Those of you who think so are forgetting the dollhouse... and the loom within, a loom so tiny that the threads of napkins were perfect for its tiny shuttle. Those of you who think so are forgetting that everything in the dollhouse was tiny, but worked perfectly. The sharp things had been removed, and that included the loom's cutting blade... but otherwise it was in-tact.
It was the dollhouse about which Flagg had had vague mis-givings so long ago which was now Peter's only real hope of escape.
Chapter 11
71
It would have to be a much better storyteller than I am, I think, to tell you how it was for Peter during the five years he spent at the top of the Needle. He ate; he slept; he looked out the window, which gave him a view to the west of the city; he exercised morning, noon, and evening; he dreamed his dreams of freedom. In the summer his apartment sweltered. In the winter it froze.
During the second winter he caught a bad case of the grippe which almost killed him.
Peter lay feverish and coughing under the thin blanket on his bed. At first, he was only afraid he would lapse into delirium and rave about the rope that was hidden in a neat coil under two of the stone blocks on the east side of his bedroom. As his fever grew worse, the rope he had woven with the tiny dollhouse loom came to seem less important, because he began to think he would die.
Beson and his Lesser Warders were convinced of it. They had, in fact, begun to wager on when it would happen. One night, about a week after the onset of his fever, while the wind raged blackly outside and the temperature dropped down to zero, Ro-land appeared to Peter in a dream. Peter was convinced that Roland had come to take him to the Far Fields.
"I'm ready, Da'!" he cried. In his delirium he didn't know if he had spoken aloud or only in his mind. "I'm ready to go!"
Yell not be dying yet, his father said in this dream... or vi-sion... or whatever it was. Ye've much to do, Peter.
"Father!" Peter shrieked. His voice was powerful, and below him, the warders-Beson included-quailed, thinking that Peter must be seeing the smoking, murdered ghost of King Roland, come to take Peter's soul to hell. They made no more wagers that night, and in fact one of them went to the Church of the Great Gods the very next day and embraced his religion again, and eventually became a priest. This man's name was Curran, and I may tell you of him in another story.
Peter really was seeing a ghost in a way-although whether it was the actual shade of his father or only a ghost born in his fever-struck brain, I cannot say.
His voice lapsed into a mutter; the warders did not hear the rest.
"It's so cold... and I am so hot."
My poor boy, his glimmering father said. You've had hard trials, and there are more of them ahead, I think. But Dennis will know...
"Know what?" Peter gasped. His cheeks were red, but his forehead was as pale as a wax candle.
Dennis will know where the sleepwalker goes, his father whis-pered, and was gone.
Peter lapsed into a faint that quickly became a deep, sound sleep. In that sleep, his fever broke. The boy who had made it his practice over the last year to do sixty push-ups and a hundred sit-ups each day awoke the next morning too weak to even get out of bed... but he was lucid again.
Beson and the Lesser Warders were disappointed. But after that night, they always treated Peter with a kind of awe, and took care never to go too close to him.
Which, of course, made his job that much easier.
All that is an easy enough tale to tell, though it would no doubt be better if I could say for sure that the ghost was there or that it was not. But like other matters in the larger tale, you'll have to make up your own mind about it, I suppose.
But how am I to tell you about Peter's endless, drudging work at that tiny loom? That tale is beyond me. All the hours spent, sometimes with frosty breath pluming from his mouth and nose, sometimes with sweat running down his face, always in fear of discovery; all those long hours alone, with nothing but long thoughts and almost absurd hopes to fill them. I can tell you some things, and will, but to convey such hours and days of slow time is impossible for me, and might be impossible for anyone except one of the great storytellers whose race is long vanished. Perhaps the only thing that even vaguely suggests how much time Peter spent in those two rooms was his beard. When he came in, it was only a shadow on his cheeks and a smudge under his nose-a boy's beard. In the 1,825 days which followed, it grew long and luxuriant; by the end it reached the middle of his chest, and although he was only twenty-one, it was shot with gray. The only place it did not grow was along the length of the jagged scar left by Beson's thumbnail.