The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) by Mark Reynolds Page A

too-small child, hoping against reason that it could be rescued.
    Ellen surrendered the
book, releasing a little too slowly, reflexively compelled to hold on, to curl
back and keep the book safe. But she finally relented, trusting him.
    It would be her undoing; sometimes
there simply wasn’t a good side, no matter how hard you looked.
    Nicholas Dabble gently
opened the book to the inside cover, moving the pages carefully, as if working
with some two thousand-year-old text written on papyrus, and not a cheap paperback
with a small bead of glue bubbled from beneath the spine and a low-grade paper
that was designed not to last. The inside cover was naked and white, empty. He
turned a slew of blank pages, pages he would have looked to for copyright
dates, the ISBN, the publisher’s disclaimer, address, and even acknowledgements
of other works borrowed and used with permission; all the gibberish and
legalese that finds its way into a book’s first few pages and is promptly
ignored by everyone.
    Everyone but him.
    Only there was nothing
there to find, the pages blank as if cut and placed into the book without the
typesetter realizing that they were empty. A fluke. An oversight. A mystery.
    His confidence shriveled
as he turned another empty page, and was confronted by the title:
     

The Sanity’s Edge Saloon
     
    By Jack Lantirn
     
    A story he did not know.
An author he had never heard of. The knee-jerk response was to blame a
production error. There were probably a couple hundred books just like this one
out there in the hands of unsuspecting booksellers and distributors, all of
them suffering the same lack of initial information. There was likely a
shipping supervisor desperately trying to recall all of these sad, nameless
bastards of mass-production, and maybe a quality-checker with a written
admonishment in his or her HR file, or perhaps even dismissed outright. But he
doubted it. When called, the distributor did not know of the book, had never
heard of it, could not find it by name or author. And more importantly, Dabble
himself had never heard of it, could not find out about it. That was what made
his blood run cold, his heart skip a beat.
    This book should not
exist.
    It had never been
written, its author never born. It was an anomaly that mocked him, and made him
wonder—not for the first time—if something was coming. Something important.
Something bad.
    Ellen fidgeted, hands
alternately smoothing and bunching the pleats of her dress, her eyes never
leaving the book; a strung-out junkie watching her fix cook in the hollow of a
bent spoon, a look not foreign to her. He was making her nervous.
    On a whim, he tested a
hypothesis. “Ellen, could I borrow this? I’d love to read it, if you wouldn’t
mind?”
    She hesitated, telling
him everything he needed to know; she would never let him have the book. Never.
“I guess it would be okay.”
    She was lying, of course.
He could read it on her face, hear it in her tone. It was not okay. It was
anything but okay. But she would need an excuse now, some means of bringing it
back into her hands without sounding obsessive or insane.
    “But I need it this
afternoon. Dr. Kohler asked to see it.”
    And there was the second
lie. Dr. Kohler was an imbecile, the link between Ellen Monroe and the book
having escaped his feeble understanding. Fabricated reality and delusion
reinforcement would be Kohler’s complete analysis of the book, and nothing
more.
    A woman browsing the
front of the store stumbled against the box Ellen left near the counter. It
scraped across the floor as the woman dramatically flailed her arms for balance.
Dabble’s gaze fell across her, read her in an instant, and dismissed her.
    But for his own purposes,
he feigned concern. “Goodness!”
    Ellen turned sharply, her
attention momentarily distracted. “Are you all right? Let me help you.”
    As she crossed towards
the front of the store, Nicholas Dabble ran his thumbnail down the inside edge
of the