by Vincent, Bev
King tells Roland and Eddie that Susannah’s baby will kill her if they don’t reach her in time and that Black Thirteen must be destroyed. If it wakes, it will become the most dangerous thing in the universe. “Take the ball to the double Tower,” he says.28 Since King hasn’t written this part of the story yet, this advice must come from deep within him, via ka.
He tells Roland he is allowed to send a letter to himself, perhaps even a small package, but only once. The message he chooses to convey is another key, which he sends to Jake. Roland wakes King from his hypnotic trance with an order to forget everything except in the depths of his mind.
CALLAHAN, JAKE AND OY pursue Mia’s trail. In New York, they encounter Reverend Earl Harrigan, Henchick’s twin and pastor of the Church of the Holy God-Bomb. He tells them that Susannah, who communicated with him via her Dogan microphone, got into a taxi less than half an hour ago. They visit the skyscraper on the site of the former vacant lot and discover the wild rose is still there in a flower garden in the lobby, behind velvet ropes where it receives sun through the building’s tall windows. Many of those who pass it on their way to work weep. A sign says GIVEN BY THE TET CORPORATION, IN HONOR OF THE BEAM FAMILY, AND IN MEMORY OF GILEAD.
Jake checks for messages at the hotel where Susannah stayed and is given the note King sent upon emerging from Roland’s hypnotic trance. The writing on the envelope is in half-script and half-printing.29 Inside the envelope is a hotel card key and a message that begins, “This is the truth,” echoing Jake’s essay.
Jake and Callahan realize Black Thirteen is still in Susannah’s room, and the Crimson King’s men will come back for it when Mia shows up without it. “I thought I was rid of it,” Callahan says. “Some bad pennies just keep turning up.” The card key gets them into Mia’s room—they don’t have any doubt which room is hers—and Jake guesses the safe combination. He arms himself with Orizas, which he learned to use in the Calla. The Wizard’s Glass tries to get Callahan to kill Jake. Jake, Callahan, Oy and a passing maid all invoke the name of God to quiet it. Their victory here renews Callahan’s faith and emboldens him for their coming mission.
Callahan steals the maid’s tip money and they take a taxi to a building with the safest storage in New York—the “double Tower.” They purchase enough tokens to store Black Thirteen indefinitely in a basement locker of the World Trade Center.30 Jake jokes that the locker is safe unless “the building falls down on top of it.” Without realizing it, Jake and Callahan have solved the problem of Black Thirteen. “Even a ball filled with deep magic wouldn’t be much good underneath a hundred and ten stories of concrete and steel.”
Callahan worries that their enemies at the Dixie Pig might pick the location of the locker from their minds. “It might be a bad idea for us to be taken alive.” Both Jake and Callahan believe this is their night to die. Callahan hears Jake’s last rites before they enter the restaurant.
Jake lays out a general plan of attack for their assault. Like the man who trained him, he knows to allow room for improvisation. He gives Callahan his father’s Ruger and arms himself with Orizas, but Oy finds another weapon that will help them immeasurably in the Dixie Pig: the scrimshaw turtle talisman that Susannah left behind in the gutter while Mia was distracted.
A FORTUITOUS TRAFFIC JAM caused by a bus—in other words, an event orchestrated by ka—prompts Mia’s taxi driver to drop her off a block short of the Dixie Pig. On the street, she encounters a singer performing “Man of Constant Sorrow,” a song Susannah associates with her days of social activism and that she sang for the people of the Calla. After all she’s been through with Roland, Susannah knows that hearing that song can’t be a coincidence. Mia, without Susannah’s influence, offers the man $50 to play it again. The song transports Susannah back to Odetta’s experiences in Oxford, Mississippi, and Mia feels their glorious hope and love, exalted by the simplicity of what they believe.
Mia sees how deeply she’s been misled when she asks Susannah what her mother was like. Susannah shows her a simple scene of coming home from school to find her mother waiting with warm gingerbread in the oven. From that moment, Mia understands what motherhood could be if allowed to run its course uninterrupted. “I agreed to mortality but I missed most of what makes the short-time life worthwhile, haven’t I?” (“Short-Timers” is how immortals describe mortals, a term used by the bald docs in Insomnia and by the ghosts in Kingdom Hospital. The creature in It also comments on the short lives mortals lived.)
During Mia’s momentary distraction, Susannah throws the scrimshaw turtle into the gutter, entrusting ka to get it to the ka-tet. Detta—Susannah’s other demon—emerges to suggest that they might use Mia’s mothering instinct to turn her into an ally.
Susannah’s attempts to keep her labor under control reach their limits. The system overloads. She flips the Chap switch from ASLEEP to AWAKE, but it’s not enough. The only solution is to increase the Labor Force, going all the way to ten, sending Mia into full labor.
Inside the Dixie Pig, the smell of roasting meat greets them. The restaurant is full of low men and women, and vampires. Sayre is there, too, with a hole in his forehead, looking like he had been shot at close range. Blood swims there but never overflows the “wound.” He claps for Mia and the others join in, crying, “Hile, Mia!” and “Hile, Mother.” Strange bugs scamper beneath the table, echoing the cheer in bug language that Mia hears in her head.
Detta takes momentary control and pulls the masks from a low woman. Beneath, she has the face of a red rat with yellow teeth growing up the outside of her cheeks. Detta tries to stay in charge, but Mia is stronger and takes over again.
Sayre humiliates Mia in front of his minions, forcing her to lick his boots.31 “You have been an excellent custodian . . . but we must also remember that it was Roland of Gilead’s gilly [that is, Susannah] who actually bred the child.”
Behind a tapestry, she sees a dozen of the man/woman-beast hybrids called taheen dining on the roasting corpse of a human baby. The restaurant’s specialty is “long pork,” a euphemism for roasted human flesh. The kitchen is a twin of the one from Castle Discordia where Mia fed in her dreams.
Mia and Susannah rendezvous briefly on the castle ramparts.32 Mia finally accepts that she’s been misled. Her epiphany is reminiscent of Harold Lauder’s eleventh-hour realization that Flagg had misled him in The Stand. She begs Susannah to help her get away with her chap, even if it means escaping into the todash darkness. Wandering forever in darkness with her son by her side is better than the alternative. “And if there’s no way for us to be free,” Mia says, “kill us.”
As they pass through a doorway between New York and Fedic, Susannah overhears the password. Though it is in a strange language, she knows she could repeat it. She is taken to a room in the Fedic Dogan filled with hospital beds, one of which is occupied by Mia in her corporeal form and is covered with the bugs Susannah saw in the Dixie Pig. These are the same parasitic little doctors used by the Little Sisters of Eluria to heal their patients.
Susannah and Mia are connected by something straight out of Star Trek. The link is required to transfer the fetus to Mia, so she can accomplish the final labor and push the baby out. After Mia delivers, neither Susannah nor Mia will be needed. Susannah is slated to appear on the menu at the Dixie Pig. She screams in pain as the baby is transmitted to Mia to be born. “And on the wings of that song, Mordred Deschain, son of Roland (and one other, o can you say Discordia), came into the world.”
THE STORY ENDS here. The book, though, contains a coda: Stephen King’s journal from three days after he meets Roland and Eddie through the date of his accident, less than three weeks after Mia gives birth to Mordred.
He records the process of returning to work on the Dark Tower series and the journey to publication of the constituent stories followed by The Gunslinger. Nine years after Roland and Eddie’s visit, he decides to give Roland some friends and starts The Drawing of the Three. “It seems to me that a lot of the other things
I’ve written (especially It) are like ‘practice shots’ for this story.” He decides it’s a good book, but “in many ways it seems like I didn’t write the damn thing at all, that it just flowed out of me . . . the wind blows, the cradle rocks, and sometimes it seems to me that none of this stuff is mine, that I’m nothing but Roland of Gilead’s fucking secretary.”
Two years later, he quits drinking, and a couple of years after that he gets a dozen roses for his birthday and hears the call to start The Waste Lands. There are hardly any strikeouts or retakes. Other than a few continuity glitches, the huge manuscript is clean. He expresses concern over Susannah’s pregnancy, but reassures himself that he won’t have to deal with that for another book or two. He knows the fans are going to howl at the cliff-hanger ending. The book feels like the high point of his make-believe life, perhaps even better than The Stand.
He gets fan mail from a seventy-six-year-old cancer victim who asks how the series will end. He feels bad because he can’t answer her. “I have no more idea what’s inside that damned Tower than . . . well, than Oy does! . . . The wind blows and the story comes. Then it stops blowing, and all I can do is wait, the same as you. . . . They think I’m in charge, every one of them from the smartest of the critics to the most mentally challenged reader. And that’s a real hoot. Because I’m not.”
The coda takes readers through his work on Wizard and Glass and discusses arguments he has with his wife about the dangers of his long walks along the narrow country roads near their lake house. He’s pleased to see Flagg show up again and muses that he may turn out to be Walter, Roland’s old nemesis. “I can see now how to a greater or lesser degree, every story I’ve ever written is about this story. . . . Writing this story is the one that always feels like coming home.”
But it also feels dangerous. He is aware of some anticreative force to which he’s more vulnerable when he’s working on this series. He’s worried he might die of a heart attack while writing, and he doesn’t want to leave behind an unfinished work.33 “The Dark Tower is my uberstory, no question about that.”
He sees the series’ influence in other books. In mid-1999, though he is between Dark Tower books, he dreams more and more about baby Mordred, Discordia and June 19, 1999. He and Tabby continue to argue again about his walking route. The coda ends with a clipping from the Portland Telegram announcing King’s accident on June 19, 1999. In this timeline, King succumbs to his injuries.34
While characters may have encountered their own creator in fiction before, the Dark Tower series may be the first to explore the implications of what happens to characters if their creator dies before they reach the end of their story.
King remarked in 1994 that he knew the general layout of the rest of the series; he said in a personal communication that he had an accident in mind for his fictional counterpart, but nothing as dramatic as what would befall him five years later.35 Reality, which is often stranger than fiction, stepped in and provided King with unexpected material that would dramatically influence his magnum opus.
Everyone faces mortality. Everyone has work they want to accomplish before they reach the clearing at the end of the path. By inserting himself and his accident into the series, King acknowledges how important finishing Roland’s quest is to him.
ENDNOTES
1 Unless otherwise specified, all quotes in this chapter come from Song of Susannah.
2 They will discover before long that they have another deadline in 1999, but the only vague notion Roland has of that situation is his worsening arthritis.
3 The Beam of the Wolf and Elephant, according to Pimli Prentiss in The Dark Tower. Roland believes it might be the Fish-Rat Beam.
4 Part of their prayer includes “Over-can-tah,” bringing to mind the language of the unformed and Tak.
5 Oy dutifully accepted this plan but cried tears of sorrow at the thought of being separated from Jake.
6 This building really exists and is somewhat as King describes it, though it is only sixteen stories tall instead of the seventy to eighty stories in The Dark Tower. The nearby pocket park with the turtle statue also exists in this region of New York, known as Turtle Bay.
7 Perhaps a symbolic name. Saul had a strange encounter on the road to Damascus that changed his life. Trudy works for Guttenberg, Furth, and Patel. Robin Furth is King’s research assistant. Surendra and Geeta Patel are friends to whom From a Buick 8 was dedicated.
8 Named for Stephen Maturin, a character in seafaring novels by Patrick O’Brian. Maturin describes a fictitious species of turtle that he discovers in the South Pacific. Jack Aubrey, for whom Testudo (“tortoise” in Latin) aubreii was named, is Maturin’s friend. According to an e-mail message from King’s office posted at Anthony Schwethelm’s Dark Tower Compendium Web site, King has a pet turtle named Maturin that he had recently discovered is actually female.
9 He calls the talisman skölpadda, the Swedish word for turtle.
10 Susannah uses the turtle to convince the receptionist that an Oriza is actually her driver’s license, reminiscent of Andy McGee “pushing” a cabbie to believe a one-dollar bill is $500 in Firestarter. Jack Sawyer makes similar use of a posy of white blossoms Speedy gave him in Black House. The can toi, a term also applied to the low men, are Tak’s children of the desert in Desperation.
11 This demon-spawned child is reminiscent of “Little Brother” from Kingdom II by Lars von Trier, the Danish miniseries that King adapted as Kingdom Hospital in 2004. His father was a demon, and he grew abnormally fast both in utero and after. “Little Brother” refused to accept his demonic nature, unlike Mordred, who will embrace it. King, however, said that he had only seen the first part of von Trier’s series, which ends with the demonic baby’s birth. Nevertheless, the name Mordred Wilder is seen on the cover of a book, Mia Dean is paged to the maternity ward and numbers 19 and 99 appear regularly on the show. In a private communication, King referred to Antubis, the program’s anteater guardian, as Roland’s old trailmate. Antubis’s name is a pun on the Egyptian god of the dead, Anubis.
12 Echoing a line by Steve McQueen’s character, Vin, in The Magnificent Seven. Roland does want to save the Tower, but having done so, he carries on beyond what is required of him by ka. Not everything Mia says can be believed. When the Breakers are freed, the Beams start to heal themselves and regenerate those that were broken.
13 Eddie laments losing a lock of Susannah’s hair. Roland says their guns are all they need.
14 In the afterword to Wizard and Glass, he wrote, “All may not live to reach the Tower.”
15 When Eddie meets King, he asks his future creator where Co-Op City is. King erroneously says Brooklyn. Eddie says, “I refuse to believe that I was raised in Brooklyn simply because of some writer’s mistake, something that will eventually be fixed in the second draft.”
16 King’s Danse Macabre closes with this passage:
We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other . . . except through faith. That we retain our sanity in the face of these simple yet blinding mysteries is nearly divine. That we may turn the powerful intuition of our maginations upon them and regard them in this glass of dreams—that we may, however timidly, place our hands within the hole which opens at the center of the column of truth—that is . . . well, it’s magic, isn’t it?
17 A similar scene appears in “Low Men in Yellow Coats” when Ted Brautigan helps replace Carol’s dislocated shoulder. “Pain rises from its source to the brain . . . but you’ll catch most of it in your mouth as it rises.” [HA]
18 Eddie calls the scene “Pulling the Bullet,” a play on “Riding the Bullet,” perhaps.
19 Tower was optimistic. First editions of ’Salem’s Lot typically sell for $750 to $1,500, depending on condition.
20 After Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” This plague was probably caused by the Crimson King, hence its name. “Some folks said something had been opened in the castle,
some jar of demonstuff that should have been left shut forever,” Mia says.
21 King isn’t sure he’s thought of the “Gilead” part yet, but acknowledges that it is good. “There is no balm in Gilead” (a misquote).
22 Though he hasn’t written The Dark Half yet, this echoes Thad Beaumont’s fear of one of his own creations, a pseudonym.
23 King says in the introduction to The Gunslinger that he did indeed lose an early outline, but it “probably wasn’t worth a tin shit anyway.”
24 King takes some liberties with history. The final sections of The Gunslinger weren’t written until 1979 or 1980.
25 They also turn up in Dreamcatcher, when the aliens recite streams of prime numbers.
26 King claims Gan is the creative force in Hindu mythology. Gan made the world and tipped it with his finger, setting it rolling, thereby creating time. Note the syllable’s presence in Dogan and Harrigan.
27 Roland thinks tobacco prolongs life. It keeps away ill-sick vapors and dangerous insects. Since they are going ahead to 1999, they can’t come back to check on him after today. In The Dark Tower, Roland and Eddie find a solution to this dilemma.
28 That is, the World Trade Center. Jake and Callahan will do this without benefit of King’s advice.
29 This is King’s normal writing hand, as seen in the reproduction ledgers Scribner used to promote Dreamcatcher.
30 In the afterword, King writes, “[T]o the best of my knowledge, there were never coin-op storage lockers in the World Trade Center.”
31 In Mejis, Big Coffin Hunter Roy Depape made Sheemie Ruiz do the same thing.
32 The castle allure is Mia’s safe place, a retreat reminiscent of the Mohonk hotel used by Audrey in The Regulators.