Stephen King - Song of Susannah

It wasn’t fair and part of him knew it wasn’t fair, but never in his life had he felt so helpless, so lost, and so consequently mean. He would tell himself not to think of Susannah, to wonder where she was or if her demon child had yet been delivered, and find himself thinking of her, anyway. She had gone to New York, of that much he was sure. But when? Were people traveling in hansom cabs by gaslight or jetting around in anti-grav taxis driven by robots from North Central Positronics?

Is she even alive?

He would have shuddered away from this thought if he could have, but the mind could be so cruel. He kept seeing her in the gutter somewhere down in Alphabet City, with a swastika carved on her forehead, and a placard reading GREETINGS FROM YOUR FRIENDS IN OXFORD TOWN hung around her neck.

Behind him the door from the rectory’s kitchen opened. There was the soft padding sound of bare feet (his ears were sharp now, trained like the rest of his killer’s equipment), and the click of toenails. Jake and Oy.

The kid sat down next to him in Callahan’s rocking chair. He was dressed and wearing his docker’s clutch. In it was the Ruger Jake had stolen from his father on the day he had run away from home. Today it had drawn… well, not blood. Not yet. Oil? Eddie smiled a little. There was no humor in it.

“Can’t sleep, Jake?”

“Ake,” Oy agreed, and collapsed at Jake’s feet, muzzle resting on the boards between his paws.

“No,” Jake said. “I keep thinking about Susannah.” He paused, then added: “And Benny.”

Eddie knew that was natural, the boy had seen his friend blown apart before his very eyes, of course he’d be thinking about him, but Eddie still felt a bitter spurt of jealousy, as if all of Jake’s regard should have been saved for Eddie Dean’s wife.

“That Tavery kid,” Jake said. “It’s his fault. Panicked. Got running. Broke his ankle. If not for him, Benny’d still be alive.” And very softly-it would have chilled the heart of the boy in question had he heard it, Eddie had no doubt of that-Jake said: “Frank… fucking… Tavery.”

Eddie reached out a hand that did not want to comfort and made it touch the kid’s head. His hair was long. Needed awash. Hell, needed a cut. Needed a mother to make sure the boy under it took care of it. No mother now, though, not for Jake. And a little miracle: giving comfort made Eddie feel better. Not a lot, but a little.

“Let it go,” He said. “Done is done.”

“Ka,” Jake said bitterly.

“Ki-yet, ka,” Oy said without raising his muzzle.

“Amen,” Jake said, and laughed. It was disturbing in its coldness. Jake took the Ruger from its makeshift holster and looked at it. “This one will go through, because it came from the other side. That’s what Roland says. The others may, too, because we won’t be going todash. If they don’t, Henchick will cache them in the cave and maybe we can come back for them.”

“If we wind up in New York,” Eddie said, “there’ll be plenty of guns. And we’ll find them.”

“Not like Roland’s. I hope like hell they go through. There aren’t any guns left in any of the worlds like his. That’s what I think.”

It was what Eddie thought, too, but he didn’t bother saying so. From town there came a rattle of firecrackers, then silence. It was winding down there. Winding down at last. Tomorrow there would undoubtedly be an all-day party on the common, a continuation of today’s celebration but a little less drunk and a little more coherent. Roland and his ka-tet would be expected as guests of honor, but if the gods of creation were good and the door opened, they would be gone. Hunting Susannah. Finding her. Never mind hunting. Finding.

As if reading his thoughts (and he could do that, he was strong in the touch), Jake said: “She’s still alive.”

“How can you know that?”

“We would have felt it if she was gone.”

“Jake, can you touch her?”

“No, but-”

Before he could finish, a deep rumbling came from the earth. The porch suddenly began to rise and fall like a boat on a heavy sea. They could hear the boards groaning. From the kitchen came the sound of rattling china like chattering teeth. Oy raised his head and whined. His foxy little face was comically startled, his ears laid back along his skull. In Callahan’s parlor, something fell over and shattered.

Eddie’s first thought, illogical but strong, was that Jake had killed Suze simply by declaring her still alive.

For a moment the shaking intensified. A window shattered as its frame was twisted out of shape. There was a crump from the darkness. Eddie assumed-correctly-that it was the ruined privy, now falling down completely. He was on his feet without realizing it. Jake was standing beside him, gripping his wrist. Eddie had drawn Roland’s gun and now they both stood as if ready to begin shooting.

There was a final grumbling from deep in the earth, and then the porch settled under their feet. At certain key points along the Beam, people were waking up and looking around, dazed. In the streets of one New York when, a few car alarms were going off. The following day’s papers would report a minor earthquake: broken windows, no reported casualties. Just a little shake of the fundamentally sound bedrock.

Jake was looking at Eddie, eyes wide. And knowing.

The door opened behind them and Callahan came out onto the porch, dressed in flimsy white underpants that fell to his knees. The only other thing on him was the gold crucifix around his neck.

“It was an earthquake, wasn’t it?” he said. “I felt one in northern California once, but never since coming to the Calla.”

“It was a hell of a lot more than an earthquake,” Eddie said, and pointed. The screened-in porch looked east, and over there the horizon was lit by silent artillery bursts of green lightning. Downhill from the rectory, the door of Rosalita’s snug creaked open and then banged shut. She and Roland came up the hill together, she in her chemise and the gunslinger in a pair of jeans, both barefoot in the dew.

Eddie, Jake, and Callahan went down to them. Roland was looking fixedly at the already diminishing flickers of lightning in the east, where the land of Thunderclap waited for them, and the Court of the Crimson King, and, at the end of End-World, the Dark Tower itself.

If , Eddie thought. If it still stands .

“Jake was just saying that if Susannah died, we’d know it,” Eddie said. “That there’d be what you call a sigul. Then comes this.” He pointed to the Peres lawn, where a new ridge had humped up, peeling the sod apart in one ten-foot line to show the puckered brown lips of the earth. A chorus of dogs was barking in town, but there were no sounds from the folken, at least not yet; Eddie supposed a goodly number had slept through the whole thing. The sleep of the drunken victorious. “But it wasn’t anything to do with Suze. Was it?”

“Not directly, no.”

“And it wasn’t ours,” Jake put in, “or the damage would have been a lot worse. Don’t you think?”

Roland nodded.

Rosa looked at Jake with a mixture of puzzlement and fright. “Wasn’t our what, boy? What are you talking about? It wasn’t an earthquake, sure!”

“No,” Roland said, “a Beam quake . One of the Beams holding up the Tower-which holds up everything-just let go. Just snapped.”

Even in the faint light from the four ’seners flickering on the porch, Eddie saw Rosalita Munoz’s face lose its color. She crossed herself. “A Beam? One of the Beams? Say no! Say not true!”

Eddie found himself thinking of some long-ago baseball scandal. Of some little boy begging, Say it ain’t so, Joe.