Song of Susannah (34 page)

“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 briefly,” 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 shadowlands. 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 obsession
made
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.”

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 on
Jake’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 a
magic
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 the
Prim
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 to
nowhere 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 of
Prim
’s way forever.

“To make me like you.”

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, be
Mama.

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 proposed 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 she
had
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 the
Prim
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—

“Were you mortal by then?” Susannah asked. “It sounds as though maybe you were.”

“I was on my way,” she said. “It was a process Walter called
becoming.
”

“All right. Go on.”

But here Mia’s recollections were lost in a dark fugue—not todash, but far from pleasant. A kind of amnesia, and it was
red.
A color Susannah had come to distrust. Had the pregnant woman’s transition from the world of the spirit to the world of the flesh—her trip to Mia—been accomplished through some other kind of doorway? She herself didn’t seem to know. Only that there had been a time of darkness—unconsciousness, she supposed—and then she had awakened “ . . . as you see me. Only not yet pregnant, of course.”

According to Walter, Mia could not actually make
a baby, even as a mortal woman. Carry, yes. Conceive, no. So it came to pass that one of the demon elementals had done a great service for the Crimson King, taking Roland’s seed as female and passing it on to Susannah as male. And there had been another reason, as well. Walter hadn’t mentioned it, but Mia had known.

“It’s the prophecy,” she said, looking into Fedic’s deserted and shadowless street. Across the way, a robot that looked like Andy of the Calla stood silent and rusting in front of the Fedic Café, which promised
GOOD MEELS CHEEP
.

“What prophecy?” Susannah asked.

“‘He who ends the line of Eld shall conceive a child of incest with his sister or his daughter, and the child will be marked, by his red heel shall you know him. It is he who shall stop the breath of the last warrior.’”

“Woman,
I’m
not Roland’s sister, or his daughter, either! You maybe didn’t notice a small but basic difference in the color of our hides, namely his being
white
and mine being
black.
” But she thought she had a pretty good idea of what the prophecy meant, just the same. Families were made in many ways. Blood was only one of them.

“Did he not tell you what dinh means?” Mia asked.

“Of course. It means leader. If he was in charge of a whole country instead of just three scruffy-ass gunpuppies, it’d mean king.”

“Leader and king, you say true. Now, Susannah, will you tell me that such words aren’t just poor substitutes for another?”