Stephen King – The Dark Tower

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