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

by Mark Reynolds

  He charged Ellen’s apartment building, shattering the plate glass door; there was no time to lose. He had to get to the flyer, had to follow Ellen or be imprisoned here forever.

  Shrugging away fragments of glass—this world could not harm him any longer, but it could trap him; trap him forever—he leaped up steps, five and seven at a time, denying the agony in his bones, body wracked and broken by circumstance and vice then pushed to its limits by desperation. But he still saw Ellen’s trail, the lightning rod leading the way as he charged upwards. He need only reach the flyer; Ellen would do the rest. She would leave and he would follow.

  It was a good plan, elegant for its simplicity.

  Only he hadn’t counted on Ellen stealing the dream flyer. No, he hadn’t counted on that.

  He slashed open the door to the roof, the staff shredding it like paper, just as the nose of the dream flyer—his dream flyer, built for him by his dreamer, his Jubjub Bird!—slipped over the edge of the building and dropped from sight.

  Lunging across the gravel rooftop, screaming after it—after her—he thrust his hands out as if he might catch it—catch them both—and pull them back. “NoooooooOOOOOOOOOO!”

  The effort, like his scream, was wasted.

  And as he stared over the edge, one hand clutching the lightning rod, the other empty air, he could see it, the point where Ellen left this world and found her way into the other: a shining pinprick in the fabric of reality already going away.

  He hadn’t counted on Ellen Monroe taking his only means of following her; no, he hadn’t counted on that.

  “Flyer’s flyin’.”

  Kreiger turned to find Jubjub Bird standing behind him, fixated on the same point as him, that place where this world and the next merged and met if only for a moment, the gateway between this reality and the one beyond. The young man looked bleary-eyed and excited. “It’s flyin’. My flyer’s flyin’.”

  Why have you forsaken me? Have I not done everything you expected? Everything you wanted? You may not have planned on me, but you sure got your use out of me. I looked after her. I protected her. I kept the world at bay while she discovered herself, unveiled this reality for what it was. Wasn’t that what you wanted? What you needed?

  Or is all of this fulfilling some sick, desperate sense of cosmic irony for you?

  Gusman Kreiger crawled to his knees, noticing for the first time since the bookstore that he was in tremendous pain. Flecks of glass clung to his skin, his face and neck speckled with blood. His lungs burned. His bones felt broken, joints pulverized. His last and only chance to escape was a million miles away, putting parsecs between them with every passing millisecond.

  And some retard was gibbering the obvious at him.

  “I expect you’ve noticed that your flyer is flying without you,” he declared sourly.

  “My flyer’s flyin’.”

  Going where only dreams and dreamers can follow, the Cast Out thought desperately as he climbed to his feet, leaning heavily upon the charged lightning rod, not as a talisman of unique and unrivaled power in this world, but as a trusted cane to a cripple. He fixed Jasper with a stare both critical and calculating.

  “Tell me, Jubjub Bird: can you fly?”

  The boy looked mildly surprised by the question, and shook his head. “Jubjub Bird can’t fly, no, Jasper can’t fly, not at all, not at all. But the flyer can fly. Jubjub Bird saw, and he knows. The flyer can fly. Yessir, Goose Man, the flyer can fly. But Jubjub Bird, he can’t really fly, no—”

  Kreiger interrupted quickly. “Can you flap your arms like a bird?”

  Jubjub Bird instantly began pumping his arms up and down. Ridiculous!

  Kreiger felt a raindrop strike cold against his cheek, and knew the storm had come to wash this reality away, taking everything and everyone with it. The final page turned. The cosmic end. Will the last one out please turn off the lights?

  “It’ll do.”

  The wizard snatched Jasper Desmond by his shirt and threw him from the rooftop after Ellen Monroe and the departed dream flyer, holding tightly to the boy’s T-shirt that he might be carried over the edge as well, the staff pressed between them like lightning in a bottle. The wind as they fell was a freight train in his ears, asphalt screaming towards them.

  It had to be now.

  It had to be here.

  For reasons too obvious to mention, Gusman Kreiger knew that he would never get another chance.

  “Now … FLYYYYYYYYY!”

  DEATH, THE DEVIL,

  AND DESTINY

  The tone of the afternoon’s tea had reached a lull, passions giving way to boredom.

  In the absence of Ellen Monroe, no one spoke, only sitting quietly around the small table, eyes shifting from object to object, lighting on each only long enough to take note before moving on lest lingering be misinterpreted as interest, a thing which might invite unwelcome conversation. It was a pregnant moment, a silence following a farewell drawn out too long searching frantically for some plausible means of escape, a way out of the deadness.

  Serena disposed of the spoiled cream, taking Arnold’s ruined tea with her as she left, and wordlessly pouring both down the drain. She returned a moment later with a fresh cup and saucer for the Garbageman, who accepted it with a murmured thank you.

  And the quiet returned.

  And this time, it remained.

  Nicholas Dabble nibbled halfheartedly at a finger sandwich while glancing uncomfortably around the room, an animal pacing the perimeter of a cage it is only just realizing it will never see the outside of. Arnold Prosser quietly finished an entire plate of hors d’oeuvres, doing so with lavish attention before helping himself to more; he dispensed with the small plate, instead eating off the serving tray, his own personal platter.

  Serena appeared unconcerned with both the heavy silence and Arnold’s shocking transgression of etiquette. Seated in her high-backed chair, she looked regally across the open rooms of her home towards the large front window and the sky beyond, a steaming cup of tea nested in the bowl of her hands. For one brief moment, her gaze tightened as if upon something outside, something unusual but not unexpected.

  Arnold turned to follow her stare, saw nothing, and turned back. “Did you ‘ear somethin’?”

  She turned to him, hers once again a simple open gaze out an empty window at an empty sky. “No.”

  Arnold Prosser nodded and grunted something that might have been a simple acknowledgement of her answer, or even a muffled burp.

  More time passed, and still Ellen Monroe did not return.

  All of the hors d’oeuvres were gone, Arnold Prosser having taken the last, a rye cracker with cheese and sardine. What remained was a picked-over selection of foods the Garbageman deigned not to his liking: didn’t care for vegetable pâté; fish was too salty; cheese had a peculiar smell or was too squishy. Mostly, the trays were empty.

  And still Ellen Monroe had not returned.

  “Excuse me, Serena,” Arnold asked, still looking as if his suit were trying to inflict bodily harm upon him. “But when do you s’pose that little girl’s gonna be back with the cream? She’s been gone a awful long time, an’ we have things what ought ta be settled.”

  “She could be back at any moment, Arnold,” Serena said, looking out the front window as the first specks of rain struck the glass. “Or she might not return at all. The matter is entirely up to her. You know, I do believe we are in for some rain.”

  Nicholas Dabble, still methodically chewing the remains of his first finger sandwich, let out a small, discomforting moan.

  The sound was lost to Arnold Prosser’s protestation. “Whadda ya mean she might not return?” The tray of remnants like an artist’s palette upon which all the paint had dried up or run out was momentarily forgotten. “‘Ow can she not return? It’s not like you sent ‘er to Wisconsin; she lives down the fucking street. And since when does she have a say in what goes on?”

  “Arnold! Language. And in answer to the point you
raised, she has free will. Her choice to exercise it is hers and hers alone. Ellen Monroe is a lost soul searching for a way home. What she does is not for you, me, or anyone to dictate.”

  “Rubbish!” Arnold declared, putting the tray down and standing up. “I’m certainly not going to just sit around ‘ere all day waitin’ for ‘er to make up ‘er mind whether or not she feels like comin’ back. I don’t need fucking half-n-half for my tea. That’s right, Serena, fucking half-n-half! I don’t need any damn cream at all. Dabble heard me say so himself.”

  Arnold looked to the bookstore owner for support, but Dabble feigned interest in an etching on Serena’s wall and pretended not to hear. The Garbageman dismissed him with a brisk thrust of his hand as though roughly shooing a hornet. “Well I’m sorry, Serena, but I have to leave. I have things to do, an’ if it looks like rain—”

  “Arnold, you will sit and wait like the rest of us,” Serena said, eyes stern, her skin gone pale and bloodless with rage, the tone of her voice as inflexible as iron and as hard as the core of a dwarf star. She would have her way: not often or mostly, but always and without exception.

  In spite of his boasts to the contrary, Arnold was not immune to Serena, her commanding eyes, her icy tone, the implication she placed upon any who challenged her. He took a step back as though she were transformed into something dangerous: a wave of scorpions, a burning whirlwind, the capricious hand of fate. But daunted was not deterred. “Why the ‘ell should I? That girl’s dangerous and you bloody know it. She’s got no business runnin’ around. And don’t pretend to me like you got everything under control, Serena, ‘cause you ain’t. That little strip could unbind all the fabric of the universe, whatever her intentions, and I can’t allow that to happen, Serena. I won’t let you destroy the order o’ things.”

  “The order of things,” Serena repeated as though Arnold’s words were blasphemous. “Don’t presume to lecture me on the order of things, Mr. Prosser. You stand before me and propose abandoning tea though it is not over; where is your order then, if not broken at your feet like the remnants of a thousand china cups after a whirlwind?”

  Arnold stared back, incredulous. “Not over? What are you talking about? It never began!”

  “No, it did not,” Serena agreed. “You cannot leave tea because tea is not over, and it is not over because it never began. And it never will begin until Ellen Monroe returns with the cream for our tea. You simply cannot have tea without cream for your tea, and you cannot end tea until it begins. There is an order to all things like there is an order to the universe; a time and a place, as I’m sure you will agree.” Arnold’s gaze shifted, as if willing to concede her point, but the coffee shop owner continued before he could say so. “You simply cannot end a thing that has not begun, just as you cannot kill a thing that never lived. Ellen Monroe is a lost soul, Arnold. All matters regarding her fate are hers to decide.”

  “I agree, but on principle only,” Arnold said peevishly. “And with respect to the case at hand, your conclusion is ridiculous.”

  Serena looked dismayed. “You accepted my invitation, Arnold; that is beyond dispute. You came willingly—eagerly as I remember. Is that not correct, Nicky?”

  Nicholas Dabble had distanced himself from the proceedings, standing by the bay windows and staring out at the world that continued turning without him. Rain spattered the sidewalk, indiscriminate specks linking together until they were indistinguishable. It was all coming together, that precious order that Serena and Prosser both idolized—and that he abhorred. He pressed his fingers to the glass, the bars that caged him, and watched the rain wash the world away.

  “The rules to tea, like the rules to the universe, are clear. The most basic rule so simple as to defy further explanation: you cannot end what has not begun. There is nothing you or I can do about it, Arnold. I’m sorry. We should talk of other things. If nothing else, it will help pass the time.” Serena smiled, her argument both reasonable and incontrovertible.

  Arnold sat back down on the loveseat, looking lost.

  By the window, Nicholas Dabble uttered some remark about rules being rules, a phrase he grumbled over and over, end to end with peevish zeal until it sounded like so much gibberish. His eyes searched the storm-dark sky, taking solace that somewhere far away, a bit of chaos was winging across the sky in a contraption built by a lunatic, a small and necessary piece of the eternal random set free in a world descending rapidly towards a hideous state of overrated certainty. And he had tasted that piece of chaos. He had touched her skin and held her for a time within his world. And he would cherish that taste for a very, very long time.

  His lost soul.

  His little bird.

  His Ellen Monroe.

  Arnold Prosser let go a puff of air, resigning himself to the inevitable. “I still think you tricked me, Serena, but I can’t fault your reasoning. Are you sure you never saw this coming?”

  She smiled, her eyes enigmatic. “I only create a path, Arnold; whether they follow it or not is up to them.”

  “But you had an idea which way she was gonna go,” he suggested.

  Serena tipped her head from side to side a bit coquettishly. “I may have had my suspicions.”

  Arnold shook a finger at her, a smile growing upon his face. “I thought so. You can’t fool me, Serena—not for long, anyway.”

  Serena smiled back politely and changed the subject. “Look, it’s raining.”

  Arnold Prosser looked back at the empty window, the colorless sky, the spattering of rain upon the glass. “So it is. Well, that’s all right, I s’pose. I actually like the rain. Cleans everything away. Makes everything seem to start new.”

  “How beautifully expressed, Arnold,” Serena remarked. “There is a side of you that is a poet.”

  “Yeah?” The notion seemed to please him. “Yeah. Say, Serena, ‘ave I ever mentioned that you ‘ave lovely eyes.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m sure you have,” Serena replied with a coy flick of her gaze. “But a woman never tires of hearing some things.”

  THE ORDER OF THE

  UNIVERSE

  Outside of the apartment over the coffee shop that Serena ran when not overseeing the fate of the world and all of its inhabitants, its only window overlooking the bookstore where Nicholas Dabble worked at perpetuating the chaos from which life’s spice drew its greatest flavor while selling books on the side, down the street from Arnold Prosser’s patient garbage hauler, the world turned.

  The storm came, heralding the end of summer and the beginning of the long, lazy slide towards autumn and winter. It scoured the streets and the sidewalks and the buildings with rain, scrubbing away the last few weeks as if they had never been.

  And then the storm passed.

  Afternoon wore into evening, and the day into night.

  The sun set and the moon rose. The moon set and the sun rose.

  Summer turned into autumn.

  And autumn into winter.

  Eventually, greenhouse winds blew restless across an unlivable wasteland, a barren earth in which the sea boiled into the sky, leaving behind a world obscured by clouds. In time, the heat surrendered to mile-thick sheets of ice that slowly ground their way across a deserted earth, crushing the last aspects of familiarity from the landscape. As it was in the beginning, so it was again.

  But still, through it all, Ellen Monroe did not return. And without cream, tea could not begin. And until tea began, tea could not end, its guests captive to the nuances of structure. And inside the folded plane of reality where Serena’s second floor apartment existed, Destiny patiently waited along with Death and the Devil for Ellen Monroe to return with cream for their tea party.

  Rules are rules.

  “A compromise, perhaps?”

  “I’m willing to listen.”

  “What are the terms?”

  DREAMLINE

  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.

&nbs
p; Ellen opened her eyes, the Dreamline ascending a landscape of clouds.

  I’m not dead!

  She pushed the handlebars forward as the Dreamline momentarily foundered in its steep ascent, struggling in the air like so much junkyard wreckage assembled by an idiot. Ellen quickly readjusted her grip and pulled back until the Dreamline regained control, then eased it into a level glide. The handbrake levers on the grips served only to shift the tail left or right, allowing for directional control. Left to its own devices, the tail would straighten, and the flyer would simply go forward.

  Just as well; she had no idea where to go. The world was mist, an endless sea of clouds that both obscured and tied every moment of her life together like echoes from the past; voices in the fog.

  Around her, the world boiled with the turbulent thunderheads of a summer storm, misty clouds crashing at the base of a waterfall, scenes from a life she had never lived. Rainforest mists of aboriginal mountains. The warm wraith emerging from the underground of the sewer grate on cold winter mornings outside the shooting galleries, vagrants and junkies gathering to the heat. Wisps of vapor like ghosts rising from an early morning pond in June, summers at her grandparent’s farm in Upstate New York, fishing with the boy from down the road. Curls of steam rising from her naked skin as she stepped from the shower into the cold morning. Steam from the surface of the morning’s first cup of coffee. Billow of opium smoke, sweetly cut with hashish and cinnamon bark. The steam from a teakettle on a Sunday in September, or the mist of her breath from a morning in December.