The Eyes of the Dragon - Stephen King [44]
Dennis took the ash bucket and a small shovel from beside the stove and went back to the secret panel. He used the shovel to pick up the smoking body of the mouse and drop it into the ash bucket. He wet the charred corners of the letters once more, just to be sure. Then he closed the panel, replaced the books, and left Peter's apartments. He took the ash bucket with him, and now he did not feel like Peter's loyal servant but like a thief- his booty was a poor mouse that died even before Dennis got back out the West Gate of the castle.
And before he had even reached his house on the far side of the castle keep, a horrible suspicion had dawned in his mind -he was the first in Delain to feel this suspicion, but he would not be the last.
He tried to push the thought out of his head, but it kept coming back. What sort of poison, Dennis wondered, had killed King Roland, anyway? Exactly what sort of poison had it been?
By the time he got back to the Brandon house, he was in a bad state indeed, and he would answer none of his mother's questions. Nor would he show her what was in the ash bucket. He told her only that he must see his father the moment he came in-it was dreadfully important. Then he went into his room and wondered exactly what sort of poison it had been. He only knew one thing about it, but that one thing was enough. It had been something hot.
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Brandon arrived just before ten o'clock, short-tem- pered, exhausted, and in no mood for foolishness. He was dirt and sweaty, there was a thin cut across his forehead, and cobwebs flew from his hair in long strings. They had found no sign of the assassin at all. His only news was that preparations for Peter's coronation were going full speed ahead in the Plaza of the Needle, under the direction of Anders Peyna, Delain's Judge-General.
His wife told him of Dennis's return. Brandon 's brow darkened. He went to the door of his son's room and rapped not with his knuckles but with a closed fist. "Come ' ee out here, boy, and tell us why you come back with the ash bucket from your master's study."
"No," Dennis said. "You come in here, Dad-I don't want Mother to see what I've got, and I don't want her to hear what we say to each other."
Brandon barged in. Dennis's mother waited apprehensively by the stove, expecting it was some sort of semi-hysterical foolishness which the boy had thought up, some ill-advised monkeyshine, and that very soon she would hear Dennis's wails as her tired and distraught husband, who must begin today at noon to buttle not a prince but a King, took out all his fears and frustrations on the boy's backside. She hardly blamed Dennis; everyone in the keep seemed hysterical this morning, running around like crazy people just let out of bedlam, repeating a hundred false rumors, then taking them back in order to repeat a hundred new ones.
But there were no raised voices from behind Dennis's door, and neither of them came out for more than an hour. When they did, a single look at her husband's white face made the poor woman feel like fainting dead away. Dennis scurried along at his father's heels like a scared puppy.
Now Brandon was carrying the ash bucket.
"Where are you going?" she asked timidly.
Brandon said nothing. It seemed that Dennis could say nothing. He only rolled his eyes at her and then followed his father out the door. She saw neither of them for twenty-four hours, and became convinced that both were dead-or even worse, that they were suffering in the Dungeon castle.
Her dire thoughts were not so unlikely, either, for those were a terrible twenty-four hours in Detain. The day mightn't have seemed so terrible in some places, places where revolt and upheaval and alarms and midnight executions are almost a way of life there really are such places, although I wish I didn't have to say so. But Detain had for years-and even centuries-been