his hands above his head and scream But-wheat say, “Lud is o-tay!”
“Come on!” the kid cried in a high, piping voice. Several sprays of the green stuff had gotten caught in his hair; he brushed absently at these with his left hand as he ran. “They’re gonna do Spankers! It’s the Spankerman’s turn to go to the land of the drums! Come on or you’ll miss the whole fakement, gods cuss it!”
Susannah was equally stunned by the child’s appearance, but as he got closer, it struck her that there was something extremely odd and awkward about the way he was brushing at the crumbles and strands of greenery which had gotten caught in his beribboned hair: he kept using just that one hand. His other had been behind his back when he ran out through the weedy waterfall, and there it remained.
How awkward that must be! she thought, and then a tape-player turned on in her mind and she heard Roland speaking at the end of the bridge. I knew something like this could happen . . . if we’d seen the fellow earlier, while we were still beyond the range of his exploding egg . . . Damn the luck!
She levelled Roland’s gun at the child, who had leaped from the curb and was running straight for them. “Hold it!” she screamed. “Stand still, you!”
“Suze, what are you doing?” Eddie yelled.
Susannah ignored him. In a very real sense, Susannah Dean was no longer even here; it was Detta Walker in the chair now, and her eyes were glittering with feverish suspicion. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”
Little Lord Fauntleroy might have been deaf for all the effect her warning had. “Hoss it!” he shouted jubilantly. “Yer gointer miss the whole show! Spanker’s gointer—”
His right hand finally began to come out from behind his back. As it did, Eddie realized they weren’t looking at a kid but at a misshapen dwarf whose childhood was many years past. The expression Eddie had at first taken for childish glee was actually a chilly mixture of hate and rage. The dwarf’s cheeks and brow were covered with the oozing, discolored patches Roland called whore’s blossoms.
Susannah never saw his face. Her attention was fixed on the emerging right hand, and the dull green sphere it held. That was all she needed to see. Roland’s gun crashed. The dwarf was hammered backward. A shrill cry of pain and rage rose from his tiny mouth as he landed on the sidewalk. The grenade bounced out of his hand and rolled back into the same arch through which he had emerged.
Detta was gone like a dream, and Susannah looked from the smoking gun to the tiny, sprawled figure on the sidewalk with surprise, horror, and dismay. “Oh, my Jesus! I shot him! Eddie, I shot him!”
“Grays . . . die!”
Little Lord Fauntleroy tried to scream these words defiantly, but they came out in a bubbling choke of blood that drenched the few remaining white patches on his frilly shirt. There was a muffled explosion from inside the overgrown plaza of the corner building, and the shaggy carpets of green stuff hanging in front of the arches billowed outward like flags in a brisk gale. With them came clouds of choking, acrid smoke. Eddie flung himself on top of Susannah to shield her, and felt a gritty shower of concrete fragments—all small ones, luckily—patter down on his back, his neck, and the crown of his head. There was a series of unpleasantly wet smacking sounds to his left. He opened his eyes a crack, looked in that direction, and saw Little Lord Fauntleroy’s head just coming to a stop in the gutter. The dwarf’s eyes were still open, his mouth still fixed in its final snarl.
Now there were other voices, some shrieking, some yelling, all furious. Eddie rolled off Susannah’s chair—it tottered on one wheel before deciding to stay up—and stared in the direction from which the dwarf had come. A ragged mob of about twenty men and women had appeared, some coming from around the corner, others pushing through the mats of foliage which obscured the corner building’s arches, materializing from the smoke of the dwarf’s grenade like evil spirits. Most were wearing blue headscarves and all were carrying weapons—a varied (and somehow pitiful) assortment of them which included rusty swords, dull knives, and splintery clubs. Eddie saw one man defiantly waving a hammer. Pubes, Eddie thought. We interrupted their necktie party, and they’re pissed as hell about it.