115
The voice came spiraling up to Peter on the cold post-storm air. It was faint, that voice, but perfectly clear.
“Open in the name of the King!”
Open in the name of hell, you mean, Peter thought.
The good brave boy had become a good brave man, but when he heard that hoarse voice and remembered that narrow white face and those reddish eyes, always shadowed by the hood of his robe, Peter’s bones turned to ice and his stomach to fire. His mouth went as dry as a wood chip. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His hair stood on end. If someone has ever told you that being good and being brave means you will never be afraid, what that someone told you is not so. At that moment, Peter had never been so afraid in his whole life.
It’s Flagg, and he’s come for me.
Peter got up and, for a moment, he thought he was going to simply fall over as his legs buckled under him. Doom was down there, hammering at the Warders’ Door to be let in.
“Open up! On your feet, you licey drunken buggers! Beson, you son of a sot!”
Don’t hurry, Peter told himself. If you hurry you’ll make a mistake and do his work for him. No one’s come to let him in yet. Beson’s drunk-he was oddly at supper and probably paralyzed by the time he got to bed. Flagg hasn’t a key or he wouldn’t be wasting time knocking. So… one step at a time. Just as you planned it. He’s got to get in, and then climb those stairs-all three hundred of them. You may beat him yet.
He went into his bedroom and pulled out the rough iron cotter pins that held the crude bedframe together. The bed collapsed. Peter grabbed one of the iron side-bars and carried it back into the sitting room. He had measured this bar carefully and knew it was wider than his window, and while its outer surface was rusted, he thought it was strong yet through the middle. It had better be, he thought. It would be a bitter joke indeed if my rope held but my anchor broke.
He looked out briefly. He could see no one now, but he had observed three figures crossing the Plaza toward the Needle shortly before Flagg’s wild pounding had begun. Dennis had recruited friends, then. Had one of them been Ben? Peter hoped so, but did not dare to really believe it. Who was the third? And why the wagon? They were questions he had no time for now.
“Oh, you dogs! Open this door! Open it in the King’s name! Open it in the name of FLAGG! Open the door! Open-”
In the stillness of almost midnight, Peter heard the rattle-thud of the wrist-thick iron bolts far below being drawn back. He supposed the door opened, but he didn’t hear that. Silence…
… and then a gurgling, choked scream.
116
The unfortunate Lesser Warder who finally answered Flagg’s summons lived less than four seconds after drawing the third bolt on the Warders’ Door. He caught a nightmare glimpse of a white face, glaring red eyes, and a black cloak that blew backward in the dying breeze like the wings of a raven. He screamed. Then the air was filled with a dry whooshing sound. The Lesser Warder, who was still half drunk, looked up just as Flagg’s battle-axe split his head in two.
“Next time someone knocks in the name of the King, bestir yourselves and you won’t have a mess to clean up in the morning!” Flagg bellowed. Then, laughing wildly, he kicked aside the body and stroke up the corridor toward the stairs. Things were still all right. He had awakened to the danger in time. He knew it.
He felt it.
He opened a door on the right and stepped into the main corridor leading away from the courtroom where Anders Peyna had once dispensed justice. At the end of that corridor, the stairs began. He looked up, grinning his dreadful, sharklike grin.
“Here I come, Peter!” he cried happily, his voice echoing and rebounding, spiraling up and up and up to where Peter stood preparing to tie his thin rope to the bar he had taken from the bed. “Here I come, dear Peter, to do what I should have done a long, long time ago!”
Flagg’s grin broadened and now he looked terrible indeed he looked like a demon which might have climbed lately from some reeking pit in the earth. He raised the executioner’s axe; drops of the slain warder’s blood fell onto his face and ran down his cheeks like tears.
“Here I come, dear Peter, to chop off your head!” Flagg screamed and began to run up the stairs.
One. Three. Six. Ten.
117
Peter’s shaking hands went wrong somehow. A knot he had made easily a thousand times before now fell apart and he had to start over again.
Don’t let him scare you.
That was idiotic. He was scared, all right; scared green. Thomas would have been astounded to know that Peter had always been frightened of Flagg; Peter had just hid it better.
If he’s going to kill you, make Him do it! Don’t do it for him!
The thought came from inside his own head… but it sounded like his mother’s voice. Peter’s hands steadied a bit, and he began to knot the end of his rope to his anchor again.
118
I’ll carry your head on my saddle horn for a thousand years!” Flagg screamed. Up and up, around and around. “Oh, what a pretty trophy you’ll make!”
Twenty. Thirty. Forty.
His bootheels struck green fire from the stones. His eyes glared. His grin was poison.
“HERE I COME, PETER!”
Seventy-two hundred and thirty steps to go.
119
If you have ever awakened in a strange place in the middle of the night, you’ll know that just to be alone in the dark can be frightening enough; now try to imagine waking in a secret passage, looking through concealed eyeholes into the room where you saw your own father murdered!
Thomas shrieked. No one heard him (unless the dogs below did, and I doubt that-they were old, deaf, and making too much noise themselves).
Now, there was an idea about sleepwalking in Detain-one that has also been commonly held as the truth in our world. This idea is that if a sleepwalker wakes up before returning to his or her bed, he or she will go mad.
Thomas might have heard this tale. If so, he could attest that it wasn’t true at all. He’d had a bad scare, and he had screamed, but he did not come even close to going mad.
In fact, his initial fright passed rather quickly-more quickly than some of you might think-and he looked back into the peepholes again. This may strike some of you as strange, but you have to remember that, before the terrible night when Flagg had come with his own glass of wine after Peter left, Thomas had spent some pleasant times in this dark passageway. The pleasantness had a sour undertone of guilt, but he had also felt close to his father. Now, being back here, he felt a queer sense of nostalgia.
He saw that the room had hardly changed at all. The stuffed heads were still there-Bonsey the elk, Craker the lynx, Snapper the great white bear from the north. And, of course, Niner the dragon, which he now looked through, with Roland’s bow and the arrow Foe-Hammer mounted above it.
Bonsey… Craker… Snapper… Niner.
I remember all their names, Thomas thought with some wonder. And I remember you, Dad. I wish you were alive now and that Peter was free, even if it meant no one even knew I was alive. At least I could sleep at night.
Some of the furniture had been covered with white dust-sheets, but most had not. The fireplace was cold and dark, but a fire had been laid. Thomas saw with mounting wonder that even his father’s old robe was still there, hung in its accustomed place on the hook by the bathroom door. The fireplace was cold, but it wanted only a match struck and held to the kindling to bring it alive, roaring and warm; the room wanted only his father to do the same for it.
Suddenly Thomas became aware of a strange, almost eerie desire in himself; he wanted to go into that room. He wanted to light the fire. He wanted to put on his father’s robe. He wanted to drink a glass of his father’s mead. He would drink it even if it had gone bad and bitter. He thought… he thought he might be able to sleep in there.