The Eyes of the Dragon

91

Dennis also found an old pair of snowshoes in the basement. The straps were far too large, but he had plenty of time to shorten them. The facings had begun to rot, and there was nothing Dennis could do about that, but he thought they would serve the purpose. He wouldn’t need them for long.

He slept in the cellar, fearing surprise, but during the daylight hours of those four long days, Dennis spent most of his time in the parlor of the deserted farmstead, watching the traffic pass to and fro-what little there was began around three o’ the clock and had mostly ceased by five, when early-winter shadows began to cover the land. The parlor was a sad, empty place. Once it had been a cheery spot in which the family had gathered to discuss the day just done. Now it belonged only to the mice… and to Dennis, of course.

Peyna, after hearing Dennis declare that he could read and write “pretty well for a fellow in service” and seeing him draw his Great Letters (this had been over breakfast on Tuesday-the last real meal Dennis had had since his own lunch on Monday, a meal he looked back on with understandable nostalgia), had provided him with several sheets of paper and a lead pencil. And during most of the hours he spent in the deserted house, Dennis labored earnestly over a note. He wrote, scratched out, rewrote, frowned horribly as he reread, scratched his head, resharpened his pencil with his knife, and wrote again. He was ashamed of his spelling, and terrified he would forget some crucial thing Peyna had told him to put in. There were several times, times when his poor frazzled brain could make no more progress, when he wished Peyna had stayed up an hour longer on the night Dennis had come and written his own damned note, or called it aloud to Arlen. Most times, however, he was glad of the job. He had worked hard his whole life, and idleness made him nervous and uneasy. He would rather have worked his sturdy young man’s body than his not-so-sturdy young man’s brains, but work was work, and he was glad to have it.

By Saturday noon, he had a letter he was pretty well satisfied with (which was good, since he had worked his way down to the final two sheets of notepaper). He looked at it with some admiration. It covered both sides of the paper, and was by far the longest thing he had ever written. He folded it to the size of a medicine tablet, and then peeked out the sitting-room window, waiting impatiently for it to be dark enough to leave. Peter saw the gathering clouds from his own poor sitting room atop the Needle, Dennis from the sitting room of this deserted house; but both had been taught by their fathers-one a King and the other a butler to that King-to read the sky, and Dennis also thought there would be snow tomorrow.

By four, the long, blue shadow of the house had begun to creep out from the foundations, and Dennis no longer felt so eager to go. It was danger ahead… deadly danger. He was to go where Flagg was perhaps even now brooding long over his infernal magics, perhaps even now checking upon a certain sick butler. But how he felt did not really matter, and he knew it, the time had come to do his duty, and as every butler in his family line had done for centuries and centuries, Dennis would do his best.

He left the house in the bleak sunset hour, donned the snowshoes, and struck off across the field on a direct line toward the castle keep. The idea of wolves occurred to his uneasy mind, and he could only hope there would be none, and if there were, that they would leave him alone. He hadn’t the slightest idea that Peter had decided to make his dangerous escape attempt the following night, but like Peyna-and Peter himself-he felt a need to hurry; it seemed to him that there were mackerel-scale clouds laid across his heart as well as the sky.

As he trudged through the snow-desolate fields, Dennis’s thoughts turned to how he might enter the castle without being seen and challenged. He thought he knew how it could be done… if, that was, Flagg did not smell him.

He had no more than thought the magician’s name when a wolf howled somewhere out in the still white wastes. In a dark room below the castle, Flagg’s own sitting room, the magician sat bolt upright suddenly in his chair, where he had fallen asleep with a book of arcane lore open on his stomach.

“Who speaks the name of Flagg?” the magician whispered, and the two-headed parrot shrieked.

Standing in the center of along and desolate field of white, Dennis heard that voice, as dry and scabrous as a spider’s scuttle, in his own head. He paused, his breath in-drawn and held. When he finally let it go, it plumed frosty from his mouth. He was cold all over, but hot drops of sweat stood out on his forehead.

From his feet he heard dry snapping noises-Pouck! Pouck! Pouck!-as several of the snowshoes’ rotted cross-facings let go.

The wolf howled in the silence. It was a hungry, heartless sound.

“No one,” Flagg muttered in the sitting room of his dark apartments. He was rarely sick-could remember being sick only three or four times in all of his long life-but he had caught a bad cold in the north, sleeping on the frozen ground, and although he was improving, he was still not well.

“No one. A dream. That’s all.”

He took the book from his lap, closed it, and set it on a side table-the surface of this table had been handsomely dressed in human skin-and settled back in his chair. Soon he slept again.

In the snowy fields west of the castle, Dennis slowly relaxed. A single drop of stinging sweat ran into his eye and he wiped it away absently. He had thought of Flagg… and somehow Flagg had heard him. But now the dark shadow of the magician’s thought had passed over him, as the shadow of a hawk may pass over a crouching rabbit. Dennis let out a long, shaky sigh. His legs felt weak. He would try-oh, with all his heart he would try-to think of the magician no more. But as the night came on and the moon with its ghostly fairy-ring rose in the sky, that was a thing easier resolved upon than done.