Stephen King - The Dark Tower

If he means to do anything besides sit in that chair and look at me, he’ll have to change. When he does, his control may slip. That’ll be my chance. It’s not much, but it’s the only one I have left.

At that moment he saw a brilliant red light run down the baby’s skin from crown to toes. In the wake of it, the chubby-pink bah-bo’s body began to darken and swell, the spider’s legs bursting out through his sides. At the same instant, the shining wire coming out of the baby’s mouth disappeared and Walter felt the suffocating band which had been holding him in place disappear.

No time to risk even a single shot, not now. Run. Run from him…from it. That’s all you can do. You never should have come here in the first place. You let your hatred of the gunslinger blind you, but it still may not be too la —

He turned to the trapdoor even as this thought raced through his mind, and was about to put his foot on the first step when the shining wire re-established itself, this time not looping around his arms and chest but around his throat, like a garrote.

Gagging and choking and spewing spit, eyes bulging from their sockets, Walter turned jerkily around. The loop around his throat loosened the barest bit. At the same time he felt something very like an invisible hand skim up his brow and push the hood back from his head. He’d always gone dressed in such fashion, when he could; in certain provinces to the south even of Garlan he had been known as Walter Hodji, the latter word meaning both dim and hood . But this particular lid (borrowed from a certain deserted house in the town of French Landing, Wisconsin) had done him no good at all, had it?

I think I may have come to the end of the path, he thought as he saw the spider strutting toward him on its seven legs, a bloated, lively thing (livelier than the baby, aye, and four thousand times as ugly) with a freakish blob of human head peering over the hairy curve of its back. On its belly, Walter could see the red mark that had been on the baby’s heel. Now it had an hourglass shape, like the one that marks the female black widow, and he understood that was the mark he’d have wanted; killing the baby and amputating its foot likely would have done him no good at all. It seemed he had been wrong all down the line.

The spider reared up on its four back legs. The three in front pawed at Walter’s jeans, making a low and ghastly scratching sound. The thing’s eyes bulged up at him with that dull intruder’s curiosity which he had already imagined too well.

Oh yes, I’m afraid it’s the end of the path for you. Huge in his head. Booming like words from a loudspeaker. But you intended the same for me, didn’t you?

No! At least not immediately —

But you did! “Don’t kid a kidder,” as Susannah would say. So now I do the one you call my White Father a small favor. You may not have been his greatest enemy, Walter Padick (as you were called when you set out, all in the long-ago), but you were his oldest, I grant. And now I take you out of his road.

Walter did not realize he had held onto some dim hope of escape even with the loathsome thing before him, reared up, the eyes staring at him with dull avidity while the mouth drooled, until he heard for the first time in a thousand years the name a boy from a farm in Delain had once answered to: Walter Padick. Walter, son of Sam the Miller in the Eastar’d Barony. He who had run away at thirteen, had been raped in the ass by another wanderer a year later and yet had somehow withstood the temptation to go crawling back home. Instead he had moved on toward his destiny.

Walter Padick.

At the sound of that voice, the man who had sometimes called himself Marten, Richard Fannin, Rudin Filaro, and Randall Flagg (among a great many others), gave over all hope except for the hope of dying well.

I be a-hungry, Mordred be a-hungry, spoke the relentless voice in the middle of Walter’s head, a voice that came to him along the shining wire of the little king’s will. But I’d eat proper, beginning with the appetizer. Your eyes, I think. Give them to me.

Walter struggled mightily, but without so much as a moment’s success. The wire was too strong. He saw his hands rise and hover in front of his face. He saw his fingers bend into hooks. They pushed up his eyelids like windowshades, then dug the orbs out from the top. He could hear the sounds they made as they tore loose of the tendons which turned them and the optic nerves which relayed their marvelous messages. The sound that marked the end of sight was low and wet. Bright red dashes of light filled his head, and then darkness rushed in forever. In Walter’s case, forever wouldn’t last long, but if time is subjective (and most of us know that it is), then it was far too long.

Give them to me, I say! No more dilly-dallying! I’m a-hungry!

Walter o’ Dim — now Walter o’ Dark — turned his hands over and dropped his eyeballs. They trailed filaments as they fell, making them look a little like tadpoles. The spider snatched one out of the air. The other plopped to the tile where the surprisingly limber claw at the end of one leg picked it up and tucked it into the spider’s mouth. Mordred popped it like a grape but did not swallow; rather he let the delicious slime trickle down his throat. Lovely.

Tongue next, please.

Walter wrapped an obedient hand around it and pulled, but succeeded in ripping it only partly loose. In the end it was too slippery. He would have wept with agony and frustration if the bleeding sockets where his eyes had been could have manufactured tears.

He reached for it again, but the spider was too greedy to wait.

Bend down! Poke your tongue out like you would at your honey’s cunny. Quick, for your father’s sake! Mordred’s a-hungry!

Walter, still all too aware of what was happening to him, struggled against this fresh horror with no more success than against the last. He bent over with his hands on his thighs and his bleeding tongue stuck crookedly out between his lips, wavering wearily as the hemorrhaging muscles at the back of his mouth tried to support it. Once more he heard the scrabbling sounds as Mordred’s front legs scratched at the legs of his denim pants. The spider’s hairy maw closed over Walter’s tongue, sucked it like a lollipop for one or two blissful seconds, and then tore it free with a single powerful wrench. Walter — now speechless as well as eyeless — uttered a swollen scream of pain and fell over, clutching at his distorted face, rolling back and forth on the tiles.

Mordred bit down on the tongue in his mouth. It burst into a bliss of blood that temporarily wiped away all thought. Walter had rolled onto his side and was feeling blindly for the trapdoor, something inside still screaming that he should not give up but keep trying to escape the monster that was eating him alive.

With the taste of blood in his mouth, all interest in foreplay departed Mordred. He was reduced to his central core, which was mostly appetite. He pounced upon Randall Flagg, Walter o’ Dim, Walter Padick that was. There were more screams, but only a few. And then Roland’s old enemy was no more.

The man had been quasi-immortal (a phrase at least as foolish as “most unique”) and made a legendary meal. After gorging on so much, Mordred’s first urge — strong but not quite insurmountable — was to vomit. He controlled it, as he did his second one, which was even stronger: to change back to his baby-self and sleep.