The Road to The Dark Tower (15 page)

The most important lesson he must teach them, though, is how to kill. How to hit the target with every shot. Roland sees parallels between his new ka-tet and the one that died on Jericho Hill. Eddie reminds him of Cuthbert, and Susannah, in her way, is not so different from Alain Johns—though he will soon replace Susannah with Jake as a surrogate Alain.

Eddie asks Roland, “What if I told you I don’t want to be a gunslinger?” Roland shrugs and says that what Eddie wants doesn’t much matter in the face of ka.

Susannah Dean, now Eddie’s wife, is Mid-World’s first female gunslinger. Though Roland never dreamt he would hear the gunslinger’s catechism being said by a woman, the words sound natural coming from her. Natural, strange and dangerous. Though she is a newly created individual, her constituent personas occasionally emerge, especially trash-talking Detta.

Roland uses his knowledge of Odetta’s past to drive her to anger during a training session, goading her to transcend rationality. He tongue-lashes her into shooting with her eye and mind and heart instead of with her hand. His strategy works, but his arrogance angers her. She calls him on it after the lesson, but Roland makes no apologies. They aren’t playing games—he’s training them to become gunslingers. “The end justifies the means” could be Roland’s motto. Susannah tells Eddie later, “Roland’s of the opinion that apprentice gunslingers who won’t bite the hand that feeds them from time to time need a good kick in the slats.”

During their debate over his teaching methods, Susannah and Roland hear the sounds of something enormous pushing over trees in the direction of their camp, where Eddie had stayed behind that morning. They run back to discover a seventy-foot-tall robotic bear running amok. Eddie is trapped up a tree.

The bear, known as Mir
³
to the old people who had feared it and Shardik
⁴
to the Great Old Ones who built it, is one of the twelve portal guardians.
⁵
Twelve doorways distributed in a circle around the Tower define the geography of Roland’s world. Between each opposing pair of portals runs a Beam; together they somehow support the Tower and preserve its existence. The Beams are breaking down, but Roland doesn’t know if
that is the cause of his world’s deterioration or an effect of it. He tells Eddie and Susannah:

The Great Old Ones didn’t make the world, but they did
re
-make it. Some tale-tellers say the Beams saved it; others say they are the seeds of the world’s destruction. The Great Old Ones created the Beams. They are lines of some sort . . . lines which
bind
 . . . and
hold
 . . .

More than eighteen centuries in the past, the Great Old Ones panicked when the world’s magic seemed to be receding. Enough magic remained from the Prim of creation to support the Tower forever, but this lack of faith made them replace the magic with finite technology, including guardians like the bear. Without the support of faith or magic, the machinery has progressively deteriorated over the centuries.

In Richard Adams’s novel, the title character Shardik stands for all the promises religion ever made and then broke. The same could be said of him here—the religion of rational thought tried to improve on the Age of Magic but failed. Shardik has gone insane and is dying. North Central Positronics, Ltd., a shadowy organization that will make many appearances over the course of Roland’s quest, manufactured him. The atomic pump at the way station was one of their creations.

Each of the three gunslingers does what is required of him or her to resolve the crisis. Eddie, knowing he can’t shoot or outrun the monster, finds the only place where he is temporarily safe. Roland recognizes the threat for what it is and improvises a plan. Susannah, riding on his shoulders, wields Roland’s gun and puts her training to the test.

Roland’s harsh lesson serves her well, for it is the love of her life she is trying to save and she can’t afford to let fear cause her hand to fail. Emotion falls away; all that remains is a deep coldness. Susannah realizes this is what Roland feels all the time and wonders how he can possibly stand it. Eddie feels a similar coldness when he shoots the other robots at Shardik’s lair. After she dispatches Shardik, she says she hopes never to have to do anything like it again but, deep inside, part of her can’t wait. Susannah has crossed the threshold into the realm of gunslingers. Ultimately, she will decide that she was made for a life like this.

Roland tells them what he knows of his world’s creation story. Some
of it is fairy tale, some of it rumor. He knows very little for sure, but he can guess at the parts he doesn’t know. The portals that support the Beams are not like the doors through which Eddie and Susannah were drawn. They are more like the pivots of seesaws that balance the ka of the opposing forces in the universe. The ka of Roland versus the ka of Walter. The White versus the Red.

They follow the bear’s trail back to the portal it once defended, which resembles the entrance to a subway station.
⁶
Here they discover one of the Beams. Everything in nature proves its existence. The needles of evergreen trees point the direction. Shadows and clouds form a herringbone path to the Tower. Flocks of birds crossing the Beam are momentarily deflected by it. Its energy ripples around the travelers like a fast-moving stream.

Allie had pointed out the clouds’ motion to him in Tull, but Roland hadn’t understood that a nearby Beam, a pull that was more than magnetism, was influencing him and Walter. After leaving Tull, he went southeast, twenty miles west to the sea, north along the beach where he drew Eddie and Susannah and then sixty miles east, inland, with his new followers. Since this Beam is running southeast, parallel to Roland’s path across the desert, at times they will be almost retracing the gunslinger’s course, which is about forty or fifty miles west of them.

If Roland had understood Allie’s clue, he might have been tempted to give up his chase for the man in black and take this shortcut to the Tower, if ka had allowed him to do so. As the ka-tet will learn in Lud, ka has a way of shepherding them back on course should they take a route that would prevent them from accomplishing something vital.

Up till now, Roland has given no indication that he knows where the Dark Tower is or how to get to it. He didn’t really believe in the guardians; they seemed too much like fantasy. If somehow convinced they were once real, he wouldn’t have believed they still existed after two millennia. Now he thinks he’s been searching for a guardian all his life.

They have found a path that will guide them directly to the Dark Tower, though Roland doesn’t know how far away it is. Thousands of miles at least, and the distance grows longer every day. Half the size of his known world, for they are currently at its eternal edge. A long way to push a wheelchair. Roland seems to know something of their future, though, when he says to Susannah that the time may come when they travel faster
than they’d like, surely alluding to their forthcoming roller-coaster ride on Blaine the Mono.

Though he shares what little he knows of their future with Eddie and Susannah, he is also hiding something from them. He’s been traveling alone for so long with no one else to trust that he often keeps important information from others. What angered Cuthbert during their long summer in Mejis wasn’t merely jealousy over Roland’s reckless enchantment with Susan Delgado, but also that Roland had kept things from him and Alain, who relied on him for their survival as Eddie and Susannah do now.

He has smiled more in the past weeks than he has in years, but Roland believes he, like Shardik, is going insane. By preventing Jack Mort from pushing Jake in front of Balazar’s car, Roland created a temporal paradox. Reality has split; so has Roland’s mind.

Since Jake didn’t die in 1977, he couldn’t be reborn into Roland’s world at the way station and Roland didn’t sacrifice the boy in the name of his quest. Jake is no longer part of his past. This poses an interesting moral question. Does this mean Roland is no longer damned? Is this part of the redemption King alludes to in the book’s new subtitle? Since Roland is allowed to make changes—course corrections—during subsequent iterations of his circular existence, perhaps a time will come when it isn’t necessary for him to sacrifice Jake at all.

Roland still has memories of encountering Jake and picking up the Speaking Demon’s jawbone in the way station’s cellar. It’s a history that isn’t true, but should be. “He felt like two men existing inside one skull.” The jawbone he has with him now reinforces his second memory. He took it from the pile of bones remaining after his long palaver with Walter to replace the one he gave Jake for protection from the oracle. It means something different to Eddie. “Remember this . . . the next time you get to thinking Roland’s maybe just another one of the guys. He’s been carrying [the jawbone] around with him all this time like some kind of a cannibal’s trophy.”

After their encounter with Shardik, Roland comes clean with his ka-tet, telling them both versions of his memory of the time between the way station and reaching the Western Sea. Eddie remembers Roland telling him on the beach that the way station was empty and that he traveled beneath the mountain alone. Eddie has a slight mental tickle associated with
this memory, but nothing as profoundly dual natured as what Roland experiences.

While he speaks, the voices of the line of Eld tell Roland to throw the jawbone into the fire. “When one hears such a voice, not to obey—and at once—is unthinkable.” Roland says something similar when he and Eddie are swept up by aven kal, the tsunami of the Beam. The Beam itself means to speak to them. “You would do well to listen if it does.” [DT7]

Though the jawbone isn’t Walter’s, it is still a powerful sigul. As the fire consumes it, Eddie sees the shape of the key he is to carve and then glimpses “a triumphant rose that might have bloomed in the dawn of this world’s first day, a thing of depthless, timeless beauty . . . as if all love and life had suddenly risen from Roland’s dead artifact.” Eddie doesn’t know what the rose represents or what the key is for, but he is driven to have it ready for when its time comes. His childhood Henry-induced insecurities make him doubt his ability to get it right, though.

That night he has a dream that sums up their quest, much of which he doesn’t understand. He dreams of a deli in New York located at the site of the future empty lot where the rose—the Tower’s representation in New York—grows. He hears Jake’s words (“there are more worlds than these”) spoken by his old nemesis Jack Andolini, dreams of Blaine the Mono and sees the Tower itself, surrounded by a field of bloodred roses. Red eyes, the eyes of the Crimson King, stare at him from the Tower, though only Roland knows the name of their greatest adversary.

From the top of the Tower, he hears a horn, the one that Roland lent to Cuthbert during the battle of Jericho Hill and neglected to retrieve after his friend was killed. The instrument is an important sigul dating back to Arthur Eld. Roland’s failure to pick it up is an indicator that this iteration of his quest is doomed to fail.

Eddie also dreams the first line of
The Gunslinger,
though in his vision it comes from
You Can’t Go Home Again
by Thomas Wolfe. This is the first significant hint of the nature of the ka-tet’s existence—that they are the fictional creations of an author from another plane of reality.

The book’s cover is illustrated with three symbols—a key, a rose and a door—that bring to mind a line from the introduction to another Wolfe novel,
Look Homeward, Angel,
which is used as an epigraph in the revised edition of
The Gunslinger
. These icons also appear on the box containing
Black Thirteen, the dangerous Wizard’s Glass that allows them to travel between worlds and save the vacant lot containing the rose.

After his dream, Eddie realizes that he and Susannah are no longer prisoners in Roland’s world. His quest is their quest.
⁷
Roland is like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz,
picking up traveling companions along her trek to find the Wizard, each one developing his own reason for completing the journey.
⁸

Eddie’s dreams the following night take him to the streets of Manhattan, but Roland’s sleep is troubled by his mental schism. He is so profoundly affected by his dual memories that he surrenders his guns—the very items that define him—to Eddie and Susannah. Eddie protests—though he and Susannah had already discussed the danger they might be in if Roland went insane—but Roland insists, saying, “Until the wound inside me closes—if it ever does—I am not fit to wear this [gun belt].” He even hands over his knife, which Eddie uses to start carving the key, keeping what he’s doing a secret, in much the same way Roland often hides his plans.

In 1977 New York, Jake Chambers also thinks he’s going insane. Just before he should have been killed, he develops an awareness of his impending death. After the moment passes, he has dim flashes of Roland and the events after he arrived at the way station, but the knowledge that he should be dead is what preys on his mind.

He develops a fascination with doors, convinced that one will open onto the desert, returning him to a world where he has never been. He’s not the only one with this obsession. Susannah will later muse that doorways have dominated her life, starting with the one that slammed shut on the jail in Mississippi.

Jake fears his English end-of-term paper will reveal his growing insanity. He has no recollection of writing the surrealistic, rambling essay entitled “My Understanding of the Truth,” which hints at what would have happened to him if Roland had not altered the timeline by killing Jack Mort, and his desire to return to the gunslinger. It also foreshadows events that lie ahead: Blaine the Mono and the contest of riddles. He decorated it with a picture of a door and one of a train. It has epigraphs from poets T. S. Eliot and Robert Browning, upon whom Jake has bestowed the nicknames “Butch” and “Sundance,” calling to mind the classic Western.