The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King Page B

would know where it was, and then bade him look.
    â€œNotice 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.
    â€œEmpty?” Flagg whispered.
    â€œYes,” 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.
    â€œEnough 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.”
    â€œI 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
    T homas 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 contempt, 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 nothing 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