by Vincent, Bev
When Rosie’s husband, Norman, finally confronts Rose Madder, he thinks hers “was the face of a supernally beautiful goddess seen in an illustration hidden within some old and dusty book like a rare flower in a weedy vacant lot.” Readers of the Dark Tower series already know that Jake found a wild rose in a weedy vacant lot, and Roland believes it is the Tower’s representation in Jake, Eddie and Odetta’s world.
Rosie saves a baby as part of her service to Rose Madder. Readers speculated that this infant might be important to the Dark Tower series, perhaps even be Susannah’s child, but neither the child nor Rose Madder ever appear again. The infant does bear something in common with Mordred, son of Mia: Though Rose Madder gave birth to the girl child, she won’t get to raise it and is to turn it over to someone, but who that is, King never specifies.
The book’s other minor ties to the Dark Tower include a framed photograph of Susan Day, the activist decapitated in Insomnia, and Cynthia Smith—one of Rosie’s friends from the Daughters and Sisters shelter for battered women—who goes on to encounter Tak in Desperation. Roland and Susannah traverse a maze beneath the Castle on the Abyss that brings to mind the one Rosie maneuvers to rescue the baby from the Minotaur.
In the fictional journal at the end of Song of Susannah, King calls the book “a real tank-job, at least in the sales sense.” He says he doesn’t like it “because I lost the song.” In On Writing, he described it—and Insomnia—as a “stiff, trying-too-hard” novel.
Desperation and The Regulators
Unlike most of the other nonseries books, it’s only in retrospect that these two novels’ place in the mosaic of the Dark Tower universe becomes clear. Desperation and The Regulators20 share a unique twinning relationship and take place in different realties—different levels of the Tower, as it were.
Desperation, Nevada, is situated among the Desatoya Mountains, the location of Eluria in the novella “The Little Sisters of Eluria.” While Tak can be traced back to the China Pit mines in The Regulators, his appearance is described firsthand in Desperation. He was unleashed upon the world when the miners broke through a wall between dimensions.
From Mia’s description of the creatures in the infinite todash spaces between universes, it seems that Tak is probably such an entity, akin to the beings that occupy the fissures outside Lud and Fedic. That Tak speaks the same language of the unformed used by the Little Sisters and the Manni supports this notion. He may also be related to the monster in It.
The authors of The Stephen King Universe speculate that the Outsider in Bag of Bones, the evil force that enhances Sara Tidwell’s vengeful power, is another of these creatures. Jo Noonan says, “She’s let one of the Outsiders in, and they’re very dangerous.” Since Bag of Bones is set in Derry and in western Maine, both thin places, and Mike Noonan’s summer house, Sara Laughs, reappears in The Dark Tower as Cara Laughs, this may be a valid assumption, although Mike Noonan believes the Outsider is Death.
Some of Tak’s power is invested in small icons called can-tah, the little gods like the turtle sigul hidden in the bowling bag Jake picked up in the vacant lot. Tak is also known as Can Tak, or “big god.” He mentions the can toi, another name for the low men, creatures from between the Prim and the natural world.
In The Regulators Audrey Wyler escapes Tak by taking Seth to her imaginary safe place in Mohonk in 1982. This kind of todash trip in time and space is reminiscent of Mia’s journeys to the allure of the Castle on the Abyss, where she and Susannah find respite from New York.
“The Little Sisters of Eluria”
After accepting an invitation to write a stand-alone Dark Tower novella, King had difficulty coming up with a story, but once he got going he had a hard time keeping it from turning into a novel. In its introduction in Everything’s Eventual, he writes:
I was about to give up when I woke one morning thinking about The Talisman, and the great pavilion where Jack Sawyer first glimpses the Queen of the Territories. . . . I started to visualize that tent in ruins . . . but still filled with whispering women. Ghosts. Maybe vampires. Little Sisters. Nurses of death instead of life. Composing a story from that central image was amazingly difficult. I had lots of space to move around in—Silverberg wanted short novels, not short stories—but it was still hard. [EE]
The Little Sisters, whose tent is currently set up near the Desatoya Mountains where the China Pit mine is located in Desperation, are vampires, Old Ones. They can go about in the daylight, but they cast no shadows.21 Their vocabulary incorporates the language of the unformed used by Tak and by characters in the Dark Tower series. At this early point in his quest, Roland doesn’t recognize the words they speak.
The story also introduces the little doctors, parasitic bugs that facilitate healing. Their presence indicates that the old vampires aren’t far away, hence their nickname “Grandfather fleas.” Mia hears them scuttling beneath the table in the dream banquet hall where she feeds, and Oy kills a few of them at the Dixie Pig in 1999. (Eluria’s saloon is the Bustling Pig.) In Insomnia, Ralph has a vision of similar creatures pouring from his late wife’s head. He decides that they are part of the black aura, the deathbag known as todana that surrounds dying people.
It’s impossible to identify exactly when in Roland’s quest this story occurs. The only indication of a date comes from Eluria’s law office register, where the most recent entry is marked 12/FE/99, a designation Roland doesn’t recognize. All that can be said is that it takes place after the final battle at Jericho Hill and before Roland picks up the man in black’s trail. He has been traveling alone for at least ten months, but probably far longer. He looks at least twenty years older than John Norman, who is a teenager.
Shortly after he enters the abandoned town of Eluria, he is confronted by a threatening group of Slow Mutants. Roland attributes their mutations to their having worked in the radium mines beneath the mountains, but similar creatures worked as overseers near the Crimson King’s Big Combination, and their proximity to this Rube Goldberg–like power-generating station may have caused their transformation. Roland hasn’t grown callous enough to shoot them in cold blood, but he also hasn’t fully developed the gunslinger skills he displays by the time he reaches Tull. He allows a mutant to sneak up behind him and knock him out, a mistake he would never make in later years.22 He thinks ka must be a cruel mistress if his quest to find the Dark Tower is to end at the hands of one such as these.
When Roland wakes up, suspended in a harness inside a vast silk tent, he thinks he’s dead. He hears bugs singing; when they stop, his pain returns. A female voice speaks to him, and the first person he thinks of is Susan Delgado. The Little Sisters, who remind him of Rhea of Cöos, are dressed like nuns and wear the sigul of the Dark Tower, a bloodred rose, on their uniforms. From the outside, their pavilion looks like an aging MASH tent but, like the Black House, it is vast on the inside.
The Sisters are ka-tet. They serve the doctors who in turn serve them by healing patients for the vampires to feed on. All that protects Roland is a religious medallion he picked up from a dead boy in the village square. Either its gold or its reference to God keeps the Sisters at bay. It identifies him as brother to John Norman, the boy in the hospital bed next to him, who is from Delain, sometimes known jestingly as Dragon’s Lair or Liar’s Heaven. All tall tales, including one about the last dragon killed by King Roland, perhaps, were said to originate there.
To keep him from escaping, the Sisters drug Roland’s food and force-feed it to him. The youngest of the six Sisters, Jenna, who is special owing to her bloodline, befriends Roland. Sister Mary, the group’s nominal leader, resents Jenna’s position. Jenna supplies Roland with an herbal remedy to counter the drug’s effects.
After the Sisters get a Slow Mutant to remove John’s protective medallion, Roland is the only human left for them to feed on. Jenna returns Roland’s guns on the night he must escape and brings with her an army of little doctors, held in command by the Dark Bells of her headdress. Roland is glad
to see that Jenna can touch John’s medallion, but it burns her hands and she can only tolerate it briefly. Roland kisses her injured hands, making her cry. Roland hasn’t yet buried his sensitive side.
Jenna decides to leave the other Sisters and go with Roland. She confesses that she has supped of blood but plans to give it up. The other Sisters tell her she’s damned. She says, “If there’s to be damnation, let it be of my choosing, not theirs.” Roland knows a little about damnation himself, and his lessons on that topic are just beginning.
Sister Mary intercepts them outside Eluria. Neither Roland’s weapons nor his hands are any use against her, but ka intervenes on his behalf. A dog with a cross-shaped patch of fur attacks the vampire leader, destroying her.
Roland and Jenna don’t get very far that night because Roland is still weak from his injuries. Jenna tells him the remaining three Sisters will move on; their canniness in this respect accounts for how they have survived for so long. He kisses Jenna, who has never been kissed as a woman before. In his dreams, the cross-marked dog leads him to the Dark Tower.
Jenna underestimates her power to exist free from her group. “Ka was a wheel; it was also a net from which none ever escaped.” Overnight she reverts to primal form: a swarm of little doctors who come together one last time to greet Roland before scattering.
Roland moves on westward, alone, leaving Eluria behind like countless other towns on his path.
The story doesn’t greatly impact the Dark Tower series. Rather, it is a snippet that reveals Roland at a transitional, vulnerable phase. He’s alone, but he doesn’t shun companionship. His skills are still developing, and he’s prone to making potentially lethal mistakes, but he is growing to understand that ka may want him to succeed.
“Low Men in Yellow Coats” (Hearts in Atlantis)
In “Low Men in Yellow Coats,” the opening section of Hearts in Atlantis, King starts tying together the clues he’s been leaving in previous books. The story introduces Breakers—people sought by the Crimson King for some unknown but undoubtedly sinister purpose—into the Dark Tower mythos.23 Ted Brautigan, an escaped super-Breaker, spends most of the novel evading the low men, who want to return him to his task.
When Ted shows up at the boardinghouse where Bobby Garfield and his mother live, he has just escaped from Devar-Toi, the Breakers’ prison. Roland’s old friend Sheemie from Mejis made a hole that Ted passed through, sending him to Connecticut in 1960. Most of Ted’s history isn’t told in this short novel, but he fills in the backstory in The Dark Tower.
Ted was born with extrasensory powers, but for most of his young life he couldn’t find any use for them. He volunteered to help Army Intelligence during World War II, but his talents threatened the hawks that wanted to fight, and he was turned away. Not only is Ted psychic, but he can also enhance the powers of others and can briefly pass on some of his own talent to those he comes in contact with.
He becomes aware that he is being watched by a certain kind of person. Men, mostly, who like loud clothes, rare steak and fast cars painted in colors as garish as their outfits. They wear special hats to block the psychic powers of those they pursue. Their symbols—astrological icons and the occasional red eye—are marked on fences, sidewalks, sometimes near hopscotch grids.24 They think upside-down pictures—especially pet posters—are the height of humor. Some people say their shoes don’t touch the ground.
Their cars look like normal vehicles, but they aren’t—they are as alien as the low men. Bobby believes the cars are alive. “If you tried to steal one, the steering wheel might turn into a snake and strangle you; the seat might turn into a quicksand pool and drown you.”25
Their long coats are reminiscent of the ones men sometimes wear in movies like Gunfight at the O.K. Corral or The Magnificent Seven. They’re regulators, like in the movie with John Payne and Karen Steele—or the novel by Richard Bachman.26
These are the low men who work for the Crimson King. They wear his red eye on their lapels like a badge. They are loyal servants, not very bright, but effective. Their outlandish clothing and vehicles are disguises that cause most people to willfully ignore them. “A little of what’s under the camouflage seeps through, and what’s underneath is ugly.” They are can toi, a cross between the beastlike taheen and humans. They worship humanity, take human names, disguise themselves to look human, and believe they will replace humans after the Tower falls.
Ted becomes a Breaker when he answers a job ad after wandering aimlessly for most of his life. By the time he’s hustled through a doorway to Thunderclap, he realizes the offer of vast amounts of money is a trick. He accepts his new life without much protest. Finally being able to use his powers is like scratching an impossible-to-reach itch. He knows he’s part of the process of breaking something, but at first he doesn’t care to know what.
From a low man he befriends, he discovers what he’s doing and how his very presence is facilitating the universe’s destruction, so he escapes. He shows up at the boardinghouse in Connecticut carrying his worldly possessions in a few mismatched suitcases and brown paper shopping bags with handles.
He befriends Bobby Garfield and hires him to watch for signs of the low men, who he knows will come after him. Bobby turns a blind eye when the signs start appearing because he’s afraid Ted will leave, but Ted already knows that the low men are getting close. He goes into fugues when they approach. His pupils dilate and constrict rapidly. He utters strange sayings, like, “One feels them first at the back of one’s eyes,” and, more tellingly, “All things serve the Beam.” When Bobby touches him, he hears a bell tolling in his head, like todash chimes.
Ted’s talents encompass what Roland calls the touch. Like Jake, Ted is mostly scrupulous about how he uses this power. He tells Bobby, “[F]riends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.” His insight isn’t infallible, though. He never realizes that Bobby doesn’t like root beer.
Ted introduces Bobby to the world of grown-up books, including The Lord of the Flies, which Jake was assigned to read, and Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D. Simak, a book that King acknowledges in the afterword to The Gunslinger as probably the inspiration for his concept of multiple universes.
When the low men finally catch up to Ted, he willingly goes with them to save Bobby’s life. The low men are tempted to bring Bobby along as a gift for the Crimson King, but Ted is smarter than any low man and convinces them that he will cooperate if they don’t harm Bobby. “If I give you what you want instead of forcing you to take it, I may be able to speed things up by fifty years or more. As you say, I’m a Breaker, made for it and born to it. There aren’t many of us. You need every one, and most of all you need me. Because I’m the best.” He also mentions the gunslinger who has reached the borderlands of End-World. The low men are unimpressed.
In the summer of 1965, Bobby gets a message from Ted, an envelope that emits a sweet smell and contains rose petals of the deepest, darkest red he has ever seen. He has one of those moments of understanding, perhaps transmitted to him by Ted. “There are other worlds than this, millions of worlds, all turning on the spindle of the Tower. And then he thought: He got away from them again. He’s free again. The petals left no room for doubt.”
Ted probably sent this letter after he escorted Susannah to Fedic. Bobby senses that Ted is not in this world or time, that he ran in another direction. When last seen in The Dark Tower, Ted and those Breakers willing to follow him were headed toward Calla Bryn Sturgis, where they planned to seek forgiveness for their part in the loss of the village’s children, work as an act of contrition and perhaps someday find a doorway back to their own world.
Bobby is reunited with his childhood girlfriend, Carol Gerber, who was supposedly killed years earlier. She lives under an assumed name and tells Bobby that she’s good at not being seen, a trick she learned from Raymond Fiegler, another incarnation of Randall Flagg, a creature familiar with fringe groups like the one Carol belonged to. Of Ted, Carol says, “For an old guy, he
sure knows how to push the right buttons, doesn’t he?” Bobby responds, “Maybe that’s what a Breaker does.”
“Everything’s Eventual”
When it was first published a few months after Wizard and Glass, few people suspected that “Everything’s Eventual” was somehow related to the Dark Tower, but by the time King and Peter Straub started work on Black House in 2000, King had decided that Dinky Earnshaw, the story’s e-mail assassin protagonist, was a Breaker.27
Dinky is a high school dropout with a new job that seems like a step up from gathering shopping carts at the grocery store or delivering pizza. He has a house stocked with anything he asks for, and he gets an allowance. His situation sounds similar to the way the Breakers are treated in Devar-Toi. The only condition is that he must throw away any money he has left over at the end of each week.
Dinky was watching a Clint Eastwood movie28 when he received a call from the mysterious Mr. Sharpton offering him this rather unique position. Sharpton describes himself as “two parts headhunter, two parts talent scout, and four parts walking, talking destiny.” He knows a lot about Dinky, but the biggest secret he knows is that Dinky was somehow involved in the death of Skipper Brannigan, his old nemesis from the Kart Korral at the grocery store and a friend of a friend of Eddie Dean’s brother, Henry.
Dinky has a rare power involving an intuitive understanding of special, lethal designs and shapes. As a child, he could kill flies by making circles and triangles with his fingers. When the neighbor’s dog terrorized him, he killed it by drawing his special symbols on the sidewalk in chalk, reminiscent of the way low men communicate with each other. The dog didn’t die immediately—the effect was similar to what happened when Atropos, the agent of Random from Insomnia, snipped a victim’s balloon cord.