by Vincent, Bev
If Roland hadn’t already redeemed himself by preventing Jack Mort from killing Jake, he does so now, validating Jake’s faith by rescuing him.
Blaine contacts Roland over the citywide PA system, demanding a riddle, having learned from Eddie and Susannah that he knows many good ones. Roland asks one and uses the promise of more as a bargaining tool to get the train to cooperate. Blaine sends a sphere to lead Roland and Jake to the Cradle, where the ka-tet is reunited. Before they can board the train, however, they have to solve a puzzle. Susannah, hypnotized by Roland, draws on Detta’s memories to figure out the riddle of the prime numbers.
Blaine activates the city’s warning sirens. Panicked, many of Lud’s residents commit suicide. As they leave, Blaine detonates a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons. He clearly has no intention of returning. Blaine rationalizes his actions by saying that he’s serving the residents by fulfilling their belief that he is a god who dispenses both favor and punishment on a whim.
The trip southeast to Topeka along the Path of the Beam will cover more than seven thousand miles in eight hours. The distance was once much less, Blaine tells them, “[b]efore all temporal synapses began to melt down.” The chasm outside Lud is reminiscent of the abyss beyond the walls of Castle Discordia, where terrible creatures battle each other and fight to escape.
The ubiquitous Randall Flagg enters the Dark Tower mythos, materializing in the underground passages, where he forces the injured Tick-Tock Man to repeat words once said by another of Flagg’s minions, Trashcan Man26 from The Stand: “My life for you.” Tick-Tock, the ruthless leader of the Grays and descendant of a great warrior, becomes completely subjugated to Flagg—who calls himself Richard Fannin—within moments of his appearance. When Flagg rips a giant flap of loose flesh from his head, the man regards him with “dumb gratitude.”
Perhaps King’s 1990 work on updating and revising The Stand—a book written during the period when the original stories that comprise The Gunslinger were composed—had him thinking about this villain and his part in the larger Dark Tower universe. Flagg is anti-ka, an agent of Discordia. His purpose is to ensure Roland and his ka-tet fail. “They’re meddling with things they have no business meddling with. . . . They must not draw closer to the Tower than they are now.”
Readers speculated for the next decade about who Flagg really was. With the reissue of The Gunslinger in 2003 and the appearance of the final three books, King confirmed that Flagg had been in the series from the very first page as Walter, the man in black.
While none of the volumes in the series have definitive conclusions, most wrap up at least some of the particular book’s business. Roland catches the man in black in The Gunslinger and assembles his ka-tet in The Drawing of the Three. The Waste Lands doesn’t have a goal, per se, other than to get the group to Lud, onto the train and across the blasted lands between there and Topeka. That goal accomplished, the book ends with a cliff-hanger. Reviewer Edward Bryant of Locus magazine said, “While clearly a symphony of traveling music, this novel is rather like an enormous chapter in some sort of cosmic radio serial.”27 A serial with five- to six-year gaps between installments
After accelerating to breakneck speeds, Blaine tells the group he will only deliver them safely to Topeka if they can stump him with a riddle. Otherwise, he will crash and kill them all. Blaine is aware of his own degeneration and also professes boredom. “I CAN ONLY CONCLUDE THAT THIS IS A SPIRITUAL MALAISE BEYOND MY ABILITY TO REPAIR,” the suicidal train tells them. Like everything else manmade in Mid-World, Blaine is coming apart at the seams. Still, he knows the answer to every riddle Roland can remember. If the group’s riddle expert can’t stump the insane train, what hope do they have for survival?
In the author’s note, King writes:
I am well aware that some readers of The Waste Lands will be displeased that it has ended as it has, with so much unresolved. I am not terribly pleased to be leaving Roland and his companions in the not-so-tender care of Blaine the Mono myself, and although you are not obligated to believe me, I must nevertheless insist that I was as surprised by the conclusion to this third volume as some of my readers may be. Yet books which write themselves (as this one did, for the most part) must also be allowed to end themselves, and I can only assure you, Reader, that Roland and his band have come to one of the crucial border-crossings in their story, and we must leave them here for a while at the customs station, answering questions and filling out forms. All of which is simply a metaphorical way of saying that it was over again for a while and my heart was wise enough to stop me from trying to push ahead anyway.
The song of the Turtle had stopped for the time being.
ENDNOTES
1 Unless otherwise specified, all quotes in this chapter are taken from The Waste Lands.
2 The book’s title is taken from T. S. Eliot, and quotes from that and other Eliot works appear in the text.
3 “Mir” means both “world” and “peace” in Russian. Mir is running down; Roland’s world is running down.
4 The eponymous gigantic bear in the novel by Richard Adams. Eddie associates the name with rabbits: Watership Down is another Adams novel.
5 On the other side of the Tower from the portal of the Bear is the portal of the Turtle, called Maturin. The other ten guardians are: Fish, Eagle (sometimes just Bird), Lion, Bat, Wolf, Hare, Rat, Horse, Dog and Elephant. The portal of the Bear is twinned with Brooklyn in Keystone Earth.
6 In the Cradle of Lud, Eddie refers to this portal as the unfound door, foreshadowing the real UNFOUND door that lurks in their futures. The Cradle of Lud is a kind of portal, too, decorated as it is with the guardians of the Beam and a statue of Arthur Eld.
7 Outside Lud, Eddie tells Roland, “We’re with you because we have to be—that’s your goddamned ka. But we’re also with you because we want to be. . . . If you died in your sleep tonight, we’d bury you and then go on. We probably wouldn’t last long, but we’d die in the path of the Beam.”
8 Eddie and Susannah promise to tell Roland the story of Oz, but they don’t get around to it until they are at the Emerald Palace, thousands of miles down the Path of the Beam, a Mid-World analog to the yellow brick road.
9 Before he leaves, his teacher hands out the summer reading list, which includes The Lord of the Flies. Ted Brautigan gives this book to Bobby Garfield in Hearts in Atlantis. Brautigan will later mistake Jake for Bobby when he first sees him at Thunderclap Station. Alas, Jake never gets to read this book. O, Discordia.
10 Deepneau is distantly related to Ed Deepneau from Insomnia, the man who became the Crimson King’s tool.
11 The book discusses how riddles are perhaps the oldest of all the games people still play today, and tells the story of Samson’s wedding-day riddle, but the account is inaccurate. It sets the story at Samson’s wedding to Delilah, but according to the Bible, it took place when Samson was supposed to marry a Philistine woman. Samson’s riddle of the lion and honey is a complex play on words that derives from the fact that “lion” and “honey” are outwardly identical in Hebrew.
12 The key isn’t the only thing Jake will find in this lot that proves crucial to their quest. The bowling bag that allows them to carry Black Thirteen in the Calla will also materialize in this lot for him to find on a future journey.
13 The roses growing near the Tower are so firmly rooted that their thorns sever another of Roland’s fingers when he tries to pick one.
14 The ability Jake and Susannah get when they wield their siguls is a more powerful version of Andy McGee’s “push” in Firestarter, which was created by science, not magic. Andy McGee’s power also damages him physically when he uses it, in the same way that using mechanical doorways (like the one the Wolves use to get to the Calla) sickens people. As King says in Wolves of the Calla, “Gods leave siguls. Men leave machines.”
15 Co-Op City is really in the Bronx, not Brooklyn, so Jake’s world isn’t Keystone Earth, even though the rose exists here. Jake and Eddie may or
may not come from the same reality.
16 Though Lud is twinned with New York, its location in Mid-World is comparable to St. Louis. Eddie jokes, “Today we’re studying Wacky Geography in Mid-World. You see, boys and girls, in Mid-World you start in New York, travel southeast to Kansas, and then continue along the Path of the Beam until you come to the Dark Tower . . . which happens to be smack in the middle of everything.”
17 When Jake arrives in Mid-World, his digital watch displays an impossible time and runs backward. Roland comments that “as a rule no timepiece did very good work these days.” The Tet Corporation gives Roland one that works fairly well until he gets close to the Tower.
18 Oy is based on King’s Welsh corgi, Marlowe.
19 At least 105 years old, she is reminiscent of Mother Abigail from The Stand. Unwin was the name of the original publisher of The Lord of the Rings.
20 Jake’s housekeeper, Greta Shaw, had a copy, too. In High Speech, “char” means “death,” as in the charyou tree that was Susan Delgado’s destiny, which may be an omen.
21 Eddie and Jake see the resemblance to the George Washington Bridge in New York. Roland will see that bridge from the window of the boardroom at the Tet Corporation’s office and agree.
22 King credits having read The Quincunx by Charles Palliser as his inspiration for Gasher’s dialect. [DT6]
23 Eddie is apoplectic when he discovers what’s going on. “You’re killing each other over a piece of music that was never even released as a single!”
24 In that story, people in a village take part in an annual lottery in which the person who draws a piece of paper with a black circle on it is stoned to death. King discusses “The Lottery” briefly in Danse Macabre, saying that it turns the concept of the outsider into something symbolic, created arbitrarily by the bad luck of the draw.
25 “ ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.”
26 “He ended up betraying me, but he was a good friend for quite some time, anyway, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for him.”
27 Edward Bryant, Locus magazine, December 1991.
Chapter 5
WIZARD AND GLASS (REGARD)
“You have the right to know all those things, I suppose, and I’ll tell them to you . . . but not now. It’s a very long story. I never expected to tell it to anyone, and I’ll only tell it once.”
“When?” Eddie persisted.
“When the time is right,” Roland said, and with that they had to be content.
[DT3]
I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights . . . One taste of the old time sets all to right! 1
For six long years, King left Roland, Jake, Eddie, Susannah and Oy on board Blaine the Mono, hurtling toward seemingly certain death. Part of his reticence about tackling the follow-up book came from his knowledge that a large section of it would be about the heat and passion of teen love, and he wasn’t sure he knew the truth of that anymore. “Suspense is relatively easy,” he writes. “Love is hard.”
He told an audience at the University of Maine in Orono, “At first I thought it would be extremely short: The train crashed and they all died.” Instead, he produced the longest book of the series in an amazingly short amount of time—six months.
Wizard and Glass starts by repeating the section of The Waste Lands explaining the rules of the riddle challenge. Blaine, the insane monorail, loves to solve riddles. “What’s happening to the rest of the world is happening to me, I reckon,” he says. If the ka-tet can’t stump him before they reach Topeka, he will commit suicide by smashing into the terminus barrier, going faster than the speed of sound, taking them with him.2
To Eddie, everything in Roland’s world is a riddle. You don’t shoot with your hand, but with your mind. Roland thinks they have a chance to win. Why else would Jake have purchased a book of riddles from Calvin Tower’s bookstore just before he was drawn into Roland’s world?
When the contest begins, the route map indicates they have nearly eight hours until the end of the line. Time moves differently in Mid-World and aboard Blaine, though. Roland tries to tempt the monorail into slowing down with the promise of harder, more interesting jokes, but Blaine knows the story of Scheherazade,3 even if Roland doesn’t.
Blaine’s knowledge reaches beyond Mid-World; he knows about New York, Marilyn Monroe and Raquel Welch. He recognizes one of Roland’s puzzles as having originated in England.4 Roland learned most of his repertoire from Cort during the Fair-Days of his youth. He isn’t surprised to discover that his old tutor may have known about other worlds, probably from the Manni who lived on the perimeter of Gilead.
The first sign that Blaine might have a weakness comes when he thinks Edith Bunker is a real person rather than a TV character.5 Roland uses up most of their time before giving the others a chance. It only takes Jake a few minutes to go through the hardest entries his riddle book has to offer, with no success. The fact that the answers had been ripped from the back of this book is perhaps a subtle hint from ka that normal riddles with sensible answers weren’t the way to defeat Blaine, a clue reinforced in Charlie the Choo-Choo.
Susannah passes her turn and Blaine skips over Eddie, asking instead if Roland remembers any more Fair-Day riddles. Blaine mocks Eddie repeatedly during the trip, perhaps sensing that his wisecracks pose the greatest challenge.
Blaine and Roland both take riddles seriously, and they have often been serious business in classic fiction all the way back to the Greeks and the story of Oedipus, who had to answer the Sphinx’s riddle at the gate of Thebes to gain entry. The penalty for failure was to be eaten by the Sphinx. When Oedipus correctly answered the challenge—a riddle that Roland uses against Blaine—the beast committed suicide by throwing itself from the city walls, in contrast to Blaine’s threat of suicide if no one can stump him.
Eddie often irritates Roland with his illogical jokes. He wonders if Blaine might react similarly. Then he realizes that the clue to winning against Blaine comes from Charlie the Choo-Choo. Charlie’s song began, “Don’t ask me silly questions, / I won’t play silly games. / I’m just a simple choo-choo train / And I’ll always be the same.”
He launches into a string of school-yard jokes that annoy Blaine, who is irritated by having to lower himself to Eddie’s level. He cannot refuse to answer, though, because the rules stipulate that no one can “cry off.” The contest must be played to the end. The train lurches each time Eddie poses a joke. Little Blaine warns Eddie that he is killing Big Blaine, but that’s exactly Eddie’s intent.6
A dead-baby joke defeats Blaine. He can’t answer, and Roland won’t allow him to crash the train with a joke unanswered. Like a verbal gunslinger, Eddie shoots more inane jokes from the hip, answering himself while he prepares the next. He doesn’t have to stop to reload—he is an endless font of tasteless humor. Blaine dies in a blaze of hateful words, and no one is seriously injured when the train coasts into the barricade at the end of the track and derails.
In eight hours, Roland has covered more territory than he has in a thousand years wandering in search of the Tower. The world they find when they climb out of the train is more familiar to Eddie, Susannah and Jake than to Roland, though.
They are in Topeka, but in this version of reality a superflu virus known as Captain Trips7 emptied the world a year before Eddie was drawn from New York. As Jake once said to Roland, there are “more worlds than these,” some mostly the same as Earth, others radically different. The three New Yorkers may have all come from different Earths, not just from different times in the same one. In this Topeka, they encounter subtle differences from the world they knew, things like baseball team names, car models and soft drinks.8
They see no indication of the Beam. Roland tells them that though the Tower exists in all worlds, it may not be accessible from them all. In fact, there are only two worlds of cosmic importance: Roland’s place of In-World, Mid-World, End-World and the one real Earth, known as Keystone Earth, which is probably at the highest level—
level 19—of the Tower of all Earths.
They hear a distant, mournful wail, which Roland recognizes as a “thinny,” a place where “the fabric of existence is almost entirely worn away.” These dangerous pockets have increased in number since the Dark Tower’s force began to fail. “[T]hey are sores on the skin of existence, able to exist because things are going wrong. Things in all worlds.” Blaine probably took them through a thinny to cross between worlds.
Eddie finds a modern, light wheelchair to replace the one Susannah left behind in their mad scramble to board Blaine. Before they set out,
* * *
Concerning Twins
King and coauthor Peter Straub introduced the concept of Twinners, people who have one-to-one counterparts in an alternate reality, in The Talisman. While the Dark Tower series doesn’t make the same use of this notion, twins feature prominently in the two central realities, Keystone Earth and Mid-World, themselves twins of a sort.
Early on, Roland sees strong similarities between Eddie and his old ka-mate Cuthbert. While under the gunslinger’s hypnotic spell, fictional King refers to them almost interchangeably when Roland and Eddie visit him in 1977. Jake resembles another of Roland’s childhood friends, Alain Johns. Both were strong in the touch. Susannah is twinned with the demon Mia who inhabits her body and steals her child, but she was already dual-natured, consisting of Odetta Holmes and Detta Walker. “If we are not used to such twinnings yet, I reckon that we never will be.” [DT7]
Mordred Deschain is referred to as a twin because of his dual paternity and nature. The Crimson King also exists in two forms, Ram Abbalah and his physical form trapped in the Tower.