The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2)

by Mark Reynolds

  That was one of the questions she was waiting to find out the answer to.

  * * *

  “And here’s your change,” Serena said politely, holding out a handful of coins that Ellen accepted a little awkwardly. “So how are things over at Dabble’s? Read any good books lately?”

  Ellen looked up, finding Serena’s eyes. They were the color of dark jade. Serena was beautiful in an elegant, timeless way, a fashionable woman of indeterminate years. The way she carried herself, the things she said and the comments she made, led Ellen to suspect that she was in her forties. But to be honest, Serena looked to be in her thirties. She had a kind of seriousness about her that seemed to defy youth, but an appearance that suggested it. Her auburn hair was long and straight, her waist tapered, her fingers thin and delicate. She had full lips that gave Ellen the impression that she knew how to kiss passionately, but for some reason had not done so in a long time—by choice, not circumstance. In some ways, Ellen thought that maybe she always came back to Serena’s Coffee Shoppe because of Serena. Because the woman was an enigma, a mystery she could not fathom, but which she found intriguing simply for its existence, like the Sphinx or the statues on Easter Island. She felt no overwhelming need to know the answer to the riddle, but found a certain comfort in knowing there were things beyond explanation; beyond the dissecting hand of science. Serena was a point of wonder in a jaded world.

  And therein lay the possibility of hope. Where there were things beyond explanation, there was a way to make the impossible possible, to realize the fantastical, to make unreality real.

  Just as Jack had done.

  “Actually, I’m reading a book right now that I like,” Ellen said, rummaging suddenly in her bag for The Sanity’s Edge Saloon. She realized as her fingers closed upon the spine that her hands were trembling, her fingers gone suddenly cold. What did she hope would happen? Did she need justification from a kindly woman at a coffee shop, or simply vindication that she wasn’t going insane? And worse, another facet of her brain was stricken, terrified she might let the book from her grasp, lose it, and lose her only physical contact with her imagined past.

  But she had lived enough of her life with reckless disregard for the consequences of her actions not to know how to ignore that screaming voice of panic. It was what sent her into one tailspin after another as she sought out various ways of achieving that dream-state of happiness, that Nirvana that she called the Dreamline. It had nearly seen her commit suicide—at least, that’s what her father and Dr. Kohler insisted. As she remembered it, she had put a screwdriver through her dealer’s throat when he tried to rape her while tripped out on mescaline and Demerol, killing him. That she remembered—well, sort of—but it was also in The Sanity’s Edge Saloon, so maybe she remembered reading it from that.

  Was it any wonder everyone thought she’d gone crazy?

  Serena looked over the counter at the book in Ellen’s hands, her expression a trifle expectant, a trifle bored. “I’m afraid I don’t read much fiction,” she remarked. “I find it too esoteric. No real sense of the living world.”

  Ellen stood there woodenly, one hand holding out the book, the other clutching the burning hot cup of coffee. Her face had gone slack with desperate recollections, ones that seemed real but were supposed to be fiction, and ones that seemed invented but were supposed to be true. Do you remember trying to kill yourself? Do you really? They told you all about it, but do you really remember the depression, the attempted drug overdose? Or do they simply want you to believe that you were taking those drugs to die, and not just to escape this reality? And why do you believe there’s a difference?

  “This one is about a kind of complexly layered reality,” Ellen said. “I’ve read it several times, and I keep finding different aspects to it, different … questions I hadn’t considered before. It’s deeper than it looks.”

  The woman behind the counter nodded politely, unconvinced.

  “The strangest thing is that no one seems to know where it came from,” Ellen added quickly. “The author doesn’t seem to exist. Neither does the publisher. And the shipper that we received the order from has no knowledge of the book whatsoever.”

  “A genuine enigma,” Serena replied, only the subtlest intimation of condescendence. She turned away, taking up the small frothing pitcher and placing it in a sink behind the counter. “You should ask Nicholas. I’m sure he has some idea about where it came from and who wrote it.”

  Turning a deaf ear to the cautionary voices in her brain, Ellen quickly added, “But he doesn’t.”

  At that, Serena looked up from the sink, the jade-dark eyes looking into Ellen’s as if trying to peer through them like some fish-eye lens in a doorway, and decipher the goings-on inside of her brain. “What do you mean, he doesn’t? Nicky knows everything.”

  Ellen knew her boss well enough to know that he hated being called anything but Nicholas, or Mr. Dabble. He allowed people to call him Sir if they were unfamiliar with him, but he did not tolerate diminutives of his name like Nick or Nicky. Even more unusual was the now-genuine interest Serena had in the book, an interest Ellen had never seen before in the coffee shop owner. Serena was polite, a good listener and a pleasant sounding board. But while she occasionally offered her opinion, she seldom showed real interest in anything. She simply went about what she was doing, tending to her own universe.

  Until now.

  “I asked Mr. Dabble about it, but he had no idea where it came from or why,” Ellen said. “He was very interested in it. I think he thought it was simply something that slipped the notice of the packer, or had been misidentified by some clerk at the publishers, or even someone with the Library of Congress. But he couldn’t find anything at all about it. I think it really bothered him. He told me to keep the book safe, and to not let anyone know about it.”

  Serena’s eyes flicked to Ellen’s face, and the young woman felt herself blush. “I’m not exactly sure what he meant by that. I mean, it isn’t a crime to write a book, or even to get it published and distributed without a whole lot of fanfare. I’ve just never seen anything like it. Underground publishing, maybe? Only it’s good enough that it should have been published by a regular book house.”

  “And Nicky knows nothing about either the author or the story?” Serena pressed, dumbfounded by this singular fact.

  “No. Nothing.”

  Serena’s hand came across the counter, the long fingers reaching out to lightly brush the glossy cover. It was the kind of reverent gesture afforded to one of the seven wonders of the world; a hesitant, tremulous brush of the fingertips, as if afraid to waken a sleeping dragon, or rouse an angry spirit, or simply wary of brazenly touching the hem of God’s robe.

  And suddenly Serena’s hand curled tightly, withdrawing as her gaze turned up and over Ellen’s shoulder. Ellen turned to follow her stare, and saw Nicholas Dabble open the front door and step out into the doorway of the bookstore. He looked up and down the street with only passing interest then returned his gaze to the front window of Serena’s Coffee Shoppe. It lingered there for a moment before he turned and went back inside. The sign on the glass door was turned from CLOSED to OPEN.

  “I should probably be going,” Ellen said.

  She put the book back in her bag, and turned to the condiment station to snap the lid on her coffee.

  “I’d love to borrow that book from you sometime,” Serena said, a trifle too eager.

  Ellen turned to her. “Sure, I guess.” It was a lie, and she was very much afraid that Serena knew that. The only thing more unnerving than Serena’s unnatural curiosity over the book was Ellen’s own need not to let anyone take it from her. It was silly, her hesitation running counter to her compulsion to tell people about it, that hope for insight into its nature; the book was the kernel of truth that proved she was sane. If others learned of it, it would confirm her story. But that did not change the fact that she would not, at any cost or for any reason, let anyone take the book from her. Her life was all
smoke and soap bubbles and wind; nothing was grounded; nothing was certain; nothing was indisputable fact. Nothing, except that she must not let anyone take The Sanity’s Edge Saloon away from her. Of that—and maybe only that—she was very certain.

  “I should go,” she repeated, taking her coffee and hurrying out the door, the small chimes ringing distantly as she left.

  * * *

  Serena’s eyes followed the girl’s willowy form across the street to Dabble’s Books. She stared long and hard at Nicholas Dabble’s shop, looking at the man on the far side of the glass. He seemed to be looking back at her, a brief glance before retreating deeper into the store, disappearing behind layers of shadow and reflection like the charlatan he was. And Dabble’s look was not kind, a subtle glare that was a little curious, a little covetous, and a little angry.

  What are you hiding over there, Nicholas? she wondered. And what is it about that book? You know every story ever told, and every storyteller who ever gibbered out some nonsensical piece of indulgent fluff while the real world flitted by and beyond his reach. Don’t tell me there’s a new player in town.

  She felt a chill pass through her like she was a kite caught high in the gusts of March, and she started to shiver.

  It cannot be that, can it? Not now. Not after so long.

  Serena reached for a delicately crafted teacup, the blend of tea smelling faintly of rose hips and peppermint, but the cup knocked over, tea spilling down on the floor, the small handle snapping off. She only stared at the dripping puddle of off-green water, the broken pieces of the teacup, and wondered what it could mean. Wondered what to make of spilled tea, broken china, Ellen Monroe, and a book called The Sanity’s Edge Saloon; a book that Nicholas Dabble had never heard of before, and of which he confessed to know nothing about—a fact alone that was impossible.

  Outside, clouds shuttled across the sun, turning the street dark, and Serena wondered for the first time that morning what had become of the limping man who stalked Ellen Monroe, the man carrying a bent lightning rod for a staff.

  A FLY IN THE OINTMENT

  He had escaped.

  No easy feat, defying the universe. To turn into the whirlwind of God and shake your privates in His direction was an affront that demanded the utmost of certainty, an absolute conviction of one’s place in the cosmos.

  And lightning reflexes lest the offender lose said privates as punishment for insurrection and poor manners.

  But that kind of reprobation really wasn’t part of His milieu anymore. No more floods or columns of fire or Angels of Death visiting the firstborn of every household not marked by the blood of the lamb. No, not His style at all.

  But while spared his life, such as it was, he lamented the loss of those simpler times when everyone had their place: rules to follow, rituals to observe. Men. Gods. Or even one such as himself.

  And simply because he escaped with his balls intact—he suspected they still worked though there was no proof of that yet—it did not mean he escaped unscathed. The damp chill of morning made his hands ache, the joints cemented together with ground slivers of glass. And his legs wept where the bones had been splintered and poorly healed like lovers enduring the heartache of prolonged separation. It was dull and constant, and he wasn’t sure if it would ever go away.

  It served as a reminder to that old axiom: bliss was fleeting, pain eternal.

  But he was alive. Others faired less well, the Wasteland burying their bones and scattering their tortured souls upon the eternal wind. They were gone from the world, gone from the mind, gone from reality on all of its separate planes in all the directions. And he seemed to be following in their footsteps. Limping like a cripple, his staff as useless as an umbrella in the desert, but he was going the way of the forgotten just the same, unable even to stop himself.

  He still clutched the paper with its delicate, purposeful folds and its promises of flight. Hope came in strange places, portents no longer carried by doves or witnessed in rainbows, but folded into paper airplanes made from old museum flyers. What a strange world this was; nothing at all like before.

  Or maybe you’re just crazy, eh, old man? Can’t rule out that possibility, can we? No, not when it’s the most obvious answer, the most reasonable, the most sane. Occam’s razor, right?

  There was that voice again, that persistent whisper in his head, soft-spoken counsel, deceptively simple and pure and very possibly true.

  Not for the first time, he found himself on the verge of tears. And he hated it. He hated the salt that begged to spill from his eyes. He hated the tight knot in his throat that choked this world’s stale air. He hated himself for letting this happen, and he hated the universe that mocked him, the once-mighty brought low.

  Mostly, he hated Jack.

  “You aren’t supposed to be here.”

  He looked up as two men approached; one tall and lanky, skin like black coffee, face etched with the lines of a life poorly spent. The other’s skin was the color of tarnished bronze, old and neglected, eyes glazed, the mind behind them faded. He read them with a perfunctory glance, their stories superficial and unimaginative. He would have dismissed them outright, but for the simple fact that they were standing before him and would not go away.

  God, how he hated Jack!

  * * *

  Lucas Bertram stared warily at the man squatting in a precarious cave of junked cars, a crooked staff in one hand, a piece of paper clutched in the other. “Benway don’t like people hanging around the junkyard. Pays us to make sure of it. Now get lost.”

  Lucas stared evenly and tried not to appear uncomfortable. He actually couldn’t care less if people hung out in William Benway’s precious world of garbage, but Benway paid them each ten dollars a week to make sure Benway’s Scrapyard didn’t become a “hangout for riffraff.” And make no mistake, Lucas and his friends were included in that category. There were rules: stay out of the yard between ten and six; take nothing; no drugs, alcohol, or hookers; and the employee washroom was off-limits. Lucas got the impression that Benway slept better at night knowing he helped the less fortunate.

  But it was easy money; who in their right mind would steal trash?

  The trespasser inclined his head, staring up at them from under a wide, drooping hat like a traveling lightning rod salesman. “You’re telling me that you are the guardians of garbage?” he asked, bemused. “I’ll grant you, that’s a new one on me.”

  Lucas continued to stare at the man atop his throne of bald tires shaded by a canopy of flake board, his lord’s staff of tarnished copper and iron in one hand, his kingly robes a battered gray overcoat. But the man held his chin high, and he spoke like an emperor with an accent that might have been British, or maybe just snooty American. And while he talked crazy, he had remarkably clear eyes; different-colored eyes.

  Crazy Moses.

  That was how Lucas knew him; how everyone on the street knew him.

  Honestly, no one actually knew Crazy Moses. No one even knew his real name. He never mentioned it, and everyone was afraid to ask, the man an enigma in the sub-strata of the indigent.

  Like his friends, Lucas was the residue scraped from the bottom of society’s collective shoe. That kind of callous disregard made you stick tight to your fellow refugees, if only because no one else would. He’d grown accustom to them just as he’d grown accustom to his world, small though it may be. He knew the dealers and the players. He knew the restaurants that threw out old food and the restaurants that dowsed their scraps in Clorox—to keep away vermin, they said. He knew the prostitutes who wouldn’t give his sort the time of day—high-nosed bitches—and he knew the whores he could get a hand job from for twenty bucks. He didn’t have twenty bucks, but it was always nice to know where a man could get a good hand job. All except for Marco who had his back this morning; Marco’s pecker was so bad off, he sometimes cried when he peed. The whores wouldn’t touch Marco for anything, not even the junkie whores who would do things for a fix that most people, in good cons
cience, could not even imagine. Marco wasn’t long for this world, and Lucas suspected this world didn’t much care. Piss on you, Marco. The world has eaten you up and shit you out; all that remains is to bury you in the kitty litter.

  “I theen thith guy before,” Marco chimed in. Marco could not remember his age or even his last name, and his words were garbled by missing teeth and killed brain cells, but he remembered being married once to a woman named Tina Barrone—her maiden name; he could not or would not remember what it was after. That was nearly the sum of Marco’s memory. Tina, a rare beauty, so he claimed, left him: maybe she died or maybe she started balling the butcher; Marco’s memory failed him on the finer points, and the others did not press. What difference did it make now, anyway? Here he was and here he would stay. That was the extent of Marco’s story, such as it was.

  But no one knew the story of Crazy Moses. They had all seen him around, of course. Their lives were reduced to minutia, so they tended the details with great diligence. They took in the small aspects of the microcosm they scavenged, the world beneath the notice of the surrounding herds with their clean clothes and their washed hair and their full plates, going to work, going to the store, going anywhere that the four who patrolled Benway’s world of garbage were denied. War in the Middle East? Who knew or cared. Crooked politicians? Not really sure who was in office anyway; didn’t vote. But ask about a new bum in town, walks with a staff and talks to himself and is always following that pretty girl from the bookstore? Sure, we know him. Call him Crazy Moses, or sometimes Mumbling Shepherd or Jesus Hannibal Christ. Or sometimes just Stalker. Yes, they knew of him. Nothing in the neighborhood escaped their notice because no one hid things from them.

  No one cared enough to try.

  “I was important once,” the intruder answered lightly. “There was a time when I made things happen; tremendous things; terrible things. Shook the earth by its heels, slapped the collective face of humanity and woke it up. And look at me now.”