Song of Susannah (49 page)

If I have it anywhere but here, it will die and we’ll die with it.
She spoke with utter certainty.
And I
will
have it. I’ve been cheated of all but my chap, and I
will
have 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 mother. 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.

In the Land of Memory, the time is always
Now.

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 look
good
, girl.”

And she smiles.

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

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 look
good,
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 end
you
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 look
good,
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 to
no
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 him
You look
good,
son!

She began to weep.

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

O Discordia!

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, the
sköldpadda.
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.

It was very dim inside and at first Mia could see nothing but murky, reddish-orange lights. Electric
flambeaux
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. Her
chap
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 the
maître 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 the
flambeaux.

There were also some dressed in more sober attire—jeans and plain white shirts seemed to be the costume of choice for this minority. These
folken
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 had
been
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 that
skin? Mia asked.
Dear God, was it their
skin?

Susannah made no reply, not even
I told you so
or
Didn’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, those
were
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.

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 Walker
came forward
—hell, when she
leaped 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.

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’s
you
, you pestering, overeducated, troublesome Negress.”

“No, it be
me
, 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 wore
over
his face—and looked at it unbelievingly.

“Mia?” he asked. “Mia, you let her do this to
me?
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 to
dwindle
, 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 . . .
sai
Sayre . . . 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.”