5th Stanza: The Turtle
One
Mia said:Talking will be easier - quicker and clearer, too - if we do it face-to-face.
How can we?Susannah asked.
We'll have our palaver in the castle,Mia replied promptly. The Castle on the Abyss. In the banquet room. Do you remember the banquet room?
Susannah nodded, but hesitantly. Her memories of the banquet room were but recently recovered, and consequently vague. She wasn't sorry, either. Mia's feeding there had been. . . well, enthusiastic, to say the very least. She'd eaten from many plates (mostly with her fingers) and drunk from many glasses and spoken to many phantoms in many borrowed voices. Borrowed? Hell,stolen voices. Two of these Susannah had known quite well. One had been Odetta Holmes's nervous - and rather hoity-toity - "social" voice. Another had been Detta's raucous who-gives-a-shit bellow. Mia's thievery had extended to every aspect of Susannah's personality, it seemed, and if Detta Walker was back, pumped up and ready to cut butt, that was in large part this unwelcome stranger's doing.
The gunslinger saw me there,Mia said. The boy, too.
There was a pause. Then:
I have met them both before.
Who? Jake and Roland?
Aye, they.
Where? When? How could y -
We can't speak here. Please. Let us go somewhere more private.
Someplace with a phone, isn't that what you mean? So your friends can call you.
I only know a little, Susannah of New York, but what little I know, I think you would hear.
Susannah thought so, too. And although she didn't necessarily want Mia to realize it, she was also anxious to get off Second Avenue. The stuff on her shirt might look like spilled egg-cream or dried coffee to the casual passerby, but Susannah herself was acutely aware of what it was: not just blood, but the blood of a brave woman who had stood true on behalf of her town's children.
And there were the bags spread around her feet. She'd seen plenty of bag-folkenin New York, aye. Now she felt like one herself, and she didn't like the feeling. She'd been raised to better, as her mother would have said. Each time someone passing on the sidewalk or cutting through the little park gave her a glance, she felt like telling them she wasn't crazy in spite of how she looked: stained shirt, dirty face, hair too long and in disarray, no purse, only those three bags at her feet. Homeless, aye - had anyone ever been as homeless as she, not just out of house but out of time itself? - but in her right mind. She needed to palaver with Mia and get an understanding of what all this was about, that was true. What shewanted was much simpler: to wash, to put on fresh clothes, and to be out of public view for at least a little while.
Might as well wish for the moon, sugar,she told herself. . . and Mia, if Mia was listening. Privacy costs money. You're in a version of New York where a single hamburger might cost as much as a dollar, crazy as that sounds. And you don't have a sou. Just a dozen or so sharpened plates and some kind of black-magic ball. So what are you gonna do?
Before she could get any further in her thinking, New York was swept away and she was back in the Doorway Cave. She'd been barely aware of her surroundings on her first visit - Mia had been in charge then, and in a hurry to make her getaway through the door - but now they were very clear. Pere Callahan was here. So was Eddie. And Eddie's brother, in a way. Susannah could hear Henry Dean's voice floating up from the cave's depths, both taunting and dismayed: "I'm in hell, bro! I'm in hell and I can't get a fix andit's all your fault! "
Susannah's disorientation was nothing to the fury she felt at the sound of that nagging, hectoring voice. "Most of what was wrong with Eddie wasyour fault! " she screamed at him. "You should have done everyone a favor and died young, Henry!"
Those in the cave didn't even look around at her. What was this? Had she come here todash from New York, just to add to the fun? If so, why hadn't she heard the chimes?
Hush. Hush, love. That was Eddie's voice in her mind, clear as day. Just watch.
Do you hear him?she asked Mia. Do you -
Yes! Now shut up!
"How long will we have to be here, do you think?" Eddie asked Callahan.
"I'm afraid it'll be awhile," Callahan replied, and Susannah understood she was seeing something that had already happened. Eddie and Callahan had gone up to the Doorway Cave to try to locate Calvin Tower and Tower's friend, Deepneau. Just before the showdown with the Wolves, this had been. Callahan was the one who'd gone through the door. Black Thirteen had captured Eddie while the Pere was gone. And almost killed him. Callahan had returned just in time to keep Eddie from hurling himself from the top of the bluff and into the draw far below.
Right now, though, Eddie was dragging the bag - pink, yes, she'd been right about that, on the Calla side it had been pink - out from underneath the troublesome sai Tower's bookcase of first editions. They needed the ball inside the bag for the same reason Mia had needed it: because it opened the Unfound Door.
Eddie lifted it, started to turn, then froze. He was frown-
"What is it?" Callahan asked.
"There's something in here," Eddie replied.
"The box - "
"No, in the bag. Sewn into the lining. It feels like a little rock, or something. " Suddenly he seemed to be looking directly at Susannah, and she was aware that she was sitting on a park bench. It was no longer voices from the depths of the cave she heard, but the watery hiss and plash of the fountain. The cave was fading. Eddie and Callahan were fading. She heard Eddie's last words as if from a great distance: "Maybe there's a secret pocket. "
Then he was gone.
Two
She hadn't gone todash at all, then. Her brief visit to the Doorway Cave had been some kind of vision. Had Eddie sent it to her? And if he had, did it mean he'd gotten the message she'd tried to send him from the Dogan? These were questions Susannah couldn't answer. If she saw him again, she'd ask him. After she'd kissed him a thousand times or so, that was.
Mia picked up the red bag and ran her hands slowly down its sides. There was the shape of the box inside, yes. But halfway down there was something else, a small bulge. And Eddie was right: it felt like a stone.
She - or perhaps it was they, it no longer mattered to her - rolled the bag down, not liking the intensified pulse from the thing hidden inside but setting her mind against it. Here it was, right in here. . . and something that felt like a seam.
She leaned closer and saw not a seam but some kind of a seal. She didn't recognize it, nor would Jake have done, but Eddie would have known Velcro when he saw it. Shehad heard a certain Z. Z. Top tribute to the stuff, a song called "Velcro Fly. " She got a fingernail into the seal and pulled with her fingertip. It came loose with a soft ripping sound, revealing a small pocket on the inside of the bag.
What is it?Mia asked, fascinated in spite of herself.
Well, let's just see.
She reached in and brought out not a stone but a small scrimshaw turtle. Made of ivory, from the look of it. Each detail of the shell was tiny and precisely executed, although it had been marred by one tiny scratch that looked almost like a question-mark. The turtle's head poked halfway out. Its eyes were tiny black dots of some tarry stuff, and looked incredibly alive. She saw another small imperfection in the turtle's beak - not a scratch but a crack.
"It's old," she whispered aloud. "So old. "
Yes,Mia whispered back.
Holding it made Susannah feel incredibly good. It made her feel. . . safe,somehow.
See the Turtle,she thought. See the Turtle of enormous girth, on his shell he holds the earth. Was that how it went? She thought it was at least close. And of course that was the Beam they had been following to the Tower. The Bear at one end - Shardik. The Turtle at the other - Maturin.
She looked from the tiny totem she'd found in the lining of the bag to the one beside the fountain. Barring the difference in materials - the one beside her bench was made of dark metal with brighter copp
ery glints - they were exactly the same, right down to the scratch on the shell and the tiny wedge-shaped break in the beak. For a moment her breath stopped, and her heart seemed to stop, also. She went along from moment to moment through this adventure - sometimes even from day to day - without thinking much but simply driven by events and what Roland insisted was ka. Then something like this would happen, and she would for a moment glimpse a far bigger picture, one that immobilized her with awe and wonder. She sensed forces beyond her ability to comprehend. Some, like the ball in the ghostwood box, were evil. But this. . . this. . .
"Wow," someone said. Almost sighed.