And that was where it all started to get strange.
According to absolutely everyone, Jack Lantirn did not exist; simply a character in a book by an author of the same name; an author no one could identify. She asked her boss down at the bookstore what he knew about The Sanity’s Edge Saloon, and Nicholas Dabble said nothing; strange because the proprietor of Dabble’s Books possessed an almost supernatural talent for information. He cataloged the entire store in his head; not just titles and authors, but every word from every page. He seemed, in fact, to know everything about anything, a living warehouse of information and utterly unconcerned with the profundity of it. When she pressed him as to why he did not do something more interesting with his gift, he replied that information was both inherently useless and boring, and that it was only the application of information that piqued his interest.
So it was to her amazement and his that Nicholas Dabble knew nothing about The Sanity’s Edge Saloon. The single paperback copy had arrived mixed in with a distributor’s shipment a couple months ago. It did not appear on the packing slip, and the shipper, when she called, had no record of the book whatsoever: not just of sending them a copy of the book, but even of its existence. The publisher’s shipping agent, after fifteen flustered, fumbling minutes on the phone, finally declared that Ellen was obviously mistaken as to its origin.
The book, like its author, should not exist. There was no explanation as to how it fell into her hands that day, the day she had last seen—correction; thought she had last seen—Jack Lantirn, her friend and lover—or imaginary friend and lover—who may or may not exist. But the book was real, and that counted for something.
Didn’t it?
She slipped out from under the covers and padded softly about the apartment, her bedroom too hot and stuffy to be comfortable. The windows in the other room were open, and the breeze against her naked skin felt good, reminiscent of something else, something before, something not entirely in concurrence with this reality.
The lines between sanity and madness had blurred, the boundaries between real and imaginary neither hard nor fast. They were like lines in the sand, or chalk rubbed on the sidewalk; easily smudged, easily erased.
But since no one else seemed to notice, unless the whole world was going crazy, she was losing her mind. Again.
And she wasn’t sleeping very well lately, either.
She stepped easily through the sparsely furnished rooms, easterly windows pale with eventual dawn. Naked in the secrecy of darkness, she thought back to that other life, or maybe that life she lived only in her head, … or in someone’s head, leastwise. The breeze against her skin reminded her of the Wasteland and the saloon. And that reminded her of Jack.
Jack. Her flawed hero, her noble fool, her guardian and protector and…
… Caretaker.
There was something there, but like everything else, it was slippery, twisting from her grasp. Her memory was like a stream, facts like fish she was pulling out with her bare hands, only to have them wriggle loose and get lost again in the icy waters. Jack haunted her thoughts and tormented her dreams, his very presence a recrimination.
She’d left him behind.
As for that time before—before Jack and the Wasteland and the Saloon and everything else that, so she was told, were simply properties of her imagination—she remembered even less. All of her life before that day in the bookstore was meaningless, her past like words on a page written in a language she did not understand. She knew bits and pieces, but it seemed to exist without any personal significance. Just words on a page.
The back window of her apartment looked down into a narrow ravine of trees. Obscured at the bottom, a thick river ran like a gray, greasy snake, surrounding the town in its coils. She knelt down, folding her arms on the sill and resting her head. The dreams were incomprehensible; what she remembered made no sense, and what she forgot drove her from sleep on the verge of screaming.
Jack had sacrificed himself, and for that, she was saved.
But for what? Court-mandated therapy sessions twice a week, random drug screenings, a mediocre job at a bookshop, no friends, no family, no one at all who cared whether she lived, died, went to the park, or went insane. No one … except Jack. Night after night, he lived on in her dreams, flickering recollections of places beyond the written page, as though they existed in her memory before reading them in his book, his tale of overdone metaphors, fragments and run-on descriptions.
Then there were things she knew only from what she read, having not witnessed them herself—assuming she had witnessed anything at all. She never saw Rebreather fall from the stair outside of the saloon; she was already on board the train, the train meant to take her and Jack out of the Wasteland and back to reality. Only Jack didn’t make it, and Rebreather didn’t die in the fall. The raging lunatic charged from the smoke of the destroyed Saloon, body broken, limbs bloody and dislocated, driven solely by madness and his hatred of Jack. He dragged him down, and the train left them behind, Ellen its only occupant.
And then she was here, awake from the dream, the book ended. Survivor’s guilt. She had escaped. Jack had not.
Ellen wiped absently at a tear that seemed to have found its way down her cheek, its trail cold in the breeze. So frustrating, living a life that did not exist. But where was the harm in it, really? She had no past, no memory of before the Sanity’s Edge Saloon. That was what she couldn’t get through to Dr. Kohler. What was the point of living solely in the now, in this reality grounded on real people and real things and real places, when she had no memory of any of them? It was a waste of time, the effort to attach meaning to the meaningless.
The dreams were more than willing to give her everything she needed, everything significant and tangible and real…
… except permanence.
She stood up carefully, feeling light-headed and insubstantial, like she herself was caught in a dream. Pulling a quilt from the back of a chair, she wrapped it around herself and curled up to watch the sky slowly brighten, scalloped shells of gray and white clouds overtaking the dark simplicity of night. After a time, the wind turned cool and damp, and she fell back asleep to the patter of rain against the glass, her dreams more pleasant in the hours of predawn, the world caught between the infinite possibility of night and the boundaries of the waking day.
* * *
Outside, a figure in a battered overcoat watched the windows on the back of the apartment building where Ellen Monroe lived. He watched her move like a ghost through the rooms, watched her nakedness with a kind of trembling awe zealots afford visions of the Madonna. But he knew her better than that; a savior maybe, but pure of neither body nor mind, simply of heart.
But oh, what a difference that could make.
He watched her, her confused expression and winsome look framed by distant, high windows looking out over endless expanses of reality already made. He saw the tear upon her cheek; could smell it from all the way down here in the alley, picking its fragile scent from out of the rot of neglected garbage, the sticky odor of late summer grass and leaves, the acrid smell of wet asphalt.
The rain spattered down upon him, and that was a wonder also, but one whose novelty had worn thin. The changing weather rubbed at his bones, aching scars that would never fully heal.
But despite his discomfort, he watched Ellen Monroe; watched her closely; as closely as a lover, or a father, or the penitent man seeking redemption at the foot of the Virgin.
Soon, he thought—maybe a prognostication; maybe a prayer. Soon.
He turned and shuffled away with the night, the crooked staff of tarnished copper and iron tapping away at the sidewalk, knocking out a fading rhythm like the ticking of an old clock.
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The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Page 57
