“Waiting room,” she mumbled, trying to bring more of the concrete details out of the flashes of images pushing through the overriding blankness in her mind. A white room, black curtains … at the … at the…
“That’s fine, Ellen,” Dr. Chaulmers condescended, lips pursed like a smug child who has earned himself empty praise and a piece of candy for some immodest display of skill. “You were in the hospital waiting room just before you came in here. Do you remember coming into this room? Into the hospital?”
She felt her head nod, feeling strangely distanced from herself, as if her awareness were invested solely within her own spirit, and that spirit was standing outside of herself, looking at her empty body in wonder.
“Good, good,” Dr. Chaulmers said in his most soothing voice, practiced and insincere. “Now I’m going to say a few things to you. I want you to tell me what you think of when I say these things.”
Again she nodded, senseless, numb to her own condition.
“Jack o’ Lantern.”
She felt herself stare stupidly, trying to make a connection that simply refused to be made. There was nothing, not even a face, or a name, or an image of a thing or a place. Everlasting sheets of gray. Nothing.
“Lindsay.”
Nothing.
“Goose Man.”
Nothing.
“The edge.”
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing—
“Nails.”
The image that hit her mind was as sudden as a lightning bolt. Not just a dim recollection, but an actual picture in her head. Beetle-browed, squat gargoyle of a creature with dragon wings, lizard tail, compact, powerful arms and legs. A living weapon, eager and able to dispatch anything that might attack from the … the…
Slipping. Going away. Try to hold on. Try! Try! Gargoyle! Gargoyle from nails. Gargoyle from nails. Gargoyle. Nails. Gargoyle whose name was…
“Nail.”
“Excuse me?” Dr. Chaulmers asked, distracted.
“Nail was a gargoyle,” she declared, the beginnings of a relieved smile upon her face. “From the Sanity’s Edge Saloon. I was there. And Jack, too. Nail protected me and Jack and the … others. He pr-pr-protected us from the people in the … in the … the Wasteland.”
She turned to Dr. Chaulmers, and her smile faded.
He was openly frowning, his mask fallen away to reveal cheeks gone red, his forehead white and blotchy. He looked ready to scream; ready to accuse her of orchestrating some secret plot to make him appear foolish. “No Ellen,” he replied sternly. “No, you are wrong. There is no Nail. No Jack. No Cast Outs. And no saloon. They are only in your mind. You have been living completely within a fantasy world, Ellen. One you devised yourself. You were admitted into our care over a week ago by your father, and you have been in one of our quiet rooms ever since, trapped in a state of non-responsive catatonia occasioned by brief periods of manic dementia. We had to restrain you to keep you from harming yourself or anyone else. You failed to respond to the regimen of drug therapy I prescribed, so this morning we began electro-shock treatment in an effort to break the dementia and depression that led you to attempt suicide. This is what you are supposed to remember, Ellen. This is what’s really going on. This is reality.”
Each word was cast like a stone, hitting and breaking her. She felt tears well up, blur her vision. She hated to cry—hated herself for it—but could not make herself stop. Please, no. Don’t end it like this, Jack. Anything but this.
“It’s okay, angel,” a familiar voice said, and someone was holding her face gently, thumbs brushing lightly at her tears, hands warm and soothing upon her cheek.
And wrong! Very wrong! No, not like this, Jack. Please not like this!
“Daddy?”
“It’s me, angel.” The owner of the voice leaned back, letting the light touch his face. Her father. He was here. Not the abusive man she thought she remembered from her childhood—fuzzy and gray, those memories, like photos borrowed from another’s album—or the neglectful guardian from her adolescence—dim recollections like the memories of a book read long ago where so much has boiled down into so little, and no detail recalled true to context—but her father; her real father.
“Daddy?”
“You’ll be okay, angel. I know you will. But you have to listen to Dr. Chaulmers. Nothing about that other place is real. It’s like … like a dream. It seems real until you wake up, and then its not. It’s not real at all. It’s just make-believe. It’s okay, as long as you can tell the difference. You understand, don’t you?”
No! No, she did not understand! Not anything, least of all reality. None of this seemed real. And the other world did. This world made sense, but it didn’t seem real. The other world did not make sense, and that seemed real. Only…
“You just have to let it go,” her father continued. “Just let it go.”
“Jack, please!” she whispered, eyes closed, praying against the confusion outside of her mind. “Not like this. Not like this. Not…
… like this.”
She opened her eyes to find herself back in the Saloon, Reginald Hyde still straddling her waist, whispering into her ear: “Just let it go.” His one hand clamped painfully upon her breast while the other reached past her, reached for something over her head, reached for something in her raised left hand.
The last ticket!
* * *
Jack ran up the steps, Rebreather close behind, the Cast Out beyond the point of pain or injury, his hatred inhuman, a demonic machine fueled on rage. His breath rasped within the mask like hydraulic vents, the cut of steel on steel. He was only a few steps behind, closing quickly even as Jack’s avenue of escape looked to run out.
But Jack knew better than to count on the Stairway to Heaven. Ellen might consider it a sign of hope, the leaping-off point of all possibilities; an avenue to dreams.
Jack knew the stairway for what it was: self-deception.
The Stairway to Heaven was the Tower of Babel, the fool’s edifice built to reach out and touch the hand of God. Incomplete by its nature, destined to remain so throughout the course of one’s lifetime, it was the very definition of form and function; death was the only means of achieving Heaven and only in dying would the stairway become complete. It was built on a fool’s dream and like a fool’s dream, it was doomed to collapse under the strain of its own improbability.
Ellen believed the purpose of the stair was to carry her up, and so it never collapsed beneath her. But Jack knew otherwise. The only purpose of the Stairway was to collapse under the weight of those who pursued it emptily.
Not only did he know it, he was counting on it.
Somewhere, Kreiger was screaming, the sound lost to the fierce wind of Jack’s flight, his own ragged, desperate breathing, and the impossible slamming of his heart. It was one thing to know; it was another thing entirely to bet your life on what you know. There was always room for doubt, room for failure.
And failure assured one outcome only.
Jack never broke stride, simply thrusting the spearheaded weapon down between a missing step and catching the hook up under the wood. He’d wrapped the other end of the chain twice around his other hand, fist tightened with fear.
And then he leaped, sailing out over the precipice of madness.
* * *
Kreiger’s fingers shuttled with blinding speed across the Jabberwock’s blood-soaked keyboard, the bone-colored keys like the rows of teeth in a shark’s gaping maw.
It was not an act of choice, but desperation.
Long barbs of jagged steel hooked through his arms while thick spears of metal punched through the seat and base of the chair with its living leather skin, skewering his thighs, calves and feet, fracturing bones and splitting muscle like the great, jagged teeth of a dragon…
… or a Jabberwock.
Blood ran from his body, feeding thirsty floorboards where Jack’s rampant imagination, fueled by the influx of Nexus energy, was busily manifesting all
manner of reality, mundane and magical. Books were heaped along the wall in stacks, bubbling up from beneath like toadstools, piles tipping over and spilling across the floor. The plant behind him writhed and pawed the air with thick, snaking tendrils, its stalk as thick as his waist, the roots ripping out the small bucket that once contained them to burrow into the floorboards while thrashing limbs shattered the picture window.
Barely a foot from Kreiger’s hand, the lightning rod leaned absently against the desk, blue-white streams of electricity running across its surface. It could save him. There was energy enough to heal the muscle, to mend the bones, to stop the blood and take back control of reality run amok. But it was out of his reach.
Twelve inches away; it might as well be twelve thousand.
His only chance left was the Nexus.
* * *
“Jack can’t save you, sweet meat,” Hyde chided absently, thick feminine fingers reaching for the last ticket. “Jack can’t even save himself. You’re on your own, and that makes you as good as gone.” He giggled to himself as if Ellen might not understand his joke—might not be aware of him at all, though his naked bulk rested squarely on top of her. “But I’ll tell you what, muffin. I might just save you myself … if you’re nice to me. You can start by calling me … daddy.”
Ellen fought past the poison and fear infusing her flesh, a lethargy that pinned her arms and legs to the floor like corpse limbs. As Hyde reached for the ticket in her left hand, trembling as though stalking a butterfly that might take wing at any moment and escape him, she fought to bring her right arm up from the floor. It moved woodenly, numb, asleep. She could not feel her fingers, or even her arm, only a dull ache, a slow grinding pain in her shoulder as she willed the limb upwards, made deadened stick-fingers open, threw her lifeless palm up towards Reginald Hyde.
Her hand fell upon Nail’s jawbone, drawn to the totem of the Guardian; a Guardian sworn by Jack to protect her.
Blue-white fire leaped from the whitened bone in a startling flash that eclipsed the ghosts clinging like molted skin to Hyde’s tattooed flesh. It jolted her fingertips and palm like an electric shock, making her hand come alive, tighten down in a convulsion of pain. Her arm likewise spasmed with returning life, tearing the jawbone from Hyde’s shoulder in one ghastly wrench, gut-thread pulling from his skin in gory rips. Hyde let out a terrific shriek, retreating to clutch his shoulder in agony. The dancing fetishes and haunts that obscured his face fleeing for a moment, their images burned away under the jawbone’s witch light.
“Bitch!”
He struck her across the face, the petulant slap of a prim, old woman, or a small girl. It served only to revive Ellen’s flesh, forcing Lovebone’s venom from her body in a milky sweat that evaporated under the warmth of the blue-white light of the Guardian’s jawbone.
“Nail!” she whispered fervently, trying to invoke his spirit as her hand tightened upon the jaw, its long, powerful tusks standing out like weapons.
And with her remaining strength, Ellen slammed the great fangs of the gargoyle’s jawbone into the side of Reginald Hydes’s head.
“Nail!”
Then Hyde was screaming, the jawbone glowing a brilliant sapphire blue, smoke rising from the fat man’s illustrated skin as he tried with dying fingers to pry the thick fangs from his temple and neck.
“You’re mine!” he gurgled, blood-spattered froth running from his lips, lost in the rivulets of red pumping from his neck and skull. His eyes seemed to be craning, as if trying to look over his shoulder at the soul that pursued him, that bit down upon his head. “Your spirit is mine! I … own…”
Ellen kicked fiercely, pitching the fat Cast Out off of her and into the wall, smacking his head against the boards. Instantly, an eldritch fire engulfed him, burning neither Ellen nor the wooden floorboards—only Reginald Hyde. He clawed at his skin, charred black filling in the spaces between his intricately diagrammed flesh, and the room took on the smell of burning meat, old grease on a charcoal grill. A last, guttering squeal spewed from his lips as the Cast Out collapsed, enveloped in shimmering flames that burned and crackled with a low, growling noise that sounded to her like the satisfied snarl of some fierce animal.
The fire died away as suddenly as it began, leaving only a useless frame of blackened bones sprinkled with wasted talismans and one remarkably untouched jawbone of pure white impaling the blackened, burned-out skull.
Ellen rolled away, one hand still gripping the ticket, her knuckles white and painful. She scrambled to her feet, running towards the missing door and the platform beyond. The train waited, the doorway pulled back expectantly. She was to ride in the last car; there was nothing else after it. She stumbled through the doorway, and collapsed upon the floor, the grooved rubber mat where mud and rainwater collected. Her hands were ablaze. Her knees felt as if they were broken. Her head seemed ready to split.
Behind her, the door slid softly shut, and the wheels started in with a slow churring sound as they hauled the sluggish bulk of the train forward.
Only then did she realize that Jack was not on board.
* * *
Until now, Jack had not fully realized what it meant, moving the Saloon closer to the Nexus. Only scant feet of Wasteland dust separated the saloon’s outer wall from the abyss of madness.
His leap had sent him straight over the edge, the world disappearing beneath his feet along with all rational thought, all rational reality. What remained was simply the insistence of the mind and nothing else; the winged flight of dreams.
Behind him, Rebreather’s gloved fingers raked the back of his shirt, snatching at what had already escaped him, missed by a hair’s breadth only.
But it was enough.
The chain went taut and Jack began to fall, the Wasteland sand four stories below. There was a brief moment when the chain seemed to pull him back, steel links little more than elastic bands. But the moment ended abruptly with a splitting crack as the entire stairway all the way to the turn of the landing buckled under the combined weight of the two climbers and the momentum of Jack’s plunge out over the chasm.
Time was fractured into pieces, each recollected in separate heartbeat moments, like the last images of life burned upon a dying man’s eyes. He was free, suspended out over nothing. Below him, and a little ahead, the great bottomless chasm of madness; the endless fall into a realm without rule or limitation.
A heartbeat, and the moment was gone.
He was being snapped backwards, back towards the sweeping claw of the gray-clad Rebreather, some twisted avatar of death or time or evil or whatever—he did not know, and could not begin to guess. He knew only a spasm of terror, a fear that he had been wrong, as wrong as he had ever been in his whole life and more. And worse, he had deceived Ellen, misleading her into believing in him. Perhaps she should have taken Kreiger’s offer on that first day. Maybe he should have, too.
Another heartbeat; another moment lost.
Wood cracked. Boards twisted. There was a wrenching shriek as nails tore loose, and an instant of fear as Jack mixed his own screams into those echoing all around the Sanity’s Edge Saloon. Above, Gusman Kreiger was screaming, his agonized wails of pain muffled by walls and his own thickened pride and hatred. Below, Ellen screamed, a terrible frightened sound. Lovebone was also screaming somewhere below, the bone priest’s terror dying away quickly, burning out.
And Rebreather was screaming; an enraged, cheated, angry scream as he plunged headfirst off the collapsing stairway, dropping like a stone straight into the hardpan forty feet below. His cry ended suddenly with a muffled thud, then silence. He didn’t move from the dent in the sand, the settling Wasteland dust; fallen Icarus; Lucifer cast down.
Jack hit the roof over the platform, knocking the wind out of his lungs and sending a spray of stars across his field of vision as he bounced his head upon the shingles. The remnants of the stair collapsed directly beside him. Two more inches, and the twisted mess of lumber would have crushed his arm, or maybe
his skull. He couldn’t make himself care. He only stared blankly up at an empty sky of naked blue, the sun slowly rising, promising to make the day hot. A shaft of white smote the blue expanse like a great tower, a needle piercing heaven, a sword thrust into the farthest reaches of distant space.
The Nexus.
Jack lay there, dazed, listening. Over the thudding of his heart, the ragged desperate gasps of breath, there was still the sound of screaming. Kreiger. Ellen. More desperate now, both of them. And something else. The sound of steel wheels grinding against misshapen rails, fighting twisted metal in an effort to battle the chrome worm beyond the sabotaged section of track and into the free region of unaffected rail where it could accelerate to something approaching the speed of light, a high pitched squeal of burning, warping metal as the last train fought its way out of the Sanity’s Edge Saloon.
Ellen must be aboard, he thought, painfully sucking air into his lungs. He rolled over, easing himself up on one elbow and looking with sun-blinded eyes at the train.
It was twenty feet away from him and pushing steadily further. The train was leaving. Ellen was leaving!
Have to get away, he thought, pulling himself weakly along to the roof’s edge. One chance. No time left.
Jack dropped down from the roof to land on the edge of the platform, his knees singing out in pain. The train was still moving away, sparks spraying out behind it in great sheets of orange fire. He squinted at the dingy window in the back of the car, a windowed emergency door. Someone was inside, but the glare off the dust-caked glass kept the train’s secret.
Ellen, he thought. It has to be Ellen.
He rose unsteadily and started after the retreating train, forcing himself to run as best he could. So little time. If Kreiger was caught in the trap then he had seconds only. No more. He had to get to the train. He had to.
“Ellen?”
* * *
The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Page 55
