Stephen King - The Eyes of the Dragon

Peter waited until he had heard all the locks and bolts go rattling home before lifting the rattan mat Ben had rubbed with his thumb. Beneath he found a square of paper no larger than the stamp on a letter. Both sides had been written on, and there were no spaces between the words. The letters were tiny in-deed-Peter had to squint to read them, and guessed that Ben must have made them with the aid of a magnifying glass.

Peter-destroy this after you have read it. I don’t believe you did it. Others feel the same I am sure. I am still your friend. I love you as I always did. Dennis does not believe it, either. If I can ever help get to me through Peyna. Let your heart be steadfast.

As he read this, Peter’s eyes filled with warm tears of gratitude. I think that real friendship always makes us feel such sweet grat-itude, because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds. “Good old Ben!” he whispered over and over again. In the fullness of his heart, he couldn’t think to say any-thing else. “Good old Ben! Good old Ben!”

For the first time he began to think that his plan, wild and dangerous as it was, might have a chance of succeeding.

Next he thought of the note. Ben had put his life on the line to write it. Ben was noble-barely-but not royal; thus not immune from the headsman’s axe. If Beson or one of his jackals found this note, they would guess that one or the other of the boys who had brought the dollhouse must have written it. The loutish one looked as if he couldn’t read even the large letters in a child’s book, let alone write such tiny ones as these. So they would look for the other boy, and from there to the chopping block might be a short trip for good old Ben.

He could think of only one sure way to get rid of it, and he didn’t hesitate; he crumpled the little note up between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and ate it.

By now I am sure you have guessed Peter’s plan of escape, because you know a good deal more than Peyna did when he read Peter’s requests. But in any case, the time has come to tell you straight out. He planned to use linen threads to make a rope. The threads would come, of course, from the edges of the napkins. He would descend this rope to the ground and so escape. Some of you may be laughing very hard at this idea.

Threads from napkins to escape a tower three hundred feet high? you could be saying. Either you are mad, Storyteller, or Peter was!

Nothing of the sort. Peter knew how high the Needle was, and he believed he must never be greedy about how many threads he took from each napkin. If he unraveled too much, someone might become very curious. It didn’t have to be the Chief War-der; the laundress who washed the napkins might be the one to notice rather a lot of each one was gone. She might mention it to a friend… who could mention it to another friend… and so the story would spread… and it wasn’t really Beson Peter was worried about, you know. Beson was, all things said, a fairly stupid fellow.

Flagg was not.

Flagg had murdered his father-

–and Flagg kept his ear to the ground.

It was a shame Peter never stopped to wonder about that vague smell of must about the napkins, or to ask if the person hired to remove the royal crests had been let go after removing a certain number, or if that person was still at work-but, of course, his mind was on other things. He could not help noticing that they were very old, and this was certainly a good thing-he was able to take a great many more threads from each than he ever would have guessed in even his most optimistic moments. How many more than that he could have taken he came to know only in time.

Still, I can hear some of you saying, threads from napkins to make a rope long enough to reach from the window of the Needle’s topmost cell to the courtyard? Threads from napkins to make a rope strong enough to support one hundred and seventy pounds? I still think you are joking!

Those of you who think so are forgetting the dollhouse… and the loom within, a loom so tiny that the threads of napkins were perfect for its tiny shuttle. Those of you who think so are forgetting that everything in the dollhouse was tiny, but worked perfectly. The sharp things had been removed, and that included the loom’s cutting blade… but otherwise it was in-tact.

It was the dollhouse about which Flagg had had vague mis-givings so long ago which was now Peter’s only real hope of escape.

It would have to be a much better storyteller than I am, I think, to tell you how it was for Peter during the five years he spent at the top of the Needle. He ate; he slept; he looked out the window, which gave him a view to the west of the city; he exercised morning, noon, and evening; he dreamed his dreams of freedom. In the summer his apartment sweltered. In the winter it froze.

During the second winter he caught a bad case of the grippe which almost killed him.

Peter lay feverish and coughing under the thin blanket on his bed. At first, he was only afraid he would lapse into delirium and rave about the rope that was hidden in a neat coil under two of the stone blocks on the east side of his bedroom. As his fever grew worse, the rope he had woven with the tiny dollhouse loom came to seem less important, because he began to think he would die.

Beson and his Lesser Warders were convinced of it. They had, in fact, begun to wager on when it would happen. One night, about a week after the onset of his fever, while the wind raged blackly outside and the temperature dropped down to zero, Ro-land appeared to Peter in a dream. Peter was convinced that Roland had come to take him to the Far Fields.

“I’m ready, Da’!” he cried. In his delirium he didn’t know if he had spoken aloud or only in his mind. “I’m ready to go!”

Yell not be dying yet, his father said in this dream… or vi-sion… or whatever it was. Ye’ve much to do, Peter.

“Father!” Peter shrieked. His voice was powerful, and below him, the warders-Beson included-quailed, thinking that Peter must be seeing the smoking, murdered ghost of King Roland, come to take Peter’s soul to hell. They made no more wagers that night, and in fact one of them went to the Church of the Great Gods the very next day and embraced his religion again, and eventually became a priest. This man’s name was Curran, and I may tell you of him in another story.

Peter really was seeing a ghost in a way-although whether it was the actual shade of his father or only a ghost born in his fever-struck brain, I cannot say.

His voice lapsed into a mutter; the warders did not hear the rest.

“It’s so cold… and I am so hot.”

My poor boy, his glimmering father said. You’ve had hard trials, and there are more of them ahead, I think. But Dennis will know…

“Know what?” Peter gasped. His cheeks were red, but his forehead was as pale as a wax candle.

Dennis will know where the sleepwalker goes, his father whis-pered, and was gone.

Peter lapsed into a faint that quickly became a deep, sound sleep. In that sleep, his fever broke. The boy who had made it his practice over the last year to do sixty push-ups and a hundred sit-ups each day awoke the next morning too weak to even get out of bed… but he was lucid again.

Beson and the Lesser Warders were disappointed. But after that night, they always treated Peter with a kind of awe, and took care never to go too close to him.

Which, of course, made his job that much easier.

All that is an easy enough tale to tell, though it would no doubt be better if I could say for sure that the ghost was there or that it was not. But like other matters in the larger tale, you’ll have to make up your own mind about it, I suppose.