Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower #6)

Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower #6) Page 13

One

Ka might have put that downtown bus where it was when Mia's cab pulled up, or it might only have been coincidence. Certainly it's the sort of question that provokes argument from the humblest street-preacher (can you give me hallelujah) all the way up to the mightiest of theological philosophers (can you give me a Socratic amen). Some might consider it almost frivolous; the mighty issues that loom their shadows behind the question, however, are anything but.

One downtown bus, half empty.

But if it hadn't been there on the corner of Lex and Sixty-first, Mia likely would never have noticed the man playing the guitar. And, had she not stopped to listen to the man playing the guitar, who knows how much of what followed might have been different?

Two

"Awwww,man, wouldja looka-dat!" the cab driver exclaimed, and lifted his hand to his windshield in an exasperated gesture. A bus was parked on the corner of Lexington and Sixty-first, its diesel engine rumbling and its taillights flashing what Mia took to be some kind of distress code. The bus driver was standing by one of the rear wheels, looking at the dark cloud of diesel smoke pouring from the bus's rear vent.

"Lady," said the cab driver, "you mind getting off on the corner of Sixtieth? Tha'be all right?"

Is it?Mia asked.What should I say?

Sure,Susannah replied absently.Sixtieth's fine.

Mia's question had called her back from her version of the Dogan, where she'd been trying to get in touch with Eddie. She'd had no luck doing that, and was appalled at the state of the place. The cracks in the floor now ran deep, and one of the ceiling panels had crashed down, bringing the fluorescent lights and several long snarls of electrical cable with it. Some of the instrument panels had gone dark. Others were seeping tendrils of smoke. The needle on the SUSANNAH-MIO dial was all the way over into the red. Below her feet, the floor was vibrating and the machinery was screaming. And saying that none of this was real, it was all only a visualization technique, kind of missed the whole point, didn't it? She'd shut down a very powerful process, and her body was paying a price. The Voice of the Dogan had warned her that what she was doing was dangerous; that it wasn't (in the words of a TV ad) nice to fool Mother Nature. Susannah had no idea which of her glands and organs were taking the biggest beating, but she knew that theywere hers. Not Mia's. It was time to call a halt to this madness before everything went sky-high.

First, though, she'd tried to get in touch with Eddie, yelling his name repeatedly into the mike with NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS stamped on it. Nothing. Yelling Roland's name also brought no result. If they were dead, she would have known it. She was sure of that. But not to be able to get in touch with them atall ...what did that mean?

It mean you once mo' been fucked mos' righteous, honeychile,Detta told her, and cackled.This what you get fo' messin wit' honkies.

I can get out here?Mia was asking, shy as a girl arriving at her first dance.Really?

Susannah would have slapped her own brow, had she had one. God, when it was about anything but her baby, the bitch was so goddamtimid!

Yes, go ahead. It's only a single block, and on the avenues, the blocks are short.

The driver...how much should I give the driver?

Give him a ten and let him keep the change. Here, hold it out for me -

Susannah sensed Mia's reluctance and reacted with weary anger. This was not entirely without amusement.

Listen to me, sweetheart, I wash my hands of you. Okay? Give him any fucking bill you want.

No, no, it's all right.Humble now. Frightened.I trust you, Susannah. And she held up the remaining bills from Mats, fanned out in front of her eyes like a hand of cards.

Susannah almost refused, but what was the point? Shecame forward, took control of the brown hands holding the money, selected a ten, and gave it to the driver. "Keep the change," she said.

"Thanks, lady!"

Susannah opened the curbside door. A robot voice began to speak when she did, startling her - startling both of them. It was someone named Whoopi Goldberg, reminding her to take her bags. For Susannah-Mia, the question of her gunna was moot. There was only one piece of baggage which concerned them now, and of this Mia would soon be delivered.

She heard guitar music. At the same time she felt her control over the hand stuffing money back into her pocket and the leg swinging out of the cab begin to ebb. Mia, taking over again now that Susannah had solved another of her little New York dilemmas. Susannah began to struggle against this usurpation

(mybody, goddammit, mine,at least from the waist up, and that includes the head and the brain inside it! )

and then quit. What was the use? Mia was stronger. Susannah had no idea why that should be, but she knew that it was.

A kind of queerBushido fatalism had come over Susannah Dean by this point. It was the sort of calmness that cloaks the drivers of cars skidding helplessly toward bridge overpasses, the pilots of planes that heel over into their final dives, their engines dead...and gunslingers driven to their final cave or draw. Later she might fight, if fighting seemed either worthwhile or honorable. She would fight to save herself or the baby, but not Mia - this was her decision. Mia had forfeited any chance of rescue she might once have deserved, in Susannah's eyes.

For now there was nothing to do, except maybe to turn the LABOR FORCE dial back to 10. She thought she would be allowed that much control.

Before that, though...the music. The guitar. It was a song she knew, and knew well. She had sung a version of it to thefolken the night of their arrival in Calla Bryn Sturgis.

After all she had been through since meeting Roland, hearing "Man of Constant Sorrow" on this New York streetcorner did not strike her as coincidental in the least. And it was a wonderful song, wasn't it? Perhaps the vertex of all the folk songs she had so loved as a younger woman, the ones that had seduced her, step by step, into activism and had led her finally to Oxford, Mississippi. Those days were gone - she felt ever so much older than she had then - but this song's sad simplicity still appealed to her. The Dixie Pig was less than a block from here. Once Mia had transported them through its doors, Susannah would be in the Land of the Crimson King. She had no doubts or illusions about that. She did not expect to return from there, did not expect to see either her friends or her beloved again, and had an idea she might have to die with Mia's cheated howls for company...but none of that had to interfere with her enjoyment of this song now. Was it her death-song? If so, fine.

Susannah, daughter of Dan, reckoned there could have been far worse.

Three

The busker had set up shop in front of a caf¨¦ called Black-strap Molasses. His guitar case was open in front of him, its purple velvet interior (exactly the same shade as the rug in sai King's Bridgton bedroom, can you say amen) scattered with change and bills, just so any unusually innocent passersby would know the right thing to do. He was sitting on a sturdy wooden cube which looked exactly like the one upon which the Rev. Harrigan stood to preach.

There were signs that he was almost through for the night. He had put on his jacket, which bore a New York Yankees patch on the sleeve, and a hat withJOHN LENNON LIVES printed above the bill. There had apparently been a sign in front of him but now it was back in his instrument case, words-side down. Not that Mia would have known what was writ upon it in any case, not she.

He looked at her, smiled, and quit his fingerpicking. She raised one of the remaining bills and said, "I'll give you this if you'll play that song again. All of it, this time."

The young man looked about twenty, and while there was nothing very handsome about him, with his pale, spotty complexion, the gold ring in one of his nostrils, and the cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth, he had an engaging air. His eyes widened as he realized whose face was on the bit of currency she was holding. "Lady, for fifty bucks I'd play every Ralph Stanley song I know...and I know quite a few of em."

"Just this one will do us fine," Mia said, and tossed the bill. It fluttered into the busker's guitar case. He watched its prankish descent with disbelief. "Hurry," Mia said. Susannah was quiet, but Mia sensed her listening. "My time is short. Play."

And so the guitar-player sitting on the box in front of the caf¨¦ began to play a song Susannah had first heard in The Hungry i, a song she had herself sung at God only knew how many hootenannies, a song she'd once sung behind a motel in Oxford, Mississippi. The night before they had all been thrown in jail, that had been. By then those three young voter-registration boys had been missing almost a month, gone into the black Mississippi earth somewhere in the general vicinity of Philadelphia (they were eventually found in the town of Longdale, can you give me hallelujah, can you please say amen). That fabled White Sledgehammer had begun once more to swing in the redneck toolies, but they had sung anyway. Odetta Holmes - Det, they called her in those days - had begun this particular song and then the rest of them joined in, the boys singingman and the girls singingmaid. Now, rapt within the Dogan which had become her gulag, Susannah listened as this young man, unborn in those terrible old days, sang it again. The cofferdam of her memory broke wide open and it was Mia, unprepared for the violence of these recollections, who was lifted upon the wave.

Four

In the Land of Memory, the time is alwaysNow.

In the Kingdom of Ago, the clocks tick...but their hands never move.

There is an Unfound Door

(O lost)

and memory is the key which opens it.

Five

Their names are Cheney, Goodman, Schwerner; these are those who fall beneath the swing of the White Sledgehammer on the 19th of June, 1964.

O Discordia!

Six

They're staying at a place called the Blue Moon Motor Hotel, on the Negro side of Oxford, Mississippi. The Blue Moon is owned by Lester Bambry, whose brother John is pastor of the First Afro-American Methodist Church of Oxford, can you give me hallelujah, can you say amen.

It is July 19th of 1964, a month to the day after the disappearance of Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Three days after they disappeared somewhere around Philadelphia there was a meeting at John Bambry's church and the local Negro activists told the three dozen or so remaining white northerners that in light of what was now happening, they were of course free to go home. And some of themhavegone home, praise God, but Odetta Holmes and eighteen others stay. Yes. They stay at the Blue Moon Motor Hotel. And sometimes at night they go out back, and Delbert Anderson brings his guitar and they sing.

"I Shall Be Released," they sing and

"John Henry," they sing, gonna whop the steel on down (great Gawd, say Gawd-bomb), and they sing

"Blowin in the Wind" and they sing

"Hesitation Blues" by the Rev. Gary Davis, all of them laughing at the amiably risqu¨¦ verses: a dollar is a dollar and a dime is a dime I got a houseful of chillun ain't none of em mine, and they sing

"I Ain't Marchin Anymore" and they sing

in the Land of Memory and the Kingdom of Ago they sing

in the blood-heat of their youth, in the strength of their bodies, in the confidence of their minds they sing

to deny Discordia

to deny the can toi

in affirmation of Gan the Maker, Gan the Evil-taker

they don't know these names

they know all these names

the heart sings what it must sing

the blood knows what the blood knows

on the Path of the Beam our hearts know all the secrets

and they sing

Odetta begins and Delbert Anderson plays; she sings

"I am a maid of constant sorrow...I've seen trouble all my days...I bid farewell...to old Kentucky..."

Seven

So Mia was ushered through the Unfound Door and into the Land of Memory, transported to the weedy yard behind Lester Bambry's Blue Moon Motor Hotel, and so she heard -

(hears)

Eight

Mia hears the woman who will become Susannah as she sings her song. She hears the others join in, one by one, until they are all singing together in a choir, and overhead is the Mississippi moon, raining its radiance down on their faces - some black, some white - and upon the cold steel rails of the tracks which run behind the hotel, tracks which run south from here, which run out to Longdale, the town where on August 5th of 1964 the badly decomposed bodies of their amigos will be found - James Cheney, twenty-one; Andrew Goodman, twenty-one; Michael Schwerner, twenty-four; O Discordia! And to you who favor darkness, give you joy of the red Eye that shines there.

She hears them sing.

All thro' this Earth I'm bound to ramble...Thro' storm and wind, thro' sleet and rain...I'm bound to ride that Northern railroad...

Nothing opens the eye of memory like a song, and it is Odetta's memories that lift Mia and carry her as they sing together, Det and her ka-mates under the silvery moon. Mia sees them walking hence from here with their arms linked, singing

(oh deep in my heart...I do believe...)

another song, the one they feel defines them most clearly. The faces lining the street and watching them are twisted with hate. The fists being shaken at them are callused. The mouths of the women who purse their lips to shoot the spit that will clabber their cheeks dirty their hair stain their shirts are paintless and their legs are without stockings and their shoes are nothing but runover lumps. There are men in overalls (Oshkosh-by-gosh, someone say hallelujah). There are teenage boys in clean white sweaters and flattop haircuts and one of them shouts at Odetta, carefully articulating each word:We Will Kill! Every! Goddam! Nigger! Who Steps Foot On The Campus Of Ole Miss!

And the camaraderie in spite of the fear.Because of the fear. The feeling that they are doing something incredibly important: something for the ages. They will change America, and if the price is blood, why then they will pay it. Say true, say hallelujah, praise God, give up your loud amen.

Then comes the white boy named Darryl, and at first he couldn't, he was limp and he couldn't, and then later on he could and Odetta's secret other - the screaming, laughing, ugly other - never came near. Darryl and Det lay together until morning, slept spoons until morning beneath the Mississippi moon. Listening to the crickets. Listening to the owls. Listening to the soft smooth hum of the Earth turning on its gimbals, turning and turning ever further into the twentieth century. They are young, their blood runs hot, and they never doubt their ability to change everything.

It's fare you well, my own true lover...

This is her song in the weeds behind the Blue Moon Motor Hotel; this is her song beneath the moon.

I'll never see your face again...

It's Odetta Holmes at the apotheosis of her life, and Mia isthere! She sees it, feels it, is lost in its glorious and some would say stupid hope (ah but I say hallelujah, we all say Gawd-bomb). She understands how being afraid all the time makes one's friends more precious; how it makes every bite of every meal sweet; how it stretches time until every day seems to last forever, leading on to velvet night, and theyknow James Cheney is dead

(say true)

theyknow Andrew Goodman is dead

(say hallelujah)

theyknow Michael Schwerner - oldest of them and still just a baby at twenty-four - is dead.

(Give up your loudest amen!)

They know that any of them is also eligible to wind up in the mud of Longdale or Philadelphia.At any time. The night after this particular hoot behind the Blue Moon, most of them, Odetta included, will be taken to jail and her time of humiliation will begin. But tonight she's with her friends, with her lover, and they are one, and Discordia has been banished. Tonight they sing swaying with their arms around each other.

The girls singmaid, the boys singman.

Mia is overwhelmed by their love for one another; she is exalted by the simplicity of what they believe.

At first, too stunned to laugh or to cry, she can only listen, amazed.

Nine

As the busker began the fourth verse, Susannah joined in, at first tentatively and then - at his encouraging smile - with a will, harmonizing above the young man's voice:

For breakfast we had bulldog gravy

For supper we had beans and bread

The miners don't have any dinner

And a tick of straw they call a bed...

Ten

The busker quit after that verse, looking at Susannah-Mia with happy surprise. "I thought I was the only one who knew that one," he said. "It's the way the Freedom Riders used to - "

"No," Susannah said quietly. "Not them. It was the voter-registration people who sang the bulldog-gravy verse. The folks who came down to Oxford in the summer of '64. When those three boys were killed."

"Schwerner and Goodman," he said. "I can't remember the name of the - "

"James Cheney," she said quietly. "He had the most beautifulhair. "

"You talk as though you knew him," he said, "but you can't be much over...thirty?"

Susannah had an idea she looked a good deal older than thirty, especially tonight, but of course this young man had fifty dollars more in his guitar case now than had been there a single song ago, and it had perhaps affected his eyesight.

"My mother spent the summer of '64 in Neshoba County," Susannah said, and with two spontaneously chosen words - my mother - did her captor more damage than she could have imagined. Those words flayed open Mia's heart.

"Cool on Mom!" the young man exclaimed, and smiled. Then the smile faded. He fished the fifty out of the guitar case and held it up to her. "Take it back. It was a pleasure just to sing with you, ma'am."

"I really couldn't," Susannah said, smiling. "Remember the struggle, that'd be enough for me. And remember Jimmy, Andy, and Michael, if it does ya. I know it would do me just fine."

"Please," the young man persisted. He was smiling again but the smile was troubled and he might have been any of those young men from the Land of Ago, singing in the moonlight between the slumped ass-ends of the Blue Moon's shacky little units and the double-hammered heatless moonlight gleam of the railroad tracks; he could have been any in his beauty and the careless flower of his youth and how in that moment Mia loved him. Even her chap seemed secondary in that glow. She knew it was in many ways a false glow, imparted by the memories of her hostess, and yet she suspected that in other ways it might be real. She knew one thing for sure: only a creature such as herself, who'd had immortality and given it up, could appreciate the raw courage it took to stand against the forces of Discordia. To risk that fragile beauty by putting beliefs before personal safety.

Make him happy, take it back,she told Susannah, but would notcome forward and make Susannah do so. Let it be her choice.

Before Susannah could reply, the alarm in the Dogan went off, flooding their shared mind with noise and red light.

Susannah turned in that direction, but Mia grabbed her shoulder in a grip like a claw before she could go.

What's happening? What's gone wrong?

Let me loose!

Susannah twisted free. And before Mia could grab her again, she was gone.

Eleven

Susannah's Dogan pulsed and flared with red panic-light. A Klaxon hammered an audio tattoo from the overhead speakers. All but two of the TV screens - one still showing the busker on the corner of Lex and Sixtieth, the other the sleeping baby - had shorted out. The cracked floor was humming under Susannah's feet and throwing up dust. One of the control panels had gone dark, and another was in flames.

This looked bad.

As if to confirm her assessment, the Blaine-like Voice of the Dogan began to speak again. "WARNING!" it cried. "SYSTEM OVERLOAD! WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 40 SECONDS!"

Susannah couldn't remember any Section Alpha from her previous visits to the Dogan, but wasn't surprised to now see a sign labeled just that. One of the panels near it suddenly erupted in a gaudy shower of orange sparks, setting the seat of a chair on fire. More ceiling panels fell, trailing snarls of wiring.

"WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 30 SECONDS!"

What about the EMOTIONAL TEMP dial?

"Leave it alone," she muttered to herself.

Okay, CHAP? What about that one?

After a moment's thought, Susannah flipped the toggle from ASLEEP to AWAKE and those disconcerting blue eyes opened at once, staring into Susannah's with what looked like fierce curiosity.

Roland's child,she thought with a strange and painful mixture of emotions.And mine. As for Mia? Girl, you nothing but a ka-mai. I'm sorry for you.

Ka-mai, yes. Not just a fool, but ka's fool - a fool of destiny.

"WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 25 SECONDS!"

So waking the baby hadn't done any good, at least not in terms of preventing a complete system crash. Time for Plan B.

She reached out for the absurd LABOR FORCE control-knob, the one that looked so much like the oven-dial on her mother's stove. Turning the dial back to 2 had been difficult, and had hurt like a bastard. Turning it the other way was easier, and there was no pain at all. What she felt was aneasing somewhere deep in her head, as if some network of muscles which had been flexed for hours was now letting go with a little cry of relief.

The blaring pulse of the Klaxon ceased.

Susannah turned LABOR FORCE to 8, paused there, then shrugged. What the hell, it was time to go for broke, get this over with. She turned the dial all the way to 10. The moment it was there, a great glossy pain hardened her stomach and then rolled lower, gripping her pelvis. She had to tighten her lips against a scream.

"POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED," said the voice, and then it dropped into a John Wayne drawl that Susannah knew all too well. "THANKS A WHOLE HEAP, LI'L COWGIRL."

She had to tighten her lips against another scream - not pain this time but outright terror. It was all very well to remind herself Blaine the Mono was dead and this voice was coming from some nasty practical joker in her own subconscious, but that didn't stop the fear.

"LABOR...HAS COMMENCED," said the amplified voice, dropping the John Wayne imitation. "LABOR...HAS COMMENCED." Then, in a horrible (and nasal) Bob Dylan drawl that set her teeth on edge, the voice sang: "HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU...BABE!...HAPPY BIRTHDAY...TO YOU! HAPPY BIRTHDAY...DEAR MORDRED...HAPPY BIRTHDAY...TO YOU!"

Susannah visualized a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall behind her, and when she turned it was, of course, right there (she had not imagined the little sign reading ONLY YOU AND SOMBRA CAN HELP PREVENT CONSOLE FIRES, however - that, along with a drawing of Shardik o' the Beam in a Smokey the Bear hat, was some other joker's treat). As she hurried across the cracked and uneven floor to get the extinguisher, skirting the fallen ceiling panels, another pain ripped into her, lighting her belly and thighs on fire, making her want to double over and bear down on the outrageous stone in her womb.

Not going to take long,she thought in a voice that was part Susannah and part Detta.No ma'am. This chap comin in on the express train!

But then the pain let up slightly. She snatched the extinguisher off the wall when it did, trained the slim black horn on the flaming control panel, and pressed the trigger. Foam billowed out, coating the flames. There was a baleful hissing sound and a smell like burning hair.

"THE FIRE...IS OUT," the Voice of the Dogan proclaimed. "THE FIRE...IS OUT." And then changing, quick as a flash, to a plummy British Lord Haw-Haw accent:

"I SAY,JOLLY GOOD SHOW, SEW-ZANNAH, AB-SO-LUTELYBRILLLL-IANT! "

She lurched across the minefield of the Dogan's floor again, seized the microphone, and pressed the transmit toggle. Above her, on one of the TV screens still operating, she could see that Mia was on the move again, crossing Sixtieth.

Then Susannah saw the green awning with the cartoon pig, and her heart sank. Not Sixtieth, but Sixty-first.The hijacking mommybitch had reached her destination.

"Eddie!" she shouted into the microphone. "Eddie or Roland!" And what the hell, she might as well make it a clean sweep. "Jake! Pere Callahan! We've reached the Dixie Pig and we're going to have this damn baby! Come for us if you can, but be careful!"

She looked up at the screen again. Mia was now on the Dixie Pig side of the street, peering at the green awning. Hesitating. Could she read the words DIXIE PIG? Probably not, but she could surely understand the cartoon. The smiling, smoking pig. And she wouldn't hesitate long in any case, now that her labor had started.

"Eddie, I have to go. I love you, sugar! Whatever else happens, you remember that! Never forget it!I love you! This is..." Her eye fell on the semicircular readout on the panel behind the mike. The needle had fallen out of the red. She thought it would stay in the yellow until the labor was over, then subside into the green.

Unless something went wrong, that was.

She realized she was still gripping the mike.

"This is Susannah-Mio, signing off. God be with you, boys. God and ka."

She put the microphone down and closed her eyes.

Twelve

Susannah sensed the difference in Mia immediately. Although she'd reached the Dixie Pig and her labor had most emphatically commenced, Mia's mind was for once elsewhere. It had turned to Odetta Holmes, in fact, and to what Michael Schwerner had called the Mississippi Summer Project. (What the Oxford rednecks had calledhim was The Jewboy.) The emotional atmosphere to which Susannah returned wasfraught, like still air before a violent September storm.

Susannah! Susannah, daughter of Dan!

Yes, Mia.

I agreed to mortality.

So you said.

And certainly Mia had looked mortal in Fedic. Mortal andterribly pregnant.

Yet I've missed most of what makes the short-time life worthwhile. Haven't I?The grief in that voice was awful; the surprise was even worse.And there's no time for you to tell me. Not now.

Go somewhere else,Susannah said, with no hope at all.Hail a cab, go to a hospital. We'll have it together, Mia. Maybe we can even raise it toge -

If I have it anywhere but here, it will die and we'll die with it.She spoke with utter certainty.And I willhave it. I've been cheated of all but my chap, and I willhave it. But...Susannah...before we go in...you spoke of your mother.

I lied. It was me in Oxford. Lying was easier than trying to explain time travel and parallel worlds.

Show me the truth. Show me your mother. Show me, I beg!

There was no time to debate this request pro and con; it was either do it or refuse on the spur of the moment. Susannah decided to do it.

Look,she said.

Thirteen

In the Land of Memory, the time is alwaysNow.

There is an Unfound Door

(O lost)

and when Susannah found it and opened it, Mia saw a woman with her dark hair pulled back from her face and startling gray eyes. There is a cameo brooch at the woman's throat. She's sitting at the kitchen table, this woman, in an eternal shaft of sun. In this memory it is always ten minutes past two on an afternoon in October of 1946, the Big War is over, Irene Daye is on the radio, and the smell is always gingerbread.

"Odetta, come and sit with me," says the woman at the table, she who is mother. "Have something sweet. You lookgood, girl."

And she smiles.

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!

Fourteen

Prosaic enough, you would say, so you would. A young girl comes home from school with her book-bag in one hand and her gym-bag in the other, wearing her white blouse and her pleated St. Ann's tartan skirt and the knee-socks with the bows on the side (orange and black, the school colors). Her mother, sitting at the kitchen table, looks up and offers her daughter a piece of the gingerbread that just came out of the oven. It is only one moment in an unmarked million, a single atom of event in a lifetime of them. But it stole Mia's breath

(you lookgood,girl )

and showed her in a concrete way she had previously not understood how rich motherhood could be...if,that was, it was allowed to run its course uninterrupted.

The rewards?

Immeasurable.

In the endyou could be the woman sitting in the shaft of sun.You could be the one looking at the child sailing bravely out of childhood's harbor. You could be the wind in that child's unfurled sails.

You.

Odetta, come and sit with me.

Mia's breath began to hitch in her chest.

Have something sweet.

Her eyes fogged over, the smiling cartoon pig on the awning first doubling, then quadrupling.

You lookgood,girl.

Some time was better than no time at all. Even five years - or three - was better than no time at all. She couldn't read, hadn't been to Morehouse, hadn't been tono house, but she could do that much math with no trouble: three = better than none. Even one = better than none.

Oh...

Oh, but...

Mia thought of a blue-eyed boy stepping through a door, one that was found instead of lost. She thought of saying to himYou look good,son!

She began to weep.

What have I donewas a terrible question.What else couldI have done was perhaps even worse.

O Discordia!

Fifteen

This was Susannah's one chance to do something: now, while Mia stood at the foot of the steps leading up to her fate. Susannah reached into the pocket of her jeans and touched the turtle, thesk?ldpadda. Her brown fingers, separated from Mia's white leg by only a thin layer of lining, closed around it.

She pulled it out and flipped it behind her, casting it into the gutter. From her hand into the lap of ka.

Then she was carried up the three steps to the double doors of the Dixie Pig.

Sixteen

It was very dim inside and at first Mia could see nothing but murky, reddish-orange lights. Electricflambeaux of the sort that still lit some of the rooms in Castle Discordia. Her sense of smell needed no adjusting, however, and even as a fresh labor pain clamped her tight, her stomach reacted to the smell of roasting pork and cried out to be fed. Herchap cried out to be fed.

That's not pork, Mia,Susannah said, and was ignored.

As the doors were closed behind her - there was a man (or a manlike being) standing at each of them - she began to see better. She was at the head of a long, narrow dining room. White napery shone. On each table was a candle in an orange-tinted holder. They glowed like fox-eyes. The floor here in the foyer was black marble, but beyond thema?tre d 's stand there was a rug of darkest crimson.

Beside the stand was a sai of about sixty with white hair combed back from a lean and rather predatory face. It was the face of an intelligent man, but his clothes - the blaring yellow sportcoat, the red shirt, the black tie - were those of a used-car salesman or a gambler who specializes in rooking small-town rubes. In the center of his forehead was a red hole about an inch across, as if he had been shot at close range. It swam with blood that never overflowed onto his pallid skin.

At the tables in the dining room stood perhaps fifty men and half again as many women. Most of them were dressed in clothes as loud or louder than those of the white-haired gent. Big rings glared on fleshy fingers, diamond eardrops sparked back orange light from theflambeaux.

There were also some dressed in more sober attire - jeans and plain white shirts seemed to be the costume of choice for this minority. Thesefolken were pallid and watchful, their eyes seemingly all pupil. Around their bodies, swirling so faintly that they sometimes disappeared, were blue auras. To Mia these pallid, aura-enclosed creatures looked quite a bit more human than the low men and women. They were vampires - she didn't have to observe the sharpened fangs which their smiles disclosed to know it - but still they looked more human than Sayre's bunch. Perhaps because they once hadbeen human. The others, though...

Their faces are only masks,she observed with growing dismay.Beneath the ones the Wolves wear lie the electric men - the robots - but what is beneath these?

The dining room was breathlessly silent, but from somewhere nearby came the uninterrupted sounds of conversation, laughter, clinking glasses, and cutlery against china. There was a patter of liquid - wine or water, she supposed - and a louder outburst of laughter.

A low man and a low woman - he in a tuxedo equipped with plaid lapels and a red velvet bow tie, she in a strapless silver lam¨¦ evening dress, both of startling obesity - turned to look (with obvious displeasure) toward the source of these sounds, which seemed to be coming from behind some sort of swaggy tapestry depicting knights and their ladies at sup. When the fat couple turned to look, Mia saw their cheeks wrinkle upward like clingy cloth, and for a moment, beneath the soft angle of their jaws, she saw something dark red and tufted with hair.

Susannah, was thatskin? Mia asked.Dear God, was it their skin?

Susannah made no reply, not evenI told you so orDidn't I warn you? Things had gone past that now. It was too late for exasperation (or any of the milder emotions), and Susannah felt genuinely sorry for the woman who had brought her here. Yes, Mia had lied and betrayed; yes, she had tried her best to get Eddie and Roland killed. But what choice had she ever had? Susannah realized, with dawning bitterness, that she could now give the perfect definition of a ka-mai: one who has been given hope but no choices.

Like giving a motorcycle to a blindman,she thought.

Richard Sayre - slim, middle-aged, handsome in a full-lipped, broad-browed way - began to applaud. The rings on his fingers flashed. His yellow blazer blared in the dim light. "Hile, Mia!" he cried.

"Hile, Mia!"the others responded.

"Hile, Mother!"

"Hile, Mother!"the vampires and low men and low women cried, and they, too began to applaud. The sound was certainly enthusiastic enough, but the acoustics of the room dulled it and turned it into the rustle of batwings. A hungry sound, one that made Susannah feel sick to her stomach. At the same time a fresh contraction gripped her and turned her legs to water. She reeled forward, yet almost welcomed the pain, which partially muffled her trepidation. Sayre stepped forward and seized her by the upper arms, steadying her before she could fall. She had thought his touch would be cold, but his fingers were as hot as those of a cholera victim.

Farther back, she saw a tall figure come out of the shadows, something that was neither low man nor vampire. It wore jeans and a plain white shirt, but emerging from the shirt's collar was the head of a bird. It was covered with sleek feathers of dark yellow. Its eyes were black. It patted its hands together in polite applause, and she saw - with ever-growing dismay - that those hands were equipped with talons rather than fingers.

Half a dozen bugs scampered from beneath one of the tables and looked at her with eyes that hung on stalks. Horribly intelligent eyes. Their mandibles clicked in a sound that was like laughter.

Hile, Mia!she heard in her head. An insectile buzzing.Hile, Mother! And then they were gone, back into the shadows.

Mia turned to the door and saw the pair of low men who blocked it. And yes, thosewere masks; this close to the door-guards it was impossible not to see how their sleek black hair had been painted on. Mia turned back to Sayre with a sinking heart.

Too late now.

Too late to do anything but go through with it.

Seventeen

Sayre's grip had slipped when she turned. Now he re-established it by taking her left hand. At the same moment her right hand was seized. She turned that way and saw the fat woman in the silver lam¨¦ dress. Her huge bust overflowed the top of her gown, which struggled gamely to hold it back. The flesh of her upper arms quivered loosely, giving off a suffocating scent of talcum powder. On her forehead was a red wound that swam but never overflowed.

It's how they breathe,Mia thought.That's how they breathe when they're wearing their -

In her growing dismay, she had largely forgotten about Susannah Dean and completely about Detta. So when Detta Walkercame forward  - hell, when sheleaped forward  - there was no way Mia could stop her. She watched her arms shoot out seemingly of their own accord and saw her fingers sink into the plump cheek of the woman in the silver lam¨¦ gown. The woman shrieked, but oddly, the others, Sayre included, laughed uproariously, as if this were the funniest thing they'd ever seen in their lives.

The mask of humanity pulled away from the low woman's startled eye, then tore. Susannah thought of her final moments on the castle allure, when everything had frozen and the sky had torn open like paper.

Detta ripped the mask almost entirely away. Tatters of what looked like latex hung from the tips of her fingers. Beneath where the mask had been was the head of a huge red rat, a mutie with yellow teeth growing up the outside of its cheeks in a crust and what looked like white worms dangling from its nose.

"Naughty girl," said the rat, shaking a roguish finger at Susannah-Mio. Its other hand was still holding hers. The thing's mate - the low man in the garish tuxedo - was laughing so hard he had doubled over, and when he did, Mia saw something poking out through the seat of his pants. It was too bony to be a tail, but she supposed it was, all the same.

"Come, Mia," Sayre said, drawing her forward. And then he leaned toward her, peering earnestly into her eyes like a lover. "Or is it you, Odetta? It is, isn't it? It'syou, you pestering, overeducated, troublesome Negress."

"No, it beme, you ratface honky mahfah!" Detta crowed, and then spat into Sayre's face.

Sayre's mouth opened in a gape of astonishment. Then it snapped shut and twisted into a bitter scowl. The room had gone silent again. He wiped the spit from his face - from the mask he woreover his face - and looked at it unbelievingly.

"Mia?" he asked. "Mia, you let her do this tome? Me, who would stand as your baby's godfather?"

"You ain't jack shit!" Detta cried. "You suck yo' ka-daddy's cock while you diddle yo' fuckfinger up his poop-chute and thass all you good fo'! You - "

"Get RID of her!"Sayre thundered.

And before the watching audience of vampires and low men in the Dixie Pig's front dining room, Mia did just that. The result was extraordinary. Detta's voice began todwindle, as if she were being escorted out of the restaurant (by the bouncer, and by the scruff of the neck). She quit trying to speak and only laughed raucously, but soon enough that, too, was gone.

Sayre stood with his hands clasped before him, looking solemnly at Mia. The others were also staring. Somewhere behind the tapestry of the knights and their ladies at feast, the low laughter and conversation of some other group continued.

"She's gone," Mia said at last. "The bad one is gone." Even in the room's quiet she was hard to hear, for she spoke in little more than a whisper. Her eyes were timidly cast down, and her cheeks had gone deathly white. "Please, Mr. Sayre...saiSayre...now that I've done as you ask, please say you've told me the truth, and I may have the raising of my chap. Please say so! If you do, you'll never hear from the other one again, I swear it on my father's face and my mother's name, so I do."

"You had neither," Sayre said. He spoke in a tone of distant contempt. The compassion and mercy for which she begged owned no space in his eyes. And above them, the red hole in the center of his forehead filled and filled but never spilled.

Another pain, this one the greatest so far, sank its teeth into her. Mia staggered, and this time Sayre didn't bother steadying her. She went to her knees before him, put her hands on the rough, gleaming surface of his ostrich-skin boots, and looked up into his pale face. It looked back at her from above the violent yellow scream of his sports jacket.

"Please," she said. "Please, I beg you:keep your promise to me."

"I may," he said, "or I may not. Do you know, I have never had my boots licked. Can you imagine? To have lived as long as I have and never to have had a single good old-fashioned boot-licking."

Somewhere a woman tittered.

Mia bent forward.

No, Mia, thee mustn't,Susannah moaned, but Mia made no reply. Nor did the paralyzing pain deep in her vitals stop her. She stuck her tongue out between her lips and began licking the rough surface of Richard Sayre's boots. Susannah could taste them, at a great distance. It was a husky, dusty, leathery taste, full of rue and humiliation.

Sayre let her go on so for a bit, then said: "Stop it. Enough."

He pulled her roughly to her feet and stood with his unsmiling face not three inches from her own. Now that she'd seen them, it was impossible to unsee the masks he and the rest of them wore. The taut cheeks were almost transparent, and whorls of dark scarlet hair were faintly visible beneath.

Or perhaps you called it fur when it covered the whole face.

"Your beggary does you no credit," he said, "although I must admit the sensation was extraordinary."

"You promised!" she cried, attempting to pull back and out of his grip. Then another contraction struck and she doubled over, trying only not to shriek. When it eased a little, she pressed on. "You said five years...or maybe seven...yes, seven...the best of everything for my chap, you said - "

"Yes," Sayre said. "I do seem to recall that, Mia." He frowned as one does when presented with an especially pernicious problem, then brightened. The area of mask around one corner of his mouth wrinkled up for a moment when he smiled, revealing a yellow snag of tooth growing out of the fold where his lower lip met his upper. He let go of her with one hand in order to raise a finger in the gesture pedagogical. "The best of everything, yes. Question is, do you fill that particular bill?"

Appreciative murmurs of laughter greeted this sally. Mia recalled them calling her Mother and saluting herhile, but that seemed distant now, like a meaningless fragment of dream.

You was good enough to tote him, though, wasn't you?Detta asked from someplace deep inside - from the brig, in fact. Yassuh! You 'us good enough to do dat,sho!

"I was good enough to carry him, wasn't I?" Mia almost spat at him. "Good enough to send the other one into the swamp to eat frogs, her all the time thinking they were caviar...I was good enough forthat, wasn't I?"

Sayre blinked, clearly startled by so brisk a response.

Mia softened again. "Sai, think of all I gave up!"

"Pish, you hadnothing! " Sayre replied. "What were you but a meaningless spirit whose existence revolved around no more than fucking the occasional saddletramp? Slut of the winds, isn't that what Roland calls your kind?"

"Then think of the other one," Mia said. "She who calls herself Susannah. I have stolen all her life and purpose for my chap, and at your bidding."

Sayre made a dismissive gesture. "Your mouth does you no credit, Mia. Therefore close it."

He nodded to his left. A low man with a wide, bulldoggy face and a luxuriant head of curly gray hair came forward. The red hole in his brow had an oddly slanted Chinese look. Walking behind him was another of the bird-things, this one with a fierce, dark brown hawk's head protruding from the round neck of a tee-shirt with DUKE BLUE DEVILS printed on it. They took hold of her. The bird-thing's grip was repulsive - scaly and alien.

"You have been an excellent custodian," Sayre said, "on that much we can surely agree. But we must also remember that it was Roland of Gilead's jilly who actually bred the child, mustn't we?"

"That's a lie!"she screamed."Oh, that is a filthy...LIE!"

He went on as if he'd not heard her. "And different jobs require different skills. Different strokes for different folks, as they say."

"PLEASE!"Mia shrieked.

The hawkman put its taloned hands to the sides of its head and then rocked from side to side, as if deafened. This witty pantomime drew laughter and even a few cheers.

Susannah dimly felt warmth gush down her legs - Mia'slegs - and saw her jeans darken at the crotch and thighs. Her water had finally broken.

"Let'sgo-ooo-ooo ...and have aBABY! " Sayre proclaimed in game-show-host tones of excitement. There were too many teeth in that smile, a double row both top and bottom.

"After that, we'll see. I promise you that your request will be taken under consideration. In the meantime...Hile, Mia! Hile, Mother!"

"Hile, Mia! Hile, Mother!"the rest cried, and Mia suddenly found herself borne toward the back of the room, the bulldog-faced low man gripping her left arm and the hawkman gripping her right. Hawkman made a faint and unpleasant buzzing sound in his throat each time he exhaled. Her feet barely touched the rug as she was carried toward the bird-thing with the yellow feathers; Canaryman, she thought him.

Sayre brought her to a stop with a single hand-gesture and spoke to Canaryman, pointing toward the Dixie Pig's street door as he did. Mia heard Roland's name, and also Jake's. The Canaryman nodded. Sayre pointed emphatically at the door again and shook his head.Nothing gets in, that headshake said.Nothing!

The Canaryman nodded again and then spoke in buzzing chirps that made Mia feel like screaming. She looked away, and her gaze happened on the mural of the knights and their ladies. They were at a table she recognized - it was the one in the banqueting hall of Castle Discordia. Arthur Eld sat at the head with his crown on his brow and his lady-wife at his right hand. And his eyes were a blue she knew from her dreams.

Ka might have chosen that particular moment to puff some errant draft across the dining room of the Dixie Pig and twitch aside the tapestry. It was only for a second or two, but long enough for Mia to see there was another dining room - aprivate dining room - behind it.

Sitting at a long wooden table beneath a blazing crystal chandelier were perhaps a dozen men and women, their appledoll faces twisted and shrunken with age and evil. Their lips had burst back from great croggled bouquets of teeth; the days when any of these monstrosities could close their mouths were long gone. Their eyes were black and oozing some sort of noisome tarry stuff from the corners. Their skin was yellow, scaled with teeth, and covered with patches of diseased-looking fur.

What are they?Mia screamed.What in the name of the gods are they?

Mutants,Susannah said.Or perhaps the word is hybrids. And it doesn't matter, Mia. You saw what matters, didn't you?

She had, and Susannah knew it. Although the velvet swag had been twitched aside but briefly, it had been long enough for both of them to see the rotisserie which had been set in the middle of that table, and the headless corpse twirling upon it, skin browning and puckering and sizzling fragrant juices. No, the smell in the air hadn't been pork. The thing turning on the spit, brown as a squab, was a human baby. The creatures around it dipped delicate china cups into the drippings beneath, toasted each other...and drank.

The draft died. The tapestry settled back into place. And before the laboring woman was once more taken by the arms and hustled away from the dining room and deeper into this building that straddled many worlds along the Beam, she saw the joke of that picture. It wasn't a drumstick Arthur Eld was lifting to his lips, as a first, casual, glance might have suggested; it was a baby's leg. The glass Queen Rowena had raised in toast was not filled with wine but with blood.

"Hile, Mia!" Sayre cried again. Oh, he was in the best of spirits, now that the homing pigeon had come back to the cote.

Hile, Mia!the others screamed back. It was like some sort of crazy football cheer. Those from behind the mural joined in, although their voices were reduced to little more than growls. And their mouths, of course, were stuffed with food.

"Hile, Mother!" This time Sayre offered her a mocking bow to go with the mockery of his respect.

Hile, Mother!the vampires and the low men responded, and on the satiric wave of their applause she was carried away, first into the kitchen, then into the pantry, and then down the stairs beyond.

Ultimately, of course, there was a door.

Eighteen

Susannah knew the kitchen of the Dixie Pig by the smell of obscene cookery: not pork after all, but certainly what the pirates of the eighteenth century had calledlong pork.

For how many years had this outpost served the vampires and low men of New York City? Since Callahan's time, in the seventies and eighties? Since her own, in the sixties? Almost certainly longer. Susannah supposed there might have been a version of the Dixie Pig here since the time of the Dutch, they who had bought off the Indians with sacks of beads and planted their murderous Christian beliefs ever so much more deeply than their flag. A practical folk, the Dutch, with a taste for spareribs and little patience for magic, either white or black.

She saw enough to recognize the kitchen for the twin of the one she had visited in the bowels of Castle Discordia. That was where Mia had killed a rat that had been trying to claim the last remaining food in the place, a pork-roast in the oven.

Except there was no oven and no roast,she thought.Hell, no kitchen. There was a piglet out behind the barn, one of Tian and Zalia Jaffords's. And I was the one who killed it and drank its hot blood, not she. By then she mostly had me, although I still didn't know it. I wonder if Eddie -

As Mia took her away for the last time, tearing her free from her thoughts and sending her a-tumble into the dark, Susannah realized how completely the needy, terrible bitch had possessed her life. She knew why Mia had done it - because of the chap. The question was why she, Susannah Dean, had allowed it to happen. Because she'd been possessed before? Because she was as addicted to the stranger inside as Eddie had been to heroin?

She feared it might be true.

Swirling dark. And when she opened her eyes again, it was upon that savage moon hanging above the Discordia, and the flexing red glow

(forge of the King)

on the horizon.

"Over here!" cried a woman's voice, just as it had cried before. "Over here, out of the wind!"

Susannah looked down and saw she was legless, and sitting in the same rude dog-cart as on her previous visit to the allure. The same woman, tall and comely, with black hair streaming in the wind, was beckoning to her. Mia, of course, and all this no more real than Susannah's vague dream-memories of the banquet room.

She thought:Fedic, though, was real. Mia's body is there just as mine is at this very moment being hustled through the kitchen behind the Dixie Pig, where unspeakable meals are prepared for inhuman customers. The castle allure is Mia's dream-place, her refuge, her Dogan.

"To me, Susannah of Mid-World, and away from the Red King's glow! Come out of the wind and into the lee of this merlon!"

Susannah shook her head. "Say what you have to say and be done, Mia. We've got to have a baby - aye, somehow, between us - and once it's out, we're quits. You've poisoned my life, so you have."

Mia looked at her with desperate intensity, her belly blooming beneath the serape, her hair harried backward at the wind's urging. "'Twas you who took the poison, Susannah! 'Twas you who swallowed it! Aye, when the child was still a seed unbloomed in your belly!"

Was it true? And if it was, which of them had invited Mia in, like the vampire she truly was? Had it been Susannah, or Detta?

Susannah thought neither.

She thought it might actually have been Odetta Holmes. Odetta who would never have broken the nasty old blue lady's forspecial plate. Odetta who loved her dolls, even though most of them were as white as her plain cotton panties.

"What do you want with me, Mia, daughter of none? Say and have finished with it!"

"Soon we'll be together - aye, really and truly, lying together in the same childbed. And all I ask is that if a chance comes for me to get away with my chap, you'll help me take it."

Susannah thought it over. In the wilderness of rocks and gaping crevasses, the hyenas cackled. The wind was numbing, but the pain that suddenly clamped her midsection in its jaws was worse. She saw that same pain on Mia's face and thought again how her entire existence seemed to have become a wilderness of mirrors. In any case, what harm could such a promise do? The chance probably wouldn't come, but if it did, was she going to let the thing Mia wanted to call Mordred fall into the hands of the King's men?

"Yes," she said. "All right. If I can help you get away with him, Iwill help you."

"Anywhere!" Mia cried in a harsh whisper. "Even..." She stopped. Swallowed. Forced herself to go on. "Even into the todash darkness. For if I had to wander forever with my son by my side, that would be no condemnation."

Maybe not foryou,sister, Susannah thought, but said nothing. In truth, she was fed up with Mia's megrims.

"And if there's no way for us to be free," Mia said, "kill us."

Although there was no sound up here but the wind and the cackling hyenas, Susannah could sense her physical body still on the move, now being carried down a flight of stairs. All that real-world stuff behind the thinnest of membranes. For Mia to have transported her to this world, especially while in the throes of childbirth, suggested a being of great power. Too bad that power couldn't be harnessed, somehow.

Mia apparently mistook Susannah's continued silence for reluctance, for she rushed around the allure's circular walkway in her sturdyhuaraches and almost ran to where Susannah sat in her gawky, balky cart. She seized Susannah's shoulders and shook her.

"Yar!"she cried vehemently. "Kill us! Better we be together in death than to..." She trailed off, then spoke in a dull and bitter voice: "I've been cozened all along. Haven't I?"

And now that the moment had come, Susannah felt neither vindication nor sympathy nor sorrow. She only nodded.

"Do they mean to eat him? To feed those terrible elders with his corpse?"

"I'm almost sure not," Susannah said. And yet cannibalism was in it somewhere; her heart whispered it was so.

"They don't care about me at all," Mia said. "Just the baby-sitter, isn't that what you called me? And they won't even let me havethat, will they?"

"I don't think so," Susannah said. "You might get six months to nurse him, but even that..." She shook her head, then bit her lip as a fresh contraction gusted into her, turning all the muscles in her belly and thighs to glass. When it eased a little she finished, "I doubt it."

"Then kill us, if it comes to that. Say you will, Susannah, do ya, I beg!"

"And if I do for you, Mia, what will you do for me? Assuming I could believe any word out of your liar's mouth?"

"I'd free you, if chance allows."

Susannah thought it over, and decided that a poor bargain was better than no bargain at all. She reached up and took the hands which were gripping her shoulders. "All right. I agree."

Then, as at the end of their previous palaver in this place, the sky tore open, and the merlon behind them, and the very air between them. Through the rip, Susannah saw a moving hallway. The image was dim, blurry. She understood she was looking through her own eyes, which were mostly shut. Bulldog and Hawkman still had her. They were bearing her toward the door at the end of the hallway - always, since Roland had come into her life, there was another door - and she guessed they must think she'd passed out, or fainted. She supposed that in a way, she had.

Then she fell back into the hybrid body with the white legs...only who knew how much of her previously brown skin was now white? She thought that situation, at least, was about to end, and she was delighted. She would gladly swap those white legs, strong though they might be, for a little peace of mind.

A little peacein her mind.

Nineteen

"She's coming around," someone growled. The one with the bulldog face, Susannah thought. Not that it mattered; underneath they all looked like humanoid rats with fur growing out of their bone-crusty flesh.

"Good deal." That was Sayre, walking behind them. She looked around and saw that her entourage consisted of six low men, Hawkman, and a trio of vampires. The low men wore pistols in docker's clutches...only she supposed that in this world you had to call them shoulder holsters. When in Rome, dear, do ya as the Romans do. Two of the vampires had bahs, the crossbow weapon of the Callas. The third was carrying a bitterly buzzing electric sword of the sort the Wolves had wielded.

Ten-to-one odds,Susannah thought coolly.Not good...but it could be worse.

Can you - Mia's voice, from somewhere inside.

Shut up,Susannah told her.Talking's done.

Ahead, on the door they were approaching, she saw this:

NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.

New York/Fedic

Maximum Security

VERBAL ENTRY CODE REQUIRED

It was familiar, and Susannah instantly knew why. She'd seen a sign similar to this during her one brief visit to Fedic. Fedic, where the real Mia - the being who had assumed mortality in what might be history's worst bargain - was imprisoned.

When they reached it, Sayre pushed past her on Hawkman's side. He leaned toward the door and spoke something guttural deep in his throat, some alien word Susannah never could have pronounced herself.It doesn't matter, Mia whispered.I can say it, and if I need to, I can teach you another that you can say. But now...Susannah, I'm sorry for everything. Fare you well.

The door to the Arc 16 Experimental Station in Fedic came open. Susannah could hear a ragged humming sound and could smell ozone. No magic powered this door between the worlds; this was the work of the old people, and failing. Those who'd made it had lost their faith in magic, had given up their belief in the Tower. In the place of magic was this buzzing, dying thing. This stupid mortal thing. And beyond it she saw a great room filled with beds. Hundreds of them.

It's where they operate on the children. Where they take from them whatever it is the Breakers need.

Now only one of the beds was occupied. Standing at its foot was a woman with one of those terrible rat's heads. A nurse, perhaps. Beside her was a human - Susannah didn't think he was a vampire but couldn't be sure, as the view through the door was as wavery as the air over an incinerator. He looked up and saw them.

"Hurry!" he shouted. "Move your freight! We have to connect them and finish it, or she'll die! They both will!" The doctor - surely no one but a doctor could have mustered such ill-tempered arrogance in the presence of Richard P. Sayre - made impatient beckoning gestures. "Get her in here! You're late, goddam you!"

Sayre pushed her rudely through the door. She heard a humming deep in her head, and a brief jangle of todash chimes: She looked down but was too late; Mia's borrowed legs were already gone and she went sprawling to the floor before Hawkman and Bulldog could come through behind her and catch her.

She braced on her elbows and looked up, aware that, for the first time in God knew how long - probably since she'd been raped in the circle of stones - she belonged only to herself. Mia was gone.

Then, as if to prove this wasn't so, Susannah's troublesome and newly departed guest let out a scream. Susannah added her own cry - the pain was now too huge for silence - and for a moment their voices sang of the baby's imminence in perfect harmony.

"Christ," said one of Susannah's guards - whether vampire or low man she didn't know. "Are my ears bleeding? Theyfeel like they must be - "

"Pick her up, Haber!" Sayre snarled. "Jey! Grab hold! Get her off the floor, for your fathers' sakes!"

Bulldog and Hawkman - or Haber and Jey, if you liked that better - grabbed her beneath the arms and quickly carried her down the aisle of the ward that way, past the rows of empty beds.

Mia turned toward Susannah and managed a weak, exhausted smile. Her face was wet with sweat and her hair was plastered to her flushed skin.

"Well-met...and ill," she managed.

"Push the next bed over!" the doctor shouted. "Hurry up, gods damn you! Why are you so Christingslow? "

Two of the low men who'd accompanied Susannah from the Dixie Pig bent over the nearest empty bed and shoved it next to Mia's while Haber and Jey continued to hold her up between them. There was something on the bed that looked like a cross between a hair-dryer and the sort of space helmet you saw in the oldFlash Gordon serials. Susannah didn't much care for the look of it. It had a brain-sucking look.

The rathead nurse, meanwhile, was bending between her patient's splayed legs and peering under the hiked-up hospital gown Mia now wore. She patted Mia's right knee with a plump hand and made a mewling sound. It was almost surely meant to comfort, but Susannah shuddered.

"Don't just stand there with your thumbs up your butts, you idiots!" the doctor cried. He was a stoutish man with brown eyes, flushed cheeks, and black hair swept back against his skull, where each track of the comb seemed as wide as a gutter. He wore a lab-coat of white nylon over a tweed suit. His scarlet cravat had an eye figured into it. This sigul did not surprise Susannah in the slightest.

"We wait your word," said Jey, the Hawkman. He spoke in a queer, inhuman monotone, as unpleasant as the rathead nurse's mewl but perfectly understandable.

"You shouldn'tneed my word!" the doctor snapped. He flapped his hands in a Gallic gesture of disgust. "Didn't your mothers have any children that lived?"

"I - " Haber began, but the doc went right over him. He was on a roll.

"How long have we been waiting for this, hmmm? How many times have we rehearsed the procedure? Why must you be so fuckingstupid, so Christingslow? Put her down on the b - "

Sayre moved with a speed Susannah wasn't sure even Roland could have equaled. At one moment he was standing beside Haber, the low man with the bulldog face. At the next he'd battened on the doctor, digging his chin into the doc's shoulder and grabbing his arm, twisting it high behind his back.

The doc's expression of petulant fury vanished in a heartbeat, and he began to scream in a childish, breaking treble. Spit spilled over his lower lip and the crotch of his tweed trousers darkened as his urine let go.

"Stop!"he howled."I'm no good to you if you break my arm! Oh stop, that HURRRTS!"

"If I sh'd break your arm, Scowther, I'd just drag some other pill-pusher in off the street to finish this, and kill him later. Why not? It's a woman having a baby, not brain-surgery, for Gan's sake!"

Yet he relaxed his hold a little bit. Scowther sobbed and wriggled and moaned as breathlessly as someone having sexual intercourse in a hot climate.

"And when it was done and you had no part in it," Sayre continued, "I'd feed you tothem. " He gestured with his chin.

Susannah looked that way and saw that the aisle from the door to the bed where Mia lay was now covered with the bugs she'd glimpsed in the Dixie Pig. Their knowing, greedy eyes were fixed on the plump doctor. Their mandibles clicked.

"What...sai, what must I do?"

"Cry my pardon."

"C-Cry pardon!"

"And now these others, for ye've insulted them as well, so you have."

"Sirs, I...I...c-cry - "

"Doctor!" the rathead nurse broke in. Her speaking voice was thick but understandable. She was still bent between Mia's legs. "The baby's crowning!"

Sayre let go of Scowther's arm. "Go on, Dr. Scowther. Do your duty. Deliver the child." Sayre bent forward and stroked Mia's cheek with extraordinary solicitude. "Be of good cheer and good hope, lady-sai," he said. "Some of your dreams may yet come true."

She looked up at him with a tired gratitude that wrung Susannah's heart.Don't believe him, his lies are endless, she tried to send, but for the nonce their contact was broken.

She was tossed like a sack of grain onto the bed which had been pushed next to Mia's. She was unable to struggle as one of the hoods was fitted over her head; another labor pain had gripped her, and once again the two women shrieked together.

Susannah could hear Sayre and the others murmuring. From below and behind them, she could also hear the unpleasant clittering of the bugs. Inside the helmet, round metal protuberances pressed against her temples, almost hard enough to hurt.

Suddenly a pleasant female voice said, "Welcome to the world of North Central Positronics, part of the Sombra Group! 'Sombra, where progress never stops!' Stand by for up-link."

A loud humming began. At first it was in Susannah's ears, but then she could feel it boring in on both sides. She visualized a pair of glowing bullets moving toward each other.

Dimly, as if from the other side of the room instead of right next to her, she heard Mia scream,"Oh no, don't, that hurts!"

The left hum and the right hum joined in the center of Susannah's brain, creating a piercing telepathic tone that would destroy her ability to think if it kept up for long. It was excruciating, but she kept her lips shut tight. She would not scream. Let them see the tears oozing out from beneath her closed lids, but she was a gunslinger and they would not make her scream.

After what seemed an eternity, the hum cut out.

Susannah had a moment or two in which to enjoy the blessed silence in her head, and then the next labor pain struck, this one very low down in her belly and with the force of a typhoon. With this pain shedid allow herself to scream. Because it was different, somehow; to scream with the baby's coming was an honor.

She turned her head and saw a similar steel hood had been fitted over Mia's sweaty black hair. The segmented steel hoses from the two helmets were connected in the middle. These were the gadgets they used on the stolen twins, but now they were being put to some other purpose. What?

Sayre leaned down to her, close enough so she could smell his cologne. Susannah thought it was English Leather.

"To accomplish the final labor and actually push the baby out, we need this physical link," he said. "Bringing you here to Fedic was absolutely vital." He patted her shoulder. "Good luck. It won't be long now." He smiled at her winsomely. The mask he wore wrinkled upward, revealing some of the red horror which lay beneath. "Then we can kill you."

The smile broadened.

"And eat you, of course. Nothing goes to waste at the Dixie Pig, not even such an arrogant bitch as yourself."

Before Susannah could reply, the female voice in her head spoke again. "Please speak your name, slowly and distinctly."

"Fuck you!" Susannah snarled back.

"Fuk Yu does not register as a valid name for a non-Asian," said the pleasant female voice. "We detect hostility, and apologize in advance for the following procedure."

For a moment there was nothing, and then Susannah's mind lit up with pain beyond anything she had ever been called upon to endure. More than she had suspected could exist. Yet her lips remained closed as it raved through her. She thought of the song, and heard it true even through the thunder of the pain:I am a maid...of constant sorrow...I've seen trials all my days...

At last the thunder ceased.

"Please speak your name, slowly and distinctly," said the pleasant female voice in the middle of her head, "or this procedure will be intensified by a factor of ten."

No need of that,Susannah sent the female voice.I'm convinced.

"Suuuu-zaaaa-nahhh," she said. "Suuu-zannnahhh..."

They stood watching her, all of them except for Ms. Rathead, who was peering ecstatically up to where the baby's down-covered head had once again appeared between the withdrawing lips of Mia's vagina.

"Miiii-aaaahhhh..."

"Suuuu-zaaa..."

"Miiii..."

"annn-ahhh..."

By the time the next contraction began, Dr. Scowther had seized a pair of forceps. The voices of the women became one, uttering a word, a name, that was neitherSusannah norMia but some combination of both.

"The link," said the pleasant female voice, "has been established." A faintclick. "Repeat the link has been established. Thank you for your cooperation."

"This is it, people," Scowther said. His pain and terror appeared forgotten; he sounded excited. He turned to his nurse. "It may cry, Alia. If it does, let it alone, for your father's sake! If it doesn't, swab out its mouth at once!"

"Yes, doctor." The thing's lips quivered back, revealing a double set of fangs. Was that a grimace or a smile?

Scowther looked around at them with a touch of his previous arrogance. "All of you stay exactly where you are until I say you can move," he said. "None of us knows exactly what we've got here. We only know that the child belongs to the Crimson King himself - "

Mia screamed at that. In pain and in protest.

"Oh, you idiot," Sayre said. He drew back a hand and slapped Scowther with enough force to make his hair fly and send blood spraying against the white wall in a pattern of fine droplets.

"No!" Mia cried. She tried to struggle up onto her elbows, failed, fell back. "No, you said I should have the raising of him! Oh, please...if only for a little while, I beg..."

Then the worst pain yet rolled over Susannah - over both of them, burying them. They screamed in tandem, and Susannah didn't need to hear Scowther, who was commanding her topush, topush NOW!

"It's coming, doctor!" the nurse cried in nervous ecstasy.

Susannah closed her eyes and bore down, and as she felt the pain begin to flow out of her like water whirlpooling its way down a dark drain, she also felt the deepest sorrow she had ever known. For it was Mia the baby was flowing into; the last few lines of the living message Susannah's body had somehow been made to transmit. It was ending. Whatever happened next, this part was ending, and Susannah Dean let out a cry of mingled relief and regret; a cry that was itself like a song.

And on the wings of that song, Mordred Deschain, son of Roland (and one other, O can you say Discordia), came into the world.

STAVE: Commala-come-kass!

The child has come at last!

Sing your song, O sing it well,

The child has come to pass.

RESPONSE: Commala-come-kass,

The worst has come to pass.

The Tower trembles on its ground;

The child has come at last.

Coda: Pages from a Writer's Journal

July 12th, 1977

Man, it's good to be back in Bridgton. They always treat us well in what Joe still calls "Nanatown," but Owen fussed almost nonstop. He's better since we got back home. We only stopped once, in Waterville to grab grub at the Silent Woman (I've had better meals there, I must add).

Anyway, I kept my promise to myself and went on a grand hunt for that Dark Tower story as soon as I got back. I'd almost given up when I found the pages in the farthest corner of the garage, under a box of Tab's old catalogues. There was a lot of "spring thaw drip" over there, and those funny blue pages smell all mildewy, but the copy is perfectly readable. I finished going over it, then sat down and added a small section to the Way Station material (where the gunslinger meets the boy Jake). I thought it would be kind of fun to put in a water pump that runs on an atomic slug, and so I did so without delay. Usually working on an old story is about as appetizing as eating a sandwich made with moldy bread, but this felt perfectly natural...like slipping on an old shoe.

What, exactly, was this story supposed to be about?

I can't remember, only that it first came to me a long, long time ago. Driving back from up north, with my entire family snoozing, I got thinking about that time David and I ran away from Aunt Ethelyn's. We were planning to go back to Connecticut, I think. The grups (i.e., grownups) caught us, of course, and put us to work in the barn, sawing wood. Punishment Detail, Uncle Oren called it. It seems to me that something scary happened to me out there, but I'll be damned if I can remember what it was, only that it was red. And I thought up a hero, a magic gunslinger, to keep me safe from it. There was something about magnetism, too, or Beams of Power. I'm pretty sure that was the genesis of this story, but it's strange how blurry it all seems. Oh well, who remembers all the nasty little nooks of their childhood? Who wants to?

Not much else happening. Joe and Naomi made Playground, and Tabby's plans for her trip to England are pretty much complete. Boy, that story about the gunslinger won't get out of my head!

Tell you what ole Roland needs: some friends!

July 19th, 1977

I went to see Star Wars on my motorcycle tonight, and I think it'll be the last time I climb on the bike until things cool off a little. I ate a ton of bugs. Talk about protein!

I kept thinking about Roland, my gunslinger from the Robert Browning poem (with a tip of Hatlo's Hat to Sergio Leone, of course), while I rode. The manuscript is a novel, no doubt - or a piece of one - but it occurs to me that the chapters also stand on their own. Or almost. I wonder if I could sell them to one of the fantasy mags? Maybe even to Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is, of course, the genre's Holy Grail.

Probably a stupid idea.

Otherwise, not much doing but the All-Star Game (National League 7, American League 5). I was pretty hammered before it was over. Tabby not pleased...

August 9th, 1978

Kirby McCauley sold the first chapter of that old Dark Tower story of mine to Fantasy and Science Fiction! Man, I can hardly believe it! That is just so cool! Kirby sez he thinks Ed Ferman (the Ed-in-chief there) will probably run everything of the DT story that I've got. He's going to call the first bit ("The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed," etc., etc., blah-blah, bang-bang) "The Gunslinger," which makes sense.

Not bad for an old story that was moldering away forgotten in a wet corner of the garage last year. Ferman told Kirby that Roland "has a feel of reality" that's missing in a lot of fantasy fiction, and wanted to know if there might be even more adventures. I'm sure there are even more adventures (or were , or will be  - what's the proper tense when you're talking about unwritten tales?), but I have no idea what they might be. Only that John "Jake" Chambers would have to come back into it.

A rainy, muggy day by the lake. No Playground for the kids. Tonight we had Andy Fulcher sit the big kids while Tab & I & Owen went to the Bridgton Drive-In. Tabby thought the film ( The Other Side of Midnight ...from last year , actually) was a piece of shit, but I didn't hear her begging to be taken home. As for me, I found my mind drifting off to that damn Roland guy again. This time to questions of his lost love. "Susan, lovely girl at the window."

Who, pray, be she?

September 9, 1978

Got my first copy of the October issue with "The Gunslinger" in it. Man, this looks fine.

Burt Hatlen called today. He's talking about me maybe doing a year at the University of Maine as writer in residence. Only Burt would be ballsy enough to think of a hack like me in connection w/ a job like that. Sort of an interesting idea, though.

October 29, 1979

Well, shit, drunk again. I can barely see the goddam page, but suppose I better put down something before I go staggering off to bed. Got a letter from Ed Ferman at F&SF today. He's going to do the second chapter of The Dark Tower  - the part where Roland meets the kid - as "The Way Station." He really wants to publish the entire run of stories, and I'm agreeable enough. I just wish there was more. Meanwhile, there's The Stand to think about - and, of course, The Dead Zone.

All of this doesn't seem to mean much to me just now. I hate being here in Orrington - hate being on such a busy road, for one thing. Owen damned near got creamed by one of those Cianbro trucks today. Scared the hell out of me. Also gave me an idea for a story, having to do with that odd little pet cemetery out in back of the house.PET SEMATARY is what the sign sez, isn't that weird? Funny, but also creepy. Almost a Vault of Horror type of thing.

June 19th, 1980

Just got off the phone with Kirby McCauley. He got a call from Donald Grant, who publishes lots of fantasy stuff under his own imprint (Kirby likes to joke that Don Grant is "the man who made Robert E. Howard infamous"). Anyway, Don would like to publish my gunslinger stories, and under their original title, The Dark Tower (subtitle The Gunslinger ). Isn't that neat? My own "limited edition." He'd do 10,000 copies, plus 500 signed and numbered. I told Kirby to go ahead and make the deal.

Anyway, it looks like my teaching career is over, and I got pretty well baked to celebrate. Took out the Pet Sematary ms. and looked it over. Good God, is that grim! Readers would lynch me if I published it, I think. That's one book that'll never see the light of day...

July 27th, 1983

Publishers Weekly (our son Owen calls it Pudlishers Weakness, which is actually sorta accurate) reviewed the latest Richard Bachman book...and once more, baby, I got roasted. They implied it was boring, and that, my friend, it ain't. Oh well, thinking about it made it that much easier to go to North Windham and pick up those 2 kegs of beer for the party. Got em at Discount Beverage. I'm smoking again, too, so sue me. I'll quit the day I turn 40 and that's a promise.

Oh, and Pet Sematary is published exactly two months from today. Then my career really will be over (joke...at least I hope it's a joke). After some thought, I added The Dark Tower to the author's ad-card at the front of the book. In the end, I thought, why not? Yes, I know it's sold out - there were only 10,000 copies to start with, fa Chrissake - but it was a real book and I'm proud of it. I don't suppose I'll ever go back to ole Roland the Gun-Toting Knight Errant, but yes, I'm proud of that book.

Good thing I remembered the beer run.

February 21st, 1984

Man, I got this crazy call from Sam Vaughn at Doubleday this afternoon (he edited Pet Sem, you will remember). I knew there were some fans who want The Dark Tower and are pissed off they can't get it, because I also get letters. But Sam sez they have gotten over THREE THOUSAND!! letters. And why, you ask? Because I was dumb enough to put The Dark Tower on the Pet Sematary author ad-card. I think Sam's a little pissed at me, and I suppose he's got a point. He says listing a book that fans want & can't get is a little like holding out a piece of meat to a hungry dog and then yanking it back, saying "No, no, you can't have it, har-har." On the other hand, God & the Man Jesus, people are so fucking spoiled! They just assume that if there's a book anywhere in the world they want, then they have a perfect right to that book. This would be news indeed to those folks in the Middle Ages who might have heard rumors of books but never actually saw one; paper was valuable (which would be a good thing to put in the next "Gunslinger/Dark Tower" novel, if I ever get around to it) and books were treasures you protected with your life. I love being able to make my living writing stories, but anyone who sez there's no dark side to it is full of shit. Someday I'm going to do a novel about a psychotic rare book dealer! (Joke)

Meanwhile, today was Owen's birthday. He's seven! The age of reason! I can hardly believe my youngest is seven and my daughter is thirteen, a lovely young woman.

August 14th, 1984 (NYC)

Just got back from a meeting with Elaine Koster from NAL and my agent, the ole Kirboo. Both of them pitched me on doing The Gunslinger as a trade-sized paperback, but I passed. Maybe someday, but I won't give that many people a chance to read something so unfinished unless/until I go back to work on the story.

Which I probably never will. Meantime, I have this other idea for a long novel about a clown that's really the worst monster in the world. Not a bad idea; clowns are scary. To me, at least. (Clowns & chickens, go figure.)

November 18th, 1984

I had a dream last night that I think breaks the creative logjam on It. Suppose there's a kind of Beam holding the Earth (or even multiple Earths) in place? And that the Beam's generator rests on the shell of a turtle? I could make that part of the book's climax. I know it sounds crazy, but I'm sure I read somewhere that in Hindu mythology there's a great turtle that bears us all on his shell, and that he serves Gan, the creative overforce. Also, I remember an anecdote where some lady sez to some famous scientist, "This evolution stuff is ridiculous. Everyone knows that a turtle holds up the universe." To which the scientist (wish I could remember his name, but I can't) replies, "That may be, madam, but what holds up the turtle?" Scornful laugh from the lady, who says, "Oh, you can't fool me! It's turtles all the way down."

Ha! Take that, ye rational men of science!

Anyway, I keep a blank book by my bed, and have gotten so I write down a lot of dreams and dream elements w/o even fully waking up. This morning I'd written Remember the Turtle! And this: See the TURTLE of enormous girth! On his shell he holds the earth. His thought is slow but always kind; he holds us all within his mind. Not great poetry, I grant you, but not bad for a guy who was three-quarters asleep when he wrote it!

Tabby has been on my case about drinking too much again. I suppose she's right, but...

June 10th, 1986 (Lovell/Turtleback Lane)

Man, am I glad we bought this house! I was scared of the expense to begin with, but I've never written better than I have here. And - this is scary, but it's true - I think I want to go back to work on The Dark Tower story. In my heart, I thought I never would, but last night when I was going to the Center General for beer, I could almost hear Roland saying, "There are many worlds and many tales, but not much time."

I ended up turning around and coming back to the house. Can't remember the last time I spent a totally sober night, but this is one of that dying breed. It actually feels fucked up not to be fucked up. That's pretty sad, I guess.

June 13th, 1986

I woke up in the middle of the night, hung-over and needing to pee. While I was standing at the bowl, it was almost as if I could see Roland of Gilead. Telling me to start with the lobstrosities. I will.

I know just what they are.

June 15th, 1986

Started the new book today. Can't believe I'm actually writing about old long, tall, and ugly again, but it felt right from the first page. Hell, from the first word. I've decided it'll be almost like the classic fairy-tales in structure: Roland walks along the beach of the Western Sea, getting sicker & sicker as he goes, and there's a series of doors to our world. He'll draw a new character from behind each one. The first one will be a stone junkie named Eddie Dean...

July 16th, 1986

I can't believe this. I mean, I've got the manuscript on the desk right in front of me so I sorta have to, but I still can't. I have written !!300!! PAGES in the last month, and the copy is so clean it's positively squeaky. I've never felt like one of those writers who can actually take credit for their work, who say they plot every move and incident, but I've also never had a book that seemed to flow through me like this one has. It's pretty much taken over my life from Day One. And do you know, it seems to me that a lot of the other things I've written (especially It ) are like "practice shots" for this story. Certainly I've never picked something up after it lay fallow for fifteen years! I mean, sure, I did a little work on the stories Ed Ferman published in F&SF, and I did a little more when Don Grant published The Gunslinger, but nothing like what I'm up to now. I even dream about this story. I have days when I wish I could quit drinking, but I'll tell you something: I'm almost scared to stop. I know inspiration doesn't flow from the neck of a bottle, but there's something...

I'm scared, okay? I feel like there's something -  Something  - that doesn't want me to finish this book. That didn't even want me to start it. Now I know that's crazy ("Like something out of a Stephen King story," har-har), but at the same time it seems very real. Probably a good thing no one'll ever read this diary; very likely they'd put me away if they did. Anyone want to buy a used fruitcake?

I'm going to call it The Drawing of the Three, I think.

September 19th, 1986

It's done. The Drawing of the Three is done. I got drunk to celebrate. Stoned, too. And what's next? Well, It will be published in a month or so, and in two days I'll be thirty-nine. Man, I can hardly believe it. Seems just about a week ago that we were living in Bridgton and the kids were babies.

Ah, fuck. Time to quit. The writer's gettin' maudlin.

June 19th, 1987

Got my first author's copy of Drawing from Donald Grant today. It's a beautiful package. I've also decided to let NAL go ahead and do both Dark Tower books in paperback - give the people what they want. Why the hell not?

Of course, I got drunk to celebrate...only these days who needs an excuse?

It's a good book but in many ways it seems like I didn't write the damn thing at all, that it just flowed out of me, like the umbilical cord from a baby's navel. What I'm trying to say is that the wind blows, the cradle rocks, and sometimes it seems to me that none of this stuff is mine, that I'm nothing but Roland of Gilead's fucking secretary. I know that's stupid, but a part of me sort of believes it. Only maybe Roland's got his own boss. Ka?

I do tend to get depressed when I look at my life: the booze, the drugs, the cigarettes. As if I'm actually trying to kill myself. Or something else is...

October 19th, 1987

I'm in Lovell tonight, the house on Turtleback Lane. Came down here to think about the way I'm living my life. Something's got to change, man, because otherwise I might as well just cut to the chase and blow my brains out.

Something's got to change.

The following item from the North Conway (N.H.)Mountain Earwas pasted into the writer's journal, marked April 12th, 1988:

LOCAL SOCIOLOGIST DISMISSES "WALK-IN" TALES

By Logan Merrill

For at least 10 years, the White Mountains have resounded with tales of "Walk-Ins," creatures who may be aliens from space, time travelers, or even "beings from another dimension." In a lively lecture last night at the North Conway Public Library, local sociologist Henry K. Verdon, author of Peer Groups and Myth-Making, used the Walk-In phenomenon as an illustration of just how myths are created and how they grow. He said that the "Walk-Ins" were probably originally created by teenagers in the border towns between Maine and New Hampshire. He also speculated that sightings of illegal aliens who cross over the northern border from Canada and then into the New England states may have played a part in kindling this myth, which has become so prevalent.

"I think we all know," Professor Verdon said, "that there is no Santa Claus, no Tooth Fairy, and no actual beings called Walk-Ins. Yet these tales

(Continued on P. 8)

The rest of the article is missing. Nor is there any explanation as to why King may have included it in his journal.

June 19th, 1989

I just got back from my one-year Alcoholix Anonymous "anniversary." An entire year w/o drugs or booze! I can hardly believe it. No regrets; sobering up undoubtedly saved my life (and probably my marriage), but I wish it wasn't so hard to write stories in the aftermath. People in "the Program" say don't push it, it'll come, but there's another voice (I think of it as the Voice of the Turtle) telling me to hurry up and get going, time is short and I have to sharpen my tools. For what? For The Dark Tower, of course, and not just because letters keep coming in from people who read The Drawing of the Three and want to know what happens next. Something in me wants to go back to work on the story, but I'll be damned if I know how to get back.

July 12th, 1989

There are some amazing treasures on the bookshelves down here in Lovell. Know what I found this morning, while I was looking for something to read? Shardik, by Richard Adams. Not the story about the rabbits but the one about the giant mythological bear. I think I'll read it over again.

Am still not writing much of interest...

September 21, 1989

Okay, this is relatively weird, so prepare yourself.

Around 10 A.M., while I was writing (while I was staring at the word processor and dreaming about how great it would be to have an ice-cold keg of Bud, at least), the doorbell rang. It was a guy from Bangor House of Flowers, with a dozen roses. Not for Tab, either, but for me. The card read Happy Birthday from the Mansfields - Dave, Sandy, and Megan.

I had totally forgotten, but today I'm the Big Four-Two. Anyway, I took one of the roses out, and I kind of got lost in it. I know how strange that sounds, believe me, but I did. I seemed to hear this sweet humming, and I just went down & down, following the curves of the rose, kind of splashing thru these drops of dew that seemed as big as ponds. And all the time that humming sound got louder & sweeter, and the rose got...well, rosier. And I found myself thinking of Jake from the first Dark Tower story, and Eddie Dean, and a bookstore. I even remember the name: The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind.

Then, boom! I feel a hand on my shoulder, I turn around, and it's Tabby. She wanted to know who sent me the roses. She also wanted to know if I'd fallen asleep. I said no, but I kind of did, right there in the kitchen.

You know what it was like? That scene at the Way Station in the The Gunslinger, where Roland hypnotizes Jake with a bullet. I'm immune to hypnosis, myself. A guy got me up on stage at the Topsham Fair when I was a kid and tried it on me, but it didn't work. As I remember, my brother Dave was quite disappointed. He wanted me to cluck like a chicken.

Anyway, I think I want to go back to work on The Dark Tower. I don't know if I'm ready for anything that complex - after some of the failures of the last couple of years let's say I'm dubious - but I want to give it a shot, just the same. I hear those make-believe people calling to me. And who knows? There might even be a place in this one for a giant bear, like Shardik in the Richard Adams novel!

October 7th, 1989

I started the next Dark Tower book today, and - as with The Drawing of the Three  - I finished my first session wondering why in God's name I waited so long. Being with Roland, Eddie, and Susannah is like a drink of cool water. Or meeting old friends after a long absence. And, once again, there is a sense that I'm not telling the story but only providing a conduit for it. And you know what? That's okie-fine with me. I sat at the word processor for four hours this morning and did not once think of a drink or any sort of mind-altering drug. I think I'll call this one The Wastelands.

October 9th, 1989

No -  Waste Lands. 2 words, as in the T. S. Eliot poem (his is actually "The Waste Land," I think).

January 19th, 1990

Finished The Waste Lands tonight, after a marathon 5-hour session. People are going to hate the way it ends, w/ no conclusion to the riddle contest, and I thought the story would go on longer myself, but I can't help it. I heard a voice speak up clearly in my head (as always it sounds like Roland's) saying, "You're done for now - close thy book, wordslinger."

Cliffhanger ending aside, the story seems fine to me, but, as always, not much like the other ones I write. The manuscript is a brick, over 800 pages long, and I created said brick in just a little over three months.

Un-fucking-real.

Once again, hardly any strike-overs or re-takes. There are a few continuity glitches, but considering the length of the book, I can hardly believe how few. Nor can I believe how, when I needed some sort of inspiration, the right book seemed to fly into my hand time after time. Like The Quin-cunx, by Charles Palliser, with all the wonderful, growly 17th-century slang: "Aye, so ye do" and "So ye will" and "my cully." That argot sounded perfect coming out of Gasher's mouth (to me, at least). And how cool it was to have Jake come back into the story the way he did!

Only thing that worries me is what's going to happen to Susannah Dean (who used to be Detta/Odetta). She's pregnant, and I'm afraid of who or what the father might be. Some demon? I don't think so, exactly. Maybe I won't have to deal w/ that until a couple of books further down the line. In any case, my experience is that, in a long book, whenever a woman gets pregnant and nobody knows who the father is, that story is headed down the tubes. Dunno why, but as a plot-thickener, pregnancy just naturally seems to suck!

Oh well, maybe it doesn't matter. For the time being I'm tired of Roland and his ka-tet. I think it may be awhile before I get back to them again, although the fans are going to howl their heads off about that cliffhanger ending on the train out of Lud. Mark my words.

I'm glad I wrote it, tho, and to me the ending seems just right. In many ways Waste Lands feels like the high point of my "make-believe life."

Even better than The Stand, maybe.

November 27th, 1991

Remember me saying that I'd get bitched at about the ending of Waste Lands? Look at this!

Letter follows from John T. Spier, of Lawrence, Kansas:

November 16, 91

Dear Mr. King,

Or should I just cut to the chase and say "Dear Asshole"?

I can't believe I paid such big bucks for a Donald Grant Edition of your GUNSLINGER book The Waste Lands and this is what I got. It had the right title anyway, for it was "a true WASTE."

I mean the story was all right don't get me wrong, great in fact, but how could you "tack on" an ending like that? It wasn't an ending at all but just a case of you getting tired and saying "Oh well, what the fuck, I don't need to strain my brain to write an ending, those slobs who buy my books will swallow anything."

I was going to send it back but will keep it because I at least liked the pictures (especially Oy). But the story was a cheat.

Can you spell CHEAT Mr. King? M-O-O-N, that spells CHEAT.

Sincerely yours in criticism,

John T. Spier

Lawrence, Kansas

March 23, 1992

In a way, this one makes me feel even worse.

Letter follows from Mrs. Coretta Vele, of Stowe, Vermont:

March 6th, 1992

Dear Stephen King,

I don't know if this letter will actually reach you but one can always hope. I have read most of your books and have loved them all. I am a 76-yrs-young "gramma" from your "sister state" of Vermont, and I especially like your Dark Tower stories. Well, to the point. Last month I went to see a team of Oncologists at Mass General, and they tell me that the brain tumor I have looks to be malignant after all (at 1st they said "Don't worry Coretta its benine"). Now I know you have to do what you have to do, Mr. King, and "follow your muse," but what they're saying is that I will be fortunate to see the 4th of July this year. I guess I've read my last "Dark Tower yarn." So what I'm wondering is, Can you tell me how the Dark Tower story comes out, at least if Roland and his "Ka-Tet" actually get to the Dark Tower? And if so what they find there? I promise not to tell a soul and you will be making a dying woman very happy.

Sincerely,

Coretta Vele

Stowe, Vt.

I feel like such a shit when I think of how blithe I was concerning the ending of Waste Lands. I gotta answer Coretta Vele's letter, but I don't know how to. Could I make her believe I don't know any more than she does about how Roland's story finishes? I doubt it, and yet "that is the truth," as Jake sez in his Final Essay. I have no more idea what's inside that damned Tower than...well, than Oy does! I didn't even know it was in a field of roses until it came off my fingertips and showed up on the screen of my new Macintosh computer! Would Coretta buy that? What would she say if I told her, "Cory, listen: The wind blows and the story comes. Then it stops blowing, and all I can do is wait, same as you."

They think I'm in charge, every one of them from the smartest of the critics to the most mentally challenged reader. And that's a real hoot.

Because I'm not.

September 22, 1992

The Grant edition of The Waste Lands is sold out, and the paperback edition is doing very well. I should be happy and guess I am, but I'm still getting a ton of letters about the cliffhanger ending. They fall into 3 major categories: People who are pissed off, people who want to know when the next book in the series is coming out, and pissed-off people who want to know when the next book in the series is coming out.

But I'm stuck. The wind from that quarter just isn't blowing. Not just now, anyway.

Meanwhile, I have an idea for a novel about a lady who buys a picture in a pawnshop and then kind of falls into it. Hey, maybe it'll be Mid-World she falls into, and she'll meet Roland!

July 9th, 1994

Tabby and I don't fight much since I quit drinking, but oboy, this morning we had a dilly. We're at the Lovell house, of course, and as I was getting ready to leave on my morning walk, she showed me a story from today's Lewiston Sun. It seems that a Stoneham man, Charles "Chip" McCaus-land, was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver while walking on Route 7. Which is the road I walk on, of course. Tabby tried to persuade me to stay on Turtleback Lane, I tried to persuade her that I had as much right to use Route 7 as anyone else (and honest to God, I only do half a mile on the blacktop), and things went downhill from there. Finally she asked me to at least stop walking on Slab City Hill, where the sightlines are so short and there's nowhere to jump if someone happens to get off the road and onto the shoulder. I told her I'd think about it (it would have been noon before I got out of the house if we kept on talking), but in truth I'll be damned if I'll live my life in fear that way. Besides, it seems to me that this poor guy from Stoneham has made the odds of me getting hit while out walking about a million to one. I told this to Tabby and she said, "The odds of you ever being as successful at writing as you have been are even higher. You've said so yourself."

To that I'm afraid I had no comeback.

June 19th, 1995 (Bangor)

Tabby and I just got back from the Bangor Auditorium where our youngest (and about four hundred of his classmates) finally got a diploma. He's now officially a high school graduate. Bangor High and the Bangor Rams are behind him. He'll be starting college in the fall and then Tab and I will have to start dealing w/ the ever-popular Empty Nest Syndrome. Everybody sez it all goes by in the wink of an eye and you say yeah yeah yeah ...and then it does.

Fuck, I'm sad.

Feel lost. What's it all for, anyway? (What's it all about, Alfie, ha-ha?) What, just a big scramble from the cradle to the grave? "The clearing at the end of the path"? Jesus, that's grim.

Meantime, we're headed down to Lovell and the house on Turtleback Lane this afternoon - Owen will join us in a day or two, he sez. Tabby knows I want to write by the lake, and boy, she's so intuitive it's scary. When we were coming back from the graduation exercises, she asked me if the wind was blowing again.

In fact it is, and this time it's blowing a gale. I can't wait to start the next volume of the DT series. Time to find out what happens in the riddling contest (that Eddie blows Blaine's computerized mind with "silly questions" - i.e., riddles - is something I've known for several months now), but I don't think that's the major story I have to tell this time. I want to write about Susan, Roland's first love, and I want to set their "cowboy romance" in a fictional part of Mid-World called Mejis (i.e., Mexico).

Time to saddle up and take another ride w/ the Wild Bunch.

Meantime, the other kids are doing well, although Naomi had some kind of allergic reaction, maybe to shell-fish...

July 19th, 1995 (Turtleback Lane, Lovell)

As on my previous expeditions to Mid-World, I feel like somebody who's just spent a month on a jet-propelled rocket-sled. While stoned on hallucinatory happygas. I thought this book would be tougher to get into, much, but in fact it was once more as easy as slipping into a pair of comfortable old shoes, or those Western-style short-boots I got from Bally's in New York 3 or 4 years ago and cannot bear to give up.

I've already got over 200 pages, and was delighted to find Roland and his friends investigating the remains of the superflu; seeing evidence of both Randall Flagg and Mother Abagail.

I think Flagg may turn out to be Walter, Roland's old nemesis. His real name is Walter o'Dim, and he was just a country boy to start with. It makes perfect sense, in a way. I can see now how, to a greater or lesser degree, every story I've ever written is about this story. And you know, I don't have a problem with that. Writing this story is the one that always feels like coming home.

Why does it always feel dangerous, as well? Why should I be so convinced that if I'm ever found slumped over my desk, dead of a heart attack (or wiped out on my Harley, probably on Route 7), it will be while working on one of these Weird Westerns? I guess because I know so many people are depending on me to finish the cycle. And I want to finish it! God, yes! No Canterbury Tales or Mystery of Edwin Drood in my portfolio if I can help it, thank you very much. And yet I always feel as if some anti-creative force is looking around for me, and that I am easier to see when I'm working on these stories.

Well, enough w/ the heebie-jeebies. I'm off on my walk.

September 2, 1995

I'm expecting the book to be done in another five weeks. This one has been more challenging, but still the story comes to me in wonderful rich details. Watched Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai last nite, and wonder if that might not be the right direction for Vol. #6, The Werewolves of End-World (or some such). I probably ought to see if any of the little side-o'-the-road video rental places around here have got The Magnificent Seven, which is the Americanized version of the Kurosawa film.

Speaking of side-o'-the-road, I almost had to dive into the ditch this afternoon to avoid a guy in a van - swerving from side to side, pretty obviously drunk - on the last part of Route 7 before I turn back into the relatively sheltered environs of Turtleback Lane. I don't think I'll mention this to Tabby; she'd go nuclear. Anyway, I've had my one "pedestrian scare," and I'm just glad it didn't happen on the Slab City Hill portion of the road.

October 19th, 1995

Took me a little longer than I thought, but I finished Wizard and Glass tonight...

August 19th, 1997

Tabby and I just said goodbye to Joe and his good wife; they're on their way back to New York. I was glad I could give them a copy of Wizard and Glass. The first bunch of finished books came today. What looks & smells better than a new book, especially one w/ your name on the title page? This is the world's best job I've got; real people pay me real money to hang out in my imagination. Where, I should add, the only ones who feel completely real to me are Roland and his ka-tet.

I think the CRs* are really going to like this one, and not just because it finishes the story of Blaine the Mono. I wonder if the Vermont Gramma with the brain tumor is still alive? I s'poze not, but if she was, I'd be happy to send her a copy...

July 6th, 1998

Tabby, Owen, Joe, and I went to Oxford tonight to see the film Armageddon. I liked it more than I expected, in part because I had my family w/ me. The movie is sfx-driven end-of-the-world stuff. Got me thinking about the Dark Tower and the Crimson King. Probably not surprising.

I wrote for awhile this morning on my Vietnam story, switching over from longhand to my PowerBook, so I guess I'm serious about it. I like the way Sully John reappeared. Question: Will Roland Deschain and his friends ever meet Bobby Garfield's pal, Ted Brautigan? And just who are those low men chasing the old Tedster, anyway? More and more my work feels like a slanted trough where everything eventually drains into Mid-World and End-World.

The Dark Tower is my uber story, no question about that. When it's done, I plan to ease back. Maybe retire completely.

August 7, 1998

Took my usual walk this afternoon, and tonight I took Fred Hauser with me to the AA meeting in Fryeburg. On the way home he asked me to sponsor him and I said yes; I think he's finally getting serious about sobering up. Good for him. Anyhow, he got talking about the so-called "Walk-Ins." He says there are more of them around the Seven Towns than ever, and all sorts of folks are gossiping about them.

"How come I never hear anything, then?" I asked him. To which I got no answer but an extremely funny look. I kept prodding, and finally Fred sez,

"People don't like to talk about them around you, Steve, because there have been two dozen reported on Turtleback Lane in the last 8 months and you claim not to have seen a single one."

To me this seemed like a non sequitur and I made no reply. It wasn't until after the meeting - and after I'd dropped my new pigeon off - that I realized what he was saying: people don't talk about the "Walk-Ins" around me because they think that in some crazy way I'M RESPONSIBLE. I thought I was pretty well used to being "America's boogeyman," but this is actually sort of outrageous...

January 2, 1999 (Boston)

Owen and I are at the Hyatt Harborside tonight, and head off to Florida tomorrow. (Tabby and I are talking about buying a place there but haven't told the kids. I mean, they're only 27, 25 and 21 - maybe when they're old enough to understand such things, ha-ha.) Earlier we met Joe and saw a film called Hurlyburly, from the play by David Rabe. Very odd. Speaking of odd, I had some sort of New Year's Night nightmare before leaving Maine. Can't remember exactly what it was, but when I woke up this morning I'd written two things in my dreambook. One was Baby Mordred, like something out of a Chas Addams cartoon. That I sort of understand; it must refer to Susannah's baby in the Dark Tower stories. It's the other thing that puzzles me. It says 6/19/99, O Discordia.

Discordia also sounds like something out of the DT stories, but it's not anything I have invented. As for 6/19/99, that's a date, right? Meaning what? June 19th of this year. Tabby and I should be back at the Turtleback Lane house by then, but so far as I can remember it's not anybody's birthday.

Maybe it's the date I'm going to meet my first walk-in!

June 12, 1999

It's wonderful to be back at the lake!

I've decided to take 10 days off, then finally return to work on the how-to-write book. I'm curious about Hearts in Atlantis; will folks want to know if Bobby Garfield's friend Ted Brautigan plays a part in the Tower saga? The truth is I really don't know the answer to that. In any case, readership of the Tower stories has fallen off a lot lately - the figures are really disappointing, compared to that of my other books (except for Rose Madder, which was a real tank-job, at least in the sales sense). But it doesn't matter, at least to me, and if the series ever gets done, sales may go up.

Tabby and I had another argument about my walking route; she asked me again to quit going out on the main road. Also she asked me "Is the wind blowing yet?" Meaning am I thinking about the next Dark Tower story. I said no, commala-come-come, the tale has not begun. But it will, and there's a dance called the commala in it. That's the one thing I see clearly: Roland dancing. Why, or for whom, I don't know.

Anyway, I asked T. why she wanted to know about the Dark Tower and she said, "You're safer when you're with the gunslingers."

Joking, I suppose, but an odd joke for T. Not much like her.

June 17, 1999

Talked with Rand Holston and Mark Carliner tonight. They both sound excited about moving on from Storm of the Century to Rose Red (or Kingdom Hospital ), but either one would fill my plate up again.

I dreamed of my walk last night & woke up crying. The Tower will fall, I thought. O Discordia, the world grows dark.

Headline from the PortlandPress-Herald,June 18, 1999:

"WALK-IN" PHENOMENON IN WESTERN MAINE

CONTINUES TO RESIST EXPLANATION

June 19, 1999

This is like one of those times when all the planets line up, except in this case it's my family all lined up here on Turtleback Lane. Joe and his family arrived around noon; their little boy is really cute. Say true! Sometimes I look in the mirror and say, "You are a grandfather." And the Steve in the mirror just laughs, because the idea is so ridiculous. The Steve in the mirror knows I'm still a college sophomore, going to classes and protesting the war in Viet Nam by day, drinking beer down at Pat's Pizza with Flip Thompson and George McLeod by night. As for my grandson, the beautiful Ethan? He just tugs on the balloon tied to his toe and laughs.

Daughter Naomi and son Owen got here late last night. We had a great Father's Day dinner; people saying things to me that were so nice I had to check to make sure I wasn't dead! God, I'm lucky to have family, lucky to have more stories to tell, lucky to still be alive. The worst thing to happen this week, I hope, will be my wife's bed collapsing under the weight of our son and daughter-in-law - the idiots were wrestling on it.

You know what? I've been thinking of going back to Roland's story after all. As soon as I finish the book on writing ( On Writing would actually not be a bad title - it's simple and to the point). But right now the sun is shining, the day is beautiful, and what I'm going to do is take a walk.

More later, maybe.

From the Portland SundayTelegram,June 20, 1999:

STEPHEN KING DIES NEAR

LOVELL HOME

POPULAR MAINE WRITER KILLED WHILE TAKING AFTERNOON WALK

INSIDER CLAIMS MAN DRIVING LETHAL VAN "TOOK EYES OFF THE ROAD" AS HE APPROACHED KING ON ROUTE 7

By Ray Routhier

LOVELL, ME. (Exclusive) Maine's most popular author was struck and killed by a van while walking near his summer home yesterday afternoon. The van was driven by Bryan Smith of Fryeburg. According to sources close to the case, Smith has admitted that he "took his eyes off the road" when one of his Rottweilers got out of the back of the van and began nosing into a cooler behind the driver's seat.

"I never even saw him," Smith is reported to have said shortly after the collision, which took place on what locals call Slab City Hill.

King, author of such popular novels asIt, 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, andThe Stand, was taken to Northern Cumberland Memorial Hospital in Bridgton, where he was pronounced dead at 6:02 PM Saturday evening. He was 52 years old.

A hospital source said the cause of death was extensive head injuries. King's family, which had gathered in part to celebrate Father's Day, is in seclusion tonight...

Commala-come-come,

The battle's now begun!

And all the foes of men and rose

Rise with the setting sun.

*Constant Readers

Wordslinger's Note

I'd once more like to acknowledge the invaluable contributions of Robin Furth, who read this novel in manuscript - and those preceding it - with great and sympathetic attention to detail. If this increasingly complex tale hangs together, Robin should get most of the credit. And if you don't believe it, check out herDark Tower concordance, which makes fascinating reading in and of itself.

Thanks are also due to Chuck Verrill, who has edited the final five novels in the Tower cycle, and to the three publishers, two large and one small, who cooperated to make this massive project a reality: Robert Wiener (Donald M. Grant, Publisher), Susan Petersen Kennedy and Pamela Dorman (Viking), Susan Moldow and Nan Graham (Scribner). Special thanks to Agent Moldow, whose irony and bravery have saved many a bleak day. There are others, plenty of them, but I'm not going to annoy you with the whole list. After all, this ain't the fucking Academy Awards, is it?

Certain geographical details in this book and in the concluding novel of the Tower cycle have been fictionalized. The real people mentioned in these pages have been used in a fictional way. And to the best of my knowledge, there were never coin-op storage lockers in the World Trade Center.

As for you, Constant Reader...

One more turn of the path, and then we reach the clearing.

Come along with me, will ya not?

Stephen King

May 28, 2003

(Tell God thank ya.)