The Road to The Dark Tower (27 page)

Roland intended to send Jake and Callahan to 1977 while he and Eddie followed Susannah’s trail. Ka has a different plan. Roland and Eddie are sucked through the door to 1977, where they are caught in an ambush. Jake and Callahan are sent after Susannah, accompanied by Oy, who was supposed to stay behind with the Manni.
⁵
Oy is part of the ka-tet and ka needs him for this part of the mission.

Mia arrives in New York on June 1, 1999, near the once-vacant lot where a skyscraper now stands at 2 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, which the people who work there jokingly call the Black Tower.
⁶
Susannah and Mia struggle for control. That they’re experiencing strong labor pains doesn’t help.

With Mia in charge, their body has white legs, and the longer she’s in control, the more the white coloration spreads up Susannah’s body. If Susannah controls the body too long, though, her legs tend to vanish, as they did during her todash trip to New York.

The tower that currently stands on the corner of Forty-sixth and Second in Manhattan.
(Ron J. Martirano, 2004)

Mia materializes in front of an accountant named Trudy Damascus.
⁷
Since she has no shoes, she accosts Trudy, threatening her with an Oriza and demanding footwear.

Trudy is only a minor character whose part is over as soon as she gives her shoes to Mia. However, in the minute between 1:18
P
.
M
. and 1:19
P
.
M
. her entire worldview was pushed off balance. A former doubter of all things supernatural and extraterrestrial, her experience puts her in a league with Donnie Russert, John Cullum’s friend from Vanderbilt who explored the walk-in phenomenon, and Ted Brautigan, who tried to convince people to make use of his psychic skills. They all discover that there are some things that people—especially those like Irene Tassenbaum’s husband, David—just won’t believe even when you can prove it. Trudy eventually learns to stop fighting this entrenched disbelief or trying to counter the mundane explanations others have for Mia’s appearance. She also comes to recognize the sympathetic nods her story receives as being similar to those afforded madwomen to keep from upsetting them.

Outside the Black Tower, she encounters the former acne sufferer whom Father Callahan met twenty years earlier. He tells her that visiting this place cleared up his acne when he was a young man, expecting that she will think he’s crazy. Her strange confrontation with a materializing shoe thief gives them a common bond. Singing still attracts people to the corner, but Trudy senses that something is very wrong. The world is tipping and in danger of toppling completely.

Susannah and Mia figure out what Roland already knew: If they are to survive in New York, they have to cooperate. Mia has full access to Susannah’s memories, but she has no experience living in a place like this, which is almost as foreign to Susannah as it is to Mia.

Susannah creates a mental control room reminiscent of Jonesy’s storage room in
Dreamcatcher
. Here she can control Emotional Temperature, Labor Force and whether her fetus—the “chap”—is awake or asleep. She reduces her Emotional Temperature to a comfortable level, sets the Chap switch to
SLEEP
, then wrests the Labor Force setting from nine out of ten all the way down to two. Unbearable pain prevents her from reducing it to one. The control room trembles and quakes under the strain, like Poe’s House of Usher.

Susannah visualizes her baby for the first time and is confused to see that it has Roland’s eyes, not Eddie’s. Before leaving, she adds a microphone that she tries to use to talk to Eddie, but she gets no response.

Her mental Dogan is more than mere visualization. All three ex–New

Yorkers have been changed by their experience. Jake has the touch, Eddie can make powerful talismanic objects like the key, and Susannah can see things hard enough to make them real. However, she isn’t in complete control. Her microphone was supposed to be a Zenith, but it bears the markings of North Central Positronics.

We’re All Going Crazy

Insanity—or concerns about going insane—is a common theme in the
Dark Tower
series. The first truly insane creature the ka-tet meets is Shardik the bear, once great Guardian of the Beam. Soon they will learn that most of the ancient sentient machinery has gone mad, including suicidally depressed Blaine the Mono.

Eddie thinks he may be going crazy when Roland enters his mind aboard the flight from the Bahamas. Both Roland and Jake fear for their sanity after Roland inadvertently causes a doubling of time by killing Jack Mort, a sociopath who is clinically insane. Greta Shaw helped Jake “hold up the Tower” of his sanity.

Living in the shadow of the Dark Tower for millennia and coveting its power drives the Crimson King insane. Father Callahan thinks the Crimson King’s eye, trapped in Black Thirteen, is mad. The Doorway Cave goes insane after the Beamquake.

Susannah frequently worries about her sanity, especially when Mia possesses her. Mia, mother of Mordred and daughter of none, goes insane giving birth, even before she realizes the true nature of her son.

And even author-character Stephen King doubts his sanity when the fruits of his imagination appear to him one sunny day in 1977.

In the now-crimson bag containing Black Thirteen, Susannah finds the object Eddie had noticed while in the Doorway Cave: a scrimshaw turtle—Maturin, a Guardian of the Beam, with a question mark scratched on his shell.
⁸
Like the singing rose, people are drawn to it. Like the key Jake found in the vacant lot, the turtle makes people susceptible to suggestion. It is can-tah, one of the little gods, a term first seen in
Desperation
. Susannah believes the scrimshaw turtle belongs to the Dark Tower. In a pocket park (Katharine Hepburn Park) next to 2 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, Susannah discovers a statue that also depicts the turtle.

She uses the totem to convince a Swedish businessman
⁹
to rent her a room at the Plaza-Park Hyatt and divests him of nearly $200. Under the sigul’s influence, the hotel receptionist says, “Soon comes the King, he of the Eye. . . . When the King comes and the Tower falls, sai, all such pretty
things as yours will be broken. There will be a darkness and nothing but the howl of the discordia and the cries of the can toi.”
¹⁰

In room 1919, Mia stores the Orizas and Black Thirteen in a safe. She’s expecting a call, though Susannah wonders how Mia knows anything about telephones. While they wait, Mia goes todash with Susannah so they can talk face-to-face. They meet on the parapet wall—the allure—of the Castle on the Abyss. Once known as Castle Discordia, it is deep in End-World, “near the place where your quest ends, for good or for ill.” Susannah feels very close to the Tower. Mia tells Susannah that Roland has finally come to the Crimson King’s attention and will surely be destroyed before his quest is over: “I carry his doom in my own belly, and I care not.”

Past the castle’s inner keep is the town of Fedic. The abyss beyond the outer wall is filled with monsters trying to escape its confines, much like those in the chasm outside Lud.

Mia’s baby will be called Mordred, a name she drew from Susannah’s mind. Part demon, the child will grow quickly
¹¹
and, like his namesake in Arthurian legend, will strive to slay his father. Mia believes Mordred will be the avatar (ideal) of every gunslinger that ever was. Susannah is stunned when Mia confirms that Roland, not Eddie, is the baby’s father.

Mia tells Susannah the Mid-World creation story. Discordia, called the Over by the Manni, is the soup of creation, also known as the Prim. From it arose the Beams, supported by a supply of magic that would have lasted forever. However, when the magic left everything else in the world except the Tower, men despaired and replaced the magic sustaining the Beams with mortal machines supported by rational thought. Now these machines are failing and the world is running down. “Maerlyn retired to his cave in one world, the sword of Eld gave way to the pistols of the gunslingers in another, and the magic went away,” Mia says. Like Shardik and Blaine the Mono, the machines are slowly going mad. The Crimson King’s Breakers are only hurrying along their decay.

The Crimson King has been promised—or perhaps he only promised himself—he will survive when the Tower falls and will rule the resulting chaos forever. Mia tells Susannah that Roland’s real quest is not to save the Tower. If he managed to free the Breakers and kill the Crimson King, he would only be slowing down its eventual collapse. She wants Susannah to believe that Roland’s goals are less noble than saving creation.

What he wants of the Tower is only to see it. Or, perhaps to enter it, and climb to the room at the top, his ambition may strike so far. He may dream of standing on its allure . . . and chant the names of his fallen comrades, and of his line all the way back to Arthur Eld. But save it? . . . Only a return of the magic could possibly save it, and . . . your dinh deals only in lead.
¹²

Mia recounts the demon hierarchy: six demon elementals, one for each Beam, who rule above the other creatures left behind on the beach of existence when the Prim receded; Speaking Demons; ghosts; and demons called disease. Each demon elemental is both male and female, so there are twelve demon aspects to counter the twelve Guardians of the Beams. They have no need of names. They are what they are.

Mia tries to tell Susannah that she is one of the demon elementals, but Susannah forces her to admit she doesn’t really know what she is or where she came from. Roland had intercourse with a female demon in the place of the oracle. His seed was preserved and given to Susannah by the demon’s male aspect in the speaking ring when Jake came through from New York.

Mia has been told she’ll get to raise Mordred, but Susannah thinks Mia’s overwhelming need to be a mother made her susceptible to believing lies. Detta raises a crucial question: If Roland’s semen entered Susannah, why is it Mia who is pregnant now that they are separate?

The ringing telephone takes them back to New York. Richard Sayre, the man who lured Father Callahan to his death, summons Mia to the Dixie Pig. Susannah and Mia’s palaver has raised doubts in Mia’s mind. She asks Sayre if he will keep his promises. Sayre placates Mia, saying her son is the most important child to ever be born and, though Mordred’s childhood will be short, she will have him for several years.

Sayre taunts Susannah, saying Eddie and Roland will be killed in an ambush. Susannah is livid that Mia—who had access to Susannah’s memories and the zip code where Tower was hiding—bartered Eddie for her monster. “No wonder you wanted to take his ring off! How could you bear to have it lie against your skin, knowing what you’d done?” Mia seals Susannah in a triply locked prison in her mind, making her flash back to Odetta’s experiences in jail in Oxford.

A SMALL ARMY led by Jack Andolini is waiting for Roland and Eddie when they arrive in Maine. Sayre underestimates Roland’s “divine combination of training, observation and hair-trigger intuition”—he drags Eddie inside the nearby general store in a hail of machine gun fire, leaving all their belongings behind except for their guns.
¹³
The ambush reminds Roland of Jericho Hill.

Some of the men taking part in the ambush are people Eddie and Roland killed previously—ten years in the future. This is the Keystone World, though, and anyone they kill here will stay dead. This interference with the timeline might have created dual memories similar to the ones Roland and Jake experienced after Roland killed Jack Mort, but it doesn’t. Perhaps this is because nothing they do affects the mortality of a member of the ka-tet.