The Dark Half - Stephen King [4]
'Absorbs it? Do you mean it eats it?' Loring asked. He looked a little green. 'Are we talking about in utero cannibalism here?'
'Call it whatever you like; it happens fairly often. If they ever develop the sonargram device they keep talking about at the med conferences, we may actually get to find out how often. But no matter how frequently or infrequently it happens, what we saw today is much more rare. Part of this boy's twin went unabsorbed. It happened to end up in his prefrontal lobe. It could just as easily have wound up in his intestines, his spleen, his spinal cord, anywhere. Usually the only doctors who see something like this are pathologists — it turns up in autopsies, and I've never heard of one where the foreign tissue was the cause of death.'
'Well, what happened here?' Albertson asked.
'Something set this mass of tissue, which was probably submicroscopic in size a year ago, going again. The growth clock of the absorbed twin, which should have run down forever at least a month before Mrs Beaumont gave birth, somehow got wound up again . . . and the damned thing actually started to run. There is no mystery about what happened; the intercranial pressure alone was enough to cause the kid's headaches and the convulsion that got him here.'
'Yes,' Loring said softly, 'but why did it happen?'
Pritchard shook his head. 'If I'm still practicing anything more demanding than my golf-stroke thirty years from now, you can ask me then. I might have an answer. All I know now is that I have located and excised a very specialized, very rare sort of tumor. A benign tumor. And, barring complications, I believe that's all the parents need to know. The kid's father would make Piltdown Man look like one of the Quiz Kids. I can't see explaining to him that I gave his eleven-year-old son an abortion. Les, let's close him up.'
And, as an afterthought, he added pleasantly to the O.R. nurse: 'I want that silly cunt who ran out of here fired. Make a note, please.'
'Yes, Doctor.'
Thad Beaumont left the hospital nine days after his surgery. The left side of his body was distressingly weak for nearly six months afterward, and occasionally, when he was very tired, he saw odd, not-quite-random patterns of flashing lights before his eyes.
His mother had bought him an old Remington 32 typewriter as a get-well present, and these flashes of light happened most frequently when he was hunched over it in the hour before bedtime, struggling with the right way to say something or trying to figure out what should happen next in the story he was writing. Eventually these passed, too.
That eerie, phantom chirruping sound — the sound of squadrons of sparrows on the wing — did not recur at all following the operation.
He continued to write, gaining confidence and polishing his emerging style, and he sold his first story — to American Teen — six years after his real life began. After that, he just never looked back.
So far as his parents or Thad himself ever knew, a small benign tumor had been removed from the prefrontal lobe of his brain in the autumn of his eleventh year. When he thought about it at all (which he did less and less frequently as the years passed), he thought only that he had been extremely lucky to survive.
Many patients who underwent brain surgery in those primitive days did not.
PART 1
FOOL'S STUFFING
Machine straightened the paper-clips slowly and carefully with his long, strong fingers. 'Hold his head, Jack,' he said to the man behind Halstead. 'Hold it tightly, please.'
Halstead saw what Machine meant to do and began to scream as Jack Rangely pressed his big hand against the sides of his head, holding it steady. The screams rang and echoed in the abandoned warehouse. The vast empty space acted as a natural amplifier. Halstead sounded like an opera singer warming up on opening night.
'I'm back,' Machine said. Halstead squeezed his eyes shut, but it did not good. The small steel rod