The Road to The Dark Tower (23 page)

DURING THE APPROXIMATELY SEVEN WEEKS
⁹
since the ka-tet’s run-in with Flagg, the clock has given them a slight reprieve, a little time-out, but it has started running against them again. Eddie’s sensitivity to the passage of time might be attributed to his latent awareness of their
somewhat unreal circumstances. When time slips back into gear, King may be answering the song of the Turtle.

Summer has come to an end, and fall, the time of harvest and festivals, is upon them. The weather reminds Eddie of the first week of November, which corresponds—coincidentally?—to the week
Wolves of the Calla
was published. But the Wolves’ pending harvest is not a time of celebration for the people of Calla Bryn Sturgis.

The mystery number 19 has started appearing to the ka-tet everywhere they look. Eddie carves it on the side of a slingshot. They carry firewood in armloads of nineteen logs. Tree branches form the number’s shape against the sky. Nineteen is the sum of the number of portals, Beams and the Tower that stands at their intersection, and was the magic word Walter provided Allie to access Nort’s memories in Tull. It’s also the number of oil derricks Roland encountered long ago in the fields of Mejis.
¹⁰

Though he normally believes in omens and portents, Roland dismisses his ka-tet’s infatuation with the number. He has other things on his mind. Susannah has manifested a new personality calling herself Mia, daughter of none. Roland recognizes her name as a word that was almost holy in Gilead, where it meant “mother” in High Speech.

Susannah has been experiencing some of the signs of pregnancy, but her periods have been regular except for one occasion before the ka-tet passed through Lud. She thinks it’s a false pregnancy brought about by her strong desire to have Eddie’s baby. Roland knows she’s pregnant by the demon in the speaking circle.

Mia, fiercely protective of the “new chap” she carries, forages in the swamp for food at night, thinking that she’s feasting in a castle banquet hall. Though she isn’t an aspect of Susannah, Mia isn’t yet fully formed, and some of Susannah’s old memories merge with Mia’s. The blue plates in the banquet hall remind the Detta within her of the “forspecial” one that belonged to her aunt. She smashes each one she encounters without understanding why.

Roland, who has been following her on her nightly expeditions, watches her strip to keep her clothes clean before she wades into a bog, devouring hand-crushed frogs and water rats, bringing to mind the lines from Stanza XXI of Browning’s poem: “It may have been a water-rat I speared, / But, ugh! it sounded like a baby’s shriek.” She picks leeches from her legs and swallows them like candy. After her repast, she cleans herself and covers
her tracks. Roland decides to keep this to himself for the time being, another of his many secrets.

Fueled by dream-inducing muffin balls
¹¹
—berries the size of tennis balls—and their proximity to Black Thirteen, the Wizard’s Glass Callahan possesses, Eddie, Jake and Oy travel to New York on the day in 1977 when Jake saw the rose in the vacant lot. Roland knows what’s happening because he learned about todash from Vannay, the court tutor who taught his students from books. He sees them fade away, their bodies replaced by a dull gray glow that approximates the shapes and positions of their bodies, “as if something was holding their places in reality.” In New York, they are invisible to others, though passersby sense their presence. As they cross over, they detect things—looming shapes behind weird phosphorescent eyes
¹²
—in the darkness between universes.

Jake notices subtle differences between this version of the day and what he remembers living through. Stephen King’s name appears in place of John D. MacDonald’s on the deli board at Calvin Tower’s bookstore, for example.
Charlie the Choo-Choo
is now written by Claudia y Inez Bachman, the fictional widow of Richard Bachman, the pseudonym under which King wrote several novels. The extra
y
pads her name out to nineteen characters. The copyright date, 1936, adds up to 19. McCauley House published the book; Kirby McCauley was King’s agent at the time. These are the first hints that King will become pivotal to the survival of the Dark Tower. Roland believes
Charlie the Choo-Choo
is important enough to ka that, in different worlds, different women wrote the same story.

Jake and Eddie learn that Calvin Tower has problems with Enrico Balazar, the crime lord Eddie would smuggle drugs for ten years later. That Balazar is involved personally impresses Eddie. Balazar and his thugs have Tower cornered in his storage-room office
¹³
leaving Aaron Deepneau to run the store.

Todash chimes announce that their time in New York is running out, but Eddie resists long enough to get the gist of the agreement between Balazar and Tower. He is drawn to see the paper Balazar is waving around, in the same way the Beam draws the ka-tet to the Tower. Balazar, acting on behalf of Sombra
¹⁴
Corporation, paid Tower $100,000 to not sell the vacant lot for a one-year period that expires in six weeks. Sombra is interested only in the rose, but they can’t get at it until they own the ground it grows on. On the contract, Eddie sees Richard Patrick Sayre’s
name (which has nineteen characters), which Father Callahan will recognize when the group exchanges stories.

The next morning, Susannah suggests that they buy the land with her inheritance, which was worth millions in 1964. Roland believes that Tower has been holding the property for them. Subconsciously, he’s the rose’s guardian and has resisted selling the last piece of property he owns, in spite of its enormous value. Still, Balazar and his thugs could terrify him into selling it, even though everything else in the universe compels him not to.

They need two doors to accomplish their plan: one opening on 1964 to safeguard Susannah’s fortune and the other to physically take them to 1977 to negotiate with Tower. Roland reminds his friends that the first time he ever encountered a door like the ones they need was on the beach a few months earlier. “You speak as though my world was . . . filled with magical doorways.”

Father Callahan, part of the contingent from the Calla that has been clumsily shadowing the gunslingers for days, interrupts their palaver and introduces himself. He traces his history from Detroit in 1983, to Topeka, to New York, back to ’Salem’s Lot, Maine. His first question of the ka-tet is not
where
they are from, but
when
.
¹⁵

As a gunslinger, Roland must accept any formal plea for help even if it takes his ka-tet far afield from their quest. Even if it means they might die. “The way of ka is always the way of duty.” He won’t try to convince the people of the Calla to hire him, though. They must make that choice for themselves by answering affirmatively to three formal questions.

Callahan hints that he possesses something of value to offer if they agree to help. Though the suggestion angers Roland, he senses that Callahan wants to get rid of this object regardless of whether they help or not. Callahan is afraid of it, believing it has come alive. Roland guesses correctly that the object is Black Thirteen, the most powerful of the Wizard’s glasses, “very likely the most terrible object from the days of Eld still remaining on the face of the earth.” Dangerous as it is, it might provide the solution to their time-travel quandary.

The other members of the contingent join the group, including Wayne Overholser,
¹⁶
Ben Slightman and his son, Benny. Benny had a twin sister who died, apparently of pneumonia. No one is sure if he is still vulnerable to the Wolves or if he is now considered a singleton.

Andy predicts another trip todash for the ka-tet that night. Eddie quizzes him about the Wolves, their origin and how he knows they are coming. The robot requests a password to access this information, citing Directive Nineteen, the first hint that there might be more to him than meets the eye. The people who created Andy more than two thousand years ago couldn’t have prevented him from speaking about something that has been going on for roughly two hundred years.

Overholser, the village’s richest farmer, is also the strongest holdout to asking the gunslingers for help. Eddie is amazed by the way Roland handles the man, surprised primarily that Roland didn’t simply kill him. Roland convinces Overholser to at least listen to their proposal. The farmer is frightened and wants to say yes, but he needs a reason to change his mind. If the Calla-folken choose badly, it could mean death for everyone. Part of his reluctance comes from not believing that Roland is really a gunslinger. Gilead has been dust in the wind for a thousand years. Roland stages an impromptu but convincing demonstration of their skills.

Roland proposes spending time surveying the land and talking to the folk. Later, they will request a meeting where he will tell the people if their town can be defended and how many men they’d want to help them. Though he now has a female gunslinger among his tet, he doesn’t anticipate that it will be primarily the women of the Calla who help during the battle.

That night, everyone goes todash to New York, including Susannah, who is delighted to find that she has legs again, not realizing they belong to Mia. Her new legs are either black—indicating that Mia hasn’t substantially taken over her body yet—or the darkness hides their color from the others. This New York is as novel to Susannah as it is to Roland; much has changed in thirteen years. Clouded by a pall cast by Black Thirteen, Roland senses despair and loss.

An extra day has passed in New York compared to in the Calla. If they spend a week in the Calla, two weeks might elapse here, perhaps more. Parallel sets of deadlines like this will haunt the ka-tet during the remainder of their quest. While they attend to business in the Calla they will need to keep a watchful eye on what is happening in New York.

At the vacant lot, Jake notices that the graffiti about the turtle of enormous girth
¹⁷
has been replaced with “Oh
SUSANNAH-MIO,
divided girl of mine, Done parked her
RIG
in the
DIXIE PIG,
in the year of ’99.”
The message was probably written by the low men to tell Mia where to go to have her baby, but it will also help the ka-tet figure out where to look for Mia when she escapes after the battle with the Wolves.

Susannah stays behind while the others climb the fence to see the rose. She uses the excuse of having no shoes, but Roland suspects that Mia fears something dreadful might happen to her and her baby if they get too close to the rose. While she waits, seven minutes slip by during which Mia takes control of Susannah’s body. When Mia recedes, Susannah’s legs vanish, as does her fear of the rose.

Eddie and Roland see the rose for the first time. It opens at Roland’s approach, as if in greeting. Its nineteen petals surround a scarlet furnace and a yellow sun burning at the center, but also a flickering purple glare that doesn’t belong there, an indication of its illness. In the rose’s glow, Eddie sees how ka intervened to enable many great events—or to prevent many horrible disasters—throughout history, and also how it influenced numerous small incidents to make people’s lives better. The Big Combination powered the multiverse’s evils, big and small; the rose is the advocate for multiuniversal good. The song it sings is “All might be well, that all manner of things might be well.”
¹⁸

Before they leave the vacant lot, Jake finds a pink bowling bag near where he found the key that got him back to Mid-World. Roland knows that ka has provided the bag made of metallic fiber to contain Black Thirteen and perhaps shield some of its terrible power, like the hat Burnside used to block Ty Marshall’s strong powers in
Black House
. When Eddie later questions how they were able to bring the bag back with them when they found it while todash, Roland says that perhaps the bag is todash, too.

Susannah’s scream at the sight of one of the vagrant dead brings the ka-tet rushing out of the vacant lot. The vags are people who either don’t know they’ve died or refuse to accept it. Why King introduced vags into the story is unclear, as no further use is made of them. Susannah tells about her missing seven minutes, but Roland doesn’t voice his concerns about what the lapse—coupled with the disappearance of her legs—might signify.

The next day, while riding back to the Calla, Benny Slightman invites Jake to stay at his ranch. Though they are similar in age, Jake’s display of gunmanship permanently changed the dynamics of their relationship.
Jake gives Roland adult reasons for accepting Benny’s invitation. Roland regrets that Jake is ashamed to just accept a friend’s invitation to sleep over like the young boy he is. The gunslinger presided over the end of Eddie’s childhood in the speaking circle outside Lud, and he knows that Jake’s childhood is nearing its end, too.

Nearly a thousand people welcome the travelers, and the evening turns into a festival. After introductions—including of Oy, who wins the townspeople’s hearts with a bow and a verbal greeting—Roland surprises and angers Eddie by turning the gathering over to him. He later realizes that Roland was getting him warmed up to talk to people during the ensuing banquet.

As they socialize, the gunslingers learn things that may prove important. Susannah hears that Tian’s grandfather has evidence the Wolves can be killed. When Eddie later follows up with Gran-Pere Jaffords, he learns about the Wolves’ vulnerable spots. The old man also tells them something crucial that King hides from readers.
¹⁹
He probably intends to build tension, but it seems like cheating to arbitrarily suppress one detail from a conversation when all else is revealed. Like Roland, King doesn’t tell his followers everything and risks breaking his ka-tet by doing so. It reminds readers that they are at the whim of the author. The relationship between reader and storyteller can’t be taken at face value.