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 legs, 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 forme, 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 die sound of that voice, the man who had sometimes called himself Marten, Richard Fannin, Rudin Filaro, and Randall Flagg (among a great many odiers), gave over all hope except for die 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 litde 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 die top. He could hear the sounds they made as they tore loose of die tendons which turned them and the optic nerves which relayed dieir marvelous messages. The sound diat marked die 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 ahungry!
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 litde like tadpoles. The spider snatched one out of the air. The other plopped to the tile where die 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 die 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 die 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 moudi. 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 brisuy claw pressed on the UP button produced nothing but a tired humming from far above and a smell like frying shoeleather 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. Waiter 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, Eddie 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.
