Dark Tower V, The Page 10

  Not Susannah. Not Detta or Odetta, either. This one calls herself Mia.

  Roland didn’t care if she called herself Queen o’ Green Days, as long as she came back safe, and the other two were still there when she did.

  He began to smell a brighter, fresher green: reeds and water-weeds. With it came the smell of mud, the thump of frogs, the sarcastic hool! hool! salute of an owl, the splash of water as something jumped. This was followed by a thin shriek as something died, maybe the jumper, maybe the jumped-upon. Underbrush began to spring up in the duff, first dotting it and then crowding it out. The tree-cover thinned. Mosquitoes and chiggers whined. Binnie-bugs stitched the air. The bog-smells grew stronger.

  The wheels of the chair had passed over the duff without leaving any trace. As duff gave way to straggling low growth, Roland began to see broken twigs and torn-off leaves marking her passage. Then, as she reached the more or less level low ground, the wheels began to sink into the increasingly soft earth. Twenty paces farther on, he began to see liquid seeping into the tracks. She was too wise to get stuck, though—too crafty. Twenty paces beyond the first signs of seepage, he came to the wheelchair itself, abandoned. Lying on the seat were her pants and shirt. She had gone on into the bog naked save for the leather caps that covered her stumps.

  Down here there were ribbons of mist hanging over puddles of standing water. Grassy hummocks rose; on one, wired to a dead log that had been planted upright, was what Roland at first took for an ancient stuffy-guy. When he got closer, he saw it was a human skeleton. The skull’s forehead had been smashed inward, leaving a triangle of darkness between the staring sockets. Some sort of primitive war-club had made that wound, no doubt, and the corpse (or its lingering spirit) had been left to mark this as the edge of some tribe’s territory. They were probably long dead or moved on, but caution was ever a virtue. Roland drew his gun and continued after the woman, stepping from hummock to hummock, wincing at the occasional jab of pain in his right hip. It took all his concentration and agility to keep up with her. Partly this was because she hadn’t Roland’s interest in staying as dry as possible. She was as naked as a mermaid and moved like one, as comfortable in the muck and swamp-ooze as on dry land. She crawled over the larger hummocks, slid through the water between them, pausing every now and then to pick off a leech. In the darkness, the walking and sliding seemed to merge into a single slithering motion that was eely and disturbing.

  She went on perhaps a quarter of a mile into the increasingly oozy bog with the gunslinger following patiently along behind her. He kept as quiet as possible, although he doubted if there was any need; the part of her that saw and felt and thought was far from here.

  At last she came to a halt, standing on her truncated legs and holding to tough tangles of brush on either side in order to keep her balance. She looked out over the black surface of a pond, head up, body still. The gunslinger couldn’t tell if the pond was big or small; its borders were lost in the mist. Yet there was light here, some sort of faint and unfocused radiance which seemed to lie just beneath the surface of the water itself, perhaps emanating from submerged and slowly rotting logs.

  She stood there, surveying this muck-crusted woodland pond like a queen surveying a…a what? What did she see? A banquet hall? That was what he had come to believe. Almost to see. It was a whisper from her mind to his, and it dovetailed with what she said and did. The banqueting hall was her mind’s ingenious way of keeping Susannah apart from Mia as it had kept Odetta apart from Detta all those years. Mia might have any number of reasons for wanting to keep her existence a secret, but surely the greatest of these had to do with the life she carried inside her.

  The chap, she called it.

  Then, with a suddenness that still startled him (although he had seen this before, as well), she began to hunt, slipping in eerie splashless silence first along the edge of the pond and then a little way out into it. Roland watched her with an expression that contained both horror and lust as she knitted and wove her way in and out of the reeds, between and over the tussocks. Now, instead of picking the leeches off her skin and throwing them away, she tossed them into her mouth like pieces of candy. The muscles in her thighs rippled. Her brown skin gleamed like wet silk. When she turned (Roland had by this time stepped behind a tree and become one of the shadows), he could clearly see the way her breasts had ripened.

  The problem, of course, extended beyond “the chap.” There was Eddie to consider, as well. What the hell’s wrong with you, Roland? Roland could hear him saying. That might be our kid. I mean, you can’t know for sure that it isn’t. Yeah, yeah, I know something had her while we were yanking Jake through, but that doesn’t necessarily mean…

  On and on and on, blah-blah-blah as Eddie himself might say, and why? Because he loved her and would want the child of their union. And because arguing came as naturally to Eddie Dean as breathing. Cuthbert had been the same.

  In the reeds, the naked woman’s hand pistoned forward and seized a good-sized frog. She squeezed and the frog popped, squirting guts and a shiny load of eggs between her fingers. Its head burst. She lifted it to her mouth and ate it greedily down while its greenish-white rear legs still twitched, licking the blood and shiny ropes of tissue from her knuckles. Then she mimed throwing something down and cried out “How you like that, you stinkin Blue Lady?” in a low, guttural voice that made Roland shiver. It was Detta Walker’s voice. Detta at her meanest and craziest.

  With hardly a pause she moved on again, questing. Next it was a small fish…then another frog…and then a real prize: a water-rat that squeaked and writhed and tried to bite. She crushed the life out of it and stuffed it into her mouth, paws and all. A moment later she bent her head down and regurgitated the waste—a twisted mass of fur and splintered bones.

  Show him this, then—always assuming that he and Jake get back from whatever adventure they’re on, that is. And say, “I know that women are supposed to have strange cravings when they carry a child, Eddie, but doesn’t this seem a little too strange? Look at her, questing through the reeds and ooze like some sort of human alligator. Look at her and tell me she’s doing that in order to feed your child. Any human child.”

  Still he would argue. Roland knew it. What he didn’t know was what Susannah herself might do when Roland told her she was growing something that craved raw meat in the middle of the night. And as if this business wasn’t worrisome enough, now there was todash. And strangers who had come looking for them. Yet the strangers were the least of his problems. In fact, he found their presence almost comforting. He didn’t know what they wanted, and yet he did know. He had met them before, many times. At bottom, they always wanted the same thing.

  Eight

  Now the woman who called herself Mia began to talk as she hunted. Roland was familiar with this part of her ritual as well, but it chilled him nevertheless. He was looking right at her and it was still hard to believe all those different voices could be coming from the same throat. She asked herself how she was. She told herself she was doing fine, thank you so vereh much. She spoke of someone named Bill, or perhaps it was Bull. She asked after someone’s mother. She asked someone about a place called Morehouse, and then in a deep, gravelly voice—a man’s voice, beyond doubt—she told herself that she didn’t go to Morehouse or no house. She laughed raucously at this, so it must have been some sort of joke. She introduced herself several times (as she had on other nights) as Mia, a name Roland knew well from his early life in Gilead. It was almost a holy name. Twice she curtsied, lifting invisible skirts in a way that tugged at the gunslinger’s heart—he had first seen that sort of curtsy in Mejis, when he and his friends Alain and Cuthbert had been sent there by their fathers.

  She worked her way back to the edge of the

  (hall)

  pond, glistening and wet. She stayed there without moving for five minutes, then ten. The owl uttered its derisive salute again—hool!—and as if in response, the moon came out of the clou
ds for a brief look around. When it did, some small animal’s bit of shady concealment disappeared. It tried to dart past the woman. She snared it faultlessly and plunged her face into its writhing belly. There was a wet crunching noise, followed by several smacking bites. She held the remains up in the moonlight, her dark hands and wrists darker with its blood. Then she tore it in half and bolted down the remains. She gave a resounding belch and rolled herself back into the water. This time she made a great splash, and Roland knew tonight’s banqueting was done. She had even eaten some of the binnie-bugs, snatching them effortlessly out of the air. He could only hope nothing she’d taken in would sicken her. So far, nothing had.

  While she made her rough toilet, washing off the mud and blood, Roland retreated back the way he’d come, ignoring the more frequent pains in his hip and moving with all his guile. He had watched her go through this three times before, and once had been enough to see how gruesomely sharp her senses were while in this state.

  He paused at her wheelchair, looking around to make sure he’d left no trace of himself. He saw a bootprint, smoothed it away, then tossed a few leaves over it for good measure. Not too many; too many might be worse than none at all. With that done, he headed back toward the road and their camp, not hurrying anymore. She would pause for a little housekeeping of her own before going on. What would Mia see as she was cleaning Susannah’s wheelchair, he wondered? Some sort of small, motorized cart? It didn’t matter. What did was how clever she was. If he hadn’t awakened with a need to make water just as she left on one of her earlier expeditions, he quite likely still wouldn’t know about her hunting trips, and he was supposed to be clever about such things.

  Not as clever as she, maggot. Now, as if the ghost of Vannay were not enough, here was Cort to lecture him. She’s shown you before, hasn’t she?

  Yes. She had shown him cleverness as three women. Now there was this fourth.

  Nine

  When Roland saw the break in the trees ahead—the road they’d been following, and the place where they’d camped for the night—he took two long, deep breaths. These were meant to steady him and didn’t succeed very well.

  Water if God wills it, he reminded himself. About the great matters, Roland, you have no say.

  Not a comfortable truth, especially for a man on a quest such as his, but one he’d learned to live with.

  He took another breath, then stepped out. He released the air in a long, relieved sigh as he saw Eddie and Jake lying deeply asleep beside the dead fire. Jake’s right hand, which had been linked with Eddie’s left when the gunslinger had followed Susannah out of camp, now circled Oy’s body.

  The bumbler opened one eye and regarded Roland. Then he closed it again.

  Roland couldn’t hear her coming, but sensed her just the same. He lay down quickly, rolled over onto his side, and put his face in the crook of his elbow. And from this position he watched as the wheelchair rolled out of the trees. She had cleaned it quickly but well. Roland couldn’t see a single spot of mud. The spokes gleamed in the moonlight.

  She parked the chair where it had been before, slipped out of it with her usual grace, and moved across to where Eddie lay. Roland watched her approach her husband’s sleeping form with some anxiety. Anyone, he thought, who had met Detta Walker would have felt that anxiety. Because the woman who called herself mother was simply too close to what Detta had been.

  Lying completely still, like one in sleep’s deepest sling, Roland prepared himself to move.

  Then she brushed the hair back from the side of Eddie’s face and kissed the hollow of his temple. The tenderness in that gesture told the gunslinger all he needed to know. It was safe to sleep. He closed his eyes and let the darkness take him.

  Chapter IV:

  Palaver

  One

  When Roland woke in the morning, Susannah was still asleep but Eddie and Jake were up. Eddie had built a small new fire on the gray bones of the old one. He and the boy sat close to it for the warmth, eating what Eddie called gunslinger burritos. They looked both excited and worried.

  “Roland,” Eddie said, “I think we need to talk. Something happened to us last night—”

  “I know,” Roland said. “I saw. You went todash.”

  “Todash?” Jake asked. “What’s that?”

  Roland started to tell them, then shook his head. “If we’re going to palaver, Eddie, you’d better wake Susannah up. That way we won’t have to double back over the first part.” He glanced south. “And hopefully our new friends won’t interrupt us until we’ve had our talk. They’re none of this.” But already he was wondering about that.

  He watched with more than ordinary interest as Eddie shook Susannah awake, quite sure but by no means positive that it would be Susannah who opened her eyes. It was. She sat up, stretched, ran her fingers through her tight curls. “What’s your problem, honeychile? I was good for another hour, at least.”

  “We need to talk, Suze,” Eddie said.

  “All you want, but not quite yet,” she said. “God, but I’m stiff.”

  “Sleeping on hard ground’ll do it every time,” Eddie said.

  Not to mention hunting naked in the bogs and damps, Roland thought.

  “Pour me some water, sug.” She held out her palms, and Eddie filled them with water from one of the skins. She dashed this over her cheeks and into her eyes, gave out a little shivery cry, and said, “Cold.”

  “Old!” Oy said.

  “Not yet,” she told the bumbler, “but you give me a few more months like the last few, and I will be. Roland, you Mid-World folks know about coffee, right?”

  Roland nodded. “From the plantations of the Outer Arc. Down south.”

  “If we come across some, we’ll hook it, won’t we? You promise me, now.”

  “I promise,” Roland said.

  Susannah, meanwhile, was studying Eddie. “What’s going on? You boys don’t look so good.”

  “More dreams,” Eddie said.

  “Me too,” Jake said.

  “Not dreams,” the gunslinger said. “Susannah, how did you sleep?”

  She looked at him candidly. Roland did not sense even the shadow of a lie in her answer. “Like a rock, as I usually do. One thing all this traveling is good for—you can throw your damn Nembutal away.”

  “What’s this toadish thing, Roland?” Eddie asked.

  “Todash,” he said, and explained it to them as well as he could. What he remembered best from Vannay’s teachings was how the Manni spent long periods fasting in order to induce the right state of mind, and how they traveled around, looking for exactly the right spot in which to induce the todash state. This was something they determined with magnets and large plumb-bobs.

  “Sounds to me like these guys would have been right at home down in Needle Park,” Eddie said.

  “Anywhere in Greenwich Village,” Susannah added.

  “ ‘Sounds Hawaiian, doesn’t it?’ ” Jake said in a grave, deep voice, and they all laughed. Even Roland laughed a little.

  “Todash is another way of traveling,” Eddie said when the laughter had stopped. “Like the doors. And the glass balls. Is that right?”

  Roland started to say yes, then hesitated. “I think they might all be variations of the same thing,” he said. “And according to Vannay, the glass balls—the pieces of the Wizard’s Rainbow—make going todash easier. Sometimes too easy.”

  Jake said, “We really flickered on and off like…like lightbulbs? What you call sparklights?”

  “Yes—you appeared and disappeared. When you were gone, there was a dim glow where you’d been, almost as if something were holding your place for you.”

  “Thank God if it was,” Eddie said. “When it ended…when those chimes started playing again and we kicked loose…I’ll tell you the truth, I didn’t think we were going to get back.”

  “Neither did I,” Jake said quietly. The sky had clouded over again, and in the dull mor
ning light, the boy looked very pale. “I lost you.”

  “I was never so glad to see anyplace in my life as I was when I opened my eyes and saw this little piece of road,” Eddie said. “And you beside me, Jake. Even Rover looked good to me.” He glanced at Oy, then over at Susannah. “Nothing like this happened to you last night, hon?”

  “We’d have seen her,” Jake said.

  “Not if she todashed off to someplace else,” Eddie said.

  Susannah shook her head, looking troubled. “I just slept the night away. As I told you. What about you, Roland?”

  “Nothing to report,” Roland said. As always, he would keep his own counsel until his instinct told him it was time to share. And besides, what he’d said wasn’t exactly a lie. He looked keenly at Eddie and Jake. “There’s trouble, isn’t there?”

  Eddie and Jake looked at each other, then back at Roland. Eddie sighed. “Yeah, probably.”

  “How bad? Do you know?”

  “I don’t think we do. Do we, Jake?”

  Jake shook his head.

  “But I’ve got some ideas,” Eddie went on, “and if I’m right, we’ve got a problem. A big one.” He swallowed. Hard. Jake touched his hand, and the gunslinger was concerned to see how quickly and firmly Eddie took hold of the boy’s fingers.

  Roland reached out and drew Susannah’s hand into his own. He had a brief vision of that hand seizing a frog and squeezing the guts out of it. He put it out of his mind. The woman who had done that was not here now.

  “Tell us,” he said to Eddie and Jake. “Tell us everything. We would hear it all.”

  “Every word,” Susannah agreed. “For your fathers’ sakes.”

  Two

  They recounted what had happened to them in the New York of 1977. Roland and Susannah listened, fascinated, as they told of following Jake to the bookstore, and of seeing Balazar and his gentlemen pull up in front.