The Eyes of the Dragon

by Stephen King

  Even as Dennis decided this, Thomas seemed to realize that the reason the latch wouldn't work was that the bolt was still on. He drew it and then passed out into the hall, looking more ghostlike than ever in the guttering light of the corridor sconces. There was a swirl of nightshirt hem, and then he was gone on bare feet.

  Dennis sat stock-still on the hearth for a moment, cross-legged, his pins and needles forgotten, his heart thumping. Outside, the wind hurled snow against the diamond-shaped panes of the sitting-room window and uttered a long banshee howl. What should he do?

  There was only one thing, of course--the young King was his master. He must follow.

  Perhaps it was the wild night which had brought Roland so vividly to Thomas's mind, but not necessarily--in fact, Thomas thought of his father a great deal. Guilt is like a sore, endlessly fascinating, and the guilty party feels compelled to examine it and pick at it, so that it never really heals. Thomas had drunk far less than usual, but, strangely, had seemed drunker than ever to Dennis. His sentences had been broken and garbled, his eyes wide and staring, showing too much of the whites.

  This was, to a large extent, because Flagg was gone. There had been rumors that the renegade nobitity--Staads among them--had been seen gathered together in the Far Forests at the northern reaches of the Kingdom. Flagg had led a regiment of tough, battle-hardened soldiers in search of them. Thomas was always more skittish when Flagg was gone. He knew it was because he had come to depend completely on the dark magician . . . but he had come to depend on Flagg in ways he did not fully understand. Too much wine was no longer Thomas's only vice. Sleep is often denied to those with secrets, and Thomas was afflicted with severe insomnia. Without knowing it, he had become addicted to Flagg's sleeping potions. Flagg had left a supply of the drug with Thomas when he led the soldiers north, but Flagg had expected to be gone only three days--four at the most. For the last three days, Thomas had slept badly, or not at all. He felt strange, never quite awake, never quite asleep. Thoughts of his father haunted him. He seemed to hear his father's voice in the wind, crying out Why do you stare at me? Why do you stare at me so? Visions of wine . . . visions of Flagg's darkly cheerful face . . . visions of his father's hair catching fire . . . these things drove sleep away and left him wide-eyed in the long watches of the night while the rest of the castle slept.

  When Flagg had still not returned on the eighth night (he and his soldiers were even then camped fifty miles from the castle and Flagg was in a foul mood; the only trace of the nobles they found had been frozen hoofprints that might have been days or weeks old), Thomas sent for Dennis. It was later that night, that eighth night, that Thomas arose from his couch and began to walk.

  78

  So Dennis followed his lord and master the King down those long, drafty stone corridors, and if you have come along this far, I think you must know where Thomas the Light-Bringer finished up.

  Late stormy night had passed into early stormy morning. No one was abroad in the corridors--at least, Dennis saw no one. If anyone had been abroad, he or she might well have fled in the other direction, perhaps screaming, believing he or she had seen two ghosts walking, the one leading in a long white nightshirt that could easily have been mistaken for a shroud, the other following in a plain jerkin, but with bare feet and a face pale enough to have been mistaken for the face of a corpse. Yes, I believe anyone who saw them would have fled, and told long prayers before sleeping . . . and even many prayers might not have kept the nightmares at bay.

  Thomas stopped in the middle of a corridor that Dennis had seldom been down, and he opened a recessed door which Dennis had never really noticed at all. The boy King stepped into another corridor (no chambermaid passed them with an armload of sheets, as one had once passed Thomas and Flagg when Flagg had brought the prince this way some years before; all good chambermaids were long since in their beds), and partway down it, Thomas stopped so suddenly that Dennis almost ran into him.

  Thomas looked around, as if to see if he had been followed, and his dreaming eyes passed directly over Dennis. Dennis's skin crawled, and it was all he could do to keep from crying out. The sconces in this almost forgotten hallway guttered and stank foully of das oil; the light was faint and gruesome. The young butler could feel his hair trying to clump up and push out in spikes as those empty eyes--eyes like dead lamps lit only by the moon--passed over him.

  He was there, standing right there, but Thomas did not see him; to Thomas, his butler was dim.

  Oh, I must run, part of Dennis's mind whispered distractedly--but inside his head, that distracted little whisper was like a scream. Oh, I must run, he has died, he has died in his sleep and I am following a walking corpse! But then he heard the voice of his da', his own dear', dead da, whispering: If the time ever comes to do yer first master a service, Dennis, you mustn't hesitate.

  A voice deeper than either told him that the time for that service had come. And Dennis, a lowly servant boy who had changed a kingdom once by discovering a burning mouse, perhaps changed it again by holding his place, in spite of the terror which froze his bones and pushed his heart into his throat.

  In a strange, deep voice that was nothing at all like his usual voice (but to Dennis that voice sounded weirdly familiar), Thomas said: "Fourth stone up from the one at the bottom with the chip in it. Press it. Quick!"

  The habit of obedience was so ingrained in Dennis that he had actually begun to move forward before realizing that Thomas, in his dream, had commanded himself in the voice of another. Thomas pushed the stone before Dennis could move more than a single step. It slid in perhaps three inches. There was a click. Dennis's jaw dropped, as part of the wall swung inward. Thomas pushed it farther, and Dennis saw there was a huge secret door here. Secret doors made him think of secret panels, and secret panels made him think of burning mice. Again he felt an urge to run and fought it down.

  Thomas went in. For a moment he was only a glimmering nightshirt in the dark, a nightshirt with no one inside it. Then the stone wall closed again. The illusion was perfect.

  Dennis stood there, shifting from one cold bare foot to the other cold bare foot. What should he do now?

  Again, it was his da's voice he seemed to hear, impatient now, brooking no refusal. Follow, you paltry boy! Follow, and be quick! This is the moment! Follow!

  But Da', the dark--

  He seemed to feel a stinging slap, and Dennis thought hysterically: Even when you're dead you got a strong right hand, Da'! All right, all right, I'm going!

  He counted up four from the chipped stone and pushed. The door swung about four inches inward on darkness.

  There was a tiny clittering sound in the awesome silence of the corridor--a sound like mice made of stone. After a moment Dennis realized that sound was his own teeth, chattering together.

  Oh Da', I'm so scared, he mourned . . . and then followed King Thomas into the darkness.

  79

  Fifty miles away, rolled into five blankets against the bitter cold and the roaring wind, Flagg cried out in his sleep at the precise moment Dennis followed the King into the secret passageway. On a knoll not far distant, wolves howled in unison with that cry. The soldier sleeping nearest Flagg on the left died instantly of a heart attack, dreaming that a great lion had come to gobble him up. The soldier sleeping on Flagg's right woke up in the morning to discover he was blind. Worlds sometimes shudder and turn inside their axes, and this was such a time. Flagg felt it, but did not grasp it. The salvation of all that is good is only this--at times of great import, evil beings sometimes fall strangely blind. When the King's magician awoke in the morning, he knew that he had had a bad dream, probably from his own long-forgotten past, but he did not remember what it had been.

  80

  The darkness inside the secret passage was utter and complete, the air still and dry. In it, coming from somewhere ahead, Dennis heard a terrible, desolate sound.

  The King was weeping.

  At that sound, some of Dennis's fear left him.
He felt a great wonder, and a great pity for Thomas, who always seemed so unhappy, and who had grown fat and pimply as King--often he was pallid and shakyhanded from too much wine the night before, and his breath was usually bad. Already Thomas's legs were beginning to bow, and unless Flagg was with him, he had a tendency to walk with his head down and his hair hanging in his face.

  Dennis felt his way forward, his hands held out in front of him. The sound of weeping grew closer in the dark . . . and then, suddenly, the dark was no longer complete. He heard a faint sliding noise and then he could see Thomas faintly. He was standing at the end of the corridor, and faint amber light was coming in from two small holes in the dark. To Dennis, those holes looked strangely like floating eyes.

  Just as Dennis began to believe that he would be all right, that he would probably survive this strange night walk, Thomas shrieked. He shrieked so loudly it seemed that his vocal cords must split open. The strength ran out of Dennis's legs and he fell to his knees, hands clapped over his mouth to stop his own screams, and now it seemed to him that this secret way was filled with ghosts, ghosts like strange flapping bats that might at any moment snare themselves in his hair; oh yes, the place seemed filled with the unquiet dead to Dennis, and perhaps it was; perhaps it was.

  He almost swooned . . . almost . . . but not quite.

  Somewhere below him, he heard barking dogs and realized they were above the old King's kennels. The few of Roland's dogs still alive had never been moved outside again. They were the only living beings--besides Dennis himself--that had heard those wild shrieks. But the dogs were real, not ghosts, and Dennis held on to that thought the way a drowning man might hold on to a floating mast.

  A moment or two later, he realized that Thomas was not just shrieking--he was crying out words. At first Dennis could make out only a single phrase, howled out again and again: "Don't drink the wine! Don't drink the wine! Don't drink the wine!"

  81

  Three nights later, a light knock came at the closed sitting-room door of a farm in one of the Inner Baronies, a farm quite close to where the Staad family had lived not so long ago.

  "Come!" Anders Peyna growled. "And it better be damned good, Arlen!"

  Arlen had aged in the years since Beson had appeared at Peyna's door with Peter's note. The changes in him, however, were slight when compared with the changes in Peyna. The former Judge-General's hair was almost all gone. His spareness of frame had become gauntness. The loss of hair and weight were very little, however, when compared with the changes in his face. Formerly he had been stern. Now he was grim. Dark-brown hollows floated below his eyes. The stamp of despair was clear on his face, and there was good reason for this. He had seen the things he had spent his life defending brought to ruin . . . and this ruin had been accomplished with shocking ease, and in a shockingly brief period of time. Oh, I suppose all men of intelligence know how fragile such things as Law and Justice and Civilization really are, but it's not a thing they think of willingly, because it disturbs one's rest and plays hob with one's appetite.

  Seeing his life's work knocked casually apart like a child's tower of blocks was bad enough, but there was another thing which had haunted Peyna these last four years, something that was even worse. This was the knowledge that Flagg had not achieved all the dark changes in Delain alone. Peyna had helped him. For who else had seen Peter brought to a trial which was perhaps too speedy? Who else had been so convinced of Peter's guilt . . . and not so much by the evidence as by a young boy's shocked tears?

  Since the day Peter had been led to the top of the Needle, the chopping block in the Plaza of the Needle had been stained a sinister rusty color. Not even the hardest rain could wash it clean. And Peyna thought he could detect that sinister red stain spreading out from the block--spreading out to cover the Plaza, the market streets, the alleys. In his troubled dreams Peyna saw rills of fresh blood washing in bright, accusing threads between the cobblestones and running down the gutters in streamlets. He saw the redans of Castle Delain gleaming bloody in the sun. He saw the carp in the moat floating belly-up, poisoned by the blood which poured out of the sewers in floods and which rose from the springs in the earth itself. He saw the blood rising everywhere, staining the fields and forests. In these unhappy dreams even the sun began to look like a bloodshot, dying eye.

  Flagg had let him live. In the meadhouses, people whispered behind their hands that he had reached an agreement with the magician--that he had perhaps given Flagg the names of certain traitors, or that perhaps Peyna "had something" on Flagg, some secret that would come out if Peyna died suddenly. This was, of course, ridiculous. Flagg was not a man to be threatened--not by Peyna, not by anyone. There were no secrets. There had been no agreements or deals. Flagg had simply let him live . . . and Peyna knew why. Dead, he would perhaps have been at peace. Alive, he was left to twist on the rack of his own bad conscience. He was left to watch the terrible changes Flagg had wrought on Delain.

  "Well?" he asked irritably. "What is it, Arlen?"

  "A boy has come, my Lord. He says he must see you."

  "Send him away," Peyna said moodily. He reflected that, even a year ago, he would have heard a knock at the front door, but it seemed that he became more deaf with every passing day. "I see no one after nine, you know that. Much has changed, but not that."

  Arlen cleared his throat. "I know the boy. It is Dennis, son of Brandon. It is the King's butler who calls."

  Peyna stared at Arlen, hardly believing what he had heard. Perhaps he was growing deaf even faster than he had thought. He asked Arlen to repeat, and it came out sounding just the same.

  "I'll see him. Send him in."

  "Very good, my Lord." Arlen turned to leave.

  The similarity to the night Beson had come with Peter's note--even down to the cold wind screaming outside--came strongly to Peyna now. "Arlen," he called.

  Arlen turned back. "My Lord?"

  The right corner of Peyna's mouth quirked the smallest bit. "Are you quite sure it's not a dwarf-boy?"

  "Quite sure, my Lord," Arlen replied, and the left corner of his own mouth twitched the tiniest bit. "There are no dwarves left in the known world. Or so my mother told me."

  "Obviously she was a woman of good sense and clear discernment, dedicated to raising her son properly and not to be held responsible for any inherent flaws in the material she had to work with. Bring the boy here directly."

  "Yes, my Lord." The door closed.

  Peyna looked into his fire again and rubbed his old, arthritis-crippled hands together in a gesture of unaccustomed agitation. Thomas's butler. Here. Now. Why?

  But there was no sense in speculating; the door would open in a moment, and the answer would come walking through it in the form of a man-boy who would be shaking with the cold, perhaps even frostbitten.

  Dennis would have found it a good deal easier to reach Peyna if Peyna had still been at his fine house in the castle city, but his house had been sold from beneath him for "unpaid taxes" following his resignation. Only the few hundred guilders he had put away over the course of forty years had allowed him to buy this small, drafty farmhouse and continue to pay Beson. It was technically in the Inner Baronies, but he was still many miles west of the castle . . . and the weather had been very cold.

  In the hallway beyond the door, he heard the murmur of approaching voices. Now. Now the answer would come through the door. Suddenly that absurd feeling--that feeling of hope, like a ray of strong light shining in a dark cave--came back to him. Now the answer will come through the door, he thought, and for a moment he found himself believing that was really true.

  As he drew his favorite pipe from the rack beside him, Anders Peyna saw that his hands were trembling.

  82

  The boy was really a man, but Aden's use of the word was not unjustified--at least not on this night. He was cold, Peyna saw, but he also knew that the cold alone does not make anyone shudder as Dennis was shuddering.

  "Dennis!" Peyna said, sittin
g forward sharply (and ignoring the twinge in his back the sudden movement caused). "Has something happened to the King?" Dreadful images, awful possibilities suddenly filled Peyna's old head--the King dead, either from too much wine, or possibly by his own hand. Everyone in Delain knew that the young King was deeply moody.

  "No . . . that is . . . yes . . . but no . . . not the way you mean . . . the way I think you mean . . ."

  "Come in here close to the fire," Peyna snapped. "Arlen, don't just stand there gawking! Get a blanket! Get two! Wrap this boy up before he shakes himself to death like a buggerlug bug!"

  "Yes, my Lord," Arlen said. He had never gawked in his life--he knew it, and Peyna did, too. But he recognized the gravity of this situation and left quickly. He stripped the two blankets from his own bed--the only other two in this glorified peasant's hut were the ones on Peyna's--and brought them back. He took them to where Dennis crouched as close to the fire as he could without bursting into flames. The deep frost which had covered his hair had begun to melt and to run down his cheeks like tears. Dennis wrapped himself in the blankets.

  "Now, tea. Strong tea. A cup for me, a pot for the boy."

  "My Lord, we only have half a canister left in the whole--"

  "Bugger how much we have left! A cup for me, a pot for the boy." He considered. "And make a cup for yourself, Arlen, and then come in here and listen."

  "My Lord?" Even all of his breeding could not keep Arlen from looking frankly astounded at this.

  "Damn!" Peyna roared. "Would you have me believe you're as deaf as I've become? Get about it!"

  "Yes, my Lord," Arlen said, and went to brew the last tea in the house.

  83

  Peyna had not forgotten everything he had ever known about the fine art of questioning; in point of fact, he had forgotten damned little of that, or anything else. He had had long sleepless nights when he wished that he could forget some things.