Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [86]
Jake turned to them. “Do you feel it?” he asked. “Do you?”
Roland nodded. So did Eddie.
“Suze?” the boy asked.
“It’s almost the loveliest thing in the world, isn’t it?” she said. Almost, Roland thought. She said almost. Nor did he miss the fact that her hand went to her belly and stroked as she said it.
Ten
The posters Jake remembered were there—Olivia Newton-John at Radio City Music Hall, G. Gordon Liddy and the Grots at a place called the Mercury Lounge, a horror movie called War of the Zombies, NO TRESPASSING. But—
“That’s not the same,” he said, pointing at a graffito in dusky pink. “It’s the same color, and the printing looks like the same person did it, but when I was here before, it was a poem about the Turtle. ‘See the TURTLE of enormous girth, on his shell he holds the earth.’ And then something about following the Beam.”
Eddie stepped closer and read this: “Oh SUSANNAH-MIO, divided girl of mine, Done parked her RIG in the DIXIE PIG, in the year of ’99.” He looked at Susannah. “What in the hell does that mean? Any idea, Suze?”
She shook her head. Her eyes were very large. Frightened eyes, Roland thought. But which woman was frightened? He couldn’t tell. He only knew that Odetta Susannah Holmes had been divided from the beginning, and that “mio” was very close to Mia. The hum coming from the darkness behind the fence made it hard to think of these things. He wanted to go to the source of the hum right now. Needed to, as a man dying of thirst needs to go to water.
“Come on,” Jake said. “We can climb right over. It’s easy.”
Susannah looked down at her bare, dirty feet, and took a step backward. “Not me,” she said. “I can’t. Not without shoes.”
Which made perfect sense, but Roland thought there was more to it than that. Mia didn’t want to go in there. Mia understood something dreadful might happen if she did. To her, and to her baby. For a moment he was on the verge of forcing the issue, of letting the rose take care of both the thing growing inside her and her troublesome new personality, one so strong that Susannah had shown up here with Mia’s legs.
No, Roland. That was Alain’s voice. Alain, who had always been strongest in the touch. Wrong time, wrong place.
“I’ll stay with her,” Jake said. He spoke with enormous regret but no hesitation, and Roland was swept by his love for the boy he had once allowed to die. That vast voice from the darkness beyond the fence sang of that love; he heard it. And of simple forgiveness rather than the difficult forced march of atonement? He thought it was.
“No,” she said. “You go on, honeybunch. I’ll be fine.” She smiled at them. “This is my city too, you know. I can look out for myself. And besides—” She lowered her voice as if confiding a great secret. “I think we’re kind of invisible.”
Eddie was once again looking at her in that searching way, as if to ask her how she could not go with them, bare feet or no bare feet, but this time Roland wasn’t worried. Mia’s secret was safe, at least for the time being; the call of the rose was too strong for Eddie to be able to think of much else. He was wild to get going.
“We should stay together,” Eddie said reluctantly. “So we don’t get lost going back. You said so yourself, Roland.”
“How far is it from here to the rose, Jake?” Roland asked. It was hard to talk with that hum singing in his ears like a wind. Hard to think.
“It’s pretty much in the middle of the lot. Maybe thirty yards, but probably less.”
“The second we hear the chimes,” Roland said, “we run for the fence and Susannah. All three of us. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Eddie said.
“All three of us and