Stephen King - Song of Susannah

Stop it. Stop. I have nowhere else to go but to them.

You do, Susannah said quickly. With Black Thirteen you can go anywhere.

You don’t understand. He’d follow me. Follow it.

You’re right, I don’t understand. She actually did, or thought she did, but… Burn up the day, he’d said.

All right, I’ll try to explain. I don’t understand everything myself- - there are things I don’t know - but I’ll tell you what I can.

Thank y -

Before she could finish, Susannah was falling again, like Alice down the rabbit-hole. Through the toilet, through the floor, through the pipes beneath the floor, and into another world.

No castle at the end of her drop, not this time. Roland had told them a few stories of his wandering years-the vampire nurses and little doctors of Eluria, the walking waters of East Downe, and, of course, the story of his doomed first love-and this was a little like falling into one of those tales. Or, perhaps, into one of the oat-operas (“adult Westerns,” as they were called) on the still relatively new ABC-TV network: Sugarfoot, with Ty Hardin, Maverick, with James Garner, or-Odetta Holmes’s personal favorite- Cheyenne, starring Clint Walker. (Odetta had once written a letter to ABC programming, suggesting they could simultaneously break new ground and open up a whole new audience if they did a series about a wandering Negro cowboy in the years after the Civil War. She never got an answer. She supposed writing the letter in the first place had been ridiculous, a waste of time.)

There was a livery stable with a sign out front reading TACK MENDED CHEAP.The sign over the hotel promised QUIET ROOMS, GUD BEDS.There were at least five saloons. Outside one of them, a rusty robot that ran on squalling treads turned its bulb head back and forth, blaring a come-on to the empty town from the horn-shaped speaker in the center of its rudimentary face: “Girls, girls, girls! Some are humie and some are cybie, but who cares, you can’t tell the difference, they do what you want without complaint, won’t is not in their vo-CAB-u-lary, they give satisfaction with every action! Girls, girls, girls! Some are cybie, some are real, you can’t tell the difference when you cop a feel! They do what you want! They want what you want!”

Walking beside Susannah was the beautiful young white woman with the swollen belly, scratched legs, and shoulder-length black hair. Now, as they walked below the gaudy false front of THE FEDIC GOOD-TIME SALOON, BAR, AND DANCE EMPORIUM,she was wearing a faded plaid dress which advertised her advanced state of pregnancy in a way that made it seem freakish, almost a sign of the apocalypse. The huaraches of the castle allure had been replaced by scuffed and battered shor’boots. Both of them were wearing shor’boots, and the heels clumped hollowly on the boardwalk.

From one of the deserted barrooms farther along came the herky-jerky jazz of a jagtime tune, and a snatch of some old poem came to Susannah: A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon!

She looked over the batwing doors and was not in the least surprised to see the words SERVICE’s MALAMUTE SALOON.

She slowed long enough to peer over the batwing doors and saw a chrome piano playing itself, dusty keys popping up and down, just a mechanical music-box no doubt built by the ever-popular North Central Positronics, entertaining a room that was empty except for a dead robot and, in the far corner, two skeletons working through the process of final decomposition, the one that would take them from bone to dust.

Farther along, at the end of the town’s single street, loomed the castle wall. It was so high and so wide it blotted out most of the sky.

Susannah abruptly knocked her fist against the side of her head. Then she held her hands out in front of her and snapped her fingers.

“What are you doing?” Mia asked. “Tell me, I beg.”

“Making sure I’m here. Physically here.”

“You are.”

“So it seems. But how can that be?”

Mia shook her head, indicating that she didn’t know. On this, at least, Susannah was inclined to believe her. There was no dissenting word from Detta, either.

“This isn’t what I expected,” Susannah said, looking around. “It’s not what I expected at all.”

“Nay?” asked her companion (and without much interest). Mia was moving in that awkward but strangely endearing duck-footed waddle that seems to best suit women in the last stages of their carry. “And what was it ye did expect, Susannah?”

“Something more medieval, I guess. More like that.” She pointed at the castle.

Mia shrugged as if to say take it or leave it, and then said, “Is the other one with you? The nasty one?”

Detta, she meant. Of course. “She’s always with me. She’s a part of me just as your chap is a part of you.” Although how Mia could be pregnant when it had been Susannah who caught the fuck was something Susannah was still dying to know.

“I’ll soon be delivered of mine,” Mia said. “Will ya never be delivered of yours?”

“I thought I was,” Susannah said truthfully. “She came back. Mostly, I think, to deal with you.”

“I hate her.”

“I know.” And Susannah knew more. Mia feared Detta, as well. Feared her big-big.

“If she speaks, our palaver ends.”

Susannah shrugged. “She comes when she comes and speaks when she speaks. She doesn’t ask my permission.”

Ahead of them on this side of the street was an arch with a sign above it:

The sign didn’t interest Susannah as much as the two things that lay on the filthy station platform beyond it: a child’s doll, decayed to little more than a head and one floppy arm, and, beyond it, a grinning mask. Although the mask appeared to be made of steel, a good deal of it seemed to have rotted like flesh. The teeth poking out of the grin were canine fangs. The eyes were glass. Lenses, Susannah felt sure, no doubt also crafted by North Central Positronics. Surrounding the mask were a few shreds and tatters of green cloth, what had undoubtedly once been this thing’s hood. Susannah had no trouble putting together the remains of the doll and the remains of the Wolf; her mamma, as Detta sometimes liked to tell folks (especially horny boys in road-house parking lots), didn’t raise no fools.

“This is where they brought them,” she said. “Where the Wolves brought the twins they stole from Calla Bryn Sturgis. Where they-what?-operated on them.”

“Not just from Calla Bryn Sturgis,” Mia said indifferently, “but aye. And once the babbies were here, they were taken there. A place you’ll also recognize, I’ve no doubt.”

She pointed across Fedic’s single street and farther up. The last building before the castle wall abruptly ended the town was a long Quonset hut with sides of filthy corrugated metal and a rusty curved roof. The windows running along the side Susannah could see had been boarded up. Also along that side was a steel hitching rail. To it were tied what looked like seventy horses, all of them gray. Some had fallen over and lay with their legs sticking straight out. One or two had turned their heads toward the women’s voices and then seemed to freeze in that position. It was very un-horselike behavior, but of course these weren’t real horses. They were robots, or cyborgs, or whichever one of Roland’s terms you might like to use. Many of them seemed to have run down or worn out.