The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2)

by Mark Reynolds

  He counseled all of his patients that the first step to wellness was acknowledging the problem. The second was willfully seeking help. Ellen refused to admit she had a problem, so refused to be helped. She was wrong, of course, and he would need to show her that. Ellen had to want to be cured, want to be made sane, made better. He would have to make her want that. There was no reward without punishment. In order to conquer her demons, to recover her memory, she would have to confront the event in her past that she was blocking. Confront it and conquer it. But to conquer it, she would need to acknowledge it, surrender to that reality.

  It had proven a most insightful session.

  EVENTS IN MOTION

  Ellen worked behind the register until six o’clock then locked the front door, turning the sign in the window: CLOSED — Please come again. Half a cup of cooling coffee in hand, she yawned and went into the backroom marked “employees only.”

  Nicholas Dabble knew all of this because he watched her do it; watched her very closely.

  She was not getting better for her twice-weekly sessions with Dr. Kohler. Frankly, she would only get worse until she stopped seeing him entirely, but that was a break she would have to make on her own. Since her return, she had been more withdrawn than usual, as if worn out, her spirit twisted dry like an old dishcloth.

  A part of him thought he should do something to help her. He knew he wouldn’t, but secretly enjoyed the sensation all the same, this sense of involvement, of concern and empathy that he felt towards Ellen Monroe. She was proving to be a very engaging find, and he was glad to have stumbled upon her.

  Are you absolutely sure that’s how it happened?

  And there was that about Ellen Monroe, the thing he liked least. It was not the secret voice of concern or empathy that bothered him so much—for it spoke so rarely—but the cautions whispered from the darkness suggesting he might have lost control already; no advice or course of action, simply fretful words about his new assistant. She was not a threat, but a harbinger of some larger doom, the angel of Armageddon.

  Still, she was charming and fragile, ravaged by evil that somehow never penetrated her heart, her soul. How like an ascending angel.

  Yes, I expect it’s only a matter of time before she attracts the wrong attention. Not unlike she did yours, old man. How complicated will it be then?

  Nicholas Dabble moved about his shop with acute familiarity, brooding over his vast collections of books. The inventory, a Herculean task that Ellen had set herself to as a favor to him—can you actually believe that she is doing you a favor?!? —only accounted for a fraction of the stories he had collected over the years. But they didn’t comfort him this evening. Always the way with desire; it made you forget what you had, and long for what you did not.

  He knew a thing or two about that as well.

  He paused by the register and breathed in the smells of the shop: the oil-soaped wood, the dust of the slowly eroding pages, the hard tang of the inks. There was a too-sweet smell of cinnamon and hazelnut in the air; one of Serena’s flavored coffees, Dabble thought contemptuously. And below that, subtle and sweet, the smell of his erstwhile assistant, her perfume, the shampoo she used in her hair, the damp fabric of her dress—silly goose, refusing to carry an umbrella. But there was something more, something deep, almost hidden in the fabric of reality, down in the cracks where it might safely be lost, or, at the very least, escape his notice: dried leaves and herbs, one of Serena’s special blends.

  What would make her give such a thing to his assistant?

  If he concentrated, if he put his mind to it, he thought he could actually hear the slow, heavy grinding of wheels already turning.

  He crossed to the back of the store and passed through the “employees only” door like a falling shadow to slip quietly down into the cramped aisles of books, the air in the backroom stifling hot and thick with dust. Ellen sat on a small footstool at the far end, staring down into a cardboard box of books he recognized at a glance: early copies of Barker and King and Peter S. Beagle. He knew the titles and the count by the smell of the box.

  No, he really did not need her to inventory his store; he knew what was his.

  He watched her pore over the handwritten ledger, taking books out in handfuls and checking their quantities, logging them down. Stooped forward, eyes heavy, lids dragging closed even as she fought to keep them open. The sweet-smelling coffee was finished, for all the good it had done. There was a light sheen of sweat on her neck and forehead, a small droplet wending its way across her cheekbone that she seemed too distracted or too tired to wipe away. While he watched, he saw her head jerk back suddenly, a violent neck spasm as she caught herself on the verge of drifting off.

  And again, he smelled that faint undercurrent of Serena’s special blend.

  Things are getting out of hand.

  “Ellen?”

  She jerked at the sound of her name, pen skidding uncontrollably across the ledger page, a sudden blush in her cheeks. Quite fetching.

  “Why don’t you go home,” Dabble said, offering her an easy smile that suggested he had not noticed her nearly asleep on the job. “It must be a hundred degrees back here. I’ll be lucky if you don’t call OSHA on me.” Then he modified his tone a little, something more sympathetic. “You look tired, and I’m guessing you’re not having the very best of days. Why don’t you head home and I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded. “All of this has waited this long. One more day for these old books won’t make a bit of difference. They’re already written.”

  “I can make up the time later this week—”

  “It’s all right. You’re the best assistant I’ve ever had.” That wasn’t true, but she certainly was the most interesting one he had had in a very long time, and that counted for something. “You’re entitled to a night off.”

  She shrugged, but he sensed she was slowly coming around to his side. All she needed was a little push.

  “You look exhausted.” He might have added that she looked a mess, too, her hair a dried tangle, her dress wrinkled by the rain. He might have, but he didn’t; he found her disheveled appearance rather charming. “I’m guessing your afternoon didn’t go all that well.”

  “No,” she said. “Not really.”

  And Dabble knew that she was covering herself, hiding that deep wound that Kohler somehow always managed to reopen. Maybe, he thought, she was starting to learn a thing or two about the good doctor. Smart girl. Maybe she would leave him. Smarter still.

  More sounds on the edge of his senses—wheels turning.

  “It’s nearly eight o’clock,” Dabble said. “Go on home.”

  After a moment of hesitation, she nodded, folding the box’s cardboard flaps back over one another and shoving it to one side, not that there was any extra space in the narrow aisle. Ellen left the ledger atop the box, place marked with a paper clip, and threaded her way back through the narrow aisles and out into the store to get her bag from under the register. Nicholas Dabble followed her.

  Outside on the street, shadows stretched out into forever, the last red of the day beginning to fade and darken against the buildings.

  “Be careful walking home,” he said because it was appropriate and polite, and because he always said it to her.

  Tonight, however, it actually meant something.

  “Thanks, Mr. Dabble,” Ellen said from the doorway, looking tired, distracted. Not a wise way to walk home alone; the streets could be dangerous for the unwary. She waved. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Goodbye, Ellen,” he replied, hating to trade lies incautiously.

  Dabble watched over her from the doorway until she was gone from sight then re-locked the front door and turned out the lights. Gathering the shadows about him like the folds of a blanket, he stepped to the glass and watched in secrecy.

  After a moment, he saw two men slink from the darkness of the alley behind Serena’s Coffee Shoppe, confident in th
e anonymity afforded by their station. He had seen them earlier, keeping tabs on Ellen Monroe, watching where she went and what she did. It wasn’t hard to notice them if you looked, and they were the kind of detail Nicholas Dabble tended to notice, the kind that tended to seek him out. He knew them the way he knew all people like them. They picked idly through the trash per usual, but lingered too long outside his store; he did not throw out the kind of garbage that interested the likes of Matthew Cho or Marco Gutierrez—yes, he did know them; better, maybe, than they knew themselves.

  More wheels turning. What galvanized these two? Dabble could not say, which in itself was interesting. One angry and stupid and self-involved, he would end up dead in a gutter, infected blood draining down the sewer. The other was simply unfortunate, weighted down by all the burdens that title had to bear. So what was their interest in his assistant? Who turned them on to her; let them know that she existed?

  Wheels turning.

  Soon enough, he would know.

  Slipping back through the narrow aisles of the backroom and retrieving the ledger, he turned to Ellen’s last entry. By the looks of it, she had been falling asleep almost from the start. Poor thing.

  Curious he should feel bad about her exhaustion, but not about her being stalked by a pair of degenerates little better than feral dogs. Both should be tied into a burlap sack of large rocks and flung into the river; that’s what you did with unwanted strays.

  But they didn’t concern him just now. He looked back through Ellen’s entries and found The Sanity’s Edge Saloon on several lines, the author listed as Jack Lantirn, the quantity on hand invariably one. Very curious, seeing as the only existing copy of The Sanity’s Edge Saloon left his store every time Ellen Monroe went out. And Jack Lantirn did not exist at all, never had. Like her, the book was wholly unique and a mystery.

  But what does it mean?

  Still more sounds like wheels turning, gears grinding, the clockwork of the universe rolling forward.

  What does it mean?

  Better figure it out soon, old man, or you might just get caught under the wheel.

  For Nicholas Dabble, it was another sleepless night ahead.

  BEHIND THE WORLD

  From deep within the shadows behind the coffee shop, Gusman Kreiger watched the derelicts slither from the alleyway to follow Ellen Monroe.

  It was his fault, he knew, speaking glibly of her value. In their ignorance, they assumed it was a value they could fathom, one that could be calculated in base tangibles like the street value of uncut heroin. After beating him senseless and leaving him for dead—their mistake was not making certain—they began to conceive of how to determine that value, how to hunt it down, secret it out, divvy it up and make it there own. What they would do if they acquired it, the single most powerful and wondrous thing in this universe, was impossible to imagine because their desperate stupidity allowed for possibilities that strained credulity. If Kreiger was any judge, they would probably slap her around, possibly rape her, and finally sell her off for a case of malt liquor and a dime bag of hash.

  But he was admittedly jaded. Just because he was healed did not mean he had forgiven them; such piety was the stock and trade of another, and he had stopped pretending to be him a very long time ago.

  But perhaps it was in him to save someone this one time.

  Perhaps.

  Or should he allow fate to take its course? Maybe this was meant to be. Maybe this was Jack’s way of breaking from the past, ending a dalliance that he could never hope to bring to fruition. Perhaps this was simply the eccentric Caretaker’s way of coping, of putting his past away so that he could move on, move forward, start afresh.

  A crooked smile teased the corner of Kreiger’s face, privately enjoying his own jest. No, not Jack. The hopeless romantic, the loving fool, the sentimental idiot equally as tormented by the past as he was in love with it. Just as he was in love with her. Kreiger had not forgotten their last encounter when he’d breached the Saloon, he and Rebreather and the necromancer, Papa Lovebone. They had finally made it to where no Cast Out had stood before: the heart of the Nexus, the center of reality, the apex of all times, all worlds, all universes that ever were or ever would be. And the only thing that stood between them and the control of the Nexus was Jack, an ignorant, misplaced, would-be writer whose only reason for being here was that he didn’t have any better place to be, and whose only reason for staying was he was too stubborn to admit that he wasn’t as good as he had always hoped. His defeat should have been easy, his death an eye-blink.

  But Jack defied him. Kreiger remembered the desperation with which the young Caretaker had crashed all of reality a fraction closer to the Nexus, like stripping away the plastic insulation from a high voltage line and grabbing hold. The rush was instantaneous, power for the taking. In that moment, Kreiger saw everything he ever wanted, worlds opening up before him, universes splayed out at his feet, supplicants to his will and whim.

  Blinded by possibilities, he never saw it coming, never saw how carefully Jack had orchestrated the pieces and set it all in motion. Kreiger thought himself the master, but was, in fact, the puppet. The Caretaker said dance, and he hopped and skipped a fool’s jig. Lovebone was killed. Rebreather, too. Kreiger escaped only by the barest fraction, fleeing into exile, a prisoner in a world that mocked him at every turn.

  And all of this, Jack had done for the love of one fair-skinned, small-breasted ex-junkie who couldn’t cope with reality any better than he could. No, Jack had not forgotten Ellen, and he would not forsake her. And he would most certainly not leave her to the likes of Marco and Matty.

  If he does forget her, if she should fall to the likes of those miscreants, then you are surely doomed, old man. Without her, there is no way out. If he does not love her, you will be trapped here forever, a prisoner for all time, your life an everlasting mistake repeated over and over and over until the end of all existence.

  Maybe this was Jack’s plan after all.

  No. He knew what he needed to do. It wouldn’t be easy to find, not easy at all. If it was, it wouldn’t be here.

  He started along the back wall of the coffee shop, the one with the pragmatic owner, her every move as graceful as it was purposeful. It wouldn’t be here, but it wouldn’t be far away. This was out of sight, on Jack’s periphery. He probably didn’t think about it more than once or twice, enough to know that the pavement was old and hard, cracked and shot full of tufts of grass and weeds. The walls were unadorned brick. A serviceable alley, to be sure, but not one Jack thought much about. No, not at all.

  What he was looking for was not easy to find. Like trying not thinking about an elephant, the very act renders the effort useless.

  Kreiger crouched down near a grated vent along the foundation, his knees cracking audibly, the pain twisting his face into an angry grimace. He struck the grate with the base of the stolen staff, the twisted metal of the lightning rod ringing off the rusted steel, sparking against the screws and shattering them like brittle glass. He pulled the grate aside and reached deep into the shadowed recesses to a place too dark to see, too silent to hear, too distant to touch, too ephemeral to taste, too plain to smell. What he was looking for wasn’t easy to find, but he knew he would find it. He knew it was here. Jack was good, but he wasn’t that good.

  No, he wasn’t that good.

  And there, past the point of the senses where the world existed only as a conceptual abstract, a notion of rules ungoverned by tangibility, he found it.

  Reality’s edge.

  “Did you think you could fool me, Jack? I was there. You had three days, not seven. There wasn’t enough time to cover all the details, cross the t’s and dot the i’s. Why, the paint’s not even dry.”

  Hand curled into a talon, Kreiger rent the very fabric of the universe apart.

  For a moment—one moment only—the world resisted, gathering its rules about itself in defiance of the white wizard’s will. But it was not enough, a flimsy shield of fog
and lights and little else. After a moment, the world surrendered to Gusman Kreiger’s power, and he tore it back, revealing the reality beneath like paper shredded from a wrapped package, raw and exposed.

  Yes, Jack was the Caretaker, and he was good. But he wasn’t that good.

  Gusman Kreiger, mad mystic and two-thousand year old messiah of a world that never was, pulled himself inside of Jack’s reality through a tear in the universe … and the way was made open before him.

  UP ON A ROOF

  Ellen had no recollection of the walk home. She remembered Dabble giving her the night off, shooing her out of the backroom. Had she fallen asleep? She didn’t really remember. Despite the coffee, her eyelids had grown heavy, her thoughts starting to wander.

  She remembered dreaming, remembered seeing Jack point to the ground, asking: “Where do you think those wires go?”

  Mr. Dabble’s voice answered, reality snapping back into place with the suddenness of breaking glass. There was no Jack in this world; it was only a dream.

  She caught glimpses of dusk between the buildings as she walked, the sun blazing a coppery orange like a penny left in a fire. She ignored her mailbox and walked up the stairs to her landing, holding tight to the rail for support. Maybe Dr. Kohler was right after all. Maybe she just needed some rest. She never felt so tired.

  Maybe he was right about a lot of things. Maybe you’re crazy. Maybe you should be on medication. Maybe you just don’t want to admit it.

  Serena had likewise suggested sleep. Why did she believe the woman at the coffee shop over her own doctor?