Song of Susannah - Stephen King [99]
She looked over the batwing doors and was not in the least surprised to see the wordsSERVICE’S MALAMUTE SALOON .
She slowed long enough to peer over the batwing doors and saw a chrome piano playing itself, dusty keys popping up and down, just a mechanical music-box no doubt built by the ever-popular North Central Positronics, entertaining a room that was empty except for a dead robot and, in the far corner, two skeletons working through the process of final decomposition, the one that would take them from bone to dust.
Farther along, at the end of the town’s single street, loomed the castle wall. It was so high and so wide it blotted out most of the sky.
Susannah abruptly knocked her fist against the side of her head. Then she held her hands out in front of her and snapped her fingers.
“What are you doing?” Mia asked. “Tell me, I beg.”
“Making sure I’m here. Physically here.”
“You are.”
“So it seems. But how can that be?”
Mia shook her head, indicating that she didn’t know. On this, at least, Susannah was inclined to believe her. There was no dissenting word from Detta, either.
“This isn’t what I expected,” Susannah said, looking around. “It’s not what I expected at all.”
“Nay?” asked her companion (and without much interest). Mia was moving in that awkward but strangely endearing duck-footed waddle that seems to best suit women in the last stages of their carry. “And what was it ye did expect, Susannah?”
“Something more medieval, I guess. More like that.” She pointed at the castle.
Mia shrugged as if to say take it or leave it, and then said, “Is the other one with you? The nasty one?”
Detta, she meant. Of course. “She’s always with me. She’s a part of me just as your chap is a part of you.” Although how Mia could be pregnant when it had been Susannah who caught the fuck was something Susannah was still dying to know.
“I’ll soon be delivered of mine,” Mia said. “Will ya never be delivered of yours?”
“I thought I was,” Susannah said truthfully. “She came back. Mostly, I think, to deal with you.”
“I hate her.”
“I know.” And Susannah knew more. Mia feared Detta, as well. Feared her big-big.
“If she speaks, our palaver ends.”
Susannah shrugged. “She comes when she comes and speaks when she speaks. She doesn’t ask my permission.”
Ahead of them on this side of the street was an arch with a sign above it:
FEDIC STATION
MONO PATRICIA DISCONTINUED
THUMBPRINT READER INOPERATIVE
SHOW TICKET
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS THANKS YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE
The sign didn’t interest Susannah as much as the two things that lay on the filthy station platform beyond it: a child’s doll, decayed to little more than a head and one floppy arm, and, beyond it, a grinning mask. Although the mask appeared to be made of steel, a good deal of it seemed to have rotted like flesh. The teeth poking out of the grin were canine fangs. The eyes were glass. Lenses, Susannah felt sure, no doubt also crafted by North Central Positronics. Surrounding the mask were a few shreds and tatters of green cloth, what had undoubtedly once been this thing’s hood. Susannah had no trouble putting together the remains of the doll and the remains of the Wolf; her mamma, as Detta sometimes liked to tell folks (especially horny boys in road-house parking lots), didn’t raise no fools.
“This is where they brought them,” she said. “Where the Wolves brought the twins they stole from Calla Bryn Sturgis. Where they—what?—operated on them.”
“Not just from Calla Bryn Sturgis,” Mia said indifferently, “but aye. And once the babbies were here, they were taken there. A place you’ll also recognize, I’ve no doubt.”
She pointed across Fedic’s single street and farther up. The last building before the castle wall abruptly ended the town was a long Quonset hut with sides of filthy corrugated metal and a rusty curved roof. The windows running along the side Susannah could see had been boarded up. Also along that side was a steel hitching rail. To it were tied what looked like seventy