The Dark Tower

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 been told 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, but stilled. 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 a woman lying on a bed but the drawing 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.