The Dark Tower (27 page)

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.

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 the
UP
button produced nothing but a tired humming from far above and a smell like frying shoeleather 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 he
had
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.

He
could
wait; felt no deep need beyond the eagerness of the child that wants everything and wants it
now.
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 was
outside
. 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 probably
would
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 only
real
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.

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 also more drinks. Of the domestic robot, however, there was no sign.

“All right, enough,” Roland said, after calling Nigel for the third time. “He told us he was on his last legs; seems that while we slept, he fell off em.”

“He was doing something he didn’t want to do,” Jake said. His face looked pale and puffy. From sleeping too heavily was Roland’s first thought, and then wondered how he could be such a fool. The boy had been crying for Pere Callahan.

“Doing what?” Eddie asked, slipping his pack over one shoulder and then hoisting Susannah onto his hip. “For who? And why?”

“I don’t know,” Jake said. “He didn’t
want
me to know, and I didn’t feel right about prying. I know he was just a robot, but with that nice English voice and all, he seemed like more.”

“That’s a scruple you may need to get over,” Roland said, as gently as he could.

“How heavy am I, sugar?” Susannah asked Eddie cheerfully. “Or maybe what I should ask is ‘How
bad you missin that good old wheelchair?’ Not to mention the shoulder-rig.”

“Suze, you hated that piggyback rig from the word go and we both know it.”

“Wasn’t askin about that, and
you
know it.”

It always fascinated Roland when Detta crept unheard into Susannah’s voice, or—even more spooky—her face. The woman herself seemed unaware of these incursions, as her husband did now.

“I’d carry you to the end of the world,” Eddie said sentimentally, and kissed the tip of her nose. “Unless you put on another ten pounds or so, that is. Then I might have to leave you and look for a lighter lady.”

She poked him—not gently, either—and then turned to Roland. “This is a damn big place, once you’re down underneath. How’re we gonna find the door that goes through to Thunderclap?”

Roland shook his head. He didn’t know.

“How bout you, Cisco?” Eddie asked Jake. “You’re the one who’s strong in the touch. Can you use it to find the door we want?”

“Maybe if I knew how to start,” Jake said, “but I don’t.”

And with that, all three of them again looked at Roland. No, make it four, because even the gods-cursed bumbler was staring. Eddie would have made a joke to dispel any discomfort he felt at such a combined stare, and Roland actually fumbled for one. Something about how too many eyes spoiled the pie, maybe? No. That saying, which he’d heard from Susannah, was about cooks and broth. In the end he simply said, “We’ll cast about a little, the way hounds do when they’ve lost the scent, and see what we find.”

“Maybe another wheelchair for me to ride in,” Susannah said brightly. “This nasty white boy has got his hands all
over
my purity.”

Eddie gave her a sincere look. “If it was really pure, hon,” he said, “it wouldn’t be cracked like it is.”

It was Oy who actually took over and led them, but not until they returned to the kitchen. The humans were poking about with a kind of aimlessness that Jake found rather unsettling when Oy began to bark out his name:
“Ake! Ake-Ake!
”

They joined the bumbler at a chocked-open door that read
C-LEVEL
. Oy went a little way along the corridor then looked back over his shoulder, eyes brilliant. When he saw they weren’t following, he barked his disappointment.

“What do you think?” Roland asked. “Should we follow him?”

“Yes,” Jake said.

“What scent has he got?” Eddie asked. “Do you know?”

“Maybe something from the Dogan,” Jake said. “The real one, on the other side of the River Whye. Where Oy and I overheard Ben Slightman’s Da’ and the . . . you know, the robot.”

“Jake?” Eddie asked. “You okay, kid?”

“Yes,” Jake said, although he’d had a bit of a bad turn, remembering how Benny’s Da’ had screamed. Andy the Messenger Robot, apparently tired of Slightman’s grumbling, had pushed or pinched something in the man’s elbow—a nerve, probably—and Slightman had “hollered like an owl,” as Roland might say (and probably with at least mild
contempt). Slightman the Younger was beyond such things, now, of course, and it was that realization—a boy, once full of fun and now cool as riverbank clay—which had made the son of Elmer pause. You had to die, yes, and Jake hoped he could do it at least moderately well when the hour came. He’d had some training in
how
to do it, after all. It was the thought of all that grave-time that chilled him. That downtime. That lie-still-and-continue-to-be-dead time.

Andy’s scent—cold but oily and distinctive—had been all over the Dogan on the far side of the River Whye, for he and Slightman the Elder had met there many times before the Wolf raid that had been greeted by Roland and his makeshift posse. This smell wasn’t exactly the same, but it was interesting. Certainly it was the only familiar one Oy had struck so far, and he wanted to follow it.