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

by Mark Reynolds

  She doubted very much that Lenny gave a shit one way or another whether she got herself run down by a bus or threw herself off a bridge. Lenny was her connection, and that was all. If he could get her hooked on heroin, why then wouldn’t she be just the best customer from now on—so long as Daddy’s long green didn’t run out?

  The problem was she didn’t get hooked. She’d experimented with almost every drug to one degree or another, but nothing could keep her for long. She didn’t know why. It certainly wasn’t a matter of willpower. Eventually, her body just lost interest in the little traumas she was determined to put it through, and saw no need to make her want more.

  No, if Lenny was looking to string her along, make her a good and loyal customer, he was wasting his time. She bought tickets on the Dreamline because she wanted it, not because it wanted her.

  Nobody wanted her, really. She didn’t look after herself because she was strong or capable or even particularly good at it. She looked after herself because she knew she was the only one who would. You had to keep yourself alive in the big rat race because no one else was going to do it for you. Just get behind the wheel, slam your foot on the gas and try not to hit anything. The rest you made up as you went along.

  Lenny was a pusher. He didn’t concern himself with her welfare so much as he concerned himself with where she spent her father’s wealth. And since money was all her father would give her, she could always keep Lenny’s friendship on retainer. But make no mistake, Lenny was not her friend. If she tripped out, Lenny would steal her cash and run before the cops showed up. Nothing personal. Lenny simply wasn’t paid to care.

  Lenny was probably hoping to get her spaced on mescaline and junk so he could grope her without her noticing. When you’re made of lead and helium, the universe exploding in your skull, who has time to notice a tiny little prick, especially if it’s only in you for a few minutes. Nothing personal; he just didn’t care about her; no one did.

  But Ellen did notice. She didn’t expect Lenny to care about her, but neither did she expect to be treated like a piece of meat. She looked after herself because no one else would, and that included making sure some scabbed-up prick didn’t go down on her while she was riding the Dreamline.

  The details were still hazy, slithering about the maybe-reality that pinned her head to the ground like an anchor. She remembered blood, a lot of it, and a knife maybe, or a sharpened screwdriver. Maybe. And definitely screaming. Hers. Lenny’s. Others.

  She tried to get her arms up underneath herself, wishing she could somehow get her head, thick as mud, a fishbowl of buzzing hornets, to move. It felt like her hair had rooted into the smelly foam-rubber mats below her, her skull planted to the ground like a tree.

  … And apparently her arms were planted in the same soil because they didn’t work either. She felt them struggling, but could not raise them, or even get her elbows underneath her so she could gain enough leverage to lift her head up, …

  … and pull the roots free.

  What if they’re broken? What if the nerves are sliced, the limbs dead, or severed and gone entirely? What if, in that black period between dropping the mescaline and waking up, you lost your arms, a cripple snuffling around a urine-stained mat like a worm?

  Panic burned through the haze like lightning in the night, darkness briefly transformed into electric day by the possibility that this might not be a dream. She started yanking and kicking furiously, desperately. And then it occurred to her, what happened and why her arms wouldn’t work.

  Someone had strapped her into a straitjacket.

  She rolled over upon her back, staring straight up at the ceiling, heart thumping in her chest, breath coming in quick, short bursts. An impulse to scream boiled up in her throat. No good would come of it, but the primitive animal taking over her brain hardly knew that.

  Come on, Ellen, she thought furiously, reason swimming hard through a ripping current of panic and confusion. But the words only echoed endlessly inside of her brain until they lost all meaning, a cacophony of sound devoid of sense.

  Okay, fuck reason. Try something a little more primitive. Pleeeeeaasse! Don’t lose it on me!

  No answer, but at least she didn’t hear her mind screaming. She laid there, teeth clenched so hard her jaw ached, staring up at the ceiling and the too-bright light high overhead. The walls were padded and white, the floor spongy beneath her. No furniture, just walls and a floor and a door with a narrow window.

  Oh God! she thought, pieces finally fitting together. I’m in a padded cell.

  She closed her eyes, the light pounding through her eyelids in an overwhelming sheet of red and vibrant green, and tried not to get sick. She had been jailed before, waking up in a cell or sometimes in restraints, but they had never used a straitjacket on her before. No one did. It was something out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It was Medieval. They might as well drill a hole in her skull to let the evil spirits fly out, or perform an exorcism. This kind of thing wasn’t done anymore.

  Or was it? Maybe Gabriel Monroe had them put his daughter in a straitjacket. He might do that, or get someone else to do it for him more likely. He might do that and say it was for her own good; a lesson to teach her that she shouldn’t ride the Dreamline; that she should straighten up and fly right; drop the drugs and get with the program. Daddy spoke in catch phrases and power slogans, sayings that appeared on inspirational posters in motivational shops in the mall. He never said what he meant, but she knew. She embarrassed him. Bad enough she existed at all, but that she should be a dropout and a drug-addict and a petty criminal; well that was too much. Especially for a man who didn’t care about much—much besides himself. The product of an affair he paid well to keep quiet, Ellen’s wellbeing was of little concern to him. The proof of the blood kept the support checks coming in, and the need to keep it from ever getting the attention of the press meant extra support for legal issues that were best contained lest someone dig too deep … and find him.

  She wasn’t daddy’s little princess. She was his little problem, his embarrassing little secret.

  Sometimes, she would close her eyes and think really hard, trying to remember a time when her father actually might have loved her. But no matter how long or how hard she tried, nothing ever came to mind. He never talked to her; only yelled. And he never pushed her on her bike; only pushed her into rehab clinics. On some level, she knew that he still believed himself a good father for insisting she receive top-notch care in good clinics with people who would care for her and help her kick her habits and lifestyle choices: the booze, the pills, the Dreamlines that she liked because they were a trip outside of here. He told himself he cared for her and that was why he did these things.

  Daddy was nothing if not an experienced liar.

  Clinics and detox programs and the hospitals that looked after her when she came a little too close to ending it all were simply Gabriel Monroe’s way of passing his problems off on someone else because he was too rich and too important to give a damn about anything he didn’t really care about in the first place, including her—maybe especially her. And if he sprang for the best clinics, it served only as bragging rights for his conscience.

  But somewhere along the way, she apparently pissed him off. She had never woken up in a straitjacket before, or in a padded cell, for that matter. Whatever she had done, it had obviously been pretty serious if he was mad enough to incarcerate her in Bedlam Hospital. Or had he finally had enough?

  She might never know for sure. She hadn’t seen him in two years. Not since her last court appearance. Daddy kept his distance, and he made sure that she respected that. He kept her in money so that she would never come close to him, or draw an association between the two of them. Likely there were those who knew that Gabriel Monroe had a daughter, but they didn’t find out from him. Unless she made a spectacle of herself, she was forgotten. And on those occasions when she did, she was remembered the way one remembers a nail head sticking up from the floorboards to
slice open the skin of your toe: she simply needed to be pounded back into place.

  Ellen lay on her back, slowly easing out of the residual effects of the Dreamline. Around her, the world gained solidity, reality less likely to slip away between her fingertips; fingertips incapable of grasping anything very tightly at the moment. She simply lay there and listened to herself breathe, her lungs expand with air, her eyes opening and closing with a weighted heaviness that felt like coins glued to her lids.

  Minutes passed. Or maybe hours; it was hard to tell. Was she ravenous or junk-sick? It was hard to tell, but she wanted to throw up either way.

  And why had no one looked in on her yet?

  “Hello?” she ventured, voice weak and dry. “Could someone bring me a drink of water, please?” She also needed to pee, but one hurdle at a time.

  Minutes went by—or maybe hours—then a face appeared in the narrow wedge of Plexiglas. It watched her for a time as if she were a bug caught in a child’s magnifier box before finally opening the door. A man’s shadow darkened the doorway, a white coat and tasteless polyester slacks. Probably a doctor. “Hello, Ellen,” he said, voice candy-sweet.

  He stopped over her and looked down, his expression that of a man who has just discovered an amusing insect beneath a bush while pruning. His glasses, lenses cut from the bottoms of Coke bottles, crimped his face as if it were being pinched between two enormous fingers. “I’m not sure if you recall our first meeting. I’m Doctor Chaulmers. How are you feeling?”

  “Sick.”

  The doctor nodded while scratching a hasty note on his clipboard. Had he even heard her, she wondered. And on the heels of that, had she even spoken, or merely thought her answer in the silent, empty corridors of her brain.

  “I assume you don’t recall being admitted to our facility. Is that correct?”

  She nodded, physical movement somehow more certain than speaking.

  “You were quite upset when you first arrived, but I want to assure you that you’re in good hands. We’re going to take care of you, Ellen, and see to it that you get better.” Again, the too-pleasant smile, so completely disingenuous, the flash of teeth as white as ivory, sharp as razors, wide as a shark’s grin … and getting wider.

  It’s happening again. Things are … changing!

  Please, no!

  She heard the air whistling in and out of her lungs: louder, deeper. Not breathing so much as the rasping of a hurricane wind sucking in and out of a long tunnel, her ear to the track, listening to the wind slamming ahead of a charging locomotive.

  Dr. Chaulmers carried on as if nothing was wrong. “Your father has had you committed, Ellen. I know how that sounds, but he only wants what’s best for you.”

  She could barely hear him over the wind, the distant grinding of steel wheels along rails only a few feet away. She could feel her entire body shiver with the vibration of the earth as the iron worm stampeded up the tunnel towards her. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to concentrate on what the doctor—what was his name? Chaulmers? Chummers? Who cared?—said. So hard to think; so very hard.

  “You don’t care about me.”

  “Of course we do, Ellen. We all care about you. You’re a good person, both capable and deserving of love.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” It was difficult to make her point, unable to hear her own thoughts over the thunder of the approaching locomotive.

  “Ellen, I think—”

  The rest was lost to the scream of the train’s whistle …

  The Dreamline?

  … as everything began to slow down.

  “… here … at …”

  She felt the slowness, the winding down of the world synchronized with the scream of the train blasting from the tunnel, a yawning canyon. So loud! Why doesn’t he hear it? It’s impossible to miss!

  This isn’t happening, Ellen; you’re simply going insane.

  But she wasn’t! It was the Dreamline come back to pick her up. And as it slowed to take on its passenger, the world slowed with it.

  But how could Dr. Chaulmers—or Chummers—not hear it? He must know it was coming, that it would take her away! Away from here!

  “… begin … with … a …”

  Oh, God! Please, stop. Please! Please! Tears burned her cheeks. Her mouth gaped open in an effort to scream, but no sound came out. Nothing could be heard over the tornado wind of the Dreamline. Pleeeeaase!

  “… regimen … of … drugs …”

  Was she screaming, or was that merely a dream. Or was the doctor the dream, the soft room and straitjacket just props on the stage of her mind. Just a dream of normalcy between endless rides aboard the Dreamline from one destination to the next; none sensible; none sane; none real. Maybe the dream wasn’t over. Maybe it would never be over. Maybe you’re dead, and all of this will go on forever, trapped in a dream on the verge of ending, a nightmare on the verge of beginning, locked in a state of neither.

  Isn’t that what it is to be insane?

  “… electro … convulsive …”

  The brakes of the train ground in with a loud nails-on-a-chalkboard screech that threatened to split her skull open like rotten fruit and peel her fingernails up in raw, bloody scraps.

  “… Ellen ???”

  Oh, God!

  It was slowing.

  “E l l e n ?”

  Please, no. Not now. Please!

  Slowing!

  “W h a t ’ s w r o n g ?”

  Noooooooooo!

  Slowing.

  Ellen saw herself from outside of her body, her mind pulled free and deposited two feet to the right. She saw herself turn to one side and curl in a spasm of retching. From this vantage, she could see the yellowish spew, even smell the curdled stink as it invaded the nostrils of her home flesh. The doctor’s face twisted with disgust, but if he said anything, she didn’t hear him. He was moving too slowly now. Sound could no longer reach her; words tumbled from his lips and fell at his feet where they cracked like brittle ice.

  Behind her, a train, the padded cell gone in favor of a blackened station wall made dark with nighttime. A night train? Well, of course it would be. And she was lying upon the platform, bound up like so much baggage, destination unknown.

  The world turned sharply, her mind caught for a single moment in the horrible fury of the maelstrom. She was back inside of her own flesh, looking out through her own eyes. Hands spun her body sharply, face pressed down upon the rough canvas, nose filled with the stink of vomit, acidic and sour, so much sharper than before. Someone struck her between the shoulder blades several times, and she gagged on something before letting it drool out on the floor. Words were shouted around her, a language she might once have known, but no longer. Something bit into her right buttocks, a sharp sting then a kind of warmth, soothing and pleasant and warm and…

  “All aboard.”

  … just like that, the world was back on track.

  “Let me help you, miss.”

  Only not the same track as before.

  She twisted from the approaching voice, fighting the passing wave of sickness and the tightly constricting straitjacket. Behind her, the padded canvas walls, the door with its narrow window, and the distant, unintelligible men in white coats and pajama pants. They were leaving, their movements the agonizing struggles of insects caught in resin. The men went away, taking the too-bright light away with them and leaving only a narrow rectangle that shined from the world without. But all of that, as real as it seemed, did not make sense in light of the train stopped in front of her, the smell of diesel and burning oil and scorching hot metal, the cool feel of concrete below her face.

  “What’s happening?” she murmured.

  “You’re moving too fast for them,” the porter replied. “You’re beyond them, now. Beyond everything, including time. Now hold tight, miss, or it’ll slip through your fingertips.”

  She turned a moment too late, the dim station allowing only his dark silhouette as he lifte
d her up in his arms—a gesture more tender than heroic; an adult cradling a sleeping child, taking care not to waken her.

  The Dreamline had never been like this before. Never.

  “Things are different now,” the porter stated, as if her thoughts were obvious, his ability to know them unremarkable.

  She took a last look at the narrow window of golden light, the padded room, the asylum her father had committed her to, then turned away.

  Steam clouded about her as she was carried aboard the train, a chance look in time to see the golden light fall about a few fragments of this new reality.

  “I can see myself in your tie,” she mumbled.

  The warming sensation that began in her backside spread like sunlight, turning her legs and torso warm and gelid, then her arms and chest. Her entire body was dissolving, disappearing, mixing with the oceans of the universe. Looking up, she saw one final thing before her head was reduced to seawater, slipping away with the rest of her body.

  “Kaleidoscope ….”

  TWO

  Jack woke up to the room shaking as if on the edge of some enormous machine. In the distance, a sound like a tornado; a sound he remembered hearing just before the train at Cross-Over Station.

  And for just a moment, he hoped the train was coming to take him back, back to that distant, sensible world where no one expected anything of him, and he could fail quietly on his own without dooming anyone for his inadequacy. But he knew better. Any trains now would be dropping people off, the ones the Writer told him about, the ones he was responsible for, the ones who would share in his fate.

  Jack sat up, muscles stiff from sleeping on the bench, and caught only a fleeting glimpse of the train in the glare of the sunrise, metal skin as bright as chrome, a gleaming silver car which remained only long enough to register against his retina before disappearing, a ghostly streak down the polished steel rails that sailed out into the great beyond. A single sound cut the air, a high whistle like half-rotted wood as it burned, then silence.