The Road to The Dark Tower (35 page)

The night before he reaches the Tower is the longest of Roland’s life, except for the one he spent in palaver with Walter and, perhaps, the night he told the story of Mejis. He knows Mordred is probably waiting for him to fall asleep, but he can’t stay awake and has no choice but to ask Patrick to keep watch. Roland gives him something to draw, hoping it will keep the boy attentive for an hour or two. He knows Patrick is addicted to “the narrow line of graphite running down the center of his pencils.”

Mordred is struggling to stay alive long enough to fulfill his destiny. He considers attacking while Patrick is still awake, but the Crimson King speaks to him from the Tower, telling him to wait, then sends out a soothing pulse that lulls Patrick to sleep. Mordred sweeps down on the camp, a black nightmare on seven legs, but in his zeal he overlooks the third member of Roland’s group. Oy throws himself at the spider with the same reckless disregard for his own safety he displayed when he attacked
Tick-Tock in the bunker beneath Lud. His barking wakes Roland. If Oy hadn’t rushed out of the tall grass to intercept Mordred, it would have been Roland in the spider’s grip. Oy has a chance to escape Mordred’s grasp, but he chooses to fight instead.

Roland commands Mordred to release Oy, promising to let him live another day, but Mordred can’t overcome his hatred. He’s going to die soon, one way or the other. He flings Oy into the branches of a tree, where he is impaled, fulfilling Roland’s vision inside the pink Wizard’s Glass in Mejis.

Ahead is a tree like a crooked, clutching hand; on its topmost branch a billy-bumbler has been impaled. It should be dead, but as the pink storm carries Roland past, it raises its head and looks at him with inexpressible pain and weariness. “Oy!” it cries, and then it, too, is gone and not to be remembered for many years. [DT4]

Mordred turns to attack Roland, but he is too slow and the gunslinger’s eye has never been clearer. He shoots Mordred several times, until he hears a howl of outraged fury in his head. The Crimson King is livid at the death of his only son, but Roland reminds the madman that it was his fault for sending Mordred after him. The outcome of Roland’s quest might have been much different if Mordred had been able to resist his need to kill his White father and reached the Dark Tower ahead of him.

Oy is the last of Roland’s ka-tet to die from the terrible germ of death the gunslinger carries. Patrick is immune because he was never part of the ka-tet. Roland thanks Oy for his sacrifice and extends his hand, aware that Oy might bite him and perhaps hoping that he will. Oy has only enough strength left to lick Roland’s hand once before he dies. Roland regrets being short with Oy the previous day, and realizes now that the bumbler probably knew he was going to die and that the dying would be hard.

After Patrick and Roland bury Oy, they set out to cover the last few miles to the Tower. Roland is careful to make sure that the wheels of his cart don’t crush any of the roses that grow in increasing numbers along the road, which is lined with the remnants of rock walls. Some look like the ruins of castles; others look like Egyptian obelisks. A few are speaking rings, and one ruin resembles Stonehenge.

At last, Roland sees for the first time something that has occupied his dreams for a thousand years—the top of the Dark Tower. He’s surprised
that the world doesn’t come trembling to a halt, but he is the same person a minute after he sees the Tower as he was a minute before. Neither, though, does he feel a sense of disappointment that his quest is nearly at an end.

Through binoculars scavenged from Mordred’s camp he sees the oriel window at the top, its many colors blazing in the spring sunshine. The black center peers back at him like an eye. A double antenna juts from the top. The two surviving Paths of the Beam cross in the sky above it.
X
marks the spot.

The voices grow louder, singing the names of all worlds. He feels so light that he asks Patrick to climb into the cart he’s pulling. “I need an anchor. . . . Without one I’m apt to start running toward yonder Tower, even though part of me knows better. And if plain old exhaustion doesn’t burst my heart, the Red King’s apt to take my head off with one of his toys.”

A few miles from the Tower, Roland sets down the cart handles and he and Patrick crest the last hill hand in hand. Below them, a great blanket of red stretches to the horizon in every direction. At the far end stands the sooty gray Tower, its windows gleaming in the sun.

The Crimson King—who looks exactly like Patrick’s childhood depiction of him—greets Roland with a scream: “GUNSLINGER! NOW YOU DIE!” They duck behind a steel-lined stone pyramid
²⁸
as a sneetch strikes their cart, blowing their belongings in every direction.

Roland taunts his nemesis, hoping to goad him into depleting his ammunition. The Crimson King rages, then falls silent and lets Roland hear the Tower, which is summoning the entire line of Eld, calling to him like the Talisman called Jack Sawyer. Its call is like a fishhook in his mind, drawing him out into the open where the Crimson King can kill him. Roland’s watch runs backward, faster all the time.

Roland wanted to kill the Crimson King himself, but he comes up with another solution. He gives Patrick the binoculars and tells him to draw the Red King. Patrick’s voice echoes in his head. “He’s not entirely there. He darkles. He tincts,” he says, echoing how Walter described the Ageless Stranger and how the Tower will describe Roland himself.
²⁹

Patrick’s pencil drawing is perhaps his greatest work, but something is missing. The eyes need to be red. Roland springs from cover to pick the nearest rose. Its thorns slash through his leather glove, severing one of the remaining fingers on his right hand. He had been unable to convince Patrick to go for the rose, and he realizes now that had he been successful, the boy
might have been injured badly enough to prevent him from finishing his drawing.

Once the rose is out of the ground, its thorns lose their bite. Patrick creates pigment the color of the Crimson King’s lunatic eyes from saliva, attar of rose and Roland’s blood of Eld, for the Crimson King is descended from Arthur, too. Roland believes it may be the first time Patrick worked in color, but Patrick often used crayons as a child.

Roland hands Patrick an eraser. “Make yonder foul dybbuk
³⁰
gone from this world and every world.” The Crimson King screams in pain, horror and understanding, throwing sneetches until he has no hands with which to throw. Patrick’s eraser removes everything but his eyes.

Roland must go the rest of the way alone, but he won’t abandon Patrick completely. The boy stands for all the murders and betrayals that brought Roland to the Tower. Roland’s family is dead; Mordred was the last. He gives Patrick his remaining gun and shells, tells him to gather what he can of their provisions, and points him back in the direction of the outpost. Stutterin’ Bill may be able to take him to a door to America. If ka leads him to Susannah, Roland asks Patrick to give her his love and a kiss. Patrick’s fate is unknown, except that he would live long enough to create the paintings Roland and Susannah found in Fedic. Like Irene, he fared better than many who abetted Roland in his quest.

Roland approaches the Tower, naming all who have been part of his journey. Finally, he says, “I am Roland of Gilead, and I come as myself; you will open to me.” The door opens and slams shut behind him.

Browning doesn’t say what happens to the narrator of “Childe Roland” after he blows his horn and announces his presence to the Tower. King tells readers they should be content to have the story end here, too. What’s behind this
UNFOUND
door may leave readers disappointed, even heartbroken. Straub and King do something similar in the closing pages of
Black House,
telling readers that the story could end with the Sawyer Gang rescuing Ty Marshall and the other children. “If you do choose to go on, never say you weren’t warned: you’re not going to like what happens next.” [BH]

With an almost audible sigh, King accedes to the imagined pleas for more and draws aside the curtain to show the bumhug.

Here is the Dark Tower.

Giving in to the call of the Tower is the greatest relief of Roland’s life,
but only slightly greater than feeling nothing at either hip except for the loops of his jeans. He hadn’t realized how heavy his guns had become.

The Crimson King’s red eyes stare down from the balcony, burning with eternal hatred. The destruction of eyes is a recurring theme in the series. Another manifestation of the Crimson King lost one of his eyes to Ralph Roberts in
Insomnia,
and another of his eyes, Black Thirteen, is doomed to destruction beneath the World Trade Center. It’s ironic that eyes are all that remain of his greatest enemy, but Roland has no weapons with which to extinguish them.

The horn that greets him is the voice of the roses, welcoming him with a kingly blast. In his dreams, the horn was his own, but he left his with Cuthbert at Jericho Hill. It would have taken only a few seconds to pick it up, and he will pay dearly for this oversight. Could Roland have avoided what comes next if he stopped here and retraced his thousand-year journey to see if he could recover this sigul?

The Tower isn’t stone. It is a living thing, Gan himself. Its pulse is Gan’s beating life force. The door swings open on its own, revealing the bottom steps of a spiral stairway. When Roland steps inside, the Song of the Tower, which he has always heard, even in Gilead, where it hid in his mother’s voice, finally ceases. He smells alkali bitterness without realizing it is the Mohaine Desert that awaits him at the far end of his climb. Is this another omen from the Tower that he should turn away, warning him before he commits himself to the stairs that he’s failed again?

The door swings shut behind him with a sigh.

At each level of Roland’s climb he encounters a signature aroma and an icon from his life—his baby clothing, feathers from his hawk. After the floor where he sees the charred stake symbolizing Susan Delgado, he has no desire to see more. The Tower is a place of death, but only because his life has made it so.

The sense of déjà vu he experienced outside the door stays with him as he climbs, but he thinks this is because the Tower is relating his life. He passes Zoltan, the way station, the lobstrosities, climbing over a mile through history in nineteen-step increments to the present, a room containing a drawing pad bearing two red, glaring eyes. Is he wrong to bypass these rooms without giving each one due consideration? Many rooms represent decisions that, if he had chosen differently, might have resulted in a vastly different result for his quest.

By the time he reaches the top, the stairs have narrowed to a passage no wider than the inside of a coffin. Death for others, but not for him. These narrow steps at the top of the Tower may be as close to a coffin as he ever comes.

Unlike the other doors he passed on his ascent, the ghostwood door to the final room at the top of the Tower is closed. It has a single word carved upon it:
ROLAND
. The knob is engraved with a revolver, the iconic representation of his life, but Roland gave his remaining gun to Patrick. “Yet it will be yours again,” whispers one of the Tower’s voices.

As soon as the door opens and he sees what lies beyond its threshold, Roland realizes that his existence has been an uncounted series of loops. He isn’t sent back to the beginning “when things might have been changed and time’s curse lifted,” but to a time in the desert when he has at last found the man in black’s trail and “finally understood that his thoughtless, questionless quest would ultimately succeed.” The same point where Walter o’Dim started to believe the prophecy that Roland would “begin the end of matters and ultimately cause the tumble of that which he wished to save.”

Roland tries to pull back, but the hands of Gan pull him through the last door, “the one he always sought, the one he always found.” Does this wording imply that not seeking the door is the change he needs to make?

King often called his series a cycle, hinting at Roland’s fate. The ka-tet had a sense of this all along, saying at one point that King’s work “has cast the circle.” The day before he drops Jake, he thinks, “How we make large circles in earth for ourselves. . . . Around we go, back to the start and the start is there again: resumption, which was ever the curse of daylight.” [DT1] Even Susan Delgado experienced what she called “the dim—that feeling of having lived a thing before.” [DT4]

The book’s subtitle becomes clear: “Resumption,” the same as for
The Gunslinger
. Once back in the desert, Roland has a momentary sense of dislocation, the memory of having been in the Tower stolen by time. A voice whispers, “Perhaps this time when you get there it will be different.” The voice seems to be encouraging him to return to the Tower.

King believes the ending will surprise people, but he hopes they will say, “Yes, it just has to be this way.”
³¹
Roland’s moment of desolation is tempered with hope. He may get it right someday.

During his previous iteration—perhaps during countless previous iterations—Roland learned that though his quest’s objective was honorable, even pure goals must be tempered by consideration for those he meets along the way. He had once known love, which he called “the Bright Tower of every human’s life and soul,” [DT4] but he also saw the ruin love could bring, first to his parents, then to Susan Delgado and ultimately to himself. He was frequently reminded that he killed anyone he loved, so for many long years he withdrew emotionally, focusing on the Tower with single-minded determination.