The Dark Tower

I’d free you, if chance allows, her kidnapper had said, and the word Susannah now heard in her mind and saw on the laboring woman’s lips was chassit.

Susannah, do you hear me?

I hear you very well, Susannah said.

And you understand our compact?

Aye. I’ll help you get away from these with your chap, if I can. And . . .

Kill us if you can’t! the voice finished fiercely. It had never been so loud. That was partly the work of the connecting cable, Susannah felt sure. Say it, Susannah, daughter of Dan!

I’ll kill you both if you—

She stopped there. Mia seemed satisfied, however, and that was well, because Susannah couldn’t have gone on if both their lives had depended on it. Her eye had happened on the ceiling of this enormous room, over the aisles of beds halfway down. And there she saw Eddie and Roland. They were hazy, floating in and out of the ceiling, looking down at her like phantom fish.

Another pain, but this one not as severe. She could feel her thighs hardening, pushing, but that seemed far away. Not important. What mattered was whether or not she was really seeing what she thought she was seeing. Could it be that her overstressed mind, wishing for rescue, had created this hallucination to comfort her?

She could almost believe it. Would have, very likely, had they not both been naked, and surrounded by an odd collection of floating junk: a matchbook, a peanut, ashes, a penny. And a floormat, by God! A car floormat with FORD printed on it.

“Doctor, I can see the hea—”

A breathless squawk as Dr. Scowther, no gentleman he, elbowed Nurse Ratty unceremoniously aside and bent even closer to the juncture of Mia’s thighs. As if he meant to pull her chap out with his teeth, perhaps. The hawk-thing, Jey or Gee, was speaking to the one called Haber in an excited, buzzing dialect.

They’re really there, Susannah thought. The floormat proves it. She wasn’t sure how the floormat proved it, only that it did. And she mouthed the word Mia had given her: chassit. It was a password. It would open at least one door and perhaps many. To wonder if Mia had told the truth never even crossed Susannah’s mind. They were tied together, not just by the cable and the helmets, but by the more primitive (and far more powerful) act of childbirth. No, Mia hadn’t lied.

“Push, you gods-damned lazy bitch!” Scowther almost howled, and Roland and Eddie suddenly disappeared through the ceiling for good, as if blown away by the force of the man’s breath. For all Susannah knew, they had been.

She turned on her side, feeling her hair stuck to her head in clumps, aware that her body was pouring out sweat in what could have been gallons. She pulled herself a little closer to Mia; a little closer to Scowther; a little closer to the crosshatched butt of Scowther’s dangling automatic.

“Be still, sissa, hear me I beg,” said one of the low men, and touched Susannah’s arm. The hand was cold and flabby, covered with fat rings. The caress made her skin crawl. “This will be over in a minute and then all the worlds change. When this one joins the Breakers in Thunderclap—”

“Shut up, Straw!” Haber snapped, and pushed Susannah’s would-be comforter backward. Then he turned eagerly to the delivery again.

Mia arched her back, groaning. The rathead nurse put her hands on Mia’s hips and pushed them gently back down to the bed. “Nawthee, nawthee, push ’ith thy belly.”

“Eat shit, you bitch!” Mia screamed, and while Susannah felt a faint tug of her pain, that was all. The connection between them was fading.

Summoning her own concentration, Susannah cried into the well of her own mind. Hey! Hey Positronics lady! You still there?

“The link . . . is down,” said the pleasant female voice. As before, it spoke in the middle of Susannah’s head, but unlike before, it seemed dim, no more dangerous than a voice on the radio that comes from far away due to some atmospheric flaw. “Repeat: the link . . . is down. We hope you’ll remember North Central Positronics for all your mental enhancement needs. And Sombra Corporation! A leader in mind-to-mind communication since the ten thousands!”

There was a tooth-rattling BEE-EEEEP far down in Susannah’s mind, and then the link was gone. It wasn’t just the absence of the horridly pleasant female voice; it was everything. She felt as if she’d been let out of some painful body-compressing trap.

Mia screamed again, and Susannah let out a cry of her own. Part of this was not wanting Sayre and his mates to know the link between her and Mia had been broken; part was genuine sorrow. She had lost a woman who had become, in a way, her true sister.