Song of Susannah (45 page)

“Ne’mine,
I’ll
do it.” The voice of the maid, drugged and avid. “I want to see it.
Dios!
I want to
hold
it!”

Jake’s arms seemed to weigh a ton, but he forced them to reach out and grab the maid, a middle-aged Hispanic lady who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and five pounds.

As he had struggled to still his hands, so Callahan now struggled to pray.

God, not my will but Thine. Not the potter but the potter’s clay. If I can’t do anything else, help me to take it in my arms and jump out the window and destroy the gods-damned thing once and for all. But if it be Your will to help me make it still, instead—to make it go back to sleep—then send me Your strength. And help me to remember . . .

Drugged by Black Thirteen he might have been, but Jake still hadn’t lost his touch. Now he plucked the rest of the thought out of the Pere’s mind and spoke it aloud, only changing the word Callahan used to the one Roland had taught them.

“I need no sigul,” Jake said. “Not the potter but the potter’s clay,
and I need no sigul!
”

“God,” Callahan said. The word was as heavy as a stone, but once it was out of his mouth, the
rest of them came easier. “God, if You’re still there, if You still hear me, this is Callahan. Please still this thing, Lord. Please send it back to sleep. I ask it in the name of Jesus.”

“In the name of the White,” Jake said.

“Ite!”
Oy yapped.

“Amen,” said the maid in a stoned, bemused voice.

For a moment the droning idiot’s song from the box rose another notch, and Callahan understood it was hopeless, that not even God Almighty could stand against Black Thirteen.

Then it fell silent.

“God be thanked,” he whispered, and realized his entire body was drenched with sweat.

Jake burst into tears and picked up Oy. The chambermaid also began to weep, but had no one to comfort her. As Pere Callahan slid the meshy (and oddly heavy) material of the bowling bag back around the ghostwood box, Jake turned to her and said, “You need to take a nap, sai.”

It was the only thing he could think of, and it worked. The maid turned and walked across to the bed. She crawled up on it, pulled her skirt down over her knees, and appeared to fall unconscious.

“Will it stay asleep?” Jake asked Callahan in a low voice. “Because . . . Pere . . . that was too close for comfort.”

Perhaps, but Callahan’s mind suddenly seemed free—freer than it had been in years. Or perhaps it was his heart that had been freed. In any case, his thoughts seemed very clear as he lowered the bowling
bag to the folded dry-cleaning bags on top of the safe.

Remembering a conversation in the alley behind Home. He and Frankie Chase and Magruder, out on a smoke-break. The talk had turned to protecting your valuables in New York, especially if you had to go away for awhile, and Magruder had said the safest storage in New York . . . the absolute safest storage . . .

“Jake, there’s also a bag of plates in the safe.”

“Orizas?”

“Yes. Get them.” While he did, Callahan went to the maid on the bed and reached into the left skirt pocket of her uniform. He brought out a number of plastic MagCards, a few regular keys, and a brand of mints he’d never heard of—Altoids.

He turned her over. It was like turning a corpse.

“What’re you doing?” Jake whispered. He had put Oy down so he could sling the silk-lined reed pouch over his shoulder. It was heavy, but he found the weight comforting.

“Robbing her, what does it look like?” the Pere replied angrily. “Father Callahan of the Holy Roman Catholic Church is robbing a hotel maid. Or would, if she had any . . . ah!”

In the other pocket was the little roll of bills he’d been hoping for. She had been performing turndown service when Oy’s barking had distracted her. This included flushing the john, pulling the shades, turning down the bed, and leaving what the maids called “pillow candy.” Sometimes patrons tipped for the service. This maid was carrying two tens, three fives, and four ones.

“I’ll pay you back if our paths cross,” Callahan told the unconscious maid. “Otherwise, just consider it your service to God.”

“Whiiiite,”
the maid said in the slurred whisper of one who talks and yet sleeps.

Callahan and Jake exchanged a look.

In the elevator going back down, Callahan held the bag containing Black Thirteen and Jake carried the one with the ’Rizas inside. He also carried their money. It now came to a total of forty-eight dollars.

“Will it be enough?” It was his only question after hearing the Pere’s plan for disposing of the ball, a plan which would necessitate another stop.

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Callahan replied. They were speaking in the low voices of conspirators, although the elevator was empty save for them. “If I can rob a sleeping chambermaid, stiffing a cab driver should be a leadpipe cinch.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. He was thinking that Roland had done more than rob a few innocent people during his quest for the Tower; he’d killed a good many, as well. “Let’s just get this done and then find the Dixie Pig.”

“You don’t have to worry so much, you know,” Callahan said. “If the Tower falls, you’ll be among the very first to know.”

Jake studied him. After a moment or two of this, Callahan cracked a smile. He couldn’t help it.

“Not that funny, sai,” Jake said, and they went
out into the dark of that early summer’s night in the year of ’99.

It was quarter to nine and there was still a residue of light across the Hudson when they arrived at the first of their two stops. The taximeter’s tale was nine dollars and fifty cents. Callahan gave the cabbie one of the maid’s tens.

“Mon, don’t hurt yose’f,” the driver said in a powerful Jamaican accent. “I dreadful ’fraid you might leave yose’f
shote.
”

“You’re lucky to get anything at all, son,” Callahan said kindly. “We’re seeing New York on a budget.”

“My woman got a budget, too,” said the cabbie, and then drove away.

Jake, meanwhile, was looking up. “Wow,” he said softly. “I guess I forgot how
big
all this is.”

Callahan followed his glance, then said: “Let’s get it done.” And, as they hurried inside: “What are you getting from Susannah? Anything?”

“Man with a guitar,” Jake said. “Singing . . . I don’t know. And I should. It was another one of those coincidences that aren’t coincidences, like the owner of the bookstore being named Tower or Balazar’s joint turning out to be The Leaning Tower. Some song . . . I should know.”

“Anything else?”

Jake shook his head. “That’s the last thing I got from her, and it was just after we got into the taxi outside the hotel. I think she’s gone into the Dixie
Pig and now she’s out of touch.” He smiled faintly at the unintentional pun.

Callahan veered toward the building directory in the center of the huge lobby. “Keep Oy close to you.”

“Don’t worry.”

It didn’t take Callahan long to find what he was looking for.

The sign read:

LONG-TERM STORAGE

10–36 MOS.

USE TOKENS

TAKE KEY

MANAGEMENT ACCEPTS

NO RESPONSIBILITY

FOR LOST PROPERTY!

Below, in a framed box, was a list of rules and regulations, which they both scanned closely. From beneath their feet came the rumble of a subway train. Callahan, who hadn’t been in New York for almost twenty years, had no idea what train it might be, where it might go, or how deep in the city’s intestine it might run. They’d already come down two levels by escalator, first to the shops and then to here. The subway station was deeper still.

Jake shifted the bag of Orizas to his other shoulder and pointed out the last line on the framed
notice. “We’d get a discount if we were tenants,” he said.

“Count!” Oy cried sternly.

“Aye, laddie,” Callahan agreed, “and if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. We don’t need a discount.”

Nor did they. After walking through a metal detector (no problem with the Orizas) and past a rent-a-cop dozing on a stool, Jake determined that one of the smallest lockers—those on the far left-hand side of the long room—would accommodate the
MID-WORLD LANES
bag and the box inside. To rent the box for the maximum length of time would cost twenty-seven dollars. Pere Callahan fed bills into the various slots of the token-dispensing machine carefully, prepared for a malfunction: of all the wonders and horrors he’d seen during their brief time back in the city (the latter including a two-dollar taxi drop-charge), this was in some ways the hardest to accept. A vending machine that accepted paper currency? A lot of sophisticated technology had to lie behind this machine with its dull brown finish and its sign commanding patrons to
INSERT BILLS FACE UP!
The picture accompanying the command showed George Washington with the top of his head facing to the left, but the bills Callahan fed into the machine seemed to work no matter which way the head was facing. Just as long as the picture was on top. Callahan was almost relieved when the machine
did
malfunction once, refusing to accept an old and wrinkled dollar bill. The relatively crisp fives it gobbled up without a murmur, dispensing little showers of
tokens into the tray beneath. Callahan gathered up twenty-seven dollars’ worth of these, started back toward where Jake was waiting, and then turned around again, curious about something. He looked on the side of the amazing (amazing to him, at least, it was) currency-eating vending machine. Toward the bottom, on a series of little plaques, was the information he’d been looking for. This was a Change-Mak-R 2000, manufactured in Cleveland, Ohio, but a lot of companies had chipped in: General Electric, DeWalt Electronics, Showrie Electric, Panasonic, and, at the bottom, smallest of all but very much there, North Central Positronics.

The snake in the garden
, Callahan thought.
This guy Stephen King, who supposedly thought me up, may only exist in one world, but what do you bet North Central Positronics exists in all of them? Sure, because that’s the Crimson King’s rig, just like Sombra’s his rig, and he only wants what any power-mad despot in history has wanted: to be everywhere, own everything, and basically control the universe.

“Or bring it to darkness,” he murmured.

“Pere!” Jake called impatiently.
“Pere!”

“I’m coming,” he said, and hurried across to Jake with his hands full of shiny gold tokens.

The key came out of Locker 883 after Jake had inserted nine of the tokens, but he went on putting them in until all twenty-seven were gone. At this
point the small glass porthole under the locker-number turned red.

“Maxed out,” Jake said with satisfaction. They were still talking in those low mustn’t-wake-the-baby tones, and this long, cavernous room was indeed very quiet. Jake guessed it would be bedlam at eight in the morning and five in the afternoon on working days, with folks coming and going from the subway station below, some of them storing their gear in the short-term coin-op lockers. Now there was just the ghostly sound of conversation drifting down the escalator well from the few shops still open in the arcade and the rumble of another approaching train.

Callahan slid the bowling bag into the narrow opening. Slid it back as far as it would go with Jake watching anxiously. Then he closed the locker and Jake turned the key. “Bingo,” Jake said, putting the key in his pocket. Then, with anxiety: “Will it sleep?”

“I think so,” Callahan said. “Like it did in my church. If another Beam breaks, it might wake up and work mischief, but then, if another Beam lets go—”

“If another Beam lets go, a little mischief won’t matter,” Jake finished for him.

Callahan nodded. “The only thing is . . . well, you know where we’re going. And you know what we’re apt to find there.”

Vampires. Low men. Other servants of the Crimson King, maybe. Possibly Walter, the hooded man in black who sometimes shifted his shape and form and called himself Randall Flagg. Possibly even the Crimson King himself.

Yes, Jake knew.

“If you have the touch,” Callahan continued, “we have to assume that some of them do, too. It’s possible they could pick this place—and the locker-number—out of our minds. We’re going to go in there and try to get her, but we have to recognize that the chances of failure are fairly high. I’ve never fired a gun in my life, and you’re not—forgive me, Jake, but you’re not exactly a battle-hardened veteran.”

“I’ve got one or two under my belt,” Jake said. He was thinking about his time with Gasher. And about the Wolves, of course.

“This is apt to be different,” Callahan said. “I’m just saying it might be a bad idea for us to be taken alive. If it comes to that. Do you understand?”

“Don’t worry,” Jake said in a tone of chilling comfort. “Don’t worry about that, Pere. We won’t be.”

Then they were outside again, looking for another cab. Thanks to the maid’s tip-money, Jake reckoned they had just about enough remaining cash to take them to the Dixie Pig. And he had an idea that once they entered the Pig, their need for ready cash—or anything else—would cease.

“Here’s one,” Callahan said, and waved his arm in a flagging gesture. Jake, meanwhile, looked back at the building from which they had just emerged.

“You’re sure it’ll be safe there?” he asked Callahan as the cab swerved toward them, honking
relentlessly at a slowpoke between him and his fares.

“According to my old friend sai Magruder, that’s the safest storage area in Manhattan,” Callahan said. “Fifty times safer than the coin-op lockers in Penn Station and Grand Central, he said . . . and of course here you’ve got the long-term storage option. There are probably other storage places in New York, but we’ll be gone before they open—one way or the other.”