His hold upon sanity was beginning to slip.
If you were trapped alone on a deserted island, what three books would you bring with you to read?
I’m sorry. I didn’t have time to pack.
Then I expect you are supremely fucked.
I expect that may be so.
I suppose you’ll just have to write your own book and read that.
I suppose you may be right.
He was going just a little bit insane.
Is that like being just a little bit pregnant?
Let’s not go there.
Pregnant? Or insane?
Insane. And I’d rather not go down that road.
Afraid you’ll recognize the landmarks?
“Yes,” he whispered, voice harsh from disuse and desert air, so alien to his ears it sent his mind into a panic, a fear of others having returned against all odds.
But of course there was no one but himself. He had destroyed everything and everyone. Rebreather was the last. How long ago he was killed, Jack could not remember, time meaningless, rendered immaterial by the lack of anything to govern: the endless sky, the endless Wasteland, and himself, Jack Lantirn.
Days passed eventually, an endless succession of moments that warped into forever, each a separate slice of eternity. The nights were better. He would drift into an exhausted sleep where time passed without notice. This is what it feels like to be dead; it doesn’t feel at all. Eventually, the nightmares would come and remind him that all of this was his fault: the outcome, the lives he upset the way a bull upsets teacups in a china shop. Sometimes he woke up screaming, unable to fall back asleep for fear of their return.
But sometimes, in that brief slice of twilight before dawn, there would be good moments, dreams where Ellen would come to him, where they would talk like long-time lovers, speaking of things of no consequence that are somehow important and meaningless both at once, and are almost always forgotten after being said. He kept those moments close, a shield against the madness. And where he could not mark the passage of days, the paradox of the sun rising and setting in an eyeblink composed of seemingly endless, consecutive moments that lasted forever, each to itself, these dreams were precious and sacred and remembered in near-perfect detail.
She would not fault him his little inaccuracies. For love’s sake. No, she would not fault him for those.
The dreams he kept like those first moments in the Wasteland when he discovered his mistake, pearls of time polished over and over again, moments only, but ones he traveled down like a ribbon of forever highway.
He thought Rebreather was dead; he was wrong.
The fall from the stairway, three stories to hardpan as unforgiving as concrete, had not killed the Cast Out. Hatred powered his shattered body forward like a damaged machine grinding towards complete destruction, the remnants of his fragmented sanity drowning beneath animal compulsions to slaughter and kill. Rebreather was Jack’s first forever moment, a scar he would carry for eternity, their final encounter branded into his memory, its raw edges waking him in the night, leaving him sleepless, eyes watching the unshadowed Wasteland for signs of the Cast Out who simply would not die.
Nights in the Wasteland were long and cold.
Jack chased the train, hoping to somehow cheat a fate he had written himself to enable this very moment, to enable Ellen’s escape. It was folly, but the realization could not assuage the fear, the uncertainty. Had he done right? Would she be free? Would she forget the Wasteland, forget him, forget everything? Limping from the wreckage of the collapsed stair, the stink of Hyde’s burning flesh like burnt pork and fried electrical insulation. Above him, the agonized screams of the sorcerer, Gusman Kreiger, snared in Jack’s trap, doomed and knowing it. And over his plaintive howls, the countdown, mechanical and meticulous, counting away reality and sanity both. It was down to seconds.
And he was afraid. Afraid of the reality he set into motion. Afraid of being alone. Afraid he would never see her again. She doesn’t need you. She never did. She will forget you. She will forget everything, King of Nothing.
He wanted Ellen, wanted to sink into her embrace, wanted to kiss her lips, run his fingers upon the smooth skin of her throat and down the small of her back. He wanted to lose himself in the smell of her hair, to have her forgive him and tell him that everything would be okay. So what if it meant this reality, this Wasteland hell, would go on forever. He could endure if she would stay. He wanted her. Needed her.
If he could just reach her, if he could just get to the train. If Ellen never left him then the story would never end, and if the story never ended, he and Ellen could stay here … forever.
All rationales for fear are but empty justifications.
You have gone quite mad, you know.
Hobbling after her, knee stiff from the fall, ankle hurting from the day before, that yesterday that felt like a lifetime ago—yesterday, Rebreather murdered Nail—he saw into the train. Ellen, hands pressed against the back window, eyes filled with tears, lips shouting words to him that he could not hear over the countdown and the metal-on-metal squeal of the wheels, sparks flying as it fled this reality, taking Ellen with it.
He had to catch the train; he had to try. Ellen, don’t leave me!
“Three … Two … One …”
The last remnants of reality exploded.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
With a horrendous whump, the Saloon disappeared within a cloud of smoke and debris, a roiling cloud of dust spewing out in all directions. Jack faltered only once, that first ear-splitting boom that made his muscles lock, his back peppered with splinters and grit. Then he was running; nothing left behind him and Ellen so close, her hands pounding the glass, bleeding into the web of cracks.
You knew how this would go down. She must be set free, or you are not the Caretaker. And only a Caretaker can use the Nexus. You had five tickets out of here. Four are already gone. She must go, Caretaker, and you must stay. You know this. If she stays, you will both be trapped in a spent world, a wasteland, the Nexus refusing your petitions. You will join the Cast Outs, mad and powerless, the desert made whiter for your bones. And Ellen will die too, victim of your inadequacy and cowardice. You don’t want that; you know you don’t want that. You know what you have to do. You’ve already made your decision. Now live with it.
But he couldn’t. Between knowing and doing lay a chasm of uncertainty.
In some strange way, he owed his life and Ellen’s to Rebreather. So what if the Cast Out’s motivation was only to kill him. His bloodlust had tipped Jack’s hand, made him the Caretaker instead of a victim to his insecurities.
He remembered the horror on Ellen’s face a fraction before Rebreather grabbed him from behind, sending them both crashing upon the tracks. Jack struck the ties, flesh clawed over by sharp stone, splintered deadwood hacking into his forearms and palms, racked against his knees and chest. And Rebreather fell upon him, the Cast Out writhing and squirming in an effort to raise himself up, free a weapon.
Jack remembered looking up and seeing the endless track running out before him, empty. In that split second of distraction, that moment of attack, the train had pulled out of the Wasteland like a bullet from a gun. Gone. Not disappearing into the distance, just gone. The train had left for distant realities, and taken Ellen Monroe with it.
And it was not coming back.
He understood Rebreather then. Understood how the Cast Out could drive his flesh to superhuman feats, his hatred sacrificing piece after piece of his sanity and soul to the roaring fires of madness, holding off the grave a little longer with coins carelessly flung in the devil’s direction. Powerful and destructive, the rage asked only for a direction…
… like a bullet from a gun.
Jack threw the Cast Out aside as easily as one throws off an old blanket. Then he turned and lunged, bloodied hands tight upon the giant’s neck, fingers finding their way through the grime and dust-saturated fabric to the grizzled, scarred flesh of
Rebreather’s throat.
Once Rebreather could have fended him off easily, shrugged him aside like an annoying insect. But that time—separated from this one by only minutes—was forever ago, and impossible to retrieve. Since that forever-ago moment, Jack had shot away most of Rebreather’s left knee. The fall from the Stairway dislocated the Cast Out’s shoulder, his arm smashed so that it hung awkwardly, loose and twitching with spasms of pain that Rebreather’s madness short-circuited before they could reach his brain lest he be paralyzed with agony. He wheezed and rasped beneath the canvas gas mask, the inside covered with blood coughed up from rib-punctured lungs. Once undefeatable, Rebreather was now a limping cripple driven solely by his deep-rooted insanity and all-consuming hatred. It might yet prove sufficient to dispatch a new Caretaker, one unfamiliar with madness. Rebreather knew psychotic ambition like his own hand.
He struck Jack in the temple, sending him sprawling, and crawled slowly to his feet, all of his weight balanced upon the still-good leg.
Jack’s hand groped the edges of the track, closing upon a stray spike. A small detail, really; the kind of thing forgotten by workers repairing the rail—workers who never existed repairing a rail that existed since the beginning of time. A detail Rebreather would not even have noticed; it was for this sin that the madman was condemned to walk the way of the Cast Outs.
Jack’s fist tightened upon the rusted steel and he turned, burying the point into Rebreather’s good knee.
The Cast Out collapsed, pitching forward upon the tracks with nothing to break his fall. There was a terrific howl of pain, Rebreather’s voice a desert-hardened rasp, and Jack fell upon him, a predator attuned to the killing. He caught Rebreather’s coat in both hands, holding him by the collar and driving the man’s head at the rail. There was a terrific chunk sound as the Cast Out’s skull banged against the steel, a kind of pulpy smack like a piece of half-thawed meat striking a metal countertop. Rebreather’s right arm battled furiously between trying to free the spike from his leg, trying to lever himself up off his shattered left side, and trying to stop Jack from killing him.
In his indecision, he was lost.
Jack drove Rebreather’s head against the rail again. Chunk!
And again. Chunk!
Chunk!
Chunk!
He continued to bash Rebreather’s head against the steel until the man’s arm stopped flailing, falling as silent and still as a rag doll’s limb. That was all he was now. Rebreather was gone. The monster had vanished in Jack’s mind and left behind nothing but a raggedy doll, a smelly sack of old clothes and dry bones and blood. Complete mental disconnect.
The track turned red and wet. At first, only a smear, a leafy pattern of crimson upon the rail that evolved into a splatter, which soon ran down across the steel and into the cracks in the blackened ties. And the pulpy smacking noise was buried beneath the Caretaker’s screams. When he started; he wasn’t sure. What he meant; a mystery. But as he fed the Cast Out’s blood to the greedy Wasteland dust, he screamed one word over and over: “Wait!”
He cast the limp body aside, exhausted, and stumbled backwards over the rails to fall upon the unforgiving sand. No longer screaming, he simply stared, looking for answers and finding only empty sky.
The first of his forever moments, it played itself out again and again in his nightmares. His first act as Caretaker, lord and master of the Nexus, was the brutal murder of a crippled lunatic.
Congratulations Caretaker, a voice sounding suspiciously like Gusman Kreiger’s whispered. And what will you do on your second day?
* * *
Ellen still needed him.
Or was it that he still needed Ellen?
Notions flitted into existence, spun out their lives like a flurry of mayflies, and fell lifeless upon the desert sand, husks left behind to recount their stories in silence like gravestones or forgotten diaries.
Slowly, he began gathering the pieces together.
The sun was higher, bright and distant and blazing white. It burned at his arms and face. Another scorcher in a world that never knew rain, or clouds, or cool autumn breezes. This was not Earth and he was not rotating around its yellow sun. This was the Wasteland, and the sun was the sun, but it was not his. The moon would rise tonight, and it would be full because it was full every night. This was not Earth. This was the Wasteland.
And he was the Caretaker.
Another remembered moment.
When Jack came to, Rebreather was gone, only the Cast Out’s clothing left behind, cast in his shape like the shedding of some forgotten reptile. That was the way of the Wasteland. With forever on its side, eventually it won. The Wasteland always won. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
He took the Confederate-gray overcoat, shaking the bone-colored powder from the sleeves; the last remnants of Rebreather now reclaimed by a reality he had fought against all of his life. Rebreather certainly wouldn’t need the coat any longer. Purged from this place upon his death, all traces of the Cast Out were fading; even his stink was gone from the fabric. It was threadbare and worn; but for that, it told no story of the man Jack knew only as Rebreather. What his actual name was had long ago been forgotten by everyone, including Rebreather himself.
And as Jack donned the coat, the last of Rebreather’s possessions, an assortment of weapons and clothing and rattling trinkets, calcified under the face of the blazing white sun to become a wind-blasted outline eroding into dust. Jack hardly noticed as he walked away, scattering the Cast Out’s remains beneath his feet.
Rebreather had finally freed himself from the Wasteland.
When are you leaving, Jack? the voice asked.
He wasn’t sure.
Maybe you should have the undertaker set aside an extra box, just in case?
Fuck you!
Fuck me? Look around yourself, boy-o. You tell me who’s fucked.
* * *
Another crystalline moment.
He found the Nexus by instinct, feeling the roots of power in a small patch of sand. As he neared it, he could feel it in his chest, a shiver in his solar plexus. This would be the place to start. It was the beginning and the ending, the center from which all things came. All the rest had been blasted to flinders and scrap, his doing. Ten feet away, the railroad tracks had been ripped apart by the explosion and strewn like taffy among the debris. Ahead of him, maybe thirty feet, the edge of reality. The tracks ran out across this emptiness before, suspended from nothing, resting on air, stretching out into the distance until the lines met in a blur of chrome-bright steel and disappeared altogether over their own event horizon. But that was before. Now there was nothing beyond the edge but emptiness.
So much to do.
He found a length of pipe in the wreckage and thrust it into the dust directly over the Nexus. It would begin here, he thought.
Everything must begin somewhere.
* * *
And another moment.
Jack sifted the wreckage like a beachcomber searching for trinkets on the Jersey shore. Most was garbage, but one thing survived miraculously unscathed. And what made that a wonder was that it had not existed at the time of the blast. It had never existed at all, actually.
Under the failing light of dusk, Jack Lantirn found a book. His book. The Sanity’s Edge Saloon. He marveled at the glossy newness of the cover, a cover he might have imagined in his arrogance, but which had never before existed. He was tempted to try and read it, but thought that might be dangerously distracting, an act of pure hubris, the folly of Narcissus. Besides, he was exhausted and the light was fading, and too many of the passages would only make him sad. The book was what he had been looking for, but it wasn’t meant for him. He knew the book. He had written it; lived it. What would reading it prove? This was meant for another.
He turned about to find a small residential mailbox near the edge of the cliff, out of place but perfectly normal, its weathered post jammed into the Wasteland, a box of unpainted, galvanized metal mounted slightly
askew, the bolts starting to rust. He didn’t wonder where it came from. A writer never would. He simply accepted its presence. And without a second thought, Jack went to the mailbox, opened it, and placed the only existing copy of The Sanity’s Edge Saloon inside. He raised the small metal flag attached to the side, and walked back to the center of the wreckage. It is beginning.
Around him, more things were changing. It was difficult to keep up.
Some first day, Caretaker.
The pipe planted atop the Nexus was gone, replaced by an antenna grown forty feet into the air, a complex, tapering structure of reinforced copper and steel strewn with metal divining rods and receivers and dishes made black by the setting sun. And strangled in the antenna’s metalwork was a mishmash of ill-conceived pieces, a deranged expressionist’s rendering: a sickle, a sword, a bottle opener, a screwdriver with a yellow plastic handle, a pry bar, and the remnants of a beer tap and a Wurlitzer jukebox. A new focal lens for the Nexus, his means of tapping its power and directing it at reality, a replacement for the old focal lens, the lightning rod that Gusman Kreiger stole.
More pieces of forever ago.
Besides, Kreiger wasn’t really gone, was he? Not him. Sneaky motherfucker.
By the cliff’s edge, a small round structure appeared. It looked like an old boiling vat or a small fuel tank with a large hatch cut into the side. Various pipes poured down into the ground from its barrel-shape like the roots of a tree, and it was that image that made Jack realize what the thing on the edge of the cliff most resembled: a tree stump, the rust-pitted surface peeling long, sun-cracked curls of paint like the mottled bark of a dead birch. Was it possible to neglect something that did not even exist a moment ago? Unimportant. Half moons of metal hung upon the exterior like shelf fungus, the top open to the sky.
He didn’t wonder where it came from. A writer never would. Might as well ask where a writer’s ideas came from. The answer was unimportant.
He wandered over, opened the door, and lay down against the cold metal, exhaustion overtaking him. And he dreamed.
The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) Page 10
