Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower #6)(68)
"Listen to me," Odetta says. "No one can get you out of this but yourself, girl."
"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 f**k 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, Susannah. And remember what I say: only you can save yourself. Only you can lift yourself out of Discordia."
Four
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.
Five
Odetta Holmes, the woman Susannah once was, points through the bars of the cell and past her. She says it again: "Only you can save yourself. But the way of the gun is the way of damnation as well as salvation; in the end there is no difference."
Susannah turns to look where the finger is pointing, and is filled with horror at what she sees: The blood! Dear God, theblood! There is a bowl filled with blood, and in it some monstrous dead thing, a dead baby that's not human, and has she killed it herself?
"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."
Susannah closes her eyes. Can shemake herself swoon? Can she swoon herself right out of this cell, this terrible world?
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.
Six
Susannah opened her eyes and looked around wildly, gasping for breath. She almost fell out of the chair in which she was sitting. It was one of those capable of rolling back and forth along the instrument panels filled with knobs and switches and blinking lights. Overhead were the black-and-white TV screens. She was back in the Dogan. Oxford
(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 Susannah realized that these were Mia's eyes she was looking through.
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, Susannah thought, looking grimly up at the screen, and then barked a short, humorless laugh.Oh, we're off to see the midwife, the wonderful midwife of Oz. Because because because because be-CAUZZZ...Because of the wonderful things she does!
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 Susannah watched, it edged into the red. Danger, danger, Diem and Nhu are dead. Papa Doc Duvalier is dead. Jackie Kennedy is dead.
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.