Song of Susannah - Stephen King [43]
Mia, her shoulder-length black hair flying out behind her (not a bit of kink in that hair, as there was in Susannah’s; Mia’s was like silk), pointed across the inner chasm below them to the far wall, where the towers rose and the allure continued its curve.
“This is the inner keep,” she said. “Beyond it is the village of Fedic, now deserted, all dead of the Red Death a thousand years ago and more. Beyond that—”
“The Red Death?” Susannah asked, startled (also frightened in spite of herself). “Poe’s Red Death? Like in the story?” And why not? Hadn’t they already wandered into—and then back out of—L. Frank Baum’s Oz? What came next? The White Rabbit and the Red Queen?
“Lady, I know not. All I can tell you is that beyond the deserted village is the outer wall, and beyond the outer wall is a great crack in the earth filled with monsters that cozen, diddle, increase, and plot to escape. Once there was a bridge across, but it fell long ago. ‘In the time before counting,’ as ’tis said. They’re horrors that might drive an ordinary man or woman mad at a glance.”
She favored Susannah with a glance of her own. A decidedly satiric one.
“But not a gunslinger. Surely not one such as thee. ”
“Why do you mock me?” Susannah asked quietly.
Mia looked startled, then grim. “Was it my idea to come here? To stand in this miserable cold where the King’s Eye dirties the horizon and sullies the very cheek of the moon with its filthy light? Nay, lady! ’Twas you, so harry me not with your tongue!”
Susannah could have responded that it hadn’t been her idea to catch preg with a demon’s baby in the first place, but this would be a terrible time to get into one of those yes-you-did, no-I-didn’t squabbles.
“I wasn’t scolding,” Susannah said, “only asking.”
Mia made an impatient shooing gesture with her hand as if to say Don’t split hairs, and half-turned away. Under her breath she said, “I didn’t go to Morehouse or no house. And in any case I’ll bear my chap, do you hear? Whichever way the cards fall. Bear him and feed him!”
All at once Susannah understood a great deal. Mia mocked because she was afraid. In spite of all she knew, so much of her was Susannah.
I didn’t go to Morehouse or no house, for instance; that was from Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. When Mia had bought into Susannah, she had purchased at least two personalities for the price of one. It was Mia, after all, who’d brought Detta out of retirement (or perhaps deep hibernation), and it was Detta who was particularly fond of that line, which expressed so much of the Negro’s deep-held disdain for and suspicion of what was sometimes called “the finer post-war Negro education.” Not to Morehouse or no house; I know what I know, in other words, I heard it through the grapevine, I got it on the earie, dearie, I picked it up on the jungle telegraph.
“Mia,” she said now. “Whose chap is it besides yours? What demon was his father, do you know?”
Mia grinned. It wasn’t a grin Susannah liked. There was too much Detta in it; too much laughing, bitter knowledge. “Aye, lady, I know. And you’re right. It was a demon got him on you, a very great demon indeed, say true! A human one! It had to have been so, for know you that true demons, those left on the shore of these worlds which spin around the Tower when the Prim receded, are sterile. And for a very good reason.”
“Then how—”
“Your dinh is the father of my chap,” Mia said. “Roland of Gilead, aye, he. Steven Deschain finally has his grandson, although he lies rotten in his grave and knows it not.”
Susannah was goggling at her, unmindful of the cold wind rushing out of the Discordia wilderness. “Roland…? It can’t be! He was beside me when the demon was in me, he was pulling Jake through from the house on Dutch Hill and fucking was the last thing on his mind…” She trailed off, thinking of the baby she’d seen in the Dogan. Thinking of those eyes. Those blue bombardier’s eyes. No. No, I refuse to believe it.