—That’s why he allowed himself to fall in love with me—
And Jack discovered something then that Ellen Monroe learned long ago, and could easily have told him if he had but asked … or listened.
Jack Lantirn learned to fly.
ON A “JAG”
Oversight lifted the Caretaker easily and placed him at the threshold of his writing room, even opened the door, but she would not venture inside. It was forbidden.
The seizures had subsided now … mostly. He laid still, body curled into a ball like an insect pricked by a red-hot needle.
A part of her was sorry for that.
The blood had infused his system; there was no turning back. Soon he would know. He would know of the Wasteland. He would know of the Saloon. He would know of the Nexus.
Jack Lantirn would never be the same again.
She perched atop the false front to watch over him, balancing easily upon the balls of her feet. Jack shivered, a hesitant trembling that ran through his body like the wind through an old leaf. Mostly, he was still—as still as a corpse.
Soon. Very soon. Then he would know, really and truly know.
After a time, his body relaxed. Gone was the convulsive tightness that made him resemble something caught in the grip of a mighty fist, writhing as it closed around him, crushing him. Now he lay with a kind of strange repose, the languid expression of a lost dreamer caught deep in his own mind. She let him stay that way a little while longer, listening absently to his gentle breathing and feeling the cool wind of morning blow gently across the Wasteland, tug at her eternal hair, brush her immortal skin.
No, Kreiger did not understand what he had made, and though Kreiger frightened her—terrified her! The mad god! Powerful and unpredictable and insane! —she could not allow him to regain the Nexus. Forget his promises of paradise, his tales of compensation for services rendered, or the hideous tortures he would mete out for her disobedience. He could not hold the Nexus. It had twisted from his grasp two thousand years ago, and all he wanted now was a way to make it free him from the Wasteland; free him from the consequences of his own decisions. He would abandon it at the moment of release, leave it empty to every charlatan, every card-trick shaman, every sad magician and half-crazed juju priest medicine man who could find a means across the desert or over the sea. The writers ended that insanity for a time, the upheavals, the holocausts, the twisting of reality like so much carnival taffy as the now-extinct covens and guilds tested their newest and brightest by pitting them against the Nexus. Most were found wanting, their bones turning the sand of the Wasteland white. Under the writers, the Nexus became forgotten lore, a little known secret, the babble of madmen and lunatics and lost dreamers. But Algernon was the last, and his protégé was not ready.
But soon, maybe.
Or maybe not. There was every possibility that Jack would fulfill Kreiger’s bleak expectations.
She climbed down from the narrow ledge and walked silently towards the dreaming Caretaker, Nail watching from the rooftop. When she approached, he dropped down, a warning expression behind eyes as black as boiling tar. Oversight did not think he would attack. She thought he understood; thought the Nexus understood. The Nexus was no more sentient than the Saloon itself, an assemblage of parts and magic, wood and stone, nails and wires; thoughtless matter and energy, and nothing more. But the Nexus needed a Caretaker and Jack would do well … if he survived. And as the Caretaker watched over the Nexus, so the Guardian watched after the Caretaker. She assumed Nail knew she had his best interest in mind.
It was only an assumption, though. Nail might still try to kill her. And while the Dust Eater possessed the necessary brute force to fend him off, she might not fair so well. Sufficiently broken, Kreiger might not bother to repair her, might leave her to perish.
Interesting…
“Take him inside,” she told the Guardian, then walked to the edge of the roof and stepped off, falling silent and carefree to the hardpan two stories below. She dropped catlike upon the ground, ignoring the inhuman act as easily as she ignored the small spurts of dust from beneath her boots. Kreiger did not make bad things, only bad decisions.
Around the corner, she found Alex sitting alone on the porch.
“I need to talk to you,” she said softly, crouching down by his side.
“Just—go—away!” he answered heavily.
“I know why you did what you did.” Her hand came to rest on his arm, and her touch raised goose flesh upon his skin. “I know why you tried to kill Jack. And Leland, too. And I know why you tried to steal the tickets.”
He shrugged, but did not move from her touch. He only raised his head, looking out over the Wasteland to avoid her gaze. “Why did you let …?” he faltered, searching for words. “Why would you allow him … Quince … to—” He spit out each word like bile, but could not finish the accusation, the truth too much for his young ego.
Oversight answered slowly, words carefully chosen. “Kreiger frightens me, Alex. I don’t expect you to understand—I hope you never do—but more than anything else in the universe, he terrifies me. I can’t defeat him and I can’t escape him; not even in death. And he knows that. And so do I.” She let out a breath, and realized she was shaking. God, how these creatures affected her. “I hate him for what he makes me do and how he makes me feel, but I cannot stop him. He’s my maker.”
“But I thought … I mean after you and I … after we made love—” He stopped abruptly, embarrassed by speaking the words out loud, as if afraid someone might hear. Old concerns from an old existence lost behind him, but not so far as to be forgotten entirely. She found it charming and sad, guilt a strange form of baggage to carry to the grave. She smiled absently, gently touching the side of his face, a discolored bruise on his cheek from his fight with Jack; she caressed its edges.
“The only time I misled you was when I said I didn’t care. I knew it would drive you away, keep Leland from sending the Dust Eater to kill you. I know it doesn’t mean much now, but I didn’t want you dead.”
Alex shrugged, and she wondered if she had been correct in being forthright. Why were people so difficult? Dregs were simple, sensible, basic. They wanted to eat her, so she killed them. Simple. Sensible. Basic. But these others were so different, so complex and confused and confusing all at once.
And yet you care.
“I don’t know why you affect me,” she said, speaking as much to herself as to Alex. “I care about you, but I shouldn’t. There’s no way for me to leave this world. No way for me to leave and no way for you to stay behind. We are impossible, you and I.”
“Why can’t Jack do something about it? If he’s remaking reality, or whatever it is he’s supposed to be doing, why can’t he remake yours, too? Why can’t he make a dozen tickets and make everyone happy? You. Me. Even the Cast Outs.”
She stroked gently at his hair. “He is only one man, Alex. He has been given the power of a god, but not the God. How much more difficult it must be to be a small god. A person has limitations and accepts that. A small god knows only that there are limitations, not what they are or why they exist.”
He turned to her, his gaze weary from the sleepless night. “I’m … I’m sorry. For what I said. What I did.”
She shook her head. “You were being true to what you are. Not what you thought you were in another world and another reality, but what you really are.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“It’s okay,” she said, kissing him softly upon the lips. “You’re not the one who needs to understand.”
Then she stood up and walked across the porch to the Pepsi machine. “I need something to drink,” she said, wiping at the corners of her mouth. “Would you like something?”
Alex shook his head, no, her remark, like the relieved look upon her face, going unnoticed.
* * *
Slowly, reality melted back into place.
Cracking his eyes, Jack found himself on the floor of his writin
g room, no idea how he got there. He remembered Oversight, remembered kissing her lips, tasting blood, seeing … things.
He shuddered, the floor shivering with him.
The room was exactly as it had been before: nothing out of place, nothing different. But there was nothing the same about it at all. Images burst through his eyes, searing his brain. The chair breathed quietly near his desk, waiting for him to come out of his stupor. The Jabberwock stared, the screen a vast blue eyeball, a slice cut from the sky. Books and objects occupying the shelves considered him with curiosity, a god becoming.
Jack arose slowly, the world still unsteady, boards shrugging beneath his feet like a breathing leviathan. But he moved easily in the uneasy reality, not noticing the pitch and yaw of the world as he crossed to his desk, staring down at it as if he had never seen any of it before.
Maybe he hadn’t; not really.
He was beginning to understand.
The coffee machine dripped a thick, dark espresso-like brew rich with a mélange of spices, cinnamon and nutmeg and peyote. A mug—my Heavy Metal mug, he thought distractedly—sat beside it, sugar and cream doled into the bottom, waiting only for the coffee to be poured. A notebook lay open on the desk, a pen uncapped and ready beside it. On the screen of the Jabberwock, a single phrase, white on blue: ANYTHING YOU NEED.
He poured a cup of coffee, stirring it with a spoon that had not been there a moment ago while an Elton John cover of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds started up on the CD Player. Outside the window, he saw the unfathomable chasm of madness, tracks like white-hot chrome sailing across the nothing, supported on empty space and insanity.
Strangely solid, that. It was not even madness so much as acceptance of the unreal, the inconceivable, the insane. When dealing with the infinite, there was no answer outside of the range.
He hadn’t understood before—before Oversight and her gift. The Sanity’s Edge Saloon was the cradle of imagination, the womb from which all dreams sprung, and everyone was nothing more than a dream, a story full of detail and diversity that made each unique and separate and wholly wonderful. The only commonality was their beginning and ending: on the first page they were born into the world, and on the last page they left it. Everything else was uniquely their own.
In the Jabberwock, five stories waiting to be born, waiting to take their first sweet breath of life, to crawl, to walk, to run, to fly! And trapped there with them, Jack struggled to recreate himself.
The whole world shuddered, and Jack saw his hand trembling; psychosis perhaps, or some side effect of his consumption of… of…
He reached out to the coffee cup, breathing in the intoxicating aroma, his hold upon this new reality tenuous. It had been there all along, this new, grander, wider reality. He simply refused to see.
Where do unicorns go when they die?
It was the riddle put to him outside of Cross-Over Station; the riddle he did not know the answer to. Not then.
Anywhere they want. Do you understand? Anywhere they want.
No.
But that was before. Before here. Before now. Before the Saloon and the Nexus and the Wasteland and the Cast Outs and Ellen and Oversight and…
“Yes.”
The coffee scalded his throat, but he savored the heat, the forcible infusion of spice into his system. His eyes drifted shut, opening to the strange world within.
The Cast Outs were small, petty and vindictive, guilty of a host of crimes that under other circumstances would make them annoying, unpleasant, pitiful individuals. But here, they were wise, godlike, blessed with knowing, with understanding.
Jack did not know, did not understand … but he was learning.
Kreiger understood the fundamental truths of reality and unreality, actual and potential, how the two twisted together in the Nexus, realities flowing in and out like a thousand rivers flowing through one narrow conduit, plowing through it with a force to shatter worlds before erupting out the other side to carry on their course. But anything passing through the Nexus was changed forever, altered. For centuries, the Tribe of Dust lived on what leaked from that impossible conduit of universes and times, the lead-laden sweat of an uninsulated pipe. And from those scant bits, they endured the Wasteland, creating something resembling order; demented and twisted in their own image, but order nonetheless. They were powerful. Limitless. Unbound.
Insane!
Slowly, Jack was beginning to understand.
The caffeine knifed into his empty system with the speed and grace of a rocket. The tremors in his hands persisted, worsened. His gaze flittered sightless. Do something, he thought. Do something!
On the computer screen, a new line of words, white on darkening blue: WHEN IN ROME…
He knew how to complete the phrase, but what did it mean?
—FEED YOUR HEAD—
A fragment from a song, or was it older than that? Do you remember what the dormouse said?
—ONE PILL MAKES YOU LARGER—
The Jabberwock had never been anything more than a machine before, an inanimate object no better than a toaster or a candy dispenser. But now it was communicating with him. Or had he simply lost his mind?
—WHEN IN ROME—
Nail gently pried his hands from the empty cup. The gargoyle perched upon his desk, tail trailing absently across the empty notebook, the unused pens, the writer’s roost waiting with a kind of pathetic eagerness to be used lest it fall to ruin and waste. Nail poured more of the dark black coffee into his cup, stirred in a heaping teaspoon of sugar—spilling much of it upon the desk—and some cream from a silver pitcher Jack hadn’t noticed before. He watched the Guardian with a kind of fascination, feeling as if he was watching a dog that had learned a new trick … or perhaps had known it all along and simply never let on. Nail placed the cup back at his elbow, and climbed down. The song on the CD player looped over.
—EAT ME, DRINK ME—
He sipped the coffee, growing more accustom to the rich, strong aroma, the chemical kick at his nervous system, the shockwaves sent through his solar plexus. How young was too young to have a heart attack?
That depends on what you took.
Slap in the face. Hard! “Try to stay with me, Jack. I need to know what you were taking. Okay?” — Slap! — “Come on, Jack.” Squeak of the gurney wheels.
There by the keyboard, a small pill, like an aspirin only larger and bright blue. It did not surprise him, not anymore. He simply wondered how long it had been there, him failing to realize.
—FEED YOUR HEAD—
He looked from the pill to the screen and back. Was the pill an allegorical key unlocking his mind, a symbol to his imagination? Was this the way to get at the power of the Nexus, or simply a way into madness? Was he crossing over, becoming one of the Tribe of Dust, one of the mad things wandering the Wasteland forever, searching endlessly for a way back; back to a place they had dismissed years ago with disdain, and now sought anew with the fervor of the damned?
Or was that simply pretentious foolishness? Was that the key to the Nexus? Madness? Insanity? The limitless, unbounded reality of the lunatic dreamer?
—WHEN IN ROME—
The tremors in his fingers and hands progressed upwards, infiltrating his arms then his legs. Do something! Anything!
Or you’ll die.
He picked up the small blue tablet, examining it with fingers a hundred yards long and stretching out four miles in front of him. “Is this what you want?” he asked, ears stuffed with cotton, voice tinny and small.
There was no reply, the Jabberwock’s screen empty and dead, as blue and unrevealing as the open sky. The cursor blinked at him absently, caught on the periphery as he considered the pill, its pulse as annoying as the thrum of bored fingers.
You’ve accepted the Saloon’s reality, Oversight told him. Now you have to accept its unreality as well.
“Is that what this is? Acceptance?”
Still no answers. There were never any answers.
The
y won’t come from out there. There are no answers outside. Only in here. Nothing else matters. Nothing else is with you forever, from page one to the last page turned. That’s where the answers are.
The Writer’s words came back to him; words he’d told himself a dozen times or more since this all began, but had never truly understood: Anything you need.
Anything.
He placed the pill in his mouth and swallowed, chasing it with coffee.
“Okay,” he told his fingers, placing them upon the keyboard and letting them dance. “Let’s get started.”
Outside, the sun was rising, light slanting through the large pane of glass to fall against the right side of his face. A new day was beginning.
* * *
Ellen sat at the bar and stared at the ticket booth across the room, the curtain pulled down: sold out. She had seen Lindsay to bed—a ridiculous chore, the little girl more than capable of going to bed on her own. Oversight was simply trying to get rid of her, to speak with Jack alone. She almost refused, a part of her not trusting the two of them and their secrets, but for some reason she felt like she understood Oversight, like they had walked similar roads with nothing more than a change of the scenery. But this understanding did not extend to trust or friendship. There was something dangerous in the woman from the Wasteland, something she shared as well. She saw it when Oversight killed the Dust Eater, an echo of her killing Lenny.
Jack was probably in no real danger; she doubted Oversight would harm him. But that did not necessarily mean she would not hurt him.
Ellen nursed a cup of black coffee—for some reason, the sugar bowl was missing—and gnawed glumly at a Fig Newton. She hoped the cosmic vending machine guy would show up to empty the change bin and restock the candy bars. She wanted to ask him about why things were disappearing.
Or would he simply take the machine away like the gumball machine and the basket chair and the obscene frog. There always seemed to be a little more in the candy and Pepsi machine, but for how long? What would run out or disappear next, and why? Was the sugar bowl missing, or misplaced? She didn’t know. She doubted anyone did, not even Jack.
The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Page 32
