Song of Susannah (32 page)

(Burn up the day,
Eddie had told her, that much she was sure of, and she would do her best, only hoping that she wasn’t working on getting Jake and Callahan killed by doing it.
)

Ole Honky Freud
, Detta went on,
he say in lots of ways de subconscious or unconscious mind
smarter
dan de one on top. Cut through de bullshit
faster
dan de one on top. An maybe yours understand what I been tellin you all along, that yo’ frien Sayre nothin but a lyin rat-ass muhfuh goan steal yo baby and, I dunno, maybe cut it up in dis bowl and den feed it to the vampires like dey was dawgs an dat baby nuffin but a big-ass bowl o’ Alpo or Purina Vampire Ch
—

Shut up! Shut up your lying face!

Out at the basins, the birdy-women laughed so shrilly that Mia felt her eyeballs shiver and threaten to liquefy in their sockets. She wanted to rush out and seize their heads and drive them into the mirrors, wanted to do it again and again until their blood was splashed all the way up to the ceiling and their
brains
—

Temper, temper
, said the woman inside, and now it sounded like Susannah again.

She lies! That bitch LIES!

No
, Susannah replied, and the conviction in that single short word was enough to send an arrow of
fear into Mia’s heart.
She says what’s on her mind, no argument there, but she doesn’t lie. Go on, Mia, turn your shirt inside out.

With a final eye-watering burst of laughter, the birdy-women left the bathroom. Mia pulled the shirt off over her head, baring Susannah’s breasts, which were the color of coffee with just the smallest splash of milk added in. Her nipples, which had always been as small as berries, were now much larger. Nipples craving a mouth.

There were only the faintest maroon spots on the inside of the shirt. Mia put it back on, then unbuttoned the front of her jeans so she could tuck it in. Susannah stared, fascinated, at the point just above her pubic thatch. Here her skin lightened to a color that might have been milk with the smallest splash of coffee added in. Below were the white legs of the woman she’d met on the castle allure. Susannah knew that if Mia lowered her jeans all the way, she’d see the scabbed and scratched shins she had already observed as Mia—the
real
Mia—looked out over Discordia toward the red glow marking the castle of the 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 her
thighs
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 white
brain,
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 clearly
believed
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 she
had
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. Follow
it.

You’re right, I
don’t
understand.
She actually did, or
thought
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.

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-ulary, 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 what
you
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. The
huaraches
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. “Will 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 roadhouse 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.”