Three
In fact, Mordred gave Walter o’ Dim far too much credit, but isn’t that a trait of the young, perhaps even a survival skill? To a wide-eyed lad, the tacky tricks of the world’s most ham-fisted prestidigitator look like miracles. Walter did not actually realize what was happening until very late in the game, but he was a wily old survivor, tell ya true, and when understanding came, it came entire.
There’s a phrase, the elephant in the living room, which purports to describe what it’s like to live with a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, “How could you let such a business go on for so many years? Didn’t you see the elephant in the living room?” And it’s so hard for anyone living in a more normal situation to understand the answer that comes closest to the truth: “I’m sorry, but it was there when I moved in. I didn’t know it was an elephant; I thought it was part of the furniture.” There comes an aha-moment for some folks—the lucky ones—when they suddenly recognize the difference. And that moment came for Walter. It came too late, but not by much.
Y’won’t shit on me, will you—that was the question he asked, but between the word shit and the phrase on me, he suddenly realized there was an intruder in his house… and it had been there all along. Not a baby, either; this was a gangling, slope-headed adolescent with pockmarked skin and dully curious eyes. It was perhaps the best, truest visualization Walter could have made for Mordred Deschain as he at that moment existed: a teenage housebreaker, probably high on some aerosol cleaning product.
And he had been there all the time! God, how could he not have known? The housebreaker hadn’t even been hiding! He had been right out in the open, standing there against the wall, gape-mouthed and taking it all in.
His plans for bringing Mordred with him—of using him to end Roland’s life (if the guards at the devar-toi couldn’t do it first, that was), then killing the little bastard and taking his valuable left foot—collapsed in an instant. In the next one a new plan arose, and it was simplicity itself. Mustn’t let him see that I know. One shot, that’s all I can risk, and only because I must risk it. Then I run. If he’s dead, fine. If not, perhaps he’ll starve before—
Then Walter realized his hand had stopped. Four fingers had closed around the butt of the gun in the jacket pocket, but they were now frozen. One was very near the trigger, but he couldn’t move that, either. It might as well have been buried in cement. And now Walter clearly saw the shining wire for the first time. It emerged from the toothless pink-gummed mouth of the baby sitting in the chair, crossed the room, glittering beneath the lights, and then encircled him at chest-level, binding his arms to his sides. He understood the wire wasn’t really there… but at the same time, it was.
He couldn’t move.
Four
Mordred didn’t see the shining wire, perhaps because he’d never read Watership Down. He’d had the chance to explore Susannah’s mind, however, and what he saw now was remarkably like Susannah’s Dogan. Only instead of switches saying things like CHAP and EMOTIONAL TEMP, he saw ones that controlled Walter’s ambulation (this one he quickly turned to OFF), cogitation, and motivation. It was certainly a more complex setup than the one in the young bumbler’s head—there he’d found nothing but a few simple nodes, like granny knots—but still not difficult to operate.
The only problem was that he was a baby.
A damned baby stuck in a chair.
If he really meant to change this delicatessen on legs into cold-cuts, he’d have to move quickly.
Five
Walter o’ Dim was not too old to be gullible, he understood that now—he’d underestimated the little monster, relying too much on what it looked like and not enough on his own knowledge of what it was—but he was at least beyond the young man’s trap of total panic.
If he means to do anything besides sit in that chair and look at me, he’ll have to change. When he does, his control may slip. That’ll be my chance. It’s not much, but it’s the only one I have left.
At that moment he saw a brilliant red light run down the baby’s skin from crown to toes. In the wake of it, the chubby-pink bah-bo’s body began to darken and swell, the spider’s legs bursting out through his sides. At the same instant, the shining wire coming out of the baby’s mouth disappeared and Walter felt the suffocating band which had been holding him in place disappear.
No time to risk even a single shot, not now. Run. Run from him… from it. That’s all you can do. You never should have come here in the first place. You let your hatred of the gunslinger blind you, but it still may not be too la—
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 for me, 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 the sound of that voice, the man who had sometimes called himself Marten, Richard Fannin, Rudin Filaro, and Randall Flagg (among a great many others), gave over all hope except for the hope of dying well.