He left the Tribe of Dust alone there in the Wasteland.
Forgotten.
Cast out.
* * *
Standing on the second landing of the Stairway to Heaven, the sun just beginning to rise, Jack watched the steam off his coffee, the only cloud the desert air might ever know. With him, Ellen, Lindsay and Oversight.
He had asked all of them to come up here ten minutes ago, but still had not said a word, hoping that Alex and Leland would show.
But neither did.
After the incident with the Dust Eater, Quince retreated to his room; while his door remained open, he neither spoke to or acknowledged anyone. Completely withdrawn, he stared out the window at the endless Wasteland and brooded, over what, Jack could not even guess. Alex was on the front porch where the shadows were still deep and long. The young man sat with his forehead upon his knees, hands covering his head. That Jack had no idea why only made him realize how little he knew about what really led up to the night’s carnage. He cleared his throat and told Alex that he was having a meeting with all of them on the Stairway to Heaven then left without knowing whether the young man had even heard. Whether he had or not was academic now; Alex was not coming. Jack had only Lindsay, Ellen, and Oversight to glean advice from.
“We’re running out of time,” Jack said, unsure how else to begin.
“You just figured that out?” Oversight remarked.
“No,” he said, keeping his voice even. “But I just confirmed it. The Tribe of Dust isn’t trying to destroy me. They’re waiting for me to destroy myself. And that’s exactly what will happen if I don’t create the stories that will generate the tickets and get us out of here.”
“When you say us, I assume you understand that not all of us will be going on to these new realities you hope to create,” Oversight informed him needlessly. “Or have you found some magical way of making more tickets than the previous Caretaker left you?”
“No, there’s only the five. I asked you here for advice because you understand the Wasteland and the Nexus and just about everything else around here. At least, you understand it better than I do.”
Oversight rolled her eyes.
“What will happen if you don’t finish in time?” Ellen sat high on the steps, unafraid of the three-story drop to the desert below. Her eyes were red, expression exhausted. The Saloon seemed to be draining her as well, but he didn’t know why.
Too many questions, too few answers.
“Kreiger has made it pretty clear. The barrier will collapse and the Tribe of Dust will lead the dregs against the Saloon. Nail won’t be able to stop them all. They’ll overrun him first, then the Saloon. I don’t expect any of us wants to find out what will happen after that.”
“They’ll make us go out into the desert,” Lindsay observed sleepily.
Jack nodded. Given a few hours sleep and some breakfast, he didn’t doubt Lindsay would be as right as rain, but right now, it was all she could do to keep her eyes open.
“Oversight was okay out there,” Lindsay said. “Won’t we be all right, too?”
Oversight knelt down, a gentle expression on her face. “It’s not as easy as that.”
Lindsay regarded her then turned to Jack. “I don’t want to live in the Wasteland. I don’t like it out there.”
“I know, Lindsay. I don’t want to live out there either. None of us do.” He saw no reason to mention that with the exception of Oversight, none of them would live out there for more than a few days. “The question is where would you like to live if you could live anywhere? What would you like to be if you could be anything? I have to create five tickets—five realities—for us. I’d appreciate some input.”
Oversight looked at him with utter astonishment.
“It’s as easy as that?” Ellen asked. “We can just pick how we want our lives to go?”
“I think so, yes,” Jack said, regretting the uncertainty in his voice. Was it that simple? Probably not. But what he needed was some ideas, a place from which to start. His imagination was a dead engine in need of a jumpstart, and he was terrified of what would happen if they found that out. Kreiger offered a way out. The Cast Out might be lying, but Jack offered them nothing and that was the truth. “I don’t want to send any of you to a place you don’t want to go, if that makes any sense.” He shrugged helplessly. “I just want some ideas.”
Ellen said nothing; Lindsay looked ready to fall back asleep. Oversight was livid. “Do you have the vaguest conception of what it is you are doing, Caretaker?” she demanded.
He turned on her, embarrassed and angry for it. “No! I thought I’d adequately demonstrated that already. I haven’t had a clue since day one. Before, even. Believe it or not, I thought the Writer was going to make me a desk clerk in some out-of-the-way motel where I’d spend most of my time writing because there wasn’t anything else to do but write and jerk off. Free room. Free board. Free time. That was all I was looking for because that’s all he promised. He never said anything about this.”
“And why do you believe this is so different?”
“Because it is! I expected peace and quiet and no worries. Well this place is definitely not that. Here everything matters.”
“Everything always matters, Caretaker. You’re just too stupid not to have noticed that until now. Everything matters, every second of every minute for as long as we draw breath. Nothing is a free ride and nothing is wasted … unless you waste it.”
“Would you please stop yelling?” Ellen asked, exhaustion lending a false sense of calm. “I don’t think it matters where you send us, Jack, or what we become. You’ll make the right choice.”
Jack felt himself grow cold, and shrugged to cover the involuntary shudder. He did not deserve their trust. Who was he to decide their fates: a disenchanted analyst destined to bottom-feed for the rest of his life, one of the legion of never-be writers who talked endlessly about where they wanted to be, and never got there? He wasn’t qualified to make these decisions. If he had no clue where he wanted to be himself, who was he to make that determination for others.
Just some false, wannabe god crawling about on the throne of the universe.
Lindsay had fallen asleep, body curled up against the wall. He gently touched her arm to waken her. “Lindsay?”
“Hmm?” She looked up through half-lidded eyes.
“Why don’t you go back to bed? None of us got too much sleep last night. I’ll take care of everything. Don’t worry.”
Liar!
She nodded and hugged his neck as she prepared to leave, whispering into his ear. “Can I have a dog, Jack?”
He smiled, though she couldn’t see, and hugged her back. Her body felt small and fragile in his arms. Just a child, he thought. Who are you to determine her fate?
Who are you?
He let her go, saying: “I’ll see what I can do, okay?”
“Okay. I know you’ll do good.”
And she believed that. She believed that, and she believed him because she was a child with a child’s innocence, and the world was still just.
Who are you?
“Ellen, why don’t you help Lindsay,” Oversight said quietly. “I need to discuss some things with the Caretaker.”
Ellen rose slowly from the steps, suspicious. But she started after Lindsay anyway, stopping in front of Jack, first. “I can’t tell you where to send me, Jack. I never thought about it. I suppose if I did, I might not be here at all. Direction isn’t exactly something addicts or lunatics have a lot of, if you know what I mean. But so long as you do what you think is right, you’ll do the right thing.” She shrugged as if unsure how well she was explaining herself. “I can’t ask for more than that. None of us can. Only …”
She faltered, looking not at Jack, but the Wasteland and the crimson and black tent of the Tribe of Dust.
“What?”
“I was just remembering how when all five of us went out there the other day, and Kreiger thought I was the Caretaker an
d you were my protector.”
He nodded.
“Do you know what a Jack o’ Lantern is?” Ellen asked after a moment.
“Yeah, a pumpkin with a face carved in it.” He had endured silly remarks about his name for as long as he could remember, but still bristled at the association. The long, sleepless night, and the too-strong coffee that smelled like burnt chocolate and made his hands shake, his stomach do flip-flops, wasn’t helping either. “Why?”
“Before it was that, it was something else,” she said. “The jack of lanterns was the man who patrolled the edge of the darkness, carrying a light along the border between the known and the unknown, protecting people from the dark and the bad things in it. Do you understand?”
He considered her remark, the expression in her eyes, brown and remarkably attractive. “I think so.”
“Good. Because we need you, Jack. Some of us more than others.” She kissed him quickly on the mouth, a chaste expression of concern that might have been more than friendship, and turned away before he could learn for sure, leaving down the stairs without looking back.
* * *
Once Ellen was gone, Oversight turned on him. “What are you doing, Caretaker?”
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t ask them where they want to go. You’re not a fucking tour guide, you’re the Caretaker.”
“But I don’t know what that means,” he challenged back. “What am I supposed to do with them? I know what it’s like to be where you don’t want to be, too far down a road that you can never go back. I can’t do that. I can’t send them someplace they don’t belong, someplace they’ll hate? I’ve seen your eyes when Alex talks about the backwater south. I don’t know why, or what place resembled the Louisiana bayou two thousand years ago, or whenever it was that Kreiger tried to send you there and failed, but I know a part of you wants that so bad you can taste it. Can you honestly tell me you wouldn’t curse a Caretaker to the end of your days if you found yourself waiting tables in a diner outside of Pittsburgh for the rest of your existence?”
She shook her head. “No, Jack, I wouldn’t.”
Her sincerity left him dumbfounded. “I have five tickets, five opportunities to alter reality, to change people’s lives. If all I do is deal out the cards, play God after God’s don’t-question-me fashion, then I might as well let the Wasteland claim all of us. What difference will it—”
Oversight’s slap left his mouth open, his left cheek blazing. Coffee slopped from the cup in his hand, scalding the meat of his thumb though he never noticed.
“Don’t ever say that, Caretaker,” she warned. “Don’t ever become like them. Everything matters. Nothing is wasted unless you waste it. You have an opportunity to change reality. If all you do is seek absolution or appeasement, then you will have wasted that opportunity. And it will not come again.”
“But I don’t know what to do. When I try, the ideas … escape, wriggle free. I didn’t ask to be God, and they didn’t ask me to decide their future.”
Oversight was incredulous, her expression that of someone trying very hard to explain something to someone who was extremely slow to learn … or extremely slow to accept. “You don’t have the right to question yourself, Caretaker. You don’t have the luxury. Where they are concerned, their best interest—their only interest—is whatever you want it to be. You cannot look to anyone else for your decisions or your failures. You own them. All that matters is what you do and what you think. Stop questioning it and just do it.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is that simple, Caretaker! It has always been that simple. You’ve accepted the Saloon’s reality. Now you have to accept its unreality as well. Existence is only what you make it, Caretaker.”
Jack could not look at her, one question still rolling over and over in his mind, the words losing sense, the answer never coming. Who are you? Not God. Not fate’s avatar. Not the puppet-master directing the universe from behind the black velvet curtain of night pricked with holes the ignorant marionettes would call stars. He was Jack. Only Jack. Who are you? Who are you?
“You’ll never defeat the Tribe of Dust if you do not first learn the fundamental truths about the Wasteland and the Nexus,” Oversight said. “You have come to do battle on their plane, in their world, on their terms, yet you wage war like you were back in your reality. It means nothing here, Caretaker. Less than nothing. The world from before was sane and safe and dismal and small. None of those things exist here. None of them. The Tribe of Dust is populated by inadequate fools and lunatics and cowards, but until you learn what they already know, what they harnessed and perfected over their centuries of exile, you will be forever retreating before them, and the corner you’re backing into is getting closer than you realize. I have seen into you, Jack. You should be their master, not their fool.”
“But I don’t know how.”
“Yes you do, but you’re afraid to do it. Jump off the edge, Caretaker.”
“I don’t know what that means,” he pleaded.
Oversight looked uncertain. “I’ve cast my lot with you, Caretaker. Your victory condemns me; that you understand at least, don’t you? Five of you and five tickets. There is no way out for me now if you succeed.”
“And still you’re here. You don’t need to tell me your reasons, but you stayed here when you could have left, or cut my throat and stolen the Jabberwock as an offering to Kreiger. You didn’t, though. You stayed. So show me what I need to know. Please.”
Oversight looked into his eyes, and drew her blade. “Remember this well, Caretaker. Kreiger might take me back if I do as you suggest. I might be allowed to wander purgatory forever to expiate my sins; clean my soul of the murder of my kin. But if I help you, I condemn myself to whatever twisted hell Kreiger can imagine, and mark my words, he did not lose his hold over the Nexus for lack of ingenuity.” She held the blade up before her, so close she could kiss its edge. “I scorned you, Caretaker, unfairly perhaps, for not already knowing what it has taken others centuries of pain to learn. You do not have so much time as all that.”
“Oversight, what are you—”
“Remember this.”
Oversight stuck out her tongue, delicate and pink, a strangely suggestive gesture—not a child’s petulant game, but something more grown-up, more sensual—and ran the tip straight up the blade. Jack tried to speak, to protest, but his voice went dead. He tried to step back, distance himself from her self-mutilation, but the world was tilting away beneath him, and he lost his balance.
Oversight reached out suddenly, grabbing Jack’s face firmly in both hands, the flat of the blade pressing dangerously against his cheek. Her face lunged for his, the corners of her mouth, sensuous earth-colored lips, lined with blood.
And she kissed him!
For a single moment, his thoughts ran rampant. Her lips were warm, her kiss soft. She smelled like Easter chocolate and vanilla and cinnamon and nutmeg. The coffee cup fell from his fingers, a dead-weight clunk and splash, wasted coffee, broken mug. He reached out to steady himself and found her leather-clad hip. In his mind’s eye, he saw the firm muscles of her waist, the arousing dip of her navel, his fingers caressing her dusky skin. Her tongue pushed at his lips and he opened them, inviting her in…
… and tasted blood!
He tried to close his mouth, to push her away. Spit it out, something warned, before it’s too late!
But Oversight held him too tightly, her strength a force of nature. The blood! The strange, obscene taste…
Jack felt it in his throat, a burning heat, a penetrative force that shattered the walls and invaded his system in a heartbeat, shot straight to the tip of every blood vessel, every nerve, and set them ablaze.
His mind bathed in a river of blue fire.
Is this the wasteland?
—No, this is the Nexus—
Oversight’s voice—not in his ears, but in his mind!
He fell to his knees before her, unable to stand,
unable to see. Pain! Enormous and sharp, it swept over him in waves. Her blood must be poison. “Oversight—”
He doubled over, mouth open to scream, and managed only a guttural choking sound. What have you done? He sprawled upon the landing as if gripped by seizures … or revelations—What have you done?—and felt himself curling tighter and tighter, a fetal ball, his brain burning in a fever that turned the world crimson and black, scrambled it into sick images and sensuous visions and a prattling of endless words, words, words that tripped across his mind in a speed defying reason, a thousand voices all shouting at once, sensations matched measure for measure.
—The wasteland is a dark place, Jack—
He opened his eyes—felt the lids move—but saw only the nightmare visions cascading across his senses, a blind man seeing within, the revelations of a lunatic. A dark angel stood over him with great sweeping raven’s wings, her body draped in folds of black silk and lace, shimmering, teasing. She looked down upon him. Her face might have been that of Oversight’s; her voice might have been Oversight’s voice. But Oversight was not an angel. Not a black angel! Just a woman. That was all she was—wasn’t she? Besides, if she was talking through the guise of a dark angel, why weren’t her lips moving?
Jack gaped upwards, saw wings spreading over him, darkening the sky. His mouth worked to make words, but nothing would come.
—You think the Wasteland bright because the sun is full and hot in an unclouded sky, and the sand is as white as bleached bones. But the Wasteland is the heart of darkness, Jack, and the way back to the light is a tunnel, long, black and horrifying. You see that now—
Another convulsion left him shivering with cold, burning with fire. Fevered sickness. Cold bloodless death. Sleeping. Dreaming. Dying. Living. Imagining. Understanding.
—Kreiger never understood what I was; what he made me—
The dark angel’s face was lost to the abyss of her spreading wings as they swept over the blood-colored sky, plunging Jack ever deeper into the veil of blackness folding over him.
The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Page 31
