Song of Susannah dt-6 Read online

  Eddie got in. Roland paused for a moment to tap his throat three times. Eddie had seen him perform this ritual before when about to cross open water, and reminded himself to ask about it. He never got the chance; before the question occurred to him again, death had slipped between them.

  Five

  The skiff moved as quietly and as gracefully over the water as any motor-powered thing can, skating on its own reflection beneath a sky of summer’s most pellucid blue. Behind them the plume of dark smoke sullied that blue, rising higher and higher, spreading as it went. Dozens of folk, most of them in shorts or bathing costumes, stood upon the banks of this little lake, turned in the smoke’s direction, hands raised to shade against the sun. Few if any marked the steady (and completely unshowy) passage of the motorboat.

  “This is Keywadin Pond, just in case you were wonderin,” John said. He pointed ahead of them, where another gray tongue of dock stuck out. Beside this one was a neat little boathouse, white with green trim, its overhead door open. As they neared it, Roland and Eddie could see both a canoe and a kayak bobbing inside, at tether.

  “Boathouse is mine,” the man in the flannel shirt added. Theboat inboathouse came out in a way impossible to reproduce with mere letters—bwutwould probably come closest—but which both men recognized. It was the way the word was spoken in the Calla.

  “Looks well-kept,” Eddie said. Mostly to be sayingsomething.

  “Oh, ayuh,” John said. “I do caretakin, camp-checkin, some rough carpenterin. Wouldn’t look good f’business if I had a fallin-down boathouse, would it?”

  Eddie smiled. “Suppose not.”

  “My place is about half a mile back from the water. Name’s John Cullum.” He held out his right hand to Roland, continuing to steer a straight course away from the rising pillar of smoke and toward the boathouse with the other.

  Roland took the hand, which was pleasantly rough. “I’m Roland Deschain, of Gilead. Long days and pleasant nights, John.”

  Eddie put out his own hand in turn. “Eddie Dean, from Brooklyn. Nice to meet you.”

  John shook with him easily enough but his eyes studied Eddie closely. When their hands parted, he said: “Young fella, did somethin just happen? It did, didn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” Eddie said. Not with complete honesty.

  “You ain’t been to Brooklyn for a long time, son, have you?”

  “Ain’t been to Morehouse or tono house,” Eddie Dean said, and then quickly, before he could lose it: “Mia’s locked Susannah away. Locked her away in the year of ’99. Suze can get to the Dogan, but going there’s no good. Mia’s locked off the controls. There’s nothing Suze can do. She’s kidnapped. She…she…”

  He stopped. For a moment everything had been soclear, like a dream upon the instant of waking. Then, as so often happens with dreams, it faded. He didn’t even know if it had been a real message from Susannah, or pure imagination.

  Young fella, did somethin just happen?

  So Cullum had felt it, too. Not imagination, then. Some form of the touch seemed more likely.

  John waited, and when there was no more from Eddie, turned to Roland. “Does your pal come over funny that way often?”

  “Not often, no. Sai…Mister,I mean. Mister Cullum, I thank you for helping us when we needed help. I thank ya big-big. It would be monstrous impudent of us to ask for more, but—”

  “But you’re gonna. Ayuh, figgered.” John made a minute course correction toward the little boathouse with its square open mouth. Roland estimated they’d be there in five minutes. That was fine by him. He had no objection to riding in this tight little motor-powered boat (even though it rode rather low in the water with the weight of three grown men inside), but Keywadin Pond was far too exposed for his taste. If Jack Andolini (or his successor, should Jack be replaced) asked enough of those shore-gawkers, he would eventually find a few who remembered the little skiff with the three men in it. And the boathouse with the neat green trim.John Cullum’s bwut-huss, may it do ya fine, these witnesses would say. Best they should be farther along the Beam before that happened, with John Cullum packed off to somewhere safe. Roland judged “safe” in this case to be perhaps three looks to the horizon-line, or about a hundred wheels. He had no doubt that Cullum, a total stranger, had saved their lives by stepping in decisively at the right moment. The last thing he wanted was for the man to lose his own as a result.

  “Well, I’ll do what I can for ya, already made up m’mind to that, but I got to ask you somethin now, while I got the chance.”

  Eddie and Roland exchanged a brief look. Roland said, “We’ll answer if we can. Which is to say, John of East Stoneham, if we judge that the answer won’t cause you harm.”

  John nodded. He seemed to gather himself. “I know you’re not ghosts, because we all saw you back at the store and I just now touched you to shake hands. I can see the shadders you cast.” He pointed at where they lay across the side of the boat. “Real as real. So my question is this: are you walk-ins?”

  “Walk-ins,” Eddie said. He looked at Roland, but Roland’s face was completely blank. Eddie looked back at John Cullum, sitting in the stern of the boat and steering them toward the boathouse. “I’m sorry, but I don’t…”

  “Been a lot of em around here, last few years,” John said. “Waterford, Stoneham, East Stoneham, Lovell, Sweden…even over in Bridgton and Denmark.” This last township name came outDenmaa-aaak.

  He saw they were still puzzled.

  “Walk-ins’re people who justappear, ” he said. “Sometimes they’re dressed in old-fashioned clothes, as if they came from…ago,I guess you’d say. One was nekkid as a jay-bird, walkin right up the middle of Route 5. Junior Angstrom seen im. Last November this was. Sometimes they talk other languages. One came to Don Russert’s house over in Waterford. Sat right there in the kitchen! Donnie’s a retired history professor from Vanderbilt College and he taped the fella. Fella jabbered quite awhile, then went into the laundry room. Donnie figured he must’a taken it for the bathroom and went after him to turn him around, but the fella was already gone. No door for him to go out of, but gone he was.

  “Donnie played that tape of his for just about everyone in the Vandy Languages Department (Depaaa-aatment), and wasn’t none of em recognized it. One said it must be a completely made-up language, like Esperanto. Do you sabby Esperanto, boys?”

  Roland shook his head. Eddie said (cautiously), “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t really know what it i—”

  “And sometimes,” John said, his voice lowering as they glided into the shadows of the boathouse, “sometimes they’re hurt. Or disfigured. Roont.”

  Roland started so suddenly and so hard that the boat rocked. For a moment they were actually in danger of being tipped out. “What? What do you say? Speak again, John, for I would hear it very well.”

  John apparently thought it was purely an issue of verbal comprehension, because this time he was at pains to pronounce the word more carefully. “Ruined.Like folks who’d been in a nuclear war, or a fallout zone, or something.”

  “Slow mutants,” Roland said. “I think he might be talking about slow muties. Here in this town.”

  Eddie nodded, thinking about the Grays and Pubes in Lud. Also thinking about a misshapen beehive and the monstrous insects which had been crawling over it.

  John killed the little Evinrude engine, but for a moment the three of them sat where they were, listening to water slap hollowly against the aluminum sides of the boat.

  “Slow mutants,” the old fellow said, almost seeming to taste the words. “Ayuh, I guess that’d be as good a name for em as any. But they ain’t the only ones. There’s been animals, too, and kinds of birds no one’s ever seen in these parts. But mostly it’s the walk-ins that’ve got people worried and talkin amongst themselves. Donnie Russert called someone he knew at Duke University, and that fella called someone in their Department of Psychic Studies—amazin they’ve got such a thing as that in a real college, but it app
ears they do—and the Psychic Studies woman said that’s what such folks are called: walk-ins. And then, when they disappear again—which they always do, except for one fella over in East Conway Village, who died—they’re called walk-outs.The lady said that some scientists who study such things—I guess you could call em scientists, although I know a lot of folks might argue—b’lieve that walk-ins are aliens from other planets, that spaceships drop em off and then pick em up again, but most of em think they’re time-travelers, or from different Earths that lie in a line with ours.”

  “How long has this been going on?” Eddie asked. “How long have the walk-ins been showing up?”

  “Oh, two or three years. And it’s gettin worse ruther’n better. I seen a couple of such fellas myself, and once a woman with a bald head who looked like she had this bleedin eye in the middle of her forread. But they was all at a distance, and you fellas are up close.”

  John leaned toward them over his bony knees, his eyes (as blue as Roland’s own) gleaming. Water slapped hollowly at the boat. Eddie felt a strong urge to take John Cullum’s hand again, to see if something else would happen. There was another Dylan song called “Visions of Johanna.” What Eddie wanted was not a vision of Johanna, but the name was at least close to that.

  “Ayuh,” John was saying, “you boys are right up close and personal. Now, I’ll help you along your way if I can, because I don’t sense nothing the least bit bad about either of you (although I’m going to tell you flat out that I ain’tnever seen such shooting), but I want to know: are you walk-ins or not?”

  Once more Roland and Eddie exchanged looks, and then Roland answered. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose we are.”

  “Gorry,” John whispered. In his awe, not even his seamed face could keep him from looking like a child. “Walk-ins! And where is it you’re from, can you tell me that?” He looked at Eddie, laughed the way people do when they are admitting you’ve put a good one over on them, and said: “NotBrooklyn. ”

  “But Iam from Brooklyn,” Eddie said. The only thing was it hadn’t beenthis world’s Brooklyn, and he knew that now. In the world he came from, a children’s book namedCharlie the Choo-Choo had been written by a woman named Beryl Evans; in this one it had been written by someone named Claudia y Inez Bachman. Beryl Evans sounded real and Claudia y Inez Bachman sounded phony as a three-dollar bill, yet Eddie was coming more and more to believe that Bachman was the true handle. And why? Because it came as part of this world.

  “Iam from Brooklyn, though. Just not the…well…the same one.”

  John Cullum was still looking at them with that wide-eyed child’s expression of wonder. “What about those other fellas? The ones who were waiting for you? Are they…?”

  “No,” Roland said. “Not they. No more time for this, John—not now.” He got cautiously to his feet, grabbed an overhead beam, and stepped out of the boat with a little wince of pain. John followed and Eddie came last. The two other men had to help him. The steady throb in his right calf had receded a little bit, but the leg was stiff and numb, hard to control.

  “Let’s go to your place,” Roland said. “There’s a man we need to find. With the blessing, you may be able to help us do that.”

  He may be able to help us in more ways than that,Eddie thought, and followed them back into the sunlight, gimping along on his bad leg with his teeth gritted.

  At that moment, Eddie thought he would have slain a saint in exchange for a dozen aspirin tablets.

  STAVE: Commala-loaf-leaven!

  They go to hell or up to heaven!

  When the guns are shot and the fire’s hot,

  You got to poke em in the oven.

  RESPONSE: Commala-come-seven!

  Salt and yow’ for leaven!

  Heat em up and knock em down

  And poke em in the oven.

  8th Stanza: A Game of Toss

  One

  In the winter of 1984—85, when Eddie’s heroin use was quietly sneaking across the border from the Land of Recreational Drugs and into the Kingdom of Really Bad Habits, Henry Dean met a girl and fell briefly in love. Eddie thought Sylvia Goldover was a SkankEl Supremo (smelly armpits and dragon breath wafting out from between a pair of Mick Jagger lips), but kept his mouth shut becauseHenry thought she was beautiful, and Eddie didn’t want to hurt Henry’s feelings. That winter the young lovers spent a lot of time either walking on the windswept beach at Coney Island or going to the movies in Times Square, where they would sit in the back row and wank each other off once the popcorn and the extra-large box of Goobers were gone.

  Eddie was philosophic about the new person in Henry’s life; if Henry could work his way past that awful breath and actually tangle tongues with Sylvia Goldover, more power to him. Eddie himself spent a lot of those mostly gray three months alone and stoned in the Dean family apartment. He didn’t mind; liked it, in fact. If Henry had been there, he would have insisted on TV and would have ragged Eddie constantly about his story-tapes. (“Oh boy! Eddie’s gonna wissen to his wittle sto-wy about theelves and theogs and the cute wittlemidgets! ”) Always calling the orcs the ogs, and always calling the Ents “the scawwy walkingtwees. ” Henry thought made-up shit was queer. Eddie had sometimes tried to tell him there was nothing more made-up than the crud they showed on afternoon TV, but Henry wasn’t having any of that; Henry could tell you all about the evil twins onGeneral Hospital and the equally evil stepmother onThe Guiding Light.

  In many ways, Henry Dean’s great love affair—which ended when Sylvia Goldover stole ninety bucks out of his wallet, left a note sayingI’m sorry, Henry in its place, and took off for points unknown with herold boyfriend—was a relief to Eddie. He’d sit on the sofa in the living room, put on the tapes of John Gielgud reading Tolkien’sRings trilogy, skin-pop along the inside of his right arm, and nod off to the Forests of Mirkwood or the Mines of Moria along with Frodo and Sam.

  He’d loved the hobbits, thought he could have cheerfully spent the rest of his life in Hobbiton, where the worst drug going was tobacco and big brothers did not spend entire days ragging on little brothers, and John Cullum’s little cottage in the woods returned him to those days and that dark-toned story with surprising force. Because the cottage had a hobbit-hole feel about it. The furniture in the living room was small but perfect: a sofa and two overstuffed chairs with those white doilies on the arms and where the back of your head would rest. The gold-framed black-and-white photograph on one wall had to be Cullum’s folks, and the one opposite it had to be his grandparents. There was a framed Certificate of Thanks from the East Stoneham Volunteer Fire Department. There was a parakeet in a cage, twittering amiably, and a cat on the hearth. She raised her head when they came in, gazed greenly at the strangers for a moment, then appeared to go back to sleep. There was a standing ashtray beside what had to be Cullum’s easy chair, and in it were two pipes, one a corncob and the other a briar. There was an old-fashioned Emerson record-player/radio (the radio of the type featuring a multi-band dial and a large knurled tuning knob) but no television. The room smelled pleasantly of tobacco and potpourri. As fabulously neat as it was, a single glance was enough to tell you that the man who lived here wasn’t married. John Cullum’s parlor was a modest ode to the joys of bachelorhood.

  “How’s your leg?” John asked. “ ’Pears to have stopped bleeding, at least, but you got a pretty good hitch in your gitalong.”

  Eddie laughed. “It hurts like a son of a bitch, but I can walk on it, so I guess that makes me lucky.”

  “Bathroom’s in there, if you want to wash up,” Cullum said, and pointed.

  “Think I better,” Eddie said.

  The washing-up was painful but also a relief. The wound in his leg was deep, but seemed to have totally missed the bone. The one in his arm was even less of a problem; the bullet had gone right through, praise God, and there was hydrogen peroxide in Cullum’s medicine cabinet. Eddie poured it into the hole, teeth bared at the pain, and then went ahead and used the stuff on both his leg a
nd the laceration in his scalp before he could lose his courage. He tried to remember if Frodo and Sam had had to face anything even close to the horrors of hydrogen peroxide, and couldn’t come up with anything. Well, of course they’d had elves to heal them, hadn’t they?

  “I got somethin might help out,” Cullum said when Eddie re-appeared. The old guy disappeared into the next room and returned with a brown prescription bottle. There were three pills inside it. He tipped them into Eddie’s palm and said, “This is from when I fell down on the ice last winter and busted my goddam collarbone. Percodan, it’s called. I dunno if there’s any good left in em or not, but—”

  Eddie brightened. “Percodan, huh?” he asked, and tossed the pills into his mouth before John Cullum could answer.

  “Don’t you want some water with those, son?”

  “Nope,” Eddie said, chewing enthusiastically. “Neat’s a treat.”

  A glass case full of baseballs stood on a table beside the fireplace, and Eddie wandered over to look at it. “Oh my God,” he said, “you’ve got a signed Mel Parnell ball! And a Lefty Grove! Holy shit!”

  “Those ain’t nothing,” Cullum said, picking up the briar pipe. “Look up on t’ top shelf.” He took a sack of Prince Albert tobacco from the drawer of an endtable and began to fill his pipe. As he did so, he caught Roland watching him. “Do ya smoke?”

  Roland nodded. From his shirt pocket he took a single bit of leaf. “P’raps I might roll one.”

  “Oh, I can do ya better than that,” Cullum said, and left the room again. The room beyond was a study not much bigger than a closet. Although the Dickens desk in it was small, Cullum had to sidle his way around it.

  “Holy shit,” Eddie said, seeing the baseball Cullum must have meant. “Autographed by the Babe!”

  “Ayuh,” Cullum said. “Not when he was a Yankee, either, I got no use for baseballs autographed by Yankees. That ’us signed when Ruth was still wearing a Red Sox…” He broke off. “Here they are, knew I had em. Might be stale, but it’s a lot staler where there’s none, my mother used to say. Here you go, mister. My nephew left em. He ain’t hardly old enough to smoke, anyway.”