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

by Mark Reynolds

  Then the patients were screaming. And Ellen was screaming. Mouths agape, slack-jawed, drool running down in thick slobbery lines. And everyone was screaming all at once. All screaming. Screaming!

  “Stop screaming!”

  Ellen crouched in the prow of the Dreaming Moon, the world of the night sea and the ghost ship and the endless ocean of the dead snapping instantly back into place. Podak was in front of her, his expression regretful. “Ellen, please stop screaming.”

  Behind him, all around the deck, the crew of dead souls were screaming with her, a terrible howl raised up to the moon, shattering the calm.

  While Ellen willed the sound dead in her throat, the memory was not so easily silenced. “What was that? What was I seeing?”

  The restless spirits went silent as well, and Podak’s voice was a haunting whisper in the dark. “Out here, all things are possible and nothing is inevitable. Reality is our own and we make it where we choose, but only if we choose to do so. Relinquish that, and your reality falls to the whim of others. Time is a construct, a consensual delusion. It is at once your enemy, but equally irrelevant.”

  His words wove in the air like a spell, and Ellen watched breathless as the wooden planks and railing about her grew pale and rotted, chains rusting to dust, lines and rigging shredding to fibrous wind, then nothing. The two trolls stooped under the weight of their own bones, faces wrinkling, hair turning gray, beards growing until they collapsed beneath their weight, falling to the deck and shattering into puddles of ash.

  Both Podak and Ellen remained unchanged, eternal.

  The cat’s lamp-like eyes blinked, and the world of the Dreaming Moon was as it had been a moment before, untouched, safe in its immortality.

  “What did you do?” she asked, barely aware of the tears running from her eyes.

  “I showed you what you are denying. The worlds of your reality are closer than you think and not all as well known as you believe. We are eternal, you and I. But we can become lost in our worlds if we are not careful. Turn back and you could fall into your old reality forever. I can show you how to find Jack, but I cannot bring you to him. Were our realities to collide, neither would survive. I would lose my sea, and Jack would lose his mind.” Podak’s eyes flicked out at the water then back. “This is as close as I go, and as near as you have ever been. Go. Your reality interferes with mine.”

  “That sounds like an argument a crazy person would use,” Ellen said, no longer sure what to believe. If she couldn’t trust Podak for what she didn’t want to hear, could she trust him for what she did?

  “Fine, then consider that my reality is interfering with what you perceive as your reality. Now you’re the one who’s crazy.” He paused thoughtfully, then added. “To each his own. Reality is simply what you make it. Nothing more.”

  “That still makes us both crazy.”

  Ellen draped the towel over the rail before climbing up and over the side, heels balanced on the edge of the forward deck. Below her in the night-black sea, the small beacon glowed with a dull, wavering red, less a morning sun than a plane’s running lights glimpsed from the ground far below, or the light of a distant, dying star. As if the world had turned upside-down.

  She steeled herself, looking back once at Podak. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’m not helping you,” the cat replied brusquely. “I’m helping me. I carved out this sea back before the sands washed over the Sahara and the rivers still flowed above ground, and I want to keep it. You and Jack are rocking the boat, and I hate getting wet. By the way, when Ishtar descended into the underworld, she was forced to disrobe as she went, symbolically stripping away her defenses for the sake of love. Eve came upon the scene naked because she was innocent, an existence outside of social mores. If you try to push the two symbols together, however, it becomes simple exhibitionism, and the message of the innocence of the eternal soul is usually misconstrued as a pubescent sexual fantasy. Remind Jack the next time you see him.”

  “What does that mean?” Then Ellen shook her head. “Never mind. Just tell me how I’m supposed to find him?”

  “Start by waking up. You will never find him on the dream plane so long as you remain outside of it. You have to come here, and that means that you have to start by finding your way back to that other world where your body lies sleeping. Follow the beacon down to the rooftop. The next time you come here, the beacon will lead you to Jack. Stay focused, or you may find yourself in the corner of the Institute’s day room in a puddle of crimson, blood pressure too low to resuscitate.”

  “You know what’s happening, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” Podak confessed. “But I don’t have the answers you’re looking for.”

  “Can you tell me anything?”

  “You are alive, Ellen Monroe, but not as alive you think. Jack Lantirn makes you live and you are his reason for living. You are a sad pair of codependent pseudo-phantoms, and you deserve each other. I wish you well. But mostly, I wish you well away from me.” His eyes narrowed to unsettling slits, and while impossible for a cat to smile wickedly—or at all—somehow, in the darkness, Podak managed the feat.

  The image of her hand covered in blood still haunting her—the plastic wristband, the small hole smashed through the glass, the garden beyond—Ellen let go and fell into the sea.

  * * *

  Podak watched her descent as a fog drifted across the water’s surface, the marsh-green glow of witch light casting a pall upon the boat, stealing Ellen Monroe from his sight. A light wind rippled the fabric of the Dreaming Moon’s sails, and Podak knew that Ellen was gone from his world forever, the ship’s deck clean of every living thing but his two hobgoblins. Both looked about in astonishment at the empty planks where fish had been only moments before.

  The living had no place in this sea.

  “Speak to them gently, boys, and they can be reasonable,” he said. “There’s no need for force.”

  He stared down through the water a little longer; eyelids within eyelids snapping open and closed and open again as Podak followed Ellen Monroe’s silvery form down through the depths and out of his world, her shape no longer visible to the mortal eye.

  “From now on, Jack, keep your dreams out of my sea.”

  * * *

  Ellen sank like a stone, the sea growing strangely lighter as she descended, the ocean depths brightening like the night sky at dawn, first light making the world over in pale sky and shadows.

  But upside-down.

  The red light was closer, the ocean floor a sea of empty sand, a curious building like an aquarium decoration sitting alone in the middle of nothing, forgotten. The red lantern had snagged atop a tall radio antenna in a junkyard behind the small building, what she began to realize was a roadside café mismatched to an auto garage. She sank down upon the rooftop, the red lantern in easy view.

  This is what you get for taking advice from talking cats aboard ghost ships; you’re now back in your own world of the senseless and the insensible. Fetch the Thorazine; Ellen’s finally back where she belongs. She tried to look at her hand, look for the blood, the plastic wristband. What happened? Did you slit your wrists again, or did you try another escape and fail?

  Again? What do mean, again?

  You never left us, Ellen. Never. Now take your meds like a good girl, and stop fighting the orderlies or we’ll have to tie you down again. You don’t want us to tie you down again, do you, sweetie? No, of course you don’t?

  Too tired to fight, she fell asleep on the rooftop and slipped into a dream within a dream, blanketed only in the warmth of a reality that could not exist.

  DELEGATE

  It was almost midnight when the sound of knocking startled Rose awake.

  She had fallen asleep in the recliner, the TV still on, whatever she had been watching long ago over. At first she thought the noise came from the TV, some sound of gunfire or explosion or whatnot sufficient to jar her from sleep, but otherwise meaningless. The room was comfortable
and warm, bathed in the golden glow of a single lamp barely able to push back the shadows as she scanned about for the remote. Time to turn this thing off and go to bed, she thought. No sense staying up if you ain’t gonna stay awake.

  Then she heard it again, the sharp knocking of someone at her door.

  She glanced at the wall clock, wondering who in his right mind would knock on somebody’s door at this hour. Easing slowly from her chair, she thought, the only thing that comes calling at this hour is bad news.

  Rose, what would Jesus do?

  And there it was. Someone might need her help: maybe their car broke down, or they were hurt. Maybe they saw her light from the street and needed to use her phone to call for assistance. That could certainly be the case, too. And what would Jesus do?

  Rose Marie wiped self-consciously at her eyes, fingering away small bits of crust her mother used to call sleepy seeds, a silly term that nevertheless stuck in her mind as she grumbled aloud, “I bet even Jesus woulda wished they’d come callin’ at a decent hour, though.”

  Walking to the door, she felt her hip stiffen; it happened more and more of late. Yet another cross of old age to bear, like drinking that filthy tasting prune juice or nodding off in front of the TV. We all get old. Nothin’ you can do about it. Just a part o’ life. Like dyin’, ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. But who’ll look after my Jasper when I’m gone? “Yeah? Who is it?”

  “It’s Gusman Kreiger, Mrs. Desmond,” the voice on the other side of the door said, speaking with the familiarity of a longtime neighbor or family friend. And that was strange because she knew for a fact that she had never heard of anyone by that name.

  “I don’t know any Goose Man Crater, or whatever you said your name was, mister,” Rose Marie replied firmly. “Now what do you want?”

  “Is Jasper in?”

  She reared back as if from a bad smell, amazed by the man’s nerve. “No! He’s gone to bed, and you should, too. It’s late. Now go away.” And she turned, prepared to dismiss the matter altogether, or call the police if the knocker refused to leave. What would Jesus do? Well he wouldn’t open the door to some damn fool at midnight, that’s for sure.

  Gusman Kreiger, however, knew differently. “Rose, open the door.”

  Stripped of its conversational pleasantness, the voice became an eerie whisper in a dark room, a displaced echo from across a cemetery. The light from the lamp dimmed, receding as if poisoned by the darkness, and the words pushed easily through the door as if it were no more than smoke, settling directly in her brain.

  And against all reason, Rose Marie Desmond, who was shuffling towards her bedroom only a second ago, found herself standing in front of her door watching her hand reach for the knob like something in a dream, her mind little more than a passenger in a borrowed vessel, one she would need to return later. We’re all on borrowed time, she thought, uncertain why. It seemed so out of place, she wasn’t even sure if the thought was her own.

  But then who’s thought would it be?

  The door caught on the short length of chain, and a grateful wheeze escaped her lungs like a sigh. She didn’t want to open the door. She didn’t want to meet this Goose Man Crater, this late night knocker with the silky, polite voice that could turn eerie and soft and make her do things she didn’t want to do. From his first words, she realized she’d heard a voice like his before. When she was just a little girl growing up in Mississippi, there was a fat man with a lisping voice and sunken eyes, his skin pale and doughy and covered in tattoos like one of those men in the carnival. But that wasn’t what made her afraid. Her granny told her the fat tattooed man was a witch doctor, a bone priest, a master of dark voodoo magic. She wasn’t sure now if the tattooed man really was some kind of magician or not, but as a child of five, there was no doubt in her mind. He was soft-spoken, creeping and lisping, his quiet, chilling tones strangely persuasive. And listening to him, you thought you were under some kind of spell, the victim of dark magic.

  The knocker sounded like him, only so much worse.

  There was a sound from the other side of the door that might have been exasperation or just simple exhaustion; she couldn’t tell which. “Rose Marie,” the stranger said, his voice still calm, still pleasant, still compelling. “Release the chain on your door. Now.”

  “I don’t want to,” she said, watching through the glass eyes of her own dream, her hands like some character from the television, heedless of her insistence to stop. She saw her fingers close upon the chain, slide it back upon the rail. She wanted them to stop, but they wouldn’t listen, her flesh not her own.

  Maybe it never was to begin with.

  The loose chain rattled against the doorframe as her hand returned to the knob, turning it, opening the door.

  There on her doorstep was a tall, stooping man clutching a staff that might have been a portion of an ancient steeple or perhaps a tall, ornate lightning rod. His hair was long and nearly white, festooned with dirt and bits of dead grass and stray leaves. The lines and pores of his skin were permeated with grease and dust, woven like a tapestry into the cell walls of his flesh. And yet he smelled of cleansers and dish soap, a mix of astringents and filth. A shapeless overcoat hid most of him, but his feet were planted at slightly wrong angles, knees akimbo. There was drying blood on one pant leg and the ties of both boots, but for some reason she did not find this alarming. The man’s fingers were twisted and scarred as he clutched the safety of his staff, the skin pale and puckered as if he had been soaking his hands in dishwater. But it was the man’s eyes that caught her, one blue, the other green. He was not the voodoo man from her childhood, no. This man scared her more. Much more.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Desmond,” Gusman Kreiger said with the sincerity one offers a stranger thrust into your path by circumstance. “I apologize for this late hour, but something’s come up and I could use the assistance of your grandson, Jasper. I would appreciate it very much if you would wake him up for me.”

  “Wake him up?” Rose Marie wondered aloud. Jasper had gone to bed almost an hour ago, exhausted after spending all day on the roof working on whatever crackpot pastime had overtaken his fancy, making him late for supper and late for bed as well. Now this man wanted her to wake him up. For what possible reason? “Jasper’s asleep,” she reiterated. “Why don’t you come back in the morning?”

  “Because the blood will have dried by then.”

  “Blood? What blood? Is somebody hurt?”

  Kreiger grimaced and brusquely dismissed her confusion. “Go wake Jasper and send him out to me. After that, you will go to the kitchen and pour yourself a glass of prune juice. Then you will go to the bathroom, urinate and brush your teeth, then go to bed—just like normal. You won’t worry about Jasper because everything is normal. Nice and normal. Won’t that be nice?”

  “That … that does sound … nice,” Rose Marie conceded. And it did. It did sound nice. Nice and normal.

  “Then go fetch your grandson.”

  “I’ll go wake him up.”

  “Wonderful,” Kreiger murmured in the same soft spell. He glanced uneasily at the threshold and said, “I’ll wait out on the landing if it’s all the same.”

  Rose Marie went to Jasper’s room, gently shaking her grandson awake and telling him that a man was here to see him. Then she went to the kitchen for a glass of prune juice. Jasper went to the front door dressed only in boxer shorts, rubbing absently at one eye. He didn’t question what his grandmother asked of him. He was a good boy; he did what he was told.

  And there on the landing, Jasper met the Goose Man for the second time that day.

  “Follow me, Jubjub Bird,” Kreiger said. “I need your help cleaning and carrying some things out to the Dumpster.”

  Jasper yawned and rolled his neck loosely from side to side. “I’m real tired, Mister Goose Man, real tired, wanna sleep. Worked on the flyer. Worked all day. All day. Made it just like you told me, just like you said, jus’ like it. Lookin’ real good, too; real goo
d. Gonna fly. And Jasper’s gonna fly. And you, too, Mister Goose Man. You’re gonna fly, too. We’re all gonna fly. But not tonight. I’m tired. I wanna go back ta bed. I wanna—”

  Kreiger held up a hand and Jasper fell silent. “I’ve seen the flyer, Jubjub Bird. You’re doing a superb job. But I need your help now. The powers that be are stepping up the pace on this little charade, forcing the pot to boil when they have no chance of containing it. And when this kettle explodes—and make no mistake, it will—I intend to be very far away from here.”

  Jasper scratched his cheek, his expression blank.

  Neither here nor there; Kreiger kept numerous realities in his mind all at once for just such an occasion, but still needed a good pair of hands to liberate them. Jubjub Bird would be his nimble limbs and crafty fingers—for now.

  Having finished her prune juice with a childish glrch sound, Rose Marie walked to the bathroom, not looking at or acknowledging Gusman Kreiger or her grandson. Nor did they acknowledge her, as if each was a ghost to the other, existing in different states of being, different layers of reality, overlapping but never touching.

  “We haven’t time to waste,” Kreiger continued. “After we clean up next door, you may go back to sleep, and resume work on the flyer in the morning. No telling when I’ll need it, and an unfinished flyer’s a dangerous thing; you get lost in the ether, and you could lose yourself forever.”

  Jasper looked bored; Kreiger was losing the young man’s limited attention. “Anyway, stay off the roof until morning. Ellen’s asleep; she and Jack have a lot of ground to cover and time’s running out. But after that, I want you back up there and working on the flyer, every minute of every hour. Understood?”