Song of Susannah - Stephen King [101]
As if picking this thought up, Mia said: “I am what I am and I am content wi’ it. If others are not, what’s that to me? Spit on em!”
Spoken like Detta Walker at her feistiest, Susannah thought, but made no reply. It seemed safer to remain quiet.
After a pause, Mia went on. “Yet I’d be lying if I didn’t say that being here brings back…certain memories. Yar!” And, unexpectedly, she laughed. Just as unexpectedly, the sound was beautiful and melodic.
“Tell your tale,” Susannah said. “This time tell me all of it. We have time before the labor starts again.”
“Do you say so?”
“I do. Tell me.”
For a few moments Mia just looked out at the street with its dusty cover of oggan and its air of sad and ancient abandonment. As Susannah waited for story-time to commence, she for the first time became aware of the still, shadeless quality to Fedic. She could see everything very well, and there was no moon in the sky as on the castle allure, but she still hesitated to call this daytime.
It’s no time, a voice inside her whispered—she knew not whose. This is a place between, Susannah; a place where shadows are cancelled and time holds its breath.
Then Mia told her tale. It was shorter than Susannah had expected (shorter than she wanted, given Eddie’s abjuration to burn up the day), but it explained a great deal. More, actually, than Susannah had hoped for. She listened with growing rage, and why not? She had been more than raped that day in the ring of stones and bones, it seemed. She had been robbed, as well—the strangest robbery to which any woman had ever been subject.
And it was still going on.
* * *
Eleven
“Look out there, may it do ya fine,” said the big-bellied woman sitting beside Susannah on the boardwalk. “Look out and see Mia before she gained her name.”
Susannah looked into the street. At first she saw nothing but a cast-off waggon-wheel, a splintered (and long-dry) watering trough, and a starry silver thing that looked like the lost rowel from some cowpoke’s spur.
Then, slowly, a misty figure formed. It was that of a nude woman. Her beauty was blinding—even before she had come fully into view, Susannah knew that. Her age was any. Her black hair brushed her shoulders. Her belly was flat, her navel a cunning cup into which any man who ever loved women would be happy to dip his tongue. Susannah (or perhaps it was Detta) thought, Hell, I could dip my own. Hidden between the ghost-woman’s thighs was a cunning cleft. Here was a different tidal pull.
“That’s me when I came here,” said the pregnant version sitting beside Susannah. She spoke almost like a woman who is showing slides of her vacation. That’s me at the Grand Canyon, that’s me in Seattle, that’s me at Grand Coulee Dam; that’s me on the Fedic high street, do it please ya. The pregnant woman was also beautiful, but not in the same eerie way as the shade in the street. The pregnant woman looked a certain age, for instance—late twenties—and her face had been marked by experience. Much of it painful.
“I said I was an elemental—the one who made love to your dinh—but that was a lie. As I think you suspected. I lied not out of hope of gain, but only…I don’t know…from a kind of wishfulness, I suppose. I wanted the baby to be mine that way, too—”
“Yours from the start.”
“Aye, from the start—you say true.” They watched the nude woman walk up the street, arms swinging, muscles of her long back flexing, hips swaying from side to side in that eternal breathless clock of motion. She left no tracks on the oggan.
“I told you that the creatures of the invisible world were left behind when the Prim receded. Most died, as fishes and sea-animals will when cast up on a beach and left to strangle in the alien air. But there are always some who adapt, and I was one of those unfortunates. I wandered far and wide, and whenever I found men in the wastes, I took on the form you see.”
Like a model on a runway (one who has forgotten to actually put on the latest Paris fashion she’s supposed to be displaying), the woman in the street