Flagg laughed cheerily-but that laugh raised gooseflesh on Thomas's arms anyway. He clapped Thomas on the back. "Not a bat! Not a drip! Not a draft! Warm as toast! And you can peek at your father, Tommy!"

Thomas knew that peeking was just another way of saying spying, and that spying was wrong-but this had been a shrewd shot all the same. This next time the b.u.g.g.e.rlug bug found a way to escape between two of the books, Thomas let it go. "All right," he said, "but there better not be any bats."

Flagg slipped an arm around the boy's shoulders. "No bats, I swear-but here's something for you to mull over in you mind, Tommy. You'll not only see your father, you'll see him through the eyes of his greatest trophy."

Thomas's own eyes widened with interest. Flagg was satisfied. The fish was hooked and landed. "What do you mean?"

"Come and see for yourself," was all he would say.

He led Thomas through a maze of corridors. You would have become lost very soon, and I probably would have gotten lost myself before long, but Thomas knew this way as well as you know your way through your own bedroom in the dark-at least he did until Flagg led him aside.

They had almost reached the King's own apartments when Flagg pushed open a recessed wooden door that Thomas had never really noticed before. Of course it had always been there, but in castles there are often doors-whole wings, even-that have mastered the art of being dim.

This pa.s.sage was quite narrow. A chambermaid with an arm-load of sheets pa.s.sed them; she was so terrified to have met the King's magician in this slim stone throat that it seemed she would happily have shrunk into the very pores of the stone blocks to avoid touching him. Thomas almost laughed because sometimes he felt a little like that himself when Flagg was around. They met no one else at all.

Faintly, from below them, he could hear dogs barking, and that gave him a rough idea of where he was. The only dogs inside the castle proper were his father's hunting dogs, and they were probably barking because it was time for them to be fed. Most of Roland's dogs were now almost as old as he was, and because he knew how the cold ached in his own bones, Roland had commanded that a kennel be made for them right here in the castle. To reach the dogs from his father's main sitting cham-ber, one went down a flight of stairs, turned right, and walked ten yards or so up an interior corridor. So Thomas knew they were about thirty feet to the right of his father's private rooms.

Flagg stopped so suddenly that Thomas almost ran into him. The magician looked swiftly around to make sure they had the pa.s.sageway to themselves. They did.

"Fourth stone up from the one at the bottom with the chip in it," Flagg said. "Press it. Quick!"

Ah, there was a secret here, all right, and Thomas loved secrets. Brightening, he counted up four stones from the one with the chip and pressed. He expected some neat little bit of Jiggery- pokery a sliding panel, perhaps-but he was quite unprepared for what did happen.

The stone slid in with perfect ease to a depth of about three inches. There was a click. An entire section of wall suddenly swung inward, revealing a dark vertical crack. This wasn't a wall at all! It was a huge door! Thomas's jaw dropped.

Flagg slapped Thomas's bottom.

"Quick, I said, you little fool!" he cried in a low voice. There was urgency in his voice, and this wasn't simply put on for Thomas's benefit, as many of Flagg's emotions were. He looked right and left to verify that the pa.s.sage was still empty. "Go! Now!"

Thomas looked at the dark crack that had been revealed and thought uneasily about bats again. But one look at Flagg's face showed him that this would be a bad time to attempt a discussion on the subject.

He pushed the door open wider and stepped into the darkness. Flagg followed at once. Thomas heard the low flap of the magician's cloak as he turned and shoved the wall closed again. The darkness was utter and complete, the air still and dry. Before he could open his mouth to say anything, the blue flame at the tip of Flagg's index finger flared alight, throwing a harsh blue-white fan of illumination.

Thomas cringed without even thinking about it, and his hands flew up.

Flagg laughed harshly. "No bats, Tommy. Didn't I promise?"

Nor were there. The ceiling was quite low, and Thomas could see for himself. No bats, and warm as toast* just as the magician had promised. By the light of Flagg's magic finger-flare, he could also see they were in a secret pa.s.sage which was about twenty-five feet long. Walls, floor, and ceiling were covered with ironwood boards. He couldn't see the far end very well, but it looked perfectly blank.

He could still hear the m.u.f.fled barking of the dogs.

"When I said be quick, I meant it," Flagg said. He bent over Thomas, a vague, looming shadow that was, in this darkness, rather batlike itself. Thomas drew back a step, uneasily. As always, there was an unpleasant smell about the magician-a smell of secret powders and bitter herbs. "You know where the pa.s.sage is now, and I'll not be the one to tell you not to use it. But if you're ever caught using it, you must say you discovered it by accident."

The shape loomed even closer, forcing Thomas back another step.

"If you say I showed it to you, Tommy, I'll make you sorry.

"I'll never tell," Thomas said. His words sounded thin and shaky.

"Good. Better yet if no one ever sees you using it. Spying on a King is serious business, prince or not. Now follow me. And be quiet."

Flagg led him to the end of the pa.s.sageway. The far wall was also dressed with ironwood, but when Flagg raised the flame that burned from the tip of his finger, Thomas saw two little panels. Flagg pursed his lips and blew out the light.

In utter blackness, he whispered: "Never open these two panels with a light burning. He might see. He's old, but he still sees well. He might see something, even though the eyeb.a.l.l.s are of tinted gla.s.s."

"What-"

" Shhhh! There isn't much wrong with his ears, either."

Thomas fell quiet, his heart pounding in his chest. He felt a great excitement that he didn't understand. Later he thought that he had been excited because he knew in some way what was going to happen.

In the darkness he heard a faint sliding sound, and suddenly a dim ray of light-torchlight-lit the darkness. There was a second sliding sound and a second ray of light appeared. No he could see Flagg again, very faintly, and his own hands when he held them up before him.

Thomas saw Flagg step up to the wall and bend a little; then most of the light was cut out as he put his eyes to the two holes through which the rays of light fell. He looked for a moment, then grunted and stepped away. He motioned to Thomas. "Have a look," he said.

More excited than ever, Thomas cautiously put his eyes to the holes. He saw clearly enough, although everything had an odd greenish-yellow aspect-it was as if he were looking through smoked gla.s.s. A sense of perfect, delighted wonder rose in him. He was looking down into his father's sitting room. He saw his father slouched by the fire in his favorite chair-one with high wings which threw shadows across his lined face.

It was very much the room of a huntsman; in our world such a room would often be called a den, although this one was as big as some ordinary houses. Flaring torches lined the long walls. Heads were mounted everywhere: heads of bear, of deer, of elk, of wildebeest, of cormorant. There was even a grand featherex, which is the cousin of our legendary bird the phoenix. Thomas could not see the head of Niner, the dragon his father had killed before he was born, but this did not immediately register on him.

His father was picking morosely at a sweet. A pot of tea steamed near at hand.

That was all that was really happening in that great room that could have (and at times had) held upward of two hundred people just his father, with a fur robe draped around him, having a solitary afternoon tea. Yet Thomas watched for a time that seemed endless. His fascination and his excitement with this view of his father cannot be told. His heartbeat, which had been rapid before, doubled. Blood sang and pounded in his head. His hands clenched into fists so tight that he would later discover b.l.o.o.d.y crescent moons imprinted into his palms where his fingernails had bitten.

{insert image on page 76} Why was he so excited simply to be looking at an old man picking halfheartedly at a piece of cake? Well, first you must remember that the old man wasn't just any old man. He was Thomas's father. And spying, sad to say, has its own attraction. When you can see people doing something and they don't see you, even the most trivial actions seem important.

After awhile, Thomas began to feel a little ashamed of what he was doing, and that was not really surprising. Spying on a person is a kind of stealing, after all-it's stealing a look at what people do when they think they are alone. But that is also one of its chief fascinations, and Thomas might have looked for hours if Flagg had not murmured, "Do you know where you are, Tommy?"

"I-" don't think so, he was going to add, but of course he did know. His sense of direction was good, and with a little thought he could imagine the reverse of this angle. He suddenly understood what Flagg meant when he said he, Thomas, would see his father through the eyes of Roland's greatest trophy. He was looking down at his father from a little more than halfway up the west wall* and that was where the greatest head of all was hung-that of Niner, his father's dragon.

He might see something, even though the eyeb.a.l.l.s are of tinted gla.s.s.

Now he understood that, too. Thomas had to clap his hands to his mouth to stifle a shrill giggle.

Flagg slid the little panels shut again* but he, too, was smiling.

"No!" Thomas whispered. "No, I want to see more!"

"Not this afternoon," Flagg said. "You've seen enough this afternoon. You can come again when you want* although if you come too often, you'll surely be caught. Now come on. We're going back."

Flagg relit the magic flame and led Thomas down the corridor again. At the end, he put the light out and there was another sliding sound as he opened a peephole. He guided Thomas's hand to it so he would know where it was, and then bade him look.

"Notice that you can see the pa.s.sageway in both directions," Flagg said. "Always be careful to look before you open the secret door, or someday you will be surprised."

Thomas put one eye to the peephole and saw, directly across the corridor, an ornate window with gla.s.s sides that angled slightly into the pa.s.sageway. It was much too fancy for such a small pa.s.sageway, but Thomas understood without having to be told that it had been put here by whoever had made the secret pa.s.sageway. Looking into the angled sides, he could indeed see a ghostly reflection of the corridor in both directions.

"Empty?" Flagg whispered.

"Yes," Thomas whispered back.

Flagg pushed an interior spring (again guiding Thomas's hand to it for future reference), and the door clicked open. "Quickly now!" Flagg said. They were out and the door was shut behind them in a trice.

Ten minutes later, they were back in Thomas's rooms.

"Enough excitement for one day," Flagg said. "Remember what I told you, Tommy: don't use the pa.s.sageway so often that you'll be caught, and if you are caught" -Flagg's eyes glittered grimly-"remember that you found that place by accident."

"I will," Thomas said quickly. His voice was high and it squeaked like a hinge that needed oil. When Flagg looked at him that way, his heart felt like a bird caught in his chest, fluttering in panic.

Thomas heeded Flagg's advice not to go often, but he did use the pa.s.sageway from time to time, and peeked at his father through the gla.s.s eyes of Niner -peeked into a world where everything became greeny -gold. Going away later with a pounding headache (as he almost always did), he would think: Your head aches because you were seeing the way dragons must see the world-as if everything was dried out and ready to burn. And perhaps Flagg's instinct for mischief in this matter was not so bad at all, because, by spying on his father, Thomas learned to feel a new thing for Roland. Before he knew about the secret pa.s.sage he had felt love for him, and often a sorrow that he could not please him better, and sometimes fear. Now he learned to feel con-tempt, as well.

Whenever Thomas spied into Roland's sitting room and found his father in company, he left again quickly. He only lingered when his father was alone. In the past, Roland rarely had been, even in such rooms as his den, which was a part of his "private apartments." There was always one more urgent matter to be attended to, one more advisor to see, one more pet.i.tion to hear.

But Roland's time of power was pa.s.sing. As his importance waned with his good health, he found himself remembering all the times he had cried to either Sasha or Flagg: "Won't these people ever leave me alone?" The memory brought a rueful smile to his lips. Now that they did, he missed them.

Thomas felt contempt because people are rarely at their best when they are alone. They usually put their masks of politeness, good order, and good breeding aside. What's beneath? Some warty monster? Some disgusting thing that would make people run away, screaming? Sometimes, perhaps, but usually it's nothing bad at all. Usually people would just laugh if they saw us with our masks off-laugh, make a revolted face, or do both at the same time.

Thomas saw that his father, whom he had always loved and feared, who had seemed to him the greatest man in the world, often picked his nose when he was alone. He would root around in first one nostril and then the other until he got a plump green booger. He would regard these with solemn satisfaction, turning each one this way and that in the firelight, the way a jeweler might turn a particularly fine emerald. Most of these he would then rub under the chair in which he was sitting. Others, I regret to say, he popped into his mouth and munched with an expression of reflective enjoyment on his face.

He would have only a single gla.s.s of wine at night-the gla.s.s which Peter brought him-but after Peter left, he drank what seemed to Thomas huge amounts of beer (it was only years later that Thomas came to realize that his father hadn't wanted Peter to see him drunk), and when he needed to urinate, he rarely used the commode in the corner. Most times he simply stood up and p.i.s.sed into the fire, often farting as he did so.

He talked to himself. He would sometimes walk around the long room like a man who was not sure where he was, speaking either to the air or to the mounted heads.

"I remember that day we got you, Bonsey," he would say to one of the elk heads (another of his eccentricities was that he had named every one of the trophies). "I was with Bill Squathings and that fellow with the great lump on the side of his face. I remember how you come through the trees and Bill let loose, and then that fellow with the lump let loose, then I let loose-"

Then his father would demonstrate how he had let loose by raising his leg and farting, even as he mimed drawing back a bowstring and letting fly. And he would laugh an old man's shrill, unpleasant cackle.

Thomas would slide the little panels back after awhile and slink down the corridor again, his head pounding and an uneasy grin on his face-the head and grin of a boy who has been eating green apples and knows he may be sicker by morning than he is now.

This was the father he had always loved and feared?

He was an old man who farted out stinking clouds of steam.

This was the King his loyal subjects called Roland the Good?

He p.i.s.sed into the fire, sending up more clouds of steam.

This was the man who made his heart break by not liking his boat?

He talked to the stuffed heads on his walls, calling them silly names like Bonsey and Stag-Pool and Puckerstring; he picked his nose and sometimes ate the boogers.

I don't care for you anymore, Thomas would think, checking the peephole to make sure the corridor was empty and then creeping back to his room like a felon. You're a filthy, silly old man and you're nothing to me! Nothing at all! No!

But he was something to Thomas. Some part of him went on loving Roland just the same-some part of him wanted to go to his father so his father would have something better to talk to than a bunch of stuffed heads on the walls.

Still, there was that other part of him that liked spying better.

The night that Flagg came to King Roland's private rooms with the gla.s.s of poisoned wine was the first occasion in a very long time that Thomas had dared spy. There was a good reason for this.

One night about three months before, Thomas found himself unable to sleep. He tossed and turned until he heard the keep watchman cry eleven. Then he got up, dressed, and left his rooms. Less than ten minutes later, he was looking down into his father's den. He had thought his father might be asleep, but he was not. Roland was awake, and very, very drunk.

Thomas had seen his father drunk many times before, but he had never seen him in anything remotely like his current state. The boy was flabbergasted and badly frightened.

There are people much older than Thomas was then who harbor the idea that old age is always a gentle time-that an old person may exhibit gentle wisdom, gentle crabbiness or craftiness, perhaps the gentle confusion of senility. They will grant these, but find it hard to credit any real fire. They have an illusion that by the seventies, any real fire must have faded to coals. That may be true, but on this night Thomas discovered that coals may sometimes flare up violently.

His father was striding rapidly up and down the length of hi sitting room, his fur robe flying out behind him. His nightcap had fallen off; his remaining hair hung down in tangled locks, mostly about his ears. He was not staggering, as he had done on other nights, moving tentatively with one hand out to keep from running into the furniture. He was rolling like a sailor, but he was not staggering. When he did happen to run into one of the high-backed chairs which stood near the walls beneath the snarling head of a lynx, Roland threw the chair aside with a roar that made Thomas cringe. The hairs on his arms p.r.i.c.kled. The chair flew across the room and hit the far wall. Its iron-wood back splintered down the middle-in this bitter drunkenness, the old King had regained the strength of his middle years.

He looked up at the lynx head with red, glaring eyes.

"Bite me!" he roared at it. The raw hoa.r.s.eness in his voice made Thomas cringe again. "Bite me, are you afeard? Come down out of that wall, Craker! Jump! Here's my chest, see?" He tore open the robe, revealing his scrawny chest. He bared his few teeth at Craker's many, and lifted his head. "Here's my neck! Come on, jump! I'll do you with my bare hands! I'LL RIP your STINKING GUT OUT!"

He stood for a moment, chest out and head up, looking like an animal himself-an ancient stag, perhaps, that has been brought to bay and can now hope for nothing better than to die well. Then he whirled away, stopping at a bear's head to shake a fist at it and roar a string of curses at it-curses so terrible that Thomas, cringing in the dark, believed that the bear's outraged spirit might swoop down, reanimate the stuffed head, and tear his father open while he watched.

But Roland was away again. He seized his mug, drained it, then whirled with brew dripping from his chops. He hurled the silver mug across the room, where it struck a stone angle of the fireplace hard enough to leave a dent in the metal.

Now his father came down the room toward him, throwing another chair out of the way, then kicking a table aside with hi bare foot. His eyes flicked up* and met Thomas's own. Yes- they met his own eyes. Thomas felt their gazes lock, and a gray, swooning terror filled him like frozen breath.

His father stalked toward him, his yellowed teeth bared, his remaining hair hanging over his ears, beer dripping from his chin and the corners of his mouth.

"You," Roland whispered in a low, terrible voice. "Why do you stare at me? What do you hope to see?"

Thomas could not move. Found out, his mind gibbered, found out, by all the G.o.ds that ever were or shall be, I am found out and I will surely be exiled!

His father stood there, his eyes fixed on the mounted dragon's head. In his guilt, Thomas was sure his father had spoken to him, but this was not so-Roland had only spoken to Niner as he had spoken to the other heads. Yet if Thomas could see out of the tinted gla.s.s eyeb.a.l.l.s, then his father could see in, at least to some degree. If Thomas hadn't been utterly paralyzed with fear, he would have run away in a panic-even if he had summoned enough presence of mind to hold his ground, his eyes surely would have moved. And if Roland had seenmove, what might he have thought? That the dragon was coming to life again? Perhaps. In his drunken state, I even think that likely. If Thomas had so much as blinked his eyes on that occasion, Flagg would have needed no poison later. The King, old and frail in spite of the temporary potency the drink had given him, would almost surely have died of fright.

Roland suddenly leaped forward.

"WHY Do You STARE AT ME?" he shrieked, and in his drunkenness it was Niner, Delain's last dragon, that he shrieked at, but of course, Thomas did not know that. "WHY Do YOU STARE AT ME SO? I'VE DONE THE BEST I COULD, ALWAYS THE BEST I COULD! DID I ASK FOR THIS? DID I ASK FOR IT? ANSWER ME, d.a.m.n YOU! I DID THE BEST I COULD AND LOOK AT ME NOW! LOOK AT ME NOW!".

He pulled his robe wide open, showing his naked body, its gray skin blotchily flushed with drink.

LOOK AT ME NOW!" he shrieked again, and looked down at himself, weeping.

Thomas could take no more. He slammed shut the panels behind the dragon's gla.s.s eyes at the same moment his father took his eyes from Niner to look down at his own wasted body. Thomas crashed and blundered down the black corridor and slammed full force into the closed door, braining himself and falling in a heap. He was up in a moment, unaware of the blood pouring down his face from a cut in his forehead, pounding at the secret spring until the door popped open. He rushed out into the corridor, not even thinking to check if anyone was there to see him. All he could see was his father's glaring, bloodshot eyes, all he could hear was his father screaming Why do you stare at me?

He had no way of knowing that his father had already fallen into a sleep of deep drunkenness. When Roland woke up the next morning, he was still on the floor, and the first thing he did, in spite of his fiercely aching head and his throbbing, bruised body (Roland was far too old for such strenuous revels), was to look at the dragon's head. He rarely dreamed when he was drunk -there was only an interval of sodden darkness. But last night a terrible dream had come to him: the gla.s.s eyes of the dragon's head had moved and Niner came to life. The worm breathed its deadly breath down on him, and although he could not see that fire, he could feel it deep down inside him, hot and getting hotter.

With this dream still lingering fresh in his mind, he dreaded what he might see when he looked up. But all was as it had been for years now. Niner snarled his fearsome snarl, his forked tongue lolled between teeth almost as long as fence pickets, his green--gold eyes stared blankly across the room. Ceremoniously crossed above this fabulous trophy were Roland's great bow and the arrow Foe-Hammer, its tip and shaft still black with dragon blood. He mentioned this terrible dream once to Flagg, who only nodded and looked more thoughtful than usual. Then Ro-land simply forgot it.

Forgetting was not so easy for Thomas.

He was haunted for weeks by nightmares. In them, his father stared at him and shrieked, "See what you've done to me!" and threw his robe open to display his nakedness-old puckered scars, drooping belly, sagging muscles-as if to say this too had all been Thomas's fault, that if he hadn't spied*

"Why do you never want to see Father anymore?" Peter asked him one day. "He thinks you're mad at him."

"That I'm mad at him?" Thomas was astounded.

"That's what he said at tea today," Peter said. He looked at his brother closely, observing the dark circles under Thomas's eyes, the pallor of Thomas's cheeks and forehead. "Tom, what's wrong?"

"Maybe nothing," Thomas said slowly.