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

by Mark Reynolds

  Without realizing, she nodded off, lost in the flood of daydreams. She was a child again, lying on her back in the tall grass, picking out shapes in the clouds. But the shapes were more complex than animals and faces; she had grown up, and her childhood games had grown up as well.

  To her left, the glow of the sun obscured in the sky; to her right, deepening shades of fleeing night. Elsewhere only clouds, pieces of herself: some memories, some imagined, some fancifully decorated over time while others made frightening for their years of repression. Momentarily forgotten was the question of where she should go. There was only the wind in her face, the rhythm of the dream flyer as she sent it winging forward, and the endless sea of clouds.

  * * *

  It was a strange thing, imagining clouds.

  Jack had not seen clouds in he forgot how long. The sky over the Wasteland was an endless expanse of empty blue. There was the sun and the moon, but nothing else. No birds. No planes. No swarming gnats or twinkling stars. The wind blew softly from the edge of reason and madness, but there were no clouds.

  For her sake, though, Jack imagined them. He saw them in his mind’s eye, that complex cinema show where reality played out day after day while he moved with silent, inhuman patience, fingers upon a keyboard, capturing what he saw as best he could, words into sentences, sentences into pages.

  What does she see in me?

  A life spent living inside of his own mind, he was neither self-reliant nor self-absorbed, only easily lost in the wonderland of his own thoughts: long, one-way conversations, made-up worlds and make-believe people. Preoccupied, the world outside turned in spite of him.

  Except here. Here at the edge of the known, the border between the real and the imagined, the sane and the mad, the explicable and the dream, the world waited for him. It waited for him, on him, with him. He was Jack Lantirn, the Caretaker of the Nexus, and the world turned because he wished it so.

  But sometimes the story took on a life of its own, a reality unto itself he was powerless to affect.

  Flying blind through an ocean of clouds on little more than hope and ill-placed faith, Ellen was coming back for him, trying to save him, spare him his lonely hermit’s existence. She was risking everything for her lost dreamer, her king of fools, perpetually wandering the distant lands of his own mind.

  He typed in vigorous fits and starts, sometimes at a loss for words, other times unable to keep up with the flood. No middle ground; some things didn’t change. Feast or famine. Flood or drought. A junkyard of debris or a vast and empty wasteland. No in-between, no happy medium. A world clear and empty for as far as the eye could see, or a world permanently obscured by clouds.

  Caffeine kept off sleep, but he still nodded in and out, brief slips into the dream world. Perhaps the Café had brewed something else into his coffee—have a nice trip—or maybe he brewed it himself, the Edge of Madness operating on a subconscious level reflecting an exhausted, self-destructive urge, some requisite for penance.

  Regardless, he kept writing. And so long as he did, Ellen would not be lost. She would find her way back to him. After that …

  Turning his eyes to the empty page, he dreamed of clouds, his fingers dancing across the keys.

  * * *

  Ellen’s eyes opened, head jerking up as she teetered on sleep, mind adrift.

  The Dreamline required little direction, any way she chose as good as any other. She started pedaling to keep herself awake, trying to focus on keeping the Dreamline pointed towards whatever was out there.

  But eventually her concentration began to slip again, her eyes tired, unwilling to focus, leaden. The morning’s coffee had been forever ago, and the converted bicycle seat not nearly as uncomfortable as she expected.

  This was a world conducive to dreaming.

  Or was it a dream already? Might she have always been dreaming, and only now just waking up from a sleep begun more than twenty years ago, her life a mistaken sense of self conjured in REM sleep between the waking life she could not remember and the dawn of a life she did not yet know?

  Or maybe she was just crazy?

  Regardless, Ellen fell asleep.

  * * *

  First light changed the sky above the Wasteland from infinite, starless black to the dark, dusty gray of shadows, a burgeoning murkiness before the sunrise, the dead screen of a blown picture tube. In the twilight, objects took on shapes not entirely their own, and reality, in those brief moments before dawn, was in flux.

  It was the world in its truest form.

  Jack left his laptop in the garage by the Pepsi machine, the story unfinished. A screensaver of billowing clouds rolling endlessly by, protecting the screen from image-burn; it went without saying that no one would read the work in progress.

  He stood at the backdoor of the kitchen, a fresh cup of coffee in hand, the aroma steaming off the surface, rich and addictive, hazelnuts and almonds and toffee. And below that, something more subtle, almost sinister: the moldy spore-flavor of dried mushrooms, the crypt-smell of Wasteland dust, the distant, no-taste of mescaline and LSD. Jack stood in the darkness overlooking the boneyard, scraps of metal that were a part of his own mind, blatant and strange: cars worn out and left to rust, the abandoned rocket, the corroded robots, the skeleton of an air whale. He had never seen one alive, wasn’t even sure if they existed except that they did because the skeleton of one lay half-buried in the dust of the boneyard, as if instinctively trying to return to the world beyond the edge, that place in dreams where it could still exist.

  So close, but so far away.

  Hammerlock stood near the cliff, face staring out over the quiet emptiness as though looking for something … or maybe someone.

  You should not have tried to bring him back. Like it or not, some things cannot be changed.

  He returned to the garage, pulling his coat a little closer. Nights were cold, the days blazing; there was no middle ground. He had worn the same overcoat for days on end now, days without number, days since the first day he had found himself here, beating a madman to death with a railroad spike, reducing him to the dust from which he came. It was Rebreather’s coat. He did not know why he wore it, and sometimes forgot where it came from. Perfect lucidity was infrequent and plagued with doubt and self-loathing, the drawback of fending off sleep.

  But the daydreams are clear as crystal.

  A long swallow of hot coffee and he stepped into the garage, the tunnel connecting the boneyard to the road that led in only two directions: one way, reality; the other, madness.

  A silly part of your psyche, Jack. What the hell do you know about a mechanic’s garage, tuning engines, cleaning carburetors? In your whole life, you have never even changed your own oil, and a car battery terrifies you.

  Lucidity was overrated.

  He made his way back to the Pepsi machine, the laptop’s field of soaring clouds, an eagle’s eye view glimpsed from the periphery.

  She was coming back.

  He sat cross-legged on the cement, laptop cradled on his legs. How soon, he didn’t know. It was up to her now. The story had a life of its own, his only influence, the where and the what; the how and the why still fell under the providence of free will. It could all still wriggle free, escaping him, loose ends hanging like fringe upon the undone tapestry of reality forever, no closure beyond simple, fatalistic acceptance. Failure.

  He had to push on; Ellen was coming back.

  It could be so easy sometimes, visualizing himself beside her, with her, nested behind her eyes as she piloted the Dreamline ever closer, winging through a world of clouds in search of a way out, a way through, a way home. The wind made her eyes water, muscles aching from the constant pumping of the flyer, the flapping of the wings, until they went pleasantly numb when she stopped and allowed the arcing wings to glide gently upon the air, ever forward, ever searching.

  Sometimes it was so easy.

  And other times…

  He sat on the floor of the garage as dawn broke the eastern s
ky, legs numb from the way he had been sitting. He was cold. And lonely. An unfinished page on the screen stared back at him: sad, smug, disappointed, knowing.

  You’re insane. Ellen Monroe isn’t coming back. She doesn’t exist, never did, a fabrication of your own head, no more alive than words on a piece of paper.

  Or maybe it was her feelings for him that were the fabrication he kept alive in his mind. They’d known each other a week; slept together only once. It was a relationship founded upon the principles of a cruise ship, spring break. Did he really think it was real?

  Jack scooted back against the wall, hiding the screen from the glare of the dawn, keeping the page visible even as it mocked him. What did he really know about Ellen Monroe? Was she just a character in his head? Was he trying to make her something she wasn’t, force her into a role she could not fill? When he closed his eyes, he saw her idealized within his brain, features he’d grown to love instantly though he could not say exactly how or why. But sometimes when he closed his eyes, he saw nothing. Not Ellen Monroe, or the view from the Dreamline, or even the Edge of Madness Café. Nothing. Only emptiness and a stupid, stupid man who probably should have paid more attention in school instead of daydreaming about something that was not only out of reach, but was never even really within his grasp.

  What did she really see in him anyway?

  Jack shook his head furiously, realizing he had nearly lost himself in the empty page, filling space with hollow arguments, moot points of philosophic emptiness. There was only one way to know for sure. Eventually you have to step forward and throw your life on the scales. Anubis is waiting. Judgement is at hand.

  A part of him—cold and alone, cast out and unworthy—worried that it was better to keep a small dream alive, dwarfed and stunted by its cage, than set it free only to have it perish.

  At the edge of the known, a solitary mailbox stood along the curb of the last few feet of blacktop. Out there, the sidewalk ended, the ultimate destination, the place of dead roads. Out there, actual fell away and potential began. Out there was a mind-altering expanse of wide-open possibilities and an empty, cloudless sky.

  There was only one way to know for sure.

  Whatever comes of this, I will never forget you. You are a part of me now. Forgive me. I love you.

  Fingers upon the keys, he started piecing together what he saw in his mind, word by word, image by image, until it began to fall into place. It was the only way to know for sure.

  Ellen first realized the world had changed at the same moment she realized she had fallen asleep, an intrusion upon her serenity, upon the calm and the darkness and the world of no-thought. The mind’s eye became a screen to an ever-brighter red as if emerging from darkness into daylight, the world through closed eyelids.

  Ellen opened her eyes suddenly, startled …

  LOST AND FOUND

  … and realized that the world was not as it had been.

  The clouds were gone, the Dreamline having carried her into a vast expanse of empty blue. Ahead, a single, uncompromising edge, a precipice without bottom or end, a limitless world, the boundary of all reality.

  And there on the edge, a vision from half-remembered dreams: a building of whitewashed cinderblock, chrome trim and neon lights, twisted metal and junkyard wreckage emerging from a landscape as desolate as a forgotten bone left behind in a desert from centuries before. And though she had never seen it before outside of dreams, Ellen Monroe knew this place. How could she not?

  The Edge of Madness Café.

  Home.

  She eased the yoke forward, squeezing the left handgrip to bank the Dreamline left and down like a bird angling towards a telephone line. She had her eye on the road in front of the Café, an unbroken stretch of blacktop disappearing into the distance, running as far away as the eye could see across the uninterrupted flatness, the desert exactly as she remembered, exactly as she dreamed, a wasteland epitomized and taken to a degree to drive one mad.

  Home.

  She tried to slow the dream flyer, envisioning birds in her mind, remembering every time she ever watched a crow drop to the ground beside a sack of curbside garbage, every seagull as it fluttered to a stop amongst its cohorts fighting for dumpster rights, pigeons on a roof’s edge, starlings on the line. She tried to see them in her mind, see the shape of their wings as they landed and fathom how they did it. The Dreamline would not stop by bumping along a runway while she reversed engines it did not have, applied brakes that were not there. If she wanted to land, she would either land like a bird, or crash.

  Ellen brought the flyer level with the ground, heart pounding as she prepared to skim the surface of the roadway. She pulled back on the handlebars and stopped pedaling just as she crossed from the infinite nothing to the solid world of the Wasteland, and the flyer reared sharply, wings frozen in a downward curve, billowed scoops catching the air.

  And there it stalled like a kite standing upright in the sky, robbed of its wind and unable to do anything else but fall.

  It was the best landing she could have imagined, and better than she deserved given her inexperience with the stolen flyer.

  But it was far from perfect.

  One wing clipped the mailbox by the roadside; if she hadn’t been at a near dead-stop in the air, it probably would have sheered off the left wing entirely, wrecking the Dreamline. And considering there were no restraints or safety devices on the flyer—not even a bike helmet—she might not have survived the collision that would likely send the flyer cartwheeling across the pavement.

  But while bone-jarring, she was unhurt.

  For a moment, she sat where she was, adjusting to being motionless, a castaway too long at sea suffering a kind of vertigo, the world no longer moving beneath her. To her right, the café was dark; a metal and neon diner attached to a wind-scoured garage of whitewashed cinderblocks devoid of life.

  The silence was overwhelming.

  She climbed tentatively from the Dreamline, the soles of her feet touching the unending ribbon of blacktop, legs weary from pedaling. How long had it been? she wondered, turning and stretching to loosen stiff muscles.

  However long it takes to travel the distance between reason and chaos, between sanity and dreams.

  The dream flyer’s tail sat inches from the edge, the road collapsing into nothingness, pavement crumbled away as though washed out by a flood … a flood that carried away the entire world! The sidewalk was similarly broken, unable to bridge the emptiness, concrete ending just a little past the edge, a small fragment of reason extending out where reason was unwelcome, a trespasser with no business there but mischief. Pounded into the earth, a simple painted sign read BEWARE! The Sidewalk Ends!

  There were things you knew about a person, especially someone you cared about; details of no importance that identified them like fingerprints. How they talked or stood, how they smelled, how they tipped their heads when they listened, the way they drank their coffee. And even how they thought, what struck them as funny or absurd. A sign at the edge of all reality that warned no one in general—for there was no one to warn—to be careful of a sidewalk that ended in oblivion as though warning about a small spill of water.

  She turned to the café, searching for signs of life, casting across the reflection of herself in the glass, dim shadows on dulled metal, the neon promise of hot coffee. Hints of the inside hid like ghosts behind the reflection of the endless Wasteland: shadow tables, phantom booths, shades of a counter and red leather barstools trimmed in polished steel. From somewhere inside, she heard music: Sarah McLachlan’s Possession. A song from years before; one she liked; one Jack liked. It entered his brain and stuck splinter-deep, an obsession he could not get over, could not get enough of—like Ellen. Just one of the things she knew about him without knowing why. He was close, maybe just inside: watching for her, waiting for her return.

  “Jack?”

  No answer, only the soft refrains of the music.

  She scanned the garage, paint scoured by
sand and sun. How long had it been here? How long had Jack imagined it had been here? The front was guarded by a statue of a dog-headed man in Egyptian attire, a pair of blackened scales gripped in one hand. Anubis, maybe, guardian of the underworld or maybe just of the dead. She couldn’t remember; seventh grade too long ago. On the other side, an antique gas pump, the clear cylinder at the top filled with a glowing green liquid that could not be gasoline.

  “Jack?”

  The garage was orderly and clean, concrete as smooth as glass, no spilled oil stains or lingering rust spots; a garage that had never been used as a garage. Against the outside wall, a familiar-looking Pepsi machine glowed florescent, blue and red, an echo of the Sanity’s Edge Saloon. And at its base, a laptop computer, a cloudscape boiling across the surface of the screen.

  And then he was there.

  Jack.

  He stepped from the Last Stop not as she imagined, but as he was: a ragged reflection of something out of a dream. Jack Lantirn, Caretaker of the Nexus. Not the man she left behind forever ago, this amalgam of dream and madness, a haunted visage that tore her up from nightmares, her screams barely contained. For as long as she hid in that other world, that normal world, Jack remained here on the edge, breaking himself apart one piece at a time. Maybe she had taken too long? Maybe he had given too much? Maybe he had finally gone mad?

  He wore Rebreather’s long coat, the rest of his clothes faded and saturated with dust, hair grown long and unkempt, days of stubble running wild on his face, eyes sunken, features drawn. Haunted. Could he distinguish reality from the plague of phantasms surrounding him? Did he even know she was here, that she was really here and not just some dream come to torment him only to fade as he reached for her?

  Jack stepped closer, squinting in the glare of early morning, and revealing something layered beneath weariness and caution and hope; something she recognized in her own reflection: madness.