Song of Susannah (7 page)

“Henchick, it’s not working. I don’t think I—”

“Nar, not yet—and never think thee needs to do it all thyself, lad. Feel for something between you and the door . . . something like a hook . . . or
a thorn . . .” As he spoke, Henchick nodded at the Manni heading the line of reinforcements. “Hedron, come forward. Thonnie, take hold of Hedron’s shoulders. Lewis, take hold of Thonnie’s. And on back! Do it!”

The line shuffled forward. Oy barked doubtfully.

“Feel, boy! Feel for that hook! It’s between thee and t’door! Feel for it!”

Jake reached out with his mind while his imagination suddenly bloomed with a powerful and terrifying vividness that was beyond even the clearest dreams. He saw Fifth Avenue between Forty-eighth and Sixtieth (“the twelve blocks where my Christmas bonus disappears every January,” his father had liked to grumble). He saw every door, on both sides of the street, swinging open at once: Fendi! Tiffany! Bergdorf Goodman! Cartier! Doubleday Books! The Sherry Netherland Hotel! He saw an endless hallway floored with brown linoleum and knew it was in the Pentagon. He saw doors, at least a thousand of them, all swinging open at once and generating a hurricane draft.

Yet the door in front of him, the only one that mattered, remained closed.

Yeah, but—

It was rattling in its frame. He could hear it.

“Go, kid!” Eddie said. The words came from between clamped teeth. “If you can’t open it, knock the fucker down!”

“Help me!” Jake shouted. “
Help
me, goddammit!
All of you
!”

The force in the cave seemed to double. The hum
seemed to be vibrating the very bones of Jake’s skull. His teeth were rattling. Sweat ran into his eyes, blurring his sight. He saw two Henchicks nodding to someone behind him: Hedron. And behind Hedron, Thonnie. And behind Thonnie, all the rest, snaking out of the cave and down thirty feet of the path.

“Get ready, lad,” Henchick said.

Hedron’s hand slipped under Jake’s shirt and gripped the waistband of his jeans. Jake felt pushed instead of pulled. Something in his head bolted forward, and for a moment he saw all the doors of a thousand, thousand worlds flung wide, generating a draft so great it could almost have blown out the sun.

And then his progress was stopped. There was something . . . something right in front of the door . . .

The hook! It’s the hook!

He slipped himself over it as if his mind and life-force were some sort of loop. At the same time he felt Hedron and the others pulling him backward. The pain was immediate, enormous, seeming to tear him apart. Then the draining sensation began. It was hideous, like having someone pull his guts out a loop at a time. And always, the manic buzzing in his ears and deep in his brain.

He tried to cry out—
No, stop, let go, it’s too much!
—and couldn’t. He tried to scream and heard it, but only inside his head. God, he was caught. Caught on the hook and being ripped in two.

One creature
did
hear his scream. Barking furiously,
Oy darted forward. And as he did, the Unfound Door sprang open, swinging in a hissing arc just in front of Jake’s nose.

“Behold!”
Henchick cried in a voice that was at once terrible and exalted.
“Behold, the door opens! Over-sam kammen! Can-tah, can-kavar kammen! Over-can-tah!”

The others responded, but by then Jake Chambers had already been torn loose from Roland’s hand on his right. By then he was flying, but not alone.

Pere Callahan flew with him.

There was just time for Eddie to hear New York,
smell
New York, and to realize what was happening. In a way, that was what made it so awful—he was able to register everything going diabolically counter to what he had expected, but not able to do anything about it.

He saw Jake yanked out of the circle and felt Callahan’s hand ripped out of his own; he saw them fly through the air toward the door, actually looping the loop in tandem, like a couple of fucked-up acrobats. Something furry and barking like a motherfucker shot past the side of his head. Oy, doing barrel-rolls, his ears laid back and his terrified eyes seeming to start from his head.

And more. Eddie was aware of dropping Cantab’s hand and lunging forward toward the door—
his
door,
his
city, and somewhere in it
his
lost and pregnant wife. He was aware (exquisitely so) of the invisible hand that
pushed him back,
and a voice that
spoke, but not in words. What Eddie heard was far more terrible than any words could have been. With words you could argue. This was only an inarticulate negation, and for all he knew, it came from the Dark Tower itself.

Jake and Callahan were shot like bullets from a gun: shot into a darkness filled with the exotic sounds of honking horns and rushing traffic. In the distance but clear, like the voices you heard in dreams, Eddie heard a rapid, rapping, ecstatic voice streetbopping its message: “Say
Gawd,
brotha, that’s right, say
Gawd
on Second Avenue, say
Gawd
on Avenue B, say
Gawd
in the Bronx, I say
Gawd,
I say
Gawd
-bomb, I say
Gawd!
” The voice of an authentic New York crazy if Eddie had ever heard one and it laid his heart open. He saw Oy zip through the door like a piece of newspaper yanked up the street in the wake of a speeding car, and then the door slammed shut, swinging so fast and hard that he had to slit his eyes against the wind it blew into his face, a wind that was gritty with the bone-dust of this rotten cave.

Before he could scream his fury, the door slapped open again. This time he was dazzled by hazy sunshine loaded with birdsong. He smelled pine trees and heard the distant backfiring of what sounded like a big truck. Then he was sucked into that brightness, unable to yell that this was fucked up, assbackw—

Something collided with the side of Eddie’s head. For one brief moment he was brilliantly aware of his passage between the worlds. Then the gunfire. Then the killing.

STAVE:
Commala-come-coo

The wind’ll blow ya through.

Ya gotta go where ka’s wind blows ya

Cause there’s nothin else to do.

RESPONSE:
Commala-come-two!

Nothin else to do!

Gotta go where ka’s wind blows ya

Cause there’s nothin else to do.

Until June first of 1999, Trudy Damascus was the sort of hard-headed woman who’d tell you that most UFOs were weather balloons (and those that weren’t were probably the fabrications of people who wanted to get on TV), the Shroud of Turin was some fourteenth-century con man’s trick, and that ghosts—Jacob Marley’s included—were either the perceptions of the mentally ill or caused by indigestion. She was hard-headed, she
prided
herself on being hard-headed, and had nothing even slightly spiritual on her mind as she walked down Second Avenue toward her business (an accounting firm called Guttenberg, Furth, and Patel) with her canvas carry-bag and her purse slung over her shoulder. One of GF&P’s clients was a chain of toy stores called KidzPlay, and KidzPlay owed GF&P a goodly sum of money. The fact that they were also tottering on the edge of Chapter Eleven meant el zippo to Trudy. She wanted that $69,211.19, and had spent most of her lunch-hour (in a back booth of Dennis’s Waffles and Pancakes, which had been Chew Chew Mama’s until 1994) mulling over ways to get it.
During the last two years she had taken several steps toward changing Guttenberg, Furth, and Patel to Guttenberg, Furth, Patel and Damascus; forcing KidzPlay to cough up would be yet another step—a long one—in that direction.

And so, as she crossed Forty-sixth Street toward the large dark glass skyscraper which now stood on the uptown corner of Second and Forty-sixth (where there had once been a certain Artistic Deli and then a certain vacant lot), Trudy wasn’t thinking about gods or ghosts or visitations from the spirit world. She was thinking about Richard Goldman, the asshole CEO of a certain toy company, and how—

But that was when Trudy’s life changed. At 1:19
P.M
., EDT, to be exact. She had just reached the curb on the downtown side of the street. Was, in fact, stepping up. And all at once a woman appeared on the sidewalk in front of her. A wide-eyed African-American woman. There was no shortage of black women in New York City, and God knew there had to be a fair percentage of them with wide eyes, but Trudy had never seen one emerge directly from thin air before, which was what this one did. And there was something else, something even more unbelievable. Ten seconds before, Trudy Damascus would have laughed and said
nothing
could be more unbelievable than a woman flicking into existence in front of her on a Midtown sidewalk, but there was. There definitely was.

And now she knew how all those people who reported seeing flying saucers (not to mention
ghosts wrapped in clanking chains) must feel, how they must grow frustrated by the entrenched disbelief of people like . . . well, people like the one Trudy Damascus had been at 1:18
P.M
on that day in June, the one who said goodbye for good on the downtown side of Forty-sixth Street. You could tell people
You don’t understand, this REALLY HAPPENED!
and it cut zero ice. They said stuff like
Well, she probably came out from behind the bus shelter and you just didn’t notice
or
She probably came out of one of the little stores and you just didn’t notice.
You could tell them that there
was
no bus shelter on the downtown side of Second and Forty-sixth (or on the uptown side, for that matter), and it did no good. You could tell them there
were
no little stores in that area, not since 2 Hammarskjöld Plaza went up, and that didn’t work, either. Trudy would soon find these things out for herself, and they would drive her close to insanity. She was not used to having her perceptions dismissed as no more than a blob of mustard or a bit of underdone potato.

No bus shelter. No little shops. There were the steps going up to Hammarskjöld Plaza, where a few late lunchers were still sitting with their brown bags, but the ghost-woman hadn’t come from there, either. The fact was this: when Trudy Damascus put her sneaker-clad left foot up on the curb, the sidewalk directly ahead of her was completely empty. As she shifted her weight preparatory to lifting her right foot up from the street, a woman appeared.

For just a moment, Trudy could see Second
Avenue through her, and something else, as well, something that looked like the mouth of a cave. Then that was gone and the woman was solidifying. It probably took only a second or two, that was Trudy’s estimate; she would later think of that old saying
If you blinked you missed it
and wish she had blinked. Because it wasn’t just the materialization.

The black lady grew legs right in front of Trudy Damascus’s eyes.

That’s right; grew legs.

There was nothing wrong with Trudy’s powers of observation, and she would later tell people (fewer and fewer of whom wanted to listen) that every detail of that brief encounter was imprinted on her memory like a tattoo. The apparition was a little over four feet tall. That was a bit on the stumpy side for an ordinary woman, Trudy supposed, but probably not for one who quit at the knees.

The apparition was wearing a white shirt, splattered with either maroon paint or dried blood, and jeans. The jeans were full and round at the thighs, where there
were
legs inside them, but below the knees they trailed out on the sidewalk like the shed skins of weird blue snakes. Then, suddenly, they plumped up.
Plumped up,
the very words sounded insane, but Trudy saw it happen. At the same moment, the woman rose from her nothing-below-the-knee four-feet-four to her all-there height of perhaps five-six or -seven. It was like watching some extraordinary camera trick in a movie, but this was no movie, it was Trudy’s
life.