The Road to The Dark Tower

by Vincent, Bev

  Roland suggests that the others should consider Flagg’s advice, since he has a reputation for getting his friends killed. “I’m aware this is probably my last chance to love. . . . For the first time since I turned around in a dark room and killed my mother, I may have found something more important than the Tower.”

  However, ka has changed the New Yorkers. They don’t want to go back to the worlds they came from—and how would they get there if they did? In Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, the protagonist is drawn from the normal world into a fantasy land and refuses to believe or participate in what happens to him there. Eddie, Susannah and Jake not only believe in their situation, but they also make the quest their own. Hand in hand, the four travelers, with Oy two paces ahead, return to the Path of the Beam, leaving their red shoes behind in a pile as they continue on the road to the Dark Tower.

  While the contemporary action in Wizard and Glass takes Roland and his ka-tet much closer to their destination—they start at the beginning of Mid-World and arrive close to where End-World begins, traveling farther in a few hours than Roland has covered in a millennium—that part of the journey does not demand much growth from its participants, which is the normal result of a quest. Travelers must usually scratch and claw for every inch of progress, but King put his cast on an express train and rocketed them halfway across the continent.32

  Through his story, Roland lays himself bare as he explains how he came to be the hardened loner the members of his ka-tet met when they arrived through their respective doors. His development since leaving Mejis isn’t growth; it’s attrition. It will take this ragtag group of erstwhile New Yorkers—and one billy-bumbler—to help him recover his soul.

  Cleansing the soul to attain the purity required to achieve a goal is another element of questing. Roland willingly accepts responsibility for his crimes—killing his mother and causing Susan Delgado’s death—though the members of his ka-tet do not blame him for his actions. His decision to forsake the woman he loved to undertake a seemingly impossible quest to save all existence impresses on his followers the seriousness of their task.

  The story of Wizard and Glass is tragedy upon tragedy. The star-crossed lovers are straight out of Shakespeare, and Roland’s matricide owes a debt to the ancient Greeks. That Gabrielle Deschain—who betrayed her husband and planned to execute him with her own hands—perhaps earned her death does not mitigate the tragedy. Just as no parent should live to see a child die, no child should have to live knowing he was the instrument of a parent’s demise. “A man doesn’t get past such a thing,” Roland says. “Not ever.”

  In an online interview at the Dark Tower Web site in 1997, Peter Straub said the flashback “offers a nice counter-rhythmic backwash to the surging forward progress of the saga as a whole.” Fans and reviewers expressed admiration for King’s literary style in this flashback section while simultaneously admitting to impatience at wanting him to get on with the contemporary story. “I think this is a very interesting way to tell a story, that is, by literalizing the story-telling,” Straub said, comparing the technique to one Joseph Conrad used in Heart of Darkness.33

  In 1994, King said he knew the remainder of the series, and in the afterword to Wizard and Glass, he outlines the general shape of the final three books. He could never have foreseen how his own personal version of ka would intervene. In July 1999, King’s world was turned upside-down when he was struck by a Dodge minivan. The incident changed his life, but it also provided inspiration for his writing and became an important plot element in the finale of the Dark Tower series.

  ENDNOTES

  1 Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Unless otherwise specified, the quotes in this chapter are from Wizard and Glass.

  2 This is reminiscent of the game of riddles Bilbo Baggins and Gollum play beneath the mountain in The Hobbit.

  3 One of the inspirations King used in Misery—as long as Paul Sheldon continued to work on his next Misery novel, Annie had reason to keep him alive.

  4 In the original version of The Gunslinger, Walter claims to have come from England.

  5 Archie Bunker’s wife from All in the Family in the 1970s.

  6 Susannah tells Little Blaine that the world would be a better place with his “big brother” gone. These words must resonate with Eddie, whose world was likely better off without Henry, his big brother.

  7 The same flu that ravaged the world in The Stand, a book that introduced an evil man named Randall Flagg. Roland is familiar with Flagg—more familiar than he realizes—from the final days of Gilead. He believes Flagg is a demon. “Hot on his heels had come two young men who looked desperate and yet grim, men named Dennis and Thomas”—two characters from The Eyes of the Dragon, which also featured a demonic wizard called Flagg.

  8 Kansas City Monarchs, Takuro Spirit and Nozz-A-La, respectively. Some of these brands will appear in future Dark Tower books, usually as an indication that a world is not Keystone Earth. Nozz-A-La is also featured prominently in Kingdom Hospital, a TV miniseries written by King that aired on ABC in 2004.

  9 The bullets work in much the same way that Eddie’s hand-carved key blocked the ricocheting dual memories Roland had been suffering from before Jake was drawn into Mid-World. Roland and Eddie use bullets as earplugs in the Doorway Cave near Calla Bryn Sturgis to block the voices.

  10 This is a hint of Roland’s repeat journeys through his past, doing things a little differently each time. After he passes through the Tower, the past rearranges itself to put Arthur Eld’s horn among his gunna.

  11 Mejis is a twin to Mexico. Many of the barony’s cultural traditions, including garb and vocabulary, are Mexican.

  12 His sigul is the red eye of the Crimson King. He started as a stage-robber in Garlan and has grown to a general. His “persuasive” style of politics is rather like Greg Stillson’s from The Dead Zone. Like Randall Flagg, whom he may well be, he brooks no intolerance and has been known to leave cities after “state visits” with the local politicians’ heads on spikes at the town’s entrance. “Death is what John Farson is all about,” Roland tells Susan Delgado, warning her that his influence may one day extend to Mejis.

  13 The blue coffin-shaped tattoos the Big Coffin Hunters sport on the webbing between thumb and forefinger of their right hands is also used by the low men/Regulators in Wolves of the Calla.

  14 Addictions plague the cast of the Dark Tower. Eddie has drugs, Callahan has alcohol, Calvin Tower has acquisitiveness, Patrick—who lies much farther down the road—has drawing and Roland has the Tower. Rhea has the pink Wizard’s Glass.

  15 Named after a victim of Ted Bundy who survived.

  16 Cordelia was King Lear’s disinherited daughter in the Shakespeare play that was the source of the line “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.”

  17 Thorin has a wife, but she can’t bear him children. As a “gilly,” it will be Susan’s obligation to bear Thorin’s child or children until he has an heir.

  18 Cordelia is reminiscent of Bobby Garfield’s mother from “Low Men in Yellow Coats” in the way she uses her parental authority to mislead her ward into believing their financial situation is poor to justify her actions. Cordelia sold Susan to the mayor for twenty-four pieces of silver and twelve pieces of gold.

  19 In Mid-World, every town has its version of a story about star-crossed lovers, a tale that often ends in a murder-suicide. The Hambry version featured lovers named Robert and Francesca.

  20 Literally—a meteor passes over their heads on the night they meet.

  21 Cuthbert’s alter ego, Arthur Heath, is from Gilead, which, to the people of Mejis, is as if he were from heaven.

  22 Her father would have told her it was ka, which will “come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than my da’s barn stood before the cyclone when it came.”

  23 Olive Thorin can’t bear children, which was “what opened the door to this horrible situation in the first place.”


  24 Mia, who will bear Roland’s child, also calls herself daughter of none.

  25 Though Rhea isn’t a vampire per se, she shares some characteristics with those creatures and is, perhaps, an augury of the real vampires that will enter the series in the next book.

  26 Mercy, the blind woman in River Crossing, hugged Roland.

  27 “I think she’s part of another story,” Roland says. “But a story close to this one. . . . Next door maybe,” Eddie replies.

  28 The west—the direction where failed gunslingers were sent when banished—is where Flagg set up his encampment in The Stand.

  29 Roland saw shoes tumbling through the air during his trip inside the Wizard’s Glass in Gilead. The title of this section, “All God’s Chillun Got Shoes,” derives from a spiritual. In the slavery era, sons wore shoes and servants went barefoot. “When I get to heaven I’m goin’ to put on my shoes/I’m goin to walk all over God’s Heaven.”

  30 It’s not Roland’s first exposure to Oz. During his vision in Mejis, Roland saw Rhea saying, “I’ll get you, my pretty,” like the Wicked Witch of the West.

  31 Roland promises to tell the others the tale of how he ultimately lost the belt, covered with his mother’s blood, that he wore for many years. It bears on his quest, but is a tale for another day, one that hasn’t yet been told.

  32 When Jack Sawyer finished his quest in The Talisman, rather than have him plod all the way back across America to his mother, he is conveniently driven back home in a chauffeured limousine.

  33 Peter Straub, in “The Dark Tower’s Architecture,” posted to the Penguin Web site in 1997. King pays homage to Conrad by naming a character in Dreamcatcher after Kurtz.

  Chapter 6

  WOLVES OF THE CALLA (RESISTANCE)

  When gunslingers come to town, things get broken. It’s a simple fact of life.1

  The six-year gap between the publication of Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla equals the longest pause in the story. Earlier, King had indicated that he wouldn’t write an argument summarizing the events in the previous books, saying that Book V wasn’t the place where readers should start the series. He must have had a change of heart, as “The Final Argument,” a six-page synopsis, appears at the beginning of the book.

  Unlike previous Dark Tower books, the opening of Wolves of the Calla doesn’t feature Roland or any of his ka-tet. Instead, it starts in Calla2 Bryn Sturgis, a rustic community on the banks of the River Whye—a long and busy commercial river similar to the Mississippi—at the edge of End-World. Farmer Tian Jaffords is plowing a rocky, cratered field he calls Son of a Bitch, “a thankless tract which mostly grew rocks and blisters and busted hopes.” Mules are too valuable to risk on such a hellish field, so Tian’s twin sister, Tia, drags the plow. Tia is “roont”—mentally handicapped and grown overlarge—and not good for much else.

  Andy, a seven-foot messenger robot known to the Calla-folken for many generations and manufactured by North Central Positronics, arrives with grim news: The Wolves will come again in thirty days. Andy—who reminds Eddie of C3PO from Star Wars—doesn’t always bear bad news; he’s usually cheerful, bringing gossip, telling horoscopes or singing songs. No one knows where he gets his information, but he’s never been wrong about the Wolves.

  His announcement isn’t a complete surprise. Once during each of the past five or six generations,3 several dozen Wolves from Thunderclap—rumored to be warriors of the Crimson King—have descended upon Calla Bryn Sturgis.

  The town’s name acknowledges the classic Western The Magnificent Seven4 as part of King’s inspiration. In the movie, the people of a small Mexican village hire gunslingers to protect them from bandits who raid their village for food. They leave only enough so the people can struggle to survive and produce more food for the next raid.

  The Wolves don’t steal food; they steal children, one of every set of twins in a village where single births are the exception. Ka determines which twin is taken. Tian’s great uncle was chosen because he was closer to the road than his grandfather. Tian and his wife, Zalia, have five children—the rare singleton will always be safe from the Wolves.

  No one knows where the children are taken or why. After several weeks, most return on a train from the east, sunburned, covered in food and feces, and roont like Tia and Zalman, Zalia’s brother. The older children come back with some vague understanding of what was stolen from them. Some commit suicide. Childlike until puberty, they suddenly grow into giants. Family members describe hearing bones grow inside the ruined bodies, calling to mind Brown’s description of how his corn sighed and moaned after one of the desert’s rare rains. The roont children all die long before their natural span of days.

  Tian is a good man to receive this news. Smarter than the average farmer and semiliterate, he knows there was a time when the Wolves didn’t raid his village. While others in the Calla accept the Wolves like drought or nightfall, Tian thinks it’s time to fight back. He sends out the opopanax feather (the word “opopanax” was used frequently throughout Black House) to call a meeting of the menfolk, including a delegation of the Manni, a reclusive Amish-like religious sect who live on the edge of town.5 Like Stu Redman in The Stand, Tian is an uncomfortable leader, but his anger drives him.

  The town hall meeting is reminiscent of the scene in Storm of the Century where the townspeople debated over the future of a single child. The Calla faces the loss of half of its children. Several ideas are proposed, ranging from the cautious to the absurd. Leaving isn’t an option. The Wolves would destroy the Calla in their absence and might even follow their trail and take the children, anyway. The men are farmers and know no other way of life. They are ill equipped to fight. A few rusty old rifles, spears, rocks and bows are poor weapons against guns, light sabers and flying metal drones called sneetches.6

  Tian speaks passionately: “Each time they come and take our children, they take a little more of our hearts and our souls.” Once the richer, more influential farmers speak, though, the meeting’s momentum starts to shift. No one believes they can defeat the Wolves. They’re farmers, not fighters.

  An unlikely savior comes to his rescue: the man known as the Old Fella or Pere Callahan. Father Donald Callahan, late of ’Salem’s Lot, Maine.7 Tian feels like “a character in a silly festival play, saved at the last moment by some improbable supernatural intervention.” Saved by ka, in other words.

  Callahan has been in the Calla for about ten years, long enough to build a church and convert half the village to his religion, but he’s still an outsider. He’s never been there when the Wolves come. He’s like the wise old man who lives on the edge of town in The Magnificent Seven who is consulted by the villagers, except Callahan doesn’t wait to be asked, and ignores the ritual of passing the feather. His solution is similar to that suggested by the old Mexican—go north and hire men who deal in lead8 to fight the battle for them; this refers to the gunslingers Andy told him are following the Path of the Beam four days northeast of town. Andy told Tian this news, too, but the farmer had been too overwrought to absorb it.

  The Mexicans offered their hired guns a pittance: $20 each for several weeks of dangerous work. The people of the Calla get a better deal. Gunslingers are forbidden to take payment. Callahan has an ace in the hole, an object buried beneath the floor of his church that a gunslinger won’t easily resist. Something that will kill Callahan if he doesn’t get rid of it soon.

  DURING THE APPROXIMATELY SEVEN WEEKS9 since the ka-tet’s run-in with Flagg, the clock has given them a slight reprieve, a little time-out, but it has started running against them again. Eddie’s sensitivity to the passage of time might be attributed to his latent awareness of their somewhat unreal circumstances. When time slips back into gear, King may be answering the song of the Turtle.

  Summer has come to an end, and fall, the time of harvest and festivals, is upon them. The weather reminds Eddie of the first week of November, which corresponds—coincidentally?—to the week Wolves of the Call
a was published. But the Wolves’ pending harvest is not a time of celebration for the people of Calla Bryn Sturgis.

  The mystery number 19 has started appearing to the ka-tet everywhere they look. Eddie carves it on the side of a slingshot. They carry firewood in armloads of nineteen logs. Tree branches form the number’s shape against the sky. Nineteen is the sum of the number of portals, Beams and the Tower that stands at their intersection, and was the magic word Walter provided Allie to access Nort’s memories in Tull. It’s also the number of oil derricks Roland encountered long ago in the fields of Mejis.10

  Though he normally believes in omens and portents, Roland dismisses his ka-tet’s infatuation with the number. He has other things on his mind. Susannah has manifested a new personality calling herself Mia, daughter of none. Roland recognizes her name as a word that was almost holy in Gilead, where it meant “mother” in High Speech.

  Susannah has been experiencing some of the signs of pregnancy, but her periods have been regular except for one occasion before the ka-tet passed through Lud. She thinks it’s a false pregnancy brought about by her strong desire to have Eddie’s baby. Roland knows she’s pregnant by the demon in the speaking circle.

  Mia, fiercely protective of the “new chap” she carries, forages in the swamp for food at night, thinking that she’s feasting in a castle banquet hall. Though she isn’t an aspect of Susannah, Mia isn’t yet fully formed, and some of Susannah’s old memories merge with Mia’s. The blue plates in the banquet hall remind the Detta within her of the “forspecial” one that belonged to her aunt. She smashes each one she encounters without understanding why.

  Roland, who has been following her on her nightly expeditions, watches her strip to keep her clothes clean before she wades into a bog, devouring hand-crushed frogs and water rats, bringing to mind the lines from Stanza XXI of Browning’s poem: “It may have been a water-rat I speared, / But, ugh! it sounded like a baby’s shriek.” She picks leeches from her legs and swallows them like candy. After her repast, she cleans herself and covers her tracks. Roland decides to keep this to himself for the time being, another of his many secrets.