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 fartoo 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 theUP 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 hehad 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.
Hecould wait; felt no deep need beyond the eagerness of the child that wants everything
and wants itnow. 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 wasoutside . 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 probablywould 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 onlyreal 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