not just sleeping), she looked back at Roland once more. He
nodded.
Sister Jenna stepped close to the suspended man on the far side of
his bed, so that Roland saw her through the twists and loops of
woven white silk. She placed her hands lightly on the left side of
his chest, bent over him ... and shook her head from side to side,
like one expressing a brisk negative. The bells she wore on her
forehead rang sharply, and Roland once more felt that weird
stirring up his back, accompanied by a low ripple of pain. It was as
if he had shuddered without actually shuddering, or shuddered in a
dream.
What happened next almost did jerk a scream from him; he had to
bite his lips against it. Once more the unconscious man's legs
seemed to move without moving ... because it was what was on
them that moved. The man's hairy shins, ankles, and feet were
exposed below the hem of his bed-dress. Now a black wave of
bugs moved down them. They were singing fiercely, like an army
column that sings as it marches.
Roland remembered the black scar across the man's cheek and
nose - the scar which had disappeared. More such as these, of
course. And they were on him, as well. That was how he could
shiver without shivering. They were all over his back. Battening on
him.
No, keeping back a scream wasn't as easy as he had expected it to
be.
The bugs ran down to the tips of the suspended man's toes, then
leaped off them in waves, like creatures leaping off an
embankment and into a swimming hole. They organized
themselves quickly and easily on the bright white sheet below, and
began to march down to the floor in a battalion about a foot wide.
Roland couldn't get a good look at them, the distance was too far
and the light too dim, but he thought they were perhaps twice the
size of ants, and a little smaller than the fat honeybees which had
swarmed the flowerbeds back home.
They sang as they went.
The bearded man didn't sing. As the swarms of bugs which had
coated his twisted legs began to diminish, he shuddered and
groaned. The young woman put her hand on his brow and soothed
him, making Roland a little jealous even in his revulsion at what he
was seeing.
And was what he was seeing really so awful? In Gilead, leeches
had been used for certain ailments - swellings of the brain, the
armpits, and the groin, primarily. When it came to the brain, the
leeches, ugly as they were, were certainly preferable to the next
step, which was trepanning.
Yet there was something loathsome about them, perhaps only
because he couldn't see them well, and something awful about
trying to imagine them all over his back as he hung here, helpless.
Not singing, though. Why? Because they were feeding? Sleeping?
Both at once?
