Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [87]
“No, Oy stays with Susannah.”
Jake frowned, clearly not liking this. Roland hadn’t expected him to. “Jake, Oy also has bare feet…and didn’t you say there was broken glass in there?”
“Ye-eahh…” Drawn-out. Reluctant. Then Jake dropped to one knee and looked into Oy’s gold-ringed eyes. “Stay with Susannah, Oy.”
“Oy! Ay!” Oy stay. It was good enough for Jake. He stood up, turned to Roland, and nodded.
“Suze?” Eddie asked. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Emphatic. No hesitation. Roland was now almost sure it was Mia in control, pulling the levers and turning the dials. Almost. Even now he wasn’t positive. The hum of the rose made it impossible to be positive of anything except that everything—everything—could be all right.
Eddie nodded, kissed the corner of her mouth, then stepped to the board fence with its odd poem: Oh SUSANNAH-MIO, divided girl of mine. He laced his fingers together into a step. Jake was into it, up, and gone like a breath of breeze.
“Ake!” Oy cried, and then was silent, sitting beside one of Susannah’s bare feet.
“You next, Eddie,” Roland said. He laced his remaining fingers together, meaning to give Eddie the same step Eddie had given Jake, but Eddie simply grabbed the top of the fence and vaulted over. The junkie Roland had first met in a jet plane coming into Kennedy Airport could never have done that.
Roland said, “Stay where you are. Both of you.” He could have meant the woman and the billy-bumbler, but it was only the woman he looked at.
“We’ll be fine,” she said, and bent to stroke Oy’s silky fur. “Won’t we, big guy?”
“Oy!”
“Go see your rose, Roland. While you still can.”
Roland gave her a last considering look, then grasped the top of the fence. A moment later he was gone, leaving Susannah and Oy alone on the most vital and vibrant streetcorner in the entire universe.
Eleven
Strange things happened to her as she waited.
Back the way they’d come, near Tower of Power Records, a bank clock alternately flashed the time and temperature: 8:27, 64. 8:27, 64. 8:27, 64. Then, suddenly, it was flashing 8:34, 64. 8:34, 64. She never took her eyes off it, she would swear to that. Had something gone wrong with the sign’s machinery?
Must’ve, she thought. What else could it be? Nothing, she supposed, but why did everything suddenly feel different? Even look different? Maybe it was my machinery that went wrong.
Oy whined and stretched his long neck toward her. As he did, she realized why things looked different. Besides somehow slipping seven uncounted minutes by her, the world had regained its former, all-too-familiar perspective. A lower perspective. She was closer to Oy because she was closer to the ground. The splendid lower legs and feet she’d been wearing when she had opened her eyes on New York were gone.
How had it happened? And when? In the missing seven minutes?
Oy whined again. This time it was almost a bark. He was looking past her, in the other direction. She turned that way. Half a dozen people were crossing Forty-sixth toward them. Five were normal. The sixth was a white-faced woman in a moss-splotched dress. The sockets of her eyes were empty and black. Her mouth hung open seemingly all the way down to her breastbone, and as Susannah watched, a green worm crawled over the lower lip. Those crossing with her gave her her own space, just as the other pedestrians on Second Avenue had given Roland and his friends theirs. Susannah guessed that in both cases, the more normal promenaders sensed something out of the ordinary and steered clear. Only this woman wasn’t todash.
This woman was dead.
Twelve
The hum rose and rose as the three of them stumbled across the trash-and brick-littered wilderness of the vacant lot. As before, Jake saw faces in every angle and shadow. He saw Gasher and Hoots; Tick-Tock and Flagg; he saw Eldred Jonas’s gunbunnies, Depape and Reynolds; he saw his mother and father and Greta Shaw, their housekeeper, who looked a little like Edith Bunker on TV and who always remembered to cut the crusts off his sandwiches. Greta Shaw who sometimes