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
seethe 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 anelephant ; I thought it waspart of the
furniture .” There comes anaha -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 wordshit and the phraseon 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 thereall 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 mustrisk 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, itwas .
He couldn’t move.
Four
Mordred didn’t see the shining wire, perhaps because he’d never readWatership 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 likeCHAP
andEMOTIONAL TEMP , he saw ones that controlled Walter’s ambulation (this one he
quickly turned toOFF ), 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 damnedbaby 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 itwas —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…fromit.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 asWalter Hodji, the latter word meaning bothdim
andhood . 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 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