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The spider reared up on its four back legs.The three in front pawed at Walter’s jeans, making a low and ghastly scratchingsound. The thing’s eyes bulged up at him with that dull intruder’s curiositywhich he had already imagined too well.
Oh yes, I’m afraid it’s the end ofthe path for you. Huge in his head. Booming like words from aloudspeaker. But you intended the same for me, didn’t you?
No! At least not immediately—
But you did! “Don’t kid a kidder,” asSusa
Walter did not realize he had held ontosome 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 heheard for the first time in a thousand years the name a boy from a farm inDelain had once answered to: Walter Padick. Walter, son of Sam the Miller inthe Eastar’d Barony. He who had run away at thirteen, had been raped in the assby another wanderer a year later and yet had somehow withstood the temptationto go crawling back home. Instead he had moved on toward his destiny.
Walter Padick.
At the sound of that voice, the man who hadsometimes called himself Marten, Richard Fa
I be a-hungry, Mordred be a-hungry,spoke the relentless voice in the middle of Walter’s head, a voice that came tohim along the shining wire of the little king’s will. But I’d eat proper,begi
Walter struggled mightily, but without somuch as a moment’s success. The wire was too strong. He saw his hands rise andhover in front of his face. He saw his fingers bend into hooks. They pushed uphis eyelids like windowshades, then dug the orbs out from the top. He couldhear the sounds they made as they tore loose of the tendons which turned themand the optic nerves which relayed their marvelous messages. The sound thatmarked the end of sight was low and wet. Bright red dashes of light filled hishead, and then darkness rushed in forever. In Walter’s case, forever wouldn’tlast long, but if time is subjective (and most of us know that it is), then itwas far too long.
Give them to me, I say! No moredilly-dallying! I’m a-hungry!
Walter o’ Dim—now Walter o’Dark—turned his hands over and dropped his eyeballs. They trailedfilaments as they fell, making them look a little like tadpoles. The spidersnatched one out of the air. The other plopped to the tile where thesurprisingly limber claw at the end of one leg picked it up and tucked it intothe spider’s mouth. Mordred popped it like a grape but did not swallow; ratherhe let the delicious slime trickle down his throat. Lovely.
Tongue next, please.
Walter wrapped an obedient hand around itand pulled, but succeeded in ripping it only partly loose. In the end it wastoo slippery. He would have wept with agony and frustration if the bleedingsockets where his eyes had been could have manufactured tears.
He reached for it again, but the spider wastoo greedy to wait.
Bend down! Poke your tongue out likeyou would at your honey’s cu
Walter, still all too aware of what washappening to him, struggled against this fresh horror with no more success thanagainst the last. He bent over with his hands on his thighs and his bleedingtongue stuck crookedly out between his lips, wavering wearily as thehemorrhaging muscles at the back of his mouth tried to support it. Once more heheard the scrabbling sounds as Mordred’s front legs scratched at the legs ofhis denim pants. The spider’s hairy maw closed over Walter’s tongue, sucked itlike a lollipop for one or two blissful seconds, and then tore it free with asingle powerful wrench. Walter—now speechless as well aseyeless—uttered a swollen scream of pain and fell over, clutching at hisdistorted face, rolling back and forth on the tiles.
Mordred bit down on the tongue in hismouth. 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 toescape the monster that was eating him alive.
With the taste of blood in his mouth, allinterest in foreplay departed Mordred. He was reduced to his central core,which was mostly appetite. He pounced upon Randall Flagg, Walter o’ Dim, WalterPadick that was. There were more screams, but only a few. And then Roland’s oldenemy was no more.
Six
The man had been quasi-immortal (a phraseat least as foolish as “most unique”) and made a legendary meal. After gorgingon so much, Mordred’s first urge—strong but not quiteinsurmountable—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 Walterhad spoken, the best time to do so was right now, and in a shape which wouldmake it possible to hurry along at a good speed: the shape of the spider. So,passing the desiccated corpse without a glance, Mordred scarpered nimblythrough the trapdoor and down the stairs and into a corridor below. Thispassage smelled strongly of alkali and seemed to have been cut out of thedesert bedrock.
All of Walter’s knowledge—at leastfifteen hundred years of it—bellowed in his brain.
The dark man’s backtrail eventually led toan elevator shaft. When a bristly claw pressed on the UP button producednothing but a tired humming from far above and a smell like frying shoe-leatherfrom behind the control panel, Mordred climbed the car’s i
He climbed the cable
(itsy bitsy spider went up thewaterspout)
until he came to the door where, his sensestold 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; gallonsof 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 thescent and the sense of the others joined Walter’s track and Mordred went thatway, 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 findMordred. To find his fate.
Twenty minutes later the little fellow cameto a door marked with no word but a sigul he could read well enough:
The question was whether to open it now orto wait. Childish eagerness clamored for the former, growing prudence for thelatter. He had been well-fed and had no need of more nourishment, especially ifhe changed back to his hume-self for awhile. Also, Roland and his friends mightstill be on the far side of this door. Suppose they were, and drew theirweapons at the sight of him? They were infernally fast, and he could be killedby gunfire.
He could wait; felt no deep needbeyond 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 ownfeelings were more complex, tinctured by sadness and loneliness and—yes,he’d do better to admit it—love. Mordred felt he wanted to enjoy thismelancholy for awhile. There would be food aplenty on the other side of thisdoor, he was sure of it, so he’d eat. And grow. And watch. He would watch hisfather, and his sister-mother, and his ka-brothers, Eddie and Jake. He’d watchthem 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 himand look uneasily into the dark, wondering what was out there.