by Vincent, Bev
As Jake and the gunslinger reach the first hilly upswells marking the far edge of the desert, the boy points upward and, far above and miles beyond, the gunslinger sees the man in black, climbing up and up toward what the gunslinger feels may be another killing ground.
The man in black has set him snares before on this terrible progress toward the Tower.
Roland fears the boy Jake may be another—and Roland has come to love him.
“The Slow Mutants”
SYNOPSIS: This is the fourth tale of Roland, the last gunslinger, and his quest for the Dark Tower which stands at the root of time. Time is the problem: the dark days have come and the world has moved on. Demons haunt the dark and monsters walk in empty places. The time of light and knowledge has passed.
Against this twilit landscape, the gunslinger pursues the man in black into the desert. . . .
The campfire remnants of the man in black grow fresher. And as Jake sleeps, the gunslinger works laboriously over the figures in his own past: Gabrielle, his mother . . . Marten, the sorcerer-physician who may have been the half-brother of the man in black . . . Roland, his father . . . Cort, his teacher . . . Cuthbert, his friend . . . and David, the falcon, “God’s gunslinger.”
He remembers the execution of a traitor, the cook Hax, by hanging and “the good man” who has ushered in this new dark age. The good man. Marten. His mother’s lover. The half-brother of the man in black . . . or is he the man in black himself?
Roland and Jake follow the man in black into the mountains toward what the gunslinger feels may be another killing ground. The man in black has set him snares before on this terrible progress toward the Tower. Roland fears Jake may be another—and Roland has come to love him.
His fears for Jake are nearly justified on their first night in the foothills when Jake is nearly caught in the toils of a sexual vampire that has been caught for eons in a cage of Druid stones. This unformed sexual creature is also an oracle, and after taking mescaline, the gunslinger approaches it. In exchange for a sexual encounter that nearly kills him, the oracle provides disquieting information.
“Three is the number of your fate,” the oracle tells Roland. “The first is young, dark-haired. He stands on the brink of robbery and murder. A demon has infested him. The name of the demon is HEROIN. The second comes on wheels; her mind is iron, but her heart and eyes are soft. The third comes in chains.”
The oracle will tell Roland no more of these three, but speaks grimly of the boy Jake’s future: “The boy is your gateway to the man in black. The man in black is your gate to the three. The three are your way to the Tower . . . some, gunslinger, live on blood. Even, I understand, the blood of young boys.”
The gunslinger asks if there is no way Jake can be saved from the mysterious and terrible fate of being killed a second time. The oracle responds that there is one: if Roland gives up his quest of the Tower, the boy may be saved—and this the gunslinger cannot do.
They climb into the mountains together, and the gunslinger finally confronts the man in black standing on a ledge where a mountain river gushes out of a dark fault in the stone. The man in black, almost within reach, mockingly promises Roland the answers he has sought for twelve years.
Answers, he says, on the other side. Just the two of us.
He disappears into the blackness under the mountains, leaving the gunslinger his final decision: give over, and save the boy he has come to love and his own soul, or push on in search of the Tower . . . and be damned forever.
The gunslinger begins to climb toward the dark opening from which the river spills, the opening which leads under the mountains . . . and Jake, the boy, his sacrifice, follows.
They go into the darkness together.
“The Gunslinger and the Dark Man”
SYNOPSIS: This is the fifth tale of Roland, the last gunslinger, and his quest for the Dark Tower which stands at the root of time. . . .
As they pursue the man in black, Roland the gunslinger recalls his strange, marked past: his mother, Gabrielle, Marten, the court sorcerer who may have somehow been transformed into the man in black he now pursues (and who, as the charismatic Good Man, pulled down the last kingdom of light), Cort, his teacher, Cuthbert, his friend, and David, the falcon, “God’s gunslinger.”
In spite of his own fears and Jake’s growing premonition of doom, the two of them plunge into the passageway after the dark man. In that darkness the gunslinger recalls the great lighted balls and fetes of his childhood . . . and his mother’s growing enchantment with Marten, the sorcerer. They follow a river in the dark, and this leads them to an old rail-line . . . and a handcar.
Flying through the dark, the gunslinger tells Jake of his coming of age, a combat-rite of manhood which he attempted early, horrifyingly early, due more than anything else to his growing realization that Marten and his mother have become lovers. He wished to challenge Marten, he tells Jake obliquely, but he could only do that as a man . . . even if the combat-rite ended in his premature exile from the kingdom he had always known.
In the horrifying combat which followed, Roland bested Cort, his teacher, by using David, his falcon, as his weapon. Jake is unimpressed by the story. It was a game, wasn’t it? he says. Do grown men always have to play games?
On their sixth day/night under the mountains, they encounter the Slow Mutants, horrible, starving subhuman creatures who subsist on whatever they may find . . . including human flesh. They fight their way through them, thanks to Jake’s courage and Roland’s sandalwood-inlaid guns.
Perhaps a week’s travel further on (in the darkness, both Jake and the gunslinger find time nearly incalculable), they come to a trestle which bridges a wide chasm through which the river has cut its path. The trestle is old and rotted but they can see daylight on the far side. They begin to walk across, leaving the handcar behind.
They have nearly negotiated all of the harrowing passage when the man in black appears at the exit-point. Almost simultaneously, the rotted metal ties Jake has been standing on give way. He falls . . . and dangles by one hand. And, from a mere thirty yards ahead, the man in black issues his challenge to Roland, the last gunslinger. “Come now . . . or catch me never.”
After a moment of agonizing choice, the gunslinger leaves Jake to fall into the abyss, electing to follow the man in black; even at the price of his soul, he is unable to give up his quest for the Tower.
“Go then,” Jake calls to him as he falls. “There are other worlds than these.”
The gunslinger emerges. The man in black is there. And the gunslinger follows him in broken boots to the place of counseling.
ENDNOTE
1 At this time, King called Roland’s father Roland as well.
APPENDIX VI:
“CHILDE ROWLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME”
by Robert Browning
(See Edgar’s song in “Lear”)
I.
My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.
II.
What else should he be set for, with his staff?
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare
All travellers who might find him posted there,
And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh
Would break, what crutch ’gin write my epitaph
For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare,
III.
If at his counsel I should turn aside
Into that ominous tract which, all agree,
Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly
I did turn as he pointed: neither pride
Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,
So much as gladness that some end might be.
IV.
For, what with my whole wo
rld-wide wandering,
What with my search drawn out thro’ years, my hope
Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope
With that obstreperous joy success would bring,
I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring
My heart made, finding failure in its scope.
V.
As when a sick man very near to death
Seems dead indeed, and feels begin and end
The tears and takes the farewell of each friend,
And hears one bid the other go, draw breath
Freelier outside (“since all is o’er,” he saith,
“And the blow fallen no grieving can amend;”)
VI.
While some discuss if near the other graves
Be room enough for this, and when a day
Suits best for carrying the corpse away,
With care about the banners, scarves and staves:
And still the man hears all, and only craves
He may not shame such tender love and stay.
VII.
Thus, I had so long suffered in this quest,
Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ
So many times among “The Band”—to wit,
The knights who to the Dark Tower’s search addressed
Their steps—that just to fail as they, seemed best,
And all the doubt was now—should I be fit?
VIII.
So, quiet as despair, I turned from him,
That hateful cripple, out of his highway
Into the path he pointed. All the day
Had been a dreary one at best, and dim
Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim
Red leer to see the plain catch its estray.
IX.
For mark! no sooner was I fairly found
Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two,
Than, pausing to throw backward a last view
O’er the safe road, ’twas gone; grey plain all round:
Nothing but plain to the horizon’s bound.
I might go on; nought else remained to do.
X.
So, on I went. I think I never saw
Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve:
For flowers—as well expect a cedar grove!
But cockle, spurge, according to their law
Might propagate their kind, with none to awe,
You’d think; a burr had been a treasure trove.
XI.
No! penury, inertness and grimace,
In some strange sort, were the land’s portion. “See
Or shut your eyes,” said Nature peevishly,
“It nothing skills: I cannot help my case:
’Tis the Last Judgment’s fire must cure this place,
Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free.”
XII.
If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk
Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents
Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents
In the dock’s harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk
All hope of greenness? ’tis a brute must walk
Pashing their life out, with a brute’s intents.
XIII.
As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.
One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,
Stood stupefied, however he came there:
Thrust out past service from the devil’s stud!
XIV.
Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.
XV.
I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart.
As a man calls for wine before he fights,
I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights,
Ere fitly I could hope to play my part.
Think first, fight afterwards—the soldier’s art:
One taste of the old time sets all to rights.
XVI.
Not it! I fancied Cuthbert’s reddening face
Beneath its garniture of curly gold,
Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold
An arm in mine to fix me to the place
That way he used. Alas, one night’s disgrace!
Out went my heart’s new fire and left it cold.
XVII.
Giles then, the soul of honour—there he stands
Frank as ten years ago when knighted first.
What honest men should dare (he said) he durst.
Good—but the scene shifts—faugh! what hangman hands
Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands
Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst!
XVIII.
Better this present than a past like that;
Back therefore to my darkening path again!
No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain.
Will the night send a howlet or a bat?
I asked: when something on the dismal flat
Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train.
XIX.
A sudden little river crossed my path
As unexpected as a serpent comes.
No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms;
This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath
For the fiend’s glowing hoof—to see the wrath
Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.
XX.
So petty yet so spiteful! All along
Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it;
Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit
Of mute despair, a suicidal throng:
The river which had done them all the wrong,
Whate’er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit.
XXI.
Which, while I forded,—good saints, how I feared
To set my foot upon a dead man’s cheek,
Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek
For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard!
—It may have been a water-rat I speared,
But, ugh! it sounded like a baby’s shriek.
XXII.
Glad was I when I reached the other bank.
Now for a better country. Vain presage!
Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage,
Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank
Soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank,
Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage—
XXIII.
The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque.
What penned them there, with all the plain to choose?
No foot-print leading to that horrid mews,
None out of it. Mad brewage set to work
Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk
Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.
XXIV.
And more than that—a furlong on—why, there!
What bad use was that engine for, that wheel,
Or brake, not wheel—that harrow fit to reel
Men’s bodies out like silk? with all the air
Of Tophet’s tool, on earth left unaware,
Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel.
XXV.
Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood,
Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth
Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth,
Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood
Changes and off he goes!) within a rood—
Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth.
XXVI.
Now blotches rankling, coloured g
ay and grim,
Now patches where some leanness of the soil’s
Broke into moss or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.
XXVII.
And just as far as ever from the end!
Nought in the distance but the evening, nought
To point my footstep further! At the thought,
A great black bird, Apollyon’s bosom-friend,
Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned
That brushed my cap—perchance the guide I sought.
XXVIII.
For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, ’
Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place
All round to mountains—with such name to grace
Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view.
How thus they had surprised me,—solve it, you!
How to get from them was no clearer case.
XXIX.