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

by Mark Reynolds

  * * *

  Serena paced about the small shop, wiping up coffee stains and spilled sugar.

  Ellen was the key though she’d mistaken it for the book the girl carried, always kept close like a Bible or a lover’s keepsake. But the book was unimportant, a portent of things to come. Ellen Monroe was the event the sign foretold, the book like the colors in autumn leaves, not significant in and of themselves, a distraction, a sign of changing seasons, the coming of winter and eventual death.

  Serena paused, intrigued by the unexpectedly cryptic train of thought.

  But was it accurate?

  She lifted the teapot from the hot pad—both cold for hours—and stopped. There on the table was the prescription Ellen Monroe had come in with this afternoon. Now perfectly flattened and heated until the paper turned crisp, it lay there like freshly ironed linen, apparently forgotten.

  Serena carried the teapot and pad over behind the counter and placed both near the sink to be washed. Then she poured herself a cup of tea, another of her special blends, but one very different from the one she had given to Ellen. She took the cup back over to the table and sat down, the damp rag forgotten for the moment in favor of the crisply flattened prescription slip.

  Perhaps it was better forgotten. This was not the solution to Ellen’s dilemma. Not when Ellen was walking around with something as fantastic as a book that did not, could not, should not exist. Kohler was not incompetent, simply a narcissist trying to vicariously resolve his own dysfunction and failing miserably. He was in over his head and would likely drown. Serena did not much care, but she worried that he would drag Ellen down with him.

  That would be calamitous.

  She placed the cup of tea down beside the prescription slip. Perhaps it was better that the thing be forgotten here, that it be “accidentally” thrown away. Perhaps it was a matter of fate.

  Yes, perhaps it was at that.

  * * *

  Unburying the past began as little more than the kicking over of stones in a field, and rapidly became a vast and horrific excavation of black and oozing earth. And each layer that he scraped away brought another to life, like clawing an old scar till it bled afresh.

  His skull hot and feverish, Frederick Kohler felt the first subtle pricks of the headache begin to edge into his frame of consciousness, swaying him from his personal distractions. Sweat had developed on his chest, beneath his arms, down his back. His feet were cold, toes numb. The muscles in his abdomen, shoulders and arms had tightened to the point of quaking, his left hand stroking vigorously.

  One last time, he promised.

  In his mind, images mixed and cavorted insensibly: Ellen Monroe mostly, but sometimes confused with Cassie. Sometimes young, sometimes grownup; sometimes together, sometimes alone; innocent and free or bound in a straitjacket, eagerly awaiting his ministrations.

  Snatching short gasps of air over chattering teeth, he felt the first pins of the headache insert themselves in earnest, only to be revealed as nails.

  * * *

  Serena looked across the street at Dabble’s Books. The store was dark, but there was a light on in the floor above. Nicky’s home away from home. She looked at the window more closely, but could not see past the blinds.

  How like him to love his secrets. Useless things. But that was Nicky. He loved to know things, all things. He kept information like a squirrel storing nuts for the winter. Only Nicky never forgot what he knew, never misplaced anything, never didn’t know something.

  Except who really wrote The Sanity’s Edge Saloon.

  And perhaps that was why Nicky kept Ellen on, an assistant he didn’t need performing an inventory he had no use for. Nicky knew everything about everything within his store, his own personal, private world. Everything, except for Ellen Monroe and the book she carried with her, and the secrets she kept hidden upon the back pages of her soul. He knew everything but that. And she didn’t doubt that it gnawed hungrily at his heart.

  As it eats at yours?

  She grimaced, but thought the annoyingly reasonable voice might be correct. She too had been caught up in the story of Ellen Monroe, the sign of things to come. And that was what bothered her the most. There were too many things going on just now, too many players getting involved. And it probably wouldn’t stop here. It would keep getting more muddled, the situation becoming less clear, the number of parties involved growing more numerous until Ellen Monroe finally left.

  Or the universe tore itself apart.

  She reached across the table and accidentally tipped over her cup, sending a puddle of hot tea across Dr. Kohler’s prescription slip.

  * * *

  Frederick knew, even in his distraction, that he had lost control: of the situation, of himself. He felt his heart banging inside of his ribcage, breath reduced to ragged gasps, head consumed in a dull, throbbing ache that was starting to feel like needles pushing out from behind his eyes. A migraine, maybe. His head and body were sweating rivers, but his hands and feet felt ice-cold. His legs and arms quivered with the strain, with the unrelenting need in the blackest part of his brain to both satisfy and deny a crazed hunger, a perverse desire, a diseased fantasy he was fighting equally as hard as he was promoting.

  In the cinema show in his mind, structure succumbed to pure sensory overload, an amorphous fantasy of naked flesh and limbs intertwined, throbbing and pulsing. Ellen moaned, the straitjacket pulled up around her waist, wet with desire—harder, doctor, please! She bucked in orgasm as he tightened his hold, pulled her down, re-buckled the straps until they cut the skin—let’s play a game. Cassie?

  No pleasure without pain. No freedom without control.

  Frederick squeezed out tears of desperation and horror, ecstasy and pain, as he embraced these visions with all of his heart. He was standing upon the edge … nearly there … almost…

  And then he burst.

  * * *

  Serena watched indifferently as the hot tea spilled over the prescription, blue ink running from the paper, bleeding out in long filmy strands that dissolved in the diffusion of tea, one of her special blends.

  Maybe it was for the best.

  * * *

  Pain both instantaneous and unimaginable tore through Frederick Kohler’s brain. He opened his mouth to scream, and managed only a gurgling choke, his throat locked tight around his final lungful of air. What he thought of as pins or even nails exploded, someone trying to tear his skull apart from the inside out with a sharpened railroad spike. His vision collapsed from the edges, leaving him in darkness, blood pouring through ruptured capillaries to blind him. A brushfire wave blasted through his skin, the cinema show instantly and suddenly aborted, his dark fantasies lost before the overwhelming terror. His heart beat so fast, each thump indistinguishable from the last. His right hand seized the arm of the chair, fingernails biting into the leather while his left hand died halfway to his temple, a belated effort to assuage the pain. His penis pumped emptily in the air, his efforts spilling across his shirttails and down his belly, forgotten.

  Dr. Frederick Timothy Kohler did not relive his life in those brief seconds before the massive hemorrhage claimed him as folk wisdom promised. He had only a moment for a single disjointed recollection that burst through his fear in a kind of crystal clear recall. The memory was of a seven-year-old Cassie hastily dressed beside a shady summer stream, strangely serious as she said, “Freddy, I want to go home.”

  Me too.

  Cassie dissolved, replaced by Ellen Monroe. Then Ellen dissolved too, leaving him nothing, nothing at all, only darkness.

  * * *

  Serena picked up the sodden paper, tea pouring away with most of the ink. What had not bled away remained an indistinguishable blur, a clouding of blue stain against white paper. It was almost serene.

  The proprietor of Serena’s Coffee Shoppe ran her rag through the spill then crossed to the counter, discarding the slip without a second thought. She wrung out the dishrag, the blue tinge of ink not even visible. Then s
he carried the pot of tea back to the table, righted the cup, and refilled it, not giving the incident another thought.

  * * *

  Far away from reality, Jack Lantirn reached across the emptiness and turned off one of the many television monitors surrounding him. It was late and he was tired, the desert turning cold with nightfall. He decided to turn in.

  Besides, the screen he had been watching had gone dead.

  FLIGHT OF FANCY

  Asleep on the roof, Ellen dreamed.

  Naked, she stepped to the building’s edge. She did not remember getting undressed, or even where she left her clothes, so she was quite sure that she was dreaming. In addition to her clothes, Jasper’s flyer and all of his tools were gone. Like her, the rooftop was bare.

  What use reason in dreams?

  Before her, the sun broke the horizon, rising upon a world different than she remembered. She should have been able to look down and see the side of the building, the alleyway of broken asphalt and weeds, garbage spilling from the enormous Dumpster. And past the alley, the treed ravine littered with debris dragged inexorably down by gravity’s hand: discarded tires, a car so rusted and disfigured that its identifying features were lost, a broken couch, a one legged chair, garbage bags picked open by scavengers, their contents robbed or scattered. And at the very bottom, the thick gray river slowly winding about its course, the inevitable end of all that gravity dragged from the slopes as though by some titan’s hand.

  But that wasn’t what she saw.

  Below toes gripping tight to the capstone edging was a world of clouds billowing and shifting, gray-blue and cottony and limned with the blazing whiteness of the newly risen sun. The rooftop was suddenly thirty-thousand feet up as though balanced upon the wing of a jet plane soaring east.

  This must be a dream; that’s the only explanation.

  Isn’t it?

  The clouds churned and boiled, edges rippling in ever-changing expressions of soft gold and searing white. They called to her. Come and fly. You remember, don’t you, Ellen? You remember how to fly?

  Yes.

  The Dreamline?

  Yes.

  The wind blew at her back, sending shivers through her stomach, the thrill of possibility. She stretched out her arms, hands arched upwards, fingers splayed like wingtips. Yes, she remembered; she remembered very well.

  Are you certain this is a dream?

  The question swam out of the darkness. If she wasn’t dreaming, if she was caught in the grips of a delusion or a hallucination or the fleeting after-effects of some long-ago hallucinogen stored away in the cell walls of her brain tissue, then she was actually standing naked upon the roof of her apartment building preparing to execute a swan dive into the pavement. Wouldn’t Dr. Kohler get a big laugh out of that? How he would gloat over her then, ego fattened on the proof of her insanity. And there would be no arguing his point, no more chance of freedom. She would be back in an asylum, medicated, her body too doped up to struggle, her head too mushy to think, her mind too dead to dream. Oh, that would give Kohler quite the thrill, seeing her like this, delusional by all appearances and suicidal as well.

  It might thrill him in other ways, too.

  The sky darkened, left her cold.

  Are you sure you remember how to fly? It’s not too late to turn around, forget it all. Being normal isn’t so bad, is it?

  Somewhere across the endless expanse of open sky and weightless clouds, across the distant river winding itself around the town like the coils of an oily serpent, the poisonous river Styx, was a small place on the edge of dreams and madness. And trapped there like a forgotten refugee of an unremembered war, the only person who ever truly mattered to her.

  Jack.

  He was waiting, waiting for her to come back to him, to free him, to save him as he had saved her. If no one believed her, so what? It wasn’t impossible to be right and the rest of the world wrong was it? Unlikely, but not impossible.

  She could run, hide from Kohler and her father and whomever they siced on her. Go underground. Follow the white rabbit, turn away from normalcy, be free. Wasn’t being normal its own kind of drug, anyway? An easy thing to get used to, generous and gentle, apathetic and drowsy, the lotus flower of the sane, the soma of the masses. You’re taught to accept it, to embrace the comforts of a job you don’t like so that you can pay your bills, keep a place to sleep, buy food from the market, and collect some possessions along the way that will own you as much as you own them. Get happy, get married, have kids, get old, buy a cemetery plot and pass away. Normal and acceptable.

  But she had to save Jack. She was the only one left who believed in him.

  You remember how to fly, don’t you?

  Ellen looked again into the vast landscape of clouds drifting below her like the sea, stealing reality from the world. Jack was out there somewhere, lost, waiting.

  She felt herself fall into the air, away from the shores of normalcy.

  And then she was flying.

  The clouds embraced her, coating her skin with dew as she descended, falling further and further until there was nothing but shadows, gray on white, a fog clinging to her skin and soaking her hair in jeweled droplets. The mist became rain and the shadows turned to darkness, deep indigo shades. Somewhere along the way, the sky became the sea, and she was gliding through the water, unconcerned about how she would breathe, only where she should go. Above her, bright azure blue; below her, midnight.

  Silver fish glimmered passed like sun arrows off chrome, a pair of dolphins herding them. Prawn and squid formed opposing angles, a curious aquatic ballet of layers and directions intersecting and missing both at once. She looked down, her body floating naked in the unbounded deep, hair a cloud of flowing strands adrift like the tendrils of a jellyfish pulled gently with the current, the ebb of the tide, the draw of the moon. She was a nereid, perhaps; some genus of sea nymph existing nowhere outside of dreams and the imagination.

  What mattered anything outside of dreams? Here was here. Now was now. You are what you are, so do what you are supposed to do.

  She must find Jack.

  Ellen turned towards the surface, the water above her bright, cerulean blue, and sailed up the face of a cliff formed from the night-blue waters like an edge to the ocean, a deep-water trench that cleaved the earth for miles in all directions.

  Above her she saw a face staring down. Nothing but darkness at first, a silhouette suspended out over the edge, something bright like the moon looming over its shoulder. As she drew closer, features came into focus, urged into familiarity.

  Jack!

  He stared down into the water, hands clutching the edge of the sea, fingers grazing the surface. His face was unburned, eyes neither blind nor dead as her nightmares warned. A smile touched his lips, but there was a trace of sadness in his eyes, as if he was holding back a secret.

  Ellen reached out …

  … and found the edge.

  They were of different worlds, separated by sea and sky. She tried to kiss his lips through the skin of the night-sea, tried to feel the warm press of his fingertips against her own, but felt only the ocean’s membrane. She could not break the surface, could not burst up into his embrace, or reach her arms around his neck and drag him close to her, pressing her naked body tight against his warmth. His eyes held a look of resignation, of sadness, as if he understood, had even expected this. He pressed against his side of reality, but could not pass through the surface of the water, each trapped in bubbles of their own existence like a pair of fish in separate bowls, pressed to the glass in an effort to reach the other.

  They might just as well be separated by a million miles, by the endless parsecs of non-reality that gaped between her apartment on the edge of a slow river, and Jack’s desert wasteland on the edge of madness. The seemingly flimsy barrier of water and air was as impassable as the unimaginable billions of miles of pan-dimensional space that separated them.

  Jack’s not really here, Ellen; this is only a dr
eam. You know that. This is self-inflicted torture, nothing more; a variation of your nightmares. That isn’t Jack, just a representation, an invention of your own mind while you struggle with your insanity, containing Jack in a part of your head and making him stay there, both accessible and unreachable. Jack doesn’t really exist.

  No! Jack was real! The Wasteland was real! She was not crazy and she was not wrong; not about Jack or the Sanity’s Edge, at least. He was still there, alive, alone and trapped in the ruins and the Wasteland, waiting for her to find him. Crazy or not, Jack was real.

  Then the net she had not seen closed around her, dragging her away.

  She tumbled end over end, swept down into the billowing envelope of fine mesh as it skimmed along, drag-lines pulling it faster than she could catch up, every effort she made at escape only catching her deeper inside, dragging her further and further out to sea.

  And she was not alone, the water a jumble of bright, tropical fish, every imaginable color of the rainbow, some larger than herself, others smaller than her little finger. A host of bottom creatures and debris sifted down: crabs and prawns, mussels and sea horses and barnacle-crusted oysters, sharks the color of thunderheads and jelly-bodied squid. As the net tightened, they crashed together in a desperate explosion, attacking the edges for the way out that was not there. And down at the very bottom of the net, a scraped-together collection of jetsam: a ship’s masthead, an anchor, mismatched flatware and broken crockery, an assortment of shells and coral of all shapes and sizes. The sea was not as bottomless as she assumed. She caught glimpses of shining objects; maybe coins or pearls, maybe only broken bits of shells and beach glass. It was a beachcomber’s paradise, a pandemonium of fool’s gold.

  Her hands walked the edge of the net, desperate to find any tear or hole, but the material proved both oily slick and strong as steel. And with each wasted moment, more and more creatures were brought tighter and tighter together, the water churning in a cloud of frenzied obscurity.