The Dark Tower (Page 35)

He reached for it again, but die 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 moudi. 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 brisuy 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. Waiter 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.

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 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 brighdy. "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."

TWO

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!"

Theyjoined 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?"