“Beds!” Susannah said, startled. Beyond them, the ghostly woman in the street rose once more on the balls of her feet and made yet one more graceful pirouette.
“Aye, for the children, although this was still long years before the Wolves began to bring em here, and long before you were part of your dinh’s story. Yet that time did draw nigh, and Walter came to me.”
“Can you make that woman in the street disappear?” Susannah asked abruptly (and rather crossly). “I know she’s a version of you, I get the idea, but she makes me . . . I don’t know . . .
nervous. Can you make her go away?”
“Aye, if you like.” Mia pursed her lips and blew. The disturbingly beautiful woman — the spirit without a name —disappeared like smoke.
For several moments Mia was quiet, once more gathering the threads of her story. Then she
said, “Walter . . . saw me. Not like other men. Even the ones I fucked to death only saw what they wanted to see. Or what I wanted them to see.” She smiled in unpleasant reminiscence. “I made some of them die thinking they were fucking their own mothers! You should have seen
their faces!” Then the smile faded. “But Walter saw me.”
“What did he look like?”
“Hard to tell, Susannah. He wore a hood, and inside it he grinned — such a grinning man he was — and he palavered with me. There.” She pointed toward the Fedic Good-Time Saloon with a finger that trembled slightly.
“No mark on his forehead, though?”
“Nay, I’m sure not, for he’s not one of what Pere Callahan calls the low men. Their job is the Breakers. The Breakers and no more.”
Susannah began to feel the anger then, although she tried not to show it. Mia had access to all her memories, which meant all the inmost workings and secrets of their ka-tet. It was like
discovering you’d had a burglar in the house who had tried on your underwear as well as stealing your money and going through your most personal papers.
It was awful.
“Walter is, I suppose, what you’d call the Crimson King’s Prime Minister. He often travels in disguise, and is known in other worlds under other names, but always he is a grinning, laughing man — ”
“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.”
TWELVE
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