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

by Mark Reynolds

  But the longer he stared, the more Jack realized it was neither. In his maniacal dedication, the other had pounded apart the flesh of his fingertips, staining the keys with his blood.

  Then the lost soul turned to him, face burned and peeling, hair tangled with dust and filth, lips locked in a desperate grimace. His eyes saw nothing, gaze fixed upon a reality that existed invisibly between the madness gripping his mind and the wretched sheet of paper looping endlessly through the ancient typewriter. And through the filth and sweat, through the gleam of madness and catatonic withdrawal, Jack saw something even more frightening than the cloud of insanity swelling around this person, eager to engulf anyone who stayed too long, or pondered too closely the ramifications of fate.

  It was himself!

  Jack woke up, heart pounding, lungs pulling shallow snatches of air through his nostrils, his lips held tight against the urge to scream. It was only a dream.

  You’re sure?

  He had seen himself, a madman lost in the white desert wasteland. But what had become of the Sanity’s Edge? Of the others? Why was he alone, lost in the middle of nothing like some mad hermit trying desperately to write without paper or instrument, an outcast, a leper pariah, a…

  Cast Out!

  It was almost dawn before Jack could fall back asleep.

  * * *

  Within the black and maroon striped tents, Leland caught a glimpse of the fat Cast Out—what was his name? Hyde or something? —seated cross-legged within a circle of candles, the air pungent with incense and scented oils thinly masking an animal stink of sweat. He was completely naked, body glistening with oil that shimmered off the smooth, hairless rolls of fat. It was easier now to see the bones piercing his flesh, the tattoos mapping his skin with arcane symbols and images. The fat man chanted softly, drool spilling unnoticed from the corner of his mouth, eyelids flickering.

  “What’s he doing?”

  Kreiger offered an appraising stare to the enormous Cast Out who sputtered on oblivious like a man possessed. “Hyde is an accomplished dreamer. It’s one of the things I like about him. He never overlooks the small things, the charming details: the flavor of the wind, the color of a scream, the sound of forever. Papa Lovebone can easily dream enough for two. Even three.”

  * * *

  Ellen was flying.

  Wasps crisscrossed the blue lines running shallow under the pale skin of her arms, itchy little insect feet tickling her skin, their bodies striped in black and red, chrome stingers like fine syringes, needles made of glass.

  They’ll sting you.

  Whole series of sharp jabs to the inside of her elbow, along the blue lines of her hands, her arms. Lip bitten against the pain. Rush of warmth moving up her arms. Along the blue lines. Trace the red line. The Dreamline. Poison. Sweet, pure lightning, it lanced through her heart and brain both at once, and lifted her up on angel’s wings. And the next thing she knew, she was…

  … Flying!

  Ellen caught the baseball gracelessly; more difficult than it looked, but she did catch it. That was the important thing. She looked at it in the pocket of the mitt, the leather stiff and unworked. She wasn’t good at baseball, didn’t care to be. But Daddy liked to play catch. He liked to lob slow balls at her, and occasionally toss them way up in the air. Easy flies, he called them. But they weren’t easy. You ran around staring up at the sky, always worrying that you would fall over something, trip, or just catch the ball right in your forehead. It happened. The ball hurt. But Daddy liked to play ball. It was the only time he liked to spend with her. So whenever he asked, she would play catch with him.

  “That was good, kiddo,” Daddy called from across the lawn. “Now throw it back the way I showed you.”

  Ellen saw her hand take the ball from the mitt; a small hand; the hand of a girl only nine or ten, maybe not even that. Not the hand of the woman she was, but the child she had been. Not a hand grown long and thin, fed on junk through the small puckered scars that worked along the veins. No, none of that. Just a child’s hand, innocent and unblemished and undamaged. A child who does not know; does not suspect.

  What’s happening?

  She saw the ball flying back through the air. Daddy scrambled to catch it. “You’re not concentrating, Ellen. Keep your eye on the ball. This one will be a little harder.”

  The ball whistled at her, and she followed it with her eyes just like he told her, reaching out to catch it just like he had showed her a hundred times.

  The ball smacked into her mitt and—she was certain—burned a hole straight through. The pulverizing force shot down her arm and into her elbow, lighting it on fire. She flung the glove and ball down, holding her savaged hand, the skin burning hot and scarlet. She was screaming.

  “That’s okay, Ellen. Try to catch this one.”

  The same burning pain erupted in her shoulder as the next baseball hit her, and nearly spun her around. For a moment, her tears halted, too amazed even to cry.

  Another baseball smashed into her kidney: the sharp sting, the fire flower bloom, the dizzying pain. “Stop!” she wailed.

  “Ellen, you’re not even trying. Here, kiddo. This one’s right to ya.”

  A spray of white against the dark of closed lids. The middle of her forehead, that same sharp, hard crack, a nail driven into her skull. Only this one not as painful. It just made everything …

  … black.

  She awoke to the sensation of something tapping against her face. She tried to shrug it away, but it came again. It felt like something small and hard bouncing off her cheek, then her forehead, then her…

  “Stop it,” she mumbled.

  “It’s always about you, isn’t it Ellen?”

  Daddy? She opened her eyes and saw him sitting in a metal folding chair, the only furniture at all in a room of soft canvas walls, off-white. He threw something at her, the small white thing smacking against her forehead with a kind of chock sound. She tried to block it with her hands, but they were bound tight to her sides. Straitjacket.

  Something hit her chin. Chock.

  “You never once stopped to consider how what you were doing would affect me, did you?”

  She saw the padded floor littered with the small pills he was throwing at her.

  “Why is it always about you?” he said, more a challenge than a question.

  Chock. Another pill bounced off her forehead.

  “Stop it.” The request—it was no more than that, no force behind it that might have made it an order—was so weak, she wondered if she had even spoken at all.

  But she had.

  “Stop it? You want me to stop it?” He flung a handful of pills at her—not serious, not painful; at least, not physically. But like magic bullets, they shattered her defenses, finding their way unerringly to her soul and ripping at it like razors. “You stop it, Ellen! You! You want out so bad, then go ahead and start eating those pills. Do it slowly, so you don’t throw ‘em up like the last time. Slow so you actually die. But if you want to live, then you stop this. You stop all this nonsense.”

  “Where’s Jack?” Her words were a strained mumble through lips turned awkward and numb.

  “Who’s Jack? Is he the guy who sold you the stuff? The one you killed?”

  “Nooooo.” So hard to think. So hard to concentrate. “Jack’s… the Caretaker.”

  “Is that what they call dealers these days?” Gabriel Monroe became angrier.

  “The Saloon? What happened to the Sanity’s Edge Saloon?”

  He grabbed her face in his hands, pulling her straying gaze straight to his eyes, wide and feverish with rage. “Just stop it, Ellen. Stop all this nonsense. There is no Saloon. You’ve been talking about it ever since they admitted you. It doesn’t exist. You’re here. Do you understand? There is no Saloon. It’s all in your head. It’s a delusion, and the longer you persist in it, the harder this is going to be. There is no wasteland, or dust tribe, or jack o’ lantern man. You were on drugs, Ellen. You were so stoned you didn’t e
ven know your own name, or what month it was. But none of that was real. This hospital is real.”

  “No. There was a train…”

  “No! There’s only here.” His hands were squeezing upon her skull, holding her painfully, refusing to let her go. “Do you remember here? Do you? You can’t get away from it that easily. You can’t escape just because you don’t like where you are. You’re still here. You’ll always be here. No matter where you go inside here,” he said, releasing one side of her face so that he could tap her forehead sharply, finger like a dull hammer. “There’s no escaping where you really are.”

  She stared, nothing making sense. Nothing.

  He regarded her glazed expression with loathing. “Fine, I’ll prove it.” His hand tightened around the back of her neck. “Open your mouth.”

  Ellen woke up suddenly, muscles stiffening like an animal ready for flight, a scream of horror and despair ready to burst from her lips.

  It was only a dream.

  Or are you dreaming of waking up from a dream, and leaving behind a reality too horrifying to face?

  No, she thought, heart slamming in her chest, that wasn’t real. That wasn’t her father, that wasn’t her life; only a dream. The Saloon was real—inexplicable, but real. And Jack was real. The Tribe of Dust was real. But that thing before was a dream. Her father would never do anything like that to her. He didn’t care enough about her for that. No tough love in Gabriel Monroe. No love at all.

  She wiped frightened tears from her eyes, struggling to regain control while something beside her squirmed.

  “Ellen?” It was Lindsay.

  “Hmm?”

  “Are you okay?”

  No, most definitely not. “Yeah. Just a bad dream.”

  The little girl curled a little closer to her. “You were mumbling and stuff. You woke me up.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The little girl shrugged, still half-asleep. “This place scares me, too.”

  Ellen let Lindsay fall asleep. There was nothing about this place that scared her nearly as much as the thought that none of it might be real. If that was true, then who knew what reality was actually waiting on the other side of this dream for her to wake up?

  Sleep, with its threat of dreams that were not dreams but peeks between the blinds into a world that was her true home, did not come for the rest of the night.

  * * *

  “I want to give you something, Mr. Quince,” Kreiger said. “Something valuable to me, but something you’ll need, I think. And I’m going to need something from you in return. Call it a demonstration of goodwill.”

  Reginald Hyde giggled, a disturbing sound like something hidden behind asylum walls, inhuman and monstrous and immensely pleased. “I don’t need it,” Leland said, pulse quickening. “I’ll just go back—”

  An arm wrapped about him from behind, restraining him while his wrist was caught in a bone-crushing grip, arm jerked out straight, palm offered up to Gusman Kreiger. In Leland’s ear, the rasping sound of Rebreather’s mask. And just as quick, Kreiger clamped a hand over Leland’s mouth, silencing his protests. “No, Mr. Quince, this is important. Realize that if I truly wanted to harm you, there would be nothing you could do to stop me, anyway.”

  Rebreather’s grip tightened like a vice, the bones in Leland’s wrist grinding together, his chest constricted until he thought his ribs would break. He squirmed, but might have been trying to free himself from beneath the crushing weight of a mountain. Useless. Kreiger stroked Leland’s upraised palm lightly, the fingers already numb and tingling. Should have kept the negotiations in your own court, Leland thought. Stayed inside the barrier, dealt from a position of equality. Fucked up! Fucked up! Try as he might to close his hand, make a fist, defy whatever intentions Kreiger had, the numbness made all sensation distant and useless, his fingers hanging there, intractable.

  Then Kreiger struck Leland’s hand, the sorcerer’s fingernail mysteriously transformed, grown long and hard like an animal’s talon. It sliced deep into Leland’s palm, and Kreiger’s other hand tightened, stifling Leland’s screams.

  “Shut up!” Kreiger hissed. “Your pain means nothing. Not here, one scream in the tumult, lost to the howling winds of Tartarus. Only life holds meaning—life and blood.”

  Leland watched the blood spill across his open palm, black under the night sky. Kreiger cupped his hand below the businessman’s, the demon’s claw still visible as he gathered the falling droplets before they could spill wasted upon the sand.

  “How else will my minions recognize you when next your paths cross?”

  * * *

  Clutching his injured hand, Leland Quince fled back to the saloon, the smell of blood and fear thick as iron in the air. Rebreather watched him go before approaching Gusman Kreiger. “Why?”

  Unmoved, Kreiger replied simply, “Great rewards require great sacrifice.”

  “Never before has a Cast Out lived so long, or kept his constructs alive as you have.” Rebreather’s words hissed out sharply through the mask, spoken with deliberate care, each syllable carefully chosen before utterance. “That was how I knew to follow you; knew you to be the one who would lead the Cast Outs from Hell, and deliver us home. But you forfeit our advantage to a construct.” The word was blasphemy to him.

  “You think me mad, perhaps?” Kreiger asked, indifferent to Rebreather’s impertinence.

  “A construct can approach the Saloon; a Cast Out cannot. A construct can kill a Guardian; the dregs cannot.”

  “But such a weapon is worthless so long as it remains here with us. All traps comprise two basic elements.” Kreiger glanced at Rebreather, eyes possessed of a maniac’s deliberate certainty. “Bait to draw in the prey … and jaws to hold it fast.”

  OVERSIGHT

  The following morning, two things happened that set events in motion, the repercussions of which could not be foreseen.

  The first was the disappearance of the hanging basket chair from the bedroom where Ellen and Lindsay slept. It was not removed or stolen; it simply disappeared. The hook from which it hung and even the drill-hole in the ceiling both likewise gone; gone as if they had never been. No one saw it happen or could remember exactly when they realized the chair was missing. It was simply gone.

  The second was the arrival of a sixth to the Sanity’s Edge Saloon.

  Alex woke up to stillness, the soft buzz and crackle of the vending machine gone with the night, the new silence unnatural. He walked to the doorway of the waiting room still half-asleep.

  And there, face down upon the floor, limbs splayed out like a fallen angel, was a young woman in black leather so saturated by Wasteland dust as to be the color of days-old ashes. Long, dark hair spread across the varnished planks, sun-browned skin blazing like molten copper in the early light of orange dawn. Alex stared at her hands, the delicate fingers, the sharpened nails, the network of veins, faint blue lines against bronze. Her fingertips caressed the floorboards lightly, sensuously, the skin of a lover, the throne of God.

  He stepped forward, offering a simple, “Hey.”

  In his time—which was not extensive, but, he believed, proudly squandered—Alex had seen more than his share of martial arts movies. And in all that time, all those wasted hours of celluloid special-effects, never had he witnessed anything like what she did next. Propelling herself into the air with a simple push of her hand, her body rolled sideways through space like a dust devil before landing in a low crouch, boots hitting the floor as quietly as cats. In her left hand, a slim dagger, blade and pommel carved from ivory or bone, the polished edge shining warmly in the morning light.

  “Whoa! Take it easy!” Alex said, pulling back to the wall, hands up in surrender. “I thought maybe you were hurt or something.”

  She remained perfectly still, the blade pointing somewhere between his throat and heart, undecided about which should be slit open first. Half-covered by a veil of hair, her smooth features and narrow brows looked exotic, a delicate quality belied b
y the extended knife blade. Her eyes, exquisite motes of captured night, carried a mix of wisdom and sadness juxtaposed over her young face. She looked to be the same age as he, but her eyes hinted she might be older by centuries.

  “It’s okay, really,” he said. “I just didn’t think anyone else was coming, you know? I thought we were all here already. I’m Alex.”

  She appeared to consider all of this for a moment, her gaze unflinching, the knife’s point steady. Then she straightened. She did not offer her name, or anything else for that matter.

  “You look like you got stuck outside all night. You didn’t come on a train like the rest of us, did you?”

  No answer, only the stare: suspicious, assessing, cold.

  “No, I guess not.” You would have heard a train, stupid? he thought. If she was dropped off elsewhere and forced to cross the Wasteland with its dregs and Cast Outs and whatever else, then he supposed she had a right to be suspicious. “Look, whatever. You’re here now, right? Did you want something to drink? It’s no problem. There’s probably something behind the bar.”

  She nodded in acknowledgment, her stare offering neither appreciation nor gratitude. But it was a response all the same. Alex walked to the bar, deliberately ignoring the way she followed him with her eyes, with the knife. He opened the small refrigerator, the contents different from the day before: half a carton of milk, a pitcher of orange juice, a small bottle of apple juice. “Uh, there’s juice and milk down here, or soda from the machine out on the porch. Water, of course. And there’s coffee—”