Stephen King – The Dark Tower

punched a series of buttons. The security room’s curved outer door slid open and Nigel

stepped into the vestibule, which was built like an airlock. Mordred went immediately on

to the buttons that would open the inner door in response to the sequence 2-5-4-1-3-1-2-1,

but his motor control was still almost nonexistent and he was rewarded by another harsh

buzz and an infuriating female voice (infuriating because it reminded him of the brown

bitch’s voice) which said, “YOU HAVE ENTERED THE WRONG SECURITY CODE

FOR THIS DOOR. YOU MAY RETRY ONCE WITHIN THE NEXT TEN SECONDS.

TEN…NINE…”

Mordred would have saidFuck you if he’d been capable of speech, but he wasn’t. The best

he could do was a babble of baby-talk that undoubtedly would have caused Mia to crow

with a mother’s pride. Now he didn’t bother with the buttons; he wanted what the robot had

in the bag too badly. The rats (he assumed they were rats) were alive this time.Alive, by

God, the blood still running in their veins.

Mordred closed his eyes and concentrated. The red light Susannah had seen before his first

change once more ran beneath his fair skin from the crown of his head to the stained right

heel. When that light passed the open wound in the baby’s hip, the sluggish flow of blood

and pussy matter grew briefly stronger, and Mordred uttered a low cry of misery. His hand

went to the wound and spread blood over the small bowl of his belly in a thoughtless

comforting gesture. For a moment there was a sense of blackness rising to replace the red

flush, accompanied by a wavering of the infant’s shape. This time there was no

transformation, however. The baby slumped back in the chair, breathing hard, a tiny trickle

of clear urine dribbling from his penis to wet the front of the towel he wore. There was a

muffled pop from beneath the control panel in front of the chair where the baby slumped

askew, panting like a dog.

Across the room, a door markedMAIN ACCESS slid open. Nigel tramped stolidly in, twitching his capsule of a head almost constantly now, counting off not in two or three

languages but in perhaps as many as a dozen.

“Sir, I really cannot continue to—”

Mordred made a baby’s cheerful goo-goo-ga-ga sounds and held out his hands toward the

bag. The thought which he sent was both clear and cold:Shut up. Give me what I need .

Nigel put the bag in his lap. From within it came a cheeping sound almost like human

speech, and for the first time Mordred realized that the twitches were all coming from a

single creature. Not a rat, then! Something bigger! Bigger and bloodier!

He opened the bag and peered in. A pair of gold-ringed eyes looked pleadingly back at him.

For a moment he thought it was the bird that flew at night, the hoo-hoo bird, he didn’t know

its name, and then he saw the thing had fur, not feathers. It was a throcken, known in many

parts of Mid-World as a billy-bumbler, this one barely old enough to be off its mother’s

teat.

There now, there,he thought at it, his mouth filling with drool.We’re in the same boat, my

little cully—we’re motherless children in a hard, cruel world. Be still and I’ll give you

comfort.

Dealing with a creature as young and simple-headed as this wasn’t much different from

dealing with the machines. Mordred looked into its thoughts and located the node that

controlled its simple bit of will. He reached for it with a hand made of thought—made of

his will—and seized it. For a moment he could hear the creature’s timid, hopeful thought

(don’t hurt me please don’t hurt me; please let me live; I want to live have fun play a little; don’t hurt me please don’t hurt me please let me live)

and he responded:

All is well, don’t fear, cully, all is well.

The bumbler in the bag (Nigel had found it in the motor-pool, separated from its mother,

brothers, and sisters by the closing of an automatic door) relaxed—not believing, exactly,

buthoping to believe.

Six

In Nigel’s study, the lights had been turned down to quarter-brilliance. When Oy began to

whine, Jake woke at once. The others slept on, at least for the time being.

What’s wrong, Oy?

The bumbler didn’t reply, only went on whining deep in his throat. His gold-ringed eyes peered into the gloomy far corner of the study, as if seeing something terrible there. Jake

could remember peering into the corner of his bedroom the same way after waking from

some nightmare in the small hours of the morning, a dream of Frankenstein or Dracula or

(Tyrannasorbet Wrecks)

some other boogeyman, God knew what. Now, thinking that perhaps bumblers also had

nightmares, he tried even harder to touch Oy’s mind. There was nothing at first, then a deep, blurred image

(eyes eyes looking out of the darkness)

of something that might have been a billy-bumbler in a sack.

“Shhhh,” he whispered into Oy’s ear, putting his arms around him. “Don’t wake em, they

need their sleep.”

“Leep,” Oy said, very low.

“You just had a bad dream,” Jake whispered. “Sometimes I have them, too. They’re not

real. Nobody’s got you in a bag. Go back to sleep.”

“Leep.” Oy put his snout on his right forepaw. “Oy-be ki-yit.”

That’s right,Jake thought at him,Oy be quiet.

The gold-ringed eyes, still looking troubled, remained open a bit longer. Then Oy winked

at Jake with one and closed both. A moment later, the bumbler was asleep again.

Somewhere close by, one of his kind had died…but dying was the way of the world; it was

a hard world and always had been.

Oy dreamed of being with Jake beneath the great orange orb of the Peddler’s Moon. Jake,

also sleeping, picked it up by touch and they dreamed of Old Cheap Rover Man’s Moon

together.

Oy, who died?asked Jake beneath the Peddler’s one-eyed, knowing wink.

Oy,said his friend.Delah. Many.

Beneath the Old Cheap Man’s empty orange stare Oy said no more; had, in fact, found a

dream within his dream, and here also Jake went with him. This dream was better. In it, the

two of them were playing together in bright sunshine. To them came another bumbler: a

sad fellow, by his look. He tried to talk to them, but neither Jake nor Oy could tell what he said, because he was speaking in English.

Seven

Mordred wasn’t strong enough to lift the bumbler from the bag, and Nigel either would not

or could not help him. The robot only stood inside the door of the Control Center, twisting

his head to one side or the other, counting and clanking more loudly than ever. A hot,

cooked smell had begun to rise from his innards.

Mordred succeeded in turning the bag over and the bumbler, probably half a yearling, fell

into his lap. Its eyes were half-open, but the yellow-and-black orbs were dull and

unmoving.

Mordred threw his head back, grimacing in concentration. That red flash ran down his

body, and his hair tried to stand on end. Before it could do more than begin to rise, however, it and the infant’s body to which it had been attached were gone. The spider came. It

hooked four of its seven legs about the bumbler’s body and drew it effortlessly up to the

craving mouth. In twenty seconds it had sucked the bumbler dry. It plunged its mouth into

the creature’s soft underbelly, tore it open, lifted the body higher, and ate the guts which

came tumbling out: delicious, strength-giving packages of dripping meat. It ate deeper,

making muffled mewling sounds of satisfaction, snapping the billy-bumbler’s spine and

sucking the brief dribble of marrow. Most of the energy was in the blood—aye, always in

the blood, as the Grandfathers well knew—but there was strength in meat, as well. As a

human baby (Roland had used the old Gilead endearment,bah-bo ), he could have taken no

nourishment from either the juice or the meat. Would likely have choked to death on it. But

as a spider—

He finished and cast the corpse aside onto the floor, just as he had the used-up, desiccated

corpses of the rats. Nigel, that dedicated bustling butler, had disposed of those. He would

not dispose of this one. Nigel stood silent no matter how many times Mordred bawledNigel,

I need you! Around the robot, the smell of charred plastic had grown strong enough to

activate the overhead fans. DNK 45932 stood with his eyeless face turned to the left. It

gave him an oddly inquisitive look, as if he’d died while on the verge of asking an

important question:What is the meaning of life, perhaps, orWho put the overalls in Mrs.

Murphy’s chowder? In any case, his brief career as a rat- and bumbler-catcher was over.

For the time being, Mordred was full of energy—the meal had been fresh and