Song of Susannah - Stephen King [104]
“Susannah? Bumbler got your tongue?”
“No, I was just thinking what a relief it must have been when he came to you.”
Mia considered that, then smiled. Smiling changed her, made her look girlish and artless and shy. Susannah had to remind herself that wasn’t a look she could trust. “Yes! It was! Of course it was!”
“After discovering your purpose and being trapped here by it…after seeing the Wolves getting ready to store the kids and then operate on them…after all that, Walter comes. The devil, in fact, but at least he can see you. At least he can hear your sad tale. And he makes you an offer.”
“He said the Crimson King would give me a child,” Mia said, and put her hands gently against the great globe of her belly. “My Mordred, whose time has come round at last.”
* * *
Twelve
Mia pointed again at the Arc 16 Experimental Station. What she had called the Dogan of Dogans. The last remnant of her smile lingered on her lips, but there was no happiness or real amusement in it now. Her eyes were shiny with fear and—perhaps—awe.
“That’s where they changed me, made me mortal. Once there were many such places—there must have been—but I’d set my watch and warrant that’s the only one left in all of In-World, Mid-World, or End-World. It’s a place both wonderful and terrible. And it was there I was taken.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.” Susannah was thinking of her Dogan. Which was, of course, based on Jake’s Dogan. It was certainly a strange place, with its flashing lights and multiple TV screens, but not frightening.
“Beneath it are passages which go under the castle,” Mia said. “At the end of one is a door that opens on the Calla side of Thunderclap, just under the last edge of the darkness. That’s the one the Wolves use when they go on their raids.”
Susannah nodded. That explained a lot. “Do they take the kiddies back the same way?”
“Nay, lady, do it please you; like many doors, the one that takes the Wolves from Fedic to the Calla side of Thunderclap goes in only one direction. When you’re on the other side, it’s no longer there.”
“Because it’s not a magic door, right?”
Mia smiled and nodded and patted her knee.
Susannah looked at her with mounting excitement. “It’s another twin-thing.”
“Do you say so?”
“Yes. Only this time Tweedledum and Tweedledee are science and magic. Rational and irrational. Sane and insane. No matter what terms you pick, that’s a double-damned pair if ever there was one.”
“Aye? Do you say so?”
“Yes! Magic doors—like the one Eddie found and you took me through to New York—go both ways. The doors North Central Positronics made to replace them when the Prim receded and the magic faded…they go only one way. Have I got that right?”
“I think so, aye.”
“Maybe they didn’t have time to figure out how to make teleportation a two-lane highway before the world moved on. In any case, the Wolves go to the Calla side of Thunderclap by door and come back to Fedic by train. Right?”
Mia nodded.
Susannah no longer thought she was just trying to kill time. This information might come in handy later on. “And after the King’s men, Pere’s low men, have scooped the kids’ brains, what then? Back through the door with them, I suppose—the one under the castle. Back to the Wolves’ staging point. And a train takes them the rest of the way home.”
“Aye.”
“Why do they bother takin em back at all?”
“Lady, I know not.” Then Mia’s voice dropped. “There’s another door under Castle Discordia. Another door in the rooms of ruin. One that goes…” She licked her lips. “That goes todash.”
“Todash?…I know the word, but