Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower #6)(116)

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."