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

by Mark Reynolds

  But he should. Under other circumstances, he might, and that fact gnawed at him. So what if she and the others didn’t know, so long as the Caretaker knew. But Jack didn’t; the Caretaker didn’t have a clue and he knew it. And they knew it. And it ground at his soul like broken glass.

  Ellen saw Oversight pass by the large front window with no idea how she got there. She watched her sit down on the porch beside Alex, the tops of their heads visible over the window’s edge. No doubt they had some things to talk about.

  After a few minutes, Ellen walked out on the porch, neither Alex nor Oversight bothering to look at her. “Where’s Jack?” she asked.

  “In his writing room,” Oversight replied, looking pale in the new light.

  “What’s he doing?”

  Oversight swallowed the last of her soda and set the can down beside her, answering softly, “Writing.”

  * * *

  It had all kinds of names: the groove, the roll, the wave. You could be in it, on it, or riding it. It made no difference. In the end, all the names were the same, just as what it did and why were always, always the same.

  Jack simply thought of it as being on the Jag.

  It was a complete submersion into another reality; that point when your fingers flew across the keys, knocking out words as quickly as they flashed into your mind. He knew everything in that state, knew every character as well as he knew himself: where they lived, what they did, why they read the books they read and ate the food they ate. He knew the taste of soft-boiled eggs, the smell of attic books, the shape of clouds, and where all secrets were hidden and why. He knew everything the way he knew his own world, that other world that felt so distant and so insipid and so intrusive when he was on the Jag, that ragged blade-edge he ran overtop, a kind of macabre dance between two connected but disparate realities.

  And his hands did their little trick all the while, a dance of their own, ideas pouring through him like the energy of a thousand realities, all different times and places funneling through the eye of a needle, a Nexus, a single focal point.

  And his hands did their little trick all the while, a dance of their own, a violent flurry of letters turned into words turned into sentences turned into paragraphs that rolled on and on and on. Pages turned and still he ran, riding the wave, slotted in the groove, a bullet rifled from the barrel at the breakneck speed of hyper-reality.

  He was on the Jag.

  Finally, he understood.

  Madness, but not madness. The new reality and the old reality, all one and the same, so long as you learned to accept. Unfettered; unchained; unbound; soaring to heights only the dreamer could know. No rules. No preconceptions. There was only the dream, the life aching to be actualized. Rules existed only for the dead, their minds like sodden clay thumping wetly inside ponderous skulls, their bodies rotting and pitted and ravaged by the worms of slow death, maggots that sniffed out the stink of adherence and dead-eye servitude to rules that begat no master save mediocrity.

  Wasted.

  Not him. Not anymore. He understood.

  I’m flying!

  And his hands did their little trick all the while, a dance of their own …

  * * *

  Lindsay was sitting on the edge of the bed tying up her sneakers when Ellen rounded the corner. “I thought you were still asleep,” she said.

  “Jack’s making too much noise.”

  Ellen tipped her head towards the spiral stair, music filtering down from above along with disjointed muttering and a persistent thrum like the rattle of a broken fan on a defective cooler, one promising to break down or burn out. It sounded like frantic, steady typing.

  “Is that Jack?” she asked.

  Lindsay nodded and hopped to the floor. “He’s been doing that for a while. He’s getting faster.”

  Faster? Ellen thought. Was that even possible? “Do you think we should get him some breakfast?” she offered, realizing her tone sounded strangely desperate.

  “I think he wants to keep writing,” Lindsay said. “I think he was waiting for inspiration. Now that he has it, he’s trying to write it all down as fast as he can.”

  “Where did he get inspiration from?” Ellen asked, forgetting that Lindsay was only seven.

  The little girl shrugged.

  Ellen glanced around the room. “What happened to that big birdcage that was in here, the one with the skeleton in it? I thought it got knocked all over the floor.” There was a dark circle on the old wooden crate where it once sat, the wood less damaged by time. But for that, there was no sign of the cage or its unfortunate occupant; both had simply disappeared.

  Lindsay shook her head as she slid past Ellen and stopped in front of Leland’s door. “Mr. Quince, we’re getting some breakfast. Did you want some?”

  “No,” he said, head turning but not quite seeing them. “But … thank you.”

  Upstairs, the vibrant clatter of computer keys went unabated.

  * * *

  Jack wrote through the day. At his elbow, cups of coffee in various stages of consumption, the cooling liquid silted or floating with pollutants: powdery spices, grounds and steeped leaves, scent of nutmeg and poppy tar. Stacks of books sprouted about him like fungus, open to passages or pictures that caught his interest, less research than random inspiration.

  He felt separated from himself. Not the out-of-body mythology—looking back and seeing himself from a distance—this was more subtle; the impression that his consciousness was slipping a little to the left, a little behind. He stared out through the eyeholes in his world, but was sliding a little further back with each passing second.

  Words tripped across the bone at breakneck speed, and he clung for dear life.

  The printer hummed softly with each new page. He gathered them up, looking them over before sending them on by rolling them into a short tube and placing them into a large brass pipe in the corner behind his desk, a recreation of an old-fashioned pneumatic tube. He wasn’t sure where he was sending them, only that he needed to do it to complete the tickets. He understood.

  Labial folds of machine-formed brass flanged the narrow opening. He pushed the small tube into the hole, pushed harder until it disappeared with a pneumatic sigh.

  Rub the small knob a the top; she’ll like—

  He shushed the impudent notion and kept writing. A moment later, the small tube returned, popping out of the narrow tube as if eager to be filled again.

  He twisted another two pages into a tight little roll, loading them into the pneumatic tube, pushing until the suction caught. He shook away the fleshly image with a violent shake of his head that left him dizzy, vision spotted with stars, a thin trickle of blood from his nose. He wiped at it absently, fingers red and tacky. The image was too H.R. Giger, machine transforming to flesh. David Lynch. William S. Burroughs.

  Madness.

  No, awareness. Reality was too vast for such small concepts; too much was possible.

  The drop tube spread obscenely.

  He squeezed his eyes until the stars exploded. It’s just a pneumatic tube.

  When he cracked his eyes, the brass lipped orifice widened, eager to accept his offerings, to have his tribute thrust deep into her—

  “No!” He dug the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. Keep a grip. Don’t fall off the edge!

  When he opened his eyes again, the vacuum tube was just a vacuum tube, just brass and copper fittings. A large cat with red and white candy-striped fur sat atop the Jabberwock, looking at him with a huge grin, enormous teeth, flat and straight and unnaturally human. “We’re all mad here,” the cat said gently. “I’m mad. You’re mad.”

  Mad!

  Stay on the edge and don’t fall. Whatever you do, don’t fall. You’re too far out now to stop yourself if you do. And it’s a long way down.

  After a while, the cylinder stopped returning. He simply tossed half-rolled sheets into the aperture of the vacuum tube, smiling as they disappeared from sight. A while after that, the stacks
of paper, words chicken-scratched in red over the neatly typed print, started to fall unnoticed to the floor. A while after that, he stopped bothering to pick them up. He knew where they would go. He knew what they said. He needed no vindication from the gaping literary machine that smiled at him through brass lips, smiling lips, lips that resembled … Never mind. They would all flow down eventually. Eventually.

  He typed on, and on, and on.

  Sing for you soul, Poet.

  Reality dissolved and reformed around him, a myriad of dream and nightmare images he was blind to, aware only of the words playing across the screen inside of his head; the word made flesh; the word made real; the Word.

  And his hands did their little trick all the while, a dance of their own…

  * * *

  Ellen waited all day before looking in on Jack … or trying to.

  No one in the Saloon said anything about what they thought Jack was doing up in his room, but it was apparent that Oversight’s earlier observation was correct: Jack was writing. If the nuances escaped them, even if the broadest understanding of the premise eluded them, this one simple fact seemed clear: Jack was the Caretaker and the Caretaker wrote the stories that would become their realities. If he was writing then that was what he was supposed to do, and they were content to let him carry on until he decided otherwise.

  The mood in the Saloon turned somber. Food was scrounged from the bar and the small refrigerator and the machine in the waiting room that buzzed and hissed more violently than before, the light inside having taken on a sickly greenish cast. But no one seemed very interested in eating anyway.

  Ellen felt like she was attending a wake, everyone gathered together for comfort and solace, but no one bothering to speak. They simply waited, automatons to the grand puppet-master that would plug them back in, or take up their strings and make them dance. Whether it was true or not—and she was not altogether sure she understood what was true—Jack had convinced them that their lives depended upon what he wrote. And like zealots following Christ’s one-donkey show, they believed.

  But Jack wasn’t Christ. No water to wine; no feeding the masses on loaves and fishes. He would not knock the devil into a pigsty, and he would not raise the dead from their graves. And if Jack died, he would not transcend death three days later. He would simply rot.

  She worried for him. When was the last time he ate something? The sun was setting, but Jack kept on typing, only brief gaps in which he seemed to shuffle about the room at the top of the Saloon, grumble strange, insensible soliloquies and requests to no one, or drop things on the floor with dull, riffling thuds.

  And still, no one wondered after him. No one cared if he was hungry or thirsty or exhausted. They all simply waited.

  And waited.

  Lindsay had curled herself into one of the chairs, sleeping peacefully; no one spoke, leaving her undisturbed. Mr. Quince excused himself as the light outside faded, the sky an enormous bruise fading to black. He bid a perfunctory goodnight, his tone distant and unaware. A moment later, they heard his door upstairs close softly.

  Ellen waited a while longer, fancying she could still hear the sound of Jack’s furious typing. Outside, the windows looked into blackness, no light left in the sky to overcome the dim yellowed bulbs inside the Saloon’s great room, the large windows throwing back darkly faded reflections of herself. On the bar was a sandwich from the vending machine, still sealed in a cellophane triangle; it was tuna fish, and was apparently no one’s first choice.

  “I’m going to take this up to Jack,” she said, hopping off the barstool.

  “If he was hungry, he’d come down,” Alex remarked, an answer more exhausted than considered.

  Ellen gave him a chilly look, and turned to go up the stairs, sandwich in hand. Nothing else was said.

  The maddening thrum of typing persisted, a red usher’s cord newly draped across the iron stair, a small sign reading: “No Unauthorized Personnel Permitted Beyond Rope.”

  “Jack?”

  No answer but steady typing.

  “Jack, I brought you something to eat. Can I come up?”

  Nothing. Only typing, its constant rhythm breaking, slowing for a few seconds before pressing on.

  “I’ll just come up and leave it for you, if that’s okay?”

  She reached out to unhook the rope, but it wouldn’t yield. She pulled on it a little harder, but the hook stubbornly refused to budge. It felt like it was welded tight to the stair frame, unyielding, no admittance, not now or ever.

  “Jack, please let me come up,” she asked, rattling the usher’s rope furiously.

  Nothing.

  She stared up at the room above, the more hesitant typing wafting down with the music, a repetitive progression of the same song playing over and over. He must have heard her, but was trying to ignore her; to keep typing.

  She started over the usher’s rope—less a barrier than a polite way of saying, please don’t come in—when a soft thump on the stairs above startled her, and she found herself looking up at Nail. The gargoyle stared down with eyes glistening red, the baleful glower of a demon beneath the furrowed shelf of his brow. Nail’s fur was standing out in thick tufts all over his body, lips curled to display his already menacing tusks, a frightening snarl warning her back.

  Ellen felt her muscles freeze, her blood go like water, her body immobilized by the blood-curdling rasp in the gargoyle’s throat. She heard herself whisper the gargoyle’s name, but that was all she could manage.

  In the room above, the typing ceased, a respite in the constant harmonics of the universe. “No one can come up,” Jack said, his voice distant, undirected. Did he even know it was her down here, or did he simply know that someone had tried to come up?

  “Jack, it’s me. Ellen. I … I brought you something to eat. Tell Nail to let me up.”

  There was a pause in which neither Ellen nor the gargoyle moved even a hair. From above, music played softly on. There was no other sound.

  Then: “I have to do this, Ellen. I hope you understand.” His voice was so distant, so unfocussed, she thought he might be tripping. He sounded the way she knew she sounded sometimes, back when she rode the Dreamline. You answered to multiple realities unknown to others around you. Disoriented. Confused. Eager to go back, back into the dream, back to where things made sense.

  “Jack, please.”

  “No one comes up,” Jack repeated, already leaving her; already retreating back into that other world.

  Nail’s grip tightened on the iron stair, muscles tensing. Slowly, Ellen retreated, eyes never leaving the transformed gargoyle. He was different, more fearsome, somehow a reflection of what was happening to Jack.

  But what was happening to him?

  Ellen swiped at angry tears, leveling an accusing stare at the Guardian. She defiantly placed the sandwich on the steps and walked away to the other stairs. She entertained no ideas of circumventing Nail and gaining entrance through the topmost door to confront Jack. What would she say to him, really? Jack, I had to come up. I … I—

  No. Better to leave it this way. Jack didn’t want her with him; better to be alone. And the top stairway was the only place.

  Behind her, the typing started up again, its manic pace careening ahead as if there had never been an interruption. Words floated down, unheard. “Not yet, but… soon…”

  Nail carried the tuna fish sandwich upstairs.

  * * *

  Beneath a starless sky, Reginald Hyde, who was called Papa Lovebone, awoke from a nightmare and would not stop screaming. Finally, Gusman Kreiger coaxed him to silence, slapping the fat necromant unconscious.

  Farther away, at the very edge of the Wasteland, the low gray line of distant mountains dissolved into fog and faded away, leaving the horizon as flat and abrupt as two overlapping pieces of paper.

  TICKETS, PLEASE!

  After two days and two nights, the Saloon fell silent.

  Over the last forty-eight hours, Ellen eventually found it possi
ble to sleep through the din of music drifting down from above, the rhythmic race of fingers across computer keys, its consistency transformed into white noise: wind through leaves, surf rolling against the shore.

  And suddenly it stopped; silence like rain in the desert.

  For two nights she had not dreamed, her sleep easy and unbroken. Now she stared around the darkness, a strange sense of panic as she scanned the silent room, shadows slow to give way under the gentle press of first light.

  A dead silence had fallen over the world, no sound save the erratic ticking of the tall grandfather clock and the pounding of her heart. For just a moment, she had been on the verge of a dream. She was on a train staring out through the smeary glass of the last car as it pulled away from the station, the world outside engulfed in the smoke of dreams, impenetrable. And from that smoke she knew something horrible was coming, something terrifying beyond imagination. But she couldn’t look away, and she couldn’t stop screaming, fists pounding the filthy pane webbed with cracks, smeared in widening stains of blood.

  The dream startled her awake, and she realized that the Saloon had gone quiet, the calm before a storm, the eye of the hurricane. Jack had stopped typing. The music had stopped playing. Everything turned still.

  Ellen climbed out of bed, careful not to disturb Lindsay who slept beside her, and padded softly across the floorboards to the base of the iron stair. The usher’s rope was gone. From upstairs, only gray twilight and the faintest noise like breathing: deep, slow, regular. Ellen started up the stairs, the metal cold against her feet, listening for any sign of the gargoyle. But Nail was nowhere to be seen. There was nothing to stop her from entering Jack’s world.

  Dimly illuminated by the growing twilight, Ellen saw that the door was open, the breeze blowing gently, skittering a couple loose pieces of paper across the floor, riffling the pages of the opened books that lay strewn about the room, rifled as if by someone looking for something that could not be found—or was never there in the first place.