Song of Susannah dt-6

by Stephen King

  Make him happy, take it back,she told Susannah, but would notcome forward and make Susannah do so. Let it be her choice.

  Before Susannah could reply, the alarm in the Dogan went off, flooding their shared mind with noise and red light.

  Susannah turned in that direction, but Mia grabbed her shoulder in a grip like a claw before she could go.

  What’s happening? What’s gone wrong?

  Let me loose!

  Susannah twisted free. And before Mia could grab her again, she was gone.

  Eleven

  Susannah’s Dogan pulsed and flared with red panic-light. A Klaxon hammered an audio tattoo from the overhead speakers. All but two of the TV screens—one still showing the busker on the corner of Lex and Sixtieth, the other the sleeping baby—had shorted out. The cracked floor was humming under Susannah’s feet and throwing up dust. One of the control panels had gone dark, and another was in flames.

  This looked bad.

  As if to confirm her assessment, the Blaine-like Voice of the Dogan began to speak again. “WARNING!” it cried. “SYSTEM OVERLOAD! WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 40 SECONDS!”

  Susannah couldn’t remember any Section Alpha from her previous visits to the Dogan, but wasn’t surprised to now see a sign labeled just that. One of the panels near it suddenly erupted in a gaudy shower of orange sparks, setting the seat of a chair on fire. More ceiling panels fell, trailing snarls of wiring.

  “WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 30 SECONDS!”

  What about the EMOTIONAL TEMP dial?

  “Leave it alone,” she muttered to herself.

  Okay, CHAP? What about that one?

  After a moment’s thought, Susannah flipped the toggle from ASLEEP to AWAKE and those disconcerting blue eyes opened at once, staring into Susannah’s with what looked like fierce curiosity.

  Roland’s child,she thought with a strange and painful mixture of emotions.And mine. As for Mia? Girl, you nothing but a ka-mai. I’m sorry for you.

  Ka-mai, yes. Not just a fool, but ka’s fool—a fool of destiny.

  “WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 25 SECONDS!”

  So waking the baby hadn’t done any good, at least not in terms of preventing a complete system crash. Time for Plan B.

  She reached out for the absurd LABOR FORCE control-knob, the one that looked so much like the oven-dial on her mother’s stove. Turning the dial back to 2 had been difficult, and had hurt like a bastard. Turning it the other way was easier, and there was no pain at all. What she felt was aneasing somewhere deep in her head, as if some network of muscles which had been flexed for hours was now letting go with a little cry of relief.

  The blaring pulse of the Klaxon ceased.

  Susannah turned LABOR FORCE to 8, paused there, then shrugged. What the hell, it was time to go for broke, get this over with. She turned the dial all the way to 10. The moment it was there, a great glossy pain hardened her stomach and then rolled lower, gripping her pelvis. She had to tighten her lips against a scream.

  “POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED,” said the voice, and then it dropped into a John Wayne drawl that Susannah knew all too well. “THANKS A WHOLE HEAP, LI’L COWGIRL.”

  She had to tighten her lips against another scream—not pain this time but outright terror. It was all very well to remind herself Blaine the Mono was dead and this voice was coming from some nasty practical joker in her own subconscious, but that didn’t stop the fear.

  “LABOR…HAS COMMENCED,” said the amplified voice, dropping the John Wayne imitation. “LABOR…HAS COMMENCED.” Then, in a horrible (and nasal) Bob Dylan drawl that set her teeth on edge, the voice sang: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU…BABE!…HAPPY BIRTHDAY…TO YOU! HAPPY BIRTHDAY…DEAR MORDRED…HAPPY BIRTHDAY…TO YOU!”

  Susannah visualized a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall behind her, and when she turned it was, of course, right there (she had not imagined the little sign reading ONLY YOU AND SOMBRA CAN HELP PREVENT CONSOLE FIRES, however—that, along with a drawing of Shardik o’ the Beam in a Smokey the Bear hat, was some other joker’s treat). As she hurried across the cracked and uneven floor to get the extinguisher, skirting the fallen ceiling panels, another pain ripped into her, lighting her belly and thighs on fire, making her want to double over and bear down on the outrageous stone in her womb.

  Not going to take long,she thought in a voice that was part Susannah and part Detta.No ma’am. This chap comin in on the express train!

  But then the pain let up slightly. She snatched the extinguisher off the wall when it did, trained the slim black horn on the flaming control panel, and pressed the trigger. Foam billowed out, coating the flames. There was a baleful hissing sound and a smell like burning hair.

  “THE FIRE…IS OUT,” the Voice of the Dogan proclaimed. “THE FIRE…IS OUT.” And then changing, quick as a flash, to a plummy British Lord Haw-Haw accent:

  “I SAY,JOLLY GOOD SHOW, SEW-ZANNAH, AB-SO-LUTELYBRILLLL-IANT! ”

  She lurched across the minefield of the Dogan’s floor again, seized the microphone, and pressed the transmit toggle. Above her, on one of the TV screens still operating, she could see that Mia was on the move again, crossing Sixtieth.

  Then Susannah saw the green awning with the cartoon pig, and her heart sank. Not Sixtieth, but Sixty-first.The hijacking mommybitch had reached her destination.

  “Eddie!” she shouted into the microphone. “Eddie or Roland!” And what the hell, she might as well make it a clean sweep. “Jake! Pere Callahan! We’ve reached the Dixie Pig and we’re going to have this damn baby! Come for us if you can, but be careful!”

  She looked up at the screen again. Mia was now on the Dixie Pig side of the street, peering at the green awning. Hesitating. Could she read the words DIXIE PIG? Probably not, but she could surely understand the cartoon. The smiling, smoking pig. And she wouldn’t hesitate long in any case, now that her labor had started.

  “Eddie, I have to go. I love you, sugar! Whatever else happens, you remember that! Never forget it!I love you! This is…” Her eye fell on the semicircular readout on the panel behind the mike. The needle had fallen out of the red. She thought it would stay in the yellow until the labor was over, then subside into the green.

  Unless something went wrong, that was.

  She realized she was still gripping the mike.

  “This is Susannah-Mio, signing off. God be with you, boys. God and ka.”

  She put the microphone down and closed her eyes.

  Twelve

  Susannah sensed the difference in Mia immediately. Although she’d reached the Dixie Pig and her labor had most emphatically commenced, Mia’s mind was for once elsewhere. It had turned to Odetta Holmes, in fact, and to what Michael Schwerner had called the Mississippi Summer Project. (What the Oxford rednecks had calledhim was The Jewboy.) The emotional atmosphere to which Susannah returned wasfraught, like still air before a violent September storm.

  Susannah! Susannah, daughter of Dan!

  Yes, Mia.

  I agreed to mortality.

  So you said.

  And certainly Mia had looked mortal in Fedic. Mortal andterribly pregnant.

  Yet I’ve missed most of what makes the short-time life worthwhile. Haven’t I?The grief in that voice was awful; the surprise was even worse.And there’s no time for you to tell me. Not now.

  Go somewhere else,Susannah said, with no hope at all.Hail a cab, go to a hospital. We’ll have it together, Mia. Maybe we can even raise it toge—

  If I have it anywhere but here, it will die and we’ll die with it.She spoke with utter certainty.And I willhave it. I’ve been cheated of all but my chap, and I willhave it. But…Susannah…before we go in…you spoke of your mother.

  I lied. It was me in Oxford. Lying was easier than trying to explain time travel and parallel worlds.

  Show me the truth. Show me your mo
ther. Show me, I beg!

  There was no time to debate this request pro and con; it was either do it or refuse on the spur of the moment. Susannah decided to do it.

  Look,she said.

  Thirteen

  In the Land of Memory, the time is alwaysNow.

  There is an Unfound Door

  (O lost)

  and when Susannah found it and opened it, Mia saw a woman with her dark hair pulled back from her face and startling gray eyes. There is a cameo brooch at the woman’s throat. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, this woman, in an eternal shaft of sun. In this memory it is always ten minutes past two on an afternoon in October of 1946, the Big War is over, Irene Daye is on the radio, and the smell is always gingerbread.

  “Odetta, come and sit with me,” says the woman at the table, she who is mother. “Have something sweet. You lookgood, girl.”

  And she smiles.

  O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!

  Fourteen

  Prosaic enough, you would say, so you would. A young girl comes home from school with her book-bag in one hand and her gym-bag in the other, wearing her white blouse and her pleated St. Ann’s tartan skirt and the knee-socks with the bows on the side (orange and black, the school colors). Her mother, sitting at the kitchen table, looks up and offers her daughter a piece of the gingerbread that just came out of the oven. It is only one moment in an unmarked million, a single atom of event in a lifetime of them. But it stole Mia’s breath

  (you lookgood,girl )

  and showed her in a concrete way she had previously not understood how rich motherhood could be…if,that was, it was allowed to run its course uninterrupted.

  The rewards?

  Immeasurable.

  In the endyou could be the woman sitting in the shaft of sun.You could be the one looking at the child sailing bravely out of childhood’s harbor. You could be the wind in that child’s unfurled sails.

  You.

  Odetta, come and sit with me.

  Mia’s breath began to hitch in her chest.

  Have something sweet.

  Her eyes fogged over, the smiling cartoon pig on the awning first doubling, then quadrupling.

  You lookgood,girl.

  Some time was better than no time at all. Even five years—or three—was better than no time at all. She couldn’t read, hadn’t been to Morehouse, hadn’t been tono house, but she could do that much math with no trouble: three = better than none. Even one = better than none.

  Oh…

  Oh, but…

  Mia thought of a blue-eyed boy stepping through a door, one that was found instead of lost. She thought of saying to himYou look good,son!

  She began to weep.

  What have I donewas a terrible question.What else couldI have done was perhaps even worse.

  O Discordia!

  Fifteen

  This was Susannah’s one chance to do something: now, while Mia stood at the foot of the steps leading up to her fate. Susannah reached into the pocket of her jeans and touched the turtle, thesköldpadda. Her brown fingers, separated from Mia’s white leg by only a thin layer of lining, closed around it.

  She pulled it out and flipped it behind her, casting it into the gutter. From her hand into the lap of ka.

  Then she was carried up the three steps to the double doors of the Dixie Pig.

  Sixteen

  It was very dim inside and at first Mia could see nothing but murky, reddish-orange lights. Electricflambeaux of the sort that still lit some of the rooms in Castle Discordia. Her sense of smell needed no adjusting, however, and even as a fresh labor pain clamped her tight, her stomach reacted to the smell of roasting pork and cried out to be fed. Herchap cried out to be fed.

  That’s not pork, Mia,Susannah said, and was ignored.

  As the doors were closed behind her—there was a man (or a manlike being) standing at each of them—she began to see better. She was at the head of a long, narrow dining room. White napery shone. On each table was a candle in an orange-tinted holder. They glowed like fox-eyes. The floor here in the foyer was black marble, but beyond themaître d ’s stand there was a rug of darkest crimson.

  Beside the stand was a sai of about sixty with white hair combed back from a lean and rather predatory face. It was the face of an intelligent man, but his clothes—the blaring yellow sportcoat, the red shirt, the black tie—were those of a used-car salesman or a gambler who specializes in rooking small-town rubes. In the center of his forehead was a red hole about an inch across, as if he had been shot at close range. It swam with blood that never overflowed onto his pallid skin.

  At the tables in the dining room stood perhaps fifty men and half again as many women. Most of them were dressed in clothes as loud or louder than those of the white-haired gent. Big rings glared on fleshy fingers, diamond eardrops sparked back orange light from theflambeaux.

  There were also some dressed in more sober attire—jeans and plain white shirts seemed to be the costume of choice for this minority. Thesefolken were pallid and watchful, their eyes seemingly all pupil. Around their bodies, swirling so faintly that they sometimes disappeared, were blue auras. To Mia these pallid, aura-enclosed creatures looked quite a bit more human than the low men and women. They were vampires—she didn’t have to observe the sharpened fangs which their smiles disclosed to know it—but still they looked more human than Sayre’s bunch. Perhaps because they once hadbeen human. The others, though…

  Their faces are only masks,she observed with growing dismay.Beneath the ones the Wolves wear lie the electric men—the robots—but what is beneath these?

  The dining room was breathlessly silent, but from somewhere nearby came the uninterrupted sounds of conversation, laughter, clinking glasses, and cutlery against china. There was a patter of liquid—wine or water, she supposed—and a louder outburst of laughter.

  A low man and a low woman—he in a tuxedo equipped with plaid lapels and a red velvet bow tie, she in a strapless silver lamé evening dress, both of startling obesity—turned to look (with obvious displeasure) toward the source of these sounds, which seemed to be coming from behind some sort of swaggy tapestry depicting knights and their ladies at sup. When the fat couple turned to look, Mia saw their cheeks wrinkle upward like clingy cloth, and for a moment, beneath the soft angle of their jaws, she saw something dark red and tufted with hair.

  Susannah, was thatskin? Mia asked.Dear God, was it their skin?

  Susannah made no reply, not evenI told you so orDidn’t I warn you? Things had gone past that now. It was too late for exasperation (or any of the milder emotions), and Susannah felt genuinely sorry for the woman who had brought her here. Yes, Mia had lied and betrayed; yes, she had tried her best to get Eddie and Roland killed. But what choice had she ever had? Susannah realized, with dawning bitterness, that she could now give the perfect definition of a ka-mai: one who has been given hope but no choices.

  Like giving a motorcycle to a blindman,she thought.

  Richard Sayre—slim, middle-aged, handsome in a full-lipped, broad-browed way—began to applaud. The rings on his fingers flashed. His yellow blazer blared in the dim light. “Hile, Mia!” he cried.

  “Hile, Mia!”the others responded.

  “Hile, Mother!”

  “Hile, Mother!”the vampires and low men and low women cried, and they, too began to applaud. The sound was certainly enthusiastic enough, but the acoustics of the room dulled it and turned it into the rustle of batwings. A hungry sound, one that made Susannah feel sick to her stomach. At the same time a fresh contraction gripped her and turned her legs to water. She reeled forward, yet almost welcomed the pain, which partially muffled her trepidation. Sayre stepped forward and seized her by the upper arms, steadying her before she could fall. She had thought his touch would be cold, but his fingers were as hot as those of a cholera victim.

  Farther back, she saw a tall figure come out of the shadows, something that was neither low man nor vampire. It wore jeans and
a plain white shirt, but emerging from the shirt’s collar was the head of a bird. It was covered with sleek feathers of dark yellow. Its eyes were black. It patted its hands together in polite applause, and she saw—with ever-growing dismay—that those hands were equipped with talons rather than fingers.

  Half a dozen bugs scampered from beneath one of the tables and looked at her with eyes that hung on stalks. Horribly intelligent eyes. Their mandibles clicked in a sound that was like laughter.

  Hile, Mia!she heard in her head. An insectile buzzing.Hile, Mother! And then they were gone, back into the shadows.

  Mia turned to the door and saw the pair of low men who blocked it. And yes, thosewere masks; this close to the door-guards it was impossible not to see how their sleek black hair had been painted on. Mia turned back to Sayre with a sinking heart.

  Too late now.

  Too late to do anything but go through with it.

  Seventeen

  Sayre’s grip had slipped when she turned. Now he re-established it by taking her left hand. At the same moment her right hand was seized. She turned that way and saw the fat woman in the silver lamé dress. Her huge bust overflowed the top of her gown, which struggled gamely to hold it back. The flesh of her upper arms quivered loosely, giving off a suffocating scent of talcum powder. On her forehead was a red wound that swam but never overflowed.

  It’s how they breathe,Mia thought.That’s how they breathe when they’re wearing their—

  In her growing dismay, she had largely forgotten about Susannah Dean and completely about Detta. So when Detta Walkercame forward —hell, when sheleaped forward —there was no way Mia could stop her. She watched her arms shoot out seemingly of their own accord and saw her fingers sink into the plump cheek of the woman in the silver lamé gown. The woman shrieked, but oddly, the others, Sayre included, laughed uproariously, as if this were the funniest thing they’d ever seen in their lives.