred itself to Hyde and the repulsive organ thrusting at her, deli
berately transformed as if he’d intended to disgust her with it. And she was disgusted. Caught in his half-dream state, Hyde was delighted by her reaction, by the fact that she was powerless before him.
The warty, moist organ stabbed into her mouth, rubbing across her lips, touching her teeth and pallet. She tasted bitterness and tried to summon the strength to spit it out, or bite his tongue, or something. Something!
His fingers tightened upon her breasts, causing her to gasp in pain, to swallow involuntarily. Hyde’s inhuman thumbs scraped their way across the smooth skin, jabbing and pumping more toxins into her. She felt fire burning through her, felt it grab her heart like an iron hand and stop its rabbit-quick beat, felt the tongue thrust down into her throat and close off her breath.
Convulsions, body shaking and writhing. Unable to move. Unable to stop … him…
White light.
Blackness.
… blacknessssssss…
The hiss died slowly in her head, her brain coming back to the world like a drowning swimmer pulled back to shore, ears ringing, eyes slow to focus, nose dripping blood.
“How are you feeling, Ellen?” Dr. Chaulmers asked, his face interposed between her and the over-bright light. “Do you remember where you are?”
Her eyes darted about the room. Sterile walls of claustrophobic white. People dressed like the walls, staring at her with feigned smiles of concern painted beneath indifferent eyes. Practiced masks. They only pretended to care about her, but no one really cared. No one but … no one but…
Empty, her mind fixed upon a once-image that slipped away and disappeared without her ever noticing. There was something about a place, a … a station? Maybe. And somebody. Somebody who … somebody…
The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Page 54