The Dark Tower - Stephen King [343]
Wait a little longer, this voice counseled. Wait a little more. I might have another trick up my sleeve. Wait…wait just a little longer…
Mordred waited. And after a moment or two, he felt the pulse from the Dark Tower change.
Eight
Patrick felt that change, too. The pulse became soothing. And there were words in it, ones that blunted his eagerness to draw. He made another line, paused, then put his pencil aside and only looked up at Old Mother, who seemed to pulse in time with the words he heard in his head, words Roland would have recognized. Only these were sung in an old man’s voice, quavering but sweet:
“Baby-bunting, darling one,
Now another day is done.
May your dreams be sweet and merry,
May you dream of fields and berries.
Baby-bunting, baby-dear,
Baby, bring your berries here.
Oh chussit, chissit, chassit!
Bring enough to fill your basket!”
Patrick’s head nodded. His eyes closed…opened…
slipped closed again.
Enough to fill my basket, he thought, and slept in the firelight.
Nine
Now, my good son, whispered the cold voice in the middle of Mordred’s hot and melting brains. Now. Go to him and make sure he never rises from his sleep. Murder him among the roses and we’ll rule together.
Mordred came from hiding, the binoculars tumbling from a hand that was no longer a hand at all. As he changed, a feeling of huge confidence swept through him. In another minute it would be done. They both slept, and there was no way he could fail.
He rushed down on the camp and the sleeping men, a black nightmare on seven legs, his mouth opening and closing.
Ten
Somewhere, a thousand miles away, Roland heard barking, loud and urgent, furious and savage. His exhausted mind tried to turn away from it, to blot it out and go deeper. Then there was a horrible scream of agony that awoke him in a flash. He knew that voice, even as distorted by pain as it was.
“Oy!” he cried, leaping up. “Oy, where are you? To me! To m—”
There he was, twisting in the spider’s grip. Both of them were clearly visible in the light of the fire. Beyond them, sitting propped against the cottonwood tree, Patrick gazed stupidly through a curtain of hair that would soon be dirty again, now that Susannah was gone. The bumbler wriggled furiously to and fro, snapping at the spider’s body with foam flying from his jaws even as Mordred bent him in a direction his back was never meant to go.
If he’d not rushed out of the tall grass, Roland thought, that would be me in Mordred’s grip.
Oy sent his teeth deep into one of the spider’s legs. In the firelight Roland could see the coin-sized dimples of the bumbler’s jaw-muscles as he chewed deeper still. The thing squalled and its grip loosened. At that moment Oy might have gotten free, had he chosen to do so. He did not. Instead of jumping down and leaping away in the momentary freedom granted him before Mordred was able to re-set his grip, Oy used the time to extend his long neck and seize the place where one of the thing’s legs joined its bloated body. He bit deep, bringing a flood of blackish-red liquor that ran freely from the sides of his muzzle. In the firelight it gleamed with orange sparks. Mordred squalled louder still. He had left Oy out of his calculations, and was now paying the price. In the firelight, the two writhing forms were figures out of a nightmare.
Somewhere nearby, Patrick was hooting in terror.