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

by Mark Reynolds

  It had taken her too long to realize that she loved him, that she cared more about him than a kind stranger or a benefactor or a friend of circumstance. And by the time she realized how much he meant to her, their time was over, the Saloon depleted, the magical barrier that protected them drained and collapsed. The Cast Outs fell upon paradise like a swarm of locust, ransacking Visigoths come to tear down the garden gates, shit in the fountains and pee on the rose bushes.

  Jack had fixed them—fixed them for good—but at such a cost. The Saloon was annihilated, Jack left behind in the wreckage, and Ellen spun across time and space, imprisoned in a world that disavowed all knowledge of the existence of Jack Lantirn and that other place, that perfect place that lived because of dreams.

  Steam rose from her naked skin as she stepped from the shower like an elemental newly born from the primordial sea. She quickly combed and dried her hair then went looking for something to wear.

  It all came back to the Sanity’s Edge Saloon. Her existence hinged on that one point, the one everyone insisted wasn’t real; the one that seemed at once a dream, and, at the same time, as real as any part of her life. Parts of her time there were difficult to remember—the way it was difficult to remember the details of an hour out of your day from a month ago, sixty minutes of life spent with little or no accounting for its passage. But for all its unreal quality, her time in the Wasteland was easier to recall than her past, which she knew of hardly at all and only in flashes; flat unemotional moments without context or meaning. Her entire life before the last couple months, before those lost days of missing time at the Sanity’s Edge, was reduced to flickering recollections like a dream upon waking, suffering the passage of time: nuances lost, meanings forced, imagination filling in holes or deliberately overlooking them. Frankly, she remembered her dreams with more clarity than her entire history, that missing life that wandered lost somewhere in the dark recesses of her mind. It was wrong by every standard of sense or sanity. What could you really say about a world reduced to an abandoned way station on the edge of a bottomless cliff along an endless railroad line where the owner was a writer manufacturing reality and the place was guarded by a furry gargoyle who sometimes spied on her in the bathtub?

  Then there was her most recent foray into the dreamworld. It seemed no less real than her time in the Sanity’s Edge Saloon, her time with Jack and the others, her recall just as perfect, every sensory image as vibrant as right here, right now. The salty taste of sea water, the cold night air against her nakedness, the feel of the dolphin’s skin against her own: smooth and wet, resilient but not hard, warmer than she might have guessed.

  But for all its detail, it was a still only a dream, distinguishable from waking reality. Or so she thought.

  Maybe all of this was Jack’s doing. Maybe all of this—her job, her shrink, her boss, her apartment—was the myth, the dream within the dream, the storybook read before bedtime about a mixed-up girl desperately in need of a good and trusted therapist with a lot of prescription slips? Maybe the true fantasy was the belief that she had actually freed herself from the Wasteland? Maybe she was just as trapped—in every sense of the word—as Jack, only less able to see the cage for the bars?

  Remember the hospital bracelet, the broken glass behind the wire, the blood?

  Maybe you’re just losing your mind … again.

  Pulling on a loose pair of cotton pants and an oversized denim shirt, she went to the kitchen for some breakfast. She dropped two slices of bread into the toaster, and turned to her refrigerator for juice. There was time for that; there just wasn’t time to over-think every aspect of her life. That kind of activity took forever, the empty passage of underutilized time while safe in the comfort of her apartment, all the inherent bliss and ignorance of mother’s womb. Nothing bad happened here, her retreat, her personal way station between the world at large and the dreamworld that was no further away than the sleepy comfort of a soft couch and a cozy blanket.

  It was tempting: lie down, close your eyes and surrender to the dreams. Instead, she picked up her bag with her copy of The Sanity’s Edge Saloon safely tucked inside, and headed for the door, already digging out money for her morning coffee.

  Normalcy was an easy enough skin to slide into. Why should she want talking cats and ghost ships sailing the sea of everlasting night? Wasn’t an assistant in a bookstore good enough? Normal enough? What was it about a normal job in a normal place with a normal apartment in a normal neighborhood that made her fight so hard against it?

  Maybe, just maybe, normal is a lie. Maybe there’s more to it, more to everything. Normal may be the fiction to the dreamworld’s reality.

  She locked the door behind her and followed the snake of electrical cords down the stairs, missing the dark streak upon the landing; a forgotten smear of now-dried blood, remnants of the previous night’s violence.

  In the foyer at the bottom of the stairs, she noticed a corner of paper poking from the bottom of her mailbox. It might have come yesterday and been missed in her distraction, her eagerness to retreat to the safety of her apartment, though it was hard to imagine now.

  She dug out her mailbox key and unlocked the small brass door to find a postcard of a roadside café, the kind found along Route 66 somewhere in the Nevada desert from a time when red and aquamarine neon, chrome surfaces, and checkered tiles were neither quaint nor nostalgic, but simply a bright sign of the times. Other elements seemed more contemporary: the neon sign that promised HOT COFFEE ALWAYS, or the simple fact that it was a café and not a diner or a drive-in. The name of the café blazed red atop a tall tombstone of polished steel over the doorway of this piece of contemporary nostalgia left abandoned in the bone-colored sands of some nameless desert: The Edge of Madness Café.

  Her hands were shaking, memories unearthed as if by a backhoe, some as new as last night, as this morning, as a dream that faded upon waking.

  She knew this place, had been there in her dreams! And she would find Jack there because a talking cat named Podak told her so.

  Forget how or why, she had stumbled upon a fragment of the truth, proof that this was not all imagined, not all the wily machinations of a divided personality. She had dreamed of this place in a dream that seemed more real than life. And now she was looking at a postcard that proved it was not just a dream.

  Jack had sent this! She knew it even before turning the card over. The postcard had been delivered during the night by whatever unearthly means carried something as delicate as reality across the vast reaches of insanity and dream that separated the two of them. The postmark was faded and incomplete, no indication of where it was sent from or when, addressed simply to Ellen Monroe in the same hasty script as the message scrawled on the last page of Jack’s book. But more than what the words said—brief and imprecise—was what they represented that made Ellen’s heart beat faster, her breath run short. All of it was real! This was proof she could hold in her hands, not easily dismissed like an authorless book, or dreams of a lover that did not exist, or even memories she knew but could not prove. This was real. This was tangible. This proved everything.

  Ellen bolted back up the steps, fumbling for her keys and nearly dropping them, her fingers shaking so badly. The simple message might seem trite, a kind of bad joke that everyone put on postcards before sending them off to friends and family left behind in less hospitable climes, more boring surroundings. But that wasn’t the case here. This meant exactly what it said in its most literal and sincere interpretation. It was a message for her; a message from Jack: Wish you were here.

  Ellen managed to work the lock open then rush inside and over to the telephone. She forgot all about being late to work or Serena’s Coffee Shoppe. Unimportant now. All that mattered was doing what she should have done weeks ago.

  Ellen Monroe stared once more at the postcard then took a deep breath and dialed.

  It was several rings before anyone answered. “Dr. Frederick Kohler’s Office.”

  Ellen recognized
Dr. Kohler’s receptionist: a bit standoffish, no one she would send a Christmas card to. She never bothered to learn her name and didn’t care to. But she knew the woman’s voice, and it sounded different this morning, more hesitant.

  “This is Ellen Monroe,” she said, pushing forward while her courage held out. “I need to speak to Dr. Kohler.”

  “I’m afraid that isn’t possible.”

  A hot surge flooded her skin at the receptionist’s distant tone; impersonal; infuriating. “Well then I need to leave him a message—”

  “Miss Monroe, I can’t …”

  That made her pause. It wasn’t unusual for Kohler’s receptionist to play gatekeeper against the crazies, but she would never refuse to pass on a message. And she never called her Miss Monroe like she was the next name on a telemarketer’s call sheet. “Why not?”

  There was a strange shivering breath of air on the far end of the line before the receptionist could answer. “Dr. Kohler passed away last night. He was … he was working late when it happened. It was very … sudden.”

  Ellen was speechless.

  “Someone from the office will be in touch with you in a couple days to make arrangements for your ongoing treatment … just as soon as we know who will be taking on your case. Dr. Chopra has made himself available in case of an emergency. If you need to speak with him, I can get you his number.”

  Ellen found her voice from far away, distant and detached. “Uh, no, that’s all right.”

  “Someone will be in touch.” There was an awkward silence, then, “I’m sorry.”

  Ellen stared down at the postcard in her hand, flabbergasted. On the far end of the phone line was a dead click, and then it was over.

  THE GARBAGEMAN COMETH

  Jack sat on the cement step behind the café. His laptop had undergone a metamorphosis since the morning, its design subconsciously altered, streamlined so it could move more easily from place to place, allowing him to take advantage of the morning shade behind the kitchen with its view of the junkyard. A bottle of Pepsi stood within arm’s reach, sweating a dark ring upon the concrete. Just to the right of the door was a large Dumpster, the dark blue paint flaked with rust and discolored with spilled and crusted residue. And just around the corner from that, the ice machine hummed tirelessly.

  But that was not what Jack was listening to.

  The lid on the Dumpster would no longer stay closed. Once or twice, he saw an enormous scorpion’s tail emerging from beneath the garbage bags and loose trash like a shark’s fin cresting the water’s surface, dark crimson, the stinger fat and armored and darkening at the tip to jet-black. He had noticed leathery wings within the Dumpster also—they were nearly hidden by the shadows and the mounded trash, but he had noticed them: dragon’s wings. And of course, there was the sound, that low growl that might have been an enormous purring, the low rumble of a well-tuned engine, waiting.

  Sometime in the last few days, a manticore had slipped from the junkyard and taken up residence in the Dumpster.

  He didn’t have time to deal with it. The pieces were coming together, and he was gathering them up as fast as his fingers could strike the keys. It never came evenly; that would be too simple: just pieces and chunks, ill-sized and inconvenient, the time and place, the way and the means always a matter of its own choosing. His craft was gathering the pieces and setting them down. He did not create the Word; he merely conveyed it.

  The tale always took on a life of its own.

  * * *

  Arnold Prosser eased the garbage hauler to a stop, the right turn signal and four-ways blinking methodically, purposefully, unmistakably. And still, despite his efforts to the contrary, an annoyed motorist was now parked behind his truck, unable or unwilling to go around him.

  Arnold Prosser looked in the sideview mirror at the woman in the sedan parked tight to the hauler’s rear: old and dried-up, vain pretences of appearance. She glowered at him, but he didn’t think she could see him watching her, her angry expression, the greater and more elaborate efforts at make-up and hair-dye meant to fill wrinkles and cover gray, lies about the time that trampled her looks, made her sallow, made her less appealing than her vanity permitted. Had she been able to see him, she would see his bored expression, the way he looked down upon her, something so far beneath him as to be insect-like, microbial. But she didn’t see him.

  Few truly saw Arnold Prosser except when he wanted them to. And none lived to pass on the warning.

  Staring at her, the annoyed, impertinent woman trapped within her practical sedan—it could easily be crushed into something no thicker than a mattress and loaded into the back of his hauler, driver and all—he wondered if she actually expected him to forego his work and skip his pick-up because it inconvenienced her. Stupid and self-absorbed, vanity was her shield against a world that stopped caring about her long ago. Prosser watched her ridiculous expressions of impatience: eyes rolling, gasping and sighing and blowing huffs of breath as though playing to an audience not there to appreciate her performance. And the Oscar goes to …

  He rolled down his window and reached out, motioning her to come around.

  She failed to notice, or, if she did, refused to act upon it. She blustered obscenities that he read on her lips from the sideview mirror while she sat safely in the air-conditioned confines of her practical little sedan.

  If she had only had the good sense to go around him in the first place—a garbage truck makes numerous, routine stops; everyone knows that—she would not be in this predicament. Arnold Prosser did not begrudge this woman her stupidity, but, by the same token, made no allowances for it.

  Dropping the hauler into reverse, he released the brake and let the truck roll backwards, beeping a loud warning as it did so.

  Not unexpectedly, the sedan’s horn let out a sudden, desperate wail. In his sideview mirror, Prosser saw the woman, body rigid, eyes white, arms straight out as her fingers locked upon the wheel in a death grip. The blood had run from her face, leaving her make-up like the accouterment of a poorly done cadaver, the work of a dust bowl mortician doing a job on the cheap.

  Arnold again applied the brake, reached out the window and motioned a little more firmly for her to come around. At least now he had her attention.

  There was a moment’s indecision while the woman scraped together the pieces of a fractured reality then the sedan punched into reverse, a sudden jerk that nearly put its bumper into the fender of a nearby parked car. Tires chirped as she threw the vehicle back into drive and sped around the hauler, making some kind of obscene gesture at him with a trembling hand, her lips stuttering crude words he knew but could not actually hear for the closed windows.

  Arnold Prosser waved back pleasantly.

  Arnold Prosser liked nothing more than an orderly universe. He was a practical man with practical needs, neither flexible nor fluid. For Arnold Prosser, there was a time for all seasons, and a season for all things: a time to sew and a time to reap, a time to be born and a time to die. He never thought it was that much to ask; the least one could expect of the universe, in fact. Consistency and orderliness were the hallmarks of perfection, and, by his observations, the universe strove towards harmony.

  Not that Arnold Prosser would ever utter anything so plainly sissified.

  He backed the hauler down the narrow alley, giving no attention to the brick wall bare inches from scraping off his side mirror; he knew exactly what he was doing. The hauler tipped and rocked its way down the alley on a combination of bad springs and old shocks, turned the corner, and lined up to the apartment building’s Dumpster.

  Here Arnold Prosser threw the truck into park and stepped down from the cab, a stocky man in a dark blue coverall, enormous work boots stained and darkened from misuse and a black baseball cap with the patch torn off; Arnold Prosser owed fealty to no one. And because it was late August, and still very warm, he had the sleeves of his coveralls rolled up to expose thick, hairy forearms. He was short, balding, eyes dark and shifting. He kne
w he did not present a fantastic case; women dismissed him out of hand if given even half the opportunity. If not, they found him inescapable. He cared for neither.

  There was a relative sort of peace about him, a karmic sense of responsibility. Some things had to be done and Arnold Prosser was the one who did them. He made sure that things got taken care of, that the universe pressed forward in its strive for perfection, and that what the universe cast aside along the way be disposed of in an orderly fashion.

  It wasn’t really all that much to ask.

  He drew a deep, satisfied breath, nostrils flared to the odors of morning tinged with decay and rot, the sharp stink of festering food scraps, the curdled drizzle of some unidentifiable ooze leaking from the corners and rust holes of this Dumpster, any Dumpster, anyplace where the past was abandoned while others waited for it to disappear. And eventually it would disappear, spirited away by maggots and blow flies and crows and, yes, by Arnold Prosser.

  Because there was an order to the universe, and that order demanded obeisance.

  Arnold Prosser marched up to the Dumpster and flung back the lids, looking inside.

  An eyeless face stared back at him, the dark crust of blood about the empty sockets and mouth rendered it a clownish caricature, a child’s crude efforts, the desperate work of a lunatic artist fighting the palsy of hallucination-inhibiting drugs.

  Prosser cracked a grin. “Matty Cho,” he whispered, a distinctly British accent. “Pegged you right as a short-timer, didn’t I?” His face darkened, mood shifting from satisfaction to irritation. “But not this short, Matty. And who the fuck decided to pull out yer eyes?”