Stephen King - Song of Susannah

(Diem and Nhu are dead)

had only been a dream. A dream within a dream, if you pleased. This was another, but marginally better.

Most of the TV screens which had been showing pictures of Calla Bryn Sturgis the last time she’d been here were now broadcasting either snow or test-patterns. On one, however, was the nineteenth-floor corridor of the Plaza-Park Hotel. The camera rolled down it toward the elevators, and Susannah realized that these were Mia’s eyes she was looking through.

My eyes, she thought. Her anger was thin, but she sensed it could be fed. Would have to be fed, if she was ever to regard the unspeakable thing she’d seen in her dream. The thing in the corner of her Oxford jail cell. The thing in the bowl of blood…

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-Mioreadout 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 mommy-bitch 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 joyjust in knowing that Eddie could still try to tell her anything.

“Burn up day,” she said. That part, at least, had come through loud and clear. “Burn up the 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 to come 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 was shy .

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 a lot.

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.

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. Her real 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. Haifa 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 of Domo! 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.