Song of Susannah - Stephen King [20]
The black lady grew legs right in front of Trudy Damascus’s eyes.
That’s right; grew legs.
There was nothing wrong with Trudy’s powers of observation, and she would later tell people (fewer and fewer of whom wanted to listen) that every detail of that brief encounter was imprinted on her memory like a tattoo. The apparition was a little over four feet tall. That was a bit on the stumpy side for an ordinary woman, Trudy supposed, but probably not for one who quit at the knees.
The apparition was wearing a white shirt, splattered with either maroon paint or dried blood, and jeans. The jeans were full and round at the thighs, where there were legs inside them, but below the knees they trailed out on the sidewalk like the shed skins of weird blue snakes. Then, suddenly, they plumped up. Plumped up, the very words sounded insane, but Trudy saw it happen. At the same moment, the woman rose from her nothing-below-the-knee four-feet-four to her all-there height of perhaps five-six or -seven. It was like watching some extraordinary camera trick in a movie, but this was no movie, it was Trudy’s life.
Over her left shoulder the apparition wore a cloth-lined pouch that looked as if it had been woven of reeds. There appeared to be plates or dishes inside it. In her right hand she clutched a faded red bag with a drawstring top. Something with square sides at the bottom, swinging back and forth. Trudy couldn’t make out everything written on the side of the bag, but she thought part of it was MIDTOWN LANES.
Then the woman grabbed Trudy by the arm. “What you got in that bag?” she asked. “You got shoes?”
This caused Trudy to look at the black woman’s feet, and she saw another amazing thing when she did: the African-American woman’s feet were white. As white as her own.
Trudy had heard of people being rendered speechless; now it had happened to her. Her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth and wouldn’t come down. Still, there was nothing wrong with her eyes. They saw everything. The white feet. More droplets on the black woman’s face, almost certainly dried blood. The smell of sweat, as if materializing on Second Avenue like this had only come as the result of tremendous exertion.
“If you got shoes, lady, you best give em to me. I don’t want to kill you but I got to get to folks that’ll help me with my chap and I can’t do that barefoot.”
No one on this little piece of Second Avenue. People—a few, anyway—sitting on the steps of 2 Hammarskjöld Plaza, and a couple were looking right at Trudy and the black woman (the mostly black woman), but not with any alarm or even interest, what the hell was wrong with them, were they blind?
Well, it’s not them she’s grabbing, for one thing. And it’s not them she’s threatening to kill, for anoth—
The canvas Borders bag with her office shoes inside it (sensible half-heels, cordovan-colored) was snatched from her shoulder. The black woman peered inside it, then looked up at Trudy again. “What size’re these?”
Trudy’s tongue finally came unstuck from the roof of her mouth, but that was no help; it promptly fell dead at the bottom.
“Ne’mine, Susannah says you look like about a seven. These’ll d—”
The apparition’s face suddenly seemed to shimmer. She lifted one hand—it rose in a loose loop with an equally loose fist anchoring the end, as if the woman didn’t have very good control of it—and thumped herself on the forehead, right between the eyes. And suddenly her face was different. Trudy had Comedy Central as part of her basic cable deal, and she’d seen stand-up comics who specialized in mimicry change their faces that same way.
When the black woman spoke again, her voice had changed, too. Now it was that of an educated woman. And (Trudy would have sworn it) a frightened one.
“Help me,” she said. “My name is Susannah Dean and I…I…oh dear…oh Christ —”
This time it was pain that twisted the woman’s face, and she clutched at her