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

by Mark Reynolds

  Kreiger’s fingers clattered frantically at the keys, line after line of text running across the screen, telling a story; describing a way out. He didn’t look at the screen; didn’t need to. He knew what his own words were. And he knew what the voice from the Jabberwock was telling him.

  INELIGIBLE USER! VIOLATION! FIVE SECONDS TO SHUT DOWN!

  “Damn you, Jack,” Kreiger snarled, the keys turning first slick then tacky with the blood running freely down his wrists, across his hands, off his fingers.

  FIVE

  Credit where it was due, Jack had tricked him; lured him in under the pretense of helplessness. But Jack wasn’t helpless. Oh, no! The little fuck was far from helpless.

  FOUR

  Had Jack really known when he broke the seal, when he moved the Saloon that dangerous fraction closer to the energy of the Nexus? Was he cognizant of the power he would unleash? Had that been his plan all along? Lure Kreiger in, make him comfortable then catch him up in the jaws of a trap.

  THREE

  Bait to draw in the prey, and jaws to hold it fast. That was what he had told Rebreather. Was he dead now, too? Kreiger wasn’t sure. Maybe. Hyde was dead, that he knew. Too eager to please the flesh, too ignorant to know the spirit. Damn you, Jack!

  TWO

  The story was spinning out under his fingertips. A way out, a way through, a way to bring the road home to him. No fancy trains or silver tracks or endless rails of gleaming chrome such as would bind the imagination and shackle the dreams of countless Caretakers before Jack. Algernon was the last in a line of ignorant fools. Jack was … well, Jack was a different kind of fool. A clever fool. Maybe not a fool at all. Could have been friends, different times, different places, different circumstances. “It’s not fair.”

  ONE

  “Not fair.” Fingers chattering in lightning rhythm, story unfolding, pages riffling, ways opening. “I’m nearly…”

  ZERO

  “… free …”

  * * *

  Ellen beat against the smeary glass with her hands, the sharp slap of pain in her fists cutting through the dull aching wish that she would simply surrender to the exhaustion and the pain and the feeling of draining away, and collapse. Blood smeared the glass, splattered in faint sprays from her sliced palms. The ticket clutched in her hand had become sticky with blood.

  Outside, running after the train like the love-struck hero in some bad romance novel, a silver screen moment poorly written, was Jack. The bad ending. The hero was supposed to catch the train, sweep the woman into his embrace. They kiss; cue the music; the camera retreats into The End.

  This was all wrong. This was all completely wrong.

  “Jack!”

  The sound of her voice seemed distant and unreal, ears stuffed with cotton, brain buzzing and humming like a can of angry hornets. Her limbs felt wooden, her flesh numb. Even the sharp pain in her hands, the prickling stabs in her torn knees, had faded to distant whimpers for attention; no longer desperate cries of pain, but simple pleas for pity.

  “Jack!” Ellen whimpered, not knowing what else to do. The train was lurching and chugging forward, as if straining against an anchor, some chain holding it back, and when that gave, the train would whip-snap like a rocket—a chrome rocket on steel rails that stretched all the way from madness to the farthest edges of the universe by way of the Dreamline.

  The Saloon was fifty feet away now, and Ellen realized as Jack hobbled after the train, stumbling and favoring one leg, lurching in time with the locomotive, that she had never stood this far from the Saloon, never looked at it from this end.

  It looked so small.

  Jack was slowly gaining, using the train’s stalled efforts on the broken rails to reach it in time. To escape. To be with her.

  Outside of the chrome-skinned machine, beyond the endless rail and the melodrama carrying itself out upon that short stretch of track, the Jabberwock reached the count of zero, and an explosion engulfed the saloon, a cloud of all-consuming smoke and dust sweeping out like a tidal wave, the devouring blast of an atomic bomb.

  The explosion rocked the train, knocking Ellen to the floor. Jack fell, scrambled desperately to his feet, then started running again, the effort excruciating. He was running as fast as he could; running to stay clear of the pursuing cloud of smoke; running to catch up to her.

  Ellen tugged uselessly at the door handle, blood dragged across the bare metal as she pushed and pulled, desperate to wrench the door open, to get out before the train managed to free itself like some half-beached leviathan thrashing in the rising tide. If she could just open the door, she could get out. Maybe the train would have to stop and wait for her. Maybe it wouldn’t. She didn’t care so long as she wasn’t leaving Jack behind, leaving him here with nothing and no one. Leaving him here to die.

  “C’mon, c’mon dammit!” Then, more softly, “Jack, I didn’t know. I thought you were on board, I swear I did. Just run. Please, Jack. Please, God. Just run. Run!”

  The door stubbornly refused to budge, the train struggling ever forward.

  The cloud rolled outwards, sweeping out to engulf Jack as he reached for the narrow step outside of the emergency door, that slender toehold that would permit him to stowaway, to secret himself out, to bend his precious rules and forget all about this place and follow Ellen back into—

  Rebreather lunged from the boiling wave of smoke, coat white with Wasteland dust, one arm hanging limp, broken at the elbow. But the other swept around the Caretaker, and dragged him down.

  Ellen’s hands shot to the glass, smeary prints of dirt and blood. “Jack!”

  The ticket fell from her fingers, instantly falling apart into useless confetti, punched into oblivion as the train lurched with a final, momentous heave, outrunning the advancing cloud that swept over Jack and the monster, Rebreather, swallowing them both.

  As the train catapulted forward, Ellen Monroe was thrown headfirst into the door, the blow sufficient to smash the glass into a spider web of fracture lines, some inked lightly in red, blood seeping quickly into the seams. She stared for one crazy, chilling moment through the cracks, reality tilting away beneath her as she fell, and she saw the world retreat away…

  … and away …

  … and away …

  She was going home.

  THE LAST TICKET HOME

  The ticket fell from her fingers, instantly falling apart into useless confetti, punched into oblivion as the train lurched with a final, momentous heave, outrunning the advancing cloud that swept over Jack and the monster, Rebreather, swallowing them both.

  As the train catapulted forward, Ellen Monroe was thrown headfirst into the door, the blow sufficient to smash the glass into a spider web of fracture lines, some inked lightly in red, blood seeping quickly into the seams. She stared for one crazy, chilling moment through the cracks, reality tilting away beneath her as she fell, and she saw the world retreat away…

  … and away …

  … and away …

  She was going home.

  “Ellen, can you give me a hand with this?”

  Ellen looked up from the book she was reading, her eyes taking a moment to refocus. Nicholas Dabble, proprietor of Dabble’s Books, stood before a newly emptied top shelf with a cardboard box of books in his arms, looking at her through the prim, round spectacles he wore.

  “Sure.” She tucked a bookmark into the paperback—only a few pages away from the end—and removed the glasses she wore for reading, placing them next to the book on the countertop beside a large, lidded cup of now-cold coffee—cinnamon-flavored with lots of extra cream—from Serena’s Coffee Shoppe across the street. Then she slid down off the stool where she had spent the entire morning and much of this afternoon reading, straightened the pleats of her skirt a little, and with a perfunctory glance around the store—no customers, so no one needed her help—she walked over to the shelf where Mr. Dabble was already waiting.

  “Just hold this for me for a moment, will you please?” He trans
ferred the heavy box to her without awaiting a reply, and quickly scaled the stepladder that gave him access to the highest shelf in the store, some twelve feet up. The only books shelved that high were special interests; books that people did not browse for, but that they actually came up to him directly and inquired about in hushed tones as they might the advice of a priest on matters of some ecclesiastical quandary: special interest, collector’s editions, rare copies, out-of-stock, out-of-print. She leaned one edge of the box against the ladder, propping it up so that Mr. Dabble could easily reach the books as needed.

  “You’ve been reading that new book all afternoon,” Nicholas Dabble mentioned by way of conversation. He was taking the books from the box with extreme care, placing each one exactly upon the shelf, no shuffling or cramming, his precision akin to a curator placing rare artifacts into a museum exhibit. The conversation he attempted with Ellen was done very much without his direct involvement or interest. “Is it good?”

  “It’s very … engaging,” she replied.

  “Not a very stirring accolade,” Mr. Dabble observed, a leather-bound edition in one hand, the cover worn and cracked, once gold-embossed lettering faded nearly to nothing.

  “It’s pretty good,” she quickly added, unsure why she felt compelled to defend the writer’s work. “Its style is sort of … instinctive, kind of raw and prosy at the same time. It’s a little predictable, but fast-paced. It kind of holds your interest; makes you curious.” She wanted to add something else that she noticed about the book, something that she couldn’t exactly explain. There was something about it that seemed almost … familiar. But she could not quite put her finger on how, and thought it better not to mention it. It sounded crazy, and she didn’t want to go back down that road. “I don’t think I’m going to like the ending, though.”

  Mr. Dabble nodded, still not paying her any attention. He listened acutely to everything she said. He always did. But he seldom offered the usual cues that most people searched for by way of response: the facial expressions, the turn of the mouth, the widening or narrowing of the eyes. Nicholas Dabble was adept at human nature, but not human interaction.

  “So you like it.” It was more a statement than a question, a plain observation from her boss who had the uncanny knack of seeing through semantics and facades and the whole masquerade of the human experience, and cutting out the very heart of the matter for open display.

  She considered this for a moment before answering, “Yes.”

  Mr. Dabble paused in his single-minded task of arranging and shelving his books, turned to her and smiled warmly. His eyes were a brilliant green, so stirring that they could easily take someone unfamiliar with the proprietor of Dabble’s Books unaware, their penetrating gaze disconcerting.

  Ellen never found them so.

  “I’m glad,” Mr. Dabble said, a faint shake of his head that might have been a satisfied nod. Then his eyes darted up and over her shoulder. “I think we have a customer.”

  Leaning against the counter, back to them, was a man in a worn gray overcoat. “I’ll be right there,” Ellen called.

  “Here, hand me those,” Mr. Dabble instructed, descending the steps and taking the cardboard box from her. “Go and take care of our customer. We’ll finish this another time.”

  She turned and started back across the shop, brushing the dust from her hands. “Can I help you?”

  But the man at the counter had already left. There was the quiet click of the door as it closed behind him, and pale footprints on the floorboards. She stared helplessly out the front picture window and the glass-paned door, but there was no longer any sign of him. Just the gray overcast day and the near-empty street outside.

  “I wonder what that was about,” Ellen said then shrugged, about to return to helping Mr. Dabble when she noticed the book lying on the counter. It was the same one she was reading, the one she distinctly recalled marking the page of and placing neatly aside by her glasses and her cup of cold, cinnamon-flavored coffee. Only now it was lying out, the back cover and last page bent backwards and left facedown on the counter.

  She glanced back up at the picture window and the empty street under the gray, overcast sky.

  Standing on the other side of the road, hands jammed into the pockets of his gray overcoat, a man stared at her, the silent petition of a lost soul, eyes penetrating and haunted … and strangely familiar.

  Like a dream.

  Eyes staring directly at her; seeing her; reading her.

  Her right hand groped blindly, found the edge of the counter, and clamped down upon it until her fingertips felt like they were impaled upon nails. The pain became a towline, an anchor that kept her mind from reeling, kept her eyes from blurring and her knees from giving out and dropping her to the floor. The chasm between her and the stranger widened and narrowed and widened in arrhythmic fits and leaps, making her heart race, and her mind struggle against the waxy wall of emptiness and no-thought that protected her sanity from the truth.

  There was an explosive scream, a banshee wail she thought must be herself completely losing her mind before she realized it was not from her that the piercing sound erupted, but the train thundering down the street without tracks, surreal and enormous, the World Worm of ancient legend, its skin transformed into metal plates of soot-darkened steel and polished iron that eclipsed the large picture window and stole the stranger from her sight. The rolling wheels were like long bursts of thunder, a hurricane wind blasting scraps of paper and litter down the sidewalks, rattling the windows and shaking the books on their shelves.

  And then it was gone. And the stranger in gray was gone. And all that remained was an empty street, slate gray under a sunless sky.

  Everything was normal. Everything was as it should be.

  Well, almost.

  The only reaction that could battle free from the pandemonium of rampant images and thoughts and memories awakened in Ellen Monroe’s brain was a sense of impossible cold. She started shivering from head to toe like someone caught in the grips of a seizure, or found suddenly teleported, naked and alone, to the dark, frozen wastes of Antarctica.

  “Ellen?” Mr. Dabble said softly, as if trying to awaken her from a nightmare.

  And it was his voice, the sense of Nicholas Dabble’s presence beside her, which brought everything back, restored solid ground, shook the creases from reality and made everything right. She jerked suddenly, turning to him, startled and a little afraid.

  “Are you all right, Ellen?” Mr. Dabble asked. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  She tried to say something, but no sound was pushed from her throat. Just an empty breath shaped like a vague word, an uttered oath, a secret prayer.

  Jack!

  Her hands scrambled to pick up the nearly finished book, the one left cracked open and facedown by some stranger who appeared and vanished again with the surrealistic quickness of a bulleting train; reality’s secret track; the Dreamline. She looked at the page it was left open to, folded back so that it cracked the cheap glue of the paperback’s spine; the final page where the mysterious man in gray whom she did not know—could not possibly know—had left her a parting message.

  Preview of The Edge of

  Madness Café

  Read on for a preview of the next book in the saga of The Sea and the Wasteland: The Edge of Madness Café

  The Sea and the

  Wasteland: Book 2

  THE EDGE

  OF MADNESS

  CAFÉ

  DREAMS AND REGRETS

  Ellen woke with a start, throat holding back a scream; sleep no escape from the torments of a reality gone slowly insane. The madness invaded her dreams, filling her head with memories of times that never were, people she never knew, a world that did not exist. Sadness and despair.

  She’d left him behind.

  Sins lost in the jumble like so much of her past, displaced in the blackness she loosely termed her memory and revived in the darkness as nightmares.

&n
bsp; Outside her window, the storm made the light from a street lamp waver, sliced apart by the blinds and scattered across her bedroom in flecks of fairy light. Covers pulled up around her chin, her eyes examined each piece of darkness in turn, nightmare-induced fear dissipating slowly into a kind of featureless embarrassment. There was nothing there, of course. Nothing extraordinary. No monsters or apparitions, no psychopaths or leering madmen invading her apartment, watching her while she slept, restless eyes twitching with dark imaginings and diseased ruminations.

  No, the room was entirely normal. The only monsters she kept inside her head, and there was no protection from them. Like creatures stalking the edges of the light, always there, always waiting.

  That was the way madness worked.

  Ellen switched on the light by her bed, the soft glow driving back demons and shadows alike.

  For a time at least.

  The clock beside her bed read 5:26 AM; too early to get up, and maybe too late to fall back asleep. Maybe.

  Beside the clock, a dog-eared book, the spine creased, the cover worn and frayed at the corners from being read and re-read—how many times, she could no longer remember. The Sanity’s Edge Saloon. On the very last page was a hand-written note signed with a drawing of a jack o’ lantern.

  A message from Jack.

  It had been nearly two months since she’d seen him last.

  Actually, it would be more accurate to say it had been nearly two months since she thought she’d seen him last; according to her court-appointed psychiatrist, Jack Lantirn did not exist. Jack Lantirn, like so much of her memory, was little more than an elaborate fabrication, the results of severe manic depression and drug abuse that left her on the brink of suicide, susceptible to the suggested reality of fiction.

  The Sanity’s Edge Saloon.

  She had read the book over and over since that day, the day he left her the message, the day she saw him standing across the street from the bookstore like a man waiting for a train. He had been watching. She hadn’t known it then, but afterwards she was certain. Watching her; watching over her. The book was Jack’s autobiography and fantasy, a mirror of his madness, his twisted reality bound together into a loose collection of words and paper. And somehow she was an element of his insanity, a fellow traveler on his journey to the edge of dreams; cast in the role of friend, confidant, maybe even lover—yes, probably lover, too—she followed him through his mad tale until, suddenly and inexplicably, she found herself here, this staid, stable, unimaginative life.