by Vincent, Bev
He knows he’s dying and his opportunity for revenge is running out. He still thinks he can defeat Roland, though, and wants him to realize that his son killed him mere hours before he reached his precious Tower. He’s willing to take a couple of bullets if necessary, but the Crimson King helps him, sending out a pulse from the Tower that lulls Patrick, Roland’s ill-chosen night watch, to sleep.
So focused is he on Roland that Mordred forgets the third member of Roland’s party. Oy intercepts Mordred, giving Roland time to regain his wits and draw his weapons. Roland offers to let him go free in exchange for Oy’s life, but it is a moot point—Mordred will die soon, regardless of what he does. He thrusts Oy aside and attacks, but in spite of Mia’s wishes for him, he’s no match for a real gunslinger. He dies in a hail of his father’s bullets, falls into Roland’s campfire and burns.
Ka could have had no part in this, and Stephen King surely did not conceive it; what writer worth his salt would ever concoct such an end for the villain of the piece? [DT7]
The Crimson King (Ram Abbalah)
The King is in the Tower, eating bread and honey! The Breakers in the basement, making all the money! [BH]
The Crimson King is Roland’s greatest enemy and has been his ancestors’ foil for generations. When Walter o’Dim, one of his chief knights, greets Mordred in Fedic, he claims that the Crimson King, like Roland, is a descendent of Arthur Eld, which makes them distant cousins, or perhaps twins. “Hile, Mordred Deschain, son of Roland and of the Crimson King whose name was once hiled from End-World to Out-World; hile you son of two fathers, both of them descended from Arthur Eld.” [DT7]
Also known as Ram Abbalah,31 the Crimson King believes that he will survive the Dark Tower’s collapse to rule the ensuing todash chaos. Unwilling to wait for the Beams supporting the Tower to decay naturally, the Crimson King has been trying to bring about its downfall “for time out of mind, maybe forever.” [BH] In two hundred years, his Breakers have destroyed two of the five remaining Beams and severely weakened two others.
According to Parkus, even though the Crimson King is a physical being trapped in the Tower, he has another manifestation that lives in Can-tah Abbalah—the Court of the Crimson King. In effect, the Crimson King is his own twin. Though he seems to bear some similarities to Pennywise from It, the Crimson King is a more powerful creature with greater aspirations.
Parkus tells Jack Sawyer that the Crimson King is too strong for Sawyer to take on, even with the lingering power given him by the Talisman. “The abbalah would blow you out like a candle.” Jack senses that there may be some counterbalancing force, possibly female, working against the king, perhaps personified in the immense swarm of bees that accompanies his gang into End-World.
The Crimson King’s low men have performed many tasks over the generations, but their chief job has been to find Breakers, telepathic slaves mostly from Earth and the Territories—a borderland in Roland’s reality where part of The Talisman is set—who generate a force that will disrupt the Beams. Children who don’t qualify as Breakers are sent to the Big Combination, a Dickensian power plant that fuels evil in all universes. The Crimson King hopes to hold Roland back and finish destroying the Tower while he and his band are still at a distance.
Apparently capable of foreseeing the future, the Crimson King goes after anyone with the potential to challenge him long before it happens. Stephen King, known to the Lord of Discordia from an early age, is one of these future threats. He tries repeatedly to divert King from writing about the Dark Tower. If he can successfully discourage the author, Roland’s quest cannot succeed. When King hears the song of the Turtle and writes, he is more vulnerable.
The Crimson King sends Atropos to manipulate Ed Deepneau into orchestrating Patrick Danville’s death when the boy is only four. Like any good villain, the Crimson King deceives his followers. Deepneau thinks he is fighting against the Crimson King, who he believes is another incarnation of King Herod, out to slaughter more babies.
Ralph, the aging insomniac chosen by the Purpose to battle the Crimson King, gets closer to him than any one of his other enemies. Even Roland only comes within shouting distance in the field of roses outside the Dark Tower. While Ralph is trying to prevent Deepneau’s kamikaze attack on the Derry Civic Center, the Crimson King appears before him in the guise of Ralph’s long-dead mother. Like Pennywise, the Crimson King uses people’s childhood fears against them. He transforms into a catfish, reminding Ralph of a traumatic occurrence from his youth. Ralph pierces one of the bulging fish eyes with the point of Lois’s earring.
When the Crimson King shows himself in human form, Ralph sees an old man with a long sandy beard and hair and wearing a white robe. The eye that Ralph damaged “was filled with the fierce, splintered glow of diamonds.” [INS] This injury does not seem to affect the version of the Crimson King who is trapped at the Tower—his eyes are intact. Maybe Ralph injured the Crimson King’s other manifestation, Ram Abbalah. Black Thirteen is rumored to be the Crimson King’s eye—perhaps this orb is somehow connected to the eye Ralph injured above Derry.
The aura Ralph perceives around the Crimson King is a fearful red, almost choleric, the color of sickness and pain. He transforms again into a tall and coldly handsome man with blond hair. Finally, he grows ancient and twisted, “less human than the strangest creature to ever flop or hop its way along the Short-Time level of existence.” [INS]
Using a booby trap planted by Clotho and Lachesis, Ralph sends the Crimson King back through the doorway that had allowed him direct access to his world, one of a series of defeats—including Ty Marshall’s destruction of the Great Combination, the ka-tet’s victory in Calla Bryn Sturgis and their attack on Blue Heaven—that drives him crazy, though he always was Gan’s crazy side. He once covered the region around Thunderclap with poison and killed almost everyone, probably as a lark. The darkness at Algul Siento is the lingering result.
Roland first hears about the Crimson King from Sylvia Pittston in Tull, and again shortly afterward from Walter. The ka-tet sees graffiti containing his name outside Topeka. Roland knows only that he lives in the West, either in Thunderclap or beyond. “I believe he may be a guardian of the Dark Tower. He may even think he owns it.”
Two conflicting compulsions bring the Crimson King to the brink of madness: to destroy the Tower, and to get there ahead of Roland and slay whatever lives behind that final door. In this he is not so different from Roland, but he has no desire to understand the Tower. He only wants to beat Roland to something he wanted and then snatch it away. “He’s like the old dog in some fable or other, wanting to make sure that if he can’t get any good from the hay, no one else will, either.” [DT7]
At some point and through unknown means, the Crimson King adds his own genetic material to Roland and Susannah’s fetus. Mordred is to be both Roland’s downfall and the ultimate Breaker, accelerating the Tower’s downfall.
The Crimson King owned six of the surviving Wizard’s glasses, which he smashed before fleeing his castle for the Tower. Using these orbs may also have contributed to his fragile mental state. Flagg told Mordred that his father’s madness came from having lived so close to the Tower for so long, and having thought upon it so deeply.
Before abandoning his castle, he made most of his staff take poison as they stood in front of him. Rando Thoughtful, his Minister of State, says, “He could have killed them in their sleep if he’d wanted to by no more than wishing it on them but instead he made them take rat poison. His throne is made of skulls. He sat there with his elbow on his knee and his fist on his chin, like a man thinking long thoughts, all the while watching them writhe and vomit and convulse on the floor of the Audience Chamber.” [DT7]
The Crimson King, known to Thoughtful as Los’ the Red, killed himself by swallowing a sharpened spoon, fulfilling an age-old prophecy and putting him beyond the reach of Roland’s guns; Roland can’t kill a man who’s already dead. Before leaving, he set a dead-line around the castle to keep any surv
ivors from escaping and to trap anyone foolish enough to wander in. Undead, he mounted the greatest of the gray horses32 and rode into the white lands of Empathica. He travels in his own portable storm. Joe Collins sensed him passing and hid in his cellar.
The Crimson King comes to fear Roland, insofar as he can fear. The ka-tet’s success at Devar-Toi means that his only chance for victory lay in conquering the Tower or killing the gunslinger. After becoming trapped on a balcony outside the Tower, he scorches off his birthmark in a fit of rage. If Mordred, who also bears the mark of the line of Eld, gets through to the Tower, the Crimson King can reenter and climb to the top.
At Federal Outpost 19, the monitor that once showed the Dark Tower no longer works. “I don’t think the Red King liked being on television,” Stutterin’ Bill says.
Once he’s trapped, he can’t climb to the top of the Tower, but he has enough ammunition with him to keep Roland out. Roland’s guns are useless against him, but he could take them and use them to free himself and gain the Tower. If he were so inclined, the mad, dead king could rule from the top of the Tower, but given his insanity, he’d rather bring it down, which he may be able to do even though the Beams are safe and regenerating.
He monitors Mordred’s progress as he pursues Roland across the wastelands. When Mordred plans to launch a desperate attack against Roland while Patrick keeps watch, he sends out a pulse from the Tower to lull Patrick to sleep. After Roland kills Mordred, he hears a howl of outraged fury in his head. “My son! My only son! You’ve murdered him!” Roland responds that Mordred was his own son, too. “Who sent him to me? Who sent him to his death, ye red boggart?”33
At the Tower, the Crimson King attacks Roland with his stockpile of sneetches. He’s an old man with a snowy white beard growing down to his chest and a flushed face. His red robe is covered with cabalistic symbols like the ones on the cases the Manni use to store their holy instruments. His eyes burn with hell’s own fire.
To the New Yorkers he would have looked like Father Christmas. To Roland he looked like what he was: Hell incarnate. A greedy and questioning long face. Cheeks and forehead marked by creases so deep they might have been bottomless. The lips within the beard full and cruel. It was the mouth of a man who would turn a kiss into a bite if the spirit took him, and the spirit often would. The eyes were wide and terrible, the eyes of a were-dragon in human form.
The reek of meat would accompany each outflow of breath. A tuft of hair curls from one of his nostrils. A tiny thread of scar wove in and out of his right eyebrow like a bit of string. [DT7]
He looks down at the gunslinger with an expression of mingled hate and fear. His hands also appear to be red, as in Patrick Danville’s crayon sketch. Roland and the Crimson King taunt each other, but Roland takes the goading better than his enemy, who leaps up and down, screaming and shaking his hands beside his face in a way that is almost comical. Roland thinks the Red King will split his own head wide with such cries.
The Crimson King knows his adversary well, saying, “Murderer! Murderer of your mother, murderer of your friends—aye, every one—and now murderer of your own son!” Realizing that Roland is capable of defending himself against the sneetches and resisting his taunts, the Crimson King has enough sanity left to fall silent and let the call of the Tower lure Roland into the open, where he would be easy prey.
As soon as Patrick starts drawing him, the Crimson King knows something bad is happening. When Patrick begins to erase his drawing, he understands what’s happening and screams in pain and horror. He throws more sneetches in desperation, but once Patrick removes his hands, he can throw no more. He shrieks and whines until Patrick erases his mouth.
In the end, Patrick removes everything but the red eyes, which his eraser won’t touch. When Roland approaches the Tower, the eyes continue to stare down at him, burning with hatred. Roland supposes that they would remain up there forever, watching the field of roses while their owner wanders the world to which Patrick’s eraser and enchanted artist’s eyes had sent him—or, more likely, to the space between the worlds.
Stephen King34
When the real Stephen King announced35 that he would be a character in the Dark Tower series, he told his audience that he wasn’t surprised to find himself part of the story, but he was taken aback to discover that he wasn’t one of the good guys, but rather a secondary character.
Though the version of the author who first appears in Song of Susannah is not a leading character, he is pivotal to the series. How could God not be crucial? For the King within the tale is the tale’s creator and, therefore, Roland’s maker, as well as the Crimson King’s, even though the latter seems to predate him and tried to thwart him when he was a young boy.
King’s name is first mentioned on the deli board at Calvin Tower’s bookstore when Jake revisits the day he died in 1977. Later, when Tower insists that Eddie hide his most valuable books in the Doorway Cave, Roland finds among them ’Salem’s Lot. The separation of reality and fiction grows hazy. Father Callahan discovers that his life is someone else’s invented story.
King shows up in person in 1977, a writer not particularly well known outside of his home state, but not a starving artist, either. He’s thirty years old, has three young children, and could pass for Roland’s son. His dark beard has a few threads of gray. He’s tall and pale, heading toward being fat, and shows the potential for alcoholism. One bow of the frames on his thick glasses is mended with tape. His way of talking reminds Eddie of everyone he’s ever known. In the author’s note at the end of The Dark Tower, King says that this version of him is “very close to the Stephen King I remember living with at that time.”
Since King is Eddie and Roland’s creator—Roland thinks of him as his biographer—his mistakes and continuity errors are real to them, which is why Eddie’s hometown of Co-Op City is in Brooklyn instead of the Bronx. He’s as much in awe of his creations as they are of him. Eddie thinks he’s likable enough, but reminds himself that King is responsible for the deaths of everyone in his family.
Though he’s their god, he’s not immortal. If the Crimson King can interfere with his work and discourage him from transcribing the Dark Tower series, Roland’s quest will fail. The Crimson King has tried to kill him many times during his life. Sometimes he’s rescued; sometimes he steps aside and saves himself. The first attempt on his life happened when he was six or seven. He and his brother were sentenced to saw wood in the barn as punishment for trying to run away. There they find some dead chickens, killed by avian flu. The diseased fowls’ bodies are covered with red spots, and red spiders crawl on them.
King is afraid that if the spiders get on him he’ll catch the flu and die and come back as a vampire, a pet writer, slave to the Lord of the Spiders. Eddie, in one of his forms, saved King from the spiders and won him over to Roland’s side. King made up a magic gunslinger to keep him safe in the future from whatever scared him in that barn. In It, King writes about George’s paper boat floating into the sewer neck and neck with a dead chicken, and later Mike Hanlon tells about someone killing all the chickens in their barn. Richie Tozier quotes Jerry Lee Lewis singing about chickens in the barn. Clearly this episode stayed with King.
One of the real King’s frequently asked interview questions is: What happened to you as a child to makes you write the things you do? King expresses frustration with the premise behind this question. He finds modern society tiresomely Freudian and claims to be more Jungian in his philosophy, subscribing to the notions of race and cultural archetypes rather than overbearing importance of childhood trauma. His regular references to spiders throughout the series may be his way of poking fun at pop psychology.
So there you go, an easy lesson in the psychology of fiction: take an imaginative boy, add a few dead chickens, pop in one common spider, stir well, and bake for roughly forty years. Result? Low men with red spots between their eyes (bloody circles that never heal), and one spider princeling. [DT6]
Very few of the things Kin
g has written since starting the Dark Tower series in 1970 were just stories. The Calvins, who research his books for Tet Corporation, believe he is leaving messages in his books in the hope they’ll reach Roland and help him gain his goal. Roland planted this suggestion in King’s mind when he hypnotized him during the summer of 1977.
King thinks he is either the creative force known as Gan, or possessed by Gan. “Maybe there’s no difference,” he tells Roland and Eddie. [DT6] Greedy old ka demands more from him beyond just turning aside from Discordia. Ka comes to him and he translates it. He hates ka for making him do some of the things he writes.
He is being carried by the tidal wave that runs along the Path of the Beam, a wave he may be creating himself. Jake thinks of him as a telecaster. He’s not thinking things up, like the key and the scrimshaw turtle. He’s just broadcasting them. He didn’t make the ka-tet; he facilitated it.
His life is a constant battle with ka and the story it wants him to write. When he opens his eyes to Roland’s world, the Crimson King sees him more clearly and turns his attention to him. He stopped writing the series at the end of The Gunslinger because he didn’t want to be the creative force, but also because he was afraid.
The Dark Tower series was going to be his epic, but the story and its hero got away from him and its scope exhausted him. By the end of The Gunslinger he was no longer sure of Roland’s nature—was he hero or antihero? He abandoned his plans for the series, but Roland hypnotizes him to return to it when he hears the song of the Turtle. Over the next twenty years, he works on it in bursts, but he finds it harder and harder to return after each book.