The Road to The Dark Tower (37 page)

I am coming to understand that Roland’s world (or worlds) actually
contains
all the others of my making.

[DT4]

This business concerns the Dark Tower.

[BH]

 Interconnections within Stephen King’s books are not a recent phenomenon. As early as
The Dead Zone,
characters in his novels referred to other King novels (“He set it on fire by his mind, just like in that book
Carrie,
” a character in
The Dead Zone
says). Characters and events from previous books recur, as in the Castle Rock novels.

Many readers enjoy finding these cross-references. The authors of
The Stephen King Universe
¹
catalog many such links and define two realities: the “real” world of Derry and Castle Rock, and the world of the
Dark Tower
. Some of the connections they make are clear and unequivocal; others are more tenuous.
²

The titles of King’s novels and story collections related to the
Dark Tower
series were bolded on the author ad-cards in the last three books of the series. Some of these books came as a surprise. Previously, no definitive link had ever been made between
From a Buick 8
and the series. However, the Buick’s mysterious driver was strongly reminiscent of a low man, and the car itself appeared to be a portal to another world.

Skeleton Crew
was also a surprise member of this list, which comprised nineteen titles when it first appeared in
Wolves of the Calla
. Arguments could be made for several stories in this collection. Mrs. Todd’s shortcuts, for example, possibly took her by way of a thinny.
Technological doorways to facilitate travel across vast distances were the subject of “The Jaunt.”

However, according to King’s research assistant, Robin Furth, “The Mist” is the
Dark Tower
story in
Skeleton Crew
. In a personal communication, she theorized that the Arrowhead Project either created the first thinny, or else it ripped a hole into todash space. While the characters in “The Mist” believed Arrowhead caused some sort of genetic mutation, such things do not happen at the speed they occurred in the story. It is far more likely that the oversized creatures entered Maine through a tear between dimensions.

Furth also commented that Mrs. Carmody seemed to be a twinner of Sylvia Pittston from
The Gunslinger
. Their sermons about the last times bear remarkable similarities.

One book that occupies a borderland is
It
. There is clearly some relationship between Pennywise and the Crimson King, both of whom have business in Derry, Maine, and share the concept of deadlights. The Crimson King tells Ralph Roberts, “You may not know it, but shape-changing is a time-honored custom in Derry.” [INS] The appearance of the song of the Turtle in
It
represents at least the germ of an idea that King developed more fully in the
Dark Tower,
but beyond these elements and a few passing references like Stutterin’ Bill and an insane clown who feeds on emotions, the book does not contribute much to an understanding of the series.

One other passage strengthens the link between
It
and the
Dark Tower
. The house on Niebold Street has wallpaper decorated with runners of roses and capering elves wearing green caps. At the house on Dutch Hill, “elves with strange, sly smiles on their faces capered on the wallpaper, peering at Jake from beneath peaked green caps.” [DT3]

The books discussed in this chapter directly illuminate the series, either through the introduction of a major character or of crucial concepts. Starting in the early 1990s, King found it increasingly difficult to keep the
Dark Tower
out of everything else he wrote. The Crimson King, low men and Breakers all appeared first in nonseries novels. People reading the series for the first time might consider pausing after
The Waste Lands
to read these related works to experience the evolution of King’s mythos in the same way as people who read the books when they were published.

In
Song of Susannah,
he calls the
Dark Tower
his übernovel. The Dark
Tower is the nexus of all universes, an axle around which infinite realities rotate. In the Stephen King universe, the
Dark Tower
series is the axle around which his myriad fictional realities rotate.

The Stand
and
The Eyes of the Dragon
could be described as the two “Books of Flagg,” for they relate two exploits of Roland’s enemy. In the former, he tries to take over a devastated Earth similar to the one known to Jake, Eddie and Odetta. In the latter, he tries to overthrow the Kingdom of Delain, one of the baronies of In-World, the land of Roland Deschain. In both cases he ultimately fails, though he manages to wreak considerable havoc and destroy many lives.

When Roland and his ka-tet arrive in Topeka at the end of their journey aboard Blaine the Mono, they find a world ravaged by a superflu very much like the one depicted in
The Stand,
a cataclysm Walter o’Dim takes credit for.

The Stand
is King’s first full-length exploration of a character who reappears in many names and forms in his work. Flagg is a shadowy character known as the Dark Man in a poem of the same name that King published in college. Some people think of him as the hardcase, which also derives from one of King’s college poems.
³

Randall Flagg doesn’t appear until well into
The Stand,
striding along US 51 from Idaho into Nevada. Drivers who pass him feel a slight chill. Sleeping passengers are touched with bad dreams. He is a tall man of no age wearing faded jeans and a denim jacket over well-worn, sharp-toed cowboy boots. His gunna is kept in an old, battered Boy Scout knapsack. His pockets are stuffed with pamphlets of conflicting opinions. “When this man handed you a tract you took it no matter what the subject.”
⁴

There was a dark hilarity in his face, and perhaps in his heart, too, you would think—and you would be right. It was the face of a hatefully happy man, a face that radiated a horrible handsome warmth, a face to make water glasses shatter in the hands of tired truck-stop waitresses, to make small children crash their trikes into board fences and then run wailing to their mommies with
stake-shaped splinters sticking out of their knees. It was a face guaranteed to make barroom arguments over batting averages turn bloody.

His hands are smooth and blank, with no life line or other lines.

He’s well known among the lunatic fringe and “even the maddest of them could only gaze upon his dark and grinning face at an oblique angle.” For decades, he has been fomenting dissent across America, using names like Richard Fry, Robert Franq, Ramsey Forrest, Robert Freemont and Richard Freemantle. He can’t speak at rallies because when he tries, microphones scream with feedback and circuits blow, but he writes speeches for those who speak and occasionally those speeches end in riots.

He met Lee Harvey Oswald and was behind the Patty Hearst kidnapping, but he always escaped before the police arrived. “[A]ll they knew was there had been someone else associated with the group, maybe someone important, maybe a hanger-on.”

Many are afraid to say his name because “they believed that to call him by name was to summon him like a djinn from a bottle.” They called him the Dark Man, the Boogeyman, the Walkin’ Dude, or even “Old Creeping Judas.” Glen Bateman says, “Call him Beelzebub, because that’s his name, too. Call him Nyarlahotep
⁵
and Ahaz and Astaroth. Call him R’yelah and Seti and Anubis. His name is legion and he’s an apostate of hell and you men kiss his ass.”

Mother Abigail believes she is part of a chess game between God and Satan. Flagg, or “the Adversary,” is Satan’s chief agent in this game. “He’s the purest evil left in the world.” The other little evils in the world are drawn to him, as are the weak and the lonely. “He ain’t Satan,” according to Mother Abigail, “but he and Satan know of each other and have kept their councils together of old . . . this man Flagg . . . is not a man at all but a supernatural being.”

“All things serve the Lord. Don’t you think this black man serves Him, too?” Mother Abigail thinks God intends for them to confront Flagg. “It don’t do no good to run from the will of the Lord God of Hosts. A man or woman who tries that only ends up in the belly of the beast.”

Sounds like ka and “all things serve the Beam.”

Glen thinks Flagg is the last magician of rational thought, gathering the tools of technology against the forces of good. The Earth has been
given to him to master, Flagg believes, though he doesn’t know by whom. He has a sense that some huge opportunity is presenting itself to him, that he is being reborn to his new destiny. “Why else could he suddenly do magic?”

He doesn’t understand his powers; he merely accepts them. His magic allows him to shape-shift, broadcast dark dreams across the continent and send out an Eye of vision to spy on his enemies. He has dominion over the predators of the animal kingdom. He can levitate and kill people with a thought. He materializes anywhere he wants to go like a ghost—or does he travel through doors? Like Walter, he can project flames and light fires from the tip of his finger. Also like Walter, he tends to titter when he laughs. “When Flagg laughs, you get scared.”

He can look normal, attractive even, but often his face is that of a devil and his eyes glow in the dark like a lynx’s. Stu Redman says, “[H]e had the eyes of a man who has been trying to look into the dark for a long time and has maybe begun to see what is there.” Dayna Jurgens said, “Looking into [his eyes] was like looking into wells which were very old and very deep.”

The women he takes to bed feel “so cold, it seemed impossible they could ever be warm again.” Nadine Cross thinks he’s “[o]lder than mankind, older than the earth.” He chooses her to mother his child, telling her she had been promised to him. When she asks him who promised her, he doesn’t remember. Maybe, like the Crimson King, he has only promised himself.

All he asks is that his minions fall down on their knees and worship him. Those in the west who oppose him are either crucified or driven mad and set free to wander in the desert. He uses people like Harold Lauder and Trashcan Man to do his dirty work. Some of his followers are so loyal they grow to love him, but even those closest to him fear him.

He begins to lose confidence in his mission toward the end, when things seem to be unraveling. Memories of his life before the superflu and his rebirth slip away. “He was like an onion, slowly peeling away one layer at a time, only it was the trappings of humanity that seemed to be peeling away: organized reflection, memory, possibly even free will.” Ordinarily when things go bad—as they have so often for him in the past—he would do a quick fade, but this was his place and time and he intended to take his stand. Threatened with death, though, he disappears like Flagg
the magician in
The Eyes of the Dragon
. As he vanishes, he seems to change into something monstrous. “Something slumped and hunched and almost without shape—something with enormous yellow eyes slit by dark cat’s pupils.”

In the unexpurgated version of
The Stand,
Flagg survives and is transported to a tropical jungle paradise. At first he doesn’t know who he is and remembers only echoes of his past, but slowly his memory returns. Birds, beasts and bugs drop dead at the sight of him. Though the people that gather around him bear spears, his terrible smile disarms them.

He doesn’t know where he is, but “[t]he place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there . . . and still on your feet.” He introduces himself to the primitive people as Russell Farraday, a man whose mission is to teach them how to be civilized.

“Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.”

The Eyes of the Dragon
tells the legend of how a demon named Flagg frames Peter, the rightful heir to the throne of Delain, for the murder of his father, King Roland, so that Peter’s weaker younger brother, Thomas, will rule in name and Flagg can control the kingdom. Flagg fears Peter’s strength of character. He knows he can control Thomas, but Peter would likely banish him from the kingdom, where he had been stirring up trouble for more than five hundred years.