by Stephen King
Mordred nodded yes.
“ ’Tisn’t the Dark Tower at all, if you want the truth; it’s Roland who stays on my mind and in my heart. I want him dead.” Walter spoke with flat and unsmiling finality. “For the long and dusty leagues he’s chased me; for all the trouble he’s caused me; and for the Red King, as well—the true King, ye do ken; for his presumption in refusing to give over his quest no matter what obstacles were placed in his path; most of all for the death of his mother, whom I once loved.” And, in an undertone: “Or at least coveted. In either case, it was he who killed her. No matter what part I or Rhea of the Cöos may have played in that matter, it was the boy himself who stopped her breath with his damned guns, slow head, and quick hands.
“As for the end of the universe…I say let it come as it will, in ice, fire, or darkness. What did the universe ever do for me that I should mind its welfare? All I know is that Roland of Gilead has lived too long and I want that son of a bitch in the ground. And those he’s drawn, too.”
For the third and last time, Mordred drew the shape of a question in the air.
“There’s only a single working door from here to the devar-toi, young master. It’s the one the Wolves use…or used; I think they’ve made their last run, so I do. Roland and his friends have gone through it, but that’s all right, there’s plenty to occupy em right where they come out—they might find the reception a bit hot! Mayhap we can take care of em while they’ve got the Breakers and the remaining Children of Roderick and the true guards o’ the watch to worry about. Would you like that?”
The infant nodded an affirmative with no hesitation. He then put his fingers to his mouth and chewed at them.
“Yes,” Walter said. His grin shone out. “Hungry, of course you are. But I’m sure we can do better than rats and half-grown billy-bumblers when it comes to dinner. Don’t you?”
Mordred nodded again. He was sure they could, too.
“Will I play the good da’ and carry you?” Walter asked. “That way you don’t have to change to your spider-self. Ugh! Not a shape ’tis easy to love, or even like, I must say.”
Mordred was holding up his arms.
“Y’won’t shit on me, will you?” Walter asked casually, halting halfway across the floor. His hand slid into his pocket, and Mordred realized with a touch of alarm that the sly bastard had been hiding something from him, just the same: he knew the so-called “thinking-cap” wasn’t working. Now he meant to use the gun after all.
Three
In fact, Mordred gave Walter o’ Dim far too much credit, but isn’t that a trait of the young, perhaps even a survival skill? To a wide-eyed lad, the tacky tricks of the world’s most ham-fisted prestidigitator look like miracles. Walter did not actually realize what was happening until very late in the game, but he was a wily old survivor, tell ya true, and when understanding came, it came entire.
There’s a phrase, the elephant in the living room, which purports to describe what it’s like to live with a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, “How could you let such a business go on for so many years? Didn’t you see the elephant in the living room?” And it’s so hard for anyone living in a more normal situation to understand the answer that comes closest to the truth: “I’m sorry, but it was there when I moved in. I didn’t know it was an elephant; I thought it was part of the furniture.” There comes an aha-moment for some folks—the lucky ones—when they suddenly recognize the difference. And that moment came for Walter. It came too late, but not by much.
Y’won’t shit on me, will you—that was the question he asked, but between the word shit and the phrase on me, he suddenly realized there was an intruder in his house…and it had been there all along. Not a baby, either; this was a gangling, slope-headed adolescent with pockmarked skin and dully curious eyes. It was perhaps the best, truest visualization Walter could have made for Mordred Deschain as he at that moment existed: a teenage housebreaker, probably high on some aerosol cleaning product.
And he had been there all the time! God, how could he not have known? The housebreaker hadn’t even been hiding! He had been right out in the open, standing there against the wall, gape-mouthed and taking it all in.
His plans for bringing Mordred with him—of using him to end Roland’s life (if the guards at the devar-toi couldn’t do it first, that was), then killing the little bastard and taking his valuable left foot—collapsed in an instant. In the next one a new plan arose, and it was simplicity itself. Mustn’t let him see that I know. One shot, that’s all I can risk, and only because I must risk it. Then I run. If he’s dead, fine. If not, perhaps he’ll starve before—
Then Walter realized his hand had stopped. Four fingers had closed around the butt of the gun in the jacket pocket, but they were now frozen. One was very near the trigger, but he couldn’t move that, either. It might as well have been buried in cement. And now Walter clearly saw the shining wire for the first time. It emerged from the toothless pink-gummed mouth of the baby sitting in the chair, crossed the room, glittering beneath the lights, and then encircled him at chest-level, binding his arms to his sides. He understood the wire wasn’t really there…but at the same time, it was.
He couldn’t move.
Four
Mordred didn’t see the shining wire, perhaps because he’d never read Watership Down. He’d had the chance to explore Susannah’s mind, however, and what he saw now was remarkably like Susannah’s Dogan. Only instead of switches saying things like CHAP and EMOTIONAL TEMP, he saw ones that controlled Walter’s ambulation (this one he quickly turned to OFF), cogitation, and motivation. It was certainly a more complex setup than the one in the young bumbler’s head—there he’d found nothing but a few simple nodes, like granny knots—but still not difficult to operate.
The only problem was that he was a baby.
A damned baby stuck in a chair.
If he really meant to change this delicatessen on legs into cold-cuts, he’d have to move quickly.
Five
Walter o’ Dim was not too old to be gullible, he understood that now—he’d underestimated the little monster, relying too much on what it looked like and not enough on his own knowledge of what it was—but he was at least beyond the young man’s trap of total panic.
If he means to do anything besides sit in that chair and look at me, he’ll have to change. When he does, his control may slip. That’ll be my chance. It’s not much, but it’s the only one I have left.
At that moment he saw a brilliant red light run down the baby’s skin from crown to toes. In the wake of it, the chubby-pink bah-bo’s body began to darken and swell, the spider’s legs bursting out through his sides. At the same instant, the shining wire coming out of the baby’s mouth disappeared and Walter felt the suffocating band which had been holding him in place disappear.
No time to risk even a single shot, not now. Run. Run from him…from it. That’s all you can do. You never should have come here in the first place. You let your hatred of the gunslinger blind you, but it still may not be too la—
He turned to the trapdoor even as this thought raced through his mind, and was about to put his foot on the first step when the shining wire re-established itself, this time not looping around his arms and chest but around his throat, like a garrote.
Gagging and choking and spewing spit, eyes bulging from their sockets, Walter turned jerkily around. The loop around his throat loosened the barest bit. At the same time he felt something very like an invisible hand skim up his brow and push the hood back from his head. He’d always gone dressed in such fashion, when he could; in certain provinces to the south even of Garlan he had been known as Walter Hodji, the latter word meaning both dim and hood. But this particular lid (borrowed from a certain deserted house in the town of French Landing, Wisconsin) had done him no good at all, had it?
I think I may have come to the end of the path, he thought as he saw the spider strutting toward him on its seven leg
s, a bloated, lively thing (livelier than the baby, aye, and four thousand times as ugly) with a freakish blob of human head peering over the hairy curve of its back. On its belly, Walter could see the red mark that had been on the baby’s heel. Now it had an hourglass shape, like the one that marks the female black widow, and he understood that was the mark he’d have wanted; killing the baby and amputating its foot likely would have done him no good at all. It seemed he had been wrong all down the line.
The spider reared up on its four back legs. The three in front pawed at Walter’s jeans, making a low and ghastly scratching sound. The thing’s eyes bulged up at him with that dull intruder’s curiosity which he had already imagined too well.
Oh yes, I’m afraid it’s the end of the path for you. Huge in his head. Booming like words from a loudspeaker. But you intended the same for me, didn’t you?
No! At least not immediately—
But you did! “Don’t kid a kidder,” as Susannah would say. So now I do the one you call my White Father a small favor. You may not have been his greatest enemy, Walter Padick (as you were called when you set out, all in the long-ago), but you were his oldest, I grant. And now I take you out of his road.
Walter did not realize he had held onto some dim hope of escape even with the loathsome thing before him, reared up, the eyes staring at him with dull avidity while the mouth drooled, until he heard for the first time in a thousand years the name a boy from a farm in Delain had once answered to: Walter Padick. Walter, son of Sam the Miller in the Eastar’d Barony. He who had run away at thirteen, had been raped in the ass by another wanderer a year later and yet had somehow withstood the temptation to go crawling back home. Instead he had moved on toward his destiny.
Walter Padick.
At the sound of that voice, the man who had sometimes called himself Marten, Richard Fannin, Rudin Filaro, and Randall Flagg (among a great many others), gave over all hope except for the hope of dying well.
I be a-hungry, Mordred be a-hungry, spoke the relentless voice in the middle of Walter’s head, a voice that came to him along the shining wire of the little king’s will. But I’d eat proper, beginning with the appetizer. Your eyes, I think. Give them to me.
Walter struggled mightily, but without so much as a moment’s success. The wire was too strong. He saw his hands rise and hover in front of his face. He saw his fingers bend into hooks. They pushed up his eyelids like windowshades, then dug the orbs out from the top. He could hear the sounds they made as they tore loose of the tendons which turned them and the optic nerves which relayed their marvelous messages. The sound that marked the end of sight was low and wet. Bright red dashes of light filled his head, and then darkness rushed in forever. In Walter’s case, forever wouldn’t last long, but if time is subjective (and most of us know that it is), then it was far too long.
Give them to me, I say! No more dilly-dallying! I’m a-hungry!
Walter o’ Dim—now Walter o’ Dark—turned his hands over and dropped his eyeballs. They trailed filaments as they fell, making them look a little like tadpoles. The spider snatched one out of the air. The other plopped to the tile where the surprisingly limber claw at the end of one leg picked it up and tucked it into the spider’s mouth. Mordred popped it like a grape but did not swallow; rather he let the delicious slime trickle down his throat. Lovely.
Tongue next, please.
Walter wrapped an obedient hand around it and pulled, but succeeded in ripping it only partly loose. In the end it was too slippery. He would have wept with agony and frustration if the bleeding sockets where his eyes had been could have manufactured tears.
He reached for it again, but the spider was too greedy to wait.
Bend down! Poke your tongue out like you would at your honey’s cunny. Quick, for your father’s sake! Mordred’s a-hungry!
Walter, still all too aware of what was happening to him, struggled against this fresh horror with no more success than against the last. He bent over with his hands on his thighs and his bleeding tongue stuck crookedly out between his lips, wavering wearily as the hemorrhaging muscles at the back of his mouth tried to support it. Once more he heard the scrabbling sounds as Mordred’s front legs scratched at the legs of his denim pants. The spider’s hairy maw closed over Walter’s tongue, sucked it like a lollipop for one or two blissful seconds, and then tore it free with a single powerful wrench. Walter—now speechless as well as eyeless—uttered a swollen scream of pain and fell over, clutching at his distorted face, rolling back and forth on the tiles.
Mordred bit down on the tongue in his mouth. It burst into a bliss of blood that temporarily wiped away all thought. Walter had rolled onto his side and was feeling blindly for the trapdoor, something inside still screaming that he should not give up but keep trying to escape the monster that was eating him alive.
With the taste of blood in his mouth, all interest in foreplay departed Mordred. He was reduced to his central core, which was mostly appetite. He pounced upon Randall Flagg, Walter o’ Dim, Walter Padick that was. There were more screams, but only a few. And then Roland’s old enemy was no more.
Six
The man had been quasi-immortal (a phrase at least as foolish as “most unique”) and made a legendary meal. After gorging on so much, Mordred’s first urge—strong but not quite insurmountable—was to vomit. He controlled it, as he did his second one, which was even stronger: to change back to his baby-self and sleep.
If he was to find the door of which Walter had spoken, the best time to do so was right now, and in a shape which would make it possible to hurry along at a good speed: the shape of the spider. So, passing the desiccated corpse without a glance, Mordred scarpered nimbly through the trapdoor and down the stairs and into a corridor below. This passage smelled strongly of alkali and seemed to have been cut out of the desert bedrock.
All of Walter’s knowledge—at least fifteen hundred years of it—bellowed in his brain.
The dark man’s backtrail eventually led to an elevator shaft. When a bristly claw pressed on the UP button produced nothing but a tired humming from far above and a smell like frying shoe-leather from behind the control panel, Mordred climbed the car’s inner wall, pushed up the maintenance hatch with a slender leg, and squeezed through. That he had to squeeze did not surprise him; he was bigger now.
He climbed the cable
(itsy bitsy spider went up the waterspout)
until he came to the door where, his senses told him, Walter had entered the elevator and then sent it on its last ride. Twenty minutes later (and still jazzing on all that wonderful blood; gallons of the stuff, it had seemed), he came to a place where Walter’s trail divided. This might have posed him, child that he still very much was, but here the scent and the sense of the others joined Walter’s track and Mordred went that way, now following Roland and his ka-tet rather than the magician’s backtrail. Walter must have followed them for awhile and then turned around to find Mordred. To find his fate.
Twenty minutes later the little fellow came to a door marked with no word but a sigul he could read well enough:
The question was whether to open it now or to wait. Childish eagerness clamored for the former, growing prudence for the latter. He had been well-fed and had no need of more nourishment, especially if he changed back to his hume-self for awhile. Also, Roland and his friends might still be on the far side of this door. Suppose they were, and drew their weapons at the sight of him? They were infernally fast, and he could be killed by gunfire.
He could wait; felt no deep need beyond the eagerness of the child that wants everything and wants it now. Certainly he didn’t suffer the bright intensity of Walter’s hate. His own feelings were more complex, tinctured by sadness and loneliness and—yes, he’d do better to admit it—love. Mordred felt he wanted to enjoy this melancholy for awhile. There would be food aplenty on the other side of this door, he was sure of it, so he’d eat. And grow. And watch. He would watch his father, and his sister-mother, and his ka-brothers, E
ddie and Jake. He’d watch them camp at night, and light their fires, and form their circle around it. He’d watch from his place that was outside. Perhaps they would feel him and look uneasily into the dark, wondering what was out there.
He approached the door, reared up before it, and pawed at it questioningly. Too bad, really, there wasn’t a peephole. And it probably would be safe to go through now. What had Walter said? That Roland’s ka-tet meant to release the Breakers, whatever they might be (it had been in Walter’s mind, but Mordred hadn’t bothered looking for it).
There’s plenty to occupy em right where they come out—they might find the reception a trifle hot!
Had Roland and his children perhaps been killed on the other side? Ambushed? Mordred believed he would have known had that happened. Would have felt it in his mind like a Beamquake.
In any case he would wait awhile before creeping through the door with the cloud-and-lightning sigul on it. And when he was through? Why, he’d find them. And overhear their palaver. And watch them, both awake and asleep. Most of all, he would watch the one Walter had called his White Father. His only real father now, if Walter had been right about the Crimson King’s having gone insane.
And for the present?
Now, for a little while, I may sleep.
The spider ran up the wall of this room, which was full of great hanging objects, and spun a web. But it was the baby—naked, and now looking fully a year old—that slept in it, head down and high above any predators that might come hunting.
Chapter IV:
The Door into Thunderclap
One
When the four wanderers woke from their sleep (Roland first, and after six hours exactly), there were more popkins stacked on a cloth-covered tray, and and also more drinks. Of the domestic robot, however, there was no sign.