Stephen King – The Dark Tower

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