Free Song of Susannah by Stephen King

Tower. The humming was stronger now that she was concentrating on it. And sweeter. Not just one voice but many of them. Like a choir. Then it was gone. Disappeared as suddenly as the black woman had done the opposite.
    No it didn’t, Trudy thought. I just lost the knack of hearing it, that’s all. If I stood here long enough, I bet it would come back. Boy, this is nuts. I’m nuts.
    Did she believe that? The truth was that she did not. All at once the world seemed very thin to her, more an idea than an actual thing, and barely there at all. She had never felt less hard-headed in her life. What she felt was weak in her knees and sick to her stomach and on the verge of passing out.
FOUR
    There was a little park on the other side of Second Avenue. In it was a fountain; nearby was a metal sculpture of a turtle, its shell gleaming wetly in the fountain’s spray. She cared nothing for fountains or sculptures, but there was also a bench.
    W ALK had come around again. Trudy tottered across Second Avenue, like a woman of eighty-three instead of thirty-eight, and sat down. She began to take long, slow breaths, and after three minutes or so felt a little better.
    Beside the bench was a trash receptacle with KEEP LITTER IN ITS PLACE stenciled on the side. Below this, in pink spray-paint, was an odd little graffito: See the TURTLE of enormous girth. Trudy saw the turtle, but didn’t think much of its girth; the sculpture was quite modest. She saw something else, as well: a copy of the New York Times, rolled up as she always rolled hers, if she wanted to keep it a little longer and happened to have a bag to stow it in. Of course there were probably at least a million copies of that day’s Times floating around Manhattan, but this one was hers. She knew it even before fishing it out of the litter basket and verifying what she knew by turning to the crossword, which she’d mostly completed over lunch, in her distinctive lilac-colored ink.
    She returned it to the litter basket and looked across Second Avenue to the place where her idea of how things worked had changed. Maybe forever.
    Took my shoes. Crossed the street and sat here by the turtle and put them on. Kept my bag butdumped the Times. Why’d she want my bag? She didn’t have any shoes of her own to put in it.
    Trudy thought she knew. The woman had put her plates in it. A cop who got a look at those sharp edges might be curious about what you served on dishes that could cut your fingers off if you grabbed them in the wrong place.
    Okay, but then where did she go?
    There was a hotel down at the corner of First and Forty-sixth. Once it had been the U.N. Plaza. Trudy didn’t know what its name was now, and didn’t care. Nor did she want to go down there and ask if a black woman in jeans and a stained white shirt might have come in a few hours ago. She had a strong intuition that her version of Jacob Marley’s ghost had done just that, but here was an intuition she didn’t want to follow up on. Better to let it go. The city was full of shoes, but sanity, one’s sanity —
    Better to head home, take a shower, and just . . . let it go. Except—
    “Something is wrong,” she said, and a man walking past on the sidewalk looked at her. She looked back defiantly. “Somewhere something is very wrong. It’s—”
    Tipping was the word that came to mind, but she would not say it. As if to say it would cause the tip to become a topple.
    It was a summer of bad dreams for Trudy Damascus. Some were about the woman who first appeared and then grew. These were bad, but not the worst. In the worst ones she was in the dark, and terrible chimes were ringing, and she sensed something tipping further and further toward the point of no return.
    STAVE: Commala-come-key
    Can ya tell me what ya see?
    Is it ghosts or just the mirror
    That makes ya want to flee?
    RESPONSE: Commala-come-three!
    I beg ya, tell me!
    Is it ghosts or just your darker self
    That makes ya want to flee?

ONE
    Susannah’s