Song of Susannah dt-6 Read online

  He looked at Oy and thought,Do me a favor and don’t say anything, okay? Jake can maybe pass you off as some new kind of Corgi or Border Collie hybrid, but the minute you start talking, that goes out the window. So do me a favor and don’t.

  “Good boy,” said Harrigan, and after Jake’s friend miraculously didnot respond by saying “Oy!” the preacher straightened up. “I have something for you, Father Don. Just a minute.”

  “Sir, we really have to—”

  “I have something for you, too, son—praise Jesus, say dear Lord! But first…this won’t take but a second…”

  Harrigan ran to open the side door of his illegally parked old Dodge van, ducked inside, rummaged.

  Callahan bore this for awhile, but the sense of passing seconds quickly became too much. “Sir, I’m sorry, but—”

  “Herethey are!” Harrigan exclaimed and backed out of the van with the first two fingers of his right hand stuck into the heels of a pair of battered brown loafers. “If you’re less than a size twelve, we can stuff em with newspaper. More, and I guess you’re out of luck.”

  “A twelve is exactly what I am,” Callahan said, and ventured a praise-God as well as a thank-you. He was actually most comfortable in size eleven and a half shoes, but these were close enough, and he slipped them on with genuine gratitude. “And now we—”

  Harrigan turned to the boy and said, “The woman you’re after got into a cab right where we had our little dust-up, and no more than half an hour ago.” He grinned at Jake’s rapidly changing expression—first astonishment, then delight. “She said the other one is in charge, that you’d know who the other one was, and where the other one is taking her.”

  “Yeah, to the Dixie Pig,” Jake said. “Lex and Sixty-first. Pere, we might still have time to catch her, but only if we go right now. She—”

  “No,” Harrigan said. “The woman who spoke to me—inside my head she spoke to me and clear as a bell, praise Jesus—said you were to go to the hotel first.”

  “Which hotel?” Callahan asked.

  Harrigan pointed down Forty-sixth Street to the Plaza—Park Hyatt. “That’s the only one in the neighborhood…and that’s the direction she came from.”

  “Thank you,” Callahan said. “Did she say why we were to go there?”

  “No,” Harrigan said serenely, “I believe right around then the other one caught her blabbing and shut her up. Then into the taxi and away she went!”

  “Speaking of moving on—” Jake began.

  Harrigan nodded, but also raised an admonitory finger. “By all means, but remember that the God-bombs are going to fall. Never mind the showers of blessing—that’s for Methodist wimps and Episcopalian scuzzballs! Thebombs are gonna fall! And boys?”

  They turned back to him.

  “I know you fellas are as much God’s human children as I am, for I’ve smelled your sweat, praise Jesus. But what about the lady? The lay-dees,for in truth I b’lieve there were two of em. What aboutthem ?”

  “The woman you met’s with us,” Callahan said after a brief hesitation. “She’s okay.”

  “I wonder about that,” Harrigan said. “The Book says—praise God and praise His Holy Word—to beware of the strange woman, for her lips drip as does the honeycomb but her feet go down to death and her steps take hold on hell. Remove thy way from her and come not nigh the door of her house.” He had raised one lumpy hand in a benedictory gesture as he offered this. Now he lowered it and shrugged.

  “That ain’t exact, I don’t have the memory for scripture that I did when I was younger and Bible-shoutin down south with my Daddy, but I think you get the drift.”

  “Book of Proverbs,” Callahan said.

  Harrigan nodded. “Chapter five, sayGawd. ” Then he turned and contemplated the building which rose into the night sky behind him. Jake started away, but Callahan stayed him with a touch…although when Jake raised his eyebrows, Callahan could only shake his head. No, he didn’t know why. All he knew was that they weren’t quite through with Harrigan yet.

  “This is a city stuffed with sin and sick with transgression,” the preacher said at last. “Sodom on the halfshell, Gomorrah on a graham cracker, ready for the God-bomb that will surely fall from the skies, say hallelujah, say sweet Jesus and gimme amen. But this right here is a good place. Agood place. Can you boys feel it?”

  “Yes,” Jake said.

  “Can youhear it?”

  “Yes,” Jake and Callahan said together.

  “Amen! I thought it would all stop when they tore down the little deli that stood here years and years ago. But it didn’t. Those angelic voices—”

  “So speaks Gan along the Beam,” Jake said.

  Callahan turned to him and saw the boy’s head cocked to one side, his face wearing the calm look of entrancement.

  Jake said: “So speaks Gan, and in the voice of the can calah, which some call angels. Gan denies the can toi; with the merry heart of the guiltless he denies the Crimson King and Discordia itself.”

  Callahan looked at him with wide eyes—frightened eyes—but Harrigan nodded matter-of-factly, as if he had heard it all before. Perhaps he had. “There was a vacant lot after the deli, and then they built this. Two Hammarskjöld Plaza. And I thought, ‘Well,that’ll end it and then I’ll move on, for Satan’s grip is strong and his hoof prints leave deep tracks in the ground, and there no flower will bloom and no grain will grow.’ Can you saysee -lah?” He raised his arms, his gnarly old man’s hands, trembling with the outriders of Parkinson’s, turned upward to the sky in that open immemorial gesture of praise and surrender. “Yet still it sings,” he said, and dropped them.

  “Selah,” Callahan murmured. “You say true, we say thank ya.”

  “Itis a flower,” Harrigan said, “for once I went in there to see. In the lobby, somebody say hallelujah, I say in thelobby between the doors to the street and the elevators to those upper floors where God knows how much dollarbill fuckery is done, there’s a little garden growing in the sun which falls through the tall windows, a garden behind velvet ropes, and the sign says GIVEN BY THE TET CORPORATION, IN HONOR OF THE BEAME FAMILY, AND IN MEMORY OF GILEAD. ”

  “Does it?” Jake said, and his face lit with a glad smile. “Do you say so, sai Harrigan?”

  “Boy, if I’m lyin I’m dyin.Gawd -bomb! And in the middle of all those flowers there grows a single wild rose, so beautiful that I saw it and wept as those by the waters of Babylon, the great river that flows by Zion. And the men coming and going in that place, them with their briefcases stuffed full of Satan’s piecework, many ofthem wept, too. Wept and went right on about their whores’ business as if they didn’t even know.”

  “They know,” Jake said softly. “You know what I think, Mr. Harrigan? I think the rose is a secret their hearts keep, and that if anyone threatened it, most of them would fight to protect it. Maybe to the death.” He looked up at Callahan.

  “Pere, we have to go.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Harrigan agreed, “for mine eyes can see Officer Benzyck headed back this way, and it might be well if you were gone when he gets here. I’m glad your furry little friend wasn’t hurt, son.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Harrigan.”

  “Praise God, he’s no more a dog than I am, is he?”

  “No, sir,” Jake said, smiling widely.

  “Beware that woman, boys. She put a thought in my head. I call that witchcraft. And she wastwo. ”

  “Twins-say-twim, aye,” Callahan said, and then (without knowing he meant to do it until it was done) he sketched the sign of the cross in front of the preacher.

  “Thank you for your blessing, heathen or not,” Earl Harrigan said, clearly touched. Then he turned toward the approaching NYPD patrolman and called cheerfully, “Officer Benzyck! Good to see you and there’s some jam right there on your collar, praise God!”

  And while Officer Benzyck was studying the jam on his uniform collar, Jake and Callahan slipped away.

  F
ive

  “Whoo-eee,” Jake said under his breath as they walked toward the brightly underlit hotel canopy. A white limousine, easily twice the size of any Jake had seen before (and he’d seen his share; once his father had even taken him to the Emmys), was offloading laughing men in tuxedos and women in evening dresses. They came out in a seemingly endless stream.

  “Yes indeed,” Callahan said. “It’s like being on a roller coaster, isn’t it?”

  Jake said, “We’re not even supposed tobe here. This was Roland and Eddie’s job. We were just supposed to go see Calvin Tower.”

  “Something apparently thought different.”

  “Well, it should have thought twice,” Jake said gloomily. “A kid and a priest, with one gun between them? It’s a joke. What are our chances, if the Dixie Pig is full of vampires and low men unwinding on their day off?”

  Callahan did not respond to this, although the prospect of trying to rescue Susannah from the Dixie Pig terrified him. “What was that Gan stuff you were spouting?”

  Jake shook his head. “I don’t know—I can barely remember what I said. I think it’s part of the touch, Pere. And do you know where I think I got it?”

  “Mia?”

  The boy nodded. Oy trotted neatly at his heel, his long snout not quite touching Jake’s calf. “And I’m getting something else, as well. I keep seeing this black man in a jail cell. There’s a radio playing, telling him all these people are dead—the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe, George Harrison, Peter Sellers, Itzak Rabin, whoeverhe is. I think it might be the jail in Oxford, Mississippi, where they kept Odetta Holmes for awhile.”

  “But this is aman you see. Not Susannah but aman. ”

  “Yes, with a toothbrush mustache, and he wears funny little gold-rimmed glasses, like a wizard in a fairy-tale.”

  They stopped just outside the radiance of the hotel’s entrance. A doorman in a green swallowtail coat blew an ear-splitting blast on his little silver whistle, hailing down a Yellow Cab.

  “Is it Gan, do you think? Is the black man in the jail cell Gan?”

  “I don’t know.” Jake shook his head with frustration.

  “There’s something about the Dogan, too, all mixed in.”

  “And this comes from the touch.”

  “Yes, but it’s not from Mia or Susannah or you or me. I think…” Jake’s voice lowered. “I think I better figure out who that black man is and what he means to us, because I think that what I’m seeing comes from the Dark Tower itself.” He looked at Callahan solemnly. “In some ways, we’re getting very close to it, and that’s why it’s so dangerous for the ka-tet to be broken like it is.

  “In some ways, we’re almost there.”

  Six

  Jake took charge smoothly and completely from the moment he stepped out of the revolving doors with Oy in his arms and then put the billy-bumbler down on the lobby’s tile floor. Callahan didn’t think the kid was even aware of it, and probably that was all to the good. If he got self-conscious, his confidence might crumble.

  Oy sniffed delicately at his own reflection in one of the lobby’s green glass walls, then followed Jake to the desk, his claws clicking faintly on the black and white marble squares. Callahan walked beside him, aware that he was looking at the future and trying not to goggle at it too obviously.

  “She was here,” Jake said. “Pere, I can almost see her. Both of them, her and Mia.”

  Before Callahan could reply, Jake was at the desk. “Cry pardon, ma’am,” he said. “My name is Jake Chambers. Do you have a message for me, or a package, or something? It’d be either from Susannah Dean or maybe from a Miss Mia.”

  The woman peered down doubtfully at Oy for a moment. Oy looked up at her with a cheery grin that revealed a great many teeth. Perhaps these disturbed the clerk, because she turned away from him with a frown and examined the screen of her computer.

  “Chambers?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Spoken in his best getting-along-with-grownups voice. It had been awhile since he’d needed to use that one, but it was still there, Jake found, and within easy reach.

  “I have something for you, but it’s not from a woman. It’s from someone named Stephen King.” She smiled. “I don’t suppose it’s the famous writer? Do you know him?”

  “No, ma’am,” Jake said, and snuck a sidewards glance at Callahan. Neither of them had heard of Stephen King until recently, but Jake understood why the name might give his current traveling companion the chills. Callahan didn’t look particularly chilly at the moment, but his mouth had thinned to a single line.

  “Well,” she said, “I suppose it’s a common enough name, isn’t it? Probably there arenormal Stephen Kings all over the United States who wish he’d just…I don’t know…give it arest. ” She voiced a nervous little laugh, and Callahan wondered what had set her on edge. Oy, who got less doggy the longer you looked at him? Maybe, but Callahan thought it was more likely something in Jake, something that whispereddanger. Perhaps evengunslinger. Certainly there was something in him that set him apart from other boys.Far. Callahan thought of him pulling the Ruger from the docker’s clutch and sticking it under the unfortunate taxi driver’s nose.Tell me that you were driving too fast and almost ran down my friend! he’d screamed, his finger already white on the trigger.Tell me that you don’t want to die here in the street with a hole in your head!

  Was that the way an ordinary twelve-year-old reacted to a near-miss accident? Callahan thought not. He thought the desk clerk was right to be nervous. As for himself, Callahan realized he felt a little better about their chances at the Dixie Pig. Not a lot, but a little.

  Seven

  Jake, perhaps sensing something a little off-kilter, flashed the clerk his best getting-along-with-grownups smile, but to Callahan it looked like Oy’s: too many teeth.

  “Just a moment,” she said, turning away from him.

  Jake gave Callahan a puzzled what’s up-with-herlook. Callahan shrugged and spread his hands.

  The clerk went to a cabinet behind her, opened it, looked through the contents of a box stored inside, and returned to the desk with an envelope bearing the Plaza—Park’s logo. Jake’s name—and something else—had been written on the front in what looked like half-script and half-printing:

  Jake Chambers

  This is the Truth

  She slid it across the desk to him, careful that their fingers should not touch.

  Jake took it and ran his fingers down the length of it. There was a piece of paper inside. Something else, as well. A hard narrow strip. He tore open the envelope and pulled out the paper. Folded inside it was the slim, white plastic rectangle of a hotel MagCard. The note had been written on a cheeky piece of stationery headed CALLING ALL BLOWHARDS. The message itself was only three lines long:

  Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee, not to worry, you’ve got the key.

  Dad-a-chud, dad-a-ched, see it, Jake! The key is red!

  Jake looked at the MagCard and watched color abruptly swirl into it, turning it the color of blood almost instantly.

  Couldn’t be red until the message was read,Jake thought, smiling a little at the idea’s riddle-ish quality. He looked up to see if the clerk had seen the MagCard’s transformation, but she had found something which required her attention at the far end of the desk. And Callahan was checking out a couple of women who’d just come strolling in from the street. He might be a Pere, Jake reflected, but his eye for the ladies still seemed to be in proper working order.

  Jake looked back at the paper and was just in time to read the last line:

  Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee, give this boy a plastic key.

  A couple of years before, his mother and father had given him a Tyco Chemistry Set for Christmas. Using the instruction booklet, he’d whipped up a batch of invisible ink. The words written in the stuff had faded almost as quickly as these words were fading now, only if you looked very closely, you could still read the message written in chemistry set ink. This one, however, was authenticallygone
, and Jake knew why. Its purpose had been served. There was no more need for it. Ditto the line about the key being red, and sure enough, that was fading, as well. Only the first line remained, as if he needed reminding:

  Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee, not to worry, you’ve got the key.

  HadStephen King sent this message? Jake doubted it. More likely one of the other players in the game—perhaps even Roland or Eddie—had used the name to get his attention. Still, he’d run upon two things since arriving here that encouraged him enormously. The first was the continued singing of the rose. It was stronger than ever, really, even though a skyscraper had been built on the vacant lot. The second was that Stephen King was apparently still alive twenty-four years after creating Jake’s traveling companion. And no longer just a writer but afamous writer.

  Great. For now things were still rattling precariously along the right set of tracks.

  Jake grabbed Father Callahan’s arm and led him toward the gift shop and tinkling cocktail piano. Oy followed, padding at Jake’s knee. Along the wall they found a line of house phones. “When the operator answers,” Jake said, “tell her you want to talk to your friend Susannah Dean, or toher friend, Mia.”

  “She’ll ask me what room,” Callahan said.

  “Tell her you forgot, but it’s on the nineteenth floor.”

  “How do you—”

  “It’ll be the nineteenth, just trust me.”

  “I do,” Callahan said.

  The phone rang twice and then the operator asked how she could help. Callahan told her. He was connected, and in some room on the nineteenth floor, a telephone began to ring.

  Jake watched the Pere begin to speak, then subside into listening again with a small, bemused smile on his face. After a few moments, he hung up. “Answering machine!” he said. “They have amachine that takes guests’ calls and then tapes messages! What a wonderful invention!”