The Dark Tower (25 page)

“You were watching them,” said a soft, laughing voice. Then it lilted a bit of cradle nonsense Roland would have remembered well from his own early childhood: “‘Penny, posy, Jack’s a-nosy! Do ya say so? Yes I do-so! He’s my sneaky, peeky, darling bah-bo!’ Did you like what you saw before you fell asleep? Did you watch them move on with the rest of the failing world?”

Perhaps ten hours had passed since Nigel the domestic robot had performed his last duty. Mordred, who in fact had fallen deeply asleep, turned his head toward the voice of the stranger with no residual fuzzy-headedness or surprise. He saw a man in bluejeans and a hooded parka standing on the gray tiles of the Control Center. His gunna—nothing more than a beat-up duffelbag—lay at his feet. His cheeks were flushed, his face handsome, his eyes burning hot. In his hand was an automatic pistol, and as he looked into the dark eye of its muzzle, Mordred Deschain for the second time realized that even gods could die once their divinity had been diluted with human blood. But he wasn’t afraid. Not of this one. He
did
look back into the monitors that showed Nigel’s apartment, and confirmed
that the newcomer was right: it was empty.

The smiling stranger, who seemed to have sprung from the very floor, raised the hand not holding the gun to the hood of his parka and turned a bit of it outward. Mordred saw a flash of metal. Some kind of woven wire coated the inside of the hood.

“I call it my ‘thinking-cap,’” said the stranger. “I can’t hear your thoughts, which is a drawback, but you can’t get into my head, which is a—”

(
which is a definite advantage, wouldn’t you say
)

“—which is a definite advantage, wouldn’t you say?”

There were two patches on the jacket. One read
U.S. ARMY
and showed a bird—the eagle-bird, not the hoo-hoo bird. The other patch was a name:
RANDALL FLAGG
. Mordred discovered (also with no surprise) that he could read easily.

“Because, if you’re anything like your father—the
red
one, that is—then your mental powers may exceed mere communication.” The man in the parka tittered. He didn’t want Mordred to know he was afraid. Perhaps he’d convinced himself he
wasn’t
afraid, that he’d come here of his own free will. Maybe he had. It didn’t matter to Mordred one way or the other. Nor did the man’s plans, which jumbled and ran in his head like hot soup. Did the man really believe the “thinking-cap” had closed off his thoughts? Mordred looked closer, pried deeper, and saw the answer was yes. Very convenient.

“In any case, I believe a bit of protection to be very prudent. Prudence is always the wisest course; how else did I survive the fall of Farson and the
death of Gilead? I wouldn’t want you to get in my head and walk me off a high building, now would I? Although why would you? You need me or someone, now that yon bucket of bolts has gone silent and you just a bah-bo who can’t tie his own clout across the crack of his shitty ass!”

The stranger—who was really no stranger at all—laughed. Mordred sat in the chair and watched him. On the side of the child’s cheek was a pink weal, for he’d gone to sleep with his small hand against the side of his small face.

The newcomer said, “I think we can communicate very well if I talk and you nod for yes or shake your head for no. Knock on your chair if you don’t understand. Simple enough! Do you agree?”

Mordred nodded. The newcomer found the steady blue glare of those eyes unsettling—
très
unsettling—but tried not to show it. He wondered again if coming here had been the right thing to do, but he had tracked Mia’s course ever since she had kindled, and why, if not for this? It was a dangerous game, agreed, but now there were only two creatures who could unlock the door at the foot of the Tower before the Tower fell . . . which it would, and soon, because the writer had only days left to live in his world, and the final Books of the Tower—three of them—remained unwritten. In the last one that
was
written in that key world, Roland’s ka-tet had banished sai Randy Flagg from a dream-palace on an interstate highway, a palace that had looked to Eddie, Susannah, and Jake like the Castle of Oz the Great and Terrible (Oz the Green King, may it do ya fine). They had, in fact, almost killed that bad old bumhug Walter o’ Dim, thereby providing what some would no doubt call
a happy ending. But beyond
page 676
of
Wizard and Glass
not a word about Roland and the Dark Tower had Stephen King written, and Walter considered this the
real
happy ending. The people of Calla Bryn Sturgis, the roont children, Mia and Mia’s baby: all those things were still sleeping inchoate in the writer’s subconscious, creatures without breath pent behind an unfound door. And now Walter judged it was too late to set them free. Damnably quick though King had been throughout his career—a genuinely talented writer who’d turned himself into a shoddy (but rich) quick-sketch artist, a rhymeless Algernon Swinburne, do it please ya—he couldn’t get through even the first hundred pages of the remaining tale in the time he had left, not if he wrote day and night.

Too late.

There had been a day of choice, as Walter well knew: he had been at
Le Casse Roi Russe,
and had seen it in the glass ball the Old Red Thing still possessed (although by now it no doubt lay forgotten in some castle corner). By the summer of 1997, King had clearly known the story of the Wolves, the twins, and the flying plates called Orizas. But to the writer, all that had seemed like too much work. He had chosen a book of loosely interlocked stories called
Hearts in Atlantis
instead, and even now, in his home on Turtleback Lane (where he had never seen so much as a single walk-in), the writer was frittering away the last of his time writing about peace and love and Vietnam. It was true that one character in what would be King’s last book had a part to play in the Dark Tower’s history as it might be, but that fellow—an old man with talented brains—would never get a
chance to speak lines that really mattered. Lovely.

In the only world that really mattered, the true world where time never turns back and there are no second chances (tell ya true), it was June 12th of 1999. The writer’s time had shrunk to less than two hundred hours.

Walter o’ Dim knew he didn’t have quite that long to reach the Dark Tower, because time (like the metabolism of certain spiders) ran faster and hotter on this side of things. Say five days. Five and a half at the outside. He had that long to reach the Tower with Mordred Deschain’s birthmarked, amputated foot in his gunna . . . to open the door at the bottom and mount those murmuring stairs . . . to bypass the trapped Red King . . .

If he could find a vehicle . . . or the right door . . .

Was it too late to become the God of All?

Perhaps not. In any case, what harm in trying?

Walter o’ Dim had wandered long, and under a hundred names, but the Tower had always been his goal. Like Roland, he wanted to climb it and see what lived at the top. If anything did.

He had belonged to none of the cliques and cults and faiths and factions that had arisen in the confused years since the Tower began to totter, although he wore their siguls when it suited him. His service to the Crimson King was a late thing, as was his service to John Farson, the Good Man who’d brought down Gilead, the last bastion of civilization, in a tide of blood and murder. Walter had done his own share of murder in those years, living a long and only quasi-mortal life. He had witnessed the end of what he had then believed to be Roland’s last ka-tet at Jericho Hill.
Witnessed
it?
That was a little overmodest, by all the gods and fishes! Under the name of Rudin Filaro, he had fought with his face painted blue, had screamed and charged with the rest of the stinking barbarians, and had brought down Cuthbert Allgood himself, with an arrow through the eye. Yet through all that he’d kept his gaze on the Tower. Perhaps that was why the damned gunslinger—as the sun went down on that day’s work, Roland of Gilead had been the last of them—had been able to escape, having buried himself in a cart filled with the dead and then creeping out of the slaughterpile at sundown, just before the whole works had been set alight.

He had seen Roland years earlier, in Mejis, and had just missed his grip on him there, too (although he put that mostly down to Eldred Jonas, he of the quavery voice and the long gray hair, and Jonas had paid). The King had told him then that they weren’t done with Roland, that the gunslinger would begin the end of matters and ultimately cause the tumble of that which he wished to save. Walter hadn’t begun to believe that until the Mohaine Desert, where he had looked around one day and discovered a certain gunslinger on his backtrail, one who had grown old over the course of falling years, and hadn’t completely believed it until the reappearance of Mia, who fulfilled an old and grave prophecy by giving birth to the Crimson King’s son. Certainly the Old Red Thing was of no more use to him, but even in his imprisonment and insanity, he—
it
—was dangerous.

Still, until he’d had Roland to complete him—to make him greater than his own destiny, perhaps—Walter o’ Dim had been little more than a
wanderer left over from the old days, a mercenary with a vague ambition to penetrate the Tower before it was brought down. Was that not what had brought him to the Crimson King in the first place? Yes. And it wasn’t his fault that the great scuttering spider-king had run mad.

Never mind. Here was his son with the same mark on his heel—Walter could see it at this very moment—and everything balanced. Of course he’d need to be careful. The thing in the chair looked helpless, perhaps even thought it
was
helpless, but it wouldn’t do to underestimate it just because it looked like a baby.

Walter slipped the gun into his pocket (for the moment; only for the moment) and held his hands out, empty and palms up. Then he closed one of them into a fist, which he raised to his forehead. Slowly, never taking his eyes from Mordred, wary lest he should change (Walter had seen that change, and what had happened to the little beast’s mother), the newcomer dropped to one knee.

“Hile, Mordred Deschain, son of Roland of Gilead that was and of the Crimson King whose name was once spoken from End-World to Out-World; hile you son of two fathers, both of them descended from Arthur Eld, first king to rise after the
Prim
receded, and Guardian of the Dark Tower.”

For a moment nothing happened. In the Control Center there was only silence and the lingering smell of Nigel’s fried circuits.

Then the baby lifted its chubby fists, opened them, and raised his hands:
Rise, bondsman, and come to me.

“It’s best you not ‘think strong,’ in any case,” the newcomer said, stepping closer. “They knew you were here, and Roland is almighty Christing clever; trig-delah is he. He caught up with me once, you know, and I thought I was done. I truly did.” From his gunna the man who sometimes called himself Flagg (on another level of the Tower, he had brought an entire world to ruin under that name) had taken peanut butter and crackers. He’d asked permission of his new dinh, and the baby (although bitterly hungry himself) had nodded regally. Now Walter sat cross-legged on the floor, eating rapidly, secure in his thinking-cap, unaware there was an intruder inside and all that he knew was being ransacked. He was safe until that ransacking was done, but afterward—

Mordred raised one chubby baby-hand in the air and swooped it gracefully down in the shape of a question mark.

“How did I escape?” Walter asked. “Why, I did what any true cozener would do in such circumstances—told him the truth! Showed him the Tower, at least several levels of it. It stunned him, right and proper, and while he was open in such fashion, I took a leaf from his own book and hypnotized him. We were in one of the fistulas of time which sometimes swirl out from the Tower, and the world moved on all around us as we had our palaver in that bony place, aye! I brought more bones—human ones—and while he slept I dressed em in what was left of my own clothes. I could have killed him then, but what of the Tower if I had, eh? What of
you,
for that matter? You
never would have come to be. It’s fair to say, Mordred, that by allowing Roland to live and draw his three, I saved your life before your life was even kindled, so I did. I stole away to the seashore—felt in need of a little vacation, hee! When Roland got there, he went one way, toward the three doors. I’d gone the other, Mordred my dear, and here I am!”

He laughed through a mouthful of crackers and sprayed crumbs on his chin and shirt. Mordred smiled, but he was revolted. This was what he was supposed to work with,
this?
A cracker-gobbling, crumb-spewing fool who was too full of his own past exploits to sense his present danger, or to know his defenses had been breached? By all the gods, he
deserved
to die! But before that could happen, there were two more things he needed. One was to know where Roland and his friends had gone. The other was to be fed. This fool would serve both purposes. And what made it easy? Why, that Walter had also grown old—old and lethally sure of himself—and too vain to realize it.

“You may wonder why I’m here, and not about your father’s business,” Walter said. “Do you?”

Mordred didn’t, but he nodded, just the same. His stomach rumbled.

“In truth, I
am
about his business,” Walter said, and gave his most charming smile (spoiled somewhat by the peanut butter on his teeth). He had once probably known that any statement beginning with the words
In truth
is almost always a lie. No more. Too old to know. Too vain to know. Too stupid to remember. But he was wary, all the same. He could feel the child’s force. In his head? Rummaging around in his head? Surely not. The thing
trapped in the baby’s body was powerful, but surely not
that
powerful.

Walter leaned forward earnestly, clasping his knees.