At least, not well enough to fool him.
He would have lamented her case, would have felt that uncommon—so very uncommon—twinge in his heart at her gradual decline, were it not for one very important nuisance of a detail. A detail he could neither refute for its sheer tangibility, nor explain. And it was that detail that stuck in his craw, rubbing at his brain the way a piece of grit rubs at the soft tissue of an oyster.
The book.
He could have dismissed all of it, Ellen included, save for the book. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her. She had a good heart and a pure soul. And as for her past, well, a part of him relished its dark side, lusted after that seamy nature of mankind housed in her flesh, ever-present in her mind. But an equal part of him deified the gentle nature of her soul. To come through so much, and still believe in goodness and love and the gentle side of human nature was a wonder.
Fools were remarkably interesting.
That was why he took her into his shop, took her under his wing. She worked hard and tried to be helpful, but he honestly did not need an assistant. Never had, never would. But while he did not need Ellen Monroe, he liked having her around. And for that simple reason and no other, he kept her there. And sometimes, all he did was watch her. Watch her… and wonder.
Now he had a clue to the riddle that was Ellen Monroe, only the clue made no sense, and that hardly made it a clue at all. Just another riddle.
Nicholas Dabble liked a riddle only so long as he had the answer. Without it, a riddle was a mystery, something he cared little for. Messy, hard to solve, the answers frequently unpleasant. No closure on the last page, no rambling confession by an unconvincing villain while an incompetent narrator served up spoonfuls of clues to the reader, ensuring the inevitable restoration of normalcy. Normalcy was a lie. Normal was what people thought existed when they closed their eyes, fell asleep at the wheel, saw nothing, knew nothing. Life was not normal, not some pocket watch you could wind up and read the hour of the day as the minutes rhythmically ticked away. Existence was an ugly, organic creature whose mind could not be fathomed simply by its appearance, a capricious monkey just as likely to bite you as nuzzle your hand. To get answers, you needed an abundance of both time and information, which Nicholas Dabble had.
But he had no answers to Ellen Monroe. No answers to the book she carried, The Sanity’s Edge Saloon.
And that troubled him.
Where had it come from? How had it fallen into her hands? And what did he actually know about her? Once, he would have thought everything. He saw her fall into the predictable routines of someone in her situation, and he followed her through these routines with a careful but not overly curious eye.
And then the book showed up, and Ellen was the one who found it, and Ellen was the one who read it, and Ellen was the one who seemed to understand it, if only subconsciously. It was enough to disjoint his carefully controlled world, a state of flux he could neither fix nor abide, but which would go on and on and on. She had upset his equilibrium.
But in spite of that, he truly liked her.
“Ellen, when you have a moment?”
“Okay,” she said, leaving a box of bestsellers on the floor beside the turning rack where he displayed them, the literary equivalent of candy at the checkout line. Nicholas Dabble was all about giving people what they wanted, whether it was good for them or not. “But I need to leave soon.”
“Tuesday.” He nodded. “I haven’t forgotten.” Dr. Kohler, every Tuesday and Friday. Ellen hated her twice-weekly sessions; hated more being late, being scolded, risking her freedom. So she pretended otherwise. Such a delicious conundrum.
Dabble knew a thing or two about Dr. Kohler, as well. The good doctor harbored secrets he told to no one, not even himself. But Dabble was a disciple of human nature. He could fathom most men with a glance, learn their most intimate secrets with a few well-placed remarks about the weather or the Indian’s chances of a pennant. And in the grand scheme of the universe, Dr. Kohler was essentially harmless, though like any insect, the closer you brought the microscope, the more frightening he became. But Dabble dealt with larger scales, greater distances that brought people like Kohler into perspective; a minnow in the ocean. Well, maybe more like a small leech or a fluke. Yes, definitely more like a fluke. No, what worried Nicholas Dabble about Dr. Kohler was that he was Ellen Monroe’s psychiatrist, and psychiatrists liked mysteries no more than he did. Only where he was interested in resolving the mystery and leaving the vessel of that conundrum (i.e., Ellen Monroe) intact, Kohler was more interested in dissecting Ellen’s mind, extracting the unusual pieces, and discarding them. He would make her scrub her own dreams with Borax and a wire brush until they were stripped raw of everything; until they sparkled like polished bone. Ellen’s soul would die and her heart would shrivel, and Kohler would congratulate himself on saving another piece of walking meat with a sanitized mind and an addiction to prescription drugs, ever pursuing the elusive state of normalcy. If Kohler succeeded, the mystery that was Ellen Monroe, the secret she guarded, would be lost, even to her. And The Sanity’s Edge Saloon would be lost as well.
He couldn’t allow that.
But could he plumb those secrets before they fell victim to Kohler’s weed-whacker methodology? The good doctor’s idea of delicate ministrations involved a mallet and a meat cleaver: Delicate work. Whack! Got to be careful where to cut. Shawk! Mustn’t hurt her too much. Wham!
He held Dr. Kohler in no greater disdain than he did most people.
Simply put, he hated the man.
“Do you still happen to have that book with you?” he asked. “The one we can’t seem to find anything out about?” As if she needed reminding.
Ellen nodded and turned back towards the counter, her bag stowed below the register, the book tucked safely towards the bottom. Dabble knew this. He knew a great many things about her. He knew for instance that Ellen always carried the book just as a dying man carries a Bible. And he knew that she dressed differently on Tuesdays and Fridays; days when she had her sessions with Dr. Kohler. It was for the same reason that she hated to be late to her appointments. But was it a conscious act of deception? Dabble knew a great many things about Ellen Monroe, but not everything, and that made him curious. And while frustrating, curiosity was a powerful and addictive drug.
Ellen returned with the book, the cover’s gloss already dulled, flakes of ink gone from the spine streaked white with cracks. The book did not even sit flat anymore, the pages fanning slightly. How many times had she read and reread it? In another month, this once-new book wouldn’t fetch a quarter at a church lawn social. What did she hope to find in its pages?
What do you hope to find, Old Nick? he chided softly.
He took the book from her carefully, slowly, the way a person might take something precious from the hands of a too-small child, hoping against reason that it could be rescued.
Ellen surrendered the book, releasing a little too slowly, reflexively compelled to hold on, to curl back and keep the book safe. But she finally relented, trusting him.
It would be her undoing; sometimes there simply wasn’t a good side, no matter how hard you looked.
Nicholas Dabble gently opened the book to the inside cover, moving the pages carefully, as if working with some two thousand-year-old text written on papyrus, and not a cheap paperback with a small bead of glue bubbled from beneath the spine and a low-grade paper that was designed not to last. The inside cover was naked and white, empty. He turned a slew of blank pages, pages he would have looked to for copyright dates, the ISBN, the publisher’s disclaimer, address, and even acknowledgements of other works borrowed and used with permission; all the gibberish and legalese that finds its way into a book’s first few pages and is promptly ignored by everyone.
Everyone but him.
Only there was nothing there to find, the pages blank as if cut and placed into the book without the typesetter realizing that they were empty. A fluke. An oversight. A mystery.
The Sanity’s Edge Saloon
By Jack Lantirn
A story he did not know. An author he had never heard of. The knee-jerk response was to blame a production error. There were probably a couple hundred books just like this one out there in the hands of unsuspecting booksellers and distributors, all of them suffering the same lack of initial information. There was likely a shipping supervisor desperately trying to recall all of these sad, nameless bastards of mass-production, and maybe a quality-checker with a written admonishment in his or her HR file, or perhaps even dismissed outright. But he doubted it. When called, the distributor did not know of the book, had never heard of it, could not find it by name or author. And more importantly, Dabble himself had never heard of it, could not find out about it. That was what made his blood run cold, his heart skip a beat.
This book should not exist.
It had never been written, its author never born. It was an anomaly that mocked him, and made him wonder—not for the first time—if something was coming. Something important. Something bad.
Ellen fidgeted, hands alternately smoothing and bunching the pleats of her dress, her eyes never leaving the book; a strung-out junkie watching her fix cook in the hollow of a bent spoon, a look not foreign to her. He was making her nervous.
On a whim, he tested a hypothesis. “Ellen, could I borrow this? I’d love to read it, if you wouldn’t mind?”
She hesitated, telling him everything he needed to know; she would never let him have the book. Never. “I guess it would be okay.”
She was lying, of course. He could read it on her face, hear it in her tone. It was not okay. It was anything but okay. But she would need an excuse now, some means of bringing it back into her hands without sounding obsessive or insane.
“But I need it this afternoon. Dr. Kohler asked to see it.”
And there was the second lie. Dr. Kohler was an imbecile, the link between Ellen Monroe and the book having escaped his feeble understanding. Fabricated reality and delusion reinforcement would be Kohler’s complete analysis of the book, and nothing more.
A woman browsing the front of the store stumbled against the box Ellen left near the counter. It scraped across the floor as the woman dramatically flailed her arms for balance. Dabble’s gaze fell across her, read her in an instant, and dismissed her.
But for his own purposes, he feigned concern. “Goodness!”
Ellen turned sharply, her attention momentarily distracted. “Are you all right? Let me help you.”
As she crossed towards the front of the store, Nicholas Dabble ran his thumbnail down the inside edge of the title page, slicing it as neatly as a razorblade. That fast, the page was folded in his fingers and vanished up his sleeve. Then he walked to the front of the store, book in hand.
“Why would someone leave a box there?” the woman complained. “I mean, anyone could fall over it.”
Dabble knew her; she frequented the store, poring over the romance section. Hair in a kerchief, peacock blue overcoat, yellow slacks struggling to contain the trunks of her legs, she was some kind of ridiculous bird; a ridiculous, squawking bird. “I could have fallen and broken my hip. Why would anyone be so irresponsible?”
“I’m so sorry,” Ellen said, but Nicholas Dabble knew her apology went unheard. The woman was into her spiel, the one she reserved for the assistant manager of the supermarket who would not honor an expired coupon, or the young retail clerk who failed to find the hand lotion she required, or anyone younger than she, anyone for whom hope has not died. “I thought I was only going to be gone a moment,” Ellen said, “and I left the books—”
“It was my fault,” Dabble interrupted crisply, holding the book out to Ellen. “Go on or you’ll be late. It’s my store. I’ll take care of this.”
The old woman turned a wrinkled face to him, jaw painfully narrow and lined, lips drawn into a pucker. He read her instantly, and knew she had not been kissed in many years, and had not enjoyed it much when she had. She liked cakes and pudding better; chocolate most of all.
“Go on,” he said again. “Everything will be all right.”
Ellen nodded, mouthing a thank-you to him that the old woman did not see, then grabbed her bag from below the register and left. She placed the book safely down inside and quickened her pace, dress flouncing nicely as she turned towards the bus stop.
Nicholas Dabble returned his attention to the bird woman. “You should go now.”
“That young woman is careless,” she insisted. “She has no regard for the welfare of others. Why, I could’ve fallen—”
“But you didn’t,” Dabble replied matter-of-factly. “You could have been hit by lightning, but that didn’t happen either. You could have married Richie Moynihan, who fancied you since junior high; you disliked him because he was fat and already losing his hair by eighteen, and thought you could do better. But you didn’t. You could have finished college, gotten a job, married and had children, grandchildren, all to help distract you from the emptiness in your soul. Or you could have been hit by a garbage truck and killed. Best not to dwell on what could have been.”
The old woman stared back at him, a tic causing her mouth to flinch on one side, her face trembling, eyes glassy and wet, swimming. She seemed about to say something, but all that came out was a small puff of air.
Nicholas Dabble turned away. “If you need anything, I’ll be in the back.”
* * *
The backroom of Dabble’s Books was storage, narrow aisles of steel shelves stacked floor to ceiling, artificial walls erected from cardboard boxes of books. Dabble threaded the cramped aisle-ways, sidestepping a short ladder from the last inventory. Unnecessary. Inventory was a task for those who did not know what they had, and Dabble knew everything there was to know about anything within his store. He knew how many of every copy of every book by any author was under his roof, down to the exact location, the date it was received, and the story it contained. He knew his store the way one knows a lover, knows her likes and dislikes, the places to touch that will bring her pleasure, the features she thinks are pretty (whether they are or not) and the blemishes she works to hide. Nicholas Dabble knew everything in his store in that way, and he reveled in the fact that here, if nowhere else, he was God. He knew the paper mites that attacked his stories, and the insects that dined upon each aspect of his collection of books, from the glue in the spines to the fiber in the pages. And he knew the spiders that feasted upon these insects, great milky-bodied creatures that stalked the shelves and rafters and cracks of Dabble’s Books, laying snare lines or lying in wait to pounce. And he knew of the mice—there were twelve, give or take a few to misadventure or simple fecundity—living in the walls, their turds left behind like fingerprints, who ate the spiders and scratched at the wood and, yes, chewed upon his books.
He bent his head and listened, hearing the shop door open, the creak of the hinges and the click of the latch. He heard the lumbering steps of the old woman as she left, grumbling to herself, empty and pointless. He had read it all in her face in those few seconds of their encounter, and it was neither unusual nor interesting, a tedious story, dull and trivial, and it made him sleepy. He was glad it was gone.
So very different from Ellen Monroe and her story, the bright soul hidden beneath sullied flesh, the warm heart buried inside a jaded mind. But there was more to her, a mystery of sorts, a riddle of the human condition. And that was a mystery he enjoyed, one he would like to explore.
Nicholas Dabble could not remember now exactly why he hired Ellen Monroe. The circumstance behind his decision seemed to have been diluted with the passage of time until he could no longer pinpoint exactly why or how it happened. And that alone was extremely unusual. But he was prepared to dismiss even this as simple malaise, a boredom that prompted his memory to wander, and perhaps encouraged him to alleviate his doldrums by hiring a new employee that might pr
ove a distraction, though nothing more.
Whatever the reason, he had placed a help wanted sign in his window. And before the end of the morning, Ellen Monroe had worked her way into his life.
Nothing had been the same since.
Barely an hour after the sign was up, Ellen Monroe stood before his counter asking about the position. She had no experience as a cashier, had never worked in a bookstore, and had no prior job history or even a reference beyond her psychiatrist. But she had a winsome look, a waifish figure, and wide eyes that suggested an innocence that Dr. Kohler seemed to indicate—between his saccharine assurances—was not fully representative of her past. Dabble liked that. He also liked her answer to his singular question: “Why do you want to work in a bookstore?”
“I like books,” she answered. “They’re like people. They begin and they end, and everything that’s really important happens in between. They have a kind of life about them. I know that’s strange, but when you read a book, for a short while anyway, you stop being a part of your own reality and become a part of theirs.”
She said she lived just down the street, and could work evenings and weekends if need be, so he hired her on the spot.
Nothing had been the same since.
At first he found it amusing that she was seeing a psychiatrist whose name he could find stamped on the base of any given urinal or piss-stained toilet in any public restroom. At first. Now he thought it suspicious.
Not unlike her walking in the very day he decided to hire someone, Daisy Miller fresh off the turnip truck. Like Kohler’s name, it seemed convenient, contrived. Had she landed on his doorstep due to his plan, or had he posted the help wanted sign due to hers?
The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) Page 5
