by Vincent, Bev
Sharpton, who works for Trans Corporation, a subsidiary of North Central Positronics, employs a group of people—low men—who look for people like Dinky with extrasensory talents: precogs, postcogs, people with telepathy, pyrokinesis or telempathy. “They can actually see fellows and gals like you, Dink, the way certain satellites in space can see nuclear piles and power-plants. . . . They crisscross the country . . . looking for that bright yellow glow. Looking for matchheads in the darkness.” Sharpton estimates that there are no more than a few thousand “trannies” in the entire world. He tells Dinky he wants to help him sharpen and focus his talent and use it for the betterment of mankind. Like Richard Sayre, Sharpton is a convincing liar.
Sharpton sends Dinky to Peoria, where he is tested and programmed for his new task, but no one tells him what his work is. He’s set up in a nice house with its fringe benefits and $70-a-week allowance. “There’s not a whole lot of cash in it, at least to begin with, but there’s a lot of satisfaction,” Sharpton tells him. When Ted and Dinky compare notes in Devar-Toi, they decide the Crimson King is trying to bring about the end of creation on the budget plan.
He’s left to his own devices, cut off from friends and family who might ask awkward questions. One night, his mission comes to him in a dream. His computer contains all the tools he needs: a folder with every mystical, magical symbol he’s ever imagined and thousands more. A modem connects him to a database of potential targets. He devises and sends special e-mail messages—sometimes he has to resort to regular mail—only mildly curious about what happens to the intended recipients.
One day, he accidentally sees a story about one of his victims, a man who committed suicide. Dinky starts feeling a little paranoid about his job.29 After doing research on a library computer, he realizes he’s a serial murderer, but he doesn’t stop. Like Ted Brautigan, he’s had an itch all his life that he’s finally able to scratch. He rationalizes that his watchers would be suspicious if his work habits changed.
Someone intervenes to help him, but the story doesn’t reveal who. Perhaps it is ka, or Stephen King, assisting his creation. Dinky composes one of his “eventual” e-mail message for Sharpton. The special word he adds to make it work is “Excalibur,” another subtle link to the Dark Tower. It’s the name of Arthur Eld’s sword, from which Roland’s guns are made. After he kills Sharpton he tries to run away, but the low men catch him and take him to Devar-Toi.
The Talisman and Black House
The Talisman’s ties to the Dark Tower series are tenuous. The Territories, where Jack Sawyer travels when he’s not in America, are a borderland near Mid-World, a place akin to the region where the Callas are located. The primary conceptual relationship between The Talisman and the Dark Tower is the notion of twins, as mentioned previously.
Peter Straub calls The Talisman “all but” a Dark Tower book.30 The Agincourt, the Black Hotel in California that contains the Talisman, is an axis of all universes and could be the Dark Tower’s representation in that reality. Jack is one of a few people who can enter it because he is single natured. His equivalent (Twinner) in every other reality except his own has died.
Twins aren’t as important to Black House as they are to The Talisman. Parkus tells Jack Sawyer, “You’ve got to get that idea out of your mind.” The Crimson King’s search for Breakers drives the plot of Black House, as in “Low Men in Yellow Coats.” It was Straub’s idea to incorporate the Dark Tower mythos into Black House. “One of the reasons [I suggested it] is that I wanted to know what that stuff was. I had no idea what a ‘Breaker’ was, what the Tower was, what the Crimson King was.”31
When it comes to reaping Breakers, the Crimson King is indiscriminate. He casts a wide net for children, knowing that a small percentage of those he catches have the talent he needs. Those who don’t qualify are enslaved to run the Big Combination, an enormous skyscraper reaching into the clouds and spanning miles in each direction that has consumed billions of children over thousands of years, his terrible power source in End-World. It appears to fuel evil—despots, pedophiles, tyrants and torturers—in the great numberless string of universes.
The Crimson King uses minions like the low men or Ed Deepneau when he wants to operate in America. In Black House, his End-World henchman, Mr. Munshun, possesses an aged serial killer named Charles Burnside. Burnside thinks of the Big Combination as an engine that turns wheels that turn bigger wheels that power engines of destruction. Roland knows it as An-tak, the King’s Forge, and it is responsible for the red glow Susannah sees in the distance from the ramparts of Castle Discordia. Burnside worries that it may be hell itself. “It runs on blood and terror and never takes a day off.”
Jack Sawyer, now a grown man, has forgotten everything that happened to him twenty years ago during his quest to find the Talisman that saved his mother’s life. His mother starred in old B movies that often featured gunslingerlike characters. One of her films was a comic Western, another blend of genres of the kind King set out to create with the Dark Tower series.
Ka needs Jack, a successful LAPD homicide detective, to resolve a crisis in French Landing, a small town in Wisconsin familiar to him through one of his cases. Unsettling reminders of his past cause him to take early retirement and he moves to French Landing, as yet unaware of the evil Black House that is a portal to End-World—the doorway to Abbalah, the entrance to hell. Abbalah is another name for the Crimson King, but its use is limited to Black House and The Plant.
Though there’s a serial killer at large in the area, the real crisis is the disappearance of Tyler Marshall, who has the potential to be as powerful a Breaker as Ted Brautigan. While wandering around her missing son’s room, Judy Marshall mutters, “Saw the eye again. It’s a red eye. His eye. Eye of the King.” Her words seem nonsensical. “Abbalah-doon, the Crimson King! Rats in their ratholes! Abbalah Munshun! The King is in the Tower, eating bread and honey! The Breakers in the basement, making all the money!” She dreams of a Dark Tower standing in a field of roses. Her husband has her committed because of her erratic behavior.
Jack is haunted by the word “opopanax,” the same word applied to the feather used to call meetings in Calla Bryn Sturgis,32 after he reads about it in the local paper. He resists pleas to help with the serial killer investigation until he has a dream encounter with his old friend Speedy, who tries to explain why Ty Marshall is important. Speedy’s ominous message is that if Jack can’t bring the boy back, he has to kill him. One more Breaker might be all the Crimson King needs to bring down the Tower.
None of this means much to Jack, but it inspires him to action. Judy thinks Jack can save Ty, who she believes is still alive. When they finally meet in the psychiatric hospital, Jack falls in love with her, or rather with her Twinner, Sophie, the Queen of the Territories. Jack leaps to the Territories, where he is reunited with Speedy’s Twinner, Parkus, who explains what’s really going on in French County.
He meets Sophie in a pavilion that reminds him of the place where his mother’s Twinner, the former queen, lay dying. This tent—a hospital to some and a twin to the room Judy occupied on the other side—is less elegant. It belongs to the Little Sisters of Eluria, perhaps the last one of the dozen or more that once existed in “the Territories, On-World, and Mid-World.” Sophie tells Jack about the vampire nurses whose patients never get well. “Don’t fear, Jack—they also serve the Beam. All things serve the Beam.” He has no idea what the Beam is.
Parkus leads them to an abandoned speaking circle like the many encountered by Roland and his ka-tet. “The Demon may be long gone, but the legends say such things leave a residue that may lighten the tongue.” He educates Jack on the nature of existence. “You asked how many worlds. The answer, in the High Speech, is da fan: worlds beyond telling. . . . There is a Tower that binds them in place. Think of it as an axle upon which many wheels spin, if you like. And there is an entity that would bring this Tower down. Ram Abbalah.”
Parkus says the Crimson King is a physical being trapped
in the Tower,33 but he has another manifestation that lives in Can-tah Abbalah, the Court of the Crimson King. If the King successfully destroys the Tower, he believes he will be free to wander in the chaos that remains, known as din-tah, the furnace. Some parts of Mid-World have fallen into that furnace already, according to Parkus.
If readers were confused about why the Crimson King wants Breakers, Parkus sets the record straight. For the last two centuries34 he has been gathering mind readers (the most common), precognates, teleports, world jumpers like Jack and telekinetics (the rarest and most valuable), mostly from Earth and the Territories. “This collection of slaves—this gulag—is his crowning achievement. We call them Breakers.” The Crimson King is using them to speed up the destruction of the Beams. Of the six, one collapsed on its own thousands of years ago, part of the ordinary course of decay. Since starting their work, the Breakers have destroyed two Beams and weakened two others. Only one (Gan’s Beam) still has its original strength.
Parkus tells Jack that the job of protecting the Beams belonged to the gunslingers, “an ancient war guild of Gilead.” They possess a “powerful psychic force . . . one fully capable of countering the Crimson King’s Breakers.” Though the gunslingers are mostly gone, Parkus has heard that the one surviving member of the line of Eld has made at least three new gunslingers, though he doesn’t know how. “If Roland were still alone, the Breakers would have toppled the Tower long since.” This new band of gunslingers is the last hope for those who want the Tower to stand, or fall in its own time.
If the Crimson King can break the Beams before Roland and his ka-tet reach the Tower, he will never have to confront them. This is why he has stepped up his search for Breakers. The low men, his knights-errant, perform many duties, but their chief job is to find psychically talented children. He also enlists the help of people like Burnside, the serial killer in French Landing. The Crimson King lets him kill and eat all the children he wants, as long as he turns over any potential Breakers to the demon who possesses him, Mr. Munshun, a quasi-immortal creature similar to Walter—though less artful—who delivers them to the Crimson King.35
Parkus tells Jack he must either rescue or kill Tyler because he is one of the two most powerful Breakers in all the history of all the worlds, analogous to a nuclear weapon. The other is Ted Brautigan, of whom Munshun says to Ty, “All the boys like the Chief Breaker . . . Perhaps he’ll tell you tales of his many escapes.”
Jack has some residual power from touching the Talisman, but it’s not enough for him to defeat the Crimson King. “But it may be enough for you to take on Mr. Munshun—to go into the furnace-lands and bring Tyler out.”
Knowing that he must win does not mean that he will win. “Proud empires and noble epochs have gone down in defeat, and the Crimson King may burst out of the Tower and rage through world after world, spreading chaos.”
Burny delivers Ty to Mr. Munshun, the Eye of the King, who plans to take him to End-World on a monorail. “Once there were two others . . . Patricia and Blaine. They’re gone. Went crazy. Committed suicide.” This helps put Black House in the context of the Dark Tower books. In Mid-World, these events occur after Wizard and Glass, and most likely after Song of Susannah, because the Forge was still visible to Susannah from Castle Discordia’s ramparts.
With the assistance of a ragtag band of erudite motorcycle gang members, Jack frees Ty from Mr. Munshun and gets the boy to use his Breaking powers to destroy the Big Combination. “Up, up in his high, faraway confinement, the Crimson King feels a deep pain in his gut and drops into a chair, grimacing. Something, he knows, something fundamental, has changed in his dreary fiefdom.”
In the end, Jack Sawyer is seriously wounded by an old enemy and survives the shooting only by leaping to the Territories, where he must remain. Parkus teases readers by saying, “This business of the Tower is moving toward its climax. I believe Jack Sawyer may have a part to play in that, although I can’t say for sure.” Readers speculated that Jack would show up in the final books of the series, but perhaps King and Straub have other plans for him. Peter Straub has said on numerous occasions that he anticipates that there will be a third Talisman book sometime in the future, this one set mostly in the Territories.
Whatever his destiny, Jack Sawyer appears no more on the road to the Dark Tower.
ENDNOTES
1 Stanley Wiater, Christopher Golden and Hank Wagner, The Stephen King Universe, Renaissance Books, 2001.
2 For example, the authors postulate that the young boy Jim Gardiner meets on the beach in The Tommyknockers, whose mother was killed by a drunk driver, is Jack Sawyer from The Talisman. Events seen later in Black House do not support this theory. Jack says that his mother died more than five years after he rescued her with the Talisman and implies that it was from a relapse of her cancer.
3 “The Hardcase Speaks,” published in Contraband number 2, December 1971. “The Dark Man” and “The Hardcase Speaks” are collected in The Devil’s Wine, edited by Tom Piccirilli, CD Publications, 2004.
4 Quotes in each section come from the book under discussion unless otherwise specified.
5 A reference to an H. P. Lovecraft many-formed character who often takes the guise of a human being while serving the purposes of the elder gods. He is known to use deceit, manipulation and propaganda to achieve his goals, and claims to have a thousand masks. He is also known as the Crawling Chaos and the Black Man.
6 A reference to the Necronomicon invented by H. P. Lovecroft.
7 The Crimson King and Flagg/Walter suffer numerous eye injuries in their long lives.
8 Ralph Roberts calls his adventure “Short-Time Life on Harris Avenue, A Tragic-Comedy in Three Acts.”
9 The Crimson King knows who his future enemies will be. He tried to scare King away from writing at the age of seven and periodically made attempts on King’s life.
10 They call themselves the “physicians of last resort.” Ralph names them after the Greek Fates. Clotho spun the thread of each life, Lachesis measured it and Atropos snipped it. Fate is nearly synonymous with ka.
11 The four constants are Life, Death, the Purpose and the Random.
12 They may be agents of Higher Purpose and Higher Random, though it’s also possible that above a certain level there is no Random.
13 Ralph thinks of Joe Wyzer, Lois and himself as the “Three Insomniacs of the Apocalypse.” The elderly leaders of Tet Corporation dubbed themselves the “Old Farts of the Apocalypse.”
14 From Pet Sematary, the book that made the existence of The Gunslinger widely known.
15 Benjamin Hanscomb of It designed the new Civic Center after the original was destroyed in the flood of 1985.
16 “Once there was a king. . . . But kings are done, lad. In the world of light, anyway,” Roland thinks in The Gunslinger (revised edition).
17 When Ralph defeats the Crimson King, there is a titanic green flash so bright that “for one moment it was as if the Emerald City of Oz had exploded around him.” The Emerald Palace shows up in Wizard and Glass, written two years after Insomnia was published.
18 At one point, Ralph covers Lois’s eyes. “His fingers flashed a momentary white so bright it was almost blinding. Must be the white they’re always talking about in the detergent commercials, he thought.”
19 Dorcas is the name of a biblical character, a disciple from Joppa whose name translates to Tabitha, which is Stephen King’s wife’s name. According to Acts, Dorcas was a woman full of good works and charitable deeds.
20 The Regulators was published under King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman, who some might call King’s dark twin. Bachman’s wife, Claudia Inez Bachman, becomes the author of Charlie the Choo-Choo in later books in the Dark Tower series, although a y is added to her name to give it nineteen characters.
21 In Black House, Sophie says, “The Little Sisters don’t come out when the sun shines,” but this proves untrue.
22 Norma Deepneau surprises him from behind in the lobby of the Black Towe
r housing the Tet Corporation in 1999. At the time, Roland thinks it hasn’t happened since he was a teenager.
23 When “Low Men in Yellow Coats” was adapted as the movie Hearts in Atlantis, all references to low men and Breakers were removed from the script because of the complexities that would have been required to explain the Dark Tower mythos to a mainstream audience.
24 In It, both Eddie and Ben think they see the figure of a turtle drawn in chalk on the sidewalk, but it turns out to be just a hopscotch grid.
25 The car in From a Buick 8 fits this description, and its driver resembles a low man, but King, in keeping with the book’s theme of unexplained mysteries, doesn’t explicitly connect the Buick to low men. However, its trunk is a portal to another world. From a Buick 8 is identified at the front of Wolves of the Calla as having ties to the Dark Tower series.
26 The Big Coffin Hunters in Wizard and Glass, though human, are also regulators. The Regulators is a fictional movie, but its stars, John Payne and Karen Steele, are real and did costar in one film.
27 Peter Straub, personal communication, July 12, 2000.
28 Coogan’s Bluff. King has often said that Roland was inspired by Clint Eastwood.
29 Dinky remembers a TV show he watched one summer. “Golden Years, it was called. You probably don’t remember it. Anyway, there was a guy on that show who used to say, ‘Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.’ ” The Golden Years was written by King.
30 Interview with Jeff Zaleski, Publishers Weekly, August 20, 2001.
31 Ibid.
32 In The Plant, Carlos Detweiller, who prayed to the god Abbalah and utters words from the language of the unformed, also mentions opoponax [sic], which is ironic because the newspaper article in Black House mentions “opopanax” as a word that was missed in a spelling bee.