“Jack?”
“What?”
She held her hand out to him. “Touch me.”
She could not mask the desperation she felt, what she was sure must show through on her face.
“It won’t be real,” he said.
“Please. Try.”
He looked up at her, and she held him with her eyes. He put the laptop aside, slid out of the truck and stood before her. “This will only make it more difficult.”
“Please.”
Then he reached out to her, fingertips touching lightly as though afraid she might vanish, might melt away into water or transform into a bird and take flight. She felt a spark leap between them, sharp and sudden and strangely compelling. Her hand jerked, and Jack’s caught it instantly, fingers lacing into her own to hold her tightly. Caution fell away, landing like brittle glass on the hardpan before her naked feet. Jack pulled her close, a desperate sweeping gesture that was both frightening and compelling in its urgency, its insistence, its insatiability. His arm tightened about her waist, pressing her body to his, pressing her lips to his. The spark, pure ecstasy; blue-white pleasures arcing through her mind, wiping away reason and doubt.
This is only a dream.
She held him tightly, her face pressed against his warmth, her eyes closing against the tears of relief, of ecstasy, of horror, that were quietly lost to the desert air of a world that did not exist, the world melting away, everything melting away with a final fleeting thought.
Only a dream.
* * *
Kreiger turned the last page, saw the hastily written note and drawing, and knew from the pen strokes that it was the Caretaker’s handiwork. After a while, you learned to spot these things. It was a simple read; a simple tale for a simple mind. Mildly compelling—unless, of course, one was there. Then it was a gross misinterpretation of the facts with a bias favoring Jack’s narcissism.
But he was beginning to understand.
The Sanity’s Edge Saloon was little more than a modern effort at the Greek parables. Jack had layered it in genre tripe, some self-indulgent religious metaphors, and enough vulgarity to make it seem contemporary, but it was Aesop’s fables less the talking animals. Jack had gone to considerable lengths to teach each of his charges a small lesson before helping them move on: Alex Foster, Leland Quince, Oversight who was now Ariel November—what a hopeless romantic—and Ellen Monroe.
And now Jack was even trying to teach him!
What an insufferable ass.
But then, he had never met a writer—not once in all his considerably long life—who was not.
I’ll bet I could teach you a lesson, Jack.
Kreiger rose from his perch, moving across Ellen’s bedroom like a shadow. He placed The Sanity’s Edge Saloon down on the nightstand, returning it to the kitty-corner position Ellen left it in before falling asleep; details mattered.
Then he reached for her throat, the lunatic’s staff gripped tightly in his other fist. Hand just off her windpipe, he felt the warmth rise from her skin, breath moist as it brushed the hairs along his flesh, a contrast to the hard metal and electric pulse of the staff in his other hand.
“I could kill her, Jack,” he whispered. “You know that, don’t you? I could strangle the life from her, and there’s nothing you could do to stop me. That would screw you good, wouldn’t it Jack? Screw you eight ways to Sunday.”
And you as well, a reasonable voice admonished. All the while he tries to save her, when in truth, she’s his salvation. And yours, too. Can you stand the irony?
Actually, no. It ate at him like cancer, gnawing his pride with harsh rodent teeth. But he was beginning to understand.
“I’m not that petty,” Kreiger conceded, drawing away to regard Ellen as she slept. Her eyes moved rapidly with dreams, her breathing fast, her body fitful. “Does she know her place in all of this, Jack? Did you tell her? Does she even know what she means to you? Or what she is, and what she needs to do?” He shook his head disapprovingly. “Or is she simply in love?”
He intended to leave then. He meant to step away, to move back from the bed and Ellen’s sleeping form, retreat through the shadows to the safe hollows in the universe. But he did not. He stayed where he was, staring at her, wondering if he could actually have done it. After all this time as her protector, a zealot prostrate before a sacred statue, searching her marble features for a sign, could he really crush the life from her, his sweet Ellen. Once, certainly, but now…
He was beginning to understand.
Damn you, Caretaker, he thought. He’d pried into Jack’s book, learned his mind, learned his secrets. And what did he have to show for it? “I cast off my soul a long time ago, Jack, just as you did. Only I’m not so foolish as to try and arrange a reunion.”
Ellen Monroe dreamt on, oblivious.
“Don’t even think about leaving me behind, Caretaker, or I will kill her. Then you can learn to live with the memories of everything you lost.” His fist tightened upon the staff. “As I have.”
The night did not reply. Perhaps it did not hear; or perhaps it simply did not care.
Kreiger turned away and stopped, something in the air catching his attention, unsettling and strange, but familiar and comfortable also, like a memory from long ago, the world before this one and the one before … and perhaps even the one before that. The smell pierced the soft meat of his brain like a needle, ripping open dreams of long ago.
He looked down at her, the young woman locked in the passion of dreams. She had pushed the sweat-soaked sheet aside, revealing herself, skin polished in the light. Her breathing was short, insistent, her legs open, hips thrusting in sleepy movements echoing activities more elegantly executed in some distant dreamscape. She was trying to tighten her hold upon a lover separated from her by a million parsecs of empty dream space. Small mewing sounds escaped her, something between a desperate moan and an aching sob.
Kreiger leaned closer, looking into her face, eyes moving beneath closed lids.
“Say hello to Jack for me, won’t you?” he whispered.
At his name, Ellen arched her back, surrendering herself to him.
“On second thought, don’t bother. Idle conversation amidst love-play is a distraction.”
She offered no response, but somewhere in a distant world, Ellen and the Caretaker were connecting on a spiritual plane, a tantric feat to beat all sex magic and foolishness regarding the seven sacred chakras. Kreiger wondered if Jack had any idea how close he was to destroying it all.
Lowering himself towards her, he breathed in her breath, an open hand running down her sleeping form just off the skin, feeling the heat rising from her flesh. His thumb grazed her breast, feather-light, and he drank in her growing excitement, fanning down across the flatness of her belly to glance the thin patch of hair concealing her sex.
And at that moment, he kissed her, a touch as delicate as moonlight.
Ellen moaned, surrendering herself to the passion that engulfed her in waves, and Gusman Kreiger felt her lips kiss him back, the intensity pulling at him, dragging him down, consuming him whole in the vast abyss of her dreams.
The white wizard jerked back, and Ellen collapsed once more into the comfort of darkness.
“She probably thought I was you,” he whispered, still struggling to collect himself. “Don’t say I never did anything for you.”
Then he retreated into the shadows of Ellen Monroe’s closet, licking his lips and savoring a taste he thought he would never experience again.
TEA
Jack’s head snapped back suddenly, striking the rear window of the ‘55 Ford pickup where he had been writing since yesterday afternoon, the coffee no longer able to keep him from nodding off.
Perhaps you need something stronger.
Things were moving too fast. The game had too many players, each with an idea of how it should end; everything dangerously close to spinning out of control.
He could lose her forever.
A loud cat
erwauling from somewhere inside the laptop woke him, an alarm responding to his fingers settling heavily upon the keys as he drifted off.
Or maybe it was Fate; Ellen needs you.
Jack set the laptop aside. As it went silent, so did the world, the only sound the crackle of flame from the oil drum. He had dreamed of Ellen again. She had materialized out of the night, ethereal and strange, her skin transformed to gold as she stood before him, eyes shaded against a brightness his world was excluded from.
Still out of synch.
They spoke, but he could not remember what she said. And the more he thought about it, the more he forgot or fabricated; a lie more readily believable. It wouldn’t matter, really. What they said to one another in dreams was lost like childhood summer.
He remembered one thing, though. She asked him to touch her. She was so insistent, eyes pleading, hand outstretched as if to confirm that all of this could be real. But he would not; there were rules that must not to be broken. He did not know why, but not knowing did not make it any less true.
But against reason and rule and sense, he reached across the void and touched her, fingers pressed tip to tip.
The effect was instantaneous. Ellen disappeared, wrenched away like so much smoke in the wind. He was left with only the dust at his feet and the voice in his head: dreams are not to be taken; not stolen and sneaked through backdoors like discretely wrapped bottles of cheap malt liquor finding their way into a late night theater. The dream had to be made real. That was what the Café was meant for; what he was meant for.
He went inside, the muscles in his back and neck stiff and knotted. He passed through the café’s kitchen, toeing the large saurian tail that emerged from the walk-in freezer out of his way. Whatever was attached to the other end—crocodile? dinosaur? dragon? he wasn’t exactly sure—uttered a low, reverberant grunt that might have been a purr or a snore or simply an expression of disinterest. Inside the diner, Jack took a mug from under the counter and poured himself a fresh cup of coffee; the one Hammerlock had brought out earlier was cold and nearly empty. Jack stirred in cream and sugar then drank most of it while standing there in the silence and the discordant light: bars of florescent-white, the cool glow of the jukebox, the ember-red of the neon sign, HOT COFFEE ALWAYS.
Maybe the dream wasn’t a mistake, not just some undersexed fantasy, Ellen’s body slick and naked like a nymph from the depths of a dark, underground spring. If it was only a dream then where was the harm? And if it wasn’t, and he had actually touched her, reached across time and space and the myriad folds of reality separating them, then maybe she was ready; ready to leave the other place behind and make her way back to the Wasteland and the Edge of Madness Café.
But if they really did touch, others would know … and they might follow.
Things were moving so fast, loose threads sewing themselves up. The end was near—or a new beginning disguised as an ending; that was usually the way of it.
Jack’s second cup was mostly espresso, dark brown and foamy before a generous helping of cream and sugar was added. He carried it out to the old pick-up and sat back down to the story, setting his fingers to the keys.
He needed her more than she needed him. Not a day went by that he wasn’t more and more certain of that. She occupied his every thought, not a word written that was not intended to open the way between the worlds and bring her back. As he once sent her away down the rabbit hole, and into that strange life of Dabble’s Books and Serena’s Coffee Shoppe, he was now determined to bring her back. Not for her, but for himself.
She was his salvation. It was selfish and foolhardy, even cruel. He only hoped she needed him as much.
* * *
Ellen awoke with a start, jerking herself up suddenly from a dream that bore the strange undercurrents of a nightmare. Outside, the sky was gray and heavy, the wind blowing through the open windows of her apartment. Where the night before was sweltering, the morning had actually turned cold. A storm was coming fast on the heels of yesterday’s unseasonable warmth; overnight, the temperature had plummeted.
She tugged the sheets up around herself, but to no avail. The wind was too cold, and she felt impossibly alone.
She wished Jack was there to keep her warm.
The dream felt so real, a lie perpetrated by the senses, the memory as vivid as any she possessed. But then she woke up, still here; still alone.
They had only made love once; that last night in the Sanity’s Edge Saloon. It was the last time she felt any real sense of certainty about reality. Since then, everyone had tried to convince her that it never happened, that it was impossible. She was a daydreamer, a drug addict, disturbed, or even a plain-out liar.
But they were wrong. Jack was real. And her dream was real—as real as the world outside viewed through a pane of glass. Reality was perception, nothing more. When I am awake, I know that I am not dreaming, but when I am dreaming, I do not know that I am not awake. Or something to that effect. No one could tell her that she was not dreaming now, or that what she thought was a dream wasn’t actually the reality separated from this place by a wall of dream. It was not make-believe or delusion or hallucination brought on by chemicals introduced into her brain. The Sanity’s Edge Saloon was real just as Jack was real. Everything about that part of her life was real, simply harder to see; to reach out for; to cross over—the world outside of the glass.
Shivering, she reluctantly climbed out of bed, her feet curling against the icy floor. She quickly showered and dressed, pulling on jeans, a loose blouse, a vest she did not remember buying and which served no practical purpose except to accessorize her outfit. She would go straight over to Serena’s from the bookstore, she decided, making a cup of coffee and finishing it while standing by the sink, not bothering with breakfast. Then she took Jack’s book and left.
The twisted rope of orange and yellow extension cords still twined up the stairwell, but the rooftop was silent. Either Jasper was finished or Rose Marie had had enough of his dream flyer project, and called him down for breakfast.
As it happened, Rose Marie Desmond had not seen her grandson in over two days, subject to a simple, inelegant geas set upon her by Gusman Kreiger. Rose Marie Desmond failed to notice Jasper’s absence or the sounds he was making on the roof, knowing only that Jasper was a good boy, and that he was helping out the nice stranger. That was all Rose Marie Desmond remembered of Gusman Kreiger, former leader of the Tribe of Dust, legendary Cast Out, and mad wizard who was more than two thousand years old and fond of boasting about how he was once mistaken for a messiah.
Indeed, a nice stranger.
Had Ellen known, she would have been more afraid. She would have known for certain that she was right, that Jack and the Wasteland and the Nexus were real. She would have known because Gusman Kreiger was supposed to be part of that insistent fantasy—a very dangerous part—and his reality confirmed everything that she believed. But Ellen didn’t know; faith demands belief in the absence of information.
Scraps of paper and the earliest of autumn’s leaves skittered about the street, gray clouds turning and boiling in the sky. Ellen could feel the electricity in the air, a prickling of the soft hairs on the nape of her neck even as the wind tugged at her sleeves and tossed her hair. A storm was coming, and it would be big.
She walked quickly to Serena’s, getting an extra-large hazelnut coffee, black because there were too many people in line for the condiments; too many people altogether. Serena moved with her usual grace and efficiency, carrying on conversations while she performed her tasks, hands moving as if without thought or direction, always precise and accurate. But the constant flood of customers monopolized her time; it was the busiest morning Ellen could remember at the coffee shop. Serena confirmed that Ellen would be over at 1:30 sharp for tea, and Ellen agreed before being asked to step aside by a sour woman in a peacock dress inquiring about a decaf espresso; Ellen left before she felt compelled to comment on the irony.
The bookstore was dark
, the door still locked, the sign turned to read CLOSED — Please Come Again. Ellen cupped her eyes to the glass, but the place appeared deserted. Poking from under the door was the corner of an envelope. She carefully slid it out, reasoning that if it was personal or of no interest to her, she could simply slide it back under and no one would be the wiser. But the envelope had her name printed on the front in Dabble’s fine, spidery script. She opened it to find a small piece of paper folded in thirds around a key. The note read:
Ellen,
I’m sorry, but some unexpected business has called me away. Please open up the store this morning. If I am not back by 1:30, go on to your tea. Just lock up the store before you leave. Don’t disappoint Serena. Thank you for everything.
Nicholas Dabble
The request, while not unreasonable, was unprecedented. She pocketed the note and unlocked the door, turning the sign around to read OPEN, and nudging a small wedge of wood under the door to keep it from closing. She turned on the lights and sat down on the stool behind the counter. She thought to sweep the floor as a favor to Mr. Dabble, but every inch was already spotless, as usual, and she could see no sense in doing it. Instead, she sat behind the counter, drinking her coffee and reading from Jack’s book; she opened it at random and read what she found.
* * *
Morning faded into afternoon, and no one stopped in at the bookstore, or even passed on the street. Ellen stared out the front window for minutes on end and saw not a single person. The earlier hustle and bustle around Serena’s ended by eleven, her place now similarly abandoned. The wind blew occasional drips and spats of rain that never turned into anything more than small stains on the sidewalk, or ghostly smears against the glass. No cars passed. No people passed. No birds hopped along the sidewalk searching for seeds or crumbs. Nothing. The world was waiting, caught on the edge of an event about to transpire, eager to watch, afraid to involve itself. Witnesses all, huddled tight around the edges and wondering at what was coming, and whether it could remain safely out of it.
The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) Page 33