He turned to the trapdoor even as this thought raced through his mind, and was about to put his foot on the first step when the shining wire re-established itself, this time not looping around his arms and chest but around his throat, like a garrote.
Gagging and choking and spewing spit, eyes bulging from their sockets, Walter turned jerkily around. The loop around his throat loosened the barest bit. At the same time he felt something very like an invisible hand skim up his brow and push the hood back from his head. He'd always gone dressed in such fashion, when he could; in certain provinces to the south even of Garlan he had been known as Walter Hodji, the latter word meaning both dim and hood. But this particular lid (borrowed from a certain deserted house in the town of French Landing, Wisconsin) had done him no good at all, had it?
I think I may have come to the end of the path, he thought as he saw the spider strutting toward him on its seven legs, a bloated, lively thing (livelier than the baby, aye, and four thousand times as ugly) with a freakish blob of human head peering over the hairy curve of its back. On its belly, Walter could see the red mark that had been on the baby's heel. Now it had an hourglass shape, like the one that marks the female black widow, and he understood that was the mark he'd have wanted; killing the baby and amputating its foot likely would have done him no good at all. It seemed he had been wrong all down the line.
The spider reared up on its four back legs. The three in front pawed at Walter's jeans, making a low and ghastly scratching sound. The thing's eyes bulged up at him with that dull intruder's curiosity which he had already imagined too well.
Oh yes, I'm afraid it's the end of the path for you. Huge in his head. Booming like words from a loudspeaker. But you intended the same forme, didn't you?
No! At least not immediately-
But you did! "Don't kid a kidder," as Susannah would say. So now I do the one you call my White Father a small favor. You may not have been his greatest enemy, Walter Padick (as you were called when you set out, all in the long-ago), but you were his oldest, I grant. And now I take you out of his road.
Walter did not realize he had held onto some 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 he heard for the first time in a thousand years the name a boy from a farm in Delain had once answered to: Walter Padick. Walter, son of Sam the Miller in the Eastar'd 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 die sound of that voice, the man who had sometimes called himself Marten, Richard Fannin, Rudin Filaro, and Randall Flagg (among a great many odiers), gave over all hope except for die 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 litde 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 die top. He could hear the sounds they made as they tore loose of die tendons which turned them and the optic nerves which relayed dieir marvelous messages. The sound diat marked die 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 far too long.
Give them to me, I say! No more dilly-dallying! I'm ahungry!
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 litde like tadpoles. The spider snatched one out of the air. The other plopped to the tile where die 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 die 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 die spider was too greedy to wait.