The Eyes of the Dragon - Stephen King [126]
"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.
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