Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower #6)(19)

You go on and do just that if you like,she'd said,but I'll always wear this one.

She had hung it around her neck, liking the way it felt between her br**sts, and now here was this unknown woman, thisbitch, trying to take it off.

Detta hadcome forward, struggling with Mia. Detta had had absolutely no success in trying to reassert control over Roland, but Mia was no Roland of Gilead. Mia's hands dropped away from the rawhide. Her control wavered. When it did, Susannah felt another of those labor pains sweep through her, making her double over and groan.

It has to come off!Mia shouted.Otherwise, they'll have hisscent as well as yours! Your husband's! You don't want that, believe me!

Who?Susannah had asked.Who are you talking about?

Never mind - there's no time. But if he comes after you - and I know you think he'll try - they mustn't have his scent! I'll leave it here, where he'll find it. Later, if ka wills, you may wear it again.

Susannah had thought of telling her they could wash the ring off, wash Eddie's smell off it, but she knew it wasn't just a smell Mia was speaking of. It was a love-ring, and that scent would always remain.

But for whom?

The Wolves, she supposed. Thereal Wolves. The ones in New York. The vampires of whom Callahan had spoken, and the low men. Or was there something else? Something even worse?

Help me!Mia cried, and again Susannah found that cry impossible to resist. The baby might or might not be Mia's, and it might or might not be a monster, but her body wanted to have it. Her eyes wanted to see it, whatever it was, and her ears wanted to hear it cry, even if the cries were really snarls.

She had taken the ring off, kissed it, and then dropped it at the foot of the path, where Eddie would surely see it. Because he would follow her at least this far, she knew it.

Then what? She didn't know. She thought she remembered riding on something most of the way up a steep path, surely the path which led to the Doorway Cave.

Then, blackness.

(not blackness)

No, notcomplete blackness. There were blinking lights. The low glow of television screens that were, for the time being, projecting no pictures but only soft gray light. The faint hum of motors; the click of relays. This was

(the Dogan Jake's Dogan)

some sort of control room. Maybe a place she had constructed herself, maybe her imagination's version of a Quonset hut Jake had found on the west side of the River Whye.

The next thing she remembered clearly was being back in New York. Her eyes were windows she looked through as Mia stole some poor terrified woman's shoes.

Susannahcame forward again, asking for help. She meant to go on, to tell the woman she needed to go to the hospital, needed a doctor, she was going to have a baby and something was wrong with it. Before she could get any of that out, another labor pain washed over her, this one monstrous, deeper than any pain she had ever felt in her life, worse even than the pain she'd felt after the loss of her lower legs. This, though - this -

"Oh Christ," she said, but Mia took over again before she could say anything else, telling Susannah that she had to make it stop, and telling the woman that if she whistled for any John Laws, she'd lose a pair of something a lot more valuable to her than shoes.

Mia, listen to me,Susannah told her.I can stop it again - I thinkI can - but you have to help. You have to sit down. If you don't settle for awhile, God Himself won't be able to stop your labor from running its course. Do you understand? Do you hear me?

Mia did. She stayed where she was for a moment, watching the woman from whom she'd stolen the shoes. Then, almost timidly, she asked a question:Where should I go?

Susannah sensed that her kidnapper was for the first time becoming aware of the enormous city in which she now found herself, was finally seeing the surging schools of pedestrians, the floods of metal carriages (every third one, it seemed, painted a yellow so bright it almost screamed), and towers so high that on a cloudy day their tops would have been lost to view.

Two women looked at an alien city through one set of eyes. Susannah knew it washer city, but in many ways, it no longer was. She'd left New York in 1964. How many years further along was this? Twenty? Thirty? Never mind, let it go. Now was not the time to worry about it.

Their combined gaze settled on the little pocket park across the street. The labor pains had ceased for the time being, and when the sign over there said WALK, Trudy Damascus's black woman (who didn't look particularly pregnant) crossed, walking slowly but steadily.

On the far side was a bench beside a fountain and a metal sculpture. Seeing the turtle comforted Susannah a little; it was as if Roland had left her this sign, what the gunslinger himself would have called a sigul.

He'll come after me, too,she told Mia.And you should 'ware him, woman. You should 'ware him very well.

I'll do what I need to do,Mia replied.You want to see the woman's papers. Why?

I want to see when this is. The newspaper will say.

Brown hands pulled the rolled-up newspaper from the canvas Borders bag, unrolled it, and held it up to blue eyes that had started that day as brown as the hands. Susannah saw the date - June 1st, 1999 - and marveled over it. Not twenty years or even thirty, but thirty-five. Until this moment she hadn't realized how little she'd thought of the world's chances to survive so long. The contemporaries she'd known in her old life - fellow students, civil rights advocates, drinking buddies, and folk-musicaficionados  - would now be edging into late middle age. Some were undoubtedly dead.