The Road to The Dark Tower (33 page)

Roland’s pain is with King now, so they walk from Irene’s New York apartment to the high-rise at 2 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza housing the Tet Corporation. The building stuns him. It’s not his Dark Tower, but it’s the
Tower’s representation in this Keystone World, just as the rose represented a field filled with them.

Irene draws his attention to the pocket park outside the building that contains a fountain and a turtle sculpture, the place where Susannah and Mia rested after stealing Trudy Damascus’s shoes. Roland leaves Irene in the park, a perfectly serene place for her to bide while he attends to business inside.

The rose is exactly where Roland last saw it. The garden lobby and the building are shrines built around it. He’s so fascinated by the rose that he doesn’t hear Nancy Deepneau—Aaron’s brother’s granddaughter—approach him from behind, a serious lapse for a gunslinger. Roland, who normally has trouble with written English, can read the sign in the garden because the inscription devoted to Eddie and Jake changes into the Great Letters of Gilead. Before June 19, the plaque had been more generic, honoring the “Beam family” and Gilead.

Nancy takes him to the nineteenth floor, where he learns about the deaths of John Cullum (in 1989 at the hands of low men
¹⁹
) and Aaron Deepneau (in 1992 of cancer). Moses Carver, the last of the Ka-Tet of the Rose, is still alive at the age of a hundred. He retired as president of Tet Corporation two years earlier in favor of his thirty-year-old daughter, Marian Odetta Carver. The business is now worth $10 billion.

To confirm his identification, Marian asks to see Roland’s gun. Carver is awestruck. “Might as well tell your gran-babbies you saw Excalibur, the Sword of Arthur, for’t comes to the same!”

Carver understands what the young women do not: that saving the Beams wasn’t Roland’s quest but a means to an end. “Had they broken, the Tower would have fallen. Had the Tower fallen, I should never have gained it, and climbed to the top.” Nancy is incredulous. “You’re saying you cared more for the Dark Tower than for the continued existence of the universe?” Roland tells her he sacrificed his friends, a boy who called him father and his own soul pursuing the Tower.

Carver tells Roland that a team of telepaths and precogs believe that Eddie told Jake something important before he died. Jake may have passed the message on, either to Irene or to Oy. They present Roland with a copy of one of King’s novels,
Insomnia,
telling him that even his earliest books touch on the
Dark Tower
in one way or another. A group of Tet scholars—the Calvins—spend their days reading his works, cross-referencing them by setting, character and theme, looking for references to the Tower and to real people.

See the TURTLE of enormous girth, on his shell he holds the Earth—from a pocket park near the Tower in NYC. (
Ron J. Martirano, 2004)

Insomnia
is the keystone nonseries book. Its red-and-white dust jacket signifies evil and good.
²⁰
The Calvins believe King named the villain Deepneau as a subconscious way of getting Roland’s attention. They tell him to be on the lookout for Patrick Danville, whom they believe will be important to his quest. The Calvins—and King—implicitly support Roland’s second quest. Patrick Danville isn’t important to saving the Tower, only to assisting him on his journey there.

Tet Corporation’s final gift is a watch. Engraved upon its gold cover are three objects: a key, a rose and a tower with tiny windows marching in an ascending spiral around its circumference. According to one of Tet’s precogs, when Roland nears the Tower, the watch may stop or begin to run backward. Moses tells Roland that in his world, giving a man a gold watch signifies he’s ready for retirement, but he knows Roland doesn’t plan to retire.

Outside the Manhattan Tower, Roland asks the bumbler what message Jake left for him. Oy tries to speak, but words fail him. Roland presses his forehead against Oy’s, closes his eyes and hears Jake’s voice one last time: “Tell him Eddie says, ‘Watch for Dandelo.’ Don’t forget!” Oy had not forgotten.

Roland says good-bye to Irene at the Dixie Pig. She fared better than most of the people he used and left behind on his way to the Dark Tower and can return to her former life, though she is much changed by her adventure.

Susannah greets Roland in Fedic. She knew someone had died but hadn’t been able to tell whom. Part of her wants to let Roland go on alone for what he has given her and then taken away. Instead, she kisses him, not on the cheek but on the lips. “Let him understand it’s no halfway thing—if I’m in it, I’m in to the end.” She tells him that Sheemie died on the train ride to Fedic.

Before going through the doorway toward Calla Bryn Sturgis, the Breakers used their powers to map out the labyrinth beneath the castle and find the passage Roland and Susannah need to get past the chasm beyond the outer walls.
²¹
The Breakers warn of creatures in the fissure that have been tunneling the catacombs for a long time and are close to
breaking through. These beasts are neither for the Crimson King nor against him; they’re only for themselves.

In Sayre’s office, Susannah and Roland find surveillance files containing photographs of Jake and Eddie that are too painful to look at. They also see a painting signed by Patrick Danville depicting Mordred beside Llamrie, Arthur Eld’s horse, which is dead. Though Roland doesn’t know it yet, this painting—and another featuring the Dark Tower that can have been done only by someone who has seen it—comes from the future and is inspired by Patrick’s experiences after he joins Roland and Susannah. The portrait of Llamrie symbolizes how Mordred, the last of the line of Eld, died partly because he ate Dandelo’s dead horse.

Narrow windows rise in an ascending spiral around it. At the top of the 600-foot tower is an oriel window of many colors, each corresponding to one of the Wizard’s Glasses. The innermost circle but one was the pink of Rhea’s ball. The center was the dead ebony of Black Thirteen. Outside the barrel of the tower were balconies encircled with waist-high wrought-iron railings. On the second of these was a blob of red and three tiny blobs of white: A face that was too small to see, and a pair of upraised hands. The Crimson King, locked out of the only thing he ever wanted.

“The room behind that window is where I would go,” Roland says, indicating the multicolored oriel window at the top, similar to the window in his nursery in Gilead. “That is where my quest ends.” He reassures Susannah that he won’t be alone, that she and Oy will help him deal with the Crimson King and climb the stairs with him to the room at the top. The words feel like a lie to both of them.

They stock up on provisions, including Sterno for fires, and Roland rigs a set of straps so he can carry Susannah. Oy leads them to the passage the Breakers found. Something big—either from the fissure or todash space—follows them. When the lights fail, it closes the gap in a scene reminiscent of Jake’s passage through the tunnel near the Oatley Tap in
The Talisman
. Susannah uses Sterno torches to hold the beast at bay while Roland runs in the darkness with her strapped to his shoulders, Oy keeping pace at their side. Eventually, they emerge into the cold land east of
Fedic, where they find a sign saying
THIS CHECKPOINT IS CLOSED
.
FOREVER
.

Though they have food for about a month and water, they don’t have heavy clothing. Past this barren land there will be animals to kill for their hides, but that is weeks away and they are in for a very hard stretch of energy-draining cold. It would have taken very little—a sweater and gloves—to make them comfortable, but even the blankets in Fedic had rotted to almost nothing.

They set out along the Path of the Beam again, mother and father, but never husband and wife, with their ill-begotten son trailing behind.

The village in the shadow of the Crimson King’s castle is deserted, the houses haunted. No wood will burn for them because this is “his place, still his even though he’s moved on. Everything here hates us.” The castle is off the Path of the Beam, but Roland wants to make sure the Crimson King is really gone and he thinks that they may also find a way to trap Mordred. They haven’t seen the red pulsing that Susannah observed from the ramparts of Castle Discordia. Roland says it probably died when they put an end to the Breakers’ work. The Forge of the King has gone out. This may also be the Big Combination, the Crimson King’s child-powered energy plant, extinguished by Ty Marshall at the end of
Black House
.

Roland prepares for whatever traps the Crimson King may have left for them at his castle. Before victory comes temptation, and the greater the victory to win, the greater the temptation to withstand. He instructs Susannah to let him do the talking.

A banner welcomes them by name. In the castle’s forecourt, two men who look like 1977 versions of Stephen King greet them. A third hangs back, staying on the far side of a dead-line set by the Crimson King.
²²
The polite one calls himself
Fee
malo, the ego. The rude one is
Fum
alo, the id, and the one behind is the superego,
Fi
malo. Their names bring to mind “Jack and the Beanstalk” and also
King Lear,
where “Fie, foh, and fom, I smell the blood of a British man” is the line after “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Wayne Overholser also says, “Fee fi fo fum” in the Calla when talking about how the roont children grew into giants.

The scene is also reminiscent of Tweedledum and Tweedledee from
Through the Looking-Glass,
which Susannah underscores by reciting the line “Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow but no jam today.” The odd twins in that book warn Alice against awakening the Red King, who is dreaming
about her. If the king should awake, they say, Alice would cease to exist, putting the girl in similar company to Roland and Susannah, who are the living dreams of Stephen King, a representation of whom stands before them.

Fumalo and Feemalo tell Roland that after the Crimson King witnessed the ka-tet’s victory against the Wolves, he forced everyone in the castle to take poison—recalling the Jonestown massacre, which is mentioned earlier—and then killed himself with a spoon, fulfilling an ancient prophecy familiar to Roland, and putting himself beyond death. He’s now trapped on one of the Tower’s balconies. In a fit of rage, he scorched the red mark from his heel and without a sigul of Eld he can’t get back in. However, he could take Roland’s guns from him and use them to reenter the Tower. From there he could rule, but he’d prefer to bring the Tower down, which he can possibly do, Beams or no Beams. Fimalo and Feemalo remind Roland that no prophecy demands he go beyond this point. He completed his task by saving the Beams and Stephen King, thereby preserving the Tower. If he continues, he goes outside ka and risks endangering the Tower again by providing the Crimson King what he needs to breach it.

When Roland makes it clear that he plans to go on, they offer food and clothing. The journey will take months through the deadly cold of Empathica. Though sorely tempted, Susannah resists their offer, remembering Roland’s warning. “She never would have suspected that her life’s greatest temptation would be nothing more than a cable-knit fisherman’s sweater.”

The provisions in the baskets are an illusion. Feemalo and Fumalo reach inside for guns, but Roland and Susannah shoot them before they raise their weapons. Fimalo transforms into a dying old man who served as the Crimson King’s Minister of State under the name Rando Thoughtful.
²³
Roland tells Thoughtful to give Mordred a message. “If he stays back he may live awhile yet with his dreams of revenge . . . although what I’ve done to him requiring his vengeance, I know not. And tell him that if he comes forward, I’ll kill him as I intend to kill his red father.”