She opened a drawer and found nothing but breadboards and a rolling pin. She considered the rolling pin briefly, but had no wish to baste her dinner with more rat-blood than she absolutely had to. She opened the cabinet beneath and found tins for muffins and molds for fancy desserts. She moved to her left, opened another drawer, and here was what she was looking for.
Mia considered the knives, took one of the meat-forks instead. It had two six-inch steel tines. She took it back to the row of ovens, hesitated, and checked the other three. They were empty, as she had known they would be. Something—some fate some providence some ka—had left fresh meat, but only enough for one. Mr. Rat thought it was his. Mr. Rat had made a mistake. She did not think he would make another. Not this side of the clearing, anyway.
She bent and once again the smell of freshly cooked pork filled her nose. Her lips spread and drool ran from the corners of her smile. This time Mr. Rat didn’t look around. Mr. Rat had decided she was no threat. That was all right. She bent further forward, drew a breath, and impaled it on the meat-fork. Rat-kebab! She drew it out and held it up in front of her face. It squealed furiously, its legs spinning in the air, its head lashing back and forth, blood running down the meat-fork’s handle to pool around her fist. She carried it, still writhing, to the sinkful of stagnant water and flipped it off the fork. It splashed into the murk and disappeared. For a moment the tip of its twitching tail stuck up, and then that was gone, too.
She went down the line of sinks, trying the faucets, and from the last one got a feeble trickle of water. She rinsed her bloody hand under it until the trickle subsided. Then she walked back to the oven, wiping her hand dry on the seat of her britches. She did not see Jake, now standing just inside the kitchen doors and watching her, although he made no attempt to hide; she was totally fixated on the smell of the meat. It wasn’t enough, and not precisely what her chap needed, but it would do for the time being.
She reached in, grasped the sides of the roasting pan, then pulled back with a gasp, shaking her fingers and grinning. It was a grin of pain, yet not entirely devoid of humor. Mr. Rat had either been a trifle more immune to the heat than she was, or maybe hongrier. Although it was hard to believe anyone or anything could be hongrier than she was right now.
“I’se hongry!” she yelled, laughing, as she went down the line of drawers, opening and closing them swiftly. “Mia’s one hongry lady, yessir! Didn’t go to Morehouse, didn’t go to no house, but I’se hongry! And my chap’s hongry, too!”
In the last drawer (wasn’t that always the way), she found the hotpads she’d been looking for. She hurried back to the oven with them in her hands, bent down, and pulled the roast out. Her laughter died in a sudden shocked gasp . . . and then burst out again, louder and stronger than ever. What a goose she was! What a damned silly-billy! For one instant she’d thought the roast, which had been done to a skin-crackling turn and only gnawed by Mr. Rat in one place, was the body of a child. And yes, she supposed that a roasted pig did look a little bit like a child . . . a baby . . . someone’s chap . . . but now that it was out and she could see the closed eyes and the charred ears and the baked apple in the open mouth, there was no question about what it was.
As she set it on the counter, she thought again about the reflection she’d seen in the foyer. But never mind that now. Her gut was a roar of famishment. She plucked a butcher’s knife out of the drawer from which she had taken the meat-fork and cut off the place where Mr. Rat had been eating the way you’d cut a wormhole out of an apple. She tossed this piece back over her shoulder, then picked up the roast entire and buried her face in it.
From the door, Jake watched her.
When the keenest edge had been taken off her hunger, Mia looked around the kitchen with an expression that wavered between calculation and despair. What was she supposed to do when the roast was gone? What was she supposed to eat the next time this sort of hunger came? And where was she supposed to find what her chap really wanted, really needed? She’d do anything to locate that stuff and secure a good supply of it, that special food or drink or vitamin or whatever it was. The pork was close (close enough to put him to sleep again, thank all the gods and the Man Jesus), but not close enough.
She banged sai Piggy back into the roasting pan for the nonce, pulled the shirt she was wearing off over her head, and turned it so she could look at the front. There was a cartoon pig, roasted bright red but seeming not to mind; it was smiling blissfully. Above it, in rustic letters made to look like barnboard, was this: THE DIXIE PIG, LEX AND 61ST. Below it: “BEST RIBS IN NEW YORK”—GOURMET MAGAZINE.
The Dixie Pig, she thought. The Dixie Pig. Where have I heard that before?
She didn’t know, but she believed she could find Lex if she had to. “It be right there between Third and Park,” she said. “That’s right, ain’t it?”
The boy, who had slipped back out but left the door ajar, heard this and nodded miserably. That was where it was, all right.
Well-a-well, Mia thought. It all does fine for now, good as it can do, anyway, and like that woman in the book said, tomorrow’s another day. Worry about it then. Right?
Right. She picked up the roast again and began to eat. The smacking sounds she made were really not much different from those made by the rat. Really not much different at all.
TWO
Tian and Zalia had tried to give Eddie and Susannah their bedroom. Convincing them that their guests really didn’t want their bedroom—that sleeping there would actually make them uncomfortable—hadn’t been easy. It was Susannah who finally turned the trick, telling the Jaffordses in a hesitant, confiding voice that something awful had happened to them in the city of Lud, something so traumatic that neither of them could sleep easily in a house anymore. A barn, where you could see the door open to the outside world any time you wanted to take a look, was much better.
It was a good tale, and well told. Tian and Zalia listened with a sympathetic credulity that made Eddie feel guilty. A lot of bad things had happened to them in Lud, that much was true, but nothing which made either of them nervous about sleeping indoors. At least he guessed not; since leaving their own world, the two of them had only spent a single night (the previous) under the actual roof of an actual house.
Now he sat cross-legged on one of the blankets Zalia had given them to spread on the hay, the other two cast aside. He was looking out into the yard, past the porch where Gran-pere had told his tale, and toward the river. The moon flitted in and out of the clouds, first brightening the scene to silver, then darkening it. Eddie hardly saw what he was looking at. His ears were trained on the floor of the barn below him, where the stalls and pens were. She was down there somewhere, he was sure she was, but God, she was so quiet.
And by the way, who is she? Mia, Roland says, but that’s just a name. Who is she really?
But it wasn’t just a name. It means mother in the High Speech, the gunslinger had said.
It means mother.
Yeah. But she’s not the mother of my kid. The chap is not my son.
A soft clunk from below him, followed by the creak of a board. Eddie stiffened. She was down there, all right. He’d begun to have his doubts, but she was.
He had awakened after perhaps six hours of deep and dreamless sleep to discover she was gone. He went to the barn’s bay door, which they’d left open, and looked out. There she was. Even by moonlight he’d known that wasn’t really Susannah down there in the wheelchair; not his Suze, not Odetta Holmes or Detta Walker, either. Yet she wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. She—
You saw her in New York, only then she had legs and she knew how to use them. She had legs and she didn’t want to go too close to the rose. She had her reasons for that, and they were good reasons, but you know what I think the real reason was? I think she was afraid it would hurt whatever it is she’s carrying in her belly.
Yet he felt sorry for the woman below. No matter who she was or what she was carrying, she’d gotten herself into this situation while saving Jake Chambers. She’d held off the demon of the circle, trapping it inside her just long enough for Eddie to finish whittling the key he’d made.
If you’d finished it earlier—if you hadn’t been such a damned little chickenshit—she might not even be in this mess, did you ever think of that?
Eddie had pushed the thought away. There was some truth to it, of course—he had lost his confidence while whittling the key, which was why it hadn’t been finished when the time of Jake’s drawing came—but he was done with that kind of thinking. It was good for nothing but creating a truly excellent array of self-inflicted wounds.
Whoever she was, his heart had gone out to the woman he saw below him. In the sleeping silence of the night, through the alternating shutters of moonlight and dark, she pushed Susannah’s wheelchair first across the yard . . . then back . . . then across again . . . then left . . . then right. She reminded him a little of the old robots in Shardik’s clearing, the ones Roland had made him shoot. And was that so surprising? He’d drifted off to sleep thinking of those robots, and what Roland had said of them: They are creatures of great sadness, I think, in their own way. Eddie is going to put them out of their misery. And so he had, after some persuasion: the one that looked like a many-jointed snake, the one that looked like the Tonka tractor he’d once gotten as a birthday present, the ill-tempered stainless-steel rat. He’d shot them all except for the last, some sort of mechanical flying thing. Roland had gotten that one.
Like the old robots, the woman in the yard below wanted to go someplace, but didn’t know where. She wanted to get something, but didn’t know what. The question was, what was he supposed to do?
Just watch and wait. Use the time to think up some other bullshit story in case one of them wakes up and sees her in the dooryard, pacing around in her wheelchair. More post-traumatic stress syndrome from Lud, maybe.
“Hey, it works for me,” he murmured, but just then Susannah had turned and wheeled back toward the barn, now moving with a purpose. Eddie had lain down, prepared to feign sleep, but instead of hearing her coming upstairs, he’d heard a faint cling, a grunt of effort, then the creak of boards going away toward the rear of the barn. In his mind’s eye he saw her getting out of her chair and heading back there at her usual speedy crawl . . . for what?
Five minutes of silence. He was just beginning to get really nervous when there was a single squeal, short and sharp. It was so much like the cry of an infant that his balls pulled up tight and his skin broke out in gooseflesh. He looked toward the ladder leading down to the barn floor and made himself wait some more.
That was a pig. One of the young ones. Just a shoat, that’s all.
Maybe, but what he kept picturing was the younger set of twins. Especially the girl. Lia, rhymes with Mia. No more than babies, and it was crazy to think of Susannah cutting a child’s throat, totally insane, but . . .
But that’s not Susannah down there, and if you start thinking it is, you’re apt to get hurt, the way you almost got hurt before.
Hurt, hell. Almost killed was what he’d been. Almost gotten his face chewed off by the lobstrosities.
It was Detta who threw me to the creepy-crawlies. This one isn’t her.
Yes, and he had an idea—only an intuition, really—that this one might be a hell of a lot nicer than Detta, but he’d be a fool to bet his life on it.
Or the lives of the children? Tian and Zalia’s children?
He sat there sweating, not knowing what to do.
Now, after what seemed an interminable wait, there were more squeaks and creaks. The last came from directly beneath the ladder leading to the loft. Eddie lay back again and closed his eyes. Not quite all the way, though. Peering through his lashes, he saw her head appear above the loft floor. At that moment the moon sailed out from behind a cloud and flooded the loft with light. He saw blood at the corners of her mouth, as dark as chocolate, and reminded himself to wipe it off her in the morning. He didn’t want any of the Jafford clan seeing it.
What I want to see is the twins, Eddie thought. Both sets, all four, alive and well. Especially Lia. What else do I want? For Tian to come out of the barn with a frown on his face. For him to ask us if we heard anything in the night, maybe a fox or even one of those rock-cats they talk about. Because, see, one of the shoats has gone missing. Hope you hid whatever was left of it, Mia or whoever you are. Hope you hid it well.
She came to him, lay down, turned over once and fell asleep—he could tell by the sound of her breathing. Eddie turned his head and looked toward the sleeping Jaffords home place.
She didn’t go anywhere near the house.
No, not unless she’d wheeled her chair all the way through the barn and right out the back, that was. Gone around that way . . . slipped in a window . . . taken one of the younger twins . . . taken the little girl . . . taken her back to the barn . . . and . . .
She didn’t do that. Didn’t have the time, for one thing.
Maybe not, but he’d feel a lot better in the morning, just the same. When he saw all the kids at breakfast. Including Aaron, the little boy with the chubby legs and the little sticking-out belly. He thought of what his mother sometimes said when she saw a mother wheeling a little one like that along the street: So cute! Looks good enough to eat!
Quit it. Go to sleep!
But it was a long time before Eddie got back to sleep.
THREE
Jake awoke from his nightmare with a gasp, not sure where he was. He sat up, shivering, arms wrapped around himself. He was wearing nothing but a plain cotton shirt—too big for him—and flimsy cotton shorts, sort of like gym shorts, that were also too big for him. What . . . ?
There was a grunt, followed by a muffled fart. Jake looked toward these sounds, saw Benny Slightman buried up to the eyes under two blankets, and everything fell into place. He was wearing one of Benny’s undershirts and a pair of Benny’s undershorts. They were in Benny’s tent. They were on the bluff overlooking the river. The riverbanks out here were stony, Benny had said, no good for rice but plenty good for fishing. If they were just a little bit lucky, they’d be able to catch their own breakfast out of the Devar-Tete Whye. And although Benny knew Jake and Oy would have to return to the Old Fella’s house to be with their dinh and their ka-mates for a day or two, maybe longer, perhaps Jake could come back later on. There was good fishing here, good swimming a little way upstream, and caves where the walls glowed in the dark and the lizards glowed, too. Jake had gone to sleep well satisfied by the prospect of these wonders. He wasn’t crazy about being out here without a gun (he had seen too much and done too much to ever feel entirely comfortable without a gun these days), but he was pretty sure Andy was keeping an eye on them, and he’d allowed himself to sleep deep.
Then the dream. The horrible dream. Susannah in the huge, dirty kitchen of an abandoned castle. Susannah holding up a squirming rat impaled on a meat-fork. Holding it up and laughing while blood ran down the fork’s wooden handle and pooled around her hand.
That was no dream and you know it. You have to tell Roland.
The thought which followed this was somehow even more disturbing: Roland already knows. So does Eddie.
Jake sat with his knees against his chest and his arms linked around his shins, feeling more miserable than at any time since getting a good look at his Final Essay in Ms. Avery’s English Comp class. My Understanding of the Truth, it had been called, and although he understood it a lot better now—understood how much of it must have been called forth by what Roland called the touch—his first reaction had been pure horror. What he felt now wasn’t so much horror as it was . . . well . . .
Sadness, he thought.
Yes. They were supposed to be ka-tet, one from many, but now their unity had been lost. Susannah had become another person and Roland didn’t want her to know, not with Wolves on the way both here and in the other world.
Wolves of the Calla, Wolves of New York.
He wanted to be angry, but there seemed no one to be angry at. Susannah had gotten pregnant helping him, after all, and if Roland and Eddie weren’t telling her stuff, it was because they wanted to protect her.
Yeah, right, a resentful voice spoke up. They also want to make sure she’s able to help out when the Wolves come riding out of Thunderclap. It’d be one less gun if she was busy having a miscarriage or a nervous breakdown or something.
He knew that wasn’t fair, but the dream had shaken him badly. The rat was what he kept coming back to; that rat writhing on the meat-fork. Her holding it up. And grinning. Don’t want to forget that. Grinning. He’d touched the thought in her mind at that moment, and the thought had been rat-kebab.
“Christ,” he whispered.
He guessed he understood why Roland wasn’t telling Susannah about Mia—and about the baby, what Mia called the chap—but didn’t the gunslinger understand that something far more important had been lost, and was getting more lost every day this was allowed to go on?
They know better than you, they’re grown-ups.
Jake thought that was bullshit. If being a grown-up really meant knowing better, why did his father go on smoking three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day and snorting cocaine until his nose bled? If being a grown-up gave you some sort of special knowledge of the right things to do, how come his mother was sleeping with her masseuse, who had huge biceps and no brains? Why had neither of them noticed, as the spring of 1977 marched toward summer, that their kid (who had a nickname—’Bama—known only to the housekeeper) was losing his fucking mind?
This isn’t the same thing.
But what if it was? What if Roland and Eddie were so close to the problem they couldn’t see the truth?
What is the truth? What is your understanding of the truth?
That they were no longer ka-tet, that was his understanding of the truth.
What was it Roland had said to Callahan, at that first palaver? We are round, and roll as we do. That had been true then, but Jake didn’t think it was true now. He remembered an old joke people told when they got a blowout: Well, it’s only flat on the bottom. That was them now, flat on the bottom. No longer truly ka-tet—how could they be, when they were keeping secrets? And were Mia and the child growing in Susannah’s stomach the only secrets? Jake thought not. There was something else, as well. Something Roland was keeping back not just from Susannah but from all of them.
We can beat the Wolves if we’re together, he thought. If we’re ka-tet. But not the way we are now. Not over here, not in New York, either. I just don’t believe it.