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

by Mark Reynolds

  Arnold Prosser hauled the corpse from the Dumpster, scooping it up under the armpits and dragging it over the lip of the container. He tossed the body aside and started rooting through the Dumpster for Marco Guitierrez, grabbing a thick handful of the dead man’s coat and pulling the corpse free of the sodden garbage bags and discarded refuse. He pitched the corpse headfirst to the asphalt where it landed with a dull thwack. Marco was past pain now, and he long ago dispensed with anything resembling dignity; a luxury difficult to maintain when you were chicken-hawking for your next fix. Besides, someone had already lumped them both up pretty hard, if he was any judge.

  And he was.

  “I don’t mind tellin’ you boys I’m a might bit annoyed by this.” Arnold slammed the Dumpster lids shut. “I don’t like unscheduled pick-ups and I don’t like messes. I don’t expect you two do much either, but I don’t really care about that. Nothin’ personal. And you two have both made quite a mess, let me tell you.”

  Neither corpse responded, a fact Arnold Prosser chose to interpret as rapt attention.

  “Neither o’ you is supposed to be dead yet,” Prosser declared, lifting Cho’s corpse up over his shoulder with the ease of a laundry sack. He walked the body to the back end of the hauler and threw a lever, raising the enormous back hatch. The hydraulics hummed loudly, the hatch gaping like a great metal jaw getting ready to shovel in an enormous load of food and swallow it whole. It always made Prosser think of a bulldog with a serious underbite, and that usually made him smile.

  But not today.

  “That’s the bitch of it, Matty ol’ horse. Someone punched your ticket early. You were probably too stupid to just get the fuck out of his way.”

  The whine of hydraulics stopped, and Prosser dumped Matty into the back of the hauler alongside the bodies of Lucas Bertram and Jonathan Sodenhardt, retrieved earlier from Benwil’s Junkyard. “So who’d you piss off, Matty? Huh? Who did this to you?”

  Arnold Prosser seized Matty’s collar and hauled his limp body up sharply, looking straight into the expressionless face, the hollowed sockets, the slack jaw. “Who the fuck ate your eyes, you miserable scrape o’ shit off the world’s shoe?” he demanded angrily.

  Prosser shook the silent corpse a final time, then pitched it back with the other two, dead by similar means, all of them missing their eyes, missing their dreams, missing no small portion of their souls. Arnold turned away sharply and went to retrieve the other corpse from the ground beside the Dumpster, hoisting it as easily as a rag-doll. He brought it back to the hauler and threw it in, limbs flopping, a puppet sans strings, its performing days over forever. “And you, you sorry sack o’ crap. Didn’t have nothing anybody wanted, did ya? Nothin’ in that sad kettle o’ mush for a brain that anybody could possibly use?”

  Arnold Prosser did not expect an answer. Not from the corpses, anyway. Their story was told. All that remained was for someone to go around and collect up the empties, gather the books off the library tables and place them back on the shelves where they could gather dust and be forgotten. There was nothing more in them. No more answers not already given.

  Prosser lifted Marco’s limp feet, placed his nose to the worn soles of the dead man’s shoes, and inhaled deeply. But there was nothing left. Small traces, scents of things not entirely right, but not enough.

  Still, Prosser thought as he threw the lever and closed the lid on the truck, there were questions. Questions that needed answers. Answers that he would need before he could let this matter go. Someone was messing with the order of the universe, and Prosser did not intend to allow the infraction to go unanswered. It was not so much a matter of the four derelicts being killed or mutilated. Death was an inevitability, and for these four, preferable perhaps. It was the timing that concerned him. The timing had been upset, and Prosser wanted very much to know by whom.

  These four were not slated to die. Not yet, anyway. He didn’t much care for the fickle workings of Fate, but he respected it. Fate respected order, respected a sense of precision and craft and overall harmony that Arnold Prosser appreciated and found beautiful. Fate had yielded up Dr. Frederick Kohler; it was simply his time. Prosser appreciated that. Ol’ Freddy had finally let himself be overcome by, of all things, himself. Some people were their own worst enemy. He would stop by the morgue later this morning for the pick up.

  But the four derelicts were not here because they were ill-fated. Prosser could smell Fate a mile away; frankly, it smelled of jasmine and honeysuckle, passion and sweat, tea and peppermint. He knew Fate, and these four had nothing to do with her. Fate was all over Freddy, but not these four.

  Prosser paused, leaning against the cold hard skin of the metal behemoth. There was something in the air, something else that Fate had a hand in. And that something was very strange. Very strange indeed. It smelled like Fate and confusion and the dead derelicts, only it smelled like none of them directly. And there was something else in there. Something peculiar.

  He stood up straight and breathed in the air, smelling that smell, that smell of tea and rose hips, lusty sweat and burnt match heads. It was coming from somewhere above, one of the rooms perhaps, or maybe just the building in general. And there was something in that peculiar smell that Arnold recognized from the soles of Marco’s shoes. He turned his head, smelling the gentle breeze, the whisper of summer winds from across the river, from the direction of the other side, from …

  Arnold Prosser scowled angrily. “There is something going on. And you thought you could squeeze me out of it, eh, you prissy little dandy? Leave me outside with my hat in my hands like a beggar at the palace gates?” He panned his gaze from the upper windows of the building down into the deep ravine below, the thick turgid river coiling around the city, squeezing it in its grip like prey in the constricting coils of a snake. “Not likely, you prick. Not likely at all. I know you’re in this, I know you know what’s going on, and I know you’re going to tell me.”

  He stomped back into the cab of the large white hauler, leaving behind a Dumpster full of garbage bags and refuse; it was not his concern. The hauler’s transmission rumbled as he urged the machine back out the narrow alleyway, foregoing his trip to the morgue for now. He had questions, and he knew who could answer them. He wasn’t about to be left out of the loop, to just allow things to go on behind his back, without his approval. Especially not things that concerned him directly; and this most certainly did, you could hardly say otherwise.

  Arnold Prosser disposed of things deemed unnecessary. This assured that the future would be forever reserved for the living, and that the past be reserved solely for the dead. And that allowed for the present to be a constant and orderly transition from one state to the next. Arnold Prosser helped keep that order in the universe by keeping it clean, and by constantly pushing it forward that the past might bury itself under the dusty sand of neglect.

  Arnold Prosser knew a lot about a good many things.

  Arnold Prosser was the Garbageman.

  DREAM AWAKE

  For Gusman Kreiger, it was a long, slow morning fraught with dreams.

  He awoke encrusted with blood, his clothes and skin stiff with it, the stubble on his face and chin caked and itchy, his throat tasting like old copper from what he swallowed. He gripped the gore-crusted lightning rod in the gnarled fingers of his left hand, his right cupped more gently over his crotch, massaging an erection through the threadbare fabric of his pants.

  It had been a long time since last he dreamed. A very long time.

  Kreiger slowly uncurled from the fetal ball in which he slept, his movements tentative and exploratory, testing each limb, each digit, each prick of nerve endings, groping the environment that greeted these slow and methodical movements, the tortured analysis of an alien probe. He remembered killing the derelicts and leaving them in the garbage. He remembered making Jasper clean up after him before setting the youth back to work on the Dream Flyer. He remembered leaving Ellen asleep on the roof, Jack’s precious book having slip
ped from her fingers. He remembered the tea.

  He did not trust the tea, did not like its smell or the smell of the brewer. There was something there, frightening and powerful. It sent Ellen back into her dreams, back across the water to Jack. She could not reach him yet, not physically. But she could dream him into her mind and her own mind into his. That was a step. A frighteningly huge step for his little dreamer. The equivalent of a pack of stick-wielding monkeys building a fusion reactor, or sitting down at a bunch of typewriters and accidentally reproducing Hamlet through random knocks at the keys.

  Only it wasn’t so random, was it?

  There were plans progressing around him. He could sense them, even if he was not privy to their design—or their designers. He was not the only one watching Ellen Monroe, keeping her safe, keeping her dreaming while she searched for a way back to the other side and the Nexus and Jack Lantirn. She might not realize that was what she was doing, but it was, most certainly. Kreiger knew and he wanted to be there when she did, when the place between the worlds opened and Ellen went through. He would follow her, leaving this hell behind forever. Good riddance!

  Ellen would find Jack, and with him, the Nexus.

  Yes, he remembered the Nexus, just as he remembered dreaming or the desperate urge in his loins for something he thought he had dispensed with long ago.

  Dreams don’t die for neglect; they lay buried, even forgotten, but they never die. Not until the dreamer dies do they pass away. Oversight could have told him that. Or maybe she had, and he simply failed to listen.

  Whether she knew it or not, Ellen was dreaming her way out of this world. And when she left, he planned on being close enough to get caught in the slipstream.

  He had stolen the derelicts’ dreams—at least those worth eating—and by stealing his way into the dream plane, had tapped into the dreams of others, hitching a ride. He tapped Ellen’s dreams last night, and she unknowingly sent him dreams of her own. He dreamed many things in the small hours of the morning, concealed within the cloak of shadows he created on the roof of Ellen’s building. They had slept together in a manner of speaking—ignore the physical distance and limitless hatred that separated her from him, neither here nor there—and still she did not know about him, and never would if he could help it.

  But the dreams she helped him have had been delicious: frightening and wonderful, sublime and passionate. There were clean tracks upon his cheeks where the blood had been washed away by tears.

  Dreaming and tears; two things he thought himself long ago incapable of.

  He woke to a horrible sense of loss, a longing for the soul he spurned long ago. Once cast off with the ease of an old garment, now he wanted her back … desperately. He called her Oversight when he bothered to call her at all. He sent her against the upstart Caretaker, and Jack stole her away, renamed her Ariel November, and set her free.

  The Cast Out believed himself over it. But as with dreams, some things were more easily buried than killed. And in his dreams, in those dark palatial hallways of his mind where he seldom went, Kreiger sought her out. But she would not have him; he was unready, inadequate and infirm. She had another now. She had moved on and left him behind. He was the garment, and she had cast him off.

  Cast off.

  Cast out.

  Once the leader, now the last; the Cast Outs were no more. They were all gone. His Tribe of Dust was dead, and he was the last, broken and bloody, laid low by Jack Lantirn and exiled to this strange land to learn humility and the art of dreaming.

  Gusman Kreiger stood up, the shadows falling away around him, leaving him revealed in the excruciating brightness of the dawn. Jasper was working with mind-numbing steadiness on the Dream Flyer, fingers stitching furiously at the canvas of the wings. Soon it would resemble a great bird of flight, instead of the shattered remnants of a dead animal that it now appeared. And Kreiger would breathe life into the sorry corpse.

  Not the first time he brought the dead back to life. The last time, they built a religion around him … and he led them to ruination. But that was another time, another world, another reality that was no more.

  The story of your life, old man.

  Kreiger leaned backwards, hands pressing into the small of his back until the bones in his lower spine popped and realigned. Then he left, walking down the stairs and leaving Jubjub Bird to his work. He needed to borrow Ellen Monroe’s bathroom; he was covered in blood and could not afford to waste time explaining why to a world that didn’t matter. Events were unfolding with frightening speed. Jack might still be directing from behind the curtain, but if he was any judge, Jack’s players had left the script behind. The ridiculous fool was very much in danger of it slipping from his grasp and running amok. Did he know that? Did he?

  Probably. And he likely still thought he was in control. Arrogant little shit.

  Kreiger slipped into Ellen’s apartment—locks were like keys; he had little use for either—and went to her bathroom where he stripped down and stood in her shower, rubbing himself down with soap. He threw his clothes in with him, letting them soak in the runoff and ignoring the gray trails that bled away from them in diseased rivulets.

  Soon, very soon, all of this would end. It would fade as a dream upon waking, the details blurring over time, and he might not ever recall it again except in nightmares.

  The thought struck him as uncharacteristically melancholic. Gusman Kreiger, leader of the Tribe of Dust, the only one to brace the Caretaker in the very eye of the Nexus and nearly succeed in wresting control of the universe away from its holder, was not one to be moved by doubts or wants or weaknesses such as feelings.

  But the flurry of dreams that came on with all the subtlety of a mescaline crash suggested otherwise. In his dreams, Ariel—it was as good a name as any for her; better, seeing as how he had never named her himself—had told him he would not go back. Not yet, she said. Maybe not ever. You are not ready. You don’t understand. You are unworthy.

  “The story of your life,” he said to the empty bathroom, speaking into the spray of water so that it would clean the taste of blood from his mouth. “I should have made you respect me.”

  The haunting image of Oversight appeared in his mind, the strong-willed young woman with raven hair and dark eyes and sun-browned skin. She stared at him, dangerous in her black leather, a knife sharp as a razor hidden somewhere on her person, enforcing her will on the stupid and the careless. You should have made me love you. Don’t you understand that yet?

  He turned off the water and stepped from the shower, letting the steam rise from his scarred and naked flesh while he wrung the water from his clothes. He pulled them back on, wet and sticking to him, and turned to leave. He thought he would feel better—perhaps on some level he did—but a part of him still felt slick with grime, chafed with the crust of dirt and filth.

  You are unworthy.

  Kreiger walked into Ellen Monroe’s living room, wet footprints trailing on the floor behind him to the site of the previous night’s carnage. Outside, the beeping of a truck backing up the alley, distracting, the sound setting his teeth on edge, churning his stomach, making his bones ache worse than he ever remembered.

  He sniffed the air, not liking the smell. Like the strange and rampant thoughts of mortality afflicting him in the shower, like the bizarre dreams of something lost to the past—and good riddance—that still made him weep, he could not explain his misgivings, but nor could he deny them.

  Something new had arrived, an unknown upon the arena sands.

  “They’ll crucify you for this one, Jack. Mark my words.” He stepped closer to the window, peering down into the alleyway.

  A white garbage hauler was parked by the Dumpster, a man making his way to the trash bin where he and Jubjub Bird stashed the two dead derelicts the night before. Kreiger stayed back from the light, wondering what the man would do when he found the bodies heaped in the Dumpster like the trash they were. Did you plan for this, Jack?

  The lids of the
Dumpster banged open, and the Garbageman reached inside, hand finding one of the derelicts. He jerked the corpse out by the hair … and looked at it!?!

  He did not scream or jump back in terror. He simply looked at it as if he were examining a particularly strange piece of rubbish, a lamp made of seashells or a colorful box of pornography. Then the man reached back into the Dumpster and fished around until he found the second body, pulling it free much as he had the first. Not fear or disgust or even confusion.

  Or was there just a bit of that? The man was talking to the corpse, arguing with it. Kreiger could not hear what was said, but he knew the man was speaking directly into Cho’s eyeless face.

  Then the Garbageman dumped the corpses into his truck beside two more bodies, their worn-out shoes and tattered pants strangely familiar. Hadn’t those worn out shoes kicked the living hell out of him yesterday morning? When a foot connects with your face, you tend to make a mental note of its features. It could only be Johnny and Lucas, the Garbageman having apparently collected their bodies from Benwil’s Junkyard. Inexplicably, the Garbageman leaned down close to the corpse’s feet, running his nose up the sole of one derelict’s shoe, smelling it like a crazed fetishist. He seemed to consider it momentarily before looking around, taking stock of the alleyway, the apartment building, the distant river that rolled sluggishly around the city like the dead coils of a great serpent. Then his eyes started traveling up the side of the building’s fire escape, panning slowly higher and higher, searching …

  Kreiger dropped to his knees, cloaking his mind in thoughts of inane docility. He dismissed the almost instinctive urge to employ his magic. This one would notice; it might be the one thing he would notice. Anything out of kilter—anything other than exactly what it should be—would be discovered. And this one was someone whose attention Kreiger absolutely did not want. He had seen enough in just the first glimmer, the first fraction of the Garbageman’s eyes, to know. Collecting bodies. Talking to corpses. Sniffing their soles.