The Dark Tower - Stephen King [28]
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 she couldn’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 chap changed.
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 a flash, 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