by Stephen King
“I told you that the creatures of the invisible world were left behind when thePrim receded. Most died, as fishes and sea-animals will when cast up on a beach and left to strangle in the alien air. But there are always some who adapt, and I was one of those unfortunates. I wandered far and wide, and whenever I found men in the wastes, I took on the form you see.”
Like a model on a runway (one who has forgotten to actually put on the latest Paris fashion she’s supposed to be displaying), the woman in the street pivoted on the balls of her feet, buttocks tensing with lovely silken ease, creating momentary crescent-shaped hollows. She began to walk back, the eyes just below the straight cut of her bangs fixed on some distant horizon, her hair swinging beside ears that were without other ornament.
“When I found someone with a prick, I fucked him,” Mia said. “That much I had in common with the demon elemental who first tried to have congress with your soh and then did have congress with your dinh, and that also accounts for my lie, I suppose. And I found your dinh passing fair.” The tiniest bit of greed roughened her voice as she said this. The Detta in Susannah found it sexy. The Detta in Susannah bared her lips in a grin of gruesome understanding.
“I fucked them, and if they couldn’t break free I fucked them to death.” Matter-of-fact.After the Grand Coulee, we went to Yosemite. Would you tell your dinh something for me, Susannah? If you see him again?”
“Aye, if you like.”
“Once he knew a man—a bad man—named Amos Depape, brother of the Roy Depape who ran with Eldred Jonas in Mejis. Your dinh believes Amos Depape was stung to death by a snake, and in a way he was…but the snake was me.”
Susannah said nothing.
“I didn’t fuck them for sex, I didn’t fuck them to kill them, although I didn’t care when they died and their pricks finally wilted out of me like melting icicles. In truth I didn’t knowwhy I was fucking them, until I came here, to Fedic. In those early days there were still men and women here; the Red Death hadn’t come, do ye ken. The crack in the earth beyond town was there, but the bridge over it still stood strong and true. Those folk were stubborn, trying not to let go, even when the rumors that Castle Discordia was haunted began. The trains still came, although on no regular schedule—”
“The children?” Susannah asked. “The twins?” She paused. “The Wolves?”
“Nay, all of that was two dozen centuries later. Or more. But hear me now: there was one couple in Fedic who had ababy. You’ve no idea, Susannah of New York, how rare and wonderful that was in those days when most folk were as sterile as the elementals themselves, and those who weren’t more often than not produced either slow mutants or monsters so terrible they were killed by their parents if they took more than a single breath. Most of them didn’t. Butthis baby!”
She clasped her hands. Her eyes shone.
“It was round and pink and unblemished by so much as a portwine stain—perfect—and I knew after a single look what I’d been made for. I wasn’t fucking for the sex of it, or because in coitus I was almost mortal, or because it brought death to most of my partners, but to have a baby like theirs. Like their Michael.”
She lowered her head slightly and said, “I would have taken him, you know. Would have gone to the man, fucked him until he was crazy, then whispered in his ear that he should kill his molly. And when she’d gone to the clearing at the end of the path, I would have fucked him dead and the baby—that beautiful little pink baby—would have been mine. D’you see?”
“Yes,” Susannah said. She felt faintly sick. In front of them, in the middle of the street, the ghostly woman made yet another turn and started back again. Farther down, the huckster-robot honked out his seemingly eternal spiel:Girls, girls, girls! Some are humie and some are cybie, but who cares, you can’t tell the difference!
“I discovered I couldn’t go near them,” Mia said. “It was as though a magic circle had been drawn around them. It was the baby, I suppose.
“Then came the plague. The Red Death. Some folks said something had been opened in the castle, some jar of demonstuff that should have been left shut forever. Others said the plague came out of the crack—what they called the Devil’s Arse. Either way, it was the end of life in Fedic, life on the edge of Discordia. Many left on foot or in waggons. Baby Michael and his parents stayed, hoping for a train. Each day I waited for them to sicken—for the red spots to show on the baby’s dear cheeks and fat little arms—but they never did; none of the three sickened. Perhaps theywere in a magic circle. I think they must have been. And a train came. It was Patricia. The mono. Do ya ken—”
“Yes,” Susannah said. She knew all she wanted to about Blaine’s companion mono. Once upon a time her route must have taken her over here as well as to Lud.
“Aye. They got on. I watched from the station platform, weeping my unseen tears and wailing my unseen cries. They got on with their sweet wee one…only by then he was three or four years old, walking and talking. And they went. I tried to follow them, and Susannah, I could not. I was a prisoner here. Knowing my purpose was what made me so.”
Susannah wondered about that, but decided not to comment.
“Years and decades and centuries went by. In Fedic there were by then only the robots and the unburied bodies left over from the Red Death, turning to skeletons, then to dust.
“Then men came again, but I didn’t dare go near them because they werehis men.” She paused. “Itsmen.”
“The Crimson King’s.”
“Aye, they with the endlessly bleeding holes on their foreheads. They went there.” She pointed to the Fedic Dogan—the Arc 16 Experimental Station. “And soon their accursed machines were running again, just as if they still believed that machines could hold up the world. Not, ye ken, that holding it up is what they want to do! No, no, not they! They brought in beds—”
“Beds!” Susannah said, startled. Beyond them, the ghostly woman in the street rose once more on the balls of her feet and made yet one more graceful pirouette.
“Aye, for the children, although this was still long years before the Wolves began to bring em here, and long before you were part of your dinh’s story. Yet that time did draw nigh, and Walter came to me.”
“Can you make that woman in the street disappear?” Susannah asked abruptly (and rather crossly). “I know she’s a version of you, I get the idea, but she makes me…I don’t know…nervous. Can you make her go away?”
“Aye, if you like.” Mia pursed her lips and blew. The disturbingly beautiful woman—the spirit without a name—disappeared like smoke.
For several moments Mia was quiet, once more gathering the threads of her story. Then she said, “Walter…saw me. Not like other men. Even the ones I fucked to death only saw what they wanted to see. Or whatI wanted them to see.” She smiled in unpleasant reminiscence. “I made some of them die thinking they were fucking their own mothers! You should have seen their faces!” Then the smile faded. “But Waltersaw me.”
“What did he look like?”
“Hard to tell, Susannah. He wore a hood, and inside it he grinned—such a grinning man he was—and he palavered with me. There.” She pointed toward the Fedic Good-Time Saloon with a finger that trembled slightly.
“No mark on his forehead, though?”
“Nay, I’m sure not, for he’s not one of what Pere Callahan calls the low men. Their job is the Breakers. The Breakers and no more.”
Susannah began to feel the anger then, although she tried not to show it. Mia had access to all her memories, which meant all the inmost workings and secrets of their ka-tet. It was like discovering you’d had a burglar in the house who had tried on your underwear as well as stealing your money and going through your most personal papers.
It was awful.
“Walter is, I suppose, what you’d call the Crimson King’s Prime Minister. He often travels in disguise, and is known in other worlds under other names, but always he is a grinning, laughing man—”
“I met him brief
ly,” Susannah said, “under the name of Flagg. I hope to meet him again.”
“If you truly knew him, you’d wish for no such thing.”
“The Breakers you spoke of—where are they?”
“Why…Thunderclap, do’ee not know? The shadow-lands. Why do you ask?”
“No reason but curiosity,” Susannah said, and seemed to hear Eddie:Ask any question she’ll answer. Burn up the day. Give us a chance to catch up. She hoped Mia couldn’t read her thoughts when they were separated like this. If she could, they were all likely up shit creek without a paddle. “Let’s go back to Walter. Can we speak of him a bit?”
Mia signaled a weary acceptance that Susannah didn’t quite believe. How long had it been since Mia had had an ear for any tale she might care to tell? The answer, Susannah guessed, was probably never. And the questions Susannah was asking, the doubts she was articulating…surely some of them must have passed through Mia’s own head. They’d be banished quickly as the blasphemies they were, but still, come on, this was not a stupid woman. Unless obsessionmade you stupid. Susannah supposed a case could be made for that idea.
“Susannah? Bumbler got your tongue?”
“No, I was just thinking what a relief it must have been when he came to you.”
Mia considered that, then smiled. Smiling changed her, made her look girlish and artless and shy. Susannah had to remind herself that wasn’t a look she could trust. “Yes! It was! Of course it was!”
“After discovering your purpose and being trapped here by it…after seeing the Wolves getting ready to store the kids and then operate on them…after all that, Walter comes. The devil, in fact, but at least he can see you. At least he can hear your sad tale. And he makes you an offer.”
“He said the Crimson King would give me a child,” Mia said, and put her hands gently against the great globe of her belly. “My Mordred, whose time has come round at last.”
Twelve
Mia pointed again at the Arc 16 Experimental Station. What she had called the Dogan of Dogans. The last remnant of her smile lingered on her lips, but there was no happiness or real amusement in it now. Her eyes were shiny with fear and—perhaps—awe.
“That’s where they changed me, made me mortal. Once there were many such places—there must have been—but I’d set my watch and warrant that’s the only one left in all of In-World, Mid-World, or End-World. It’s a place both wonderful and terrible. And it was there I was taken.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.” Susannah was thinking of her Dogan. Which was, of course, based onJake’s Dogan. It was certainly a strange place, with its flashing lights and multiple TV screens, but not frightening.
“Beneath it are passages which go under the castle,” Mia said. “At the end of one is a door that opens on the Calla side of Thunderclap, just under the last edge of the darkness. That’s the one the Wolves use when they go on their raids.”
Susannah nodded. That explained a lot. “Do they take the kiddies back the same way?”
“Nay, lady, do it please you; like many doors, the one that takes the Wolves from Fedic to the Calla side of Thunderclap goes in only one direction. When you’re on the other side, it’s no longer there.”
“Because it’s not amagic door, right?”
Mia smiled and nodded and patted her knee.
Susannah looked at her with mounting excitement. “It’s another twin-thing.”
“Do you say so?”
“Yes. Only this time Tweedledum and Tweedledee are science and magic. Rational and irrational. Sane and insane. No matter what terms you pick, that’s a double-damned pair if ever there was one.”
“Aye? Do you say so?”
“Yes!Magic doors—like the one Eddie found and you took me through to New York—go both ways. The doors North Central Positronics made to replace them when thePrim receded and the magic faded…they go only one way. Have I got that right?”
“I think so, aye.”
“Maybe they didn’t have time to figure out how to make teleportation a two-lane highway before the world moved on. In any case, the Wolves go to the Calla side of Thunderclap by door and come back to Fedic by train. Right?”
Mia nodded.
Susannah no longer thought she was just trying to kill time. This information might come in handy later on. “And after the King’s men, Pere’s low men, have scooped the kids’ brains, what then? Back through the door with them, I suppose—the one under the castle. Back to the Wolves’ staging point. And a train takes them the rest of the way home.”
“Aye.”
“Why do they bother takin em back at all?”
“Lady, I know not.” Then Mia’s voice dropped. “There’s another door under Castle Discordia. Another door in the rooms of ruin. One that goes…” She licked her lips. “That goes todash.”
“Todash?…I know the word, but I don’t understand what’s so bad—”
“There are endless worlds, your dinh is correct about that, but even when those worlds are close together—like some of the multiple New Yorks—there are endless spaces between. Think ya of the spaces between the inner and outer walls of a house. Places where it’s always dark. But just because a place is always dark doesn’t mean it’s empty. Does it, Susannah?”
There are monsters in the todash darkness.
Who had said that? Roland? She couldn’t remember for sure, and what did it matter? She thought she understood what Mia was saying, and if so, it was horrible.
“Rats in the walls, Susannah.Bats in the walls. All sorts of sucking, biting bugs in the walls.”
“Stop it, I get the picture.”
“That door beneath the castle—one of their mistakes, I have no doubt—goes tonowhere at all. Into the darkness between worlds. Todash-space. But not empty space.” Her voice lowered further. “That door is reserved for the Red King’s most bitter enemies. They’re thrown into a darkness where they may exist—blind, wandering, insane—for years. But in the end, something always finds them and devours them. Monsters beyond the ability of such minds as ours to bear thought of.”
Susannah found herself trying to picture such a door, and what waited behind it. She didn’t want to but couldn’t help it. Her mouth dried up.
In that same low and somehow horrible tone of confidentiality, Mia said, “There were many places where the old people tried to join magic and science together, but yon may be the only one left.” She nodded toward the Dogan. “It was there that Walter took me, to make me mortal and take me out ofPrim ’s way forever.
“To make me like you.”
Thirteen
Mia didn’t know everything, but so far as Susannah could make out, Walter/Flagg had offered the spirit later to be known as Mia the ultimate Faustian bargain. If she was willing to give up her nearly eternal but discorporate state and become a mortal woman, then she could become pregnant and bear a child. Walter was honest with her about how little she would actually be getting for all she’d be giving up. The baby wouldn’t grow as normal babies did—as Baby Michael had done before Mia’s unseen but worshipful eyes—and she might only have him for seven years, but oh what wonderful years they could be!
Beyond this, Walter had been tactfully silent, allowing Mia to form her own pictures: how she would nurse her baby and wash him, not neglecting the tender creases behind the knees and ears; how she would kiss him in the honeyspot between the unfledged wings of his shoulderblades; how she would walk with him, holding both of his hands in both of hers as he toddled; how she would read to him and point out Old Star and Old Mother in the sky and tell him the story of how Rustie Sam stole the widow’s best loaf of bread; how she would hug him to her and bathe his cheek with her grateful tears when he spoke his first word, which would, of course, beMama.
Susannah listened to this rapturous account with a mixture of pity and cynicism. Certainly Walter had done one hell of a job selling the idea to her, and as ever, the best way to do that was to let the mark sell herself. He’d even prop
osed a properly Satanic period of proprietorship: seven years.Just sign on the dotted line, madam, and please don’t mind that whiff of brimstone; I just can’t seem to get the smell out of my clothes.
Susannah understood the deal and still had trouble swallowing it. This creature had given up immortality for morning sickness, swollen and achy breasts, and, in the last six weeks of her carry, the need to pee approximately every fifteen minutes. And wait, folks, there’s more! Two and a half years of changing diapers soaked with piss and loaded with shit! Of getting up in the night as the kid howls with the pain of cutting his first tooth (and cheer up, Mom, only thirty-one to go). That first magic spit-up! That first heartwarming spray of urine across the bridge of your nose when the kid lets go as you’re changing his clout!
And yes, there would be magic. Even though she’d never had a child herself, Susannah knew there would be magic even in the dirty diapers and the colic if the child were the result of a loving union. But to have the child and then have him taken away from you just when it was getting good, just as the child approached what most people agreed was the age of reason, responsibility, and accountability? To then be swept over the Crimson King’s red horizon? That was an awful idea. And was Mia so besotted by her impending motherhood that she didn’t realize the little shehad been promised was now being whittled away? Walter/Flagg had come to her in Fedic, Scenic Aftermath of the Red Death, and promised her seven years with her son. On the telephone in the Plaza-Park, however, Richard Sayre had spoken of a mere five.
In any case, Mia had agreed to the dark man’s terms. And really, how much sport could there have been in getting her to do that? She’d been made for motherhood, had arisen from thePrim with that imperative, had known it herself ever since seeing her first perfect human baby, the boy Michael. How could she have said no? Even if the offer had only been for three years, or for one, how? Might as well expect a long-time junkie to refuse a loaded spike when it was offered.
Mia had been taken into the Arc 16 Experimental Station. She’d been given a tour by the smiling, sarcastic (and undoubtedly frightening) Walter, who sometimes called himself Walter of End-World and sometimes Walter of All-World. She’d seen the great room filled with beds, awaiting the children who would come to fill them; at the head of each was a stainless-steel hood attached to a segmented steel hose. She did not like to think what the purpose of such equipment might be. She’d also been shown some of the passages under the Castle on the Abyss, and had been in places where the smell of death was strong and suffocating. She—there had been a red darkness and she—
