by Vincent, Bev
Like Sancho Panza from Don Quixote, who also discovers he’s a character in a book, Father Callahan doesn’t understand how someone could have written a story that contains details only he knew, things that happened when he was alone. Unlike Don Quixote, Callahan isn’t concerned over whether he has been portrayed accurately or adequately in the novel. Don Quixote knows he’s real; Father Callahan is no longer sure.
Apart from being Father Callahan’s creator, Stephen King will become an increasingly important presence in the series. His fate and ka are inextricably commingled.
The ka-tet still has a dual imperative. Where once they had to save the Calla from the Wolves and protect the rose, now they have to find Susannah and protect the rose. The rose, which represents the Tower, is ultimately the more important task, but Roland has softened enough to accept that he cannot ignore one of his ka-tet as he once abandoned Jake in the name of his quest. The linear nature of time in Keystone Earth means they have to carefully plan their strategy. They can’t go back to fix any mistakes they make, a catchall of time-travel stories.
Wolves of the Calla’s ending is not as much of a cliff-hanger as the ending of The Waste Lands, but it leaves some pressing business—the question of Susannah’s pregnancy—unfinished. King says the fifth and sixth books of the series “both end on notes that [make] you really want to know what happens next.”38
For the first time, though, readers knew exactly how long they had to wait for the next installment—seven months—because the follow-up was already written and its publication date set well before Wolves of the Calla was released.
ENDNOTES
1 Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes in this chapter come from Wolves of the Calla.
2 “Calla” isn’t pronounced like the first part of “Callahan,” but more like the beginning of “cauliflower”—Kaw-la.
3 Pennywise from It also returned once per generation to prey on the children of Derry.
4 Which is in turn based on the Japanese movie The Seven Samurai, directed by Akira Kurosawa.
5 They also lived on the perimeter of Gilead in Roland’s time. Brown the farmer’s wife was of the Manni. They are also known as sailors on ka’s wind.
6 George Telford says, “They can strip a man from top to toe in five seconds, leaving nothing around him but a circle of blood and hair.”
7 While King once considered doing a sequel to ’Salem’s Lot, he later declared that the time for such a story had passed, but he was still interested to see what happened to the failed priest who snuck out of town on a Greyhound bus. He hinted in the afterword to Wizard and Glass that Callahan would have a part to play in the story.
8 This famous phrase was uttered by Steve McQueen’s character in The Magnificent Seven. King—as Richard Bachman—also used it as an epigraph in The Regulators.
9 This is Eddie’s rough estimate, corroborated by the fact that Susannah has had two menstrual periods since they left the Emerald Palace.
10 Once readers start combing King’s other works, they will undoubtedly turn up 19 everywhere. When Roland robs Katz’s Drugs, the police dispatcher calls Code 19. Many characters have things happen to them at that age, but it’s also the page of the manuscript in Bag of Bones where Mike Noonan finds his subconscious message, and the last number Johnny Smith played at the Wheel of Fortune just before his accident in The Dead Zone. The digits in Donald M. Grant’s zip code add up to 19.
11 Eddie is reluctant to try them at first because they remind him of the poisoned mushrooms served in the Shirley Jackson novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. This is Jackson’s first direct mention in the series, though her spirit was invoked by the deadly lottery Eddie and Susannah witnessed in Lud.
12 In Black House, Jack Sawyer goes todash during his first dream of Speedy. “[I]t is the mad sound of that laughter which follows Jack Sawyer down into the darkness between worlds” [BH], which seems to describe todash spaces. Later, when Jack remembers how to flip, he dissolves into a shimmering gray glow like those Roland saw, but he goes farther and the glowing placeholder vanishes as he goes fully to the other side.
13 The wall calendar behind Tower’s desk features a picture of Robert Browning, author of the poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” The shop cat’s name is Sergio, a nod to Sergio Leone, director of spaghetti westerns often featuring Clint Eastwood.
14 “Sombra” means “shadow” in Spanish.
15 He asks Eddie, who is the only one from a when later than his own, whether the Red Sox, King’s favorite baseball team, had won the World Series yet. As of 2003, this team still has not found favor with ka. In fact, mere days before Wolves of the Calla went on sale, the Red Sox once again played the role of ka-mai, losing to their longtime rivals, the Yankees, a mere five outs away from making it to the World Series.
16 Overholser is named for a real Western writer who started publishing in the 1930s. Calvin Tower told Jake his name “sounds like the footloose hero in a Western novel—the guy who blows into Black Fork, Arizona, cleans up the town, and then travels on. Something by Wayne D. Overholser, maybe.” Fictional King made this connection after Roland and Eddie leave him, also mentioning the auspiciously named real-life Western author Ray Hogan.
17 “On his shell he holds the earth / If you want to run and play, / Come along the BEAM today.”
18 The origin of the quotation is a fifteenth-century English mystic named Julian or Juliana of Norwich. In her book Revelations of Divine Love, she wrote, “All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Peter Straub encountered this quote in a novel by Muriel Spark and used it first in The Talisman. [Personal communication.]
19 In From a Buick 8, Sandy Dearborn (Will’s distant relative?) picks up something from the shed, but King hides what it is until it comes into play during a climactic scene.
20 Will you open to us if we open to you? Do you see us for what we are, and accept what we do? Roland later asks these questions of individual people. Even those against confronting the Wolves can agree to these two questions.
21 “Roland stage-dives like Joey Ramone,” Eddie says. The Ramones are one of King’s favorite rock bands. He wrote the liner notes for the 2003 tribute album We’re a Happy Family.
22 Roland realizes later that his ailments reflect the injuries Stephen King will suffer on June 19, 1999.
23 “All God’s Chillun Got Shoes.”
24 By Thomas Wolfe. In his vision of a rose, a key and a door in The Waste Lands, Eddie saw a copy of Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again.
25 Perhaps named for actor Robert Vaughn of The Magnificent Seven.
26 In a rare display of droll humor, Roland tells Eisenhart he might as well stick one of his rifles in the ground. “Maybe it’ll grow something better.”
27 The cassette player also played a song, “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” that made Callahan weep.
28 Thinnies produce a similar effect. In the vacant lot, the phenomenon is extended to the visualization of the phantoms of people’s lives.
29 Another nod to The Lord of the Rings. The Tooks were a well-respected hobbit family. In the Calla, the greedy store owner’s name is almost literal.
30 Roland has already had at least one town rise up against him. However, he’s here to save the people of the Calla. He wasn’t similarly invested in the folks of Tull.
31 Slightman’s full name consists of nineteen characters. While Wayne D. Overholser is named after a real writer, Slightman isn’t, probably because Slightman the Elder is traitorous. The fictional Slightman also wrote science fiction novels about multiple universes under the name Daniel Holmes, which is Odetta’s father’s name.
32 An error on the dust jacket and its small first printing is why ’Salem’s Lot appears among Tower’s collection of rare books, though King isn’t particularly famous in 1977.
33 First mentioned in the revised edition of The Gunslinger. Roland met a taheen looking for a place by that name.
35 Breakers were introduced in “Low Men in Yellow Coats” (Hearts in Atlantis), and play an important part in Black House. Ted Brautigan, who will return in The Dark Tower, is a Breaker.
36 They don’t just seem to be light sabers—they really are Star Wars light sabers. The Wolves’ masks are all Dr. Doom from Marvel Comics. Eddie remembers him as being from Spider-Man but Dr. Doom was primarily a Fantastic Four villain.
37 They are the Harry Potter model. None of the ka-tet recognizes the reference, since the first Harry Potter novel was published after Eddie’s time.
38 Interview with Ben Reese, published on Amazon.com, May 2003.
Chapter 7
SONG OF SUSANNAH (REPRODUCTION)
Terrible surgeons waited to deliver her of her equally terrible chap.1
Except for a short preamble in Calla Bryn Sturgis, Song of Susannah takes place during a twenty-four-hour period, though the action occurs in two different decades: July 9, 1977, and June 1, 1999. Instead of chapters, the book is divided into stanzas, each ending with a “stave” and a “response,” like the Rice Song Roland performed for the people of the Calla.
Only a few hours have elapsed since the ka-tet learned that Susannah and Mia passed through the UNFOUND door, taking the key—Black Thirteen—with them. The group descends from the Doorway Cave to Callahan’s rectory to plan their next steps.
Their main problem is figuring out how to open the door again. Roland has two destinations in mind: Maine in 1977 to complete their property deal with Calvin Tower, and wherever and whenever Susannah went. The Manni—who know the secrets of traveling to other worlds—might be able to use their magic to reopen it on the last two places it accessed.
Concerned that Susannah may deliver her cannibalistic baby at any time, Eddie is eager to get started, but the Manni won’t go to the cave at night. The ka-tet has several clocks running against them—Susannah’s pregnancy, the deadline to close the deal with Calvin Tower and the omnipresent decline of the Beams supporting the Tower.2 The latter concern is always with them, but its immediacy is brought home when a Beamquake rocks the Calla. The Breakers’ work is progressing, and they have successfully disrupted another Beam.3 It’s not the Beam they are following, or else the damage would have been much worse. “The very birds would have fallen flaming from the sky,” Roland says. This brings to mind the earthquake that occurred when Jack Sawyer finally took possession of the Talisman.
Two Beams remain, but time is running out. They have to handle each crisis in its turn. “We can’t win through to the Tower without [Susannah]. For all I know, we can’t win through without Mia’s chap.” Mia will need Susannah’s cooperation to survive in Keystone Earth. “If they can’t find a way to work together now that they’re there, they may die together.”
On the way to the Doorway Cave in the morning, the ka-tet and the Manni pass the battle site, where the Calla-folken have built a funeral pyre of dead Wolves and their mechanical horses. Susannah’s beaten-up chair is nearby, positioned as a tribute to her. The Manni form a ring around the site and pray for success to their god, the Over,4 which Henchick sometimes calls The Force.
In the cave, the Manni use plumb bobs and magnets to gather their force. Their equipment is in boxes covered with stars, moons and odd geometric shapes, reminiscent of the japps, mirks, bews, smims and fouders Dinky Earnshaw used in “Everything’s Eventual.” Jake’s powerful touch focuses their power. He grabs an imaginary hook—like Bill Denborough performing the Ritual of Chüd—and the Manni pull the door open through him.
Roland intended to send Jake and Callahan to 1977 while he and Eddie followed Susannah’s trail. Ka has a different plan. Roland and Eddie are sucked through the door to 1977, where they are caught in an ambush. Jake and Callahan are sent after Susannah, accompanied by Oy, who was supposed to stay behind with the Manni.5 Oy is part of the ka-tet and ka needs him for this part of the mission.
Mia arrives in New York on June 1, 1999, near the once-vacant lot where a skyscraper now stands at 2 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, which the people who work there jokingly call the Black Tower.6 Susannah and Mia struggle for control. That they’re experiencing strong labor pains doesn’t help.
With Mia in charge, their body has white legs, and the longer she’s in control, the more the white coloration spreads up Susannah’s body. If Susannah controls the body too long, though, her legs tend to vanish, as they did during her todash trip to New York.
The tower that currently stands on the corner of Forty-sixth and Second in Manhattan. (Ron J. Martirano, 2004)
Mia materializes in front of an accountant named Trudy Damascus.7 Since she has no shoes, she accosts Trudy, threatening her with an Oriza and demanding footwear.
Trudy is only a minor character whose part is over as soon as she gives her shoes to Mia. However, in the minute between 1:18 P.M. and 1:19 P.M. her entire worldview was pushed off balance. A former doubter of all things supernatural and extraterrestrial, her experience puts her in a league with Donnie Russert, John Cullum’s friend from Vanderbilt who explored the walk-in phenomenon, and Ted Brautigan, who tried to convince people to make use of his psychic skills. They all discover that there are some things that people—especially those like Irene Tassenbaum’s husband, David—just won’t believe even when you can prove it. Trudy eventually learns to stop fighting this entrenched disbelief or trying to counter the mundane explanations others have for Mia’s appearance. She also comes to recognize the sympathetic nods her story receives as being similar to those afforded madwomen to keep from upsetting them.
Outside the Black Tower, she encounters the former acne sufferer whom Father Callahan met twenty years earlier. He tells her that visiting this place cleared up his acne when he was a young man, expecting that she will think he’s crazy. Her strange confrontation with a materializing shoe thief gives them a common bond. Singing still attracts people to the corner, but Trudy senses that something is very wrong. The world is tipping and in danger of toppling completely.
Susannah and Mia figure out what Roland already knew: If they are to survive in New York, they have to cooperate. Mia has full access to Susannah’s memories, but she has no experience living in a place like this, which is almost as foreign to Susannah as it is to Mia.
Susannah creates a mental control room reminiscent of Jonesy’s storage room in Dreamcatcher. Here she can control Emotional Temperature, Labor Force and whether her fetus—the “chap”—is awake or asleep. She reduces her Emotional Temperature to a comfortable level, sets the Chap switch to SLEEP, then wrests the Labor Force setting from nine out of ten all the way down to two. Unbearable pain prevents her from reducing it to one. The control room trembles and quakes under the strain, like Poe’s House of Usher.
Susannah visualizes her baby for the first time and is confused to see that it has Roland’s eyes, not Eddie’s. Before leaving, she adds a microphone that she tries to use to talk to Eddie, but she gets no response.
Her mental Dogan is more than mere visualization. All three ex–New
Yorkers have been changed by their experience. Jake has the touch, Eddie can make powerful talismanic objects like the key, and Susannah can see things hard enough to make them real. However, she isn’t in complete control. Her microphone was supposed to be a Zenith, but it bears the markings of North Central Positronics.
* * *
We’re All Going Crazy
Insanity—or concerns about going insane—is a common theme in the Dark Tower series. The first truly insane creature the ka-tet meets is Shardik the bear, once great Guardian of the Beam. Soon they will learn that most of the ancient sentient machinery has gone mad, including suicidally depressed Blaine the Mono.
Eddie thinks he may be going crazy when Roland enters his mind aboard the flight from the Bahamas. Both Roland and Jake fear for their sanity after Roland inadvertently causes a doubling of time by ki
lling Jack Mort, a sociopath who is clinically insane. Greta Shaw helped Jake “hold up the Tower” of his sanity.
Living in the shadow of the Dark Tower for millennia and coveting its power drives the Crimson King insane. Father Callahan thinks the Crimson King’s eye, trapped in Black Thirteen, is mad. The Doorway Cave goes insane after the Beamquake.
Susannah frequently worries about her sanity, especially when Mia possesses her. Mia, mother of Mordred and daughter of none, goes insane giving birth, even before she realizes the true nature of her son.
And even author-character Stephen King doubts his sanity when the fruits of his imagination appear to him one sunny day in 1977.
* * *
In the now-crimson bag containing Black Thirteen, Susannah finds the object Eddie had noticed while in the Doorway Cave: a scrimshaw turtle—Maturin, a Guardian of the Beam, with a question mark scratched on his shell.8 Like the singing rose, people are drawn to it. Like the key Jake found in the vacant lot, the turtle makes people susceptible to suggestion. It is can-tah, one of the little gods, a term first seen in Desperation. Susannah believes the scrimshaw turtle belongs to the Dark Tower. In a pocket park (Katharine Hepburn Park) next to 2 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, Susannah discovers a statue that also depicts the turtle.
She uses the totem to convince a Swedish businessman9 to rent her a room at the Plaza-Park Hyatt and divests him of nearly $200. Under the sigul’s influence, the hotel receptionist says, “Soon comes the King, he of the Eye. . . . When the King comes and the Tower falls, sai, all such pretty things as yours will be broken. There will be a darkness and nothing but the howl of the discordia and the cries of the can toi.”10