Stephen King – The Dark Tower

Panting harshly, she covered the baby’s bloody, staring face with kisses, smearing her

mouth until she looked like a drunk who has tried to put on lipstick. She laughed and kissed

the chubby flap of his infant’s double chin, his nipples, his navel, the jutting tip of his penis, and—holding him up higher and higher in her trembling arms, the child she meant to call

Mordred goggling down at her with that comic look of astonishment—she kissed his knees

and then each tiny foot. Susannah heard that room’s first suckle: not the baby at his

mother’s breast but Mia’s mouth on each perfectly shaped toe.

Three

Yon child’s my dinh’s doom,Susannah thought coldly.If I do nothing else, I could seize

Scowther’s gun and shoot it. T’would be the work of two seconds .

With her speed—her uncanny gunslinger’s speed—this was likely true. But she found

herself unable to move. She had foreseen many outcomes to this act of the play, but not

Mia’s madness, never that, and it had caught her entirely by surprise. It crossed Susannah’s mind that she was lucky indeed that the Positronics link had gone down when it had. If it

hadn’t, she might be as mad as Mia.

And that link could kick back in, sister—don’t you think you better make your move while

you still can?

But shecouldn’t, that was the thing. She was frozen in wonder, held in thrall.

“Stop that!” Sayre snapped at her. “Your job isn’t to slurp at him but to feed him! If you’d

keep him, hurry up! Give him suck! Or should I summon a wetnurse? There are many

who’d give their eyes for the opportunity!”

“Never…in…your…LIFE!” Mia cried, laughing, but she lowered the child to her chest

and impatiently brushed aside the bodice of the plain white gown she wore, baring her right

breast. Susannah could see why men would be taken by her; even now that breast was a

perfect, coral-tipped globe that seemed more fit for a man’s hand and a man’s lust than a

baby’s nourishment. Mia lowered the chap to it. For a moment he rooted as comically as

he’d goggled at her, his face striking the nipple and then seeming to bounce off. When it

came down again, however, the pink rose of his mouth closed on the erect pink bud of her

breast and began to suck.

Mia stroked the chap’s tangled and blood-soaked black curls, still laughing. To Susannah,

her laughter sounded like screams.

There was a clumping on the floor as a robot approached. It looked quite a bit like Andy

the Messenger Robot—same skinny seven- or eight-foot height, same electric-blue eyes,

same many-jointed, gleaming body. In its arms it bore a large glass box filled with green

light.

“What’s that fucking thing for?” Sayre snapped. He sounded both pissed off and

incredulous.

“An incubator,” Scowther said. “I felt it would be better to be safe than sorry.”

When he turned to look, his shoulder-holstered gun swung toward Susannah. It was an

even better chance, the best she’d ever have, and she knew it, but before she could take it,

Mia’s chapchanged .

Four

Susannah saw red light run down the child’s smooth skin, from the crown of its head to the

stained heel of its right foot. It was not a flush but aflash, lighting the child from without: Susannah would have sworn it. And then, as it lay upon Mia’s deflated stomach with its

lips clamped around her nipple, the red flash was followed by a blackness that rose up and

spread, turning the child into a lightless gnome, a negative of the rosy baby that had

escaped Mia’s womb. At the same time its body began to shrivel, its legs pulling up and melting into its belly, its head sliding down—and pulling Mia’s breast with it—into its

neck, which puffed up like the throat of a toad. Its blue eyes turned to tar, then back to blue again.

Susannah tried to scream and could not.

Tumors swelled along the black thing’s sides, then burst and extruded legs. The red mark

which had ridden the heel was still visible, but now had become a blob like the crimson

brand on a black widow spider’s belly. For that was what this thing was: a spider. Yet the

baby was not entirely gone. A white excrescence rose from the spider’s back. In it

Susannah could see a tiny, deformed face and blue sparks that were eyes.

“What—?” Mia asked, and started up on her elbows once again. Blood had begun to pour

from her breast. The baby drank it like milk, losing not a drop. Beside Mia, Sayre was

standing as still as a graven image, his mouth open and his eyes bulging from their sockets.

Whatever he’d expected from this birth—whatever he’d beentold to expect—it wasn’t this.

The Detta part of Susannah took a child’s vicious pleasure in the man’s shocked expression:

he looked like the comedian Jack Benny milking a laugh.

For a moment only Mia seemed to realize what had happened, for her face began to

lengthen with a kind of informed horror—and, perhaps, pain. Then her smile returned, that

angelic madonna’s smile. She reached out and stroked the still-changing freak at her breast,

the black spider with the tiny human head and the red mark on its bristly gut.

“Is he not beautiful?” she cried.“Is my son not beautiful, as fair as the summer sun? ”

These were her last words.

Five

Her face didn’t freeze, exactly, butstilled . Her cheeks and brow and throat, flushed dark

with the exertions of childbirth only a moment before, faded to the waxy whiteness of

orchid petals. Her shining eyes grew still and fixed in their sockets. And suddenly it was as if Susannah were looking not at awoman lying on a bed but thedrawing of a woman. An

extraordinarily good one, but still something that had been created on paper with strokes of

charcoal and a few pale colors.

Susannah remembered how she had returned to the Plaza–Park Hyatt Hotel after her first

visit to the allure of Castle Discordia, and how she’d come here to Fedic after her last

palaver with Mia, in the shelter of the merlon. How the sky and the castle and the very

stone of the merlon had torn open. And then, as if her thought had caused it, Mia’s face was

ripped apart from hairline to chin. Her fixed and dulling eyes fell crookedly away to either

side. Her lips split into a crazy double twin-grin. And it wasn’t blood that poured out of that widening fissure in her face but a stale-smelling white powder. Susannah had a fragmented

memory of T. S. Eliot

(hollow men stuffed men headpiece filled with straw)

and Lewis Carroll

(why you’re nothing but a pack of cards)

before Mia’s dan-tete raised its unspeakable head from its first meal. Its blood-smeared

mouth opened and it hoisted itself, lower legs scrabbling for purchase on its mother’s

deflating belly, upper ones almost seeming to shadowbox at Susannah.

It squealed with triumph, and if it had at that moment chosen to attack the other woman

who had given it nurture, Susannah Dean would surely have died next to Mia. Instead, it

returned to the deflated sac of breast from which it had taken its first suck, and tore it off.

The sound of its chewing was wet and loose. A moment later it burrowed into the hole it

had made, the white human face disappearing while Mia’s was obliterated by the dust

boiling out of her deflating head. There was a harsh, almost industrial sucking sound and

Susannah thought,It’s taking all the moisture out of her, all the moisture that’s left. And

look at it! Look at it swell! Like a leech on a horse’s neck!

Just then a ridiculously English voice—it was the plummy intonation of the lifelong

gentleman’s gentleman—said: “Pardon me, sirs, but will you be wanting this incubator

after all? For the situation seems to have altered somewhat, if you don’t mind my saying.”

It broke Susannah’s paralysis. She pushed herself upward with one hand and seized

Scowther’s automatic pistol with the other. She yanked, but the gun was strapped across

the butt and wouldn’t come free. Her questing index finger found the little sliding knob that was the safety and pushed it. She turned the gun, holster and all, toward Scowther’s

ribcage.

“What the dev—” he began, and then she pulled the trigger with her middle finger, at the

same time yanking back on the shoulder-rig with all her force. The straps binding the

holster to Scowther’s body held, but the thinner one holding the automatic in place snapped,

and as Scowther fell sideways, trying to look down at the smoking black hole in his white

lab-coat, Susannah took full possession of his gun. She shot Straw and the vampire beside

him, the one with the electric sword. For a moment the vampire was there, still staring at