Stephen King - Song of Susannah

“I met him briefly,” Susannah said, “under the name of Flagg. I hope to meet him again.’

“If you truly knew him, you’d wish for no such thing.”

“The Breakers you spoke of-where are they?”

“Why… Thunderclap, do’ee not know? The shadow-lands. Why do you ask?”

“No reason but curiosity,” Susannah said, and seemed to hear Eddie: Ask any question she’ll answer. Burn up the day. Give us a chance to catch up. She hoped Mia couldn’t read her thoughts when they were separated like this. If she could, they were all likely up shit creek without a paddle. “Let’s go back to Walter. Can we speak of him a bit?”

Mia signaled a weary acceptance that Susannah didn’t quite believe. How long had it been since Mia had had an ear for any tale she might care to tell? The answer, Susannah guessed, was probably never. And the questions Susannah was asking, the doubts she was articulating… surely some of them must have passed through Mia’s own head. They’d be banished quickly as the blasphemies they were, but still, come on, this was not a stupid woman. Unless obsession made you stupid. Susannah supposed a case could be made for that idea.

“Susannah? Bumbler got your tongue?”

“No, I was just thinking what a relief it must have been when he came to you.”

Mia considered that, then smiled. Smiling changed her, made her look girlish and artless and shy. Susannah had to remind herself that wasn’t a look she could trust. ’Yes! It was! Of course it was!”

“After discovering your purpose and being trapped here by it… after seeing the Wolves getting ready to store the kids and then operate on them… after all that, Walter comes. The devil, in fact, but at least he can see you. At least he can hear your sad tale. And he makes you an offer.”

“He said the Crimson King would give me a child,” Mia said, and put her hands gently against the great globe of her belly. “My Mordred, whose time has come round at last.”

Mia pointed again at the Arc 16 Experimental Station. What she had called the Dogan of Dogans. The last remnant of her smile lingered on her lips, but there was no happiness or real amusement in it now. Her eyes were shiny with fear and-perhaps-awe.

“That’s where they changed me, made me mortal. Once there were many such places-there must have been-but I’d set my watch and warrant that’s the only one left in all of In-World, Mid-World, or End-World. It’s a place both wonderful and terrible. And it was there I was taken.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.” Susannah was thinking of her Dogan. Which was, of course, based on Jake’s Dogan. It was certainly a strange place, with its flashing lights and multiple TV screens, but not frightening.

“Beneath it are passages which go under the castle,” Mia said. “At the end of one is a door that opens on the Calla side of Thunderclap, just under the last edge of the darkness. That’s the one the Wolves use when they go on their raids.”

Susannah nodded. That explained a lot. “Do they take the kiddies back the same way?”

“Nay, lady, do it please you; like many doors, the one that takes the Wolves from Fedic to the Calla side of Thunderclap goes in only one direction. When you’re on the other side, it’s no longer there.”

“Because it’s not a magic door, right?”

Mia smiled and nodded and patted her knee.

Susannah looked at her with mounting excitement. “It’s another twin-thing.”

“Do you say so?”

“Yes. Only this time Tweedledum and Tweedledee are science and magic. Rational and irrational. Sane and insane. No matter what terms you pick, that’s a double-damned pair if ever there was one.”

“Aye? Do you say so?”

“Yes! Magic doors-like the one Eddie found and you took me through to New York-go both ways. The doors North Central Positronics made to replace them when the Prim receded and the magic faded… they go only one way. Have I got that right?”

“I think so, aye.”

“Maybe they didn’t have time to figure out how to make teleportation a two-lane highway before the world moved on. In any case, the Wolves go to the Calla side of Thunderclap by door and come back to Fedic by train. Right?”

Mia nodded.

Susannah no longer thought she was just trying to kill time. This information might come in handy later on. “And after the King’s men, Pere’s low men, have scooped the kids’ brains, what then? Back through the door with them, I suppose-the one under the castle. Back to the Wolves’ staging point. And a train takes them the rest of the way home.”

“Aye.”

“Why do they bother takin em back at all?”

“Lady, I know not.” Then Mia’s voice dropped. “There’s another door under Castle Discordia. Another door in the rooms of ruin. One that goes…” She licked her lips. “That goes todash.”

“Todash?… I know the word, but I don’t understand what’s so bad-”

“There are endless worlds, your dinh is correct about that, but even when those worlds are close together-like some of the multiple New Yorks-there are endless spaces between. Think ya of the spaces between the inner and outer walls of a house. Places where it’s always dark. But just because a place is always dark doesn’t mean it’s empty. Does it, Susannah?”

There are monsters in the todash darkness.

Who had said that? Roland? She couldn’t remember for sure, and what did it matter? She thought she understood what Mia was saying, and if so, it was horrible.

“Rats in the walls, Susannah. Bats in the walls. All sorts of sucking, biting bugs in the walls.”

“Stop it, I get the picture.”

“That door beneath the castle-one of their mistakes, I have no doubt-goes to nowhere at all. Into the darkness between worlds. Todash-space. But not empty space.” Her voice lowered further. “That door is reserved for the Red King’s most bitter enemies. They’re thrown into a darkness where they may exist-blind, wandering, insane-for years. But in the end, something always finds them and devours them. Monsters beyond the ability of such minds as ours to bear thought of.”

Susannah found herself trying to picture such a door, and what waited behind it. She didn’t want to but couldn’t help it. Her mouth dried up.

In that same low and somehow horrible tone of confidentiality, Mia said, “There were many places where the old people tried to join magic and science together, but yon may be the only one left.” She nodded toward the Dogan. “It was there that Walter took me, to make me mortal and take me out of Prim ’s way forever.

“To make me like you.”

Mia didn’t know everything, but so far as Susannah could make out, Walter/Flagg had offered the spirit later to be known as Mia the avatar of Faustian bargains. If she was willing to give up her nearly eternal but discorporate state and become a mortal woman, then she could become pregnant and bear a child. Walter was honest with her about how little she would actually be getting for all she’d be giving up. The baby wouldn’t grow as normal babies did-as Baby Michael had done before Mia’s unseen but worshipful eyes-and she might only have him for seven years, but oh what wonderful years they could be!

Beyond this, Walter had been tactfully silent, allowing Mia to form her own pictures: how she would nurse her baby and wash him, not neglecting the tender creases behind the knees and ears; how she would kiss him in the honeyspot between the unfledged wings of his shoulderblades; how she would walk with him, holding both of his hands in both of hers as he toddled; how she would read to him and point out Old Star and Old Mother in the sky and tell him the story of how Rustie Sam stole the widow’s best loaf of bread; how she would hug him to her and bathe his cheek with her grateful tears when he spoke his first word, which would, of course, be Mama.