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

by Mark Reynolds

  And so Reginald Hyde joined the ranks of the Cast Out.

  He sat at a draftsman’s table, the surface unfinished particleboard that smelled of wet wood and damp glue, cast-iron frame pitted and flaking, on the verge of collapse. The Wasteland sucked the life from everything, even what lived beneath it. Only the Nexus was immune. The Nexus was the focal point, the optic nerve to the eye of existence. And the new Caretaker stood at the center of this blind spot, and for all the power available to him, he would never see them coming.

  Hyde’s naked buttocks swelled over the rickety stool that looked to the same sad fate as the draftsman’s table, corroded and ready to buckle. Words held it together, but for how long he could not say. The only guarantee in the Wasteland was that eventually the Wasteland would win. Until then, Hyde would indulge his pleasures, none around to decry his immodesty, or stare with revulsion at the rolls of doughy flesh that spilled down around him as if he were a thick candle stub of tallow slowly melting beneath the unyielding flame.

  Naked and secure, Hyde carefully threaded the bone of a bat’s wing through the flesh of his left shoulder, piercing the skin with a quick thrust, sharp pain and a small spurt of blood. He had already threaded over three-dozen bones collected from dead Cast Outs, Wasteland creatures and even a shrieker he had clubbed to death years ago when it inadvertently discovered his hideaway. The bones laced up both sides of his enormous belly and flanged out from his upper arms, shoulders, and even his nipples. Those last had been exquisitely painful, and in the Wasteland, anything exquisite was like anything pleasurable: you took it wherever you could and for all it was worth.

  The bones would help him, he knew, as surely as he knew that Rebreather was mad and Gusman Kreiger was not God, but as close as a man might come without exploding in holy fire. Lacking the ink to construct tattoo cages, he bound the bones to his flesh in the old way, binding the spirits to his person, their power to his will.

  A war was coming. He would need all the power he could muster if he was to help Kreiger. He knew the white wizard was about to throw himself against the Caretaker of the Nexus. He felt the bend in reality this morning, the force of Kreiger breaking free of this world, leaping into the other for that brief moment like a fish lunging from the water to snare an errant fly.

  The old Caretaker was likely dead, his protégé defenseless. Kreiger was orchestrating a coupe against Heaven, and, God help him, Reginald Hyde wanted to be beside Kreiger when he went at the gates. The loyal would be rewarded, brought into the Nexus that was theirs by right. And once back in the Nexus …

  The very notion sent shivers through his flesh … but not like before. There was no power; simply exhilaration at the thought of a return to the pleasures of a reality more like a dream: the silken touch of satin, the sugary smell of crème brûlée, the first tingle of absinthe on the tongue and lips, the delicate, rose petal texture of a young girl’s labia—never again so soft, especially after puberty—the air of fine brandy so strong and sweet that a teacupful could jeopardize a young woman’s virtue, the scent of perfume dabbed discretely between a virgin’s breasts, her flesh untried and untainted, ripe and ready as a berry upon the vine…

  He thrust another bone through a fold of flesh in his upper arm, the pleasure so sharply punctuated that he became instantly erect. The bone was a fang from a rock viper, needle-sharp and deadly, an excellent talisman. Good juju! It made a soft pop before whispering through his skin with a sound like paper cutting the thumb of the one that turns the page. He remembered pages like he remembered paper, though he had seen neither in decades. He had tried time and again, but its creation eluded him. The bone was the substitute. It told the story of the creature he extracted it from, so the story was the creature. To possess the bone of the creature was to possess the story of the creature, and to possess the story of the creature was to possess its essence, its soul. The bones were totems, strong talismans to wield against the new Caretaker.

  Hyde wiped the blood clean with the soft pad of his thumb, and licked it daintily. In another reality, the details of which he tried hard to forget over his many years of exile, his penchant for bone totems earned him a nickname: Papa Lovebone.

  Or perhaps there had been other reasons for that name. He no longer remembered.

  Well, no matter. It would not be long now. He wondered idly if the new Caretaker would be a man or a woman.

  A woman as Caretaker. To fall, to be broken by Kreiger’s army, to succumb…

  The image brought another explosion of pleasure from his loins, brief and unexpected and wonderful. Already, horn-black centipedes milled hungrily beneath the rickety stool, feasting upon his previous inspiration.

  Oh yes! Good juju!

  * * *

  Elsewhere, one stared at the edifice called the Sanity’s Edge Saloon from a distance of miles, eyes slitted against the intense sunlight, pupils become pinholes in orbs of milky white.

  It was not one of the Cast Out. It was an animal, not unlike the Wasteland dregs but for one fundamental difference. Dregs were born of the dust and would die in the dust, random burps of energy coursing the Wasteland to the Nexus, and their demise was of no concern to anyone, not even themselves.

  But it had a soul, and would live beyond the timelessness of the Wasteland. It waited only for Judgement Day when all the undead would die for good, and all the souls would be freed. It waited for that day when its soul would be freed at last from the Wasteland, a hellbound spirit rotting forever in Purgatory. It waited because God had told it to; it believed because God had told it to.

  It was the duty of the faithful to execute God’s will.

  It squatted low to the ground, gangly and bent as a cactus, though such things did not grow in the dead soil of the Wasteland. Its skin was burnt and flaking like the rotted leather binding of an old, mistreated book, but beneath that skin ran iron-hard muscles as spare as wire cables. Its broad hands and feet were well-suited to the sand, its head oversized, powerful muscles running along its mouth and neck bulging like a child with mumps, or the swollen expression of someone whose jaw was recently shattered with a steel truncheon.

  It stared at the distant building, the polished metal tracks running from the distant horizon off into the emptiness that was absolute madness. It had considered simply leaping into that madness, but did not. It was tasked with watching that which God called the Nexus, a holy place, so God had told it. And that holy place was possessed.

  When the demon that possessed God’s Nexus left, it was to tell God.

  And when the demon returned, it was to tell God.

  It did that now as it watched the iron worm blur across the track, faster than thought, sliding to a stop in front of the building, no sound of protest from the wheels. It let out a low moan, the note so deep it might have been mistaken for a slow breeze. A human might even miss it altogether, below their normal range of hearing, or confuse it for an insect rubbing its wings. But the dregs and the other animals of the Wasteland would hear and they would know.

  And, of course, God would know. God knew everything.

  It did this for almost an hour, watching with eyes slitted against the sun as the interloper wandered about the building, moving in and out, passing before the darkened glass of the windows and the open doors. It watched as the interloper—not the same as the one who had inhabited the Nexus before, which was unusual, yes, very unusual—relieved itself, and it lusted for the water that would be wasted. There was always so much water in the Nexus.

  After an hour, it went silent. All who would know knew. All that remained was to wait.

  This one did not have a name for God had not seen fit to give it one. It was the prerogative of God to do such things just as it was the duty of those like it to follow and obey; never to question, but simply to live each day in thanks for the bounty of the life given unto them.

  It thrust a clawed fist into the powdery sand of the Wasteland, sinewy arm burrowing all the way to the elbow, and extracted a handful of
packed earth that might have contained naught but two drops of ancient water, and perhaps, if it was lucky, the mashed remains of one of the dark centipedes.

  It did not really matter though. The creature jammed it whole into its enormous maw, the sizable back teeth working upon it with a maniacal fervor as if they somehow hoped to grind the Wasteland soil into something even finer than powder.

  No, God had not seen fit to give it a name. So it had named itself.

  It was the Dust Eater.

  * * *

  Since the whistle and the dead droning of the Dust Eater, others had come. Dregs. Many of them. An army as still as the dead.

  Oversight sat upon the rock shelf, keeping her distance. She gave Rebreather her back, but kept her ears tuned to his approach, a bone-knife in her hand. The bone once belonged in the thigh of a Cast Out who, though clearly a failure by virtue of his sentence, had thought himself superior to her, and able to bend her to his will. She had broken his spine—not once, but five times. He was dead after the second, but his skeleton made an excellent object lesson to any Cast Out or dreg that thought her free for the taking.

  Like the Dust Eater, she knew herself superior to those misfires of reality. And even if Kreiger could not weave a stable existence for her—Kreiger, who could not even come up with a name for her because he was too busy forcing the Nexus to masturbate his ego—she knew her own worth. She had almost been free centuries ago, and if Kreiger won his battle with the new Caretaker and retook the Nexus for his own, she might yet get a second chance.

  The single greatest injustice of the Wasteland was its inability to slay its own. The Cast Outs who came here, from other worlds and other times, were sentenced to walk the Wasteland for their failure, and eventually be consumed by the sun and the sand and the random freaks that walked this hell. Those same freaks would live and die as dictated by the Wasteland. But not so those like her and the Dust Eater, a crazed animal, but one with whom she shared a great deal. They were unfinished, and would continue to exist so long as no one finished them.

  Because it would not be hell without the tortured souls.

  In the distance, the hollow lowing of the Dust Eater, a ghostly sound like wind over rotted stumps. Unlike the Cast Outs who tried so hard to forget a life they could never regain, she remembered: cool wind and Spanish moss and the hollowed boles of swamp-rotted stumps that caught the rain water and turned it magical; all part of a failed life, a reality that Kreiger promised to make for her before revealing his inadequacy to the task. Now he shaped reality with no more truth than a common street magician.

  Nothing like what the Caretaker could do.

  So Kreiger marshaled his forces, seeking to take the new Caretaker down before he could establish himself, learn the defenses available to him. And she would help. Not because she loved him, or worshipped him, or even because she wanted to. She would help Kreiger for the unspoken promise of another chance at cool wind and Spanish moss. If it was right to obey ones parent and ones God, then she owed him allegiance as both. He was an inattentive father, and an inadequate God, but he was all she had.

  Mostly, she kept her back to Rebreather so that he would not see the tracks made through the dust upon her face. Not from pain or the sting of his rebuke—she had endured worse—but for the memories of an existence lost.

  Some things were worth the water.

  Some things were worth anything.

  HOUSE RULES

  Jack continued searching the horizon, but saw only desert, a vast emptiness that would not be denied. It lay in all directions for as far as the eye could see, a wasteland of sand and dust straight out of science fiction: Mad Max or Dune.

  Only this wasn’t fiction.

  The wind from the desert offered a distant lowing. It made him uneasy, the disquiet lending credence to his otherwise baseless suspicions that the shimmering speck in the distance was not just some reflection off a scrap of metal or glass turning absently in the wind, a forgotten derelict of no importance.

  Someone was out there.

  The Writer had said there were others.

  Jack climbed down from the landing and crossed the flat roof to the strange singular room as though drawn to it. While out of place both architecturally and stylistically, there was something about this room that felt comfortable, even familiar. The notion was misguided—he was hard-pressed to imagine a place more alien—but the sensation was undeniable.

  Pushed into a corner as if forgotten was a short gargoyle; apparently gothic suited the predominantly western motif no better than Victorian. Too bad; he rather liked the statue, its mouth agape with fangs, canines like upward sabers. The squat guardian totem had thick legs and enormous arms, a saurian tail, and small dragon wings folded close against its back. The stone was perfect, unweathered by sand or wind, so detailed Jack could make out the lines of fur, the knobs of flesh, and even the scales of its skin. The carved-fur body and horn-crested scowl was too bestial for the newer, smooth-skinned gargoyles, and its visage was likewise too inhuman for anything old. The impression was more … demonic. At its foot was a jackstraw collection of bones heaped around the clawed toes like sacrifices before an altar … or something cast aside in an animal’s den.

  Jack’s first thought was of the bird feeder in his backyard when he was growing up. The squirrels would climb into it and feast on the birdseed. It didn’t matter how high a pole his father used, or what methods he employed to discourage them; the squirrels always found a way. They would climb in, crack open the sunflower seeds, and feast until the feeder was empty, the husks tossed aside until the base was transformed into a hill of empty, black and white shells, useless food scraps left by the wayside. The bones around the gargoyle’s feet resembled a discarded meal; droppings left behind by ravenous consumption, crumbs falling from the jaws of a contented predator.

  — Nail —

  The sound startled him, a disruption of the overwhelming silence. He didn’t even hear the word so much as it popped into his mind. One moment, empty curiosity as he stared at the gargoyle; the next, a simple word whispered harshly into his brain, bypassing his auditory nerves altogether: Nail.

  He looked uneasily at the gargoyle, tucking both hands safely into his pockets and away from the large teeth. The eyes stared back with a smooth, milky quality, and the stone countenance studied him as though possessed of a deeper understanding, the stare of an old dog that knows how to lull a person inside the reach of its chain.

  Jack decided to explore the small room, the one that felt so familiar but seemed so out of place, leaving the gargoyle alone for the time being.

  * * *

  He found the room small and cluttered and strangely homey, one windowless wall dominated by an enormous bookshelf, every inch crammed with books and magazines, no apparent rhyme or reason to their placement, simply dumped pell-mell upon the shelf as if by some lackadaisical librarian towards shift’s end. A ladder extended up the bookshelf and into the rafters where it met with a trapdoor in the ceiling, presumably to the widow’s walk he’d noticed from outside. The iron stair from the bedroom below took up one corner of the room, blocking access to an enormous potted plant with great sweeping leaves and a peculiar blossom resembling the jaws of a colossal Venus flytrap. Jack half expected it to move when he entered, or perform a Broadway musical—neither would have surprised him.

  But the plant only sat there, silent and motionless, only a plant after all. Just because you’re losing your mind, doesn’t mean the world has to.

  The other half of the room was raised two steps on a platform occupied by an L-shaped desk with an Elite typewriter and a stack of paper in front of a high-backed, black leather chair. Casting about, Jack saw a filing cabinet under the desk, empty, one drawer cracked open to reveal only dust and a few old paper clips. To one side, a coffee maker, a Post-it note pasted to the front reading:

  Jack,

  As promised. Good luck!

  The Writer

  So there it was. This wa
s not a mistake. There had been no mix-up, no wrong station. This was the place! This was the Writer’s promised “special place;” the place he planned to take Jack to before missing their train this morning.

  Jack felt his stomach sink at the hastily-penned note, caught between exhilaration at having uncovered a portion of the riddle and sheer horror. This place was what the Writer was talking about? This place was the special place in need of a carefully selected caretaker?

  “This place is a hole in the wall!” Jack shouted, unsure whom he was shouting at, or even why he was shouting at all. He had been promised a special place, a place where he could be a real writer. What he got was nowhere, Purgatory on Quaaludes, a place to redefine the meaning of boredom. “You stranded me in the middle of nowhere!”

  No sound from the Saloon. No answer to his recriminations. Within the small room, even the wind was silent. Emptiness. Nothing. It mocked him, taunting him with answers it refused to give.

  He turned … and did a double take.

  There had been a turntable in the corner near the door when he entered, a collection of antique vinyls on a rack beside it, some so old they were actually seventy-eights. He hadn’t really taken any interest in it—antiques bored him—but now it was gone! In its place was a CD-Player, the kind he would have owned back in the real world—not to be confused with this place. He even saw a small shoebox containing half a dozen CD’s; CD’s he would have called his favorites, not that anyone should have known. All that was missing were speakers.

  But they’re right there in the corners, Jack.

  He stared up in amazement at the once-empty corners in the ceiling where the stereo’s speakers were now securely mounted. They weren’t there when he had come in, of that, he was certain.

  Jack started to back-pedal absently, and nearly went backwards down the stairs. He hung tightly to the rail, gaze passing stupidly around a room where reality was not the same as it had been only seconds ago.