by Stephen King
Susannahcame forward, but not all the way. For a moment she was looking through two sets of eyes at two signs, the sensation so peculiar that it made her feel nauseated. Then the images came together and she could read the message:
THIS SAFE IS PROVIDED FOR YOUR PERSONAL BELONGINGS
THE MANAGEMENT OF THE PLAZA—PARK HYATT ASSUMES NO
RESPONSIBILITY FOR ITEMS LEFT HERE
CASH AND JEWELRY SHOULD BE DEPOSITED IN THE HOTEL SAFE
DOWNSTAIRS
TO SET CODE, PUNCH IN FOUR NUMBERS PLUS ENTER
TO OPEN, ENTER YOUR FOUR-NUMBER CODE AND PUSH OPEN
Susannah retired and let Mia select four numbers. They turned out to be a one and three nines. It was the current year and might be one of the first combinations a room burglar would try, but at least it wasn’t quite the room number itself. Besides, they were theright numbers. Numbers of power. Asigul. They both knew it.
Mia tried the safe after programming it, found it locked tightly, then followed the directions for opening it. There was a whirring noise from somewhere inside and the door popped ajar. She put in the faded red MIDTOWN LANES bag—the box inside just fit on the shelf—and then the bag of Oriza plates. She closed and locked the safe’s door again, tried the handle, found it tight, and nodded. The Borders bag was still on the bed. She took the wad of cash out of it and tucked it into the right front pocket of her jeans, along with the turtle.
Have to get a clean shirt,Susannah reminded her unwelcome guest.
Mia, daughter of none, made no reply. She clearly caredbupkes for shirts, clean or dirty. Mia was looking at the telephone. For the time being, with her labor on hold, the phone was all she cared about.
Now we palaver,Susannah said.You promised, and it’s a promise you’re going to keep. But not in that banquet room. She shuddered.Somewhere outside, hear me I beg. I want fresh air. That banqueting hall smelled of death.
Mia didn’t argue. Susannah got a vague sense of the other woman riffling through various files of memory—examining, rejecting, examining, rejecting—and at last finding something that would serve.
How do we go there?Mia asked indifferently.
The black woman who was now two women (again) sat on one of the beds and folded her hands in her lap.Like on a sled, the woman’s Susannah part said.I’ll push, you steer. And remember, Susannah-Mio, if you want my cooperation, you give me some straight answers.
I will,the other replied.Just don’t expect to like them. Or even understand them.
What do you—
Never mind! Gods, I never metanyonewho could ask so many questions! Time is short! When the telephone rings, our palaver ends! So if you’d palaver at all—
Susannah didn’t bother giving her a chance to finish. She closed her eyes and let herself fall back. No bed stopped that fall; she went right through it. She was falling for real, falling through space. She could hear the jangle of the todash chimes, dim and far.
Here I go again,she thought. And:Eddie, I love you.
STAVE: Commala-gin-jive
Ain’t it grand to be alive?
To look out on Discordia
When the Demon Moon arrives.
RESPONSE: Commala-come-five!
Even when the shadows rise!
To see the world and walk the world
Makes ya glad to be alive.
6th Stanza: The Castle Allure
One
All at once she was falling into her body again and the sensation provoked a memory of blinding brilliance: Odetta Holmes at sixteen, sitting on her bed in her slip, sitting in a brilliant bar of sun and pulling up a silk stocking. For the moment this memory held, she could smell White Shoulders perfume and Pond’s Beauty Bar, her mother’s soap and her mother’s borrowed perfume, so grown-up to be allowed perfume, and she thought:It’s the Spring Hop! I’m going with Nathan Freeman !
Then it was gone. The sweet smell of Pond’s soap was replaced by a clean and cold (but somehow dank) night breeze, and all that remained was that sense, so queer and perfect, of stretching into a new body as if it were a stocking one was pulling up over one’s calf and knee.
She opened her eyes. The wind gusted, blowing a fine grit in her face. She squinted against it, grimacing and raising an arm, as if she might have to ward off a blow.
“Over here!” a woman’s voice called. It wasn’t the voice Susannah would have expected. Not strident, not a triumphant caw. “Over here, out of the wind!”
She looked and saw a tall and comely woman beckoning to her. Susannah’s first look at Mia in the flesh astounded her, because the chap’s mother waswhite. Apparently Odetta-that-was now had a Caucasian side to her personality, and how that must frost Detta Walker’s racially sensitive butt!
She herself was legless again, and sitting in a kind of rude one-person cart. It had been parked at a notch in a low parapet wall. She looked out at the most fearsome, forbidding stretch of countryside she had ever seen in her life. Huge rock formations sawed at the sky and jostled into the distance. They glistened like alien bone beneath the glare of a savage sickle moon. Away from the glare of that lunar grin, a billion stars burned like hot ice. Amid the rocks with their broken edges and gaping crevices, a single narrow path wound into the distance. Looking at it, Susannah thought that a party would have to travel that path in single file.And bring plenty of supplies. No mushrooms to pick along the way; no pokeberries, either. And in the distance—dim and baleful, its source somewhere over the horizon—a dark crimson light waxed and waned.Heart of the rose, she thought, and then:No, not that. Forge of the King. She looked at the pulsing sullen light with helpless, horrified fascination. Flex…and loosen. Wax…and wane. An infection announcing itself to the sky.
“Come to me now, if you’d come at all, Susannah of New York,” said Mia. She was dressed in a heavy serape and what looked like leather pants that stopped just below the knee. Her shins were scabbed and scratched. She wore thick-soledhuaraches on her feet. “For the King can fascinate, even at a distance. We’re on the Discordia side of the Castle. Would you like to end your life on the needles at the foot of this wall? If he fascinates you and tells you to jump, you’ll do just that. Your bossy gunslinger-men aren’t here to help you now, are they? Nay, nay. You’re on your own, so y’are.”
Susannah tried to pull her gaze from that steadily pulsing glow and at first couldn’t do it. Panic bloomed in her mind
(if he fascinates you and tells you to jump)
and she seized it as a tool, compressing it to an edge with which to cut through her frightened immobility. For a moment nothing happened, and then she threw herself backward so violently in the shabby little cart that she had to clutch the edge in order to keep herself from tumbling to the cobbles. The wind gusted again, blowing stone-dust and grit against her face and into her hair, seeming to mock her.
But that pull…fascination…glammer…whatever it had been, it was gone.
She looked at the dog-cart (so she thought it, whether that was the right name or not) and saw at once how it worked. Simple enough, too. With no mule to draw it,she was the mule. It was miles from the sweet, light little chair they’d found in Topeka, and light-years from being able to walk on the strong legs that had conveyed her from the little park to the hotel. God, she missed having legs. Missed it already.
But you made do.
She seized hold of the cart’s wooden wheels, strained, produced no movement, strained harder. Just as she was deciding she’d have to get out of the chair and hop-crawl her ignominious way to where Mia waited, the wheels turned with a groaning, oilless creak. She rumbled toward Mia, who was standing behind a squat stone pillar. There were a great many of these, marching away into the dark along a curve. Susannah supposed that once upon a time (before the world had moved on), archers would have stood behind them for protection while the assaulting army fired their arrows or red-hot catapults or whatever you called them. Then they’d step into the gaps and fire their own weapons. How long ago had that
been? What worldwas this? And how close to the Dark Tower?
Susannah had an idea it might be very close indeed.
She pushed the balky, gawky, protesting cart out of the wind and looked at the woman in the serape, ashamed to be so out of breath after moving less than a dozen yards but unable to help panting. She drew down deep breaths of the dank and somehow stony air. The pillars—she had an idea they were called merlons, or something like that—were on her right. On her left was a circular pool of darkness surrounded by crumbling stone walls. Across the way, two towers rose high above the outer wall, but one had been shattered, as if by lightning or some powerful explosive.
“This where we stand is the allure,” Mia said. “The wall-walk of the Castle on the Abyss, once known as Castle Discordia. You said you wanted fresh air. I hope this does ya, as they say in the Calla. This is far beyond there, Susannah, this is deep in End-World, near the place where your quest ends, for good or for ill.” She paused and then said, “For ill, almost surely. Yet I care nothing for that, no, not I. I am Mia, daughter of none, mother of one. I care for my chap and nothing more. Chap be enough for me, aye! Would you palaver? Fine. I’ll tell you what I may and be true. Why not? What is it to me, one way or the other?”
Susannah looked around. When she faced in toward the center of the castle—what she supposed was the courtyard—she caught an aroma of ancient rot. Mia saw her wrinkle her nose and smiled.
“Aye, they’re long gone, and the machines the later ones left behind are mostly stilled, but the smell of their dying lingers, doesn’t it? The smell of death always does. Ask your friend the gunslinger, thetrue gunslinger. He knows, for he’s dealt his share of it. He is responsible for much, Susannah of New York. The guilt of worlds hangs around his neck like a rotting corpse. Yet he’s gone far enough with his dry and lusty determination to finally draw the eyes of the great. He will be destroyed, aye, and all those who stand with him. I carry his doom in my own belly, and I care not.” Her chin jutted forward in the starlight. Beneath the serape her breasts heaved…and, Susannah saw, her belly curved. In this world, at least, Mia was very clearly pregnant. Ready to burst, in fact.
“Ask your questions, have at me,” Mia said. “Just remember, we exist in the other world, too, the one where we’re bound together. We’re lying on a bed in the inn, as if asleep…but we don’t sleep, do we, Susannah? Nay. And when the telephone rings, when my friends call, we leave this place and go to them. If your questions have been asked and answered, fine. If not, that’s also fine. Ask. Or…are you not a gunslinger?” Her lips curved in a disdainful smile. Susannah thought she was pert, yes, pert indeed. Especially for someone who wouldn’t be able to find her way from Forty-sixth Street to Forty-seventh in the world they had to go back to. “Soshoot! I should say.”
Susannah looked once more into the darkened, broken well that was the castle’s soft center, where lay its keeps and lists, its barbicans and murder holes, its God-knew-what. She had taken a course in medieval history and knew some of the terms, but that had been long ago. Surely there was a banqueting hall somewhere down there, one that she herself had supplied with food, at least for awhile. But her catering days were done. If Mia tried to push her too hard or too far, she’d find that out for herself.
Meantime, she thought she’d start with something relatively easy.
“If this is the Castle on the Abyss,” she said, “where’s the Abyss? I don’t see anything out that way except for a minefield of rocks. And that red glow on the horizon.”
Mia, her shoulder-length black hair flying out behind her (not a bit of kink in that hair, as there was in Susannah’s; Mia’s was like silk), pointed across the inner chasm below them to the far wall, where the towers rose and the allure continued its curve.
“This is the inner keep,” she said. “Beyond it is the village of Fedic, now deserted, all dead of the Red Death a thousand years ago and more. Beyond that—”
“The Red Death?” Susannah asked, startled (also frightened in spite of herself). “Poe’sRed Death? Like in the story?” And why not? Hadn’t they already wandered into—and then back out of—L. Frank Baum’s Oz? What came next? The White Rabbit and the Red Queen?
“Lady, I know not. All I can tell you is that beyond the deserted village is the outer wall, and beyond the outer wall is a great crack in the earth filled with monsters that cozen, diddle, increase, and plot to escape. Once there was a bridge across, but it fell long ago. ‘In the time before counting,’ as ’tis said. They’re horrors that might drive an ordinary man or woman mad at a glance.”
She favored Susannah with a glance of her own. A decidedly satiric one.
“But not agunslinger. Surely not one such asthee. ”
“Why do you mock me?” Susannah asked quietly.
Mia looked startled, then grim. “Was it my idea to come here? To stand in this miserable cold where the King’s Eye dirties the horizon and sullies the very cheek of the moon with its filthy light? Nay, lady! ’Twas you, so harry me not with your tongue!”
Susannah could have responded that it hadn’t been her idea to catch preg with a demon’s baby in the first place, but this would be a terrible time to get into one of those yes-you-did, no-I-didn’t squabbles.
“I wasn’t scolding,” Susannah said, “only asking.”
Mia made an impatient shooing gesture with her hand as if to sayDon’t split hairs, and half-turned away. Under her breath she said, “I didn’t go to Morehouse orno house. And in any case I’ll bear my chap, do you hear? Whichever way the cards fall. Bear him and feed him!”
All at once Susannah understood a great deal. Mia mocked because she was afraid. In spite of all she knew, so much of herwas Susannah.
I didn’t go to Morehouse or no house,for instance; that was fromInvisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. When Mia had bought into Susannah, she had purchased at least two personalities for the price of one. It was Mia, after all, who’d brought Detta out of retirement (or perhaps deep hibernation), and it was Detta who was particularly fond of that line, which expressed so much of the Negro’s deep-held disdain for and suspicion of what was sometimes called “the finer post-war Negro education.” Not to Morehouse orno house; I know what I know, in other words, I heard it through the grapevine, I got it on the earie, dearie, I picked it up on the jungle telegraph.
“Mia,” she said now. “Whose chap is it besides yours? What demon was his father, do you know?”
Mia grinned. It wasn’t a grin Susannah liked. There was too much Detta in it; too much laughing, bitter knowledge. “Aye, lady, I know. And you’re right. It was a demon got him on you, a very great demon indeed, say true! A human one! It had to have been so, for know you that true demons, those left on the shore of these worlds which spin around the Tower when thePrim receded, are sterile. And for a very good reason.”
“Then how—”
“Your dinh is the father of my chap,” Mia said. “Roland of Gilead, aye, he. Steven Deschain finally has his grandson, although he lies rotten in his grave and knows it not.”
Susannah was goggling at her, unmindful of the cold wind rushing out of the Discordia wilderness. “Roland…?It can’t be! He was beside me when the demon wasin me, he was pulling Jake through from the house on Dutch Hill and fucking was thelast thing on his mind…” She trailed off, thinking of the baby she’d seen in the Dogan. Thinking of those eyes. Those blue bombardier’s eyes.No. No, I refuse to believe it.
“All the same, Roland is his father,” Mia insisted. “And when the chap comes, I shall name him from your own mind, Susannah of New York; from what you learned at the same time you learned of merlons and courtyards and tre-bouchets and barbicans. Why not? ’Tis a good name, and fair.”
Professor Murray’s Introduction to Medieval History, that’s what she’s talking about.
“I will name him Mordred,” said she. “He’ll grow quickly, my darling boy, quicker than human, after his demon nature. He’ll grow strong. The avatar of every gunslinger that e
ver was. And so, like the Mordred of your tale, will he slay his father.”
And with that, Mia, daughter of none, raised her arms to the star-shot sky and screamed, although whether in sorrow, terror, or joy, Susannah could not tell.
Two
“Hunker,” Mia said. “I have this.”
From beneath her serape she produced a bundle of grapes and a paper sack filled with orange pokeberries as swollen as her belly. Where, Susannah wondered, had the fruit come from? Was their shared body sleepwalking back in the Plaza—Park Hotel? Had there perhaps been a fruit basket she hadn’t noticed? Or were these the fruits of pure imagination?
Not that it mattered. Any appetite she might have had was gone, robbed by Mia’s claim. The fact that it was impossible somehow only added to the monstrosity of the idea. And she couldn’t stop thinking of the baby she’d seenin utero on one of those TV screens. Those blue eyes.
No. It can’t be, do you hear? Itcannot be!
The wind coming through the notches between the merlons was chilling her to the bone. She swung off the seat of the cart and settled herself against the allure wall beside Mia, listening to the wind’s constant whine and looking up at the alien stars.
Mia was cramming her mouth with grapes. Juice ran from one corner of her mouth while she spat seeds from the other corner with the rapidity of machine-gun bullets. She swallowed, wiped her chin, and said: “It can. It can be. And more: it is. Are you still glad you came, Susannah of New York, or do you wish you’d left your curiosity unsatisfied?”
“If I’m gonna have a baby I didn’t hump for, I’m gonna know everything about that baby that I can. Do you understand that?”
Mia blinked at the deliberate crudity, then nodded. “If you like.”
“Tell me how it can be Roland’s. And if you want me to believe anything you tell me, you better start by making me believe this.”