by Vincent, Bev
With Susan’s permission, Roland hypnotizes her but is unable to see everything that happened that night at Rhea’s house. Part of it is hidden in a cloud of pink.
The lovers have numerous clandestine meetings in the ensuing weeks. Cuthbert is jealous of Roland for winning the most beautiful girl any of them has ever seen, but he also hates her for stealing his best friend and distracting him from their mission. Roland is the weapon they count on, but now he’s like a revolver dropped into water. “God knows if it’ll ever fire again, even if it’s fished out and dried off,” Cuthbert says, a simile an older Roland would appreciate after the Western Sea wets his ammunition. Roland refuses to even argue with them.
Cordelia Delgado tells Eldred Jonas her suspicion that something is going on between her niece and Will Dearborn. Jonas is surprised by the revelation. If Roland has been able to keep that big a secret, what others might he have?
He uncovers evidence that the boys have been to the oil fields. After searching the ranch where they are staying and finding their guns, he kills their messenger pigeons and covers his tracks by pretending it is an act of vandalism. He then meets with Walter, the man in black. A hundred of Farson’s men are coming to town to escort the oil tankers west. They concoct a plan to frame the Affiliation brats as traitors to get them out of the way.
When he realizes that Roland sensed what was going to happen at the ranch, Cuthbert is ready to hit Roland. Alain holds him back, saying that they have to trust Roland or fail. Roland is a gunslinger; they’re not. Alain can’t intervene a second time, though, when Cuthbert encounters Sheemie on his way from Rhea’s house. Sheemie has a note he’s supposed to deliver to Cordelia, announcing Rhea’s knowledge of Susan’s relationship with Will Dearborn.
Cuthbert carries the message back to Roland, calls him outside and strikes him in the face, then thrusts out the note before Roland can react. “I’ve been a fool,” Roland says, and cries. His mistake, he says, is not falling in love but “thinking that love could somehow be apart from everything else.” He thought he could live two lives, one with his ka-tet and one with Susan. He thought love could lift him above ka. Love made him blind.
Roland and Cuthbert make peace and then ride out as gunslingers to deal with Rhea, who Roland calls “daughter of none.”24 Roland doesn’t want to kill her unless he must, a decision he would come to regret. He was still a boy and the decision to kill “does not come easily or naturally to most boys.” They warn her off, but she doesn’t emerge from her house.
She wails in sorrow when Roland shoots her pet poison snake, a parallel to Arthur Eld’s victory over the great snake Saita. In that legend, Arthur Eld wore the dead snake around his neck as a trophy. In Mejis, it is Rhea who wears her dead pet around her neck until it turns into a stinking carcass.
Roland knows their time is running out. They have to destroy the oil before it leaves Mejis. He, Cuthbert and Alain meet with Susan to sketch out a general plan. They trust ka to sweep them out of the situation it has swept them into. The thinny is an integral part of their plan—they think they can drive Farson’s men into the canyon and destroy them.
Working near the thinny, with its haunting voices, puts their tempers on edge, though. Alain tells Cuthbert, “You’ll die young,” which is meant in jest but perhaps comes from Alain’s touch, for it proves true. A few years later at Jericho Hill, the ka-tet will make its last stand against Farson’s men. Alain dies under Roland’s and Cuthbert’s guns, an accidental nighttime shooting. A sniper kills Jamie DeCurrie. They are a dozen against thousands, but Roland and Cuthbert go out in a blaze of glory, fighting to the end. The arrow in the eye that fells Cuthbert comes from the bow of Randolph Filardo, aka Randall Flagg.
Roland hypnotizes Susan again when Alain questions how Rhea knew what was going on. He has grown to suspect that the witch possesses one of the Wizard’s glasses. His father thought Farson owned one because of the way he seemed to know things he shouldn’t have known. With Alain’s help, he gets Susan to reveal where the “grapefruit” is hidden.
Bolstered by her knowledge of what is going on in Mejis, Susan searches her father’s office and finds evidence to support Roland’s suggestion that he had been killed. After another fight with Cordelia, she moves out of the house. She meets Roland in a hut, where he shows her his guns. If things go badly for him, she’s to take them to Gilead and show them to his father.
After they make love for the last time, Susan expresses a sense of dread about their future, a feeling akin to ka-shume, the sense of an impending break in a ka-tet. Roland realizes later that some part of her knew what lay ahead. Like Eldred Jonas, Roland has a sudden urge to pack up and leave, but he knows that the faces of his friends and those who would die against Farson would haunt him if he doesn’t complete this mission.
The next day, the Big Coffin Hunters make the first move by murdering Mayor Thorin and his chancellor and framing Roland and his friends. During their arrest, Roland exposes Jonas as a failed gunslinger. Jonas limps because Cort’s father broke his leg with his ironwood club, then disarmed the boy and sent him into exile. Roland tells him, “The soul of a man such as you can never leave the west.”
Jonas goes to retrieve the Wizard’s Glass, only to discover that Rhea’s become little more than a walking skeleton. She believes she’s the ball’s chosen one, its mistress, and tells Jonas it will do Farson no good without her. Jonas knows about the ball’s seductive power, but rather than kill her to get it back, he agrees to take her along.
Susan decides to free Roland and his friends from jail, defying his orders to flee west and save herself. Sheemie is waiting for her in town to help her. His foreknowledge of what she would do is an indication that there’s more to the boy than meets the eye, that he has powers that will lead him to become a Breaker a thousand years down history’s long trail.
During the rescue, Susan is forced to kill both the sheriff and his deputy. For a brief time, she is a part of the ka-tet of gunslingers. Roland hides her in one of their secret meeting places with Sheemie to watch over her, and makes her promise again to go to Gilead with warnings of Farson’s plans if he doesn’t return. It’s the last time he sees her in person.
Before tackling Farson’s men, Roland, Cuthbert and Alain set the oil fields ablaze, destroying Farson’s fuel source. They know that Jonas has the Wizard’s Glass and are worried it will reveal their plans. Instead, it shows Rhea where Susan and Sheemie are hiding.
Jonas captures Susan and sends her to Coral Thorin with Reynolds. Then he takes the Wizard’s Glass and evicts Rhea from the camp. “May it damn you the way it’s damned me,” she tells him. She finds her way to Cordelia Delgado’s house, where the two bitter women plot their final revenge on Susan, whom they both blame for their downfall. Rhea replenishes her energy with Cordelia’s blood.25
Sheemie follows Susan’s trail and seeks Olive Thorin’s help in freeing Susan. Olive and Susan escape north but Clay Reynolds, told where to wait by Rhea, recaptures them.
Roland and his friends prepare to ambush Jonas and Farson’s cowboys. “Today it was Cuthbert and Alain’s turn to be tested—not in Gilead, in the traditional place of proving behind the Great Hall, but here in Mejis, on the edge of the Bad Grass, in the desert and in the canyon.” They lie in hiding, wait for the posse to pass, then attack from behind, killing a quarter of the contingent before the group realizes it’s under assault. What they lack in training they make up for with the keen eyes and reflexes of the young. Within minutes, those not dead flee in panic. Roland takes the Wizard’s Glass from Jonas before killing him.
The ball sweeps Roland away in a vision of the future, showing him disjointed images of his undeclared quest, all the way to the edge of End-World and beyond, where he sees Oy impaled on a tree branch. He sees his destiny: the Dark Tower. “[He] senses both the strength of the place and the wrongness of it; he can feel how it is spooling error across everything, softening the divisions between the worlds, how its potential for mischie
f is growing stronger even as disease weakens its truth and coherence, like a body afflicted with cancer; this jutting arm of dark gray stone is the world’s great mystery and last awful riddle.”
The vision is his call to adventure, a call that he never questions or refuses. Now Roland understands why his father felt that the pending civil war was comparatively unimportant. He swears to reach the Tower and conquer the wrongness within. A voice tells him he will kill everyone he loves and “still the Tower will be pent shut against you.” Roland defies the voice, drawing on the strength of every generation before him. Then he passes out.
When he comes to, he doesn’t remember much of his vision, but he knows his destiny is forever altered. He and his friends may be going back to Gilead, but not for long. If they survive the day, they will search for the Dark Tower. They will still fight Farson’s men, but only because they’re in their way and gunslinger ethics demands they forbid these thieves their prize.
Cuthbert argues that the Tower is a myth, no more real than the Holy Grail. Roland replies, “Its existence is the great secret our fathers keep; it’s what has held them together as ka-tet across all the years of our world’s decline.”
Roland’s choice between the Tower and a full life with Susan is both difficult and easy. He knows she’s pregnant with his child and he would choose her in an instant, except the Tower is crumbling. “If it falls, everything we know will be swept away. There will be chaos beyond our imagining. . . . I choose the Tower. I must. Let her live a good life and long with someone else. . . . As for me, I choose the Tower.”
Their attack on Farson’s men goes exactly as planned. Alain blows up several of the tankers with a machine gun taken from the Big Coffin Hunters’ posse, and the rest explode on their own. The defenders get off only a single shot in return before the three boys lure them into Eyebolt Canyon, where Roland sets a fire that drives the men closer to the thinny. Those who don’t ride into it by accident are drawn by the voices emerging from it.
After their victory, the bloodred moon rises and Roland realizes how the Wizard’s Glass misdirected him into believing Susan was safe. “Sometimes it sees a future that’s already happening.” He watches in the glass as Susan is taken into town, tied on the back of a cart. The people of Hambry are in a frenzy, believing Susan was a traitor and that her death will bring life for their crops. Cordelia throws the first torch onto the cornshucks surrounding her. Rhea is only a second behind her. With her final breaths, Susan screams her love for Roland.
Roland remains in a trance while Cuthbert and Alain take him back to Gilead. Along the way, he eats and drinks but does not speak or sleep and cannot be separated from the Wizard’s Glass. He wasn’t traveling inside the glass, he says later, but rather inside his head, where everyone has a Wizard’s Glass.
When they reach the outskirts of Gilead, the ball comes to life and shows him everything that happened in Mejis. “It showed me these things not to teach or enlighten, but to hurt and wound. The remaining pieces of the Wizard’s Rainbow are all evil things. Hurt enlivens them, somehow.”
At home, he keeps the glass from his father. It continues to show him the Dark Tower, but he also sees the fall of Gilead to Farson. Their triumph in Mejis only bought the Affiliation another couple of years.
EDDIE, SUSANNAH AND JAKE are amazed by Roland’s story. “To have gone through all that . . . and at fourteen,” Susannah says. They see the gunslinger in a new light, understanding better how and why his emotions have been stripped away.
Roland feels better for having told the story. Jake hugs him, and Eddie thinks it’s probably the first hug the gunslinger has received in a long time.26 Eddie had been afraid Roland was going to tell him that he had killed Susan himself, for his “damned Tower.” Susannah realizes that Roland believes that’s exactly what he did.
They continue along the interstate, asking questions. Jake asks what became of Sheemie. Roland says he followed them, though he doesn’t know how. When they left in search of the Dark Tower, Sheemie started out with them as a sort-of squire. He understands how the boy managed to keep up with them when he later learns of Sheemie’s teleportation skills.
Jake spots a note left under a vehicle’s windshield wiper. “The old woman from the dreams is in Nebraska. Her name is Abigail.27 The dark man is in the west. Maybe Vegas.”28
They encounter four pairs of shoes29 and a set of four booties lined up on the road before them. The footwear is tailored for the gunslingers’ individual personalities. Susannah’s are designed to fit over her stumps. The three erstwhile New Yorkers immediately make the connection to The Wizard of Oz.30 Jake clicks the heels of his red leather oxfords together, to no effect. They tell Roland the story—which Eddie and Susannah had mentioned to him near Shardik’s portal—and he identifies with Dorothy’s desire to get back home again. The ka-tet wants that, too, but for them home is the Path of the Beam. They carry their new footwear toward the Emerald Palace. Ka will tell them when to use the shoes.
A flag bearing the Crimson King’s eye flies over the palace. A gate of neonlike tubes blocks their way. Each bar is a different color, representing the thirteen Wizard’s balls. Living creatures—fish, birds, horses—swim within the colored lights, some disquietingly human, perhaps symbolic of the twelve guardians.
The interstate expires beyond this barrier. Jake senses they can get through the gate using their shoes. Once they successfully train Oy to click his heels together, the black bar explodes. On the other side, omens and warnings attempt to discourage them from their path.
They enter the palace and find a chamber that is a cross between the Wizard of Oz’s domain and Blaine’s Barony Coach. The putative Wizard greets them in Blaine’s voice over a PA system. As in The Wizard of Oz, doglike Oy pulls away the curtain to reveal the Tick-Tock Man. Eddie and Susannah kill him before he can do anything, never stopping to consider that the only way he could have gotten here ahead of them is by magic, perhaps through a door.
The real wizard sits behind them: Randall Flagg, whom Roland knew as Marten, the betrayer in his father’s court. Marten reminds Roland that they met during the last days of Gilead, when his first ka-tet was preparing to go west in search of the Tower. “I know you saw me, but I doubt you knew until now that I saw you, as well.”
Like Lucifer tempting Christ, Flagg promises Roland and the others an easier life if they would just “give over this stupid and hopeless quest for the Tower.” To a man, woman, child and billy-bumbler, the members of the ka-tet all answer “No.”
Roland’s Mid-World gun is useless against Flagg, so he draws Jake’s father’s gun. His maimed hand fails him briefly and the gun sight gets caught in his belt buckle long enough for Flagg to disappear, leaving the pink Wizard’s Glass behind. Flagg was genuinely taken by surprise and if Roland hadn’t faltered, the wizard might have been killed—or so he later claimed.
Winning the Emerald Palace returns them to the Path of the Beam. The voice of ka tells Roland he can’t continue until he tells the last scene of his story. The only way to show his friends the truth is to take them inside the Wizard’s Glass. Everything around them is tinged pink. When they travel via Black Thirteen, a black pall clouds their vision. As in her later todash trips, Susannah’s legs are restored to her.
“I lost my one true love at the beginning of my quest for the Dark Tower. Now look into this wretched thing, if you would, and see what I lost not long after.”
After he got back from Mejis, the ball showed Roland an assassination plot against his father. Farson’s agents passed a poisoned knife to the castle’s chief of domestic staff, who was to pass it on to the actual assassin, Roland’s mother. The toxin came from Garlan, the same place Flagg got the poison he used against King Roland of Delain. Roland reported the intermediary to his father, but decided to give his mother a chance to stop her foolishness, recover her sanity and return to her husband’s side. “He has saved her from herself once, he will tell her, but he cannot do it again.”
Filled with dread, Eddie, Jake, Susannah and Oy follow the young Roland and see with their own eyes what Roland can’t bear to tell them.
Roland’s mother stole the grapefruit to give to Marten as a consolation prize for failing to murder her husband. Inside Gabrielle Deschain’s chamber, the ka-tet sees what Roland does not—a pair of shoes beneath the drapes near the window. A shadowy figure appears with a snakelike object in its hands. The ka-tet believes it is Rhea of Cöos, still bearing the decaying body of her dead snake, Ermot, come to retrieve the Wizard’s Glass and punish the boy who caused her so much trouble.
Roland sees her reflection in the ball. He turns and fires at the figure, which transforms back into his mother. In her hands she carries a belt she had made for him.31 It’s a scenario befitting any Greek tragedy: Roland used his father’s guns to kill his mother.
Rhea appears to the ka-tet in the pink ball, first as the Wicked Witch of the East, again beseeching them to cry off their quest. Like any good deceiver, she tempts them with the truth, telling them to ask Roland what happened to Cuthbert, Alain or Jamie. “He never had a friend he didn’t kill, never had a lover who’s not dust in the wind!”
The pink ball—the only real thing in this group vision—self-destructs, returning them to Mid-World. Roland tells them he saw Rhea once more and, without elaborating, implies that he killed her.
Time has slipped again and they have no way to tell how much. They’ve apparently been walking during the vision: The Emerald Palace is at least thirty miles behind them. The cloud pattern tells them that they are back on the path to the Tower.
In their packs they find food and drink, provided by ka or Flagg (or, according to Eddie, the Keebler Elves). They find a message from Flagg: “Next time I won’t leave. Renounce the Tower.” Beneath it, a sketch of a cloud emitting a bolt of lightning, the symbol for Thunderclap.