The Eyes of the Dragon(24)

"Notice that you can see the passageway 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 glass sides that angled slightly into the passageway. It was much too fancy for such a small passageway, but Thomas understood without having to be told that it had been put here by whoever had made the secret passageway. 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 passageway 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.

27

Thomas heeded Flagg's advice not to go often, but he did use the passageway from time to time, and peeked at his father through the glass 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 passage 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 petition to hear.

But Roland's time of power was passing. 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 noth-ing 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 glass of wine at night-the glass 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 pissed 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 pissed 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.