Song of Susannah

really thought I was rid of it.”

“Some bad pennies just keep turning up,” Jake said.

EIGHT

He was prepared to try his unique red key in every door on the nineteenth floor if he had to, but Jake knew 1919 was right even before they reached it. Callahan did, too, and a sheen of sweat broke on his forehead. It felt thin and hot. Feverish.

Even Oy knew. The bumbler whined uneasily.

“Jake,” Callahan said. “We need to think this over. That thing is dangerous. Worse, it’s malevolent.”

“That’s why we gotta take it,” Jake said patiently. He stood in front of 1919, drumming the MagCard between his fingers. From behind the door-and under it, and through it-came a hideous drone like the singing voice of some apocalyptic idiot. Mixed in was the sound of jangling, out-of-tune chimes. Jake knew the ball had the power to send you todash, and in those dark and mostly doorless spaces, it was all too possible to become lost forever. Even if you found your way to another version of Earth, it would have a queer darkness to it, as if the sun were always on the verge of total eclipse.

“Have you seen it?” Callahan asked.

Jake shook his head.

“I have,” Callahan said dully, and armed sweat from his forehead. His cheeks had gone leaden. “There’s an Eye in it. I think it’s the Crimson King’s eye. I think it’s a part of him that’s trapped in there forever, and insane. Jake, taking that ball to a place where there are vampires and low men-servants of the King-would be like giving Adolf Hitler an A-bomb for his birthday.”

Jake knew perfectly well that Black Thirteen was capable of doing great, perhaps illimitable, damage. But he knew something else, as well.

“Pere, if Mia left Black Thirteen in this room and she’s now going to where they are, they’ll know about it soon enough. And they’ll be after it in one of their big flashy cars before you can say Jack Robinson.”

“Can’t we leave it for Roland?” Callahan asked miserably.

“Yes,” Jake said. “That’s a good idea, just like taking it to the Dixie Pig is a bad one. But we can’t leave it for him here.” Then, before Callahan could say anything else, Jake slid the blood-red MagCard into the slot above the doorknob. There was a loud click and the door swung open.

“Oy, stay right here, outside the door.”

“Ake!” He sat down, curling his cartoon squiggle of a tail around his paws, and looked at Jake with anxious eyes.

Before they went in, Jake laid a cold hand on Callahan’s wrist and said a terrible thing…

“Guard your mind.”

NINE

Mia had left the lights on, and yet a queer darkness had crept into Room 1919 since her departure. Jake recognized it for what it was: todash darkness. The droning song of the idiot and the muffled, jangling chimes were coming from the closet.

It’s awake, he thought with mounting dismay. It was asleep before-dozing, at least-but all this moving around woke it up. What do I do'? Are the box and the bowling bag enough to make it safe? Do I have anything that will make it safer? Any charm, any sigul?

As Jake opened the closet door, Callahan found himself exerting all the force of his will-which was considerable-just to keep from fleeing. That atonal humming and the occasional jangling chimes beneath it offended his ears and mind and heart. He kept remembering the way station, and how he had shrieked when the hooded man had opened the box. How slick the thing inside had been! It had been lying on red velvet… and it had rolled. Had looked at him, and all the malevolent madness of the universe had been in that disembodied, leering gaze.

I will not run.I will not. If the boy can stay, I can stay.

Ah, but the boy was a gunslinger, and that made a difference. He was more than ka’s child; he was Roland of Gilead’s child as well, his adopted son.

Don’t you see how pale he is? He’s as scared as you are, for Christ’s sake! Now get hold of yourself, man!

Perhaps it was perverse, but observing Jake’s extreme pallor steadied him. When an old bit of nonsense song occurred to him and he began to sing under his breath, he steadied yet more.

“Round and round the mulberry bush,” he sang in a whisper, “the monkey chased the weasel… the monkey thought ’twas all in fun…”

Jake eased open the closet. There was a room safe inside. He tried 1919 and nothing happened. He paused to let the safe mechanism reset itself, wiped sweat from his forehead with both hands (they were shaking), and tried again. This time he punched 1999, and the safe swung open.

Black Thirteen’s droning song and the contrapuntal jangle of the todash chimes both increased. The sounds were like chilly fingers prying around in their heads.

And it can send you places, Callahan thought. All you have to do is let down your guard a little bit… open the bag… open the box… and then… oh, the places you ’ll go! Pop goes the weasel!

True though he knew this to be, part of him wanted to open the box. Lusted to. Nor was he the only one; as he watched, Jake knelt before the safe like a worshipper at an altar. Callahan reached to stop him from lifting the bag out with an arm that seemed incredibly heavy.

It doesn’t matter if you do or don’t, a voice whispered in his mind. It was sleep-inducing, that voice, and incredibly persuasive. Nonetheless, Callahan kept reaching. He grasped Jake’s collar with fingers from which all feeling seemed to have departed.

“No,” he said. “Don’t.” His voice sounded draggy, dispirited, depressed. When he pulled Jake to one side, the boy seemed to go as if in slow motion, or underwater. The room now seemed lit by the sick yellow light that sometimes falls over a landscape before a ruinous storm. As Callahan fell onto his own knees before the open safe (he seemed to descend through the air for at least a full minute before touching down), he heard the voice of Black Thirteen, louder than ever. It was telling him to kill the boy, to open the boy’s throat and give the ball a refreshing drink of his warm life’s blood. Then Callahan himself would be allowed to leap from the room’s window.

All the way down to Forty-sixth Street you will praise me, Black Thirteen assured him in a voice both sane and lucid.

“Do it,” Jake sighed. “Oh yes, do it, who gives a damn.”

“Ake!” Oy barked from the doorway. “Ake!” They both ignored him.

As Callahan reached for the bag, he found himself remembering his final encounter with Barlow, the king vampire-the Type One, in Callahan’s own parlance-who had come to the little town of ’salem’s Lot. Found himself remembering how he’d confronted Barlow in Mark Petrie’s house, with Mark’s parents lying lifeless on the floor at the vampire’s feet, their skulls crushed and their oh-so- rational brains turned to jelly.

While you fall, I’ll let you whisper the name of my king, Black Thirteen whispered. The Crimson King.

As Callahan watched his hands grasp the bag-whatever had been there before, nothing but strikes at mid-world lanes was now printed on the side-he thought of how his crucifix had first glared with some otherworldly light, driving Barlow back… and then had begun to darken again.

“Open it!” Jake said eagerly. “Open it, I want to see it!”

Oy was barking steadily now. Down the hall someone yelled “Shut that dog up!” and was likewise ignored.

Callahan slipped the ghostwood box from the bag-the box that had spent such a blessedly quiet time hidden beneath the pulpit of his church in Calla Bryn Sturgis. Now he would open it. Now he would observe Black Thirteen in all its repellent glory.

And then die. Gratefully.

TEN

Sad to see a man’s faith fail, the vampire Kurt Barlow had said, and then he’d plucked Don Callahan’s dark and useless cross from his hand. Why had he been able to do that? Because-behold the paradox, consider the riddle-Father Callahan had failed to throw the cross away himself. Because he had failed to accept that the cross was nothing but one symbol of a far greater power, one that ran like a river beneath the universe, perhaps beneath a thousand universes-

Ineed no symbol, Callahan thought; and then: Is that why God let me live? Was He giving me a second chance to learn that?

It was possible, he thought as his hands settled on the lid of the box. Second chances were one of God’s specialties.

“Folks, you got to shut your dog up.” The querulous voice of a hotel maid, but very distant. Then it said: “Madre de Dios, why’s it so dark in here? What’s that… what’s that… n… n…”

Perhaps she was trying to say noise. If so, she never finished. Even Oy now seemed resigned to the spell of the humming, singing ball, for he gave up his protests (and his post at the door) to come trotting into the room. Callahan supposed the beast wanted to be at Jake’s side when the end came.

The Pere struggled to still his suicidal hands. The thing in the box raised the volume of its idiot’s song, and the tips of his fingers twitched in response. Then they stilled again. Ihave that much of a victory, Callahan thought.

“Ne’mine, I’ll do it.” The voice of the maid, drugged and avid. “I want to see it. Dios! I want to hold it!”

Jake’s arms seemed to weigh a ton, but he forced them to reach out and grab the maid, a middle-aged Hispanic lady who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and five pounds.

As he had struggled to still his hands, so Callahan now struggled to pray.

God, not my will but Thine. Not the potter but the potter’s clay.