The Eyes of the Dragon

80

The darkness inside the secret passage was utter and complete, the air still and dry. In it, coming from somewhere ahead, Dennis heard a terrible, desolate sound.

The King was weeping.

At that sound, some of Dennis’s fear left him. He felt a great wonder, and a great pity for Thomas, who always seemed so unhappy, and who had grown fat and pimply as King-often he was pallid and shaky-handed from too much wine the night before, and his breath was usually bad. Already Thomas’s legs were beginning to bow, and unless Flagg was with him, he had a tendency to walk with his head down and his hair hanging in his face.

Dennis felt his way forward, his hands held out in front of him. The sound of weeping grew closer in the dark… and then, suddenly, the dark was no longer complete. He heard a faint sliding noise and then he could see Thomas faintly. He was standing at the end of the corridor, and faint amber light was coming in from two small holes in the dark. To Dennis, those holes looked strangely like floating eyes.

Just as Dennis began to believe that he would be all right, that he would probably survive this strange night walk, Thomas shrieked. He shrieked so loudly it seemed that his vocal cords must split open. The strength ran out of Dennis’s legs and he fell to his knees, hands clapped over his mouth to stop his own screams, and now it seemed to him that this secret way was filled with ghosts, ghosts like strange flapping bats that might at any moment snare themselves in his hair; oh yes, the place seemed filled with the unquiet dead to Dennis, and perhaps it was; perhaps it was.

He almost swooned… almost… but not quite.

Somewhere below him, he heard barking dogs and realized they were above the old King’s kennels. The few of Roland’s dogs still alive had never been moved outside again. They were the only living beings-besides Dennis himself-that had heard those wild shrieks. But the dogs were real, not ghosts, and Dennis held on to that thought the way a drowning man might hold on to a floating mast.

A moment or two later, he realized that Thomas was not just shrieking-he was crying out words. At first Dennis could make out only a single phrase, howled out again and again: “Don’t drink the wine! Don’t drink the wine! Don’t drink the wine!”