The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (24 page)

It was almost midnight
when the sound of knocking startled Rose awake.

She had fallen asleep in the
recliner, the TV still on, whatever she had been watching long ago over. At
first she thought the noise came from the TV, some sound of gunfire or explosion
or whatnot sufficient to jar her from sleep, but otherwise meaningless. The
room was comfortable and warm, bathed in the golden glow of a single lamp
barely able to push back the shadows as she scanned about for the remote.
Time
to turn this thing off and go to bed,
she thought.
No sense staying up
if you ain’t gonna stay awake.

Then she
heard it again, the sharp knocking of
someone at her door.

She glanced at the wall
clock, wondering who in his right mind would knock on somebody’s door at this
hour. Easing slowly from her chair, she thought,
the only thing that comes
calling at this hour is bad news
.

Rose, what would Jesus
do?

And there it was. Someone might need her help:
maybe their car broke down, or they were hurt. Maybe they saw
her light
from the street and needed to use her phone to call for
assistance. That could certainly be the case, too.
And what would
Jesus do?

Rose Marie wiped
self-consciously at her eyes, fingering away small bits of crust her mother
used to call sleepy seeds, a silly term that nevertheless stuck in her mind as
she grumbled aloud, “I bet even Jesus woulda wished they’d come callin’ at a
decent hour, though.”

Walking to the door, she felt
her hip stiffen; it happened more and more of late. Yet another cross of old
age to bear, like drinking that filthy tasting prune juice or nodding off in
front of the TV.
We all get old. Nothin’ you can do about it. Just a part o’
life. Like dyin’, ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. But who’ll look after my
Jasper when I’m gone?
 “Yeah? Who is it?”

“It’s Gusman Kreiger,
Mrs. Desmond,” the voice on the other side of the door said, speaking with the
familiarity
of a
longtime neighbor or family friend. And that was strange because she knew for a
fact that she had never heard of anyone by that name.

“I don’t know any Goose
Man Crater, or whatever you said your name was, mister,” Rose Marie replied firmly.
“Now what do you want?”

“Is Jasper in?”

She reared back as if
from a bad smell, amazed by the man’s nerve. “No! He’s gone to bed, and you
should, too. It’s late. Now go away.” And she turned, prepared to dismiss the
matter altogether, or call the police if the knocker refused to leave.
What
would Jesus do? Well he wouldn’t open the door to some damn fool at midnight,
that’s for sure.

Gusman Kreiger, however, knew
differently. “
Rose, open the door
.”

Stripped of its conversational pleasantness, the voice became
an eerie whisper in a dark room, a displaced echo from across a cemetery. The
light from the lamp dimmed, receding as if poisoned by the darkness, and the words
pushed easily through the door as if it were no more than smoke, settling
directly in her brain.

And against all reason, Rose Marie Desmond, who was shuffling
towards her bedroom only a second ago, found herself standing in front of her
door watching her hand reach for the knob like something in a dream, her mind
little more than a passenger in a borrowed vessel, one she would need to return
later.
We’re all on borrowed time
, she thought, uncertain why. It seemed
so out of place, she wasn’t even sure if the thought was her own.

But then who’s thought would it be?

The door caught on the short length of chain, and a grateful
wheeze escaped her lungs like a sigh. She didn’t want to open the door. She
didn’t want to meet this Goose Man Crater, this late night knocker with the
silky, polite voice that could turn eerie and soft and make her do things she
didn’t want to do. From his first words, she realized she’d heard a voice like his
before. When she was just a little girl growing up in Mississippi, there was a
fat man with a lisping voice and sunken eyes, his skin pale and doughy and
covered in tattoos like one of those men in the carnival. But that wasn’t what
made her afraid. Her granny told her the fat tattooed man was a witch doctor, a
bone priest, a master of dark voodoo magic. She wasn’t sure now if the tattooed
man really was some kind of magician or not, but as a child of five, there was
no doubt in her mind. He was soft-spoken, creeping and lisping, his quiet,
chilling tones strangely persuasive. And listening to him, you thought you were
under some kind of spell, the victim of dark magic.

The knocker sounded like him, only so much worse.

There was a sound from the other side of the door that might
have been exasperation or just simple exhaustion; she couldn’t tell which. “
Rose
Marie,
” the stranger said, his voice still calm, still pleasant, still
compelling. “
Release the chain on your door. Now
.”

“I don’t want to,” she said, watching through the glass eyes
of her own dream, her hands like some character from the television, heedless
of her insistence to stop. She saw her fingers close upon the chain, slide it
back upon the rail. She wanted them to stop, but they wouldn’t listen, her
flesh not her own.

Maybe it never was to begin with
.

The loose chain rattled against the doorframe as her hand
returned to the knob, turning it, opening the door.

There on her doorstep was a tall, stooping man clutching a
staff that might have been a portion of an ancient steeple or perhaps a tall, ornate
lightning rod. His hair was long and nearly white, festooned with dirt and bits
of dead grass and stray leaves. The lines and pores of his skin were permeated with
grease and dust, woven like a tapestry into the cell walls of his flesh. And
yet he smelled of cleansers and dish soap, a mix of astringents and filth. A
shapeless overcoat hid most of him, but his feet were planted at slightly wrong
angles, knees akimbo. There was drying blood on one pant leg and the ties of
both boots, but for some reason she did not find this alarming. The man’s
fingers were twisted and scarred as he clutched the safety of his staff, the
skin pale and puckered as if he had been soaking his hands in dishwater. But it
was the man’s eyes that caught her, one blue, the other green. He was not the
voodoo man from her childhood, no. This man scared her more. Much more.

“Good evening, Mrs. Desmond,” Gusman Kreiger said with the
sincerity one offers a stranger thrust into your path by circumstance. “I
apologize for this late hour, but something’s come up and I could use the
assistance of your grandson, Jasper. I would appreciate it very much if you
would wake him up for me.”

“Wake him up?” Rose Marie wondered aloud. Jasper had gone to
bed almost an hour ago, exhausted after spending all day on the roof working on
whatever crackpot pastime had overtaken his fancy, making him late for supper
and late for bed as well. Now this man wanted her to wake him up.
For what
possible reason?
“Jasper’s asleep,” she reiterated. “Why don’t you come
back in the morning?”

“Because the blood will have dried by then.”

“Blood? What blood? Is somebody hurt?”

Kreiger grimaced and brusquely dismissed her confusion. “
Go
wake Jasper and send him out to me. After that, you will go to the kitchen and
pour yourself a glass of prune juice. Then you will go to the bathroom, urinate
and brush your teeth, then go to bed—just like normal. You won’t worry about
Jasper because everything is normal. Nice and normal. Won’t that be nice?
”

“That … that does sound … nice,” Rose Marie conceded. And it
did. It did sound nice. Nice and normal.

“Then go fetch your grandson.”

“I’ll go wake him up.”

“Wonderful,” Kreiger murmured in the same soft spell. He
glanced uneasily at the threshold and said, “I’ll wait out on the landing if
it’s all the same.”

Rose Marie went to Jasper’s room, gently shaking her grandson
awake and telling him that a man was here to see him. Then she went to the
kitchen for a glass of prune juice. Jasper went to the front door dressed only
in boxer shorts, rubbing absently at one eye. He didn’t question what his
grandmother asked of him. He was a good boy; he did what he was told.

And there on the landing, Jasper met the Goose Man for the
second time that day.

“Follow me, Jubjub Bird,” Kreiger said. “I need your help cleaning
and carrying some things out to the Dumpster.”

Jasper yawned and rolled his neck loosely from side to side.
“I’m real tired, Mister Goose Man, real tired, wanna sleep. Worked on the
flyer. Worked all day. All day. Made it just like you told me, just like you
said, jus’ like it. Lookin’ real good, too; real good. Gonna fly. And Jasper’s
gonna fly. And you, too, Mister Goose Man. You’re gonna fly, too. We’re all
gonna fly. But not tonight. I’m tired. I wanna go back ta bed. I wanna—”

Kreiger held up a hand and Jasper fell silent. “I’ve seen the
flyer, Jubjub Bird. You’re doing a superb job. But I need your help now. The
powers that be are stepping up the pace on this little charade, forcing the pot
to boil when they have no chance of containing it. And when this kettle
explodes—and make no mistake, it will—I intend to be very far away from here.”

Jasper scratched his cheek, his expression blank.

Neither here nor there; Kreiger kept numerous realities in
his mind all at once for just such an occasion, but still needed a good pair of
hands to liberate them. Jubjub Bird would be his nimble limbs and crafty
fingers—for now.

Having finished her prune juice with a childish
glrch
sound, Rose Marie walked to the bathroom, not looking at or acknowledging
Gusman Kreiger or her grandson. Nor did they acknowledge her, as if each was a
ghost to the other, existing in different states of being, different layers of
reality, overlapping but never touching.

“We haven’t time to waste,” Kreiger continued. “After we
clean up next door, you may go back to sleep, and resume work on the flyer in
the morning. No telling when I’ll need it, and an unfinished flyer’s a
dangerous thing; you get lost in the ether, and you could lose yourself
forever.”

Jasper looked bored; Kreiger was losing the young man’s
limited attention. “Anyway, stay off the roof until morning. Ellen’s asleep;
she and Jack have a lot of ground to cover and time’s running out. But after that,
I want you back up there and working on the flyer, every minute of every hour.
Understood?”

“But gramma won’t like me—”

Kreiger waved the protest into silence. The trouble with
dreamers was they sometimes had difficulty accepting reality. “You’re
grandmother and I had a talk. She’s fine with you working on the dream flyer. But
now we have other work to do.”

Kreiger turned and led the way back to Ellen’s apartment.
Behind them, Rose Marie emerged from the bathroom and ambled off towards bed,
breaking wind loudly as she went. She mumbled a perfunctory “excuse me,” a
remark offered out of habit more than etiquette, not realizing there was no one
there to offend. She closed her bedroom door behind her.

*     *     *

Jasper followed Goose Man into Ellen Monroe’s apartment where
two men lay sprawled in the middle of the living room. A breeze through the
open windows stirred up odors: a little like Saturday mornings in springtime
when Gramma cleaned the apartment, the smell of soap and cleansers and plastic
buckets of sudsy water. But there was another smell too, thinly masked by the first,
a stench like a public restroom that no one had bothered to clean, toilets
clogged and overflowing, tiles slick and black with mildew.

Jasper paused, wrinkling his nose, but Goose Man only snapped
his fingers impatiently. “No time to waste, Jubjub Bird.”

The boy nodded, blinking, the smell making his eyes sting, his
nose prickle so that he might sneeze. “Who are they?”

“No one of any consequence,” Goose Man answered, nudging one
of the corpses with his boot, a detached gesture as if toeing a stray stone
from his path. “Tertiary constructs: flat, underdeveloped, poorly fleshed; one
of Jack’s many failings. Easy enough to dispose of, though. They’re mostly
fluff.”

“What what what happened to ‘em?”

“Has your grandmother ever warned you about running with scissors?”

Jasper nodded.

Goose Man tapped the puddle of blood with the staff. “This is
why.”

Then the wizard reached down and hefted one of the bodies up
under his arm as if it was nothing more than a sack of groceries. He carried
the corpse awkwardly to the open window overlooking the fire escape and the
gorge beyond, refusing to set the staff aside though it would have made the
task easier. Then he heaved it headfirst through the window.

The derelict’s top half passed through, but the rest—arms
akimbo, legs dragging against the floor—did not. The corpse slumped awkwardly over
the window frame, half in and half out, a new smear of blood trailing the soles
of its shoes.

Goose Man glared at it. “Heavier than expected.
Touché
,
Jack.”

Then he angrily grabbed the dead man’s crotch and hoisted him
out the window, tumbling the body awkwardly against the confines of the fire
escape. Goose Man stepped out after the corpse, glowered at it, and turned back
to Jasper Desmond who had been watching the entire proceeding in silent
fascination. “Bring the other one.”