Song of Susannah (30 page)

“It’s the end-game now,” Roland said. “All I’ve worked for and waited for all the long years. The end is coming. I feel it. Don’t you?”

Eddie nodded. It was like that point in a piece of music when all the instruments begin rushing toward some inevitable crashing climax.

“Susannah?” Roland asked.

“Still alive.”

“Mia?”

“Still in control.”

“The baby?”

“Still coming.”

“And Jake? Father Callahan?”

Eddie stopped at the road, looked both ways, then made his turn.

“No,” he said. “From them I haven’t heard. What about you?”

Roland shook his own head. From Jake, somewhere in the future with just an ex-Catholic priest and a billy-bumbler for protection, there was only silence. Roland hoped the boy was all right.

For the time being, he could do no more.

STAVE:
Commala-me-mine
You have to walk the line.

When you finally get the thing you need

It makes you feel so fine.

RESPONSE:
Commala-come-nine!

It makes ya feel fine!

But if you’d have the thing you need

You have to walk the line.

“John Fitzgerald Kennedy died this afternoon at Parkland Memorial Hospital.”

This voice, this grieving voice: Walter Cronkite’s voice, in a dream.

“America’s last gunslinger is dead. O Discordia!”

As Mia left room 1919 of the New York Plaza–Park (soon to be the Regal U.N. Plaza, a Sombra/North Central project, O Discordia), Susannah fell into a swoon. From a swoon she passed into a savage dream filled with savage news.

The next voice is that of Chet Huntley, co-anchor of
The Huntley-Brinkley Report.
It’s also—in some way she cannot understand—the voice of Andrew, her chauffeur.

“Diem and Nhu are dead,” says that voice.
“Now do slip the dogs of war, the tale of woe begins; from here the way to Jericho Hill is paved with blood and sin. Ah, Discordia! Charyou tree! Come, reap!”

Where am I?

She looks around and sees a concrete wall packed with a jostling intaglio of names, slogans, and obscene drawings. In the middle, where anyone sitting on the bunk must see it, is this greeting:
HELLO NIGGER WELCOME TO OXFORD DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU HERE
!

The crotch of her slacks is damp. The underwear beneath is downright soaked, and she remembers why: although the bail bondsman was notified well in advance, the cops held onto them as long as possible, cheerfully ignoring the increasing chorus of pleas for a bathroom break. No toilets in the cells; no sinks; not even a tin bucket. You didn’t need to be a quiz-kid on
Twenty-one
to figure it out; they were
supposed
to piss in their pants, supposed to get in touch with their essential animal natures, and eventually she had,
she
, Odetta Holmes—

No
, she thinks,
I am Susannah. Susannah Dean. I’ve been taken prisoner again, jailed again, but I am still I.

She hears voices from beyond this wing of jail cells, voices which for her sum up the present. She’s supposed to think they’re coming from a TV out in the jail’s office, she assumes, but it’s got to be a trick. Or some ghoul’s idea of a joke. Why else would Frank McGee be saying President Kennedy’s brother, Bobby, is dead? Why would Dave Garroway from the
Today
show be saying that the
President’s little
boy
is dead, that John-John has been killed in a plane crash? What sort of awful lie is that to hear as you sit in a stinking southern jail with your wet underpants clinging to your crotch? Why is “Buffalo” Bob Smith of the
Howdy Doody
show yelling “Cowabunga, kids, Martin Luther King is dead”? And the kids all screaming back, “Commala-come-
Yay!
We love the things ya say! Only good nigger’s a dead nigger, so kill a coon
today!
”

The bail bondsman will be here soon. That’s what she needs to hold onto,
that.

She goes to the bars and grips them. Yes, this is Oxford Town, all right, Oxford all over again, two men dead by the light of the moon, somebody better investigate soon. But she’s going to get out, and she’ll fly away, fly away, fly away home, and not long after that there will be an entirely new world to explore, with a new person to love and a new person to
be.
Commala-come-come, the journey’s just begun.

Oh, but that’s a lie. The journey is almost over. Her heart knows this.

Down the hall a door opens and footsteps come clicking toward her. She looks in that direction—eagerly, hoping for the bondsman, or a deputy with a ring of keys—but instead it’s a black woman in a pair of stolen shoes. It’s her old self. It’s Odetta Holmes. Didn’t go to Morehouse, but did go to Columbia. And to all those coffee houses down in the Village. And to the Castle on the Abyss, that house, too.

“Listen to me,” Odetta says. “No one can get you out of this but yourself, girl.”

“You want to enjoy those legs while you got em, honey!” The voice she hears coming out of her mouth is rough and confrontational on top, scared underneath. The voice of Detta Walker. “You goan lose em fore long! They goan be cut off by the A train! That fabled A train! Man named Jack Mort goan push you off the platform in the Christopher Street station!”

Odetta looks at her calmly and says, “The A train doesn’t stop there. It’s
never
stopped there.”

“What the fuck you
talkin
about, bitch?”

Odetta is not fooled by the angry voice or the profanity. She knows who she’s talking to. And she knows what she’s talking about. The column of truth has a hole in it. These are not the voices of the gramophone but those of our dead friends. There are ghosts in the rooms of ruin. “Go back to the Dogan, Susannah. And remember what I say: only you can save yourself. Only you can lift yourself out of Discordia.”

Now it’s the voice of David Brinkley, saying that someone named Stephen King was struck and killed by a minivan while walking near his home in Lovell, a small town in western Maine. King was fifty-two, he says, the author of many novels, most notably
The Stand, The Shining
, and ’
Salem’s Lot.
Ah Discordia, Brinkley says, the world grows darker.

Odetta Holmes, the woman Susannah once was, points through the bars of the cell and past her. She says it again: “Only you can save yourself. But the way of the gun is the way of damnation as well as salvation; in the end there is no difference.”

Susannah turns to look where the finger is pointing, and is filled with horror at what she sees: The blood! Dear God, the
blood!
There is a bowl filled with blood, and in it some monstrous dead thing, a dead baby that’s not human, and has she killed it herself?

“No!” she screams. “No, I will never!
I will NEVER!
”

“Then the gunslinger will die and the Dark Tower will fall,” says the terrible woman standing in the corridor, the terrible woman who is wearing Trudy Damascus’s shoes. “Discordia indeed.”

Susannah closes her eyes. Can she
make
herself swoon? Can she swoon herself right out of this cell, this terrible world?

She does. She falls forward into the darkness and the soft beeping of machinery and the last voice she hears is that of Walter Cronkite, telling her that Diem and Nhu are dead, astronaut Alan Shepard is dead, Lyndon Johnson is dead, Richard Nixon is dead, Elvis Presley is dead, Rock Hudson is dead, Roland of Gilead is dead, Eddie of New York is dead, Jake of New York is dead, the world is dead, the
worlds
, the Tower is falling, a trillion universes are merging, and all is Discordia, all is ruin, all is ended.

Susannah opened her eyes and looked around wildly, gasping for breath. She almost fell out of the chair in which she was sitting. It was one of those capable of rolling back and forth along the instrument panels filled with knobs and switches and blinking lights. Overhead were the black-and-white TV screens. She was back in the Dogan. Oxford

(
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
S
USANNAH
-M
IO
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 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!”