castle allure. Susannah knew that if Mia lowered her jeans all the way, she’d see the scabbed and scratched shins she had already observed as Mia — the real Mia — looked out over Discordia toward the red glow marking the castle of the King.
Something about this frightened Susannah terribly, and after a moment’s consideration (it took
no longer), the reason came to her. If Mia had only replaced those parts of her legs that Odetta Holmes had lost to the subway train when Jack Mort pushed her onto the tracks she would have
been white only from the knees or so down. But her thighs were white, too, and her groin area was turning. What strange lycanthropy was this?
De body-stealin kind, Detta replied cheerfully. Pretty soon you be havin a white belly . . .
white breas’s . . . white neck . . . white cheeks . . .
Stop it, Susannah warned, but when had Detta Walker ever listened to her warnings? Hers or anybody’s?
And den, las’ of all, you have a white brain, girl! A Mia brain! And won’t dat be fahn? Sho!
You be all Mia den! Nobody give you no shit if you want to ride right up front on de bus!
Then the shirt was drawn over her hips; the jeans were again buttoned up. Mia sat down on the
toilet ring that way. In front of her, scrawled on the door, was this graffito: BANGO SKANK
AWAITS THE KING!
Who is this Bango Shank? Mia asked.
I have no idea.
I think . . . It was hard, but Mia forced herself. I think I owe you a word of thanks.
Susannah’s response was cold and immediate. Thank me with the truth.
First tell me why you ‘d help me at all, after I . . .
This time Mia couldn’t finish. She liked to think of herself as brave — as brave as she had to
be in the service of her chap, at least — but this time she couldn’t finish.
After you betrayed the man I love to men who are, when you get right down to it, footsoldiers of the Crimson King? After you decided it would be all right for them to kill mine so long as you could keep yours? Is that what you want to know?
Mia hated to hear it spoken of that way, but bore it. Had to bear it.
Yes, lady, if you like.
It was the other one who replied this time, in that voice — harsh, cawing, laughing,
triumphant, and hateful —that was even worse than the shrill laughter of the birdy-women.
Worse by far.
Because mah boys got away, dass why! Fucked those honkies mos’ righteous! The ones dey
didn’t shoot all blowed to smithereens!
Mia felt a deep stirring of unease. Whether it was true or not, the bad laughing woman clearly
believed it was true. And if Roland and Eddie Dean were still out there, wasn’t it possible the Crimson King wasn’t as strong, as all-powerful, as she had been told? Wasn’t it even possible
that she had been misled about —
Stop it, stop it, you can’t think that way!
There’s another reason I helped. The harsh one was gone and the other was back. At least for now.
What?
It’s my baby, too, Susannah said. I don’t want it killed.
I don’t believe you.
But she did. Because the woman inside was right: Mordred Deschain of Gilead and Discordia
belonged to both of them. The bad one might not care, but the other, Susannah, clearly felt the
chap’s tidal pull. And if she was right about Sayre and whoever waited for her at the Dixie Pig . .
. if they were liars and cozeners . . .
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.
NINE
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.