The thought died away unfinished, Lucas refusing to give it the satisfaction, to let it win the argument that he was very much afraid was already over before it even began. “Johnny?”
Lucas rounded the oil drum and looked down, his worst fears already come to pass.
Johnny was dead.
Not dead like they expected to go—from the cold, or pneumonia, or heart or liver failure. These were the ways Lucas and Johnny expected to go—but not too soon! Please God, not too soon! But this was different. One more thing that was so very, very wrong about this day, this unending day.
A deep, gory wound punched clean through the middle of Johnny’s chest. Not a gunshot wound; he’d have heard that. Someone had killed Johnny in silence, butchered him like an animal with something as thick as a spear.
And whatever sick monster murdered him had also torn his eyes from their sockets. No final expression for Johnny: not peace or fear or despair or revelation, only slack emptiness. No enlightenment as he lay in the dust of his beggar’s deathbed, only death.
Why should you hope for anything more, Lucas?
“John?” A useless petition upon deaf ears. Lucas scanned about in the litter and dirt, wondering where Johnny’s killer had discarded his eyes. He didn’t see them, and knew he wasn’t really looking for them anyway. He was simply looking away.
“And then there was one.”
Lucas spun at the sound of the voice from behind him, recognition turning his blood to ice, his joints to rust, his heart stopping for a moment. It took all of his will not to start shaking. “Goose Man!”
Feet balanced neatly upon the weld-cut edges of the oil drum, Goose Man stared down at Lucas, the fire licking at the tail of his overcoat and the soles of his boots. But the fire could not burn him, or even illuminate his face. It was as if Goose Man was a ghost, a revenant returned from the dead to make Lucas beg for his soul.
Or maybe he was the devil.
“You, of them all, should be glad to see me,” Goose Man remarked. “Think of the meaning I bring to your otherwise useless existence. I am the force behind your life without which you would have no purpose or meaning, no reality. This morning you left me for dead, but I am risen. Imagine how fucking incredible I’d be if I’d waited until the third day.”
“You’re crazy, asshole!” Lucas snarled, the remark childish; boasts of bravado to mask his fear.
“Come on, Lucas. Don’t be that way. We have things to talk about, you and I.”
“There ain’t nothing we got to talk about.”
“No? Don’t you have questions for me? I would in your shoes. Though if I were in your shoes, I’d spend all of my energies trying to find a way out of my condition, or barring that, a convenient and relatively painless way of killing myself. No offense, but your existence bores the hell out of me.”
“So die, motherfucker. Whaddo I care?” Lucas awkwardly retreated, convinced more and more that Goose Man—or Crazy Moses or Mumbling Shepherd, call him what you will—was completely insane. Not goofed-up insane like Marco, or even hell-bent insane like Matty, but insane like Hitler and Manson and Son of Sam. Goose Man was out on Pluto looking back at the human flock with a red eye and a sharp hook concealed in his sleeve. It was all meat to him. The whole human race just meat, and he was hungry. “There ain’t nothin’ I need from you ‘cept for you to let me walk outta here alive. Ain’t no one have ta know nuthin’.”
“Alive. Now there’s a topic,” Goose Man said jubilantly, stepping from the edge of the oil drum, still carrying his strange six-foot staff of metal, flanged and inscribed and resembling, for all the world, a strange cross between a television aerial, a decorative steeple crown, and a lightning rod. And Lucas guessed that the sharpened tip might be just about right for punching a hole through a once-stockbroker’s heart. “Have you any idea the irony of you worrying about leaving here alive? Enlightenment, like death, is a stone’s throw away, so the question you should be asking me is not whether I killed Matty and Marco and Johnny. That’s plain enough. The question you need to answer—and quickly—is why I took their eyes, the windows to their souls, the doorways to their dreams? Why take them? Why eat them?”
“You ate their—”
Lucas’s heel caught the outstretched hand of the late stockbroker and he slipped into a tangle of old boxes and particleboard, warped and fragile from the elements. The entire mess gave way beneath him with a loud carumph.
Goose Man stepped closer. “Don’t bother trying to run away from me, Lucas. You can’t. As it is written, so shall it be done. Sucks to be a sad victim in a second-rate hack’s novel. But don’t fret. Maybe in your next life—Jack Lantirn’s next tiresome sequel—you’ll come back as something less trite.”
Lucas flailed frantically, cardboard and particle sheets scattering as he tried to right himself. “Stay away from me, ya hear! Just quit all this stupid crazy shit, and stay the hell away from me!”
Lucas’s hands scrambled across everything in reach, hoping to latch upon something useful: a long stick, a length of metal, a brick, anything. Instead, he found only sodden cardboard and musty-smelling fragments of drywall. “What the hell you wanna kill them for anyway? They can’t hurt you. They can’t hurt nobody. They’re just a bunch of dumb, worn-out nobodies. You coulda just left ‘em alone.”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t,” Goose Man said matter-of-factly. “Loose lips and sinking ships, cabbages and kings. I like secrets, and the best kept secrets are the kinds that no one knows but me.”
Lucas watched as Goose Man stood crookedly, explaining himself as he leaned upon his sharpened staff. Beneath his fingers, something hard, something solid amidst the rubbish: a narrow length of pipe or a core rod from a piece of concrete or maybe just a rusty spindle of rod iron; it didn’t matter. Eyes fixed upon Goose Man, he slid his fingers around the metal until it nestled across his palm. “Whatever your secret is, I don’t know and I don’t care. It’s safe with me like it woulda been safe with them. We don’t tell nobody nothing; that, I swear. And nobody’d listen to the likes of us, anyway.”
“I wish I could believe that, Lucas. I really do. But I haven’t time for pipe dreams; I leave those to others better suited than myself. I killed Matty because he wanted something I couldn’t let him have. Killing Marco was just a mercy. Which brings me to the two of you.”
Lucas tightened down upon the rough piece of metal, unsure if he could get it out in time, but damned if he wouldn’t try.
“Sooner or later, you would have missed your friends,” Goose Man said. “Sooner or later, you would have asked where they were. Sooner or later, they would stop ignoring you and listen. Sooner or later, they would discover what became of them. I don’t really care one way or the other about what comes later because I won’t be here. I’ve seen the signs, felt the convergence in my bones, and when it comes, I’ll be long gone. That said, I don’t have the time to mess around with what might happen if sooner comes before later. Do you follow me, Lucas? I hope so because I really want you to understand.”
“I understand,” Lucas said, the bar turning easily in his grip—maybe a weapon, maybe just a distraction while he escaped! “You’re cr—!”
The rest died in his throat, one hand still behind his back, fingers gripping the shank of a useless five-inch lag bolt.
Like a jag of lightning, Goose Man’s staff arced the distance between them, the steel glinting malefic blue light that did not reflect from its surface so much as emanate from the very metal itself. And Goose Man was there, his movement completed within the span of an eyeblink. One moment he was leaning on the staff, the next he was forcing it through Lucas’s chest, silencing his heart, stilling his lungs, leaving his mouth to gape like a speared fish. Lucas felt his hand tighten then relax, losing the bar of steel, that ephemeral hope that danced now far beyond his sight like a soap bubble bursting in the sunlight. His vision traveled up from the lance that felt like an icicle punched into his chest to the mad eyes of the one they cal
led Goose Man, the crazy two-colored eyes that looked down upon him with the feigned sorrow of a demon. Goose Man spoke, words chasing Lucas down the long spiral of darkness closing around him.
“It’s nothing personal, Lucas. Ain’t nobody want to be here.”
WISH YOU WERE HERE
Jack woke up twice that night.
The first time was from a dream—not quite a nightmare, but still one that forced him awake in a panic. He’d been frantically searching for something, but, as was so often the way with dreams, could not remember what. Sometimes it was something lost in the wind, a spirit obscured by clouds. Other times a shimmer in the water, the traces of a mermaid lost in the folded dark of the briny sea. No matter. That he could not find what he was looking for did not change the fact that he could not stop looking.
He knew what it meant.
Ellen.
How long ago he lost her, he no longer knew, time irrelevant in the Wasteland. What was anything measured against eternity? He had sent her away, the realization like a white-hot razor across his soul. He told himself he had no choice; it was her only chance, the only way to keep her safe, to use all of the tickets and keep them—keep the Nexus—safe from the Cast Outs. Justifications blew empty like wind from the desert, and when he dreamed, the loneliness and guilt fell down upon him like iron.
Across the open loft where he slept, the computer screen pulsed. Oscillations of red in the darkness, it drove sleep even further away, and brought the dream ever closer to the surface of his mind like a body dragged from the water.
Don’t go there, Jack; that’s a bad place. No telling who you might find.
It was only natural to be afraid of death, especially your own. But there was another possibility, and it scared him more. How would he survive if she was gone, some mythic bird from a creation myth, flying away and taking love and hope out of his world with her?
The computer screen pulsed black and red, startling in the otherwise total darkness of the loft where the only light came from the soft pale florescence of the Pepsi machine below and the blue-white screens out in the junkyard. It was the one thing about the Wasteland he had grown accustomed to: absolutes. Absolute silence where every breath, every heartbeat, was a violation, absolute darkness that made miracles out of sparks in the night, and absolute stillness where the living did not belong.
He alone lived here, and perhaps that was the biggest lie of all.
Jack got up, his narrow bed suspended from the ceiling like an afterthought, and carefully navigated the walkway, the wood rough and cold against his feet. Something about the flashing computer screen was wrong. It was the first time he had sensed such a thing in the Wasteland since driving away the Cast Outs and sending Ellen away. He hated that he knew this world so well, but he did. In so many ways, it was his, and while strange and mind-bending, never before had it been wrong. He felt a prickling on the back of his scalp, a feeling like eyes upon him.
The red light did not emanate from the computer, but was a reflection off the screen, its source somewhere outside like dawn through the turning slats of a windmill.
That would mean the sun was rising in the west, and in the middle of the night. Impossible.
So states the sole inhabitant of the Last Stop Gas Station and the Edge of Madness Café, places perched on the borderland between reality and madness. Your whole world begins at the line where possible ends.
Jack peered through the open corner of the garage.
Atop the needle-thin spire of the radio antenna serving as the new focal lens to the Nexus, a red light, the kind used to warn off approaching aircrafts. It turned slowly, a distant lighthouse, a beacon in the darkness, a dwarfed and dying sun. Someone had haphazardly fastened it to the top of the antenna with a twisted length of bailing wire.
Someone? There is no someone, Jack; there’s only you.
He circled the narrow walkway, and stepped out upon the fire escape landing that led to the Scarlet Cinema and the stairs down. The red light was not his doing; reality had settled down around the Nexus. Occasional surprises still bubbled up, but even their sporadic inspiration had cooled of late with no more spillovers into the world around him.
So how do you explain an aircraft warning light in a world with no aircrafts?
Perhaps another had sent this, a neighbor in this layered reality of ill-defined rules and boundaries? Maybe this was insanity’s version of the welcome wagon, dreams and madness having dispensed with bundt cakes in favor of a volunteer fireman’s light?
He climbed to the roof for a better view, the light still winking at him, not some knowing eye, but a simple mechanical device, dead and blind. A beacon, nothing more; a guide for fellow travelers, maybe. Or a warning.
So when did I stop writing the story and become a part of it?
The rooftop was cold against his feet, the air turning his skin to goose flesh. The moon shone down from the cloudless sky—full; the moon was always and forever full—reflecting off the damp area of capstone as though someone had stretched out, soaking wet, and left an outline of where they were.
A mermaid cast upon a distant shore, perhaps, lost and left to perish. The notion crept into his head, eased along by the late hour and the disquiet of the red light and everything it entailed.
In the morning, he would ask Hammerlock to take the light down and bring it to him. He didn’t expect to learn much from the broken beacon, but it wouldn’t do to leave it lying around either, someone else’s reality corrupting his own. The Wasteland was difficult enough without that.
He drew closer to the wet outline on the rooftop, drawn by the faintest of smells that dredged up an entire childhood of family vacations: the smell of salt water and brine and the limitless sea. In his dreams, the mermaid looked like Ellen.
Every dream is of Ellen, Jack. It means nothing except that you are obsessed.
Still.
He laid down atop the wet area of stones, eager for the little bit of her that might linger there: a small taste, the memory of her lips, the feel of her hair in his fingers or the small of her back where the flesh dimpled, so smooth and sensitive to the touch. Maybe, in a manner of speaking, he could be with her. Maybe.
Dreamers live off hope and little else.
Jack rested his head on the smooth capstone near the roof’s edge and closed his eyes, amazed at the residual heat, as if this place was still occupied, someone keeping it warm. He liked the idea of that, and allowed it to carry him back to sleep where he could linger with Ellen in that perfect place of his dreams for just a little bit longer.
I’ll take what time I’m given. As to the rest, I’ll steal what more I can. Just try and stop me.
* * *
It was the crash of music blasting up from the diner that woke him the next time. Distorted by layers of cinderblock, he could not even make out the words or the song, only that it was loud enough to make the walls tremble.
He scrambled down the service ladder then the stairs to the garage below, every surface cold and jarring to his skin. The eastern sky had turned pale with the coming of dawn. He ran through the garage and out to the sidewalk, the music growing ever louder, the diner windows shivering in their frames, threatening to shatter.
“GET OFFA MY CLOUD … GET OFFA MY CLOUD … GET OFFA MY CLOUD!”
Hands clapped to his ears, Jack kicked open the doors. He could actually feel the music thrumming against his bones, throbbing in his chest. The popcorn machine jiggled on the countertop while glasses and plates rattled on the shelves. The glass coffeepot bobbled upon the warmer plate, ready to shatter. The Wurlitzer itself vibrated, the air around it shimmering like a wave of afternoon heat.
The music kept skipping, the one phrase repeated over and over: “GET OFFA MY CLOUD … GET OFFA MY CLOUD … GET OFFA MY CLOUD!”
He stabbed the cancel button on the Wurlitzer, but nothing happened. He jabbed it again, harder. Still nothing.
Flatware skittered across the metal countertops and clattered to t
he floor, the noise lost in the cacophony. Salt and pepper shakers walked the tabletops, and in the kitchen, pots fell from the shelves and crashed upon the floor, soundless in the deafening noise.
“GET OFFA MY CLOUD … GET OFFA MY CLOUD … GET OFFA MY CLOUD!”
Jack shouldered the Wurlitzer to one side, grabbing the plug and pulling it from the wall.
And the music stopped.
First a beacon light, now this. There was no such thing as coincidence. Not here. On some level, everything was intentional.
It’s a message from the neighbors, Jackie boy. Or whatever they are out here in the middle of insanity and dreams. Listen to the message. Remember the warning light. Remember first and foremost that each one was a wakeup call; you’re treading on someone’s toes and they don’t like it. Go easy from here on out. Don’t force anything. Or the next one may be more than an inconvenience.
It was only a theory, logic applied to the illogical, and he knew better than to place too much stock in reason.
Still…
He looked through the glass front of the Jukebox; saw the CDs in the carousel. But the reader was empty. And the song wasn’t even listed. Why would it be? He plugged the jukebox back in, but the song did not start up again. For the moment, normalcy was restored … or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
“Next time,” he grumbled, “try a ringing telephone. I’ll get the message.”
Jack went back to the loft and got dressed before returning to the diner, the first sliver of sun cresting the flat horizon of bone-white sand. Sometimes, when he tried, he could almost make himself believe that everything here was normal. Just another day along a lonely stretch of desert highway where no one stopped and no one left and business was simply a matter of getting by, and nothing more.
The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) Page 23
