by Vincent, Bev
Tet Corporation’s final gift is a watch. Engraved upon its gold cover are three objects: a key, a rose and a tower with tiny windows marching in an ascending spiral around its circumference. According to one of Tet’s precogs, when Roland nears the Tower, the watch may stop or begin to run backward. Moses tells Roland that in his world, giving a man a gold watch signifies he’s ready for retirement, but he knows Roland doesn’t plan to retire.
Outside the Manhattan Tower, Roland asks the bumbler what message Jake left for him. Oy tries to speak, but words fail him. Roland presses his forehead against Oy’s, closes his eyes and hears Jake’s voice one last time: “Tell him Eddie says, ‘Watch for Dandelo.’ Don’t forget!” Oy had not forgotten.
Roland says good-bye to Irene at the Dixie Pig. She fared better than most of the people he used and left behind on his way to the Dark Tower and can return to her former life, though she is much changed by her adventure.
Susannah greets Roland in Fedic. She knew someone had died but hadn’t been able to tell whom. Part of her wants to let Roland go on alone for what he has given her and then taken away. Instead, she kisses him, not on the cheek but on the lips. “Let him understand it’s no halfway thing—if I’m in it, I’m in to the end.” She tells him that Sheemie died on the train ride to Fedic.
Before going through the doorway toward Calla Bryn Sturgis, the Breakers used their powers to map out the labyrinth beneath the castle and find the passage Roland and Susannah need to get past the chasm beyond the outer walls.21 The Breakers warn of creatures in the fissure that have been tunneling the catacombs for a long time and are close to breaking through. These beasts are neither for the Crimson King nor against him; they’re only for themselves.
In Sayre’s office, Susannah and Roland find surveillance files containing photographs of Jake and Eddie that are too painful to look at. They also see a painting signed by Patrick Danville depicting Mordred beside Llamrie, Arthur Eld’s horse, which is dead. Though Roland doesn’t know it yet, this painting—and another featuring the Dark Tower that can have been done only by someone who has seen it—comes from the future and is inspired by Patrick’s experiences after he joins Roland and Susannah. The portrait of Llamrie symbolizes how Mordred, the last of the line of Eld, died partly because he ate Dandelo’s dead horse.
Narrow windows rise in an ascending spiral around it. At the top of the 600-foot tower is an oriel window of many colors, each corresponding to one of the Wizard’s Glasses. The innermost circle but one was the pink of Rhea’s ball. The center was the dead ebony of Black Thirteen. Outside the barrel of the tower were balconies encircled with waist-high wrought-iron railings. On the second of these was a blob of red and three tiny blobs of white: A face that was too small to see, and a pair of upraised hands. The Crimson King, locked out of the only thing he ever wanted.
“The room behind that window is where I would go,” Roland says, indicating the multicolored oriel window at the top, similar to the window in his nursery in Gilead. “That is where my quest ends.” He reassures Susannah that he won’t be alone, that she and Oy will help him deal with the Crimson King and climb the stairs with him to the room at the top. The words feel like a lie to both of them.
They stock up on provisions, including Sterno for fires, and Roland rigs a set of straps so he can carry Susannah. Oy leads them to the passage the Breakers found. Something big—either from the fissure or todash space—follows them. When the lights fail, it closes the gap in a scene reminiscent of Jake’s passage through the tunnel near the Oatley Tap in The Talisman. Susannah uses Sterno torches to hold the beast at bay while Roland runs in the darkness with her strapped to his shoulders, Oy keeping pace at their side. Eventually, they emerge into the cold land east of Fedic, where they find a sign saying THIS CHECKPOINT IS CLOSED. FOREVER.
Though they have food for about a month and water, they don’t have heavy clothing. Past this barren land there will be animals to kill for their hides, but that is weeks away and they are in for a very hard stretch of energy-draining cold. It would have taken very little—a sweater and gloves—to make them comfortable, but even the blankets in Fedic had rotted to almost nothing.
They set out along the Path of the Beam again, mother and father, but never husband and wife, with their ill-begotten son trailing behind.
The village in the shadow of the Crimson King’s castle is deserted, the houses haunted. No wood will burn for them because this is “his place, still his even though he’s moved on. Everything here hates us.” The castle is off the Path of the Beam, but Roland wants to make sure the Crimson King is really gone and he thinks that they may also find a way to trap Mordred. They haven’t seen the red pulsing that Susannah observed from the ramparts of Castle Discordia. Roland says it probably died when they put an end to the Breakers’ work. The Forge of the King has gone out. This may also be the Big Combination, the Crimson King’s child-powered energy plant, extinguished by Ty Marshall at the end of Black House.
Roland prepares for whatever traps the Crimson King may have left for them at his castle. Before victory comes temptation, and the greater the victory to win, the greater the temptation to withstand. He instructs Susannah to let him do the talking.
A banner welcomes them by name. In the castle’s forecourt, two men who look like 1977 versions of Stephen King greet them. A third hangs back, staying on the far side of a dead-line set by the Crimson King.22 The polite one calls himself Feemalo, the ego. The rude one is Fumalo, the id, and the one behind is the superego, Fimalo. Their names bring to mind “Jack and the Beanstalk” and also King Lear, where “Fie, foh, and fom, I smell the blood of a British man” is the line after “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Wayne Overholser also says, “Fee fi fo fum” in the Calla when talking about how the roont children grew into giants.
The scene is also reminiscent of Tweedledum and Tweedledee from Through the Looking-Glass, which Susannah underscores by reciting the line “Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow but no jam today.” The odd twins in that book warn Alice against awakening the Red King, who is dreaming about her. If the king should awake, they say, Alice would cease to exist, putting the girl in similar company to Roland and Susannah, who are the living dreams of Stephen King, a representation of whom stands before them.
Fumalo and Feemalo tell Roland that after the Crimson King witnessed the ka-tet’s victory against the Wolves, he forced everyone in the castle to take poison—recalling the Jonestown massacre, which is mentioned earlier—and then killed himself with a spoon, fulfilling an ancient prophecy familiar to Roland, and putting himself beyond death. He’s now trapped on one of the Tower’s balconies. In a fit of rage, he scorched the red mark from his heel and without a sigul of Eld he can’t get back in. However, he could take Roland’s guns from him and use them to reenter the Tower. From there he could rule, but he’d prefer to bring the Tower down, which he can possibly do, Beams or no Beams. Fimalo and Feemalo remind Roland that no prophecy demands he go beyond this point. He completed his task by saving the Beams and Stephen King, thereby preserving the Tower. If he continues, he goes outside ka and risks endangering the Tower again by providing the Crimson King what he needs to breach it.
When Roland makes it clear that he plans to go on, they offer food and clothing. The journey will take months through the deadly cold of Empathica. Though sorely tempted, Susannah resists their offer, remembering Roland’s warning. “She never would have suspected that her life’s greatest temptation would be nothing more than a cable-knit fisherman’s sweater.”
The provisions in the baskets are an illusion. Feemalo and Fumalo reach inside for guns, but Roland and Susannah shoot them before they raise their weapons. Fimalo transforms into a dying old man who served as the Crimson King’s Minister of State under the name Rando Thoughtful.23 Roland tells Thoughtful to give Mordred a message. “If he stays back he may live awhile yet with his dreams of revenge . . . although what I’ve done to him requiring his vengeance, I know not. And tell him
that if he comes forward, I’ll kill him as I intend to kill his red father.”
Roland’s watch is losing a few minutes each day. Susannah hopes that his eagerness to complete his quest won’t make him careless. If he makes the right mistake at the wrong moment, neither of them will see the Dark Tower. Back on the Path of the Beam, they find wood that will burn, and are warm for the first time since Fedic. Keeping pace behind them, Mordred is so cold that he lines his mouth with straw to keep them from hearing his teeth chatter. Only hatred stops him from turning back to his red father’s castle.
The poisoned lands cause serious health problems for those who linger or pass through. The Breakers and minders in Devar-Toi had severe acne problems. Roland develops a dry, harsh cough. A cancerous tumor grows beside Susannah’s mouth. As Detta, she asks Roland to remove it, but he advises her to wait. Ironically, this cancer will provide her with the clue she needs to solve the riddle of how to get back to Eddie.
After several nights without fire, Roland and Oy corral a herd of deer out of the woods. Roland and Susannah kill ten, from which they make food, clothing and medicine that cures Roland’s cough. Roland isn’t much of a tailor,24 so Susannah resews his stitches. Each of them now has a leather vest, a pair of leggings, a coat and a pair of mittens.
Susannah cuts weeks from their uphill struggle through the snowfields by making Roland a pair of snowshoes. She’s pleased by her contribution, and can let Roland pull her along on a travois—like he had once been pulled along the beach—without feeling too much guilt. Still, it takes them three weeks to crest the hill and start downward again. She dreams nightly about Eddie and Jake. Eddie tells her she must let Roland go on alone. Jake reminds her to beware of Dandelo.
Mordred falls farther and farther behind, struggling to eat, to catch up and to stay warm.
They reach two recently plowed roads, the intersection of Odd Lane and Tower Road. One of the cottages clustered nearby looks lived-in. Susannah wants to keep going, but Roland feels obligated to warn whomever lives there about Mordred, who will not pass by.
An old man, introducing himself as Joe Collins, comes out to greet them. If Collins looks decrepit, his horse, Lippy,25 blind in both eyes and malnourished, is the ugliest quadruped Susannah has ever seen. Some of her good cheer melts away at the sight of it.
Collins has an ice machine, a hot-air furnace and electricity thanks to a generator. A robot changes the propane tanks periodically. He’s the first person they’ve met since Ben Slightman who possesses modern conveniences, a potential warning sign Roland and Susannah overlook. As long ago as the days of Mejis, Roland found out that people with access to luxuries like ice should not be trusted because they have likely traded their souls for them.
Collins invites them to take cover in his house from the approaching blizzard. He has lived at Odd Lane for nearly seventeen years. The Polaroid photograph of the Dark Tower tacked haphazardly to the wall seems to Susannah almost sacrilegious. Roland is paralyzed with awe. Collins saw the Tower as recently as two years ago. Even walking, Roland can reach it in a few weeks.
Susannah is suspicious of inconsistencies in the story Collins tells them during dinner. He denies that the white lands are known as Empathica. She doubts much of his tale about how he came to live in this cottage, and she thinks she hears something crying. The only part she believes is when he tells about hiding in the cellar when the Crimson King blazed past in his own portable storm on his final pilgrimage to the Dark Tower six months earlier. He says he felt like “potential snack food.” Time is beyond relative in Mid-World, so it’s not clear what this six-month time span corresponds to for Roland. It hasn’t been six months since the liberation of Algul Siento.
Roland seems unaware anything is wrong. He encourages Collins to tell them jokes from his old stand-up routine and doesn’t seem to mind Collins’s lowbrow sense of humor, which is barely better than Eddie’s. Soon Roland and Susannah are laughing uncontrollably. The sore beside Susannah’s mouth starts bleeding, so she retreats to the bathroom to get a styptic pencil and Band-Aids. Here, she finds a note that says, RELAX! HERE COMES THE DEUS EX MACHINA! The message urges her to think about Odd Lane and then look for something the note’s author left her in the medicine cabinet.
She rearranges the letters in “Odd Lane” to get “Dandelo,” which Eddie and Jake had warned them about. In the living room, Roland is almost choking with laughter. Collins, feeding off their emotions, has grown almost twenty years younger in the few minutes she’s been out of the room.
Before she shoots Dandelo, the emotional vampire’s face changes into that of a psychotic clown. King seems to be leaving hints that connect the Dark Tower series and It. Pennywise often presented himself as a clown, and a member of the ka-tet that fought It was called Stutterin’ Bill, the same name as the robot who fills Collins’s propane tanks. The encounter with Dandelo is reminiscent of Beverly Marsh’s experience with Pennywise. Mrs. Kersh—Pennywise in disguise—claimed that her father, Bob Gray, one of It’s aliases, loved his jokes. It came from a place outside the Earth, perhaps in one of the todash spaces between universes. (Henry Bowers thinks that It “came from the spaces between the stars.”)
Pennywise and Dandelo both feed on emotions—fear and imagination. Dandelo, however, doesn’t seem to have an existence that extends into the multiverse, like Pennywise did. To that extent, It is more akin to Tak and, possibly, the Crimson King, who disappeared into the deadlights after being bested by Ralph Roberts in Insomnia. In 1977, King told Roland and Eddie, “When I open my eyes to your world, he [the Crimson King] sees me. . . . It.”
Roland falls to his knees and won’t get up until Susannah forgives him for being taken in. Inside the medicine cabinet, they find an envelope addressed to them. The note calls the gunslinger Childe Roland, an ancient, formal term Roland says describes a knight—or a gunslinger—on a quest. “We never used it among ourselves, for it means holy, chosen by ka. We never liked to think of ourselves in such terms.” The message says, “You saved my life. I’ve saved yours. All debts are paid.”
They also find a photocopy of Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” with several stanzas circled26 depicting the liar, set with his staff to waylay travelers. Susannah realizes that this poem was King’s inspiration. Stanza XVI tells of how Cuthbert and Roland fell out over Susan Delgado. They wonder if Browning is also in some way responsible for their existence since the poet wrote about the gunslinger a century before King wrote the Dark Tower series. Was Browning an earlier channel for Gan?
Dandelo’s main supply of emotional energy was Patrick Danville, whom Roland and Susannah find in the cellar. The boy’s mind is terribly damaged. Dandelo fed him barely enough to stay alive, while consuming his laughter, tears and fears several times a week.
Unwilling to stay in the house—which degrades after Dandelo dies—they hole up in the barn for three days until the blizzard passes. Stutterin’ Bill clears the road after the storm and gives them a ride to Federal Outpost 19, which is as far as his programming will let him go. Some of the monitors in the outpost still work, but the one that used to show the Tower has gone out. “I don’t think the Red King liked being on television,” Bill says.
Dandelo had forbidden Bill from repairing the computer glitch that caused him to stutter; Roland gives him permission to fix it. Behind the outpost, Bill shows them vehicles that could carry them the last hundred miles of their journey, but Roland wants to walk. “I’m not ready to be there yet. . . . I need a little more time to prepare my mind and my heart. Mayhap even my soul.” Now that the Tower is within his grasp, he’s lost a little of the imperative that has driven him for a thousand years. When he thought Walter was within his grasp at the way station, he ran to confront him. Now he needs more time. The temptation to run will come upon him again soon, though.
They take a pull-cart for their provisions and a battery-powered vehicle for Susannah. Five days at a comfortable pace will get them to the Tower
. He’d like to arrive around sunset if possible, for that’s when he’s always seen it in his dreams.
Susannah suffers frequent bouts of weeping. Only Roland is meant to reach the Tower, and she doesn’t know what is to become of her, Patrick and Oy. She dreams about Eddie and Jake waiting for her in New York, trying to tell her something. She sees product brands that tell her they aren’t in Keystone Earth, and she begins to realize that this is where she needs to go.27 Given her power to imagine things and have them manifest, it is possible that her repeated dreams of Christmas in Central Park turn this fantasy into her future reality.
Her dream also features a door decorated with two crossed pencils with the erasers cut off and the words THE ARTIST, a clue that Patrick is involved. In Dandelo’s pantry, Roland found pencils like these. Dandelo removed the erasers because Patrick’s drawings make things real and unreal, although he doesn’t know it.
She needs to find this door before she sees any part of the Tower, or her choice between it and the door will be harder. She’s worried that Eddie won’t know her, or that he’ll turn out to be a junkie. Even worse, she worries that Eddie will recognize her but deny it because that would be easier than trying to deal with how they could possibly know each other.
Her way to the door is through Patrick. Susannah tests her theory by having him erase the cancerous sore beside her mouth in his portrait of her. Roland had drawn her, Eddie and Jake. Now Patrick has drawn her, too.
Patrick draws a doorway to her specifications and copies onto it the symbols she dreamt. If he doesn’t get these siguls exactly right, the door will either not open or open some place she doesn’t want to go. When Roland shows Patrick how to put the doorway into the context of their surroundings, it materializes before them. Susannah invites Patrick to come with her but he, like the Breakers, is a misfit, afraid of going someplace new.