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

by Mark Reynolds

  The Dreaming Moon was a ghost ship!

  “Ellen?”

  Podak was speaking, but she barely heard him. She was looking at the strange sailors who waited about the deck, stock-still. Why hadn’t she noticed it before? The trolls possessed a quality of life, one she could sense but not fully explain, but the sailors were different. The pallor of dead fish, their features appeared haggard and indistinct. They seemed to be waiting for something, but she wasn’t sure what. Orders, maybe, or perhaps simply attention; marionettes waiting on the shelf for someone to pick them up and pull their strings. Looking at them brought them into focus, clarified their features as if she were seeing them through the lens of a telescope slowly being turned towards clarity. But when she glanced away, they blurred on the periphery of her sight, as if her attention was what made them real, gave them substance. And without her, they became as distant memories, fading.

  “Stop playing with them,” Podak scolded.

  She jumped, startled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean … I’m not sure what I was doing, but—what’s wrong with them?”

  “Nothing is wrong with them, Ellen Monroe,” Podak said patiently. “They’re dead.”

  She could not think of an appropriate response.

  Podak tilted his head as if Ellen were the most curious of things he had ever seen. “You really have no idea, do you?”

  “About what?”

  The cat fell silent for a moment, considering the side of the boat, the night sea, the dark sky. Ellen had an inspired flash that Podak was thinking of what—and what not—to tell her, constructing a narrative of truths and hastily editing pieces of them away. No lies, simply omissions.

  “Every night we cast our nets,” Podak began slowly, “dragging the night sea for the ghosts of the dead. Piotr, Simon, and I constitute the only living crew aboard the Dreaming Moon. Both of them are afraid of me because I command the dead. They are even more afraid that I will catch their souls upon their deaths, enslaving them as I do the sailors you see around you. In exchange for my pledge to see their souls safely to the other side, they serve me without question. We find the relationship mutually beneficial.”

  “You enslave souls?”

  “It’s what cats do,” he answered in a whisper. “We capture and we enslave the souls of the dead. We have done so since the very beginning.”

  “But…” She wasn’t sure what she wanted to say, what question to ask, what point to raise. She was remembering a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge called Rime of the Ancient Mariner. She had stumbled across it one afternoon at the bookstore. The poem was long, and towards the end began to lose her interest, but the ship in the poem, its crew damned and the voyage surreal and nightmarish, reminded her very much of this boat, a boat also damned, manned by the dead and trapped in a silent sea of freezing mist and green witch light.

  Or had she imagined those details?

  “Frankly, I am a bit surprised that you can see them at all,” Podak said, sitting on the low rail separating the decks. “The living seldom see the dead, and vice-versa. Their two worlds are asynchronous, contradictory, and unharmonious. Ghosts are trapped in the past while the living tend towards the present and, on rare occasions, the future. The only ones who see the dead clearly are cats, those already dead …” He turned, eyeing her curiously. “And you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Probably nothing,” he lied. “Tell me where you were and in what direction you were going before you found yourself here.” Podak’s eyes narrowed, the gold intruded upon by a thin filmy membrane sliding sideways across them. “Or did you lose your way altogether?”

  “Do all cats steal souls?” Ellen asked, ignoring Podak’s question.

  The cat’s lids lifted, regarding her impatiently. “No. All cats steal babies’ breath. They control souls. And no, I don’t imagine Snowball and Mr. Socks stash collections of dead souls away, folded up under the couch beside their rubber mouse and that lost ball of yarn. I have about as much in common with a house cat as you have with a howling, ring-tailed lemur. Be that as it may, please tell me how you found yourself here. A paradox is an amusing thing until you actually catch one and drop it naked upon the deck of your ship. Then it has the unfortunate knack of unbinding the fabric of the reality you have worked so hard to create. Now what were you doing before you came here?”

  “I fell asleep, I think. I’m pretty sure I did, anyway. I was drinking some tea and reading a book on the roof of my apartment building. I guess I fell asleep. I thought all of this was a dream.”

  “Probably,” the cat murmured, eyes blinking alternately. Then he turned his lidded gaze out towards the boat. “Dreams are the halfway-point between the world of the living and the world of the dead, a convergence of the actual and the imagined, reality and fantasy. It is the river between what is and what is not. But that only explains why you see the dead. It does not explain why you’re here. You are more than a simple dreamer, Ellen Monroe. Tell me, what were you dreaming of? You were drinking tea and reading a book. You fell asleep. Where did you go in your dreams?”

  Ellen found Podak’s voice soothing, his tone compelling. A part of her still did not trust him, but neither could she resist telling him what he wanted to know. “I was looking for Jack.”

  Ellen did not miss the way Podak’s tail jerked at the mention of the lost writer. “You know of him, don’t you?” she said, not fooled by Podak’s placid expression of disinterest. “You know something about him. Can you help me reach him? He needs me. He needs me to find him.”

  “Does he?” Podak asked angrily. “Does he need you as much as you need him?”

  “Yes … I think so. I don’t know, really. Please help me. Tell me what you know?”

  “There are a great many things I know, and very little I will tell you,” Podak answered sourly, deflecting further petitions. “One thing I will tell you, however, is that I wish I had ordered Piotr and Simon to cut the lines before bringing you on board. The fish are your fault; they don’t belong in my sea and neither do you. Every moment that you remain, the edges of my existence crumble away a little further, and if too much of it breaks apart, everything I know will collapse and disappear, forgotten by everyone, including me. And where will I be when I have forgotten myself?”

  “Are you afraid of me?” she asked, incredulous.

  “I’m afraid of what you can do; what you are.”

  “I won’t hurt you, I swear. I just need to find Jack.”

  “You may not intend any harm, Ellen Monroe, but by design you can do little else. Jack has punched a hole through the world. How could he expect anything less?”

  Podak jumped from the rail and started walking towards the front of the boat. “Very well. If we’re to survive this, you’ll need to follow me and do as I tell you. I think I can guide you back before you cause any permanent damage. Bring that lantern with you. We’ll need it.”

  Ellen hurried after him, lantern in hand as she skirted the motionless souls that followed Podak’s movements with flat, dead stares.

  “I might have known this had to do with the Caretakers. Always meddling. Always after what they can’t have, shouldn’t have. Witless conjurors. All skill and no wisdom, they expend all their energy trying to get into what they spend the rest of their existence trying to get out of. Ungrateful, self-absorbed, self-indulgent neophytes. And now they’ve caught me up in their insanity as well.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ellen said.

  Podak stopped, turning his head to regard her with his enormous lamplight eyes. “Don’t be sorry for me, Ellen Monroe. You’re just as caught in this as I am.” Then more loudly, he said, “Simon, bring the ship hard to port. We’re heading back the way we came. Piotr, man the sails. Do the best you can with the wind she gave us.”

  The two stopped what they were doing, looking confused as Podak took a seat on the prow, as stiff as a masthead figurine. The mid-deck was still littered with old shells, fry, scuttling crabs, an octopus su
ckered tightly to the planks, and a barnacle-encrusted anchor that proved too heavy to scoop over the edge.

  Podak sensed their indecision without even looking. “Forget the fish, boys. Once she’s gone, I expect they’ll go with her. Now man the sails and the wheel while there’s still a sea to sail in.”

  Ellen stared at the back of the cat’s head, the stiff, bristly fur and long ears with narrow tufts of wiry hair. “Are you like him, Podak?”

  “Like who, Ellen Monroe?” he asked, tone suggesting he knew perfectly well whom she meant.

  “Are you like Jack? Do you create the reality in which you exist? Does it live for you and only you?”

  “All of us create a reality that exists solely unto ourselves,” Podak said, and sighed. It was a strange sound coming from a cat, even given that Podak was not, in any sense of the word, an ordinary cat. When he spoke again, his voice had turned sad. “But we are of a kind, your Jack and I. We are each building a world out of our own dreams and imagination and trying to live in it, our own personal house of cards. It is a precarious life, and its balance is easily upset. I wanted to believe you were random, but you are not. I wanted to believe you were his, a trespasser into my world that I could easily dismiss. But you are not that either. You are more. And reality has ever had an untidy effect upon my world, pulling out its stitching, unraveling its seams, leaving it so much loose, empty cloth.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ellen said, not exactly sure what she had done, or even if it was anything that she could have prevented. But there was no mistaking the regret in Podak’s voice.

  “It’s all right, Ellen Monroe,” Podak said. The enormous skulls lashed to either side of the ghost ship rocked gently against the hull as the vessel listed into a hard turn, thick chains scraping and knocking against the wood, the sound against the hull a hollow raven’s rapping at a chamber door. “This isn’t your fault. You are only doing what you must, what you are supposed to do. I only regret that I was the one who found himself in your way.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  Podak released a series of hitchy squeaks and rasps that Ellen realized after a moment was the cat’s version of laughter. “You’ve done quite enough already, Ellen Monroe. You don’t belong in the world from which you came. You never did, and you should get out of it quickly before it ensnares you forever. Or you tear it to shreds. But you don’t belong in my sea, either. The reasons are the same.”

  “So where do I belong?”

  Podak turned his head, eyes wide. “You belong with Jack. In his world. In his reality. The more important question is where does Jack belong, and when will he figure that out?”

  Podak turned away and said nothing more, the boat sailing on in silence, no sound but the flapping canvas, the cut of water about the prow, the creak of ropes straining against pulleys and masts while the lobster pots and whale skulls thumped against the wooden hull.

  “Drop sail, boys,” Podak ordered finally. “We’ll coast the rest of the way. I need a moment with our stowaway.” Gliding along the rail, he moved up beside her. “Look down over the side, Ellen Monroe.”

  She did, seeing only the glossy blackness of the night sky reflected on the sea, the blue foamy surf cut by the prow. If there was anything beneath, she could not see it. It was hard to believe how brightly lit that world once seemed. “I’m sorry, I don’t see anything.”

  The nictitating membranes snapped once then twice across Podak’s lamplight eyes. “Curiouser and curiouser. Take the lantern and place it between us on the rail. Be careful not to let it fall over the side.”

  She did as he instructed, and Podak said, “Now look into the light. The frosted lens makes the color very subtle; bright enough to see, but not bright enough to boast about.”

  “I suppose,” Ellen said.

  “Look more closely,” the cat said, tone almost hypnotic. “Don’t you think it resembles the sun in the morning? Those first misty minutes of full dawn when the sun has finally risen, the morning haze still clinging to the sky, turning its light dull and fiery orange? Can you see that?”

  “I guess—”

  “Look harder. Concentrate. You want to get out of here, don’t you? You want to see Jack again?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then first you have to see the morning sun in a boat lantern. Think of that first quarter of an hour after dawn when the dog days of summer are past and the mornings are cool and easy and good for sleeping and dreaming. I’m guessing you’re familiar with dreaming. Think of the languid sight of the sun as it changes the entire color of the sky. Not the burnt out blue-white pale of an August afternoon, but the soft pink of a summer morning when the world is still silent, the realm of mourning doves and laughing crows and dead milkmen of a bygone age. In the east, the sun is shining, but not brilliant; a penny left in the coals of a campfire, easy enough to look at without imprinting itself upon your sight. Easier still to hide outside the curtain of closed lids, the world of dreams still at your disposal with their promise of escape to better things, things ungrounded, unbounded by rules or reality or sense or sensibility. Do you see the sun in the lantern?”

  And to her amazement, she could; she could see it in her mind! She nodded.

  “Good,” Podak said. “Now hold that picture in your head. Keep it whole and perfect and intact. And when you are absolutely certain that you hold it in unwavering perfection, pick up the lantern—the one that looks like the sun—and throw it as far out into the night and the sea as you can.”

  “But what about—”

  “Forget about everything else,” Podak admonished. “It is of no consequence. I asked you to throw my lantern out into the sea, and I want you to do that while picturing the morning sun in your mind. Fix the image until it’s perfect, then throw the lantern away. It will lead you to Jack.”

  She looked at the lamp a moment longer, trying to hold in her mind a strange amalgam of a hundred different sunrises coalesced into a single image of one sun not unlike a ghost ship’s lantern, then threw it as far out into the open air as she could. The lamp splashed into the sea, the pink glow floating down…

  … down …

  … down.

  “That ought to wake him up,” Podak whispered.

  Ellen watched the light reduce to a small glowing speck deep beneath the surface, more imagined than real.

  “Now follow the light,” Podak said, “and you will find Jack.”

  “Just like that?”

  “No. Before you can go forward, you must go back. Over the side, down through the water, back the way you came. The rules haven’t changed, Ellen Monroe; you’re simply becoming more aware of them. You can’t find Jack this way, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, but the light will show you where he is, and how to find your way back to him when you’re ready.”

  “Why can’t I go to him now?”

  “Because you’re not really here,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You’re dreaming, Ellen Monroe. You know this. You’re sleeping on the rooftop of your apartment building, just like you said.”

  “But …” This can’t be. It can’t. This is too real.

  “How do you know when you’re dreaming?” Podak asked rhetorically, eyes alternately narrowing and widening as he watched her intensely. “You travel without moving, flying through the air, talking to the animals while they talk back to you. And at no time do you think this abnormal.” Podak blinked. “You are dreaming.”

  “This isn’t real?”

  “Dreams are just another reality less understood. We wander through them like tourists, staring incredulous at everything while understanding nothing. Alice never wondered why the Cheshire Cat spoke to her, or why the white rabbit was pressed for time. She was too young and had not yet learned to resist the temptation of alternate realities. Were she older, she would have been more entrenched in her own sense of reality, her existence crystallized into a shell from which her mind could no longer escape. She would have gone mad.
Or maybe she did. It happens to everyone eventually when they try to escape. You either find your way out, or you lose your way forever.”

  “You said you could help me find him,” Ellen said, focussing on the distant red speck under the water, the boat caught in the dead calm.

  “Strictly speaking, I am helping you … out of my reality. A dream is nothing more than a small hole cleared through a murky window used to gaze upon a kinder world outside the walls of our own existence. You have been staring through the glass so long that you have forgotten where you are and why you are looking at green lawns and distant forests beneath an azure sky.” Podak’s eyes widened, twin moons stealing all light from the world of the night sea. “Do you remember what is in back of you, Ellen Monroe?”

  The hair on the nape of her neck rose, her flesh gone cold, shivering as she turned, the world not what it was before. Cornered by cream-colored walls, floors of chocolate linoleum, high ceilings of caged-over lights, she was trapped, her face pressed to a wired-over window of translucent glass, murky and impenetrable save for the hole smashed through the corner, shards littering the floor. She was wearing a bathrobe, and one of her hands was covered in blood running freely down her arm, concealing the information on the plastic wristband. Through a stray shock of her own hair, she saw people running towards her dressed in white, skin the sunless, bleached color of the dead, veins bright and blue along their sickly flesh, a cold, parchment-thin camouflage over the metal substrate, servos and cables of their robotic substructure, eyes glimmering red. Behind them, others sat in chairs, leaned against walls, waited with waxy expressions like puppets without masters, meat awaiting the saw. The air was thick with the cloying stench of chlorine, a frail mask over the stink of urine and stale, unwashed skin. Farther away, a man in a white coat, gray hair, a goatee, was moving towards her, lost behind the angry, snatching hands of dead white flesh, his eyes kind if regretful, green behind wire spectacles. Before being yanked from the corner and crushed against the floor, she saw a tag on his coat, an ID badge on a clip: Dr. Podiliak of the Drummond-Moen Mental Institute.