by Stephen King
They’re my eyes. She hijacked them, that’s all.
Another TV screen showed Mia arriving in the elevator lobby, examining the buttons, and then pushing the one marked with the DOWN arrow.We’re off to see the midwife, Susannah thought, looking grimly up at the screen, and then barked a short, humorless laugh.Oh, we’re off to see the midwife, the wonderful midwife of Oz. Because because because because be-CAUZZZ…Because of the wonderful things she does!
Here were the dials she’d reset at some considerable inconvenience—hell,pain. EMOTIONAL TEMP still at 72. The toggle-switch marked CHAP still turned to ASLEEP, and in the monitor above it the chap thus still in black-and-white like everything else: no sign of those disquieting blue eyes. The absurd LABOR FORCE oven-dial was still at 2, but she saw that most of the lights which had been amber the last time she’d been in this room had now turned red. There were more cracks in the floor and the ancient dead soldier in the corner had lost his head: the increasingly heavy vibration of the machinery had toppled the skull from the top of its spine, and it now laughed up at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling.
The needle on the SUSANNAH-MIO readout had reached the end of the yellow zone; as Susannah watched, it edged into the red. Danger, danger, Diem and Nhu are dead. Papa Doc Duvalier is dead. Jackie Kennedy is dead.
She tried the controls one after another, confirming what she already knew: they were locked in place. Mia might not have been able to change the settings in the first place, but locking things up once those settings were to her liking? That much she had been able to do.
There was a crackle and squall from the overhead speakers, loud enough to make her jump. Then, coming to her through heavy bursts of static, Eddie’s voice.
“Suze!…ay!…Ear me? Burn…ay! Do it before…ever…posed…id! Do you hear me?”
On the screen she thought of as Mia-Vision, the doors of the central elevator car opened. The hijacking mommybitch got on. Susannah barely noticed. She snatched up the microphone and pushed the toggle-switch on the side. “Eddie!” she shouted. “I’m in 1999! The girls walk around with their bellies showing and their bra-straps—” Christ, what was she blathering on about? She made a mighty effort to sweep her mind clear.
“Eddie, I don’t understand you! Say it again, sugar!”
For a moment there was nothing but more static, plus the occasional spooky wail of feedback. She was about to try the mike again when Eddie’s voice returned, this time a little clearer.
“Burn up…day! Jake…Pere Cal…hold on! Burn…before she…to wherever she…have the kid! If you…knowledge!”
“I hear you, I acknowledge that much!” she cried. She was clutching the silver mike so tightly that it trembled in her grasp. “I’m in 1999! June of 1999! But I’m not understanding you as well as I need to, sug! Say again, and tell me if you’re all right!”
But Eddie was gone.
After calling for him half a dozen times and getting nothing but that blur of static, she set the microphone down again and tried to figure out what he had been trying to tell her. Trying also to set aside her joy just in knowing that Eddie could still try to tell heranything.
“Burn up day,” she said. That part, at least, had come through loud and clear. “Burn upthe day. As in kill some time.” She thought that almost had to be right. Eddie wanted Susannah to slow Mia down. Maybe because Jake and Pere Callahan were coming? About that part she wasn’t so sure, and she didn’t much like it, anyway. Jake was a gunslinger, all right, but he was also only a kid. And Susannah had an idea that the Dixie Pig was full of very nasty people.
Meanwhile, on Mia-Vision, the elevator doors were opening again. The hijacking mommy-bitch had reached the lobby. For the time being Susannah put Eddie, Jake, and Pere Callahan out of her mind. She was recalling how Mia had refused tocome forward, even when their Susannah-Mio legs were threatening to disappear right out from under their shared Susannah-Mio body. Because she was, to misquote some old poem or other, alone and afraid in a world she never made.
Because she wasshy.
And my goodness, things in the lobby of the Plaza—Park had changed while the hijacking mommy-bitch had been upstairs waiting for her phone call. They had changed alot.
Susannah leaned forward with her elbows propped on the edge of the Dogan’s main instrument panel and her chin propped on the palms of her hands.
This might be interesting.
Seven
Mia stepped out of the elevator, then attempted to step right back in. She thumped against the doors instead, and hard enough to make her teeth come together with a little ivory click. She looked around, bewildered, at first not sure how it was that the little descending room had disappeared.
Susannah! What happened to it?
No answer from the dark-skinned woman whose face she now wore, but Mia discovered she didn’t actually need one. She could see the place where the door slid in and out. If she pushed the button the door would probably open again, but she had to conquer her sudden strong desire to go back up to Room 1919. Her business there was done. Herreal business was somewhere beyond the lobby doors.
She looked toward those doors with the sort of lip-biting dismay which may escalate into panic at a single rough word or angry look.
She’d been upstairs for a little over an hour, and during that time the lobby’s early-afternoon lull had ended. Half a dozen taxis from La Guardia and Kennedy had pulled up in front of the hotel at roughly the same time; so had a Japanese tour-bus from Newark Airport. The tour had originated in Sapporo and consisted of fifty couples with reservations at the Plaza—Park. Now the lobby was rapidly filling with chattering people. Most had dark, slanted eyes and shiny black hair, and were wearing oblong objects around their necks on straps. Every now and then one would raise one of these objects and point it at someone else. There would be a brilliant flash, laughter, and cries ofDomo! Domo! There were three lines forming at the desk. The beautiful woman who’d checked Mia in during quieter times had been joined by two other clerks, all of them working like mad. The high-ceilinged lobby echoed with laughter and mingled conversation in some strange tongue that sounded to Mia like the twittering of birds. The banks of mirror-glass added to the general confusion by making the lobby seem twice as full as it actually was.
Mia cringed back, wondering what to do.
“Front!” yelled a desk clerk, and banged a bell. The sound seemed to shoot across Mia’s confused thoughts like a silver arrow. “Front, please!”
A grinning man—black hair slicked against his skull, yellow skin, slanting eyes behind round spectacles—came rushing up to Mia, holding one of the oblong flash-things. Mia steeled herself to kill him if he attacked.
“Ah-yoo takea pickcha me and my wife?”
Offering her the flash-thing. Wanting her to take it from him. Mia cringed away, wondering if it ran on radiation, if the flashes might hurt her baby.
Susannah! What do I do?
No answer. Of course not, she really couldn’t expect Susannah’s help after what had just happened, but…
The grinning man was still thrusting the flash-machine at her. He looked a trifle puzzled, but mostly undaunted. “Yooo take-ah pickcha, preese?” And put the oblong thing in her hand. He stepped back and put his arm around a lady who looked exactly like him except for her shiny black hair, which was cut across her forehead in what Mia thought of as a wench-clip. Even the round glasses were the same.
“No,” Mia said. “No, cry pardon…no.” The panic was very close now and very bright, whirling and gibbering right in front of her
(yooo take-ah pickcha, we kill-ah baby)
and Mia’s impulse was to drop the oblong flasher on the floor. That might break it, however, and release the deviltry that powered the flashes.
She put it down carefully instead, smiling apologetically at the astonished Japanese couple (the man still had his arm around his wife), and hurried across the lobby in the direction of the little shop. Even the piano music had cha
nged; instead of the former soothing melodies, it was pounding out something jagged and dissonant, a kind of musical headache.
I need a shirt because there’s blood on this one. I’ll get the shirt and then I’ll go to the Dixie Pig, Sixty-first and Lexingworth…Lexington,I mean, Lexing ton…and then I’ll have my baby. I’ll have my baby and all this confusion will end. I’ll think of how I was afraid and I’ll laugh.
But the shop was also full. Japanese women examined souvenirs and twittered to each other in their bird-language while they waited for their husbands to get them checked in. Mia could see a counter stacked with shirts, but there were women all around it, examining them. And there was another line at the counter.
Susannah, what should I do? You’ve got to help me!
No answer. She was in there, Mia could feel her, but she would not help.And really, she thought,would I, if I were in her position?
Well, perhaps she would. Someone would have to offer her the right inducement, of course, but—
The only inducement I want from you is the truth,Susannah said coldly.
Someone brushed against Mia as she stood in the door to the shop and she turned, her hands coming up. If it was an enemy, or some enemy of her chap, she would claw his eyes out.
“Solly,” said a smiling black-haired woman. Like the man, she was holding out one of the oblong flash-things. In the middle was a circular glass eye that stared at Mia. She could see her own face in it, small and dark and bewildered.
“You take pickcha, preese? Take pickcha me and my fliend?”
Mia had no idea what the woman was saying or what she wanted or what the flash-makers were supposed to do. She only knew that there were too many people, they were everywhere, this was a madhouse. Through the shop window she could see that the front of the hotel was likewise thronged. There were yellow cars and long black cars with windows you couldn’t look into (although the people inside could doubtless look out), and a huge silver conveyance that sat rumbling at the curb. Two men in green uniforms were in the street, blowing silver whistles. Somewhere close by something began to rattle loudly. To Mia, who had never heard a jackhammer, it sounded like a speed-shooter gun, but no one outside was throwing himself to the sidewalk; no one even looked alarmed.
How was she supposed to get to the Dixie Pig on her own? Richard P. Sayre had said he was sure Susannah could help her find it, but Susannah had fallen stubbornly silent, and Mia herself was on the verge of losing control entirely.
Then Susannah spoke up again.
If I help you a little now—get you to a quiet place where you can catch your breath and at least do something about your shirt—will you give me some straight answers?
About what?
About the baby, Mia. And about the mother. About you.
I did!
I don’t think so. I don’t think you’re any more elemental than…well, than I am. I want the truth.
Why?
I want the truth,Susannah repeated, and then fell silent, refusing to respond to any more of Mia’s questions. And when yet another grinning little man approached her with yet another flash-thing, Mia’s nerve broke. Right now just getting across the hotel lobby looked like more than she could manage on her own; how was she supposed to get all the way to this Dixie Pig place? After so many years in
(Fedic)
(Discordia)
(the Castle on the Abyss)
to be among so many people made her feel like screaming. And after all, why not tell the dark-skinned woman what little she knew? She—Mia, daughter of none, mother of one—was firmly in charge. What harm in a little truth-telling?
All right,she said.I’ll do as you ask, Susannah or Odetta or whoever you are. Just help me. Get me out of here.
Susannah Deancame forward.
Eight
There was a women’s restroom adjacent to the hotel bar, around the corner from the piano player. Two of the yellow-skinned, black-haired ladies with the tipped eyes were at the basins, one washing her hands, the other fixing her hair, both of them twittering in their birdy-lingo. Neither paid any attention to thekokujin lady who went past them and to the stalls. A moment later they left her in blessed silence except for the faint music drifting down from the overhead speakers.
Mia saw how the latch worked and engaged it. She was about to sit down on the toilet seat when Susannah said:Turn it inside out.
What?
The shirt, woman. Turn it inside out, for your father’s sake!
For a moment Mia didn’t. She was too stunned.
The shirt was a rough-woven callum-ka, the sort of simple pullover favored by both sexes in the rice-growing country during cooler weather. It had what Odetta Holmes would have called a boatneck. No buttons, so yes, it could very easily be turned inside out, but—
Susannah, clearly impatient:Are you going to stand there commala-moon all day? Turn it inside out! And tuck it into your jeans this time.
W…Why?
It’ll give you a different look,Susannah replied promptly, but that wasn’t the reason. What she wanted was a look at herself below the waist. If her legs were Mia’s then they were quite probably white legs. She was fascinated (and a little sickened) by the idea that she had become a kind of tu-tone halfbreed.
Mia paused a moment longer, fingertips rubbing the rough weave of the shirt above the worst of the bloodstains, which was over her left breast. Over her heart. Turn it inside out! In the lobby, a dozen half-baked ideas had gone through her head (using the scrimshaw turtle to fascinate the people in the shop had probably been the only one even close to workable), but simply turning the damned thing inside out hadn’t been one of them. Which only showed, she supposed, how close to total panic she had been. But now…
Did she need Susannah for the brief time she would be in this overcrowded and disorienting city, which was so different from the quiet rooms of the castle and the quiet streets of Fedic? Just to get from here to Sixty-first Street and Lexingworth?
Lexington, said the woman trapped inside her.Lexing ton.You keep forgetting that, don’t you?
Yes. Yes, she did. And there was no reason to forget such a simple thing, maybe she hadn’t been to Morehouse, Morehouse or no house, but she wasn’t stupid. So why—
What?she demanded suddenly.What are you smiling about?
Nothing,said the woman inside…but she was still smiling. Almost grinning. Mia could feel it, and she didn’t like it. Upstairs in Room 1919, Susannah had been screaming at her in a mixture of terror and fury, accusing Mia of betraying the man she loved and the one she followed. Which had been true enough to make Mia ashamed. She didn’t enjoy feeling that way, but she’d liked the woman inside better when she was howling and crying and totally discombobulated. The smile made her nervous. This version of the brown-skinned woman was trying to turn the tables on her; maybe thought shehad turned the tables. Which was impossible, of course, she was under the protection of the King, but…
Tell me why you’re smiling!
Oh, it don’t amount to much,Susannah said, only now she sounded like the other one, whose name was Detta. Mia did more than dislike that one. She was a little afraid of that one.It’s just that there was this fella named Sigmund Freud, honeychile—honky muhfuh, but not stupid. And he said that when someone always be f’gittin sump’in, might be because that person wantto be f’gittin it.
That’s stupid,Mia said coldly. Beyond the stall where she was having this mental conversation, the door opened and two more ladies came in—no, at least three and maybe four—twittering in their birdy-language and giggling in a way that made Mia clamp her teeth together.Why would I want to forget the place where they’re waiting to help me have my baby?
Well, dis Freud—dis smart cigar-smoking Viennese honky muhfuh—he claim dat we got dis mindunderour mind, he call it the unconscious or subconscious or somefuckin conscious. Now I ain’t claimin dere is such a thing, only dat he saydere was.
(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 smarterdan de one on top. Cut through de bullshit fasterdan 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 theirbrains —
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—thereal Mia—looked out over Discordia toward the red glow marking the castle of the King.