by Stephen King
The voice broke off, but not before she heard a ghostly rattle of distant gunfire. Jake shooting at someone? She thought not. She thought someone was shooting at him.
Two
“Now!” Scowther shouted. “Now, Mia! Push! For your life! Give it all you have! PUSH!”
Susannah tried to roll closer to the other woman—Oh, I’m concerned and wanting comfort, see how concerned I am, concern and wanting comfort is all it is—but the one called Straw pulled her back. The segmented steel cable swung and stretched out between them. “Keep your distance, bitch,” Straw said, and for the first time Susannah faced the possibility that they weren’t going to let her get hold of Scowther’s gun. Or any gun.
Mia screamed again, crying out to a strange god in a strange language. When she tried to raise her midsection from the table, the nurse—Alia, Susannah thought the nurse’s name was Alia—forced her down again, and Scowther gave a short, curt cry of what sounded like satisfaction. He tossed aside the forceps he’d been holding.
“Why d’ye do that?” Sayre demanded. The sheets beneath Mia’s spread legs were now damp with blood, and the boss sounded flustered.
“Won’t need them!” Scowther returned breezily. “She was built for babies, could have a dozen in the rice-patch and never miss a row’s worth of picking. Here it comes, neat as you please!”
Scowther made as if to grab the largish basin sitting on the next bed, decided he didn’t have quite enough time, and slipped his pink, gloveless hands up the inside of Mia’s thighs, instead. This time when Susannah made an effort to move closer to Mia, Straw didn’t stop her. All of them, low men and vampires alike, were watching the last stage of the birth with complete fascination, most of them clustered at the end of the two beds which had been pushed together to make one. Only Straw was still close to Susannah. The vampire with the fire-sword had just been demoted; she decided that Straw would be the first to go.
“Once more!” Scowther cried. “For your baby!”
Like the low men and the vampires, Mia had forgotten Susannah. Her wounded, pain-filled eyes fixed on Sayre. “May I have him, sir? Please say I may have him, if only for a little while!”
Sayre took her hand. The mask which covered his real face smiled. “Yes, my darling,” he said. “The chap is yours for years and years. Only push this one last time.”
Mia, don’t believe his lies! Susannah cried, but the cry went nowhere. Likely that was just as well. Best she be entirely forgotten for the time being.
Susannah turned her thoughts in a new direction. Jake! Jake, where are you?
No answer. Not good. Please God he was still alive.
Maybe he’s only busy. Running…hiding…fighting. Silence doesn’t necessarily mean he’s—
Mia howled what sounded like a string of obscenities, pushing as she did so. The lips of her already distended vagina spread further. A freshet of blood poured out, widening the muddy delta-shape on the sheet beneath her. And then, through the welter of crimson, Susannah saw a crown of white and black. The white was skin. The black was hair.
The mottle of white and black began to retreat into the crimson and Susannah thought the baby would settle back, still not quite ready to come into the world, but Mia was done waiting. She pushed with all her considerable might, her hands held up before her eyes in clenched and trembling fists, her eyes slitted, her teeth bared. A vein pulsed alarmingly in the center of her forehead; another stood out on the column of her throat.
“HEEEYAHHHH!” she cried. “COMMALA, YOU PRETTY BASTARD! COMMALA-COME-COME!”
“Dan-tete,” murmured Jey, the hawk-thing, and the others picked it up in a kind of reverent whisper: Dan-tete…dan-tete…commala dan-tete. The coming of the little god.
This time the baby’s head did not just crown but rushed forward. Susannah saw his hands held against his blood-spattered chest in tiny fists that trembled with life. She saw blue eyes, wide open and startling in both their awareness and their similarity to Roland’s. She saw sooty black lashes. Tiny beads of blood jeweled them, barbaric natal finery. Susannah saw—and would never forget—how the baby’s lower lip momentarily caught on the inner lip of his mother’s vulva. The baby’s mouth was pulled briefly open, revealing a perfect row of little teeth in the lower jaw. They were teeth—not fangs but perfect little teeth—yet still, to see them in the mouth of a newborn gave Susannah a chill. So did the sight of the chap’s penis, disproportionately large and fully erect. Susannah guessed it was longer than her little finger.
Howling in pain and triumph, Mia surged up on her elbows, her eyes bulging and streaming tears. She reached out and seized Sayre’s hand in a grip of iron as Scowther deftly caught the baby. Sayre yelped and tried to pull away, but he might as well have tried to…well, to pull away from a Deputy Sheriff in Oxford, Mississippi. The little chant had died and there was a moment of shocked silence. In it, Susannah’s overstrained ears clearly heard the sound of bones grinding in Sayre’s wrist.
“DOES HE LIVE?” Mia shrieked into Sayre’s startled face. Spittle flew from her lips. “TELL ME, YOU POXY WHORESON, IF MY CHAP LIVES!”
Scowther lifted the chap so that he and the child were face to face. The doctor’s brown eyes met the baby’s blue ones. And as the chap hung there in Scowther’s grip with its penis jutting defiantly upward, Susannah clearly saw the crimson mark on the babe’s left heel. It was as if that foot had been dipped in blood just before the baby left Mia’s womb.
Rather than spanking the baby’s buttocks, Scowther drew in a breath and blew it in puffs directly into the chap’s eyes. Mia’s chap blinked in comical (and undeniably human) surprise. It drew in a breath of its own, held it for a moment, then let it out. King of Kings he might be, or the destroyer of worlds, but he embarked upon life as had so many before him, squalling with outrage. Mia burst into glad tears at the sound of that cry. The devilish creatures gathered around the new mother were bond-servants of the Crimson King, but that didn’t make them immune to what they had just witnessed. They broke into applause and laughter. Susannah was not a little disgusted to find herself joining them. The baby looked around at the sound, his expression one of clear amazement.
Weeping, with tears running down her cheeks and clear snot dripping from her nose, Mia held out her arms. “Give him to me!” wept she; so wept Mia, daughter of none and mother of one. “Let me hold him, I beg, let me hold my son! Let me hold my chap! Let me hold my precious!”
And the baby turned its head to the sound of his mother’s voice. Susannah would have said such a thing was impossible, but of course she would have said a baby born wide awake, with a mouthful of teeth and a boner, was impossible, as well. Yet in every other way the babe seemed completely normal to her: chubby and well-formed, human and thus dear. There was the red mark on his heel, yes, but how many children, normal in every other regard, were born with some sort of birthmark? Hadn’t her own father been born red-handed, according to family legend? This mark wouldn’t even show, unless the kid was at the beach.
Still holding the newborn up to his face, Scowther looked at Sayre. There was a momentary pause during which Susannah could easily have seized Scowther’s automatic. She didn’t even think of doing it. She’d forgotten Jake’s telepathic cry; had likewise forgotten her weird visit from Roland and her husband. She was as enrapt as Jey and Straw and Haber and all the rest, enrapt at this moment of a child’s arrival in a worn-out world.
Sayre nodded, almost imperceptibly, and Scowther lowered baby Mordred, still wailing (and still looking over his shoulder, apparently for his mother), into Mia’s waiting arms.
Mia turned him around at once so she could look at him, and Susannah’s heart froze with dismay and horror. For Mia had run mad. It was brilliant in her eyes; it was in the way her mouth managed to sneer and smile at the same time while drool, pinked and thickened with blood from her bitten tongue, trickled down the sides of her chin; most of all it was in her triumphant laughter. She might come back to sanity in the days ah
ead, but—
Bitch ain’t nevah comin back, Detta said, not without sympathy. Gittin this far n den gittin shed of it done broke her. She busted, n you know it as well’s Ah do!
“O, such beauty!” Mia crooned. “O, see thy blue eyes, thy skin as white as the sky before Wide Earth’s first snow! See thy nipples, such perfect berries they are, see thy prick and thy balls as smooth as new peaches!” She looked around, first at Susannah—her eyes skating over Susannah’s face with absolutely no recognition—and then at the others. “See my chap, ye unfortunates, ye gonicks, my precious, my baby, my boy!” She shouted to them, demanded of them, laughing with her mad eyes and crying with her crooked mouth. “See what I gave up eternity for! See my Mordred, see him very well, for never will you see another his like!”
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 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 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.
“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 the spider-god that had looked so much like a baby to begin with, and then its aura whiffed out. The thing’s flesh went with it. For a moment there was nothing where it had been but an empty shirt tucked into an empty pair of bluejeans. Then the clothes collapsed.
“Kill her!” Sayre screamed, reaching for his own gun. “Kill that bitch!”
Susannah rolled away from the spider crouched on the body of its rapidly deflating mother, raking at the helmet she was wearing even as she tumbled off the side of the bed. There was a moment of excruciating pain when she thought it wasn’t going to come away and then she hit the floor, free of it. It hung over the side of the bed, fringed with her hair. The spider-thing, momentarily pulled off its roost when its mother’s body jerked, chittered angrily.
Susannah rolled beneath the bed as a series of gunshots went off above her. She heard a loud SPROINK as one of the slugs hit a spring. She saw the rathead nurse’s feet and hairy lower legs and put a bullet into one of her knees. The nurse gave a scream, turned, and began to limp away, squalling.