"The Sanity's Edge Saloon"

Chapter 1: A DAY LIKE ANY OTHER

     Summer began like any other day, Jack’s routine calcified over time, the permanence of words etched in stone.

     He awoke at six and got ready for work, donned a drab-gray suit, black shoes, an inexpressive tie. After breakfast, he rinsed the dishes and left them in the sink. He would wash them after dinner and leave them in the rack to dry overnight, so he could do it all over again tomorrow. Just like usual. Just like every morning. Five days a week every week. At ten after seven, he was headed for Stone Surety Mortgage, and by 7:33, he was parked in the company’s south lot.

     There was security in routine, in its precision, in the semblance of normalcy it represented. Routine becomes ritual, every day like clockwork, order overseeing the tedium of the mundane, leaving his mind free to roam the halls of his imagination. At twenty-five, Jack Lantirn was already killing time.

     Clockwork is inherently fragile, gears inflexible, the unbending quality of the springs. A machine, once broken, is ruined forever, discarded and replaced. Normalcy reveals itself as little more than an elaborate fabrication, a lie told over and over until it loses all cohesion, breaking apart when it is believed in most.

     In twenty-eight hours, a bomb placed in the basement of the Stone Surety Mortgage building would explode, debris scattering as far away as a quarter mile.

     Unknowing, Jack Lantirn stared absently at a layer of gray pushing into the blue, the wind electrified, heat of the approaching storm.

     He thought he should have called in sick. No one needed a report analyst for a broken company, no matter what they said. But Jack never called in sick.

     Three weeks ago, Stone Surety’s parent company, cash-strapped and lacking a cohesive direction, auctioned off the bulk of the mortgage company’s assets to a lending house based in South Carolina. The two hundred and thirty-five employees residing within fell on the wrong side of the balance sheet, and were summarily terminated. Those still expected to show up every day either worked very hard or not at all; neither had a future with Stone Surety Mortgage.

     Part of the latter, Jack spent the last three weeks doing nothing. Who needed progress reports or product forecasts on a dead company when your job was going away? Most of his co-workers were given sixty days off with pay; not for courtesy or kindness, but because it was required by law. Two months with a paycheck. Start your job search. Take a vacation. Paint your house. Just go away.

     Not so fortunate, Jack was at work on this particular Tuesday, the first official day of summer, dutifully tending a dying job.

     He walked in through the loading bay, the door—normally accessible only with an employee ID card—blocked open to accommodate the movers loading a semi in the bay with banker’s boxes of mortgage files, what was loosely termed “assets” in this industry. He walked past dark rows of empty cubicles once loud with telemarketing reps. No one even bothered to turn on the lights in this part of the building anymore.

     But strangely, the company trusted him to come in for eight hours a day on the off-chance someone—who, no one seemed to know—had a report-based question about numbers that no longer mattered.

     Being trustworthy, Jack discovered, was not a compliment in corporate America. Some thought so, but they were wrong. Being trustworthy meant you were afraid. It meant you wouldn’t step out of line or do anything unusual. It meant you could be trusted to do exactly what was expected, and nothing more.

     And on that day when the company expected him to walk away without raising a fuss, Jack would do that too.

     A dry-erase board greeted him at the end of the empty cubicles, naked and white but for a single, inelegant phrase printed in violent green: TODAY IS TUESDAY. Once filled with achievements and assignments for the coming week, month, year, now it was wiped clean, empty.

     It could as easily have said that the day would be no different than any other day, the same as yesterday and the day before and the day before that. It might have promised that today would be repeated over and over and over until Jack lost his mind. It might have said all that and been true.

     But this was simpler: Today is Tuesday.

     Another day closer to unemployment. Surfing job-search sites, trying to set up first interviews, asking people if they had heard of any openings and could they let him know about job-postings they might come across. Eventually, money would run out, and he would get some desperate job that paid him less, worked him more, and put off his dreams of being a writer a little longer.

     Thinking about it made him sick.

     So he tried very hard not to.

     Denial.

     It was a day like any other.

     A box packed with one hundred sticks of dynamite would explode near the gas main in the basement of the Stone Surety Mortgage building tomorrow morning. The detonation would obliterate most of the building in what authorities would call the most devastating singular bomb blast on American soil since Oklahoma City. The only silver lining, the building was empty, no employees remaining.

     But that was still twenty-eight hours away.

     Jack made his way to the cafeteria where he spent the next forty minutes writing and drinking mediocre coffee served from a vending machine, killing time before the start of his shift. In its heyday, the company employed over seven hundred people, the cafeteria serving both breakfast and lunch. It closed a year ago during the first round of layoffs—I should have seen this coming—leaving only the vending machines behind.

     I just want to be a writer.

     His book seemed so much more important now: for himself, for his sanity, for no other reason than he hoped to be a real writer one day. But writing didn’t pay. Truthfully, it cost more in time and money than it was worth. Just a foolish hobby. He’d heard stories of first-time writers getting fat advances from publishers, of semi-literate pop icons releasing bestsellers into the market. Exceptions that proved the rule, he insisted. If he wanted to continue eating and paying rent, he needed a job.

     Dreams could wait.

     Through the wall of windows lining one side of the cafeteria, Jack stared out at the lawn, grass bright green and shiny. What’s stopping me from leaving? From simply getting up from this chair, walking out the door, and never coming back? Not to my job or my apartment or anything. A dozen steps? Twenty at the most. Open the door and just walk away. It would be a whole different world then, wouldn’t it? So, what’s stopping me from simply leaving?

     The question occurred to him more often of late, and more often he had trouble coming up with an answer.

     Most of the immediate terminations took place last Wednesday. By Thursday morning, Jack had ten pre-programmed numbers on his desk phone that rang dead-lines.

     And on Friday, Jools left.

     Technically, she left Saturday morning, but it was over on Friday.

     They would meet at Finnegan’s Pub every Friday after work, part of Jack’s comfortable clockwork. He arrived early—nothing at the office to keep him late—and saw Jools sitting with a man, sitting too close, laughing too comfortably. He leaned towards her—this man she was with—and they kissed. Jack watched it all from across the room, not knowing what to think, how to feel, what to believe. Only emptiness, a void of thought and emotion. He was actually prepared to dismiss it, a misunderstanding on his part—He’s probably just a friend, a relative perhaps. And Jools is affectionate, demonstrative; a kiss means nothing. She’s my girlfriend, after all. Six months now. Hardly a lifetime, but it means something. I should—

     Jools leaned into his kiss, eyes closed, the space between them disappearing.

     … should …

     Six months evaporated like ice on a hot sidewalk—a meaningless waste, empty time—as two lovers kissed, her hand brushing his cheek, his fingers caressing her hip, gestures of dreadful familiarity.

     … should …

     Jools looked up, saw Jack standing there, watching, doing nothing. No surprise or guilt in her expression, only resignation.

     He nearly collided with the doorframe as he tried to escape, pulse deafening, hands shaking. He walked uneasily to his car, drove home in silence, hands tightening upon the wheel until his knuckles ached. Back at his apartment, he collapsed, strength pouring from him like water. This must be what it feels like to bleed to death, he thought, the notion both romantic and ignorant as he sat in the swelling darkness, nursing his misery.

     He needed Jools more than ever. Selfish perhaps, but what was the point of love if you couldn’t depend on it when you needed it?

     This notion was similarly romantic, and just as ignorant.

     Jack never particularly cared about his job, but he did care about Jools. He was an unfocused dreamer doomed to be utterly ordinary, utterly forgettable, a hapless victim of his own mediocrity. Julie Eden—she nicknamed herself Jools; said it sounded exotic—was everything Jack could ever imagine in a woman. Extraordinary. Beautiful. Bright. Exciting. Jools had a few tattoos, a few piercings—not all in her ears. What she saw in him, he never understood, and never allowed himself to think on too hard.

     It would have surprised him to learn that Julie Eden was not so different, a romantic who believed in the adage that still waters run deep. A self-professed writer, Jack sounded exciting. At first. Unrealized potential. Raw clay to be molded and shaped, his inner qualities coaxed to the surface. But when Jools reached into the pool that was Jack Lantirn, she made a disappointing discovery: it wasn’t really all that deep. She’d tired of the labor and moved on to more willing clay, more realized potential.

     All dreams end eventually, and we wake up.

     If he was being honest with himself—which was rare—Jack did not love Jools so much as the ideaof Jools; that glimpse into another life, a more pristine life that writers and artists deserved, of satiated wants and fulfilled needs. But that same honesty would force another revelation he was even less prepared for: he was not a writer or an artist. He was no one. Nobody. Nothing. When you cut through the bullshit, Jack was a writer who had never been published, not once, not even in a school paper or some empty online blog.

     Jools’ disillusionment was understandable, her betrayal not unexpected—if Jack was being totally honest with himself.

     But that was rare.

     He heard the door unlock, and Jools walked in, looked at him sitting in the darkness. “Can we talk?”

     He didn’t answer.

     “I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to find out like that.”

     Light from outside turned her to shadows and lines. “How did you want me to find out?”

     “I wasn’t really sure how to tell you. This isn’t easy for me.”

     Hmm. Maybe this was his fault.

     “I … I guess I thought it would be different. When you told me you were a writer, it sounded exciting, you know. I guess it was silly of me to think that.”

     “I’m sorry I disappointed you.” He’d hoped for a scathing remark, but it came out like a sincere apology.

     “It wasn’t you, really. I just expected something … more. For a while, I thought I was okay with it. But I’m not. I’m sorry you found out about it that way, though. It wasn’t fair.”

     “I’m getting used to it.”

     “Please don’t hate me. I couldn’t bear it if you hated me.”

     The break in her voice was the cruelest thing he could imagine. Cruel because it dangled hope before him, and Jack swam eagerly towards it. There was just enough light to see the tears against her cheek and make him regret the hurtful things he had said—or meant to say. He wanted to comfort her, wanted to hold her in his arms and press her head to his shoulder, feel her warmth against his skin, even …

     “I don’t want to end this with you hating me,” Jools said, stepping closer, kneeling down in the chair atop him. “Please say you won’t hate me, Jack. Please.”

     In that moment, Jack concocted elaborate myths of how Jools would fall back in love with him, how she would see his commitment and forget this other guy, make love to him tonight and stay with him forever. And everything would be as it was.

     Jools leaned down, a deep, aching kiss like none he had ever had before. And for a brief time, Jack Lantirn believed his own fiction.

     He woke up alone, tangled in sheets that smelled of spent lust and Jools’ perfume, a note on the pillow, very trite, very cliché.

               Jack, I’m sorry. Please don’t hate me.

                         I will always love you.

                                                    — Jools

     He had forgiven her. He had promised he would not hate her. He’d cleaned her Karma in exchange for one last night, one final bit of fiction.

     So Jools left, free to pursue her life without him.

     Jack wrapped himself in his writing, such as it was, and retreated into his routine, hoping that through an imitation of normalcy he might in some way influence its return, the superstitious primitive stamping around the fire, petitioning the night sky and casting chicken’s blood into the blaze. His ritualistic dance was the daily grind, his work that no longer existed. Bored at his desk, he wrote every day and saved it on a thumb drive. This to keep him from going mad, losing his mind, standing up and walking the hell out of everything. What is keeping me here? The routine. The routine would bring back normalcy, restore reality.

     These were the lies Jack Lantirn made himself believe.

     He wrote out a page and a half in long-hand before heading up from the cafeteria to the pre-fabricated, mauve walls of his cubical where he started his day by turning on his computer.

No, not really his computer. No more than it was hiscubical, his files, or his reports. None of this was his. It was all temporary, borrowed, privileges on the verge of being rescinded, sixty days and done. Surrender your ID badge upon exiting the premises.

     Jack loaded the story from his thumb drive—this, at least, was his—and started typing what he had written in the cafeteria.

     A winter storm rolled across the leaden sky, eddies of wind twisting cascades of great crystal helices, snow strands of DNA collapsing under the onslaught of some new viral strain.

     So this is the way the world goes, Andrew thought, echoing T.S. Eliot, his existence consumed by his own needs, his desperate wants. Who cared about storms and snow and everything else? Who cared at all about anything?

     Please, please don’t leave me.

     At the sound of footsteps, Jack’s fingers toggled a report page he kept in the background just as his supervisor poked his head around the corner. Fear, like any habit, dies a hard, slow death.

     “Hey, Jack. I didn’t expect to find you here this early,” Henry said. “You must leave your place before eight, huh?”

     “Usually.” Jack shrugged, having already traded more words with his boss than he did on most days, and some weeks. “Why? What’s up?”

     “Well, something happened last night.” Henry looked about awkwardly, then lowered his voice. “Someone broke in. Stole some equipment.”

     Jack stared back as if Henry might be speaking in tongues.

     “It happened after everyone left,” Henry pressed on. “Video surveillance shows someone just walked in off the street through the loading dock. They couldn’t make out his face, but … anyway, the company’s feeling a little vulnerable. They want to tighten security. All personnel not actively involved with the physical transfer and shutdown of operations are being asked to leave the building. You and about thirty others who were staying on for the next few weeks are on a list of those they’d like to have turn in their ID’s and vacate the premises, so to speak. They’ve even locked all the doors except for the main entrance. I tried to call you at home, tell you not to bother dressing up for work since you’d only be coming in to collect your things.”

     Jack felt his eyes losing focus.

     “This won’t affect your payout, of course,” Henry added quickly. “You’re still considered a full-time employee for the remainder of your sixty days. Full pay and benefits. You can just use this time to start your job search a little earlier.”

     Jack smiled mechanically, betraying nothing.

     “The company just needed a blanket policy that would cover everyone objectively. I didn’t even find out myself until I got in this morning. I tried to call you, but … anyway, there’s no reason to stick around for the rest of the day. Hell, I’m taking a halfer myself.” Henry smiled in an effort to make Jack feel better.

     It failed.

     “Well,” he said, silence turning uncomfortable, “there are some spare boxes by the filing cabinets for packing up any personal effects.”

     Jack thought he should say something, let Henry know it was okay, that he understood. It wasn’t his fault.

     It wasn’t anyone’s fault.

     Before today, Jack was harmless. Now, he was also worthless. Four years of college, two years on the job, countless hours of unpaid overtime, and they were just going to send him home like a goddamn temp good for nothing but fetching coffee and tacking notes to the memo board: TODAY IS TUESDAY.

     And the worst part of it all was that Jack would do it. He would pack up his desk, turn off his—the!—computer, and leave. He wouldn’t complain, or steal the tape dispenser, or the stapler, or even a box of paper clips. He would simply leave.

     “Jack, are you okay? You have a way home, don’t you?”

     “Yeah, sure,” Jack murmured distantly. “Let me just shut my system down, and I’ll get out of here. It shouldn’t take long.”

     “No need to hurry.”

     Henry was wrong. If Jack didn’t leave now, right away, he might find himself doing something … unpredictable; breaking his routine; breaking.

     He turned away, made a show of closing files. He didn’t want a sounding board or a shoulder to cry on. He wanted normalcy, and he wasn’t going to get it here.

     Jack loaded the little he’d managed to gather in two years into a copier paper box: a cheap clock radio, a framed picture of Jools, his Heavy Metal movie commemorative mug, and a stack of pens—stolen, but who gives a shit, he thought fiercely. A writer needs to write, and he needs pens to write with.

     “Just sign out at the front desk,” Henry said from the doorway of his own cubicle, larger, but a prefab cube all the same, easily torn down once it outlived its usefulness. Stone Surety was not reality; it was Studio Lot B the day after shooting finished on a movie set. Soon, everything would be broken down and reassembled for the next project—the role of Henry Leeds, Supervisor, will be played by … 

     “You have my number,” Henry said. “Call if you need anything, okay? Good luck.”

     Jack nodded and wished him the same. It was a great performance.

     It wasn’t until he unclipped his ID card and left it with the receptionist at the front desk that it hit him: his job was over; finished, The End in bold letters. He felt something between numbness and being punched in the stomach, left winded and sucking air. His signature as he signed out was an illegible scribble, hands still shaking as he started across the empty parking lot.

     He stopped halfway, staring in disbelief, the box of meager possessions limp in one hand.

     Beneath the front of his car, a widening puddle of florescent green like some slick of diseased lemonade.

     He knew little about cars, but even he knew leaked radiator fluid when he saw it.

     Inside Jack’s mind, the last frayed fiber of a long rope snapped with an audible twang and sailed away into the darkness, taking Jack Lantirn with it.

     It was not even nine o’clock.

     Leaving the box on the hood of the car, he took the pens and the mug and shoved them into his backpack. He left behind the radio and the picture of Jools.

     A crow dropped down upon the roof of his car, a straggled mass of feathers the color of coal and hearth stone, head bobbing crazily at him, an insinuating look in its tar-black stare.

     You have lost your mind.

     Jack looked away to the field behind Stone Surety Mortgage, smelled the strangely familiar air, a trace of summer flowers and dew clinging to the moist June morning, deceptively close and fleeting, the perfume of a lover that lingers even after she has left you asleep and alone, a note folded upon the pillow.

     What’s stopping me from walking out and never coming back? What’s stopping me from calling it quits? Maybe it’s time to catch the next train out of Dodge. Don’t wonder where it’s going; it doesn’t matter, never did. Just climb aboard.

     Maybe I should.

     Maybe ….

     The crow on the car in the parking lot said, “Man, you gotta take a shot.”

     Jack looked up, but the bird was already winging away, a gangly takeoff of batting black feathers. It flew to the top of a light post, and made a point of ignoring him, as if what it said—that it said anything at all—was meant merely in passing.

     Jack stared up at it for a time, but the crow did not speak again. Perhaps it never spoke at all. Perhaps I’m losing my mind.

     He looked one last time at the yellow-green slick beneath his car, the beat-up Civic with rusting door panels and a leaking head gasket that he had been so proud of when he bought it his second year of college. Then he started walking, home seven miles away. He pulled the car keys from his key ring and dropped them on the asphalt. An empty clinking sound, and they were forgotten.

     On the light post, the crow pumped its head up and down in what might have been a gesture of agreement.

     Or it might have been nothing at all.

                                         * * *

     Two miles in, the sky made good its promise, clouds thickening to sheets of gray slate, and Jack found himself caught in a downpour, rain soaking his drab suit and inexpressive tie, puddles ruining his shoes.

     He escaped into a nearby coffee shop.

Chapter 1: 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 crept in, filled 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 of her past, displaced in the blackness she loosely termed her memory, and revived in the darkness as nightmares.

     Outside Ellen’s bedroom window, the storm made the light from a street lamp waver, sliced apart by the blinds and scattered across the room. Covers pulled up around her chin, she 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 sleep, restless eyes twitching with dark ruminations.

     No, the room was entirely normal. Ellen kept her monsters inside her own head, and there was no protection from them. They stalked the edges of the light, waiting. 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 on the nightstand read 5:26 AM. Too early to get up, she thought. And maybe too late to fall back asleep. Maybe.

     Beside the clock, a dog-eared book, spine creased, 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, a hand-written note signed with a drawing of a jack o’ lantern.

It was a message from Jack.

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

     Actually, it would be more accurate to say it had been nearly two months since she thought she’d seen him. According to her psychiatrist, Jack Lantirn did not exist. Jack Lantirn, like so much of Ellen’s memory, was nothing 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.

     Ellen 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. Jack had been watching her. Ellen 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, Ellen 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—Ellen followed Jack 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. He was simply a character in a book by an author of the same name. An author no one could identify. Ellen asked her boss 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 utterly boring, and that it was only the application of information that piqued his interest.

     So it was to Ellen’s 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 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 and hung up on her.

     The book, like its author, should not exist. There was no explanation as to how it fell into her hands that day, the day Ellen 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?

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

     The lines between sanity and madness blurred, the boundaries between real and imaginary neither hard nor fast, 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, Ellen 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.

     The Caretaker.

     There was something there, but slippery. Her memory was like a stream, facts like fish she was pulling out with 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, like words on a page written in a language she did not understand. She knew bits and pieces, but they seemed to exist without personal significance.

     Just words on a page.

     The back window of Ellen’s 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, Ellen 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, Jack 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 drawn out metaphors, misplaced fragments, and run-on sentences.

     Then there were the things Ellen knew only from what she read, having not witnessed them herself—assuming she witnessed anything at all. Ellen never saw Rebreather’s fall from the stairway. She was already on board the train, the one 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 the Caretaker, of Jack. He dragged Jack down, spilling them on the tracks, and the train left them behind.

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

     In shrink speak, survivor’s guilt. She escaped. Jack didn’t.

     Ellen wiped absently at her cheek, a tear finding its way down her face, trail cold in the breeze. So frustrating, living a life that did not exist. But where was the harm then, really? 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 Ellen everything she needed, everything significant and tangible and real…

     … except permanence.

     Ellen stood up carefully, 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, scalloped shells of gray and white clouds overtaking the dark simplicity of night.

     And after a time, the wind turned cooler, damp, and Ellen fell back asleep to the sound of rain pattering 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 through the rooms like a ghost, watched her nakedness with a kind of trembling awe zealots afford visions of the Virgin. But he knew better. 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 an endless expanse of reality already made. He saw the tear upon her cheek, could smell it all the way down here in the alley, picking out its fragile scent from the rot of neglected garbage, the sticky odor of late summer grass and leaves, the acrid smell of wet asphalt.

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

Chapter 2: JUST ANOTHER DAY

     It was nearly eight o’clock.

     Ellen 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.

     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, thinking 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.

     Ellen always felt better if she could get back to sleep before first light. In the twilight, she dreamed. She would see Jack, speak with him, touch him. So very 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 the span of eternity. Ellen watched 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. Ellen 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 stolen by the white sorcerer, Gusman Kreiger. Jack rebuilt the world around him, made it in his own image, a small god starting his own book of Genesis on the outskirts of reality. In the nightmares, Ellen was kept from him, living only through the soft breeze on his skin or the cold face of the moon. Jack did not know of her, could not sense her near him, or know that she cared. In the twilight dreams, Jack 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, Ellen supposed. And either just as likely untrue.

     The water turned suddenly scalding, someone in the apartment complex running the cold water out of her pipes. Ellen 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.

     Ellen gingerly tested the water 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 saw Dr. Kohler today, and she hated waiting in the rain afterwards 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. Ellen left Dr. Kohler’s office the moment her session was complete, and refused to think about going back until her next appointment. One of the many conditions of her freedom was twice-weekly sessions with Dr. Frederick Kohler. But damned if she would lose one more minute of her life in his office, thoughts scrutinized, dreams picked apart.

     She’d stand in the rain if need be.

     Ellen put on a white summer dress and a pair of slip-on sneakers; the hardwood floor at Dabble’s Books was no place for heels, and Dr. Kohler needed no additional encouragement. He would find the dress sufficiently distracting. Not that there was anything obvious about Dr. Kohler—no lingering stare at her breasts, the accidental brush of the knee, or hand gently wrapping her shoulder—but the impression remained. There was something about Dr. Kohler that simply wasn’t right.

     Paranoia is a sign of mental illness.

     Ellen’s freedom had three conditions, actually. Maintain gainful employment, stay within the city limits, and meet twice a week with the court-appointed therapist. Dr. Frederick Kohler. Dr. Kohler also reported to her father. Daddy’s means of assuring Ellen stayed safely out of the way and under control. She was free so long as she remained a prisoner. Therapy twice a week out here in the real world, or Thorazine twice a day in an asylum. Daddy loved offering choices.

     But how do I know this is the real world? Ellen wondered, a piece of toast in one hand and a half-empty glass of juice in the other. Dreams are real until you wake up, and you realize you can’t do in reality what you can in dreams. So how do I know I won’t wake up at some moment and discover that all of this is just a dream?

     Yeah, she thought dryly, taking a bite from her toast. And maybe I’m really just a rabbit dreaming she’s a human.

     Ellen placed the glass in the sink, threw her bag over her shoulder—checking first to make sure that The Sanity’s Edge Saloon was safely stowed in the bottom—and left, locking the door behind her.

     “Jasper? That you?”

     Ellen turned as the door across the hall opened, a squat, black woman shuffling out upon the landing, hair coarse as steel wool. She squinted through thick-framed glasses, pulling together the sides of a gray, faded sweater.

     “Oh, Ellen, I’m sorry. I thought you were Jasper.”

     Rose Marie Desmond lived with her grandson in the apartment across from hers. They shared a landing, and sometimes exchanged mail when the postman became confused or simply indifferent. A pleasant enough neighbor somewhere in her sixties, though Ellen thought she looked closer to seventy.

     “No, I’m sorry. I haven’t seen him.” They spoke to one another on the landing, the urban picket fence, a neighborly relationship where none would exist otherwise. They did not exchange recipes or news or the occasional cup of sugar or any of the things that neighbors supposedly did in that black-and-white fabrication of society’s collective, a vicarious past gleaned from fifty-odd years of semi-literate television. They had no common ground save the landing. “I was just on my way to work.”

     “Tha’s alright. I worry ‘bout him, is all. He slipped out after breakfast while I was takin’ care of bidness, ya know.”

     Ellen didn’t need to ask what “bidness” Rose Marie was talking about. The older woman could and had comfortably discussed her numerous bodily functions and dysfunctions with a perfect stranger in the supermarket, and just as quickly clucked indignantly at the shamelessly open discussions carried out by the younger generation regarding sex. Ellen chalked it up to a generational thing.

      “And when I was finished, he was gone. Just phhhht! Gone.” She shook her head. “He’s a handful, that boy is.”

     “Rose, is there …” Ellen felt her words stumble, the most obvious question regarding Rose Marie’s situation also the most tactless. “I mean … well, has a doctor ever said if there was anything they could do for him?”

     Jasper was special. That was what Rose Marie Desmond always said. Like her “bidness,” special was a euphemism. Ellen was given to understand that Jasper was the equivalent of a six-year-old; a six-year-old wearing the gangly body of a young man of seventeen. But Jasper was more complicated than that. There were times when he was fairly lucid and other times when he simply blabbered non-stop to anyone or no one for hours. And there were still other times when he said nothing at all, sometimes for days. Some form of autism or Asperger’s Syndrome maybe, though Ellen was hardly an expert. Her specialty was escaping reality … by any means available.

     Rose Marie tilted her head, the look of someone who has answered an awkward question so many times that it can no longer offend, only amuse by the embarrassment of the one who asks. “Oh, I ‘spect one has. In fact, I’m quite sure there’s a treatment of some nature out there for him. I think I saw it once on one of ‘em nighttime news shows; you know the ones I mean?”

     Ellen nodded respectfully.

     “But doctors cost money, and it’s just me now. I got my Social Security and some money Norris and I saved up before he passed on, bless him, but tha’s it. The boy’s mother gone and run off. Livin’ like a whore, she is. A whore!”

     Ellen chewed at the inside of her lip regretfully.

     “She got herself knocked up with some no-good drug dealer she was hanging around with, and when that boy came out, all screwed up from her drinkin’ and whorin’, she just left him with me. I think to myself, well, why not? I look after him for a while, then, when she’s dried out and better, we can look after the boy together. Only that ain’t what happened. She jus’ up an’ left. Living in Fort Lauderdale, or some such place. Don’t call. Don’t write. Don’t give a shit.”

     Rose Marie looked up apologetically. “Oh, Ellen, I’m sorry. Please excuse my language. I start ramblin’ on about Maggie, an’ I get myself all worked up. But it ain’t no concern of yours, and I’m sorry I made it so.”

     “It’s okay, Rose, really,” Ellen said, too late to gracefully exit the conversation, anyway.

     “I just can’t imagine leaving someone like Jasper behind? He’s such a good boy.” Then she shook her head, waved it off. “I know, I know. He’s a handful. Quiet as a church mouse for days, then, for no reason at all, he starts to babblin’ and he won’t never shut up. But he’s a good boy. He’s polite and he’s clean. He minds me, mostly.” To that last part, she sounded a little rueful. “I wish I could afford the therapy or the doctors what would make him better. I know there’s smarts locked in there somewhere. I can see it in the things he does. He’s very clever with his hands, did you know that?”

     Ellen shook her head automatically.

     “I buy him models and he assembles them just perfectly. Doesn’t even use the instructions half the time. He just looks at it, and his fingers understand how to put it together. And they’re fine, too. Smooth and tight and seamless. Like art. He’s clever with his hands. Re-worked the pieces o’ one kit into some kind of airplane once. Just amazing, though I’m not sure why. Nothin’ wrong with the ‘65 Mustang it was s’posed to be. But that plane sure looked fine.” Rose Marie beamed. “He’s got no head for inventin’, but his hands can do just fantastic things when you set them to it. Like that Rainman fella. You know the one I mean?”

     Ellen nodded. It was not the first time she’d heard Mrs. Desmond’s lament. But she also knew there was nothing she could do, nothing she could even suggest. And the fact was, his condition scared her. Not him, per se, but the simple fact that you never knew. Jasper was a reminder of the madness lurking just behind the shadows of Ellen’s own thoughts, inescapable and clever, stalking her, ready to take her unaware and rip all normalcy asunder. Seeing Jasper tightened her nerves like piano wire. Not for fear of him, but of being like him, of losing control, losing her mind, going crazy … 

     … again.

     Ellen shook her head, realizing the older woman was talking and she hadn’t been listening; too deep in her own thoughts and insecurities. Reason number one not to dispense advice, Ellen thought reproachfully: Anyone as fucked up as you is wholly unqualified.

     “Rose, I’m sorry, but I need to get to work. I’m sure Jasper will show up. I don’t think he would run off or—”

     Ellen was interrupted mid-sentence by a paper airplane circling down from the stairwell above. A broad-winged construction, tips craftily angled, it glided between the spiral switchbacks of the stairwell and down; not skipping upon the banister or whisking against the walls, but flying as if by some invisible pilot determined to navigate the four stories without a hitch or a wobble.

     “Jasper!” Rose Marie shouted up the stairs. “Are you on the roof again?”

     Ellen risked a glance up, light spilling upon the next landing where the stairs opened to the roof. More than that, she could not see.

     “It’s raining out there, you silly goose,” Rose Marie persisted. “You’ll get all wet and catch a cold. Now you come down here right now. Least put on a coat.”

     Ellen used the opportunity to leave. At the bottom of the well, she saw the paper airplane lying upon the small shag mat just inside of the door. Had the door been open, the plane might have sailed right out into the street.

     And from there, who knew how far it would go?

     Ellen nudged the plane aside with her toe and stepped out. It was only a block and a half to Dabble’s Books. She started off, walking briskly through the drizzle.

                                                  * * *

     The man in the gray coat stared after Ellen Monroe as she left.

     He knew where she was going, knew her routine intimately. She was a couple minutes late, he knew, just as he knew she wouldn’t wear a jacket or carry an umbrella, though the rain was only just tapering off and would certainly return.

     He could feel the coming storm in his knotted hands.

     Silly goose. Pride will be your undoing, though you probably don’t know it. You hardly know yourself at all.

     He, on the other hand, did not wear a raincoat because he did not own one. And he did not carry an umbrella because he did not own one of those either. He had only a staff, and it would not keep the rain from his head.

     At least, not here. Not now.

     But once…

     Well, no use crying over things lost … or maybe things that never were. For therein was the rub. What was real? And how long had it been real? And, more to the point, what was the reality before, and when was the next one coming along, that next reality that would be better than this … or at least different? And how could anything different from this not be better? The only question, when would the magic bus arrive? When could he climb aboard the cosmic carpet ride, give his token to the transit authority djinni, and punch out of this dead universe for good?

     He pondered these questions as he watched Ellen walk off to her nice normal job with her nice normal boss in the middle of her nice normal life.

     Only not so normal, and not so nice.

     He was about to follow, just as he had done every day since this began—would do every day from now until the end of eternity—when he saw something and stopped.

     There on the steps was a folded paper airplane. It sat on the stoop like a loyal and lovesick dog awaiting Ellen’s return. He picked it up, unfolded it. A historical society flyer celebrating a new exhibit: Flights of Fancy: The History of Aviation. An intricate diagram of Da Vinci’s ornithopter etched in gray behind the words, words like the picture that captured his attention, seized his heart, rolled over and over in his mind. He glanced up, searching for secrets, saw only the light rain from the dappled sky, the paper flyer turning damp in his hand.

     “I knew you would come for her,” he whispered, paper clutched to his chest, sheltered from the rain.

     The empty staff clacked softly against the sidewalk and his legs and hands pained him greatly, but he listened to neither, head filled only with the penitent praises of a man found wondering lost in the desert, and is at last called home. He did not follow Ellen that morning as he had every other morning for the last two months. He did not need to.

     He had at last received a sign.

Chapter 1:  Prologue: And Sometimes the City Dreams

     The asphalt burned through the night, drizzle-slick and steaming, a wasteland of obsidian and glass, features lost to the broken reflections of the night sky littered with streetlights, traffic signals, and the colors of discordant neon.

     The street was quiet at this hour, Mr. Liu’s walk home from Shanghai Imports where he worked second-shift making fortune cookies uneventful. Nighttime in the city is not the fevered hustle-and-jerk darkly imagined by the twisted romantics, nicotine-amped alcoholics and soul-scarred artists searching for meaning in the pain and darkness of the secret underground world: whore havens, gang sprawls, shooting galleries, and darkened conclaves of organized crime.

     Sometimes the city slept.

     And sometimes, when she slept, she dreamed.

     Clouds of steam caressed his skin with the unsubtle persuasion of an alleyway diva vying for attention, eager to earn a place in his mind, a corner of his heart, and just maybe the means to escape. But he paid it no mind, pushing past as his breath mingled with the saturated air, visible in spite of the heat.

     Yes, sometimes the city would dream.

     His building was old brick the color of scorched clay, a three-story walk-up of narrow hallways, sturdy steel doors and stout locks, the only sound his footsteps and the jingle of keys, the click of locks: one for the outer door, a second for the inside hall, two outside of his apartment. And once inside, three deadbolts and a chain.

     The city could be fitful when she dreamed, sometimes thrashing against her restraints.

     Once inside, Mr. Liu hung up his coat, the shirt beneath sticking tightly to his skin and darkened with sweat. It was too hot for a suit coat; he should not have worn it. It was not even necessary for his job at Shanghai Imports. But habits are hard to break, and there is dignity in a job one wears a coat to, even if only to hang the coat in a locker shortly after arriving for work, not putting it on again until after he left. At work, Mr. Liu wore an apron tied over a white overcoat buttoned to the neck, nitrile gloves, and a hairnet; he had been bald for many years, but the company had strict rules about proper head-covering.

     But walking to and from work, Mr. Liu wore a coat, indulging in memories of better times.

     The apartment was small and hot, dry in spite of the humidity saturating the city. Stripping off his clothes, he wandered naked around the tight collection of empty rooms. His wife had passed away many years ago. His granddaughter would visit him sometimes, but she always called first, and she always knocked. And she never visited at night.

     His son never visited at all.

     Liu kept a small table by the window for writing, the glass covered over in yellowed rice paper, the room a sanctum from the world outside. At the desk, a pen, a pot of ink, a tablet of writing paper; all suited to more noble purposes once.

     Sometimes, the city dreamed.

     He set a match to a candle and let its aroma overtake the lingering smell of sulfur and sweat, the omnipresent odor of wet garbage rotting in the miles of alleyways and streets of the dreaming city without. He breathed deeply, the air smelling like sandalwood and cinnamon, and the darkness of the city retreated, allowing him to see distant horizons in his mind, lands far away. He sat upon the stool, listening to the stillness surrounding him, hearing the beat of his heart, the sound of his breath, the secret song of the universe.

     Her whisper was faint now, as if from very far away. Soon, he feared, it would be gone.

     Sweat ran down his scalp and neck, across his chest and back, armpits and groin.

     And still, he waited.

     Perhaps it was already too late. Over and over he breathed in the scent of the candle, and he listened to the night, and he waited.

     And he waited.

     Sometimes, the city dreams.

It was almost dawn before he reached for the pen, dipped it to the waiting ink, and placed it on the paper: 

               Someone will ask you for assistance.

                    Your journey begins with her.

     Mr. Liu looked at the words on the tablet, studied them, listened to them repeat over and over in his mind. He thought it more elegantly phrased in Mandarin; thought it would sound more beautiful in French, English too unsubtle. But they spoke neither Mandarin nor French in the Americas—did not want to—and no good would come from these words if they were not understood by the one they were meant for.

     He reached to the small box on the side of the writing table where he kept a collection of the tiny blank slips of paper that cookie fortunes were printed upon, and he took one, very carefully printing the fortune upon it in an excruciatingly tight, neat script, letters like grains of sand, lines thin as silk.

     Finished, he raised it up for inspection, gently breathing upon the ink, blowing it dry…

     … And he discovered something unexpected.

     A second slip of paper stuck to the back of the first as if eager for the feather-light touch of the pen, the purpose of the words, the significance of potential made actual. What is the use of paper if there are no words upon it?

     He thought about this for a long time also, wondering what it could mean and listening to the nighttime city, the stars, the universe as it turned.

     “Perhaps.”

     And so he wrote the fortune again, a duplicate of the first.

     He would take them both with him tomorrow, and, while bending the hot cookies around the thousands of other mass-produced fortunes offering only philosophic notions and useless advice, Mr. Liu would insert these two very special fortunes into two of the cookies and leave them to find their way. Fate would guide them along their path. He had done all he could; he was only a scribe of the messenger.

     Then Mr. Liu went to bed and fell asleep.

     This is what he did every night.

     Sometimes, the city dreams.

Chapter 2:  The Hollander's Tale

     Everyone calls me the Collector.

     It’s not my real name, of course, but that doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t know it if you heard it.

     I was a reporter.

     No, I was a writer. A staff writer.

     Don’t wonder if you ever read any of my articles. You didn’t. I was never famous, and they were shit anyway. Most of what I did was buried in the C and D sections back when they had those, stock filler that seldom garnered a byline—at least, not one you’d remember. Middle sections. Middle of the page. Middle of the road. None of that matters now. I realize how stupid I was, endlessly pursuing fabricated news, scribbled half-truths and outlandish rants, ignorant streams of insensibility outdated within hours of being committed to paper, chemically-bleached scraps of falsehoods and opinions crumpled into loose balls of piffle and flung out at the masses like pellets in a stocking pond, gobbled down in an endless pursuit of whatever reinforced the prevailing whim. It wasn’t informative. It wasn’t enlightening. It wasn’t truth. It was nothing, a distraction. I just didn’t know it. I was ignorant.

     Like you.

     But this is different. I’ve seen through it all. The veils and the smoke, the little distractions that capture our attention and lead us away from what’s real like a street hustler playing the shell game with us while his accomplice works the crowd, lifting wallets, stealing watches.

     There is more to reality than meets the eye.

     How do I know? Because I’ve seen it.

     Why should you believe me?

     Because I’ve seen it!

     I saw the beginning. And I saw the end. And I’ve gathered the stories along the way like I promised I would, taking them from the few who would know. The dying and the lost, their tales passing away like love’s last breath gone to the wind. I’ve traveled to the way-back when the pieces first started falling together even as everything else was falling apart. Some stories I found. Others I stole. Some truths are not shared openly outside of dreams and nightmares.

     If you don’t like it, you can go to hell.

     Or maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t realize you’re already there and have been since before you can remember.

     Let me remind you of some things then. Things you might have forgotten. Things you may simply have failed to notice because you were distracted by the noise and nonsense around you. It begins where it begins. There was a beginning before just as there are things that will come after, but I’m done apologizing.

     It begins in the Pacific Ocean. There is still water there. It won’t always be so, but that’s another story.

     A small feeder vessel, the Hollander, pulls through the dark at a lazy fifteen knots. She’d set sail under capacity, no one in a hurry to get three hundred and seventy containers of mixed consumer products to the US port in San Francisco: plastic models, print cartridges, rubber pet toys, adult novelty items, lawn furniture. The sooner she arrives, the longer she sits and waits; no one in Asia is looking for anything from America right now, and the captain knows he’ll lose money if he’s forced to return with anything less than three-quarters capacity. Increased mooring fees and currency fluctuations means he will only lose more for getting there faster, so he takes his time, even taking on passengers in Fiji to cut the losses.

     Nothing uncommon about taking on a couple passengers.

     But there was nothing common about these two.

     Passage was arranged by a garishly attired dwarf who spoke lavishly and wore comically large sunglasses and a pirate’s hat. His draping patch coat, once yellow and red and blue like a clown, was weathered and faded to the color of old cotton, dried blood, and the winter sea. A sad clown.

     The captain disliked him, this short, talkative, sad-colored clown. But the dwarf paid well and requested only privacy for himself and one other. The captain bunked them in an empty hold: bare steel walls, some packing crates to sit on, an oil drum of scrap to burn if they had a mind to. Normally, the crew used empty holds for card games or whoring, if one was available.

     Fuck ‘em. The dwarf paid well; the privacy of the empty hold was his.

     The little man’s companion was his opposite in every regard, a giant who stood head and shoulders over the captain and every man on his crew. But the giant never spoke. His face was disfigured, skin oddly colored. The dwarf claimed the giant worked in the Thai mines, suffering a skin ailment and injury in the process, but nothing contagious. The giant’s movements were slow, deliberate, as if holding himself in reserve. For what, he gave no indication. He was the hulking behemoth to the scurrying rodent.

     The captain liked the giant no better. If these two wanted privacy, that was perfectly all right with him. He only wanted their money; the less he had to deal with them, the better.

     The Pacific Ocean. Its name means peaceful.

     Its name is a lie.

     Pirates hit the Hollander in the middle of the night, nimble as spiders, quick as snakes; not uncommon in this part of the world. Ships are valued for their ability to transport contraband; the vessel’s crew and cargo is not so highly regarded. A passenger might be held for ransom. Europeans will pay for the safe return of a family member. Middle Easterners, too, if they’re able. Those that cannot are given over to the Pacific—the peaceful ocean. Despite the danger, the captain did not employ security. It would only inflate the cost of the run, and too many countries did not allow weapons in port; more money wasted on bribes. So he rolled the dice. No guards. No guns.

     Snake eyes.

     The crew—sailors, mechanics, and deckhands—are hunted down by the pirates and slaughtered with hatchets. The pirates carry an assortment of cheaply manufactured assault rifles, Chinese knock-offs, but ammunition is still expensive; blades less so. Bodies are thrown overboard, the holds searched.

     It is nearly twenty-seven minutes before a trio of pirates finds the ship’s only paying passengers. The hulk of a man sits wrapped in a blanket before a burning oil drum in the middle of the vast, empty hold, back to the door, a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his disfigurement, protecting others from the sight of the grotesque malady afflicting him. The garishly attired dwarf—or was he a child in his ridiculous three-corner hat, patchwork coat, and wrap-around sunglasses; a silly child playing in costume—screeches at them in Filipino that they are to be left alone, that they paid for privacy, that this is all wrong.

     He doesn’t know what’s happened.

     He looks ridiculous.

     He sounds ridiculous.

     A sad, silly, ridiculous clown.

     The three pirates laugh. They do not understand.

     No one understands … until it’s too late.

     Unwilling to risk an altercation with the big man, the pirates unleash a short burst of bullets into the giant’s back, causing him to shudder violently beneath the wrap of blankets, the staccato of gunfire sending the world into icy-slick silence. Crouching behind the big man’s knees for cover, the dwarf looks out at them, sunglasses in hand, deep black eyes regarding them sadly, pityingly. “The Captain needs us,” he says, voice a raspy sound like words through river gravel. “You should have left us alone.”

     And then the pirates finally see, and they realize what is wrong about the dwarf. His eyes are of purest black like a rodent’s or a spider’s … and he has too many!

     The giant’s singular, fluidic movement is the cresting of a lunging shark, swift and silent and certain as death. He shrugs the bullet-riddled blanket aside as he stands, hat falling away to reveal inhuman features—inhuman because the giant is just that. Not human; not at all. The pirates see his face as he turns, they see the undamaged skin on his back—Impossible! What about the bullets?—and they see the glint of metal fixed forever into the monster’s flesh.

     And the pirates scream—less like grown men than small children; children trapped in a nightmare from which there is no waking.

     Then the killing begins.

     This is how the cargo freighter Hollander found its way to the northern coast of California four weeks later, grounded, hull torn open by the rocky shore. The ship was abandoned, no crew or passengers, all lifeboats accounted for, the cargo undisturbed. None of the plastic models, print cartridges, rubber pet toys or assorted adult novelty products is missing or out of place. Not so much as a single model Gundam, red jelly dildo, or piece of rubber dog shit is anywhere but where it should be. The news outlets dub it a modern day Mary Celeste. A ghost ship.

     They don’t understand.

     The Mary Celeste was found adrift between the Azores and the coast of Portugal nearly a century and a half ago without crew or passengers, no message left behind, no indication of what might have happened to them, the people aboard vanishing without a trace and leaving only a riddle that begged an answer.

     The Hollander, however, offered a single clue: blood. Smeared across the walls, in puddles upon the floors, spattered against the ceiling. Nobody—and no bodies—just blood.

     This tantalizing detail was not lost on the media outlets reporting the incident—“Viewers are cautioned that some of the images you are about to see are extremely graphic, and parents are strongly advised not to allow young children to view these scenes as they may find them disturbing.” The disclaimer alone increases ratings by six points.

     Perhaps you forgot already.

     Such are the veils and the smoke and the carnival mirrors, the shell game of lies and disinformation that distracts you from the truth.

     Now wake the fuck up!

Chapter 3: Standing upon the Shore

     The station was quiet. Abandoned. Derelict.

     He gazed for a long time upon the empty tracks, rails cold, gone the color of old slate, victim of the station’s passing. Sunless. Neglected. It had been years since a train passed through. Distant memories of once-crowds lingered against the walls like absent shades, lost echoes of passengers coming and going, memories of thundering engines running day and night on clouds of diesel and ash. All gone now, phantoms of another time.

     But before that … and before that … it had been here.

     It had always been here.

     A way in.

     A way out.

     Doors are eternal.

     Only this door was gone, the station empty, the building scheduled for demolition. He’d read the postings glued on slick, waterproof paper to the hastily erected fences meant to discourage the curious. One more old building gone to ruin, soon to be rubble, returned to dust. Legal rhetoric accompanied each notice sufficient to dishearten even the most strident admirers of the aging Art Deco design, extinguishing whatever feeble torches they carried with warnings of exposed asbestos and the danger of falling debris. The empty building was little more than an eyesore now to the city at large, a safety concern, infested by vermin, a haven for the addicts and indigents, its antiquated design seemingly in defiance of every effort at repurposing. The surrounding neighborhood had followed the railroad’s downward spiral, the collapse of big industry and domestic steel, and could not have supported any business that might have taken the structure over. No chance at upscale gentrification. Even less at funding restoration, the misguided notion of historical significance.

     Nothing of historical note ever happened at Crossover Station.

     At least, nothing anyone knew about. True history frequently occurs in the margins and the spaces between the lines of text.

     The world had finally, once and for all, forgotten this empty corner of reality.

     Favoring his left leg, the tall man knelt to the concrete, setting aside the metal-capped cane but never far from reach. He placed his palms flat to the ground as if intending to pray; a laughable notion, for he knew the truth of what was listening … and what was not.

     And slowly, he drew his hands back across the concrete, skin scraping drily upon the surface. And when he raised them up, he saw a pale shade of dust discoloring his fingers.

     “How could it be gone?”

     The walls of the train station do not answer, only pull away and leave him in empty silence. Light filters sparingly through the milky, glass ceiling, grimed and greasy from the years of neglect. Some of the panes have broken, light landing in small, brilliant pools around the platform. But not much. Not enough to chase back the shadows. This was a place that wanted to be forgotten, even by itself; a lonely ghost aching for oblivion, its story told and retold and of no real consequence. Distant sounds of wings beating in the rafters, trapped in the darkness, powerless and ineffectual.

     The door was dead.

     He held his palms to his face and inhaled, catching the smell of the dust. It had been so long—so very, very long—but he knew it. He would know it anywhere. Finding his way to the dust was all he had known for almost two thousand years.

     The man licked his fingertips, tasting the flat whiteness that lingered, tracked upon the soles of one who had been there and come back. One who had found one of the mythic doors and walked through; found it again and returned.

     The dust tasted like forgetting.

     It no longer mattered; the door was gone, the way closed. The traveler had come here for something; he did not know for what. Regardless, the traveler had stumbled upon the God Slayer. For it was he who dwelled in the land of the dust. And now the traveler was dead. And the door was gone forever.

     Lost.

     But the dust remained, telling its own tale, an unfolding of secret properties like shadows in the darkness, raindrops lost upon the sea. It whispered to a notion: not all doors can be closed. Not for good. Not forever. Hidden away perhaps, or lost like secrets unvoiced for generations. It did not change the fact that a door remained. Somewhere. The dust promised, and the dust would not be denied.

     The dust tasted like forgetting.

     The man levered himself back up, straightening against his cane. He was tall, skin brown as the rich earth. He dressed darkly, from the long, coal-black coat of fine leather as soft as skin to his shirt the color of crow feathers and boots as dark as the night sea. Even the cane gleamed like a black, lacquered box, the top polished silver with veins of cobalt running like lightning in the finely etched lines. The man’s hair was a mane of thick dreadlocks worn with the proud grace of a savage warlord. Glancing back to the abandoned platform, one eye glimmering with knowledge as deep and vast as the universe, the other the color of foam on a storm-wracked sea, the center of a scar running from his forehead down through his eye and under his collar. Some claimed he could see into the world of the dead with that eye.

     He could not.

     Behind him, his companions stood in silence, attentive, one layered in oversized sweatshirts and jackets in spite of the heat, hood drawn up, sleeves pulled down so that only the fingertips were seen; impossible to know if it was a slight woman or a tall child. The other appeared a crude facsimile of his master’s indigent majesty, a reflection from a fey mirror: black t-shirt hanging loose over muscles corded like rope, pronounced veins and tendons wrapping his limbs like bundled wire, skin dark as creosote stretched tight and paper-thin, lines distinct to the point of anguish, head smoothly shaved, his expression a joyless smile beneath fiercely manic eyes.

     The Captain flicked his gaze at them before returning to the darkness of the abandoned station, the place of the dead door, the last one recorded. The only one that remained now—the only one even suggested by rumor, legend, or myth—was buried deep in the riddles and ramblings of a madman and secreted away for centuries, lost to everything and everyone. He feared perhaps it had been lost altogether, and this dread notion drove his hatred to new bounds over the long years of his unending quest, the route of madness.

     But the dust had promised him a way, and the dust would not be denied.

     The book had been found.

     He need only find a Pilot to fathom the madman’s riddles and open the door, and he and his would go through, and a reckoning eons in the making would be had. The God Slayer had brought down the world. It was time the God Slayer himself was brought low. The Captain had worked too hard for too long, and so much had been sacrificed. He would be denied no longer.

     “This way is closed,” he whispered, brushing away dust as white as old bones from his palms. “There is only the one now. All of the rest are gone.”

     The other two said nothing, only fell in behind him, footsteps light as ghosts.

     “We will never find it until the way is shown … but the way wants to be found. Chronicle is en route. We must gather the others.”

     Like some darksome bird, liquid-tar raven, the shining night sea, the Captain passed into the recesses of the empty train station and the two dutifully followed, the darkness swallowing them whole.

Chapter 4: The Thief

     The room felt … temporary.

     A small square of space, insignificant but for the position it occupied, the moment in time in which it existed, the few objects contained therein. A place in between. A stopover between once and after.

     She gave herself a moment to acclimate. Light. Air pressure. Gravity.

     Dust layered the empty shelves. The worn boards smelled old and tired. Milky glass, sunlight a golden glow that lit the dance of dust before her. It hung still in the air, glimmering quietly in the morning light, motionless, flecks trapped in amber. All of this was transient. Fleeting.

     All except for the books left behind on the table, placed in the sunlight, yet free of the dust. As if waiting.

     A trap.

     She looked at the table centered beneath the milky window like an altar, the books an interrupted rite momentarily unattended. Two paperbacks pushed aside, much worn and over-read, no gloss left on the covers, edges dark from turning, unable to sit flat. But the third was different. Centered upon the wood, its leather binding ancient and well attended, the skin of its pages centuries old. And beside the ancient, leather-bound book and the worn, paperback novels, something else.

      A compass.

     She paused, eyes fixed on the leather cover. It was not why she was here, not what she had come for. But there was no denying it. She could smell it, the dust and the distance. Not the velvety dust of this world, but something much older. These books had traveled from very far away. They did not belong here.

     But there was something else, too; something deeper. Scent of spring rain, of vanilla and honeysuckle and cherry blossoms. And of sadness.

     “Broken.”

     The door opened suddenly, dust motes whirling in the sunlight like gold flakes suspended in oil, bubbles under the sea, startled into action.

     She looked back only once and saw him, saw the baleful stare, eye glimmering at her.

     Snatching everything from the sun-covered table, she turned and stepped back into the wall, and the way through closed behind her as if it had never been. Only a wall in a small, dusty room, solid and unforgiving.

     But it was done.

     The sand spread out before him, a sea of blackness under an indigo sky glittering ocean-bright with stars, a distant fingernail moon.

     Too dark to see the blood.

     He pushed the blade once more beneath the skin, slicing a ribbon of flesh rife with the blackness of pent-up rage blighted by sorrow. Separating it from the tissue below was slow, laborious, excruciating.

     The moon was full the night he began.

     Edging the blade deeper, he cut the last remnant of blackened flesh from his back, left the dangling shred that he could peel it up, pull it free, cast it upon the heap with the rest. What remained bled pure, cleansed of that which he could no longer abide within himself, pain but a shadow of what he’d endured. And the reward was clarity. Of thought. Of purpose.

     His an unobstructed view of the end and the way to reach it.

     The sorcerer from the north had defeated him. Everything he had known, destroyed. Everyone he had loved, lost. And he knew—knew with a fire-blackened rage that made him scream into the very eyes watching silent from the heavens—that it was his weaknesses that allowed it to happen; weaknesses now cut away.

     The sorcerer from the north suffered no such afflictions, perpetuating acts of purest betrayal and cruelest savagery with unflinching indifference. Forever after called God Slayer, the White Sorcerer from the north suffered not from rage or hatred, not from love or lust, not from appetites or greed or desire. The God Slayer was none of that.

     The God Slayer was inhuman.

     When next we meet, it will be on equal footing.

     For thirteen days and thirteen nights, he had wept over the loss of her and raged at the great desert, screamed at the sky until lightning rained down and burned the sand into glass. And over and over, he cut into his flesh, peeled away the agony, the torment of his failure that left him consumed by anger, lost to the chaos and the madness that swallowed him whole after the fall of the City of Doors. And this too he cut away, the poisoned strips of flesh sick with self-loathing and despair.

     Soon after followed his wants and desires, his thirst for glory, his longings for the soft comforts, the sins of the flesh, the tender nature of the meat that shackled his mind, kept him prisoner to his base nature.

     But not his hatred. That he kept.

     Again and again, he drew the blade along the skin, peeled it up like the rind of an orange, cut it away in black and bleeding bits until he was raw. And he threw the pieces upon the heaped jackal bones laid out in the circle he’d inscribed in the sand, outlined in sapphire and salt. Anyone other than him, highest among the court of the gods, and the Ritual of Clarity would have ended in death. But the gods did not flee the world without leaving a few things behind for those who knew how to use them.

     Looking to the sky, he saw further than he had seen in years. Maybe in his lifetime. How long had he carried them, these horrid things that weighed upon him like chains, kept him down, cost him an eye and the use of one leg, left him homeless and broken and insane, a man without anything but the scars that marked his failure and the emptiness that sang to a universe that could no longer hear? Months? Years? He no longer knew.

     When the walled city fell, when he cradled her body in his arms, her blood cold against his skin, he lost his mind. A lunatic, he ran into the desert and disappeared into himself, a shrieking wild man, a mad demon haunting the night with hands that dripped liquid fire, powerful and unpredictable.

     Even the djinn dared not cross him, the wizard gone mad.

     Hearing of him, the god-king sent soldiers to investigate, find him, kill him. Pathetic. And when they did not return, the god-king lied to his subjects and declared the Dark Wizard from the City of Doors dead, denounced rumors to the contrary as false and treasonous, and claimed the raving monster stalking the dunes was but a low demon cast out, banished from the god-king’s lands forever and in fear of the god-king’s power.

     With the gods dead and gone, even an impudent charlatan seemed grand, a puffing monkey howling from his squalid pedestal of shit.

     No matter. Let the god-king spread his lies, let him worship his own reflection and tell tall tales to his subjects of his God-given rights. He knew better. There were no gods left to give the charlatan his powers, no powers left to be given.

     The gods were dead. All of them.

     The air seized in his lungs, and he bent double, forehead pressed to the hard carpet of dust like a man at prayer—Laughable! Nothing was listening anymore—choking, unable to breathe. He retched the poisoned bile up from deep inside, tangled and thick and black as tar, and spat it within the circle.

     Nearly done.

     He looked once more upon the arrangement of bones, upon the long strips of blackened skin, stench replete with all the things that weakened him. A whiff still evoked memories: the mouthwatering taste of fine foods, roasted meats, sugared fruits, honeyed bread, succulent wine. Or the perfumed scent of a woman’s hair, the tang of sweat between her breasts, the smell of her sex. Or the raw hotness of digging his fingers into the throat of an enemy, squeezing the life from them, feeling them die, the iron smell of blood. 

     All of these things lay in the circle of sapphire blue as the sea, salt bright as the moon, bled freely atop the frame of the jackal bones under the cold stare of the distant stars.

     This was the Ritual of Clarity.

     Somewhere beyond the farthest edges of the sands, beyond the last corner of the sky, behind the most distant smear of stars so far away as to beleaguer the imaginations of any but the few who could conceive of eternity and godhead and worlds beyond worlds, the White Sorcerer from the north was hiding.

     And Akil would find him.

     Under the sliver moon and the empty heavens, the Dark Wizard finished the spell he’d begun nights before, the spell he’d bled for, wept for, raged for. And as he spoke the words that were older than the desert, the black ribbons of skin began to slide one atop the other like a knot of vipers, laying themselves across the bone lattice, binding and bending them to their will, transforming both into something unrecognizable but hauntingly familiar.

     And under the waning knife-blade moon, the thing took shape, building itself from the magic and the raw dark material, from the blood and the hatred and the weakness and the agony that the Dark Wizard could not stand within himself, but of which he was unable to rid himself completely.

     Before the sun could throw its first rays across the sparkling sea of sand, a man crouched within the circle where the bones and the black and bloody skin had been, body strong and lean and dark, muscles taut and rope-thin. He sat tensed within the ring as if he meant to leap up, run free, find something alive and choke it to death. Grin wide and feral, flash of white teeth, eyes full of immeasurable hatred, painful truths spilling endlessly from his lips in a babble.

    The Dark Wizard looked on him with understanding, knowing what had to be done. And though he was tempted—a little, he would not deny it—he knew it was not right to leave it behind, trapped forever within the circle, this flesh of his flesh, this inheritor of all his dark and weak emotions.

     Leaning heavily upon his staff, he smeared an edge of the circle with his foot, releasing what was inside.

     “Come. There is much to do.”

     In the sky, the last stars of the night watched in silence. And they waited. The end was a very long way off. There was still time for it to change.

     Perhaps …

     On Tuesday, witnesses reported an attack on the shore near the old pier, two men assaulting a young woman. The two men are dark-skinned. The young woman is white. All three are homeless.

     None of that matters.

     They were fighting, witnesses claim, over books. Videos of the incident already uploaded to the internet, bystanders quick to record everything with smart phones though none possessing the wherewithal to contact authorities or otherwise intervene. The reality of information overload is rampant disassociation, leaving us spectators to our own existence, no more participants in the events surrounding us than the audience is a participant in a movie playing out on the screen. The social media revolution has rendered society less sociable than ever before, billions of people all quietly tracking every facet of everyone else’s lives, endlessly entertained and never more ignorant, despondent, or alone.

     Wobbly footage filmed by amateur voyeurs with handheld cellphones shows one of the men repeatedly striking the young woman until she collapses. The other rummages her bag, takes her books, then wipes the knuckles of the first clean of blood with a linen cloth. They leave. She screams after them, but no one seems to hear.

     All of this over books.

     Speculation runs rampant, the mouths of the cyber sleuths moistened with anticipation. It could, of course, be an elaborate hoax, a marketing stunt dreamed up by guerilla advertisers looking for a hook, viral video all the rage now that flash mobs have gone the way of the passenger pigeon. But to what end? Local authorities refuse to comment on the story despite uploaded videos—bad publicity for the city’s waterfront—and point out that the captured footage clearly does not tell the whole story.

     It is the age of deniability. Facts can be challenged or even dismissed outright if taken out of context, held too close, scrutinized too deeply … questioned. 

     Sometimes an elephant is not an elephant.

     Authorities are also quick to point out that, as a rule, the homeless do not trust law enforcement. Even when they themselves are the apparent victims of a crime, the homeless seldom choose to report it, afraid of being arrested themselves. Trust is not a thing universally given … or deserved. All parties flee before the police arrive, no one left behind to question. This is not unusual.

     Sometimes an elephant is an elephant.

     Locals say they know the young woman who carries the books, have seen her around the beach before, but do not know her real name or where she stays. Locally, she is known only as “Lost Angeles.” No witnesses claim to have ever seen the two men prior to that day, but this is not unusual. The homeless are frequently transient, moving towards opportunity or away from danger like fish swimming a coral reef, and it is not uncommon for them to exist beneath the notice of those around them, their condition a kind of camouflage, invisibility by virtue of being beneath notice. Regardless, none of the parties to the incident have been seen since. Authorities indicate finding these two men without the assistance of the public will likely be impossible, and they encourage anyone with information as to their whereabouts to please contact them. Tips will be kept confidential.

     Off the record, police are not optimistic. This is also not unusual.

     You did not hear about this.

     On that same Tuesday, a news report out of the Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe detailed the slaughter of a small herd of elephants on the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park by ivory poachers, the story immediately picked up by the AP, going international. The animals are killed with high-powered rifles, tusks separated with chainsaws, carcasses left to rot in the sun. Images shared thousands of times. Millions. We are horrified, unable to look away. Reporters descend like flies, and the story rockets around the globe in hours. The reality of the World Wide Web is that we live in an age of boundless information, saturation to the point of distraction. Snippets of footage, seconds of sound bites, small and easily digestible tidbits of story bled dry of any detail save the most salacious. The social media monster awakens, tears into anything it can find like a starved animal.

      And in the midst of all this information, we have never been more ignorant.

     The incident explodes.

     Park officials blame underfunding for their inability to adequately protect the animals under their supervision. Foreign conservancy groups blame lax regulations and policing of parkland by the government of Zimbabwe. The government of Zimbabwe blames the global demand for illegal ivory, likening the trade in animal products to the trafficking of narcotics; it is the demand from other, wealthier nations that fuels the need for supply.

     Rangers note hopefully that they could account for only eleven of the fifteen animals in this herd, launching a search for the remainder. “Find the Four” becomes a rally cry, a popular hashtag as the world turns its attention to this small corner of the globe and four missing elephants. The money machine turns on, donations pour in. Our love of animals is proportional only to our indifference or hatred towards other human beings. Most of the charitable funds will not reach their intended destination, skimmed off en route. They term this breakage.

     Six days later, a Nor’easter slams the mid-Atlantic causing severe coastal flooding. Thousands are left without power. Homes are destroyed. Possessions are lost. Some of these are the invaluable collections of memorabilia, meaningless and worthless to any except the one who has lost them. And for them, the loss is immeasurable. Photographs and mementos and trinkets that tell a story greater than their own all disappear in the raging of the storm, but are mourned only by the few who choose to listen. The National Guard is mobilized. The Red Cross responds. The money machine changes direction. There are no deaths, and for this, we are grateful.

     The elephants are forgotten, both the living and the dead.

     Sooner or later, everything is forgotten. It only means that it is simpler to forget about something than it is to make it go away.

     No trace of the missing elephants is ever found.

     The police never find the homeless girl from the beach by the pier, the girl they call Lost Angeles, or learn why she was attacked by two men over her books. No one even knows if it is true.

     But it is.

     The Nor’easter is meaningless. The skies clear. The waters drain away. The sun comes out. Life goes on. The elephants are also meaningless. The dead simply arrive at their destination ahead of the rest, a destination not so far away as you might think. Soon they will be gone, all of them, and the world will never again know elephants.

     The only thing that is important is the girl. And the two men. And the books that bind them.

     I’ve put it all down, kept the stories because that is what I must do. What I promised I would do. She did not lie about the cost. I simply did not listen. Whom among us ever does? But the door is closed forever now. Everyone else is dead. Except for him. And her, of course.

     As for me, that’s a matter of opinion.

     So why are you still sitting there, breathing easy, eyes going shut? I told you already to wake up! This world is already happening, and you don’t even realize it. The ending is already written, and you don’t even know. Too concerned with your morning commute, the highlights on the sports page, insensate politics populated by selfish, self-important children screaming at one another like piglets in a pen, television programs of believable fiction and unbelievable reality, political affiliations, sexual orientations, cell phone apps, likes and shares, the credit card bill, your cholesterol score, swipe left, swipe right, turn on, jerk off.

     None of it matters.

     None if it!

     All of this will end sooner than you realize.

     And you’ll never see it coming … 

          … never … see it … coming … 

               … never … see … 

                    … never … 

     The sorcerer walks the endless plains, the infinite desert, the place at the end of all roads where reality finally runs out.

     He is looking for something.

     The dust beneath his boots barely lifts, his presence little more than the passing of a breeze. Not sand but dust, to the very edges of the horizon. No dunes or hills or distant mountains or thirsty scrub. Only dust, bone-dry, a wasteland as limitless and empty as the sky.

     Behind him looms the edge. If the Wasteland actualized infinity, an emptiness of dust and sky, endless in all directions, then the edge takes it one step further. That way, even the ground disappears. Over the edge is nothing. Not ahead, not down, not up, not anything.

     The void.

     And sometimes it calls to him.

     He keeps his back to it this day, searching. He’d cast a message into reality’s ocean. No hollow scream from the lip of the abyss, no shout from the precipice, the mad and mighty roar at the water’s edge. This message was more subtle. Someone was looking for it, had been looking for it for thousands of years. And when they saw it, they would know.

     And they would smell the dust. 

    Just as he could smell the dust. 

     They’re coming.

     He catches sight of it from the corner of his eye, a restless shimmer to the air. He walks over, stares down, sees the filmy ether beneath his boots, down below, hidden under the surface.

     The wizard strikes the ground with such force that his fist smashes into the hardpan, no more resistance than a pool of water. And that quick, he snatches it up, wrenches it free from the ground, writhing and hissing with undirected rage, slithering coils of coal-colored smoke, wisps of carbon blackness snatching and clawing the air. One might think it nothing, ephemera, a hollow of shadow and vapor, the stench of oil, the color of midnight.

     How wrong one would be.

     He draws the snapping, chittering thing close, stares into the murk, reads the pieces of its story. It is what he expects. What he seeks. This far out in the Wasteland, this far down, there is little left but what he holds: unformed hatred woven with fear and anger and disgust, so tight that nothing can break it apart but time, infinite and agonizing.

     The wizard speaks to the writhing shadow of smoke and stench, his words printed on the back of the darkness, etched into the foundation of the universe, inscribed on the notes of the sea. And like a snake attentive to the charmer’s flute, the smoke ceases to move, more haunting for the suggestion that there might be something aware lurking inside.

     Then the wizard breathes in, drawing the thing into himself, holding it, transforming it. And when he breathes out again, it falls upon the pale ground with a slushy splat like blood-soaked rags, edges more defined, movements agitated, angry.

     Sometimes hatred only needs a direction.

     The White Sorcerer lifts the shifting mass—its wet edges, its sharpening resolve—like a hunter holding a snared rabbit, bleeding out, almost ready to skin and roast. He is careful to keep his hands clear of the new claws, the forming teeth, sharp and growing sharper. He will take it back to the palace, let it grow, age, harden. 

     He will need more. Many more.

     They can smell the dust.

     And after more than two thousand years, they are coming for him.
 

     At night, the glass walls of the lobby had a tendency to reflect back upon themselves, an effect of the glazing that made it look from without like a golden mirror. But even with the interior lighting reduced by a third— afterhours green initiative, energy saving rules—it was too bright inside to see anything but the lobby’s reflection. Soaring walls of bone-colored tile. Dizzying floor pattern that appeared to recede and approach, both at once. The stark emptiness that was the ground floor of the Abaddon, Hopewell, Andreher Building at night.

     Clark worked the lobby. Alone. He leaned back, glanced across the half dozen screens arrayed below the line of sight at the Information Desk—stupid name; like there was anything wrong with calling it the Security Desk; that’s what it was, wasn’t it? And everyone knew it—and saw nothing on any of them.

     Empty views of empty hallways and dingy, pixelated shadows. Nothing.

     The way it should be.

     He absently flipped through a magazine.

     It was a good job, for the most part. Abaddon, Hopewell, Andreher hadn’t replaced out guards with a security motion sensor system like a lot of the other big office buildings. And if everything went well, he could retire out in a little less than two years. Abaddon, Hopewell, Andreher would be the last job he ever held before he found his way to a place with a little more sun and maybe a little more sand.

     Good job or no, this shit gets old.

     Like that weird electrical glitch a week and half ago, the one that shorted out the video backup server and killed all security camera recordings for the better part of six hours. Real fuckaroo. Put Security on edge, and had IT crawling around the Information Desk like they were looking for a way to blame it on the guards on the evening shift. It was the same day, according to the morning shift, that some young woman from the college came in and defaced one of the lobby alcoves. She just showed up that morning and started painting the wall, creating some kind of mural or whatnot.

     The whole world’s gone nuts.

     Apparently, some Mail Room dumb-ass let her into the building through the employee entrance. The same dumb-ass was fired and walked out the same entrance a few hours later.

     Nuts!

     Clark enjoyed the quiet of the evening shift, make no mistake, but still wished he’d been there to see that. Moron! Instead, Clark got the electrical issue later that night that had IT playing ant hill with the Security Desk—Information Desk; whatever—for hours before concluding it was some kind of short.

     Yeah, no shit, geniuses.

     Maintenance brought in an electrical contractor the following day who confirmed the same and started pulling and rerunning all the wiring from the Information Desk down to the server vault. Cause it’d be a real shame if no one could keep video recordings of empty halls and shadowy corners and a whole lot of nothing. 

     Seriously, who cares?

     Abaddon, Hopewell, Andreher kept surveillance recordings for ninety days on the local server. After that, it was purged and overwritten, gone like it never was. Morning to evening, recordings of a bustling lobby, busy hallways, people filing in and going out, scurrying like insects. But much past six o’clock, and the lobby—like the rest of the building—became a ghost town minus the ghosts.

     Nothing.

     And that’s what made this a good job. He got to sit behind the Information Desk and monitor the screens, watching and making sure that nothing happened. And nothing did. The cleaning crew made their rounds. A few of the white collars put in their thankless overtime. Corporate suck-ups. And some of the more eager security guards, mostly young kids who didn’t know any better, walked patrols, flashlights hefted over their shoulders, one hand kept on the holstered walkie—can’t carry guns in AHA, even Security; liability issues—because it made them feel like they were accomplishing something.

     This only served to confirm Clark’s low opinion of Millennials and Gen Z’s. Not a one of them appreciated how his generation had worked to make life better. How they’d put in their time, learned the ropes, earned their stripes. Folks today figured everything should be handed to them on a plate, too lazy or too stupid to earn it on their own. They tossed out participation awards like candy at Halloween. Everybody’s a winner, so nobody gets their feelings hurt. Boo-hoo! All anyone knew how to do now was complain, talk about getting everything faster, making everything better, get paid more for working less. Like no one before them ever thought of that. What was wrong with doing a job, with working hard and going home after, huh? Where was the issue with doing what you were told and collecting a paycheck? 

     Evening shift security at Abaddon, Hopewell, Andreher was the cream of the crop for an ex-cop. Best ever. It paid well. No walking a beat or worrying about somebody standing over you telling you what to do. Never worrying about stacks of bureaucratic bullshit at the end of every day, or running down some tweaker, or getting jabbed with a stray needle, or having to pull a gun. Nobody was ever going to bust into Abaddon, Hopewell, Andreher. Seriously, what the hell for? The place turned on information, investments, and transactions. Nothing here but file cabinets and computer records. Nothing worth stealing that anyone could carry except maybe a couple computers. But what kind of an idiot would do that nowadays?

     And the evening shift had other perks, too; ones no one talked much about. Security had access to any floor in the building, and that included the executive floors above thirteen, the ones with the nice restrooms that smelled like tropical suntan oil and mango, where the floor and the seats and the sinks and the handles were all spotless, not just clean but shining. Regular employees, the herds of wage meat morons and suck-ups that filed in every morning and out every evening, couldn’t access above thirteen. Being able to use those executive toilets every night, so clean you could eat off the floor, was definitely a perk of working security at night.

     And of course, working the evening shift came with a ten-percent shift differential, so there was that.

     Come in late, don’t work too hard, go home every night safe and sound, and collect your pay. Plus the little extras.

     Yeah, a pretty good job.

     Clark stopped, the magazine’s thin, glossy paper held between his finger and thumb, page half-turned. He cocked his head a little to one side, listening over the white noise whisper of the building’s HVAC system.

     Voices?

     His eyes trailed over the monitors, each screen segmented into fours, dozens of images of empty halls, empty elevator lobbies, empty cafeteria entrance, empty everything. Even the cleaning crew was done for the night.

     So who was still here?

     Hands instinctively closed the magazine, rolled it quietly into a tight tube before rising from the Information Desk, holding it tightly like a policeman’s baton, the one Abaddon, Hopewell, Andreher wouldn’t let him carry.

     “Is someone back there?”

     He turned into the main hall leading to the elevators, the hall with the vestibule alcoves, the one still sheeted to the ceiling in Tyvek covering the scaffold that concealed the crazy woman’s graffiti.

     The magazine fell from his hand, made a soft crumpling sound upon the floor, pages fanning open.

     Curls of plastic lay about the base of the wooden scaffold, swaths cut from nearly seven feet up all the way down to the floor, light from the hallway shining down on the vandalized alcove. A strong smell of paint.

     “What …?”

     He was sure he was looking at two people, a man and a woman. They were holding hands, stepping back into the shallow alcove, trying to hide, trying to …

     And just like that, they disappeared right into the wall.

     Like ghosts.

     Clark stepped closer, blinked, shook his head. One hand fumbled for his walkie, the other groped for his flashlight before remembering he wasn’t carrying either, had left both behind at the Information Desk. 

     He found himself staring into the exposed alcove, the exposed painting, an illusion of depth and doorways, darkness that seemed to descend through the wall, through the building, through the heart of the universe.

     What the hell is this?

     The explosion from the front of the Abaddon, Hopewell, Andreher Building spun Clark’s head around like a swivel, startled him so badly that he fell, tripped over his own feet.

     A small truck had barreled into the building, smashed through the revolving doors, blasted a swath of mirrored glass across the lobby like flung ice as it skidded to a halt, front axle torn completely from the carriage, shredded metal scraping across the lobby, carving into the gleaming tilework.

     Clark stared at the wreck, realized the vehicle looked like it might have been an ambulance before it was demolished by the collision. Probably racing to an accident. Or the hospital. Either way, trying to help someone. And now they needed help.

     The security guard watched someone crawl from the ambulance. Not from the door, but through the missing windshield. Skinny, jet-black, wearing a loose black t-shirt and pants, he dropped nimbly to the ground, engine already dead, and surveyed the wreck, swaying back and forth as if the world was a ship at sea. 

     “Cripes!” Clark declared, starting towards the man. “A-are you all right?”

     He forgot to stop at the Information Desk for his walkie and flashlight. 

     Through the gaping hole in the front of the Abaddon, Hopewell, Andreher Building, a young boy suddenly appeared, racing inside. Behind him, supermodels, two women, tall and slim and exquisite, one with long, platinum hair, the other with hair black as night. Both women were dressed in tight, black-and-red silk like glossy spiders. All three stopped suddenly, looked at him, eyes hard and alert.

     Then the ambulance driver—the one that looked nothing like an ambulance driver should look—turned as well. The thin man glared at him, white teeth flashing as he grinned widely, fearsome eyes inexplicably filled with what Clark could only describe as unbounded hatred.

     And that was when he realized that this wasn’t an accident. It was a crime!

     Walking faster, Clark’s hand graces his right hip, a reflex to draw the revolver he hasn’t carried in years, not since leaving the force, not since taking on the cushy security job at Abaddon, Hopewell, Andreher.

     The boy looks back at him with black, almond-shaped eyes—they’re wrong; those eyes are wrong—points, fingers twisting the very air before closing into a fist.

     “Stop!”

     And Clark stops, ogles. Something inside of the security guard’s chest closes like a fist.

     He falls face first upon the marble floor of the Abaddon, Hopewell, Andreher lobby.

     It hurts! Everything hurts!

     And then it doesn’t.