by Stephen King
Something about this frightened Susannah terribly, and after a moment’s consideration (it took no longer), the reason came to her. If Mia had only replaced those parts of her legs that Odetta Holmes had lost to the subway train when Jack Mort pushed her onto the tracks she would have been white only from the knees or so down. But herthighs were white, too, and her groin area was turning. What strange lycanthropy was this?
De body-stealin kind,Detta replied cheerfully.Pretty soon you be havin a white belly…white breas’s…white neck…white cheeks…
Stop it,Susannah warned, but when had Detta Walker ever listened to her warnings? Hers or anybody’s?
And den, las’ of all, you have a whitebrain,girl! A Mia brain! And won’t dat be fahn? Sho! You be all Mia den! Nobody give you no shit if you want to ride right up front on de bus!
Then the shirt was drawn over her hips; the jeans were again buttoned up. Mia sat down on the toilet ring that way. In front of her, scrawled on the door, was this graffito: BANGO SKANK AWAITS THE KING!
Who is this Bango Skank?Mia asked.
I have no idea.
I think…It was hard, but Mia forced herself.I think I owe you a word of thanks.
Susannah’s response was cold and immediate.Thank me with the truth.
First tell me why you’d help me at all, after I…
This time Mia couldn’t finish. She liked to think of herself as brave—as brave as she had to be in the service of her chap, at least—but this time she couldn’t finish.
After you betrayed the man I love to men who are, when you get right down to it, footsoldiers of the Crimson King? After you decided it would be all right for them to kill mine so long as you could keep yours? Is that what you want to know?
Mia hated to hear it spoken of that way, but bore it.Had to bear it.
Yes, lady, if you like.
It was the other one who replied this time, in that voice—harsh, cawing, laughing, triumphant, and hateful—that was even worse than the shrill laughter of the birdy-women. Worse by far.
Because mah boys got away, dass why! Fucked those honkies mos’ righteous! The ones dey didn’t shoot all blowed to smithereens!
Mia felt a deep stirring of unease. Whether it was true or not, the bad laughing woman clearlybelieved it was true. And if Roland and Eddie Dean were still out there, wasn’t it possible the Crimson King wasn’t as strong, as all-powerful, as she had been told? Wasn’t it even possible that shehad been misled about—
Stop it, stop it, you can’t think that way!
There’s another reason I helped.The harsh one was gone and the other was back. At least for now.
What?
It’s my baby, too,Susannah said.I don’t want it killed.
I don’t believe you.
But she did. Because the woman inside was right: Mordred Deschain of Gilead and Discordia belonged to both of them. The bad one might not care, but the other, Susannah, clearly felt the chap’s tidal pull. And if she was right about Sayre and whoever waited for her at the Dixie Pig…if they were liars and cozeners…
Stop it. Stop. I have nowhere else to go but to them.
You do,Susannah said quickly.With Black Thirteen you can go anywhere.
You don’t understand. He’d follow me. Followit.
You’re right, Idon’tunderstand. She actually did, orthought she did, but…Burn up the day,he’d said.
All right, I’ll try to explain. I don’t understand everything myself—there are things I don’t know—but I’ll tell you what I can.
Thank y—
Before she could finish, Susannah was falling again, like Alice down the rabbit-hole. Through the toilet, through the floor, through the pipes beneath the floor, and into another world.
Nine
No castle at the end of her drop, not this time. Roland had told them a few stories of his wandering years—the vampire nurses and little doctors of Eluria, the walking waters of East Downe, and, of course, the story of his doomed first love—and this was a little like falling into one of those tales. Or, perhaps, into one of the oat-operas (“adult Westerns,” as they were called) on the still relatively new ABC-TV network:Sugarfoot, with Ty Hardin,Maverick, with James Garner, or—Odetta Holmes’s personal favorite—Cheyenne,starring Clint Walker. (Odetta had once written a letter to ABC programming, suggesting they could simultaneously break new ground and open up a whole new audience if they did a series about a wandering Negro cowboy in the years after the Civil War. She never got an answer. She supposed writing the letter in the first place had been ridiculous, a waste of time.)
There was a livery stable with a sign out front reading TACK MENDED CHEAP . The sign over the hotel promised QUIET ROOMS, GUD BEDS . There were at least five saloons. Outside one of them, a rusty robot that ran on squalling treads turned its bulb head back and forth, blaring a come-on to the empty town from the horn-shaped speaker in the center of its rudimentary face: “Girls, girls,girls! Some are humie and some are cybie, but who cares, you can’t tell the difference, they do what you want without complaint, won’t is not in their vo-CAB-u-lary, they give satisfaction with every action! Girls, girls, girls! Some are cybie, some are real, you can’t tell the difference when you cop a feel! They do what you want! They want whatyou want!”
Walking beside Susannah was the beautiful young white woman with the swollen belly, scratched legs, and shoulder-length black hair. Now, as they walked below the gaudy false front of THE FEDIC GOOD-TIME SALOON, BAR, AND DANCE EMPORIUM , she was wearing a faded plaid dress which advertised her advanced state of pregnancy in a way that made it seem freakish, almost a sign of the apocalypse. Thehuaraches of the castle allure had been replaced by scuffed and battered shor’boots. Both of them were wearing shor’boots, and the heels clumped hollowly on the boardwalk.
From one of the deserted barrooms farther along came the herky-jerky jazz of a jagtime tune, and a snatch of some old poem came to Susannah:A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon!
She looked over the batwing doors and was not in the least surprised to see the words SERVICE’S MALAMUTE SALOON .
She slowed long enough to peer over the batwing doors and saw a chrome piano playing itself, dusty keys popping up and down, just a mechanical music-box no doubt built by the ever-popular North Central Positronics, entertaining a room that was empty except for a dead robot and, in the far corner, two skeletons working through the process of final decomposition, the one that would take them from bone to dust.
Farther along, at the end of the town’s single street, loomed the castle wall. It was so high and so wide it blotted out most of the sky.
Susannah abruptly knocked her fist against the side of her head. Then she held her hands out in front of her and snapped her fingers.
“What are you doing?” Mia asked. “Tell me, I beg.”
“Making sure I’m here. Physically here.”
“You are.”
“So it seems. But how can that be?”
Mia shook her head, indicating that she didn’t know. On this, at least, Susannah was inclined to believe her. There was no dissenting word from Detta, either.
“This isn’t what I expected,” Susannah said, looking around. “It’s not what I expected at all.”
“Nay?” asked her companion (and without much interest). Mia was moving in that awkward but strangely endearing duck-footed waddle that seems to best suit women in the last stages of their carry. “And what was it ye did expect, Susannah?”
“Something more medieval, I guess. More like that.” She pointed at the castle.
Mia shrugged as if to say take it or leave it, and then said, “Is the other one with you? The nasty one?”
Detta, she meant. Of course. “She’s always with me. She’s a part of me just as your chap is a part of you.” Although how Mia could be pregnant when it had been Susannah who caught the fuck was something Susannah was still dying to know.
“I’ll soon be delivered of mine,” Mia said. “W
ill ya never be delivered of yours?”
“I thought I was,” Susannah said truthfully. “She came back. Mostly, I think, to deal with you.”
“I hate her.”
“I know.” And Susannah knew more. Mia feared Detta, as well. Feared her big-big.
“If she speaks, our palaver ends.”
Susannah shrugged. “She comes when she comes and speaks when she speaks. She doesn’t ask my permission.”
Ahead of them on this side of the street was an arch with a sign above it:
FEDIC STATION
MONO PATRICIA DISCONTINUED
THUMBPRINT READER INOPERATIVE
SHOW TICKET
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS THANKS YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE
The sign didn’t interest Susannah as much as the two things that lay on the filthy station platform beyond it: a child’s doll, decayed to little more than a head and one floppy arm, and, beyond it, a grinning mask. Although the mask appeared to be made of steel, a good deal of it seemed to have rotted like flesh. The teeth poking out of the grin were canine fangs. The eyes were glass. Lenses, Susannah felt sure, no doubt also crafted by North Central Positronics. Surrounding the mask were a few shreds and tatters of green cloth, what had undoubtedly once been this thing’s hood. Susannah had no trouble putting together the remains of the doll and the remains of the Wolf; her mamma, as Detta sometimes liked to tell folks (especially horny boys in road-house parking lots), didn’t raise no fools.
“This is where they brought them,” she said. “Where the Wolves brought the twins they stole from Calla Bryn Sturgis. Where they—what?—operated on them.”
“Not just from Calla Bryn Sturgis,” Mia said indifferently, “but aye. And once the babbies were here, they were taken there. A place you’ll also recognize, I’ve no doubt.”
She pointed across Fedic’s single street and farther up. The last building before the castle wall abruptly ended the town was a long Quonset hut with sides of filthy corrugated metal and a rusty curved roof. The windows running along the side Susannah could see had been boarded up. Also along that side was a steel hitching rail. To it were tied what looked like seventy horses, all of them gray. Some had fallen over and lay with their legs sticking straight out. One or two had turned their heads toward the women’s voices and then seemed to freeze in that position. It was very un-horselike behavior, but of course these weren’t real horses. They were robots, or cyborgs, or whichever one of Roland’s terms you might like to use. Many of them seemed to have run down or worn out.
In front of this building was a sign on a rusting steel plate. It read:
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.
Fedic Headquarters
Arc 16 Experimental Station
Maximum Security
VERBAL ENTRY CODE REQUIRED
EYEPRINT REQUIRED
“It’s another Dogan, isn’t it?” Susannah asked.
“Well, yes and no,” Mia said. “It’s the Dogan of all Dogans, actually.”
“Where the Wolves brought the children.”
“Aye, and will bring them again,” Mia said. “For the King’s work will go forward after this disturbance raised by your friend the gunslinger is past. I have no doubt of it.”
Susannah looked at her with real curiosity. “How can you speak so cruel and yet be so serene?” she asked. “They bring children here and scoop out their heads like…like gourds. Children, who’ve harmed nobody! What they send back are great galumphing idiots who grow to their full size in agony and often die in much the same way. Would you be so sanguine, Mia, ifyour child was borne away across one of those saddles, shrieking for you and holding out his arms?”
Mia flushed, but was able to meet Susannah’s gaze. “Each must follow the road upon which ka has set her feet, Susannah of New York. Mine is to bear my chap, and raise him, and thus end your dinn’s quest. And his life.”
“It’s wonderful how everyone seems to think they know just what ka means for them,” Susannah said. “Don’t you think that’s wonderful?”
“I think you’re trying to make jest of me because you fear,” Mia said levelly. “If such makes you feel better, than aye, have on.” She spread her arms and made a little sarcastic bow over her great belly.
They had stopped on the boardwalk in front of a shop advertising MILLINERY & LADIES’ WEAR and across from the Fedic Dogan. Susannah thought:Burn up the day, don’t forget that’s the other part of your job here. Kill time. Keep the oddity of a body we now seem to share in that women’s restroom just as long as you possibly can.
“I’m not making fun,” Susannah said. “I’m only asking you to put yourself in the place of all those other mothers.”
Mia shook her head angrily, her inky hair flying around her ears and brushing at her shoulders. “I did not make their fate, lady, nor did they make mine. I’ll save my tears, thank you. Would you hear my tale or not?”
“Yes, please.”
“Then let us sit, for my legs are sorely tired.”
Ten
In the Gin-Puppie Saloon, a few rickety storefronts back in the direction from which they’d come, they found chairs which would still bear their weight, but neither woman had any taste for the saloon itself, which smelled of dusty death. They dragged the chairs out to the boardwalk, where Mia sat with an audible sigh of relief.
“Soon,” she said. “Soon you shall be delivered, Susannah of New York, and so shall I.”
“Maybe, but I don’t understand any of this. Least of all why you’re rushing to this guy Sayre when you must know he serves the Crimson King.”
“Hush!” Mia said. She sat with her legs apart and her huge belly rising before her, looking out across the empty street. “’Twas a man of the King who gave me a chance to fulfill the only destiny ka ever left me. Not Sayre but one much greater than he. Someone to whom Sayre answers. A man named Walter.”
Susannah started at the name of Roland’s ancient nemesis. Mia looked at her, gave her a grim smile.
“You know the name, I see. Well, maybe that’ll save some talk. Gods know there’s been far too much talk for my taste, already; it’s not what I was made for. I was made to bear my chap and raise him, no more than that. And no less.”
Susannah offered no reply. Killing was supposedly her trade, killing time her current chore, but in truth she had begun to find Mia’s single-mindedness a trifle tiresome. Not to mention frightening.
As if picking this thought up, Mia said: “I am what I am and I am content wi’ it. If others are not, what’s that to me? Spit on em!”
Spoken like Detta Walker at her feistiest,Susannah thought, but made no reply. It seemed safer to remain quiet.
After a pause, Mia went on. “Yet I’d be lying if I didn’t say that being here brings back…certain memories. Yar!” And, unexpectedly, she laughed. Just as unexpectedly, the sound was beautiful and melodic.
“Tell your tale,” Susannah said. “This time tell me all of it. We have time before the labor starts again.”
“Do you say so?”
“I do. Tell me.”
For a few moments Mia just looked out at the street with its dusty cover of oggan and its air of sad and ancient abandonment. As Susannah waited for story-time to commence, she for the first time became aware of the still, shadeless quality to Fedic. She could see everything very well, and there was no moon in the sky as on the castle allure, but she still hesitated to call this daytime.
It’snotime, a voice inside her whispered—she knew not whose.This is a place between, Susannah; a place where shadows are cancelled and time holds its breath.
Then Mia told her tale. It was shorter than Susannah had expected (shorter than she wanted, given Eddie’s abjuration to burn up the day), but it explained a great deal. More, actually, than Susannah had hoped for. She listened with growing rage, and why not? She had been more than raped that day in the ring of stones and bones, it seemed. She had been robbed, as well—the strangest robbery to which any woman had ever bee
n subject.
And it was still going on.
Eleven
“Look out there, may it do ya fine,” said the big-bellied woman sitting beside Susannah on the boardwalk. “Look out and see Mia before she gained her name.”
Susannah looked into the street. At first she saw nothing but a cast-off waggon-wheel, a splintered (and long-dry) watering trough, and a starry silver thing that looked like the lost rowel from some cowpoke’s spur.
Then, slowly, a misty figure formed. It was that of a nude woman. Her beauty was blinding—even before she had come fully into view, Susannah knew that. Her age was any. Her black hair brushed her shoulders. Her belly was flat, her navel a cunning cup into which any man who ever loved women would be happy to dip his tongue. Susannah (or perhaps it was Detta) thought,Hell, I could dip my own. Hidden between the ghost-woman’s thighs was a cunning cleft. Here was a different tidal pull.
“That’s me when I came here,” said the pregnant version sitting beside Susannah. She spoke almost like a woman who is showing slides of her vacation.That’s me at the Grand Canyon, that’s me in Seattle, that’s me at Grand Coulee Dam; that’s me on the Fedic high street, do it please ya. The pregnant woman was also beautiful, but not in the same eerie way as the shade in the street. The pregnant woman looked a certain age, for instance—late twenties—and her face had been marked by experience. Much of it painful.
“I said I was an elemental—the one who made love to your dinh—but that was a lie. As I think you suspected. I lied not out of hope of gain, but only…I don’t know…from a kind of wishfulness, I suppose. I wanted the baby to be mine that way, too—”
“Yours from the start.”
“Aye, from the start—you say true.” They watched the nude woman walk up the street, arms swinging, muscles of her long back flexing, hips swaying from side to side in that eternal breathless clock of motion. She left no tracks on the oggan.
