by Stephen King
The mask of humanity pulled away from the low woman’s startled eye, then tore. Susannah thought of her final moments on the castle allure, when everything had frozen and the sky had torn open like paper.
Detta ripped the mask almost entirely away. Tatters of what looked like latex hung from the tips of her fingers. Beneath where the mask had been was the head of a huge red rat, a mutie with yellow teeth growing up the outside of its cheeks in a crust and what looked like white worms dangling from its nose.
“Naughty girl,” said the rat, shaking a roguish finger at Susannah-Mio. Its other hand was still holding hers. The thing’s mate—the low man in the garish tuxedo—was laughing so hard he had doubled over, and when he did, Mia saw something poking out through the seat of his pants. It was too bony to be a tail, but she supposed it was, all the same.
“Come, Mia,” Sayre said, drawing her forward. And then he leaned toward her, peering earnestly into her eyes like a lover. “Or is it you, Odetta? It is, isn’t it? It’syou, you pestering, overeducated, troublesome Negress.”
“No, it beme, you ratface honky mahfah!” Detta crowed, and then spat into Sayre’s face.
Sayre’s mouth opened in a gape of astonishment. Then it snapped shut and twisted into a bitter scowl. The room had gone silent again. He wiped the spit from his face—from the mask he woreover his face—and looked at it unbelievingly.
“Mia?” he asked. “Mia, you let her do this tome? Me, who would stand as your baby’s godfather?”
“You ain’t jack shit!” Detta cried. “You suck yo’ ka-daddy’s cock while you diddle yo’ fuckfinger up his poop-chute and thass all you good fo’! You—”
“Get RID of her!”Sayre thundered.
And before the watching audience of vampires and low men in the Dixie Pig’s front dining room, Mia did just that. The result was extraordinary. Detta’s voice began todwindle, as if she were being escorted out of the restaurant (by the bouncer, and by the scruff of the neck). She quit trying to speak and only laughed raucously, but soon enough that, too, was gone.
Sayre stood with his hands clasped before him, looking solemnly at Mia. The others were also staring. Somewhere behind the tapestry of the knights and their ladies at feast, the low laughter and conversation of some other group continued.
“She’s gone,” Mia said at last. “The bad one is gone.” Even in the room’s quiet she was hard to hear, for she spoke in little more than a whisper. Her eyes were timidly cast down, and her cheeks had gone deathly white. “Please, Mr. Sayre…saiSayre…now that I’ve done as you ask, please say you’ve told me the truth, and I may have the raising of my chap. Please say so! If you do, you’ll never hear from the other one again, I swear it on my father’s face and my mother’s name, so I do.”
“You had neither,” Sayre said. He spoke in a tone of distant contempt. The compassion and mercy for which she begged owned no space in his eyes. And above them, the red hole in the center of his forehead filled and filled but never spilled.
Another pain, this one the greatest so far, sank its teeth into her. Mia staggered, and this time Sayre didn’t bother steadying her. She went to her knees before him, put her hands on the rough, gleaming surface of his ostrich-skin boots, and looked up into his pale face. It looked back at her from above the violent yellow scream of his sports jacket.
“Please,” she said. “Please, I beg you:keep your promise to me.”
“I may,” he said, “or I may not. Do you know, I have never had my boots licked. Can you imagine? To have lived as long as I have and never to have had a single good old-fashioned boot-licking.”
Somewhere a woman tittered.
Mia bent forward.
No, Mia, thee mustn’t,Susannah moaned, but Mia made no reply. Nor did the paralyzing pain deep in her vitals stop her. She stuck her tongue out between her lips and began licking the rough surface of Richard Sayre’s boots. Susannah could taste them, at a great distance. It was a husky, dusty, leathery taste, full of rue and humiliation.
Sayre let her go on so for a bit, then said: “Stop it. Enough.”
He pulled her roughly to her feet and stood with his unsmiling face not three inches from her own. Now that she’d seen them, it was impossible to unsee the masks he and the rest of them wore. The taut cheeks were almost transparent, and whorls of dark scarlet hair were faintly visible beneath.
Or perhaps you called it fur when it covered the whole face.
“Your beggary does you no credit,” he said, “although I must admit the sensation was extraordinary.”
“You promised!” she cried, attempting to pull back and out of his grip. Then another contraction struck and she doubled over, trying only not to shriek. When it eased a little, she pressed on. “You said five years…or maybe seven…yes, seven…the best of everything for my chap, you said—”
“Yes,” Sayre said. “I do seem to recall that, Mia.” He frowned as one does when presented with an especially pernicious problem, then brightened. The area of mask around one corner of his mouth wrinkled up for a moment when he smiled, revealing a yellow snag of tooth growing out of the fold where his lower lip met his upper. He let go of her with one hand in order to raise a finger in the gesture pedagogical. “The best of everything, yes. Question is, do you fill that particular bill?”
Appreciative murmurs of laughter greeted this sally. Mia recalled them calling her Mother and saluting herhile, but that seemed distant now, like a meaningless fragment of dream.
You was good enough to tote him, though, wasn’t you?Detta asked from someplace deep inside—from the brig, in fact. Yassuh! You ’us good enough to do dat,sho!
“I was good enough to carry him, wasn’t I?” Mia almost spat at him. “Good enough to send the other one into the swamp to eat frogs, her all the time thinking they were caviar…I was good enough forthat, wasn’t I?”
Sayre blinked, clearly startled by so brisk a response.
Mia softened again. “Sai, think of all I gave up!”
“Pish, you hadnothing! ” Sayre replied. “What were you but a meaningless spirit whose existence revolved around no more than fucking the occasional saddletramp? Slut of the winds, isn’t that what Roland calls your kind?”
“Then think of the other one,” Mia said. “She who calls herself Susannah. I have stolen all her life and purpose for my chap, and at your bidding.”
Sayre made a dismissive gesture. “Your mouth does you no credit, Mia. Therefore close it.”
He nodded to his left. A low man with a wide, bulldoggy face and a luxuriant head of curly gray hair came forward. The red hole in his brow had an oddly slanted Chinese look. Walking behind him was another of the bird-things, this one with a fierce, dark brown hawk’s head protruding from the round neck of a tee-shirt with DUKE BLUE DEVILS printed on it. They took hold of her. The bird-thing’s grip was repulsive—scaly and alien.
“You have been an excellent custodian,” Sayre said, “on that much we can surely agree. But we must also remember that it was Roland of Gilead’s jilly who actually bred the child, mustn’t we?”
“That’s a lie!”she screamed.“Oh, that is a filthy…LIE!”
He went on as if he’d not heard her. “And different jobs require different skills. Different strokes for different folks, as they say.”
“PLEASE!”Mia shrieked.
The hawkman put its taloned hands to the sides of its head and then rocked from side to side, as if deafened. This witty pantomime drew laughter and even a few cheers.
Susannah dimly felt warmth gush down her legs—Mia’slegs—and saw her jeans darken at the crotch and thighs. Her water had finally broken.
“Let’sgo-ooo-ooo …and have aBABY! ” Sayre proclaimed in game-show-host tones of excitement. There were too many teeth in that smile, a double row both top and bottom.
“After that, we’ll see. I promise you that your request will be taken under consideration. In the meantime…Hile, Mia! Hile, Mother!”
“Hile, Mia! Hile, Mother
!”the rest cried, and Mia suddenly found herself borne toward the back of the room, the bulldog-faced low man gripping her left arm and the hawkman gripping her right. Hawkman made a faint and unpleasant buzzing sound in his throat each time he exhaled. Her feet barely touched the rug as she was carried toward the bird-thing with the yellow feathers; Canaryman, she thought him.
Sayre brought her to a stop with a single hand-gesture and spoke to Canaryman, pointing toward the Dixie Pig’s street door as he did. Mia heard Roland’s name, and also Jake’s. The Canaryman nodded. Sayre pointed emphatically at the door again and shook his head.Nothing gets in, that headshake said.Nothing!
The Canaryman nodded again and then spoke in buzzing chirps that made Mia feel like screaming. She looked away, and her gaze happened on the mural of the knights and their ladies. They were at a table she recognized—it was the one in the banqueting hall of Castle Discordia. Arthur Eld sat at the head with his crown on his brow and his lady-wife at his right hand. And his eyes were a blue she knew from her dreams.
Ka might have chosen that particular moment to puff some errant draft across the dining room of the Dixie Pig and twitch aside the tapestry. It was only for a second or two, but long enough for Mia to see there was another dining room—aprivate dining room—behind it.
Sitting at a long wooden table beneath a blazing crystal chandelier were perhaps a dozen men and women, their appledoll faces twisted and shrunken with age and evil. Their lips had burst back from great croggled bouquets of teeth; the days when any of these monstrosities could close their mouths were long gone. Their eyes were black and oozing some sort of noisome tarry stuff from the corners. Their skin was yellow, scaled with teeth, and covered with patches of diseased-looking fur.
What are they?Mia screamed.What in the name of the gods are they?
Mutants,Susannah said.Or perhaps the word is hybrids. And it doesn’t matter, Mia. You saw what matters, didn’t you?
She had, and Susannah knew it. Although the velvet swag had been twitched aside but briefly, it had been long enough for both of them to see the rotisserie which had been set in the middle of that table, and the headless corpse twirling upon it, skin browning and puckering and sizzling fragrant juices. No, the smell in the air hadn’t been pork. The thing turning on the spit, brown as a squab, was a human baby. The creatures around it dipped delicate china cups into the drippings beneath, toasted each other…and drank.
The draft died. The tapestry settled back into place. And before the laboring woman was once more taken by the arms and hustled away from the dining room and deeper into this building that straddled many worlds along the Beam, she saw the joke of that picture. It wasn’t a drumstick Arthur Eld was lifting to his lips, as a first, casual, glance might have suggested; it was a baby’s leg. The glass Queen Rowena had raised in toast was not filled with wine but with blood.
“Hile, Mia!” Sayre cried again. Oh, he was in the best of spirits, now that the homing pigeon had come back to the cote.
Hile, Mia!the others screamed back. It was like some sort of crazy football cheer. Those from behind the mural joined in, although their voices were reduced to little more than growls. And their mouths, of course, were stuffed with food.
“Hile, Mother!” This time Sayre offered her a mocking bow to go with the mockery of his respect.
Hile, Mother!the vampires and the low men responded, and on the satiric wave of their applause she was carried away, first into the kitchen, then into the pantry, and then down the stairs beyond.
Ultimately, of course, there was a door.
Eighteen
Susannah knew the kitchen of the Dixie Pig by the smell of obscene cookery: not pork after all, but certainly what the pirates of the eighteenth century had calledlong pork.
For how many years had this outpost served the vampires and low men of New York City? Since Callahan’s time, in the seventies and eighties? Since her own, in the sixties? Almost certainly longer. Susannah supposed there might have been a version of the Dixie Pig here since the time of the Dutch, they who had bought off the Indians with sacks of beads and planted their murderous Christian beliefs ever so much more deeply than their flag. A practical folk, the Dutch, with a taste for spareribs and little patience for magic, either white or black.
She saw enough to recognize the kitchen for the twin of the one she had visited in the bowels of Castle Discordia. That was where Mia had killed a rat that had been trying to claim the last remaining food in the place, a pork-roast in the oven.
Except there was no oven and no roast,she thought.Hell, no kitchen. There was a piglet out behind the barn, one of Tian and Zalia Jaffords’s. And I was the one who killed it and drank its hot blood, not she. By then she mostly had me, although I still didn’t know it. I wonder if Eddie—
As Mia took her away for the last time, tearing her free from her thoughts and sending her a-tumble into the dark, Susannah realized how completely the needy, terrible bitch had possessed her life. She knew why Mia had done it—because of the chap. The question was why she, Susannah Dean, had allowed it to happen. Because she’d been possessed before? Because she was as addicted to the stranger inside as Eddie had been to heroin?
She feared it might be true.
Swirling dark. And when she opened her eyes again, it was upon that savage moon hanging above the Discordia, and the flexing red glow
(forge of the King)
on the horizon.
“Over here!” cried a woman’s voice, just as it had cried before. “Over here, out of the wind!”
Susannah looked down and saw she was legless, and sitting in the same rude dog-cart as on her previous visit to the allure. The same woman, tall and comely, with black hair streaming in the wind, was beckoning to her. Mia, of course, and all this no more real than Susannah’s vague dream-memories of the banquet room.
She thought:Fedic, though, was real. Mia’s body is there just as mine is at this very moment being hustled through the kitchen behind the Dixie Pig, where unspeakable meals are prepared for inhuman customers. The castle allure is Mia’s dream-place, her refuge, her Dogan.
“To me, Susannah of Mid-World, and away from the Red King’s glow! Come out of the wind and into the lee of this merlon!”
Susannah shook her head. “Say what you have to say and be done, Mia. We’ve got to have a baby—aye, somehow, between us—and once it’s out, we’re quits. You’ve poisoned my life, so you have.”
Mia looked at her with desperate intensity, her belly blooming beneath the serape, her hair harried backward at the wind’s urging. “’Twas you who took the poison, Susannah! ’Twas you who swallowed it! Aye, when the child was still a seed unbloomed in your belly!”
Was it true? And if it was, which of them had invited Mia in, like the vampire she truly was? Had it been Susannah, or Detta?
Susannah thought neither.
She thought it might actually have been Odetta Holmes. Odetta who would never have broken the nasty old blue lady’s forspecial plate. Odetta who loved her dolls, even though most of them were as white as her plain cotton panties.
“What do you want with me, Mia, daughter of none? Say and have finished with it!”
“Soon we’ll be together—aye, really and truly, lying together in the same childbed. And all I ask is that if a chance comes for me to get away with my chap, you’ll help me take it.”
Susannah thought it over. In the wilderness of rocks and gaping crevasses, the hyenas cackled. The wind was numbing, but the pain that suddenly clamped her midsection in its jaws was worse. She saw that same pain on Mia’s face and thought again how her entire existence seemed to have become a wilderness of mirrors. In any case, what harm could such a promise do? The chance probably wouldn’t come, but if it did, was she going to let the thing Mia wanted to call Mordred fall into the hands of the King’s men?
“Yes,” she said. “All right. If I can help you get away with him, Iwill help you.”
“Anywhere!” Mia cried in a harsh whisp
er. “Even…” She stopped. Swallowed. Forced herself to go on. “Even into the todash darkness. For if I had to wander forever with my son by my side, that would be no condemnation.”
Maybe not foryou,sister, Susannah thought, but said nothing. In truth, she was fed up with Mia’s megrims.
“And if there’s no way for us to be free,” Mia said, “kill us.”
Although there was no sound up here but the wind and the cackling hyenas, Susannah could sense her physical body still on the move, now being carried down a flight of stairs. All that real-world stuff behind the thinnest of membranes. For Mia to have transported her to this world, especially while in the throes of childbirth, suggested a being of great power. Too bad that power couldn’t be harnessed, somehow.
Mia apparently mistook Susannah’s continued silence for reluctance, for she rushed around the allure’s circular walkway in her sturdyhuaraches and almost ran to where Susannah sat in her gawky, balky cart. She seized Susannah’s shoulders and shook her.
“Yar!”she cried vehemently. “Kill us! Better we be together in death than to…” She trailed off, then spoke in a dull and bitter voice: “I’ve been cozened all along. Haven’t I?”
And now that the moment had come, Susannah felt neither vindication nor sympathy nor sorrow. She only nodded.
“Do they mean to eat him? To feed those terrible elders with his corpse?”
“I’m almost sure not,” Susannah said. And yet cannibalism was in it somewhere; her heart whispered it was so.
“They don’t care about me at all,” Mia said. “Just the baby-sitter, isn’t that what you called me? And they won’t even let me havethat, will they?”
“I don’t think so,” Susannah said. “You might get six months to nurse him, but even that…” She shook her head, then bit her lip as a fresh contraction gusted into her, turning all the muscles in her belly and thighs to glass. When it eased a little she finished, “I doubt it.”
“Then kill us, if it comes to that. Say you will, Susannah, do ya, I beg!”
“And if I do for you, Mia, what will you do for me? Assuming I could believe any word out of your liar’s mouth?”
