“And Ellen?”
“Leave that to me,” she said reproachfully. “You’ve done quite enough already.”
Serena turned away, already gathering the threads in her mind, putting them straight, weaving the pattern. It had been there all along; it was simply a matter of putting the pieces in their proper place … before time ran out.
FEAR THE REAPER
Arnold Prosser spent the morning retracing his steps, a tack unfamiliar to him. As a rule, he never visited anyone or anything more than once. But something was amiss. Secrets were being kept from him.
And for that, there would be an accounting.
Traveling to Benwil’s Junkyard, he wandered the car body mausoleums and trash pile barrows: headstones and markers, testaments to things gone, a useful life exhausted, a shell cast aside, forgotten and buried. What was of use had been taken away, what remained behind suitable only for compost.
But the derelict’s refuge offered nothing. He was not surprised; as a rule, you can’t take from the dead. But the place did have a most peculiar smell, one he was starting to recognize. It was there beneath the garbage and the stink of rusted metal that set one’s teeth on edge and reminded the tongue of old pennies. It was the smell of something that did not belong. Not something touched with tea and peppermint and jasmine; he knew where that came from now, even if he wasn’t sure why. Nor was it something tainted with dust and sulfur; again, he knew but not why. No, this was something entirely different, something clean and out of place. It was the same smell he caught back where Matty and Marco were laid to rest, the former with his eyes scooped out.
What was it about that place? That old stick, Dabble, he knew what was going on. Serena, too, but it was her prerogative to know things, after all—and change them too, if she saw fit.
But not Dabble. He was meddling where he didn’t belong, and now death was involved. Four derelicts already fading from the memory of a world that barely knew them and didn’t care anyway, and Freddy—the world not knowing was all that kept his memory safe. But something else was involved, tangling the threads, muddying up the waters, pissing in the soup. He had to find out what, and lay the matter to rest.
He couldn’t go back to Dabble now. Serena neither. Both were hiding secrets, and nothing would be learned for pressing. Now if he knew, that would be something he could bargain with. But until then, he was pissing in the wind, and telling himself it was raining.
That left the apartment complex—or something from there, to be more precise. Its smell tainted the derelicts and Serena’s coffee shop and Dabble’s little bookstore; subtly different each time, but always there. It was even on Frederick Kohler, caught in the grooves of his fingertips.
Or was that the connection?
“What was getting’ you off, Freddy?” he wondered, sidling down the alley where Matty and Marco were found. There was a glimmer of something, something out of place, and it was strong here, very strong. This was the key, an epicenter radiating shockwaves outward, shaking Serena and Dabble until they saw fit to lie to him. Add that to four derelicts laid out alongside the late Dr. Kohler—who was neither as good nor as noble as he pretended to be—and what you had was something that didn’t belong.
Freddy didn’t fit with all this, but somehow he’d been involved anyway. And his involvement got him killed? What were you thinking of when you blew a pipe in your brain, Freddy?
He threw the hauler into park and killed the engine before climbing down from the cab and walking around to the back. He grabbed the body of the late Dr. Frederick Kohler from inside—newly liberated from the morgue; they could have it back when he was done—and pulled it forward by its feet. He looked long and hard at Kohler’s face, the muscles still rigid with death, face a rictus of pain, anger and unassuaged guilt. Two more days and the muscle tissue would break down in earnest, the rigor mortis would loosen, and his features would go slack; Freddy would finally appear to be at peace with the world and his maker.
Death was not entirely without its mercies.
Placing his thumbs below the corpse’s eyes, Arnold dragged the lids down and peered closely. The aneurysm was both sudden and severe; thickened blood vessels fractured the whites, a dim redness clouding the pupils.
“Lucky ya didn’t blow yer head up, Freddy,” he said, searching the doctor’s eyes for that last bit of sight, the final imprint upon the nerves before his system shut down, its message unseen, unacknowledged, unknown. Necromancers talked about it. Gypsies, too. Sometimes they got lucky, guessed right.
Arnold Prosser was neither a gypsy nor a necromancer. He was the Garbageman. He never guessed. And he always got it right.
“What were you gettin’ your peckah all worked up for, Freddy, huh?” Prosser asked the dead body. “Not daydreamin’ of ‘er. Too long ago, too long forgotten. There’s something else what’s in there, somethin’ what ‘wakened Cassie’s ghost for ya, I’m bettin’. Come on diddler, what’re you hiding back in there?”
He turned the face in his hands, trying to catch the image in the right light, to see into Kohler’s eyes and down the road of his soul. He stared deeper, and seconds stretched away into minutes. Then hours. The sun climbed and the shadows shortened. The metal of the hauler warmed then turned hot, and sweat dripped from Arnold Prosser’s face, neck, and head, long stains darkening his back and chest. But all he saw for his efforts, all he could determine from Kohler’s lifeless eyes, was a skinny strip of a girl or a young woman. He saw her longish hair, the curve of her back, the line of her neck. Sad eyes looked at him from within Kohler’s dead orbs, but that was all. The image was fading, and Prosser could make no sense of it; none whatsoever.
Grabbing the corpse by the ankles, he flipped it head over heels into the hauler. “Miserable fucker, ya got nothin’ ta tell. Yer whole goddamn life could be written on a fuckin’ fortune cookie slip. Might as well ‘ave died when you was ten. Ya ain’t changed a lick since.” He snatched the lever and sent the lid of the hauler grinding down with a loud, hydraulic whine. “Fuckin’ useless.”
Prosser stamped towards the hauler’s cab, angry with the corpse, angrier still with himself. Someone was having a lark at his expense. He wasn’t sure whom, but he was sure of one thing; Dabble knew. Serena, too. Serena he could forgive—he always had, and he always would—but Dabble would give him answers. The stupid prig might not think so, might think himself safe in his little castle of paper and brick, but he was wrong. Dead fucking wrong!
Prosser climbed into the cab and slammed the door, the hauler coming to life with a loud, disconcerting roar. It was time he paid a serious visit to Nicholas Dabble. Time he showed the miserable fuck what was what. No more pissing around. Time to give the devil his due, so to speak.
“Fuck with me, will ya? I don’t think so. I got some questions that you’re gonna answer if I ‘ave to reach down your scrawny neck and tear ‘em out by the roots. You don’t screw with me, Dabble.” He gunned the engine, the hauler snarling and belching thick clots of oily smoke. “You don’t … screw … with … ME!” each word punctuated with an angry snarl of the machine’s engines, a sound like grinders rending bone and tissue into paste. The sound made Arnold smile, a wicked grin that would dry the courage from a hero’s heart like rain upon the desert, and he started forward into the road, a perfunctory check to the left for traffic before pulling out.
And what he saw caused the smile to fall from his face, jaw dropping, eyes wide. The hauler lurched suddenly, the engine choking and going dead.
He’d stalled it! It was indeed a morning of firsts for the universe.
Arnold Prosser sat stupefied, his truck dead upon the sidewalk, dashboard alight with red warnings, bumper leaning precariously into traffic.
Someone honked at him, but he failed to notice.
Another car skirted his front, the driver giving him the finger. He failed to notice that as well.
He opened the door of the hauler and climbed out, forgetting even to set the brake. He could
not get his head past what he was seeing.
Down the sidewalk, not thirty feet away, was the same strip of a girl he had seen burned into Freddy’s eyes, the one that sent Freddy across the void and smelled of bookstores and coffee shops and inexplicably dead derelicts.
And he had no idea who she was!
* * *
Ellen Monroe walked out the front door of her apartment building, hurrying to get back from lunch. Mr. Dabble had been acting peculiar today—more so than usual. She thought he might need her; not for work or for any reason she could exactly put a finger on. But because he had always been there for her, offered her a job when she needed one, no questions asked or judgments rendered, she thought it only right that she be there for him.
Ironically, if Ellen Monroe did not return to the bookstore that afternoon—if she had never come at all—Nicholas Dabble’s life would have been substantially improved. But she had no way of knowing.
“Excuse me, miss?”
A stocky bald man in coveralls and work-boots clopped towards her, body drenched in sweat, the set of his mouth turning his expression from open astonishment to outright anger. Behind him, unnoticed, an empty garbage truck slowly rolled out across the sidewalk and into the street.
Ellen felt an edge of fear creeping over her, a flush rising in her cheeks, her hastily eaten lunch curdling in her stomach.
“Yeah, you!” the man barked. “I need a word with you.”
“I … I have to get to work,” was all the excuse she could come up with. The man looked too clear-eyed to be high, and sounded too coherent to be retarded. But he might well be insane: senses needle-sharp, perspective twisted, his world a reality viewed through carnival glass and funhouse mirrors. She had met one or two in her lifetime—at least, she thought she had—and wasn’t eager to go back there.
Of course, there was always the chance that this guy with the sweat-soaked coveralls and the stink of garbage preceding him was just an asshole wondering if she would give him a hand job for twenty bucks.
Not waiting to find out, she turned to go.
He was beside her at once, hand clamping around her arm just above the elbow and spinning her about to face him. Her lower arm went instantly cold, the pins-and-needles sensation of a deadened limb, and she was almost overcome with his smell: body odor, raw garbage, stinking breath as he pushed himself close to her. Around her, people passed by in a mindless stream, giving them space, maintaining a distance that would prevent involvement.
“Didn’t you ‘ear me? I said I needed to talk ta you.” He pulled her close, his eyes dark and piggish, course hair pushing from beneath his collar and sleeves. When he jerked her arm, she nearly stumbled; no more than a flick of his wrist, but it felt like being caught in the gears of a machine, absolute and merciless. He leaned close, nostrils flaring. “I can smell ‘im on you!” he said accusingly. “And ‘er, too! I can smell ‘em all!”
She was only shaking her head, unsure what kind of answer he expected. His remarks were insensible, dangerously and unpredictably insane. “I … I don’t know … what—”
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded, staring into her eyes.
Ellen felt a part of her stiffen like iron. Distantly, she thought of something, something she had witnessed and read about time and again in Jack’s book while she stared into the man’s eyes, frightening and crazy and deep as midnight. She remembered Oversight and how she struck down the Dust Eater, blinding him in one eye. If she did the same, it might distract the man long enough to get free of him and run, that was all—
“Speak up girl,” he said, shaking her, holding her arm as though she was a five-year-old caught pinching candy in a drugstore. “How’d you get ‘ere? Did you cross the sand, or swim the sea? Eh? Tell me!”
She drew strength from her memories of the woman from the Wasteland, beautiful and deadly. It was this that gave her the will to pull free from the queer little man with his bald head and his too-dark eyes that were confused and angry and …
… frightened!
She returned his glare, uncertain why the sight of her should make him crazy, but not caring either. She took a step back, her reply—the only thing that came to mind—was like a thin layer of ice. “You smell. And your truck just rolled into the street.”
It was true; the hauler was now quietly resting in the middle of the road, blocking traffic in both lanes. Horns were honking. People stepped from their cars. Some pointed at the truck. A few pointed at him.
Then she simply walked away, and did not look back. She arrived at Dabble’s Books a few minutes later and would gladly have put the matter behind her forever.
Fate, however, had something different in mind.
AN INVITATION TO TEA
By the time she arrived at Dabble’s Books, Ellen had managed to convince herself that the entire incident was little more than the ramblings of an obsessed and possibly delusional sanitation worker coupled with her own overactive imagination. The man had not actually asked her anything specific, and there was no way he could know about her dreams of the Wasteland or of the eternal sea. That was hers and hers alone. Well, hers and Jack’s. But it was not the province of a garbage collector who lacked the common sense to throw the parking brake before leaping from his truck.
So why are you still thinking about it?
Because he had asked her about the desert. And about the sea. And no one knew anything about those things except her and Jack. No one else had read Jack’s book, or believed that the places he wrote about existed. Jack himself was not supposed to exist; nor the sea; nor the desert. They were all a part of her delusion. Dr. Kohler was the only person she had ever mentioned any of these details to.
And what Dr. Kohler did or didn’t know hardly mattered anymore, did it?
Only now there was a lunatic garbageman with a glimmer of understanding, and he didn’t really seem like a lunatic at all. She had seen her share of the deranged and the drug-addled, people whose minds had slipped in one fashion or another, skewing their view of the world. She had even been one herself. The garbageman did not look like that.
He looked pissed.
Maybe you’re just paranoid.
Dabble looked up as she entered the bookstore—not his usual sidelong glance, but something more. She was aware he sometimes looked at her. She saw some of his stares, and knew from the clever way he concealed them that she probably missed more than she saw. But this afternoon was different. He simply sat behind the counter, head lifting as she entered, face tilted to one side in an appraising stare. His expression defied her; she never could read Nicholas Dabble’s face, or know his thoughts. His eyes had a way of hiding what was behind them like some kind of dark prism always bending you away from where you were looking. But she could feel this look. Unaccompanied by his elderly smile or charming manner of speech, it felt more intimate. Not as disturbing as Kohler’s way of mentally undressing her, but not entirely benign either; less the fumbling grope than the indecent brush of a hand while crowding towards a bus.
But it was something she never felt from Nicholas Dabble. “What?” she asked.
He met her eyes with the look of a long time lover, affectionate and pleasant and unthreatening. But curious. “You’re early,” he said.
“I finished my lunch so I thought I’d come back. Is that all right?” She stepped into the store, aware of the silence that transformed each footstep into a noisome thump, made old floorboards creak. It was as if the entire world had gone still, waiting on her, turning upon her next move, her next word, her next thought.
“Certainly, that’s all right,” Mr. Dabble said, and looked as if he were about to say something else before thinking better of the matter. Ellen was prepared to dismiss it—the strange look, the open expression, everything—just as she tried to dismiss the garbageman when Dabble looked back up at her. “Have I told you what a pleasure it’s been having you around, Ellen?”
She looked back at him, not sure if this was some kind of
strange and gentle prelude to her dismissal, or worse, an unexpected expression of romantic interest. But all she saw was that strange look of adoration in his eyes, a little covetous and a little sad. It was the look of someone who cannot have something, and has made a kind of peace with this inevitable loss, even if the craving remained. She fumbled in her head for the words to reply, wondered if she should reply at all, and managed only a look of trepidation.
Nicholas Dabble’s hand slowly crossed the counter, fingers lightly brushing her own as though he were touching a rare object, or the wings of a butterfly. He brushed against her flesh as if he thought she might crumble if his touch was not softer than a whisper. Or maybe he feared it was himself who would disintegrate.
Then he smiled, amused perhaps by her discomfort, or his own. He withdrew his hand and said, “Well it has been. I’m very glad you came into my store. I thought you should know.”
She had the overwhelming urge to pull her hand away, to hold her fingers protectively from him, wipe self-consciously at them as if she had touched something slimy, or even dangerous. But she kept her hand exactly where it was, maintaining her composure with Nicholas Dabble though he had never before placed his skin against hers in a manner quite like that.
Strange things indeed.
It was no exaggeration that in all the time she had been with him, he had never touched her, not once. He had never shaken her hand, never brushed past her in a narrow aisle of books, never placed a well-intentioned hand against the small of her back, or touched her arm just above the elbow to elicit her attention. Never.
Until today.
The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) Page 29
