Song of Susannah

“You want to enjoy those legs while you got em, honey!” The voice she hears coming out of her mouth is rough and confrontational on top, scared underneath. The voice of Detta Walker. “You goan lose em fore long! They goan be cut off by the A train! That fabled A train! Man named Jack Mort goan push you off the platform in the Christopher Street station!”

Odetta looks at her calmly and says, “The A train doesn’t stop there. It’snever stopped there.”

“What the fuck youtalkin about, bitch?”

Odetta is not fooled by the angry voice or the profanity. She knows who she’s talking to. And she knows what she’s talking about. The column of truth has a hole in it. These are not the voices of the gramophone but those of our dead friends. There are ghosts in the rooms of ruin. “Go back to the Dogan, Susa

Now it’s the voice of David Brinkley, saying that someone named Stephen King was struck and killed by a minivan while walking near his home in Lovell, a small town in western Maine. King was fifty-two, he says, the author of many novels, most notablyThe Stand, The Shining, and’Salem’s Lot. Ah Discordia, Brinkley says, the world grows darker.

Odetta Holmes, the woman Susa

Susa

“No!” she screams. “No, I will never!I will NEVER! ”

“Then the gunslinger will die and the Dark Tower will fall,” says the terrible woman standing in the corridor, the terrible woman who is wearing Trudy Damascus’s shoes.

“Discordia indeed.”

Susa

She does. She falls forward into the darkness and the soft beeping of machinery and the last voice she hears is that of Walter Cronkite, telling her that Diem and Nhu are dead, astronaut Alan Shepard is dead, Lyndon Johnson is dead, Richard Nixon is dead, Elvis Presley is dead, Rock Hudson is dead, Roland of Gilead is dead, Eddie of New York is dead, Jake of New York is dead, the world is dead, theworlds, the Tower is falling, a trillion universes are merging, and all is Discordia, all is ruin, all is ended.

Susa

(Diem and Nhu are dead)

had only been a dream. A dream within a dream, if you pleased. This was another, but marginally better.

Most of the TV screens which had been showing pictures of Calla Bryn Sturgis the last time she’d been here were now broadcasting either snow or test-patterns. On one, however, was the nineteenth-floor corridor of the Plaza—Park Hotel. The camera rolled down it toward the elevators, and Susa

My eyes,she thought. Her anger was thin, but she sensed it could be fed. Wouldhave to be fed, if she was ever to regard the unspeakable thing she’d seen in her dream. The thing in the corner of her Oxford jail cell. The thing in the bowl of blood.

They’re my eyes. She hijacked them, that’s all.

Another TV screen showed Mia arriving in the elevator lobby, examining the buttons, and then pushing the one marked with the DOWN arrow.We’re off to see the midwife, Susa

Here were the dials she’d reset at some considerable inconvenience—hell,pain. EMOTIONAL TEMP still at 72. The toggle-switch marked CHAP still turned to ASLEEP, and in the monitor above it the chap thus still in black-and-white like everything else: no sign of those disquieting blue eyes. The absurd LABOR FORCE oven-dial was still at 2, but she saw that most of the lights which had been amber the last time she’d been in this room had now turned red. There were more cracks in the floor and the ancient dead soldier in the corner had lost his head: the increasingly heavy vibration of the machinery had toppled the skull from the top of its spine, and it now laughed up at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling.

The needle on the SUSANNAH-MIO readout had reached the end of the yellow zone; as Susa

She tried the controls one after another, confirming what she already knew: they were locked in place. Mia might not have been able to change the settings in the first place, but locking things up once those settings were to her liking? That much she had been able to do.

There was a crackle and squall from the overhead speakers, loud enough to make her jump. Then, coming to her through heavy bursts of static, Eddie’s voice.

“Suze!…ay!…Ear me? Burn…ay! Do it before…ever…posed…id! Do you hear me?”

On the screen she thought of as Mia-Vision, the doors of the central elevator car opened. The hijacking mommybitch got on. Susa

“Eddie, I don’t understand you! Say it again, sugar!”

For a moment there was nothing but more static, plus the occasional spooky wail of feedback. She was about to try the mike again when Eddie’s voice returned, this time a little clearer.

“Burn up…day! Jake…Pere Cal…hold on! Burn…before she…to wherever she…have the kid! If you…knowledge!”

“I hear you, I acknowledge that much!” she cried. She was clutching the silver mike so tightly that it trembled in her grasp. “I’m in 1999! June of 1999! But I’m not understanding you as well as I need to, sug! Say again, and tell me if you’re all right!”

But Eddie was gone.

After calling for him half a dozen times and getting nothing but that blur of static, she set the microphone down again and tried to figure out what he had been trying to tell her. Trying also to set aside her joy just in knowing that Eddie could still try to tell heranything.

“Burn up day,” she said. That part, at least, had come through loud and clear. “Burn upthe day. As in kill some time.” She thought that almost had to be right. Eddie wanted Susa

Meanwhile, on Mia-Vision, the elevator doors were opening again. The hijacking mommy-bitch had reached the lobby. For the time being Susa