The Road to The Dark Tower (17 page)

Before they reach Lud and whatever challenges that city poses for them, they must first solve the riddle of the decrepit, rusting bridge that spans the Send River.
²¹
Eddie’s recent retelling of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
about people who die together when the bridge they’re crossing collapses, adds to their nervousness. This bridge is a three-quarter-mile-long shattered maze of steel and concrete, perhaps as old as Roland. The scene where the ka-tet crosses the bridge, evading holes and navigating tilted walkways is a cross between Larry Underhill’s trek though the Lincoln Tunnel to escape New York in
The Stand,
and Roland and Jake’s earlier experience on the trestle.

While King seems to foreshadow that Eddie’s acrophobia will be the source of any trouble they have during the crossing, the wind is what brings about their crisis. A strong gust sweeps Oy over the edge while they are navigating the gap in the middle, and Jake leaps to his rescue. Eddie functions like a gunslinger, running to Jake’s rescue mindless of his fear.

While all attention is focused on saving Jake and Oy, an intruder, Gasher by name, arrives wielding a hand grenade.
²²
He threatens to kill everyone—himself included—unless they turn Jake over to him. It’s another Mexican standoff. Jake demonstrates his faith in Roland by choosing to go with Gasher, trusting that Roland won’t let him down this time.

Roland sends Eddie and Susannah to find Blaine, while he and Oy follow Jake’s trail through the booby-trapped streets of Lud. The warlike drum track from a ZZ Top song emanates from speakers hanging around the city, once part of a public address system for emergency announcement during some ancient war. The city’s residents hear within the drumbeats an invitation to commit ritual murder.
²³
They sacrifice themselves by lottery to appease the ghosts they believe responsible for the noise, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s famous short story “The Lottery.”
²⁴
From each speaker pole hangs a “grisly garland of corpses.” Thousands of bodies line the streets, a scene familiar to Dorcas from
Rose Madder
.

In this section, King deftly juggles three parallel story lines, following Jake and Gasher, Roland and Oy, and Eddie and Susannah simultaneously. Each subplot is a crucial part of the gunslingers’ mission in Lud, and each has its own thread and building tension. The Fellowship of the Ring was similarly split into fragments during Frodo’s journey to the Tower. This is the first time the ka-tet is subdivided, but it won’t be the last.

Eddie and Susannah encounter a simulacrum of Roland’s universe—six streets radiating from a central square. They follow the street whose entrance is guarded by a giant turtle, a logical choice since they are on the path of the Bear heading in the direction of the Turtle. Susannah kills a human being for the first time, shooting a childlike dwarf—one of the Pubes—who approaches with a grenade hidden behind his back. She and Eddie kill several others before the mob dissipates.

They force two Pubes to lead them to the Cradle of Lud. Atop the station’s roof they see the Guardians of the Beam and a statue of Arthur Eld,
the father of all gunslingers, the King Arthur of Roland’s land. The Pubes are afraid of Blaine, who they believe is the most dangerous of Lud’s ghosts. Inside, Eddie and Susannah find the monorail, made by North Central Positronics, who was also responsible for Shardik. From the front, the train looks like it has a face, reminiscent of
Charlie the Choo-Choo
.

Blaine, who hasn’t run in a decade, is more than the train; he’s the voice of Lud, the one who brought the city’s technology back to life, deliberately driving its residents to battle. His brain is a vast array of computers buried in the city’s bowels. Like Susannah, he has two personalities: Big Blaine, a brash, confrontational lover of puzzles, and Little Blaine, a conscience who speaks only when Big Blaine isn’t paying attention. Little Blaine begs Eddie and Susannah not to disturb the train, who apparently isn’t aware of his alter ego.

When Blaine comes to life, Little Blaine disappears, afraid Big Blaine will kill him. Blaine is angry at being awakened and a little out of touch with reality. He thinks the doorways between worlds are closed and believes gunslingers haven’t walked Mid-World or In-World in three centuries.

After Eddie convinces Blaine they really are from New York, the games begin. The monorail doesn’t care where they came from; he just wants to hear some good riddles. The penalty for failure is death.

Meanwhile, Gasher takes Jake deeper into the bowels of Lud to the lair of the Tick-Tock Man, “a cross between a Viking warrior and a giant from a child’s fairy tale,” named, perhaps, after a Harlan Ellison story.
²⁵
He was once Andrew Quick, the great-grandson of David Quick, and he rules with an iron fist. To Jake, he’s the only person in Lud who “seemed wholly vital, wholly healthy, and wholly alive.” Tick-Tock doesn’t have a short fuse; he has no fuse at all. Jake easily angers him and is battered as a reward for his pertness.

Oy picks up Jake’s scent and leads Roland through the decaying city. The ka-tet can communicate with each other telepathically, though their power most often manifests as a kind of knowing—the “touch,” Roland calls it, likening it to sending out his ka. His old friend Alain was strong with it, and Jake’s touch is growing, too. Roland tries to see through Jake’s eyes, but he can’t establish contact for fear that Jake will inadvertently reveal something to Tick-Tock.

Roland knows how intelligent some billy-bumblers can be. He sends Oy to scout the room where Jake is being held. Oy reports the number of people in the room by tapping on the floor. The gunslinger finally contacts Jake and tells him to create a diversion. Jake imitates Eddie in Balazar’s lair, turning Tick-Tock’s suspicions on his own men.

Oy breaks into the chamber through a ventilation grid and attacks Tick-Tock with the same determination and disregard for his own well-being that he will later use against Mordred. Tick-Tock bends Oy almost to the breaking point; Mordred will break Oy’s spine in the bumbler’s final battle. Though Oy survives, Roland knew it was possible that he was asking one member of his ka-tet to sacrifice himself for the sake of another, which indicates that, although he is evolving, Roland hasn’t yet reached a point where he won’t risk another being’s life to further his goals.

Jake is distracted from opening the door to admit Roland, but it opens anyway, triggered remotely by Blaine. Jake joins the ranks of gunslingers when he shoots Tick-Tock Man with his father’s gun. The wound only appears to be fatal, though.

If Roland hadn’t already redeemed himself by preventing Jack Mort from killing Jake, he does so now, validating Jake’s faith by rescuing him.

Blaine contacts Roland over the citywide PA system, demanding a riddle, having learned from Eddie and Susannah that he knows many good ones. Roland asks one and uses the promise of more as a bargaining tool to get the train to cooperate. Blaine sends a sphere to lead Roland and Jake to the Cradle, where the ka-tet is reunited. Before they can board the train, however, they have to solve a puzzle. Susannah, hypnotized by Roland, draws on Detta’s memories to figure out the riddle of the prime numbers.

Blaine activates the city’s warning sirens. Panicked, many of Lud’s residents commit suicide. As they leave, Blaine detonates a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons. He clearly has no intention of returning. Blaine rationalizes his actions by saying that he’s serving the residents by fulfilling their belief that he is a god who dispenses both favor and punishment on a whim.

The trip southeast to Topeka along the Path of the Beam will cover more than seven thousand miles in eight hours. The distance was once much less, Blaine tells them, “[b]efore all temporal synapses began to melt down.” The chasm outside Lud is reminiscent of the abyss beyond
the walls of Castle Discordia, where terrible creatures battle each other and fight to escape.

The ubiquitous Randall Flagg enters the
Dark Tower
mythos, materializing in the underground passages, where he forces the injured Tick-Tock Man to repeat words once said by another of Flagg’s minions, Trashcan Man
²⁶
from
The Stand
: “My life for you.” Tick-Tock, the ruthless leader of the Grays and descendant of a great warrior, becomes completely subjugated to Flagg—who calls himself Richard Fannin—within moments of his appearance. When Flagg rips a giant flap of loose flesh from his head, the man regards him with “dumb gratitude.”

Perhaps King’s 1990 work on updating and revising
The Stand
—a book written during the period when the original stories that comprise
The Gunslinger
were composed—had him thinking about this villain and his part in the larger
Dark Tower
universe. Flagg is anti-ka, an agent of Discordia. His purpose is to ensure Roland and his ka-tet fail. “They’re meddling with things they have no business meddling with. . . . They must not draw closer to the Tower than they are now.”

Readers speculated for the next decade about who Flagg really was. With the reissue of
The Gunslinger
in 2003 and the appearance of the final three books, King confirmed that Flagg had been in the series from the very first page as Walter, the man in black.

While none of the volumes in the series have definitive conclusions, most wrap up at least some of the particular book’s business. Roland catches the man in black in
The Gunslinger
and assembles his ka-tet in
The Drawing of the Three. The Waste Lands
doesn’t have a goal, per se, other than to get the group to Lud, onto the train and across the blasted lands between there and Topeka. That goal accomplished, the book ends with a cliff-hanger. Reviewer Edward Bryant of
Locus
magazine said, “While clearly a symphony of traveling music, this novel is rather like an enormous chapter in some sort of cosmic radio serial.”
²⁷
A serial with five- to six-year gaps between installments

After accelerating to breakneck speeds, Blaine tells the group he will only deliver them safely to Topeka if they can stump him with a riddle. Otherwise, he will crash and kill them all. Blaine is aware of his own degeneration and also professes boredom. “I CAN ONLY CONCLUDE THAT THIS IS A SPIRITUAL MALAISE BEYOND MY ABILITY TO REPAIR,” the suicidal train tells them. Like everything else manmade in
Mid-World, Blaine is coming apart at the seams. Still, he knows the answer to every riddle Roland can remember. If the group’s riddle expert can’t stump the insane train, what hope do they have for survival?

In the author’s note, King writes:

I am well aware that some readers of
The Waste Lands
will be displeased that it has ended as it has, with so much unresolved. I am not terribly pleased to be leaving Roland and his companions in the not-so-tender care of Blaine the Mono myself, and although you are not obligated to believe me, I must nevertheless insist that I was as surprised by the conclusion to this third volume as some of my readers may be. Yet books which write themselves (as this one did, for the most part) must also be allowed to end themselves, and I can only assure you, Reader, that Roland and his band have come to one of the crucial border-crossings in their story, and we must leave them here for a while at the customs station, answering questions and filling out forms. All of which is simply a metaphorical way of saying that it was over again for a while and my heart was wise enough to stop me from trying to push ahead anyway.

The song of the Turtle had stopped for the time being.

¹
Unless otherwise specified, all quotes in this chapter are taken from
The Waste Lands
.

²
The book’s title is taken from T. S. Eliot, and quotes from that and other Eliot works appear in the text.

³
“Mir” means both “world” and “peace” in Russian. Mir is running down; Roland’s world is running down.

⁴
The eponymous gigantic bear in the novel by Richard Adams. Eddie associates the name with rabbits:
Watership Down
is another Adams novel.

⁵
On the other side of the Tower from the portal of the Bear is the portal of the Turtle, called Maturin. The other ten guardians are: Fish, Eagle (sometimes just Bird), Lion, Bat, Wolf, Hare, Rat, Horse, Dog and Elephant. The portal of the Bear is twinned with Brooklyn in Keystone Earth.

⁶
In the Cradle of Lud, Eddie refers to this portal as the unfound door, foreshadowing the real
UNFOUND
door that lurks in their futures. The Cradle of Lud is a kind of portal, too, decorated as it is with the guardians of the Beam and a statue of Arthur Eld.

⁷
Outside Lud, Eddie tells Roland, “We’re with you because we have to be—that’s your goddamned
ka
. But we’re also with you because we
want
to be. . . . If you died in your
sleep tonight, we’d bury you and then go on. We probably wouldn’t last long, but we’d die in the path of the Beam.”

⁸
Eddie and Susannah promise to tell Roland the story of Oz, but they don’t get around to it until they are at the Emerald Palace, thousands of miles down the Path of the Beam, a Mid-World analog to the yellow brick road.

⁹
Before he leaves, his teacher hands out the summer reading list, which includes
The Lord of the Flies
. Ted Brautigan gives this book to Bobby Garfield in
Hearts in Atlantis
. Brautigan will later mistake Jake for Bobby when he first sees him at Thunderclap Station. Alas, Jake never gets to read this book. O, Discordia.