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

  The Sea and the

  Wasteland: Book II

  THE EDGE

  OF MADNESS

  CAFÉ

  By Mark Reynolds

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, locations, and events are all products of the imagination, and any resemblance to any actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  The Edge of Madness Café – Copyright © 2000. This work was first copyrighted in 2000, and filed with the United States Copyright Office in 2002. Subsequent versions of the same title that have been edited by the author are similarly protected under the original copyright.

  Cover art and design by Mark Reynolds, Copyright © 2014

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my wife, Linda, for her unwavering support through all of these words. And to every reader who ever wondered what happened after the last page was turned.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Table of Contents

  DREAMS AND REGRETS

  JUST ANOTHER DAY

  TEA & COFFEE

  A FLY IN THE OINTMENT

  DABBLE’S BOOKS

  THE GOOD DOCTOR

  JUBJUB BIRD

  ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

  EVERY TUESDAY AND FRIDAY

  MOMENTS BEFORE

  THE EDGE OF MADNESS CAFÉ

  A TIME FOR TEA

  PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF

  EVENTS IN MOTION

  BEHIND THE WORLD

  UP ON A ROOF

  THE DOCTOR IS OUT

  FLIGHT OF FANCY

  GUARDIAN

  THE DREAMING MOON

  DELEGATE

  LOOSE ENDS

  WISH YOU WERE HERE

  MEMORIES OF OUR TIME THAT NEVER WAS

  POSTCARDS FROM THE DEAD

  THE GARBAGEMAN COMETH

  DREAM AWAKE

  MAKING THE ROUNDS

  CONSPIRATORS

  FEAR THE REAPER

  AN INVITATION TO TEA

  THE WORLD WILL TURN

  FEVERISH DREAMS

  TEA

  TEMPEST IN A TEAPOT

  FLIGHTS OF MADNESS

  OF THOSE LEFT BEHIND

  DEATH, THE DEVIL, AND DESTINY

  THE ORDER OF THE UNIVERSE

  DREAMLINE

  LOST AND FOUND

  THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT

  A SEMBLANCE OF NORMALCY

  CINEMA SHOW

  THE LONG AWAITED REUNION

  PARADISE LOST

  DECISIONS

  UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT

  LONG ROAD HOME

  EPILOGUE

  “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  — Lewis Carroll

  DREAMS AND REGRETS

  Ellen woke with a start, throat holding back a scream; sleep no escape from the torments of a reality gone slowly insane. The madness invaded her dreams, filling her head with memories of times that never were, people she never knew, a world that did not exist. Sadness and despair.

  She’d left him behind.

  Sins lost in the jumble like so much of her past, displaced in the blackness she loosely termed her memory and revived in the darkness as nightmares.

  Outside her window, the storm made the light from a street lamp waver, sliced apart by the blinds and scattered across her bedroom in flecks of fairy light. Covers pulled up around her chin, her eyes examined each piece of darkness in turn, nightmare-induced fear dissipating slowly into a kind of featureless embarrassment. There was nothing there, of course. Nothing extraordinary. No monsters or apparitions, no psychopaths or leering madmen invading her apartment, watching her while she slept, restless eyes twitching with dark imaginings and diseased ruminations.

  No, the room was entirely normal. The only monsters she kept inside her head, and there was no protection from them. Like creatures stalking the edges of the light, always there, always waiting.

  That was the way madness worked.

  Ellen switched on the light by her bed, the soft glow driving back demons and shadows alike.

  For a time at least.

  The clock beside her bed read 5:26 AM; too early to get up, and maybe too late to fall back asleep. Maybe.

  Beside the clock, a dog-eared book, the spine creased, the cover worn and frayed at the corners from being read and re-read—how many times, she could no longer remember. The Sanity’s Edge Saloon. On the very last page was a hand-written note signed with a drawing of a jack o’ lantern.

  A message from Jack.

  It had been nearly two months since she’d seen him last.

  Actually, it would be more accurate to say it had been nearly two months since she thought she’d seen him last; according to her court-appointed psychiatrist, Jack Lantirn did not exist. Jack Lantirn, like so much of her memory, was little more than an elaborate fabrication, the results of severe manic depression and drug abuse that left her on the brink of suicide, susceptible to the suggested reality of fiction.

  The Sanity’s Edge Saloon.

  She had read the book over and over since that day, the day he left her the message, the day she saw him standing across the street from the bookstore like a man waiting for a train. He had been watching. She hadn’t known it then, but afterwards she was certain. Watching her; watching over her. The book was Jack’s autobiography and fantasy, a mirror of his madness, his twisted reality bound together into a loose collection of words and paper. And somehow she was an element of his insanity, a fellow traveler on his journey to the edge of dreams; cast in the role of friend, confidant, maybe even lover—yes, probably lover, too—she followed him through his mad tale until, suddenly and inexplicably, she found herself here, this trite, unimaginative life.

  And that was where it all started to get strange.

  According to absolutely everyone, Jack Lantirn did not exist; simply a character in a book by an author of the same name; an author no one could identify. She asked her boss down at the bookstore what he knew about The Sanity’s Edge Saloon, and Nicholas Dabble said nothing; strange because the proprietor of Dabble’s Books possessed an almost supernatural talent for information. He cataloged the entire store in his head; not just titles and authors, but every word from every page. He seemed, in fact, to know everything about anything, a living warehouse of information and utterly unconcerned with the profundity of it. When she pressed him as to why he did not do something more interesting with his gift, he replied that information was both inherently useless and boring, and that it was only the application of information that piqued his interest.

  So it was to her amazement and his that Nicholas Dabble knew nothing about The Sanity’s Edge Saloon. The single paperback copy had arrived mixed in with a distributor’s shipment a couple months ago. It did not appear on the packing slip, and the shipper, when she called, had no record of the book whatsoever: not just of sending them a copy of the book, but even of its existence. The publisher’s shipping agent, after fifteen flustered, fumbling minutes on the phone, finally declared that Ellen was obviously mistaken as to its origin.

  The book, like its author, should not exist. There was no explanation as to how it fell into her hands that day, the day she had last seen—correction; thought she had last seen—Jack Lantirn, her friend and lover—or imaginary friend and lover—who may or may not exist. But the book was real, and that counted for something.

  Didn’t it?

  She slipped out from under the covers and padded softly about the apartment, her bedroo
m too hot and stuffy to be comfortable. The windows in the other room were open, and the breeze against her naked skin felt good, reminiscent of something else, something before, something not entirely in concurrence with this reality.

  The lines between sanity and madness had blurred, the boundaries between real and imaginary neither hard nor fast. They were like lines in the sand, or chalk rubbed on the sidewalk; easily smudged, easily erased.

  But since no one else seemed to notice, unless the whole world was going crazy, she was losing her mind. Again.

  And she wasn’t sleeping very well lately, either.

  She stepped easily through the sparsely furnished rooms, easterly windows pale with eventual dawn. Naked in the secrecy of darkness, she thought back to that other life, or maybe that life she lived only in her head, … or in someone’s head, leastwise. The breeze against her skin reminded her of the Wasteland and the saloon. And that reminded her of Jack.

  Jack. Hero. Fool. Protector.

  Caretaker.

  There was something there, but like everything else, it was slippery. Her memory was like a stream, facts like fish she was pulling out with her bare hands, only to have them wriggle loose and get lost again in the icy waters. Jack haunted her thoughts and tormented her dreams, his very presence a recrimination.

  She’d left him behind.

  As for that time before—before Jack and the Wasteland and the Saloon and everything else that, so she was told, were simply properties of her imagination—she remembered even less. All of her life before that day in the bookstore was meaningless, her past like words on a page written in a language she did not understand. She knew bits and pieces, but it seemed to exist without any personal significance.

  Just words on a page.

  The back window of her apartment looked down into a narrow ravine of trees. Obscured at the bottom, a thick river ran like a gray, greasy snake, surrounding the town in its coils. She knelt down, folding her arms on the sill and resting her head. The dreams were incomprehensible; what she remembered made no sense, and what she forgot drove her from sleep on the verge of screaming.

  Jack had sacrificed himself, and for that, she was saved.

  But for what? Court-mandated therapy sessions twice a week, random drug screenings, a mediocre job at a bookshop, no friends, no family, no one at all who cared whether she lived, died, went to the park, or went insane. No one … except Jack. Night after night, he lived on in her dreams, flickering recollections of places beyond the written page, as though they existed in her memory before reading them in his book, his tale of overdone metaphors, fragments and run-on descriptions.

  Then there were things she knew only from what she read, having not witnessed them herself—assuming she had witnessed anything at all. She never saw Rebreather fall; she was already on board the train, the train meant to take her and Jack out of the Wasteland and back to reality. Only Jack didn’t make it, and Rebreather didn’t die in the fall. The raging lunatic charged from the smoke of the destroyed Saloon, body broken, limbs bloody and dislocated, driven solely by madness and his hatred of Jack. He dragged him down, and the train left them behind, Ellen its only occupant.

  And then she was here, awake from the dream, the book ended.

  Survivor’s guilt. She had escaped.

  Jack had not.

  Ellen wiped absently at a tear that seemed to have found its way down her cheek, its trail cold in the breeze. So frustrating, living a life that did not exist. But where was the harm then? She had no past, no memory of before the Sanity’s Edge Saloon. That was what she couldn’t get through to Dr. Kohler. What was the point of living solely in the now, in this reality grounded on real people and real things and real places, when she had no memory of any of them? It was a waste of time, the effort to attach meaning to the meaningless.

  The dreams were more than willing to give her everything she needed, everything significant and tangible and real…

  … except permanence.

  She stood up carefully, feeling light-headed and insubstantial, like she herself was caught in a dream. Pulling a quilt from the back of a chair, she wrapped it around herself and curled up to watch the sky slowly brighten, scalloped shells of gray and white clouds overtaking the dark simplicity of night. After a time, the wind turned cool and damp, and she fell back asleep to the patter of rain against the glass, her dreams more pleasant in the hours of predawn, the world caught between the infinite possibility of night and the boundaries of the waking day.

  * * *

  Outside, a figure in a battered overcoat watched the windows on the back of the apartment building where Ellen Monroe lived. He watched her move like a ghost through the rooms, watched her nakedness with a kind of trembling awe zealots afford visions of the Madonna. But he knew her better than that; a savior maybe, but pure of neither body nor mind, simply of heart.

  But oh, what a difference that could make.

  He watched her, her confused expression and winsome look framed by distant, high windows looking out over endless expanses of reality already made. He saw the tear upon her cheek; could smell it from all the way down here in the alley, picking its fragile scent from out of the rot of neglected garbage, the sticky odor of late summer grass and leaves, the acrid smell of wet asphalt.

  The rain spattered down upon him, and that was a wonder also, but one whose novelty had worn thin. The changing weather rubbed at his bones, aching scars that would never fully heal.

  But despite his discomfort, he watched Ellen Monroe; watched her closely; as closely as a lover, or a father, or the penitent man seeking redemption at the foot of the Virgin.

  Soon, he thought—maybe a prognostication; maybe a prayer. Soon.

  He turned and shuffled away with the night, the crooked staff of tarnished copper and iron tapping away at the sidewalk, knocking out a fading rhythm like the ticking of an old clock.

  JUST ANOTHER DAY

  It was nearly eight the next time Ellen awoke.

  She wrapped the blanket around herself like some homeless beggar, and walked to the window where the rain had been hitting the screen for the last hour. A puddle had formed on the floor beneath the sill, but that didn’t really concern her. She simply closed the window and walked to the bathroom to brush her teeth. Mr. Dabble wasn’t expecting her at the store until 9:30; plenty of time for a shower, an unhurried breakfast, and even a visit to Serena’s Coffee Shoppe.

  She stood in the shower, forehead against the tile, and let the water run down through her hair and across her skin. Like standing in a waterfall, she thought idly. Then, as she thought about it a little longer, she supposed it really wasn’t like that at all; it was only a shower.

  But it was a welcome sensation all the same.

  She always felt better if she could get back to sleep before first light. In the twilight, her dreams were better. She would see Jack, speak with him, touch him; so different from the hollow-eyed nightmares of being alone. In the nightmares, even when Jack was there, he was oblivious, as though she was a ghost he could not see, could not hear. She watched him shiver beneath the night sky, the Wasteland sand as white as the bones of everyone who had ever died there across all the years of eternity. She saw him scrape the residue from the inside of an old soup can, hunger reducing him to a stray dog. She saw him scribble his stories on rare pieces of paper, front and back filled from corner to corner, top to bottom in tight, tiny script like the ravings of a lunatic. Paper was difficult to come by in the Wasteland.

  And therein lay the problem. This made-up world, senseless and nonexistent, was known to her. She knew things about it, both things from the book and things not, but still true all the same. She had no way of knowing any of it for certain, no proof she could point to. But still, she knew.

  But which dreams to believe? In the nightmares, Jack lived a mad hermit’s existence on the edge of a cliff bordering unrestricted dreams-turned-to-lunacy, huddling in the blasted wreckage of the Sanity’s Edge Saloon, and battering out
his stories on a broken typewriter incapable of accessing the Nexus and making them real. Then there were the dreams where Jack remade the focal lens that Gusman Kreiger stole, rebuilt the world around him in his own image, a small god starting his own book of Genesis on the outskirts of reality. In the nightmares, she was kept from him, living only through the breeze or the cold face of the moon. He did not know of her, could not sense her near him, or know that she cared. In the twilight dreams, he could always see her, though they did not talk with the urgency or passion of lovers parted, but the simple familiarity of two people alone in a house, moving from room to room, offering brief conversation or greetings as they passed. Either reality was plausible, she supposed.

  And either just as likely untrue.

  The water turned suddenly scalding as someone in the apartment complex ran the cold water out of her pipes. She yelped and leaped back from the steaming jets, standing awkwardly on one foot in the far corner of her tub while she waited for the water pressure to normalize. That’s what you get for spending too much time inside your head. Just make peace with the here and now? Accept it.

  Accept it.

  She gingerly tested the water with her hand before rinsing herself off and climbing out. The sky outside was the sad gray of summer rain, of a missed morning that would clear by the afternoon. Good. She had her appointment with Dr. Kohler today, and she hated waiting in the rain for the bus. And she refused to wait in his tiny office, eyeing the fixtures or pretending to read the magazines he left on the coffee table, out of date and uninteresting. She left the moment her session was complete, and refused to think about going back until her next appointment. Her freedom was conditional: twice-weekly sessions with Dr. Frederick Kohler. But damned if she would lose one more minute of her life in his office, her thoughts scrutinized, her dreams picked apart.