The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1)

by Mark Reynolds

  No one got off. No one ran through the doors behind him, late and scrambling to board before the train pulled away. Three minutes remained and he was still alone on the platform in a deserted station, no one else anywhere to be seen. No passengers. No conductor. Maybe not even an engineer.

  The open door waited on his indecision.

  Jack glanced at the clock. In a minute, it would be 11:05, and then the train would leave.

  This is crazy, he thought. You’ve pissed away all your options. This is the only one left. Don’t piss this away, too?

  He would have preferred to follow the Writer on board. He would have liked someone who could answer his questions—of which there were many—or give him a little direction—of which he had none. But he was alone.

  Maybe that’s the way it should be. Maybe it’s time you learned to do it on your own. The Writer gave you a direction. It’s up to you to follow it.

  Tightening his grip on the straps of his bags, Jack climbed on board.

  Inside, the train car looked like an old movie theater, maroon velvet and red leather, nappy threadbare seats showing bared metal worn through the paint along the edges of the armrests. And the air had a faint, salt-sour odor of dust, the kind you might expect to find in a forgotten corner of the garage, or in the floorboards of an old attic. There was no one aboard. No luggage in the overhead compartments. No half-read newspaper or folded-up jacket left behind to hold someone’s seat while they were off searching for the club car. The train was deserted.

  Jack tossed his duffel bag and laptop into the first pair of seats, creating a small billow of dust, and leaned down to look out the windows: empty rows of benches, a deserted platform, an ancient clock.

  He heard the familiar cuh-clunk of the gears, the hand moving to 11:05 with a sound mysteriously like a loud, throat-clearing cough.

  Far away from Cross-Over Station, a copy paper box filled with explosives and a crudely-made detonator exploded in the basement of the Stone Surety Mortgage Company. Placed near the gas main two nights before by the Writer, the resulting blast completely obliterated the company right down to the foundations. The explosion was heard as far away as the city, dulled and mistaken as the tick of a train station clock. It was the Writer’s way of cutting Jack free from his past with a slight editorial jab against the impersonal attitude of big business; the Writer hated banks ever since the Depression and he enjoyed the soapbox. The stolen computers were discarded that same night in a Dumpster behind Stone Surety, the only purpose in their theft to alarm the company into making a blanket policy that would keep Jack from coming to work today as well as send him home early yesterday, thereby guaranteeing the Writer’s meeting with Jack.

  But Jack knew nothing of these things.

  At exactly 11:05, the train left Cross-Over Station; not with the gradual grinding of steel wheels hauling tons of rolling metal inexorably along behind it. No, when Heavy Metal departed Cross-Over Station, it did so at something approaching three-quarters of the speed of light.

  One moment, Jack was staring out the window, ticket in hand. The next, the entire world outside was reduced to a smear, as if reality itself were nothing more than wet paint on glass being rubbed away by some great invisible hand, streaking out, disappearing. The whistle screamed first with a shrill, ear-splitting shriek that quickly ground to a low wail, then a still lower groan before disappearing altogether in what Jack distractedly thought must be something akin to the Doppler-effect. The world outside became a smear of non-distinction, boundaries disappearing, colors burning into a brilliant white like the blazing eye of the noonday sun.

  All of this occurred in that briefest of moments before Jack was pitched to the floor. He remembered nothing else about his last moments on this side of reality.

  THE SANITY’S EDGE SALOON

  The floor of a train is not the most comfortable way to travel.

  When Jack came to—mouth dry, forehead throbbing—he was staring up at sunlight slanting through a haze of dust, drifting like sparks suspended in amber, stars in the firmament, and trying to remember how he came to be lying facedown in the aisle way of an empty train car. Through the windows, he could see a cloudless sky, but little else, and with the exception of the breeze through the open windows of the train, the world was still.

  “What happened?” he wondered aloud.

  There was no answer.

  He probed gingerly at the small knot on his forehead, swollen but not badly; no big deal in the great scheme of things. But it still hurt like hell. He could do with some ice if he could find some. Aspirin, too.

  He climbed to his feet, knees rubbery, ready to surrender to the marginal safety of the nappy, too-worn carpet scuffed with black smudges, bits of petrified gum, and a litter of splinters and paper scraps like years of forgotten chits punched from a million train tickets. The aisle alone gave him some measure of understanding as to why no one had chosen to ride in this car for what he could only assume was years, if not decades.

  Through one side of windows, he saw the back wall of a building; weatherworn clapboard blasted smooth by the wind and bleached by the sun until it resembled old driftwood. By all appearances, the weather might have been wearing away at it for centuries. He saw ragged posters and signs pasted across much of the surface, the same elements scraping the older ones into obscurity: slogans washed out, messages faded like the ghostly barn-side ads for Mail Pouch Chewing Tobacco. He saw an invitation to “Come in and Stay at the Sanity’s Edge Saloon — Rooms Available for Train Passengers.” A sign reminded folks that coffee was still five cents inside at the bar, which apparently served Corona, Red Wolf, and Dixie Blackened Voodoo Lager as well, their colorful signs worn away at the corners. Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey’s Circus was in town, featuring the P.T. Barnum Freak Show. And near the bottom, someone had hastily painted what now seemed to be an incomprehensible message: SAVE US, MILK BOY! It all felt reminiscent of the JUST STEPPED OUT sign at Cross-Over Station. He was pretty sure P.T. Barnum’s Freak Show had gone the way of Barnum himself more than a hundred years ago.

  The door to the train car stood open, exiting upon a narrow platform adjacent to the clapboard wall of signs, ten feet of worn wooden decking covered by a suspended roof that came nearly to the edge of the train. A window and door looked out on the platform; both similarly empty. No one was waiting for the train, or kissing missed relatives, or gawking at new arrivals. This station, like the train, like Cross-Over Station, was deserted.

  What he saw when he looked out the other side of the train caused his fingers to dig into the seatback until his knuckles turned white, desperate to keep from fainting.

  A desert. White hardpan as flat as a board and stretched to the edges of the horizon. No trees or rocks or scrub brush. Not even a cactus or scorched tumbleweed. Nothing but hard, bleached earth burned salt-white under the unrelenting sun. In the far distance, he could just make out a thin seam of gray between the whiteness and the blue sky, like a mountain ridge or a line of low bluffs. If he didn’t know better, he would swear he was parked outside of some obscure outpost on the very edge of the Sahara overlooking the widest part.

  But he did know better. You can’t cross an ocean by rail. And what desert was this flat? He should see scrub-grass, haphazardly strewn rocks, or, at the very least, dunes. Even the Nevada Salt Flats had mountains visible in the distance. This place had nothing, the epitome of infinity actualized, Stephen King’s wasteland, a fragment of the mind trying to imagine the perfect example of nothingness.

  With effort, Jack turned his attention back to the wall of posters and ads. “Come In and Stay at the Sanity’s Edge Saloon — Rooms Available for Train Passengers.”

  The Sanity’s Edge Saloon?

  Let’s not dwell too long on sanity right now, huh Jack? You might open some unpleasant doors. For instance, are you sure this is even reality and not just the latest phase in a colossal nervous breakdown? Or do you think sane people sell all of their possessions, aban
don their life, and follow a stranger blindly out into the middle of nowhere? You could be in a rubber room right now wearing a straitjacket and suffering a psychotic episode, hallucinations and all?

  That voice in his head had, of late, developed a knack for cutting through the bullshit he cleverly wove around his thoughts, and searching out the ugliest possibilities he so carefully hid away.

  Maybe this is all a dream?

  Not now! I need to figure out where I am.

  The remains of his ticket lay under the corner of a nearby seat, punched into confetti as if by some deranged conductor, some mystery ticket agent who climbed aboard the train somewhere along the way, stepped over his fallen body and validated his ticket with maddening vigor before wandering on through the cars, perhaps whispering his telltale line “tickets, please,” so as not to disturb the passenger who was obviously so tired he had decided to nap facedown in the aisle.

  First thing’s first. Get off the train.

  The heat struck him as he stepped through the doorway, a late July, dog-day heat that burned the eyes and tightened the skin as every pore opened, the effort ineffectual. Cut off by the bulk of the train, the desert breeze became a stifling mix of coal smoke, oily fumes, and the bone-dry, pure earth smell of the desert. It made him wonder about the signs that promised beer. Was it too early?

  He glanced at his watch and saw digits flickering, random and meaningless, insensible. He shook it, looked again, but they remained.

  “Damn!” He stowed the broken watch in his pocket. He’d seen digital watches freeze or go blank, but he’d never seen one flash random symbols and digits like it was intercepting a secret radio frequency from Mars. Maybe a chip jarred loose when he fell, making the watch go crazy.

  Did you just say go crazy?

  He opened the door to the station, seldom-used hinges groaning, glass rattling in the frame. Yellow flakes of old varnish drifted away, the breeze catching and dispersing them, so much dust. If he was the caretaker and this turned out to be the place, he had a lot of work to do.

  The door stepped down into a small, claustrophobic waiting room; the kind from small towns where few people boarded and fewer still got off. Just a room, walls and ceiling painted bright white, black curtains hung over windows noticeably off plumb.

  He looked more closely, realizing it wasn’t simply the window that was crooked, but the entire wall! Neither from age nor disrepair, but actually designed to be off-kilter, the room a product of a nonlinear architect with no respect for building codes, the standards of formal architecture or Jack’s fragmenting sanity.

  He peered out the window of the sloping wall, leaded glass warping the view of the tracks as they ran away from the station across a bare twenty feet of sand before proceeding out over the edge of a cliff. From there on, they were aloft on empty air; an unsupported track sailing straight off the edge and out into the open space until it was lost from sight, a glinting sliver of sunlight trailing into distant, empty nothingness.

  That settles it, Jack. You’ve gone mad.

  The room contained little else: a wooden bench below the window, a candy machine on the adjacent wall, its interior flickering unsteadily as if on the verge of shorting out. Through the open glass face, Jack saw a bologna and cheese sandwich in a triangle of shrink-wrap, a can of beef stew with a silver spoon and a linen napkin rubber-banded to the can, half a dozen different kinds of candy bars, snack-bags of pork rinds and potato chips, a sample-size tin of aspirin, a banded stack of worn one-dollar bills, a single, plain-wrapped, glow-in-the-dark condom and an open Styrofoam cup with a warning printed on the sides: caution — contents hot!

  He could no more fathom what vending machine would mix snack foods with condoms then he could understand why a hot beverage—not that whatever was in the cup was still hot—was placed on the top shelf in an open container. But the flickering suggested the machine would not survive much longer, and that the likely result of feeding it fifty cents was a small bout of frustration and the loss of said fifty cents.

  On the opposite wall was a train schedule mounted over a small magazine rack and an uncomfortable looking chair. The magazines were all out of date, dog-eared and worn. The chair sat in front of a hole in the wall like crude camouflage, a couch covering a cherry soda stain on the rug. But the hole, chewed through the wallboards as if by a rat, was easily a foot and a half around, exceeding the chair’s meager capabilities. Frankly, whatever needed a hole that big, he had no desire to meet.

  The train schedule made less sense than anything else, mostly sly puns, song lyrics, or obscure literary references. He recognized the one-way train he had come in on, Heavy Metal, though its apparent destination was, in fact, Midnight. And while it was slated to arrive, it had no scheduled departure time, the epitome of one-way.

  Jack was again struck by the feeling of being on an unused sound stage for an old Twilight Zone episode or Tales From the Dark Side. He was a million miles away from the world of this morning—or whatever the last time was that he was in the world of litter-strewn gutters, lost jobs, and disappointed lovers. What was he supposed to do here? Was someone going to explain his caretaker duties to him? Was this even the place the Writer was referring to, or had he foolishly stepped off the train at some one-horse junction, a fly speck along the tracks between Cross-Over Station and his final destination which he knew only as the “special place?”

  Maybe you should get back on the train while you figure this out.

  Good advice, he thought. Logical. Sensible. Timid. The kind of advice he had decided to stop following.

  Well, if you won’t go back aboard the train, what will you do?

  The breeze knocked the door loosely against the frame, the glass clacking softly. The candy machine buzzed and crackled on the verge of some terminal electrical short, the lights inside flickering painfully. The empty silence of the place mocked him, waiting for answers he didn’t have.

  “Okay,” he declared, pleased to hear a voice in the emptiness, even if it was only his own. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

  Through the doorway of the waiting room was the Saloon proper, a large open room with bat wing doors across from him leading out into another endless expanse of desert. He stepped out to a covered walkway that fronted the Saloon, and stared across the dusty hardpan of white desert that ended only at the farthest edges of the horizon in all directions save one: the abrupt lip of the cliff only a stone’s throw away. Other than the train tracks, there was only the Sanity’s Edge Saloon—the place’s identity stenciled in red on the front bay window and confirmed on a large white sign nailed to the porch roof. There was nothing else anywhere. The building seemed to be the only thing in the universe, an inverted trapezoid that grew wider as it went up, snubbing conformity and bourgeois right angles and parallel lines.

  Jack stared up at the building, trying to fathom why it seemed to pull towards the cliff’s edge. Even a couple of the windows and the main doorway had a tendency to list that way. Only the Pepsi machine, like a silent glowing sentinel beside the bat wing doors, seemed immune.

  A stray breeze raised a small whorl of dust, but nothing more. He saw a post to one side, its top crisscrossed with signs, directions to destinations scrawled with clumsy imprecision, places like the Wastelands, Dreamline, Wonderland, the Moon, Mercy Street, and the Street of Broken Dreams.

  The more he saw of the Sanity’s Edge Saloon, the more it reminded him of a thing plucked out by its roots from some other place, a thing not quite alive, but perhaps alive once, like a fossil or the forgotten shell of a sea creature. The image that kept popping into his mind was of a cocoon caught inside of a child’s killing jar, the worm dead, its house left behind, pinned to a wax display board; a board that resembled an endless desert wasteland with only a single rail connecting it with any world outside of its own. He imagined that if some great hand shook the world—a world in a glass bubble—it would start a flurry of artificial snow swirling liquid-like from the sky.


  Cascades of great crystal helices like strands of DNA collapsing under the onslaught of some new viral strain. His own words, ridiculous and poetic, echoed back at him. How easy to fold his fiction into this place.

  He returned to the main room, hoping he might find answers among the Saloon’s artifacts. In the corner near the waiting room was a narrow green booth caged in chicken wire from waist-level up with a door on one side and a sign on the front that read TICKETS. Alongside the ticket booth was a Wurlitzer half-blocking a window overlooking the great chasm, small bubbles traveling up the inside tubes lit in orange and bright green. A red light on the Wurlitzer’s console blinked at him, an unplayed song. Jack scanned the titles quickly, not really reading what he was staring at, and tapped the button before turning his attention to the rest of the saloon. Behind him, the Wurlitzer started spinning through its stacks of old vinyl 45’s.

  In the middle of the room, a green-felted poker table, cementing the saloon’s western motif. Not the real west, but one of those off-kilter periods of time straight out of the Twilight Zone, props determined not by history but fictional necessity.

  From the jukebox, Eric Clapton’s signature guitar riff led into the throaty lyrics of “White Room.”

  God, he wanted a beer! He could imagine nothing better than an ice-cold bottle of Corona with a wedge of lime sticking out. The signs on the building promised, but looking at this place, he had his doubts. He’d be lucky to find water.

  A loud peal of laughter, high and hysterical, startled him. Even more surprising was the discovery that it was his own, a laugh like no sound he had ever heard coming from his own lips. Suddenly, he didn’t care if it was an ice-cold beer or a glass of hard water dredged up from some deep well with a reluctant, rusty hand-pump, he just wanted something—anything—to drink.