Song of Susannah dt-6 Page 7

  He’ll come after me, too,she told Mia.And you should ’ware him, woman. You should ’ware him very well.

  I’ll do what I need to do,Mia replied.You want to see the woman’s papers. Why?

  I want to see when this is. The newspaper will say.

  Brown hands pulled the rolled-up newspaper from the canvas Borders bag, unrolled it, and held it up to blue eyes that had started that day as brown as the hands. Susannah saw the date—June 1st, 1999—and marveled over it. Not twenty years or even thirty, but thirty-five. Until this moment she hadn’t realized how little she’d thought of the world’s chances to survive so long. The contemporaries she’d known in her old life—fellow students, civil rights advocates, drinking buddies, and folk-musicaficionados —would now be edging into late middle age. Some were undoubtedly dead.

  Enough,Mia said, and tossed the newspaper back into the trash barrel, where it curled into its former rolled shape. She brushed as much dirt as she could from the soles of her bare feet (because of the dirt, Susannah did not notice they had changed color) and then put on the stolen shoes. They were a little tight, and with no socks she supposed they’d give her blisters if she had to walk very far, but—

  What do you care, right?Susannah asked her.Ain’t your feet. And knew as soon as she’d said it (for thiswas a form of talking; what Roland called palaver) that she might be wrong about that. Certainly her own feet, those which had marched obediently through life below the body of Odetta Holmes (and sometimes Detta Walker), were long gone, rotting or—more likely—burned in some municipal incinerator.

  But she did not notice the change in color. Except later she’d think:You noticed, all right. Noticed it and blocked it right out. Because too much is too much.

  Before she could pursue the question, as much philosophical as it was physical, of whose feet she now wore, another labor pain struck her. It cramped her stomach and turned it to stone even as it loosened her thighs. For the first time she felt the dismaying and terrifying need topush.

  You have to stop it!Mia cried.Woman, you have to! For the chap’s sake, and for ours, too!

  Yes, all right, but how?

  Close your eyes,Susannah told her.

  What? Didn’t you hear me? You’ve got to—

  I heard you,Susannah said.Close your eyes.

  The park disappeared. The world went dark. She was a black woman, still young and undoubtedly beautiful, sitting on a park bench beside a fountain and a metal turtle with a wet and gleaming metal shell. She might have been meditating on this warm late-spring afternoon in the year of 1999.

  I’m going away for a little while now,Susannah said.I’ll be back. In the meantime, sit where you are. Sit quiet. Don’t move. The pain should draw back again, but even if it doesn’t at first, sit still. Moving around will only make it worse. Do you understand me?

  Mia might be frightened, and she was certainly determined to have her way, but she wasn’t dumb. She asked only a single question.

  Where are you going?

  Back to the Dogan,Susannah said. MyDogan. The one inside.

  Two

  The building Jake had found on the far side of the River Whye was some sort of ancient communications-and-surveillance post. The boy had described it to them in some detail, but he still might not have recognized Susannah’s imagined version of it, which was based on a technology which had been far out of date only thirteen years later, when Jake had left New York for Mid-World. In Susannah’s when, Lyndon Johnson had been President and color TV was still a curiosity. Computers were huge things that filled whole buildings. Yet Susannah had visited the city of Lud and seen some of the wonders there, and so Jakemight have recognized the place where he had hidden from Ben Slightman and Andy the Messenger Robot, after all.

  Certainly he would have recognized the dusty linoleum floor, with its checkerboard pattern of black and red squares, and the rolling chairs along consoles filled with blinking lights and glowing dials. And he would have recognized the skeleton in the corner, grinning above the frayed collar of its ancient uniform shirt.

  She crossed the room and sat in one of the chairs. Above her, black-and-white TV screens showed dozens of pictures. Some were of Calla Bryn Sturgis (the town common, Callahan’s church, the general store, the road leading east out of town). Some were still pictures like studio photographs: one of Roland, one of a smiling Jake holding Oy in his arms, and one—she could hardly bear to look at it—of Eddie with his hat tipped back cowpoke-style and his whittling knife in one hand.

  Another monitor showed the slim black woman sitting on the bench beside the turtle, knees together, hands folded in her lap, eyes closed, a pair of stolen shoes on her feet. She now had three bags: the one she’d stolen from the woman on Second Avenue, the rush sack with the sharpened Orizas in it…and a bowling bag. This one was a faded red, and there was something with square corners inside it. A box. Looking at it in the TV screen made Susannah feel angry—betrayed—but she didn’t know why.

  The bag was pink on the other side,she thought.It changed color when we crossed, but only a little.

  The woman’s face on the black-and-white screen above the control board grimaced. Susannah felt an echo of the pain Mia was experiencing, only faint and distant.

  Got to stop that. And quick.

  The question still remained: how?

  The way you did on the other side. While she was horsing her freight up to that cave just as fast as she damn could.

  But that seemed a long time ago now, in another life. And why not? Ithad been another life, another world, and if she ever hoped to get back there, she had to help right now. So what had she done?

  You used this stuff, that’s what you did. It’s only in your head, anyway—what Professor Overmeyer called “a visualization technique” back in Psych One. Close your eyes.

  Susannah did so. Now both sets of eyes were closed, the physical ones that Mia controlled in New York and the ones in her mind.

  Visualize.

  She did. Or tried.

  Open.

  She opened her eyes. Now on the panel in front of her there were two large dials and a single toggle-switch where before there had been rheostats and flashing lights. The dials looked to be made of Bakelite, like the oven-dials on her mother’s stove back in the house where Susannah had grown up. She supposed there was no surprise there; all you imagined, no matter how wild it might seem, was no more than a disguised version of what you already knew.

  The dial on her left was labeled EMOTIONAL TEMP. The markings on it ran from 32 to 212 (32 in blue; 212 in bright red). It was currently set at 160. The dial in the middle was marked LABOR FORCE. The numbers around its face went from 0 to 10, and it was currently turned to 9. The label under the toggle-switch simply read CHAP, and there were only two settings: AWAKE and ASLEEP. It was currently set to AWAKE.

  Susannah looked up and saw one of the screens was now showing a babyin utero. It was a boy. Abeautiful boy. His tiny penis floated like a strand of kelp below the lazy curl of his umbilical cord. His eyes were open, and although the rest of the image was black and white, those eyes were a piercing blue. The chap’s gaze seemed to go right through her.

  They’re Roland’s eyes,she thought, feeling stupid with wonder.How can that be?

  It couldn’t, of course. All this was nothing but the work of her own imagination, a visualization technique. But if so, why would she imagine Roland’s blue eyes? Why not Eddie’s hazel ones? Why not her husband’s hazel eyes?

  No time for that now. Do what you have to do.

  She reached out to EMOTIONAL TEMP with her lower lip caught between her teeth (on the monitor showing the park bench, Mia also began biting her lower lip). She hesitated, then dialed it back to 72, exactly as if it was a thermostat. And wasn’t it?

  Calm immediately filled her. She relaxed in her chair and let her lip escape the grip of her teeth. On the park monitor, the black woman did the same. All right, so far, so good.

  She hesitated fo
r a moment with her hand not quite touching the LABOR FORCE dial, then moved on to CHAP instead. She flipped the toggle from AWAKE to ASLEEP. The baby’s eyes closed immediately. Susannah found this something of a relief. Those blue eyes were disconcerting.

  All right, back to LABOR FORCE. Susannah thought this was the important one, what Eddie would call the Big Casino. She took hold of the old-fashioned dial, applied a little experimental force, and was not exactly surprised to find the clunky thing dully resistant in its socket. It didn’t want to turn.

  But you will,Susannah thought.Because we need you to. We needyou to.

  She grasped it tightly and began turning it slowly counter-clockwise. A pain went through her head and she grimaced. Another momentarily constricted her throat, as if she’d gotten a fishbone stuck in there, but then both pains cleared. To her right an entire bank of lights flashed on, most of them amber, a few bright red.

  “WARNING,” said a voice that sounded eerily like that of Blaine the Mono. “THIS OPERATION MAY EXCEED SAFETY PARAMETERS.”

  No shit, Sherlock,Susannah thought. The LABOR FORCE dial was now down to 6. When she turned it past 5, another bank of amber and red lights flashed on, and three of the monitors showing Calla scenes shorted out with sizzling pops. Another pain gripped her head like invisible pressing fingers. From somewhere beneath her came the start-up whine of motors or turbines. Big ones, from the sound. She could feel them thrumming against her feet, which were bare, of course—Mia had gotten the shoes.Oh well, she thought,I didn’t have any feet at all before this, so maybe I’m ahead of the game.

  “WARNING,” said the mechanical voice. “WHAT YOU’RE DOING IS DANGEROUS, SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK. HEAR ME I BEG. IT’S NOT NICE TO FOOL MOTHER NATURE.”

  One of Roland’s proverbs occurred to her: You do whatyou need to, and I’ll do whatI need to, and we’ll see who gets the goose. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but it seemed to fit this situation, so she repeated it aloud as she slowly but steadily turned the LABOR FORCE dial past 4, to 3…

  She meant to turn the dial all the way back to 1, but the pain which ripped through her head when the absurd thing passed 2 was so huge—sosickening —that she dropped her hand.

  For a moment the pain continued—intensified, even—and she thought it would kill her. Mia would topple off the bench where she was sitting, and both of them would be dead before their shared body hit the concrete in front of the turtle sculpture. Tomorrow or the next day, her remains would take a quick trip to Potter’s Field. And what would go on the death certificate? Stroke? Heart attack? Or maybe that old standby of the medical man in a hurry, natural causes?

  But the pain subsided and she was still alive when it did. She sat in front of the console with the two ridiculous dials and the toggle-switch, taking deep breaths and wiping the sweat from her cheeks with both hands. Boy-howdy, when it came to visualization technique, she had to be the champ of the world.

  This is more than visualization—you know that, right?

  She supposed she did. Something had changed her—had changed all of them. Jake had gotten the touch, which was a kind of telepathy. Eddie had grown (was still growing) into some sort of ability to create powerful, talismanic objects—one of them had already served to open a door between two worlds. And she?

  I…see. That’s all. Except if I see it hard enough, it starts to be real. The way Detta Walker got to be real.

  All over this version of the Dogan, amber lights were glowing. Even as she looked, some turned red. Beneath her feet—special guest feet, she thought them—the floor trembled and thrummed. Enough of this and cracks would start to appear in its elderly surface. Cracks that would widen and deepen. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the House of Usher.

  Susannah got up from the chair and looked around. She should go back. Was there anything else that needed doing before she did?

  One thing occurred to her.

  Three

  Susannah closed her eyes and imagined a radio mike. When she opened them the mike was there, standing on the console to the right of the two dials and the toggle-switch. She had imagined a Zenith trademark, right down to the lightning-bolt Z, on the microphone’s base, but NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS had been stamped there, instead. So something was messing in with her visualization technique. She found that extremely scary.

  On the control panel directly behind the microphone was a semicircular, tri-colored readout with the words SUSANNAH-MIO printed below it. A needle was moving out of the green and into the yellow. Beyond the yellow segment the dial turned red, and a single word was printed in black: DANGER.

  Susannah picked up the mike, saw no way to use it, closed her eyes again, and imagined a toggle-switch like the one-marked with AWAKE and ASLEEP, only this time on the side of the mike. When she opened her eyes again, the switch was there. She pressed it.

  “Eddie,” she said. She felt a little foolish, but went on, anyway. “Eddie, if you hear me, I’m okay, at least for the time being. I’m with Mia, in New York. It’s June first of 1999, and I’m going to try and help her have the baby. I don’t see any other choice. If nothing else, I have to be rid of it myself. Eddie, you take care of yourself. I…” Her eyes welled with tears. “I love you, sugar. So much.”

  The tears spilled down her cheeks. She started to wipe them away and then stopped herself. Didn’t she have a right to cry for her man? As much right as any other woman?

  She waited for a response, knowing she could make one if she wanted to and resisting the urge. This wasn’t a situation where talking to herself in Eddie’s voice would do any good.

  Suddenly her vision doubled in front of her eyes. She saw the Dogan for the unreal shade that it was. Beyond its walls were not the deserty wastelands on the east side of the Whye but Second Avenue with its rushing traffic.

  Mia had opened her eyes. She was feeling fine again—thanks to me, honeybunch, thanks to me—and was ready to move on.

  Susannah went back.

  Four

  A black woman (who still thought of herself as a Negro woman) was sitting on a bench in New York City in the spring of ’99. A black woman with her traveling bags—her gunna—spread around her. One of them was a faded red. N OTHING BUT STRIKES AT MIDTOWN LANES was printed on it. It had been pink on the other side. The color of the rose.

  Mia stood up. Susannah promptlycame forward and made her sit down again.

  What did you do that for?Mia asked, surprised.

  I don’t know, I don’t have a clue. But let’s us palaver a little. Why don’t you start by telling me where you want to go?

  I need a telefung. Someone will call.

  Telephone, Susannah said.And by the way, there’s blood on our shirt, sugar, Margaret Eisenhart’s blood, and sooner or later someone’s gonna recognize it for what it is. Then where will you be?

  The response to this was wordless, a swell of smiling contempt. It made Susannah angry. Five minutes ago—or maybe fifteen, it was hard to keep track of time when you were having fun—this hijacking bitch had been screaming for help. And now that she’d gotten it, what her rescuer got was an internal contemptuous smile. What made it worse was that the bitch was right: she could probably stroll around Midtown all day without anyone asking her if that was dried blood on her shirt, or had she maybe just spilled her chocolate egg-cream.

  All right,she said,but even if nobody bothers you about the blood, where are you going to store your goods? Then another question occurred to her, one that probably should have come to her right away.

  Mia, how do you even know what a telephone is? And don’t tell me they have em where you came from, either.

  No response. Only a kind of watchful silence. But she had wiped the smile off the bitch’s face; she’d done that much.

  You have friends, don’t you? Or at least you think they’re friends. Folks you’ve been talking to behind my back. Folks that’ll help you. Or so you think.

  Areyougoing to help me or not? Back to that. And angry. But beneath th
e anger, what? Fright? Probably that was too strong, at least for now. But worry, certainly.How long have I—have we—got before the labor starts up again?

  Susannah guessed somewhere between six and ten hours—certainly before midnight saw in June second—but tried to keep this to herself.

  I don’t know. Not all that long.

  Then we have to get started. I have to find a telefung.Phone.In a private place.

  Susannah thought there was a hotel at the First Avenue end of Forty-sixth Street, and tried to keep this to herself. Her eyes went back to the bag, once pink, now red, and suddenly she understood. Not everything, but enough to dismay and anger her.

  I’ll leave it here,Mia had said, speaking of the ring Eddie had made her,I’ll leave it here, where he’ll find it. Later, if ka wills, you may wear it again.

  Not a promise, exactly, at least not a direct one, but Mia had certainlyimplied—

  Dull anger surged through Susannah’s mind. No, she’d not promised. She had simply led Susannah in a certain direction, and Susannah had done the rest.

  She didn’t cozen me; she let me cozen myself.

  Mia stood up again, and once again Susannahcame forward and made her sit down. Hard, this time.

  What? Susannah, you promised! The chap—

  I’ll help you with the chap,Susannah replied grimly. She bent forward and picked up the red bag. The bag with the box inside it. And inside the box? The ghostwood box with UNFOUND written upon it in runes? She could feel a baleful pulse even through the layer of magical wood and cloth which hid it. Black Thirteen was in the bag. Mia had taken it through the door. And if it was the ball that opened the door, how could Eddie get to her now?

  I did what I had to,Mia said nervously.It’s my baby, my chap, and every hand is against me now. Every hand but yours, and you only help me because you have to. Remember what I said…if ka wills, I said—

  It was Detta Walker’s voice that replied. It was harsh and crude and brooked no argument. “I don’t give a shit bout ka,” she said, “and you bes be rememberin dat. You got problems, girl. Got a rug-monkey comin you don’t know what it is. Got folks say they’ll he’p you and you don’t know whatdey are. Shit, you doan even know what a telephone is or where to find one. Now we goan sit here, and you’re goan tell me what happens next. We goan palaver, girl, and if you don’t play straight, we still be sittin here with these bags come nightfall and you can have your precious chap on this bench and wash him off in the fuckin fountain.”