by Stephen King
Roland’s goal is not this half-human creature but the Dark Tower; the man in black—and, more specifically, what the man in black knows—is his first step on his road to that mysterious place.
Who, exactly, is Roland? What was his world like before it “moved on”? What is the Tower, and why does he pursue it? We have only fragmentary answers. Roland is a gunslinger, a kind of knight, one of those charged with holding a world Roland remembers as being “filled with love and light” as it is; to keep it from moving on.
We know that Roland was forced to an early trial of manhood after discovering that his mother had become the mistress of Marten, a much greater sorcerer than Walter (who, unknown to Roland’s father, is Marten’s ally); we know Marten has planned Roland’s discovery, expecting Roland to fail and to be “sent West”; we know that Roland triumphs in his test.
What else do we know? That the gunslinger’s world is not completely unlike our own. Artifacts such as gasoline pumps and certain songs (“Hey Jude,” for instance, or the bit of doggerel that begins “Beans, beans, the musical fruit . . .”) have survived; so have customs and rituals oddly like those from our own romanticized view of the American west.
And there is an umbilicus which somehow connects our world to the world of the gunslinger. At a way-station on a long-deserted coach-road in a great and sterile desert, Roland meets a boy named Jake who died in our world. A boy who was, in fact, pushed from a street-corner by the ubiquitous (and iniquitous) man in black. The last thing Jake, who was on his way to school with his book-bag in one hand and his lunch-box in the other, remembers of his world—our world—is being crushed beneath the wheels of a Cadillac . . . and dying.
Before reaching the man in black, Jake dies again . . . this time because the gunslinger, faced with the second-most agonizing choice of his life, elects to sacrifice this symbolic son. Given a choice between the Tower and child, possibly between damnation and salvation, Roland chooses the Tower.
“Go, then,” Jake tells him before plunging into the abyss. “There are other worlds than these.”
The final confrontation between Roland and Walter occurs in a dusty golgotha of decaying bones. The dark man tells Roland’s future with a deck of Tarot cards. These cards, showing a man called The Prisoner, a woman called The Lady of Shadows, and a darker shape that is simply Death (“but not for you, gunslinger,” the man in black tells him), are prophecies which become the subject of this volume . . . and Roland’s second step on the long and difficult path to the Dark Tower.
The Gunslinger ends with Roland sitting upon the beach of the Western Sea, watching the sunset. The man in black is dead, the gunslinger’s own future course unclear; The Drawing of the Three begins on that same beach, less than seven hours later.
PROLOGUE
THE SAILOR
PROLOGUE
The gunslinger came awake from a confused dream which seemed to consist of a single image: that of the Sailor in the Tarot deck from which the man in black had dealt (or purported to deal) the gunslinger’s own moaning future.
He drowns, gunslinger, the man in black was saying, and no one throws out the line. The boy Jake.
But this was no nightmare. It was a good dream. It was good because he was the one drowning, and that meant he was not Roland at all but Jake, and he found this a relief because it would be far better to drown as Jake than to live as himself, a man who had, for a cold dream, betrayed a child who had trusted him.
Good, all right, I’ll drown, he thought, listening to the roar of the sea. Let me drown. But this was not the sound of the open deeps; it was the grating sound of water with a throatful of stones. Was he the Sailor? If so, why was land so close? And, in fact, was he not on the land? It felt as if—
Freezing cold water doused his boots and ran up his legs to his crotch. His eyes flew open then, and what snapped him out of the dream wasn’t his freezing balls, which had suddenly shrunk to what felt like the size of walnuts, nor even the horror to his right, but the thought of his guns . . . his guns, and even more important, his shells. Wet guns could be quickly disassembled, wiped dry, oiled, wiped dry again, oiled again, and re-assembled; wet shells, like wet matches, might or might not ever be usable again.
The horror was a crawling thing which must have been cast up by a previous wave. It dragged a wet, gleaming body laboriously along the sand. It was about four feet long and about four yards to the right. It regarded Roland with bleak eyes on stalks. Its long serrated beak dropped open and it began to make a noise that was weirdly like human speech: plaintive, even desperate questions in an alien tongue.
“Did-a-chick? Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham? Ded-a-check?”
The gunslinger had seen lobsters. This wasn’t one, although lobsters were the only things he had ever seen which this creature even vaguely resembled. It didn’t seem afraid of him at all. The gunslinger didn’t know if it was dangerous or not. He didn’t care about his own mental confusion—his temporary inability to remember where he was or how he had gotten there, if he had actually caught the man in black or if all that had only been a dream. He only knew he had to get away from the water before it could drown his shells.
He heard the grinding, swelling roar of water and looked from the creature (it had stopped and was holding up the claws with which it had been pulling itself along, looking absurdly like a boxer assuming his opening stance, which, Cort had taught them, was called The Honor Stance) to the incoming breaker with its curdle of foam.
It hears the wave, the gunslinger thought. Whatever it is, it’s got ears. He tried to get up, but his legs, too numb to feel, buckled under him.
I’m still dreaming, he thought, but even in his current confused state this was a belief much too tempting to really be believed. He tried to get up again, almost made it, then fell back. The wave was breaking. There was no time again. He had to settle for moving in much the same way the creature on his right seemed to move: he dug in with both hands and dragged his butt up the stony shingle, away from the wave.
He didn’t progress enough to avoid the wave entirely, but he got far enough for his purposes. The wave buried nothing but his boots. It reached almost to his knees and then retreated. Perhaps the first one didn’t go as far as I thought. Perhaps—
There was a half-moon in the sky. A caul of mist covered it, but it shed enough light for him to see that the holsters were too dark. The guns, at least, had suffered a wetting. It was impossible to tell how bad it had been, or if either the shells currently in the cylinders or those in the crossed gunbelts had also been wetted. Before checking, he had to get away from the water. Had to—
“Dod-a-chock?” This was much closer. In his worry over the water he had forgotten the creature the water had cast up. He looked around and saw it was now only four feet away. Its claws were buried in the stone- and shell-littered sand of the shingle, pulling its body along. It lifted its meaty, serrated body, making it momentarily resemble a scorpion, but Roland could see no stinger at the end of its body.
Another grinding roar, this one much louder. The creature immediately stopped and raised its claws into its own peculiar version of the Honor Stance again.
This wave was bigger. Roland began to drag himself up the slope of the strand again, and when he put out his hands, the clawed creature moved with a speed of which its previous movements had not even hinted.
The gunslinger felt a bright flare of pain in his right hand, but there was no time to think about that now. He pushed with the heels of his soggy boots, clawed with his hands, and managed to get away from the wave.
“Did-a-chick?” the monstrosity enquired in its plaintive Won’t you help me? Can’t you see I am desperate? voice, and Roland saw the stumps of the first and second fingers of his right hand disappearing into the creature’s jagged beak. It lunged again and Roland lifted his dripping right hand just in time to save his remaining two fingers.
“Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham?”
The gunslinger staggered to his feet. The thi
ng tore open his dripping jeans, tore through a boot whose old leather was soft but as tough as iron, and took a chunk of meat from Roland’s lower calf.
He drew with his right hand, and realized two of the fingers needed to perform this ancient killing operation were gone only when the revolver thumped to the sand.
The monstrosity snapped at it greedily.
“No, bastard!” Roland snarled, and kicked it. It was like kicking a block of rock . . . one that bit. It tore away the end of Roland’s right boot, tore away most of his great toe, tore the boot itself from his foot.
The gunslinger bent, picked up his revolver, dropped it, cursed, and finally managed. What had once been a thing so easy it didn’t even bear thinking about had suddenly become a trick akin to juggling.
The creature was crouched on the gunslinger’s boot, tearing at it as it asked its garbled questions. A wave rolled toward the beach, the foam which curdled its top looking pallid and dead in the netted light of the half-moon. The lobstrosity stopped working on the boot and raised its claws in that boxer’s pose.
Roland drew with his left hand and pulled the trigger three times.
Click, click, click.
Now he knew about the shells in the chambers, at least.
He holstered the left gun. To holster the right he had to turn its barrel downward with his left hand and then let it drop into its place. Blood slimed the worn ironwood handgrips; blood spotted the holster and the old jeans to which the holster was thong-tied. It poured from the stumps where his fingers used to be.
His mangled right foot was still too numb to hurt, but his right hand was a bellowing fire. The ghosts of talented and long-trained fingers which were already decomposing in the digestive juices of that thing’s guts screamed that they were still there, that they were burning.
I see serious problems ahead, the gunslinger thought remotely.
The wave retreated. The monstrosity lowered its claws, tore a fresh hole in the gunslinger’s boot, and then decided the wearer had been a good deal more tasty than this bit of skin it had somehow sloughed off.
“Dud-a-chum?” it asked, and scurried toward him with ghastly speed. The gunslinger retreated on legs he could barely feel, realizing that the creature must have some intelligence; it had approached him cautiously, perhaps from a long way down the strand, not sure what he was or of what he might be capable. If the dousing wave hadn’t wakened him, the thing would have torn off his face while he was still deep in his dream. Now it had decided he was not only tasty but vulnerable; easy prey.
It was almost upon him, a thing four feet long and a foot high, a creature which might weigh as much as seventy pounds and which was as single-mindedly carnivorous as David, the hawk he had had as a boy—but without David’s dim vestige of loyalty.
The gunslinger’s left bootheel struck a rock jutting from the sand and he tottered on the edge of falling.
“Dod-a-chock?” the thing asked, solicitously it seemed, and peered at the gunslinger from its stalky, waving eyes as its claws reached . . . and then a wave came, and the claws went up again in the Honor Stance. Yet now they wavered the slightest bit, and the gunslinger realized that it responded to the sound of the wave, and now the sound was—for it, at least—fading a bit.
He stepped backward over the rock, then bent down as the wave broke upon the shingle with its grinding roar. His head was inches from the insectile face of the creature. One of its claws might easily have slashed the eyes from his face, but its trembling claws, so like clenched fists, remained raised to either side of its parrotlike beak.
The gunslinger reached for the stone over which he had nearly fallen. It was large, half-buried in the sand, and his mutilated right hand howled as bits of dirt and sharp edges of pebble ground into the open bleeding flesh, but he yanked the rock free and raised it, his lips pulled away from his teeth.
“Dad-a—” the monstrosity began, its claws lowering and opening as the wave broke and its sound receded, and the gunslinger swept the rock down upon it with all his strength.
There was a crunching noise as the creature’s segmented back broke. It lashed wildly beneath the rock, its rear half lifting and thudding, lifting and thudding. Its interrogatives became buzzing exclamations of pain. Its claws opened and shut upon nothing. Its maw of a beak gnashed up clots of sand and pebbles.
And yet, as another wave broke, it tried to raise its claws again, and when it did the gunslinger stepped on its head with his remaining boot. There was a sound like many small dry twigs being broken. Thick fluid burst from beneath the heel of Roland’s boot, splashing in two directions. It looked black. The thing arched and wriggled in a frenzy. The gunslinger planted his boot harder.
A wave came.
The monstrosity’s claws rose an inch . . . two inches . . . trembled and then fell, twitching open and shut.
The gunslinger removed his boot. The thing’s serrated beak, which had separated two fingers and one toe from his living body, slowly opened and closed. One antenna lay broken on the sand. The other trembled meaninglessly.
The gunslinger stamped down again. And again.
He kicked the rock aside with a grunt of effort and marched along the right side of the monstrosity’s body, stamping methodically with his left boot, smashing its shell, squeezing its pale guts out onto dark gray sand. It was dead, but he meant to have his way with it all the same; he had never, in all his long strange time, been so fundamentally hurt, and it had all been so unexpected.
He kept on until he saw the tip of one of his own fingers in the dead thing’s sour mash, saw the white dust beneath the nail from the golgotha where he and the man in black had held their long palaver, and then he looked aside and vomited.
The gunslinger walked back toward the water like a drunken man, holding his wounded hand against his shirt, looking back from time to time to make sure the thing wasn’t still alive, like some tenacious wasp you swat again and again and still twitches, stunned but not dead; to make sure it wasn’t following, asking its alien questions in its deadly despairing voice.
Halfway down the shingle he stood swaying, looking at the place where he had been, remembering. He had fallen asleep, apparently, just below the high tide line. He grabbed his purse and his torn boot.
In the moon’s glabrous light he saw other creatures of the same type, and in the caesura between one wave and the next, heard their questioning voices.
The gunslinger retreated a step at a time, retreated until he reached the grassy edge of the shingle. There he sat down, and did all he knew to do: he sprinkled the stumps of fingers and toe with the last of his tobacco to stop the bleeding, sprinkled it thick in spite of the new stinging (his missing great toe had joined the chorus), and then he only sat, sweating in the chill, wondering about infection, wondering how he would make his way in this world with two fingers on his right hand gone (when it came to the guns both hands had been equal, but in all other things his right had ruled), wondering if the thing had some poison in its bite which might already be working its way into him, wondering if morning would ever come.
THE
PRISONER
CHAPTER 1
The Door
1
Three. This is the number of your fate.
Three?
Yes, three is mystic. Three stands at the heart of the mantra.
Which three?
The first is dark-haired. He stands on the brink of robbery and murder. A demon has infested him. The name of the demon is HEROIN.
Which demon is that? I know it not, even from nursery stories.
He tried to speak but his voice was gone, the voice of the oracle, Star-Slut, Whore of the Winds, both were gone; he saw a card fluttering down from nowhere to nowhere, turning and turning in the lazy dark. On it a baboon grinned from over the shoulder of a young man with dark hair; its disturbingly human fingers were buried so deeply in the young man’s neck that their tips had disappeared in flesh. Looking more closely, the gunslinger saw the
baboon held a whip in one of those clutching, strangling hands. The face of the ridden man seemed to writhe in wordless terror.
The Prisoner, the man in black (who had once been a man the gunslinger trusted, a man named Walter) whispered chummily. A trifle upsetting, isn’t he? A trifle upsetting . . . a trifle upsetting . . . a trifle—
2
The gunslinger snapped awake, waving at something with his mutilated hand, sure that in a moment one of the monstrous shelled things from the Western Sea would drop on him, desperately enquiring in its foreign tongue as it pulled his face off his skull.
Instead a sea-bird, attracted by the glister of the morning sun on the buttons of his shirt, wheeled away with a frightened squawk.
Roland sat up.
His hand throbbed wretchedly, endlessly. His right foot did the same. Both fingers and toe continued to insist they were there. The bottom half of his shirt was gone; what was left resembled a ragged vest. He had used one piece to bind his hand, the other to bind his foot.
Go away, he told the absent parts of his body. You are ghosts now. Go away.
It helped a little. Not much, but a little. They were ghosts, all right, but lively ghosts.
The gunslinger ate jerky. His mouth wanted it little, his stomach less, but he insisted. When it was inside him, he felt a little stronger. There was not much left, though; he was nearly up against it.
Yet things needed to be done.
He rose unsteadily to his feet and looked about. Birds swooped and dived, but the world seemed to belong to only him and them. The monstrosities were gone. Perhaps they were nocturnal; perhaps tidal. At the moment it seemed to make no difference.