by Bev Vincent
THROG (5)
Three ways.
TIME HAS MOVED ON (THROUGHOUT)
A way of expressing the changes to Mid-World since the Dark Tower has begun its decline. The Mejis version of this proverb is “Time is a face on the water.”
TODANA (6)
Deathbag. The hazy black aura or shadow around a person that indicates someone has been marked for death. A variant of the word todash.
TODASH (5, 6, 7, M)
Passing between two worlds without using a doorway. The start and end of these trips are heralded by kammen, the todash chimes, which start out sounding beautiful but grow physically and mentally painful. To an observer, the person going todash vanishes, but leaves behind a dull gray glow that approximates their body shape and position as a placeholder. In the other world, the person is free to wander at will, unobserved for the most part, although people generally avoid the todash traveler. The traveler has the ability to pass through solid items in the other world and sometimes sees the vagrant dead. However, the traveler’s essence is in the second world. They can return bearing injuries suffered on the other side. Waking a person in a todash state is risky, as is the process of passing from one world to the other, because a person might fall into the space between. Pieces of the Wizard’s Rainbow are said to make going todash easier. The Manni, who believe todash is the holiest of rites and most exalted of states, fast and meditate to induce the todash state and use magnets and plumb bobs to determine the best locations.
TODASH DARKNESS (5, 6, 7)
The endless spaces between worlds, where it is always dark. Monsters live in these places like rats in walls. A defective doorway beneath Castle Discordia opens on one. The Crimson King, who hopes to be the lord of the todash darkness, sends his bitterest enemies there.
TODASH TAHKEN (5)
Holes in reality that allow passage from one world to another.
TOOTER-FISH (2, 7)
The way Roland pronounces the words “tuna fish.”
TOUCH, THE (1, 4, 5, 6, 7)
A kind of psychic ability that some gunslingers, artists and lunatics possess. Alain Johns is strong in the touch, as is Jake. Most members of a ka-tet have a little of this, although Cuthbert has absolutely none.
TRIG (1, 3, 4.5, 5, 7)
Clever or savvy, cunning or sly.
TRUM (5)
The ability to convince others to do things that might seem dangerous or foolhardy.
TWIM (6, 7)
The number two or twins.
URS-A-KA GAN (7)
The Scream of the Bear. A more emphatic version of Urs-Ka Gan, which is the Song of the Bear. Another component of the song Stephen King hears when he writes about the Dark Tower.
VES’-KA GAN (7)
The Song of the Turtle. The voice that Stephen King hears when the Dark Tower story comes to him. Sometimes he calls it Susannah’s Song.
VURT (4.5)
Flying creatures from the Endless Forest, sometimes known as bullet-birds. One killed Bern Kells’s father by boring a hole right through him.
WASEAU (7)
Bird.
WATER-STOOL (4)
A flush toilet.
WENBERRY (3)
A fruit similar to a strawberry.
WERVEL (4.5)
A poisonous rodent the size of a dog that dwells in the Endless Forest.
WHEEL (1, 3, 4, 4.5, 5, 6, 7)
A unit of distance that is approximately 1.1 miles. The subunit is arcs o’ the wheel. One yard is roughly two arcs.
WHORE’S BLOSSOMS (3)
A disease like syphilis. Also known as mandrus.
wORLD HAS MOVED ON, THE (1, 2, 3, 4, 4.5, 5, 6)
A vague description for the way Mid-World has changed since the fall of Gilead and the decline of the Dark Tower. It indicates that time, distance and direction are no longer stable, but also implies that the halcyon days of Gilead are no more.
WOT (4, 4.5, 5)
Reckon or believe.
YAR (1, 3, 4, 4.5, 6, 7)
Yes.
YOUNKERS (3)
Young people.
ZN (5)
One of the Great Letters. It means both eternity (zi), now and come, as in come-commala. It appears on the Orizas.
SOME STORIES LAST FOREVER
At the beginning of the Coda at the end of The Dark Tower, King directly addresses his readers. He chastises some for being grim and goal-oriented—that goal being the conclusion of the series. “I hope you came to hear the tale, and not just munch your way through the pages to the ending,” he writes.
Perhaps it didn’t start out that way, but the Dark Tower series became a commentary on storytelling. Or maybe it did start out that way. King’s ambition in 1970 was to write the longest popular novel in history, and he also wanted to blend the disparate genres of the Western, the epic fantasy and horror. The form of the story would comment on storytelling.
For someone who claims he doesn’t talk of himself, as he does when he catches up to Walter at the end of The Gunslinger, Roland spends a lot of time talking about himself. When he reaches Brown’s cabin, he tells this total stranger the story of his recent adventures in Tull, where he wiped out the town’s entire population. Storytelling is a form of confession, though he doesn’t seek absolution. He is simply compelled to relate these events.
Once he has a traveling companion—Jake Chambers—he looks back even farther, to his days in Gilead as a boy. As they cross the desert and traverse the mountains, Roland tells of how he and Cuthbert discovered a traitor in Gilead and what happened after they relayed this information to Roland’s father. Watching Hax hang was an important moment in his life.
At Jake’s insistence, he also tells about his coming of age, a tale that requires him to remember how his mother betrayed his father and Gilead by having an affair with Marten Broadcloak, Steven Deschain’s adviser and the court magician. He explains how he allowed Marten to goad him into taking his challenge to become a gunslinger sooner than anyone had ever done before, and how his inspired choice of a weapon—his hawk, David—allowed him to prevail when, by all rights, he should have been beaten, perhaps maimed, and exiled from his homeland.
When Roland plucks Eddie Dean from the clutches of mobsters and drags him into Mid-World, the young junkie also has a story to tell—the story of life with his older brother, Henry. Roland lets him ramble—the story passes the time as they make their way up the beach—but he also thinks Eddie needs to hear his own story now that he’s off drugs for the first time in a long time. In return, while suffering from infection, Roland tells Eddie about his trek across the desert. Later, he tells Eddie and Susannah both versions of that story: the one where Jake shows up at the Way Station and the one where he doesn’t.
Two books in the series consist primarily of Roland telling stories about his past. In Wizard and Glass, he picks up the tale the day after his coming of age and continues through the following months after he is sent to Mejis for his own safety, where he meets the love of his life. In The Wind Through the Keyhole, while the ka-tet rides out a killing storm, Roland relates an adventure that took place less than six months after his return from Mejis. “There’s nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world,” he says. In that story, his younger self tells yet another story, this one a fairy tale that his mother used to read to him. The story is meant to occupy the mind of a scared and bored boy who has just lost his father and to teach him about courage. Stories pass the time and take a person away from his troubles. The stories we hear as children are the ones we remember all our lives, King writes, and Roland tells Young Bill that a person is never too old for stories—we live for them.
Roland tells the legends of his world, too—the story of Old Mother and Old Star, for example. His homeland is almost mythic to everyone else he meets in Mid-World. Gilead and Arthur Eld exist so far in the past that many people doubt they ever existed. Overholser of Calla Bryn Sturgis calls Roland’s claim to be
from Gilead “a children’s good-night story.” It would be the same thing for us if someone claimed to be from Atlantis.
Paper in Mid-World is scarce and valuable, so there aren’t many books, which means there’s no written record. People have to rely on their memories. Even Roland isn’t sure which parts of what he’s been told about Mid-World are real and which are made up, and he’s forgotten a lot of what he knew at one time. He is frequently astonished to come face-to-face with something he had written off as legend, such as Shardik, the Guardian of the Beam who was part of a story he heard as a child.
He tells his ka-tet other stories of his wandering years, including his misadventures in Eluria. When he isn’t telling stories, he’s asking them to tell him stories. He’s a glutton for stories, especially those that lead off with “Once upon a time when everyone lived in the forest” or “Once upon a bye, before your grandfather’s grandfather was born,” though he usually listens to them like an anthropologist trying to figure out some strange culture by their myths and legends. He asks Eddie and Susannah to tell him The Wizard of Oz and “Hansel and Gretel,” both of which bear on their quest, but it’s clear that the gunslinger simply likes a good story.
Margaret Eisenhart tells the story of Gray Dick. Father Callahan recounts the story of his life after ’Salem’s Lot, and Ted Brautigan records his own life story on a tape recorder for the ka-tet to hear while they’re preparing to attack Algul Siento. Again, these stories have some relevance to the matters at hand, but they are also self-contained adventures.
Along the way, Eddie starts noticing how fictions from their reality intrude on their adventures. Everything that happens reminds him of a book or a film. The Red Death of Fedic and Poe’s story. Alice in Wonderland. The Green Palace outside Topeka and The Wizard of Oz. The plight of the people in Calla Bryn Sturgis and the plot of The Magnificent Seven, directed by John Sturges. The Wolves wear masks that resemble comic book characters and their weapons are straight out of Star Wars and Harry Potter.
Matters take a strange turn when Father Callahan is handed a copy of a novel in which he is a character. Naturally, this causes some confusion in the former priest. He knows he’s real, but the book contains details of his life that only he knows, and everything written about him is as real as his memories. Disoriented, he starts thinking of other people as being in a story with him.
Then Roland and Eddie discover that Stephen King lives near the place where Calvin Tower (a collector of rare books, such as the valuable edition of ’Salem’s Lot that Father Callahan perused) and his friend Aaron Deepneau are hiding. When they visit the author in 1977, they learn that they, too, are Stephen King’s creations, even though he hasn’t yet consciously thought up Eddie or the others. Realizing that he’s a character in someone else’s fiction, and that this author’s mistakes affect his reality, is nearly enough to drive Eddie crazy. People don’t really die—they leave the story.
Stephen King complains about being Roland’s personal secretary. He believes he isn’t making conscious decisions about Roland’s story but is transcribing what comes to him. Writing is a kind of todash journey in which his consciousness enters and interacts with another world. He didn’t make Roland leave Jake to die under the mountains. That was all Roland’s doing, he tells Roland and Eddie. He’s not sure he even likes his supposed hero anymore.
Roland isn’t terribly fond of his creator, either, thinking that he’s lazy, seeking easier tales to work on instead of doing the hard but important work of telling his story. His general assessment of people who make up stories is harsh. He thinks they tell tales because they’re afraid of life. Of course, this is coming from a man who has been told all his life that he has no imagination. Even so, while Roland is chiding King to pick up the story again, King is telling Roland to finish his job. The creation of his story works both ways.
It is in Roland’s best interests to make sure King remains safe. Roland’s enemy, the Crimson King, knows that Stephen King is breathing life into Roland’s adventures and attempts to prevent him from writing. If King dies, Roland will never reach the Dark Tower. (What exactly would happen to him is open to debate. The ka-tet believes Gan’s Beam would break, leading to the fall of the Dark Tower. However, since the “real” Stephen King said that his son Joe would have finished the series if he couldn’t, then maybe Roland would have simply cast about with his ka-tet like they did at the beginning of Wolves of the Calla, waiting for time to slip back into gear when a new King hears the Song of the Turtle.)
Eddie believes the way for Stephen King to become immortal is to write the right story, because some stories live forever. The problem with the Dark Tower stories is that when King works on them, pushing against creation, he feels something pushing back.
The Calvins who study King’s work believe that little of what he’s written after penning the famous line “The man in black crossed the desert and the gunslinger followed” is simply a story. They’re all messages in a bottle cast into the Prim to convey information to Roland. Even King (the fictional version) thinks that his other stories have all been practice runs for writing the Dark Tower story. Writing this story is the one that always feels like coming home.
There are many tales that Roland didn’t get the chance to tell his ka-tet. He always said those were stories for another day. The next time the Voice of the Turtle speaks, perhaps we will be graced with another story of Roland’s adventures.
ROLAND DESCHAIN’S ENEMIES
Some readers have reacted strongly to the fates of the three characters who appeared to be Roland’s nemeses. In order of appearance, these are: Walter o’Dim—also known as the man in black, Randall Flagg and Marten Broadcloak—the Crimson King, and Mordred Deschain. Roland had other adversaries—Rhea of the Cöos, Sylvia Pittston, Gasher, the Big Coffin Hunters, to name a few—but their tenures were of relatively short duration.
The strongest howls of dismay came at the way destiny played out for the first of these. Randall Flagg has a long history in King’s fiction. He was the villain in The Stand, the Dark Man who assembled the forces of evil and corruption against the followers of Mother Abigail. In The Eyes of the Dragon, he appeared as the court magician and counselor to kings, a man who for centuries sought to corrupt and disrupt the kingdoms around Delain. He even made a brief, off-screen cameo in “Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling,” the final section of Hearts in Atlantis, recognizable by his initials and his pernicious influence, a man who knew how to become dim.
And, of course, he is the man in black, present in the Dark Tower series from the very first sentence, introduced to readers even before Roland is. Although he is the object of Roland’s pursuit, for most of the book the gunslinger knows him only from the remains of his campfires and the traps that he sets for Roland. He is glimpsed on occasion, a black dot on the horizon luring Roland on until, finally, they confront each other beneath the mountains. Once through the mountains, they hold palaver.
Though their conversation lasts a preternaturally long time, Walter tells Roland little that is important to his quest. The Oracle had already told him about the three people he will draw. Beyond the lesson in metaphysics, the sum total of Walter’s useful information is this: go west.
As Marten, this man of many faces, who lies even when the truth might serve him, held sway over the court of Gilead when Roland was a boy. He insinuated himself into the circle of gunslingers who governed the Baronies, acting as court magician and counsel. His power was strong enough to destroy Roland’s mother, first seducing her, then enticing her to conspire against her husband. After he attempted to get Roland exiled by angering him into taking his test of manhood at an early age, he fled west to collude with John Farson in the civil war against the Affiliation. He was present at Jericho Hill and fired the arrow that killed Cuthbert.
Although Flagg wrought havoc in many times and places, his missions almost always failed. On Earth, the emissaries from Boulder defeated him with the misguided help of Trashca
n Man, one of his own minions. Simple-minded Tom Cullen eluded him, Dayna Jurgens outwitted him and Nadine Cross provoked him into killing his unborn child. In Delain, a group of children foiled his plans to run the kingdom into the ground. Maerlyn says that little magic and long life is all he’s capable of. Mordred Deschain thinks of him as a man of many faces and neat tricks, but never half as clever as he thought. He gets points for longevity but not greatness or power. Arrogance, vanity, hubris and carelessness lead him to underestimate Roland time and again, and to underestimate Mordred, too.
Readers eagerly anticipated a big showdown between Roland and Flagg. Since he was there at the beginning, they wanted Roland to meet Flagg at the Tower for one final battle. The best man would win (Roland, of course) and ascend to the top to claim whatever power or knowledge the Tower held.
Was Flagg worthy of being Roland’s ultimate adversary? Through the moderator on his message board, King said, “Flagg/Walter was not the same person that he was when he and Roland palavered (and neither was Roland).” Quasi-immortal though he may have been, he had grown old and his arrogance had weakened him. But for the slip of a nonexistent finger, Roland would have gunned Flagg down on the throne in the Green Palace, where he sat taunting the gunslinger, a clear indication of how vain and careless he’d become. How would readers have reacted if Roland had succeeded in killing him then? Flagg muses later that many would have considered that a happy ending. Would they? Would that death have been any more satisfying than what eventually transpired?
Flagg lost sight of his goal. Even when his eyes were set on the Tower, the Crimson King probably controlled him without his realizing it, in much the same way that he controlled others. Mordred speculates that Flagg likely believed that he came to the Fedic control room of his own free will, leaving readers to infer that he was manipulated into going there.
Flagg believed that Roland completed him, made him greater than his own destiny as a mercenary who wanted to explore the Tower before it fell. However, who besides Flagg believes in this elevated status? When he sees Roland defeating him at every turn, or taking away the things he covets (like Roland’s mother), he snaps. He lowers his eyes from the Tower and sets them firmly on his age-old enemy. He loses any sanity he might have once had. Roland becomes his obsession, his Dark Tower. He no longer dreams of overthrowing the Crimson King and ruling Discordia in his place. He no longer cares. He is overcome by jealousy and frustration, and this causes his premature downfall.