The Road to The Dark Tower (38 page)

Flagg returned to Delain from Garlan nearly eighty years before King Roland’s reign began, but he appears to have aged a mere ten years in that time. The people convince themselves that having a real magician in the court is good, but in their hearts they know there’s nothing good about Flagg.

Each time he comes to Delain, he uses a different name, but “always with the same load of woe and misery and death.” Once he was Bill Hinch, the Lord High Executioner under three savage kings. Once he came as Browson, a singer who advised the king and successfully instigated a war between Delain and nearby Andua. “He always came hooded, a man who seemed almost to have no face, and he never came as a King himself, but
always as the whisperer in the shadows, the man who poured poison into the porches of Kings’ ears.”

He wanted what evil men always want: to have power and use that power to make mischief. Being a King did not interest him because the heads of Kings all too often found their way to spikes on castle walls when things went wrong. But the advisors to Kings . . . the spinners in the shadows . . . such people usually melted away like evening shadows at dawning as soon as the headsman’s axe started to fall. Flagg was a sickness, a fever looking for a cool brow to heat up. He hooded his actions just as he hooded his face. And when the great trouble came—as it always did after a span of years—Flagg always disappeared like shadows at dawn. Later, when the carnage was over and the fever had passed, when the rebuilding was complete and there was again something worth destroying, Flagg would appear once more.

A great magician, he knows all about the worst poisons in existence. He owns a huge book of spells bound in human skin. After a thousand years, he has gotten through only a quarter of it. “To read too long of this book, written on the high, distant Plains of Leng by a madman named Al-hazred, was to risk madness.”
⁶
He possesses a magic crystal that allows him to see things, a device akin to one of the Wizard’s glasses. “His mind was very complex, like a hall of mirrors with everything reflected twice at different sizes.”

Flagg isn’t a shape-shifter and has never seen that trick done. He can’t make himself invisible, but he can go dim. He, too, can start fires from the tip of his finger. Though his powers are real, he also knows “it was not always necessary to make claims and tell people how wonderful you were to achieve greatness. Sometimes all you had to do was look wise and keep your mouth shut.” This is reminiscent of Cort’s advice to Roland to bide his time and let the legend go before him.

Like Randall Flagg and John Farson, he thinks deserters set a bad example. “If one or two were allowed to get away without paying the full penalty, others might try it. The only way to discourage them . . . was to show them the heads of those who had already tried it.”

Flagg suspects something is amiss when Peter is planning his escape, but he can’t grasp what. Fifty miles from the castle, he cries out in his sleep.

The soldier sleeping nearest Flagg on the left died instantly of a heart attack, dreaming that a great lion had come to gobble him up. The soldier sleeping on Flagg’s right woke up in the morning to discover he was blind. Worlds sometimes shudder and turn inside their axes, and this was such a time. Flagg felt it, but did not grasp it. The salvation of all that is good is only this—at times of great import, evil beings sometimes fall strangely blind.

“[M]en like Flagg are full of pride and confidence in themselves, and although they may see much, they are sometimes strangely blind.” Peter uncovers of one of Flagg’s exploits, more than four centuries earlier, and realizes the King’s magician’s true nature. “I think that, sooner or later, things like you always begin to repeat themselves, because things like you know only a very few simple tricks. After a while, someone always sees through them. I think that is all that saves us, ever.”

In the end, Thomas admits seeing Flagg deliver the poisoned wine to his father. He shoots Flagg through the eye
⁷
with an arrow, but the demon-wizard vanishes. Thomas decides to atone for his complicity in Peter’s imprisonment by going south on a quest after Flagg, who he knows is out there somewhere, “[i]n this world or in some other . . . He got away from us at the last second.” Peter’s friend Dennis joins him, and they catch up with Flagg at some point, but the nature of their encounter is never revealed and Flagg apparently survived to make more trouble for the world. Roland met the two young men during the last days of Gilead.

In 1994, King admitted to an audience at Cornell University that the
Dark Tower
elements in
Insomnia
came to him as a surprise, but he didn’t think it was a coincidence. “It delighted me because it cast a light on what I have to do with the
Dark Tower,
” he said. The book was written during a period when King intended to complete the final books in the series
back-to-back. It raises more questions than it answers, but all that keeps it from being a true
Dark Tower
novel is the absence of Roland and his ka-tet.

Published between
The Waste Lands
and
Wizard and Glass, Insomnia
introduces two important characters: Patrick Danville, the boy who accompanies Roland down the last stretch of road to the Tower, and the Crimson King, who awaits him there. Ed Deepneau is a herald of Aaron Deepneau, Calvin Tower’s friend and future board member of Tet Corporation. Aaron had a distant cousin named Ed who died in 1947, the year King was born. He was a bookkeeper, “as inoffensive as milk and cookies.”

In
The Dark Tower,
Roland learns that Tet Corporation created a group of Stephen King scholars, the Calvins, who study the author’s non-Tower novels. The Calvins conclude that
Insomnia
is the keystone book relating to the
Dark Tower
series. The hardcover edition’s dust jacket symbolizes the fight of good versus evil: White over Red. The Calvins believe that most of what (fictional) King has written contains veiled clues meant to help Roland attain his goal. Messages in bottles, Moses Carver calls them, cast upon the Prim. Messages from King’s subconscious.

Ralph Roberts,
Insomnia
’s main character, suffers from a rare sleep disorder after his wife dies. Instead of having difficulty getting to sleep, Ralph wakes up earlier and earlier each morning. The resultant sleep deprivation puts him in altered mental status and opens his mind to different levels of reality going on around him in Derry, Maine, one of King’s thin places where, until recently, a murderous creature from “outer space” came once every generation to steal the town’s children, reminiscent of the periodic sweeps through the Callas by the Wolves. Ralph says, “It was as if a door in the wall of reality had come ajar . . . and now all sorts of unwelcome things were flying through,” like the magic portal on Turtleback Lane.

Ralph is one of the few people aware that events of cosmic importance are happening in Derry. A neighbor and family friend, Ed Deepneau, begins acting strangely, having fallen under the power of the Crimson King, an evil force from another level of reality. Ed’s goal is cloaked as anti-abortion activism, but the Crimson King really wants him to kill Patrick Danville, a talented four-year-old learning how to create art with crayons.
⁹

Forces beyond his understanding are manipulating Ralph. He is terrified by the notion that some creature capable of foretelling the future has taken an interest in him. Events are orchestrated to facilitate his success; he describes it as “the sense of being pushed by invisible hands,” as if he
were “being
carried,
the way a river carries a man in a small boat.” Roland knows that feeling well: ka, the great wheel of being. Like Roland, Ralph reaches a point in his newfound intuition where feeling and knowing something become nearly the same thing.

Ralph argues with Clotho and Lachesis—the two benign bald doc Long-Timers,
¹⁰
who represent Purpose
¹¹
—that ka repudiates freedom of choice. Lachesis responds that freedom of choice is part of ka. Life is both random and on purpose, but not in equal measure.

Clotho and Lachesis can’t lie, but they’re very good at avoiding telling the truth. Though they induced the insomnia that opens Ralph’s mind to heightened reality, thereby altering his ka, they serve creatures from higher reality.
¹²
These All-Timers are either eternal or so close to it as to make no difference. Something from one of these higher levels has taken an interest in Ed, and something else has made a countermove.

Atropos, an agent of Random, is terrified of his master. He tells Ralph, “If you succeed in stopping what’s been started . . . I will be punished by the creature you call the Crimson King!” All three bald docs are responsible for severing the cord of life for people in this reality, sending their victims to “other worlds than these.”

Dorrance Marstellar wanders through the story like deus ex machina personified, putting the can of pepper spray in Ralph’s pocket so it will be available when fanatic Charles Pickering attacks him. “It isn’t just like he knew I’d need the stuff; he knew where to find it, and
he knew where to put it,
” Ralph thinks. Old Dor would be at home in a certain vacant lot in New York, dropping a key or a red bowling bag for Jake to find. He knows much more than he is willing to reveal, but occasionally conveys important instructions—telling Ralph to cancel his acupuncture appointment, for example—in the same way Stephen King sends messages to Jake at the hotel in New York or to Susannah in Dandelo’s bathroom. Dorrance tells Ralph and Lois that they are ka-tet, one made of many, bound together by the Purpose.
¹³

Ed is a blank card, up for grabs by either Random or Purpose. Only Short-Timers like Ralph and Lois can oppose Atropos. Dorrance tells them that the work of the higher universe has “almost completely come to a stop as those of both the Random and the Purpose turn to mark your progress.” It’s possible that Ralph’s interference with the Crimson King is one of the events that drive him insane.

In Atropos’s lair, near a sneaker once worn by Gage Creed, who was run down by a tanker truck in Ludlow, Maine,
¹⁴
Ralph and Lois find a saxophone with
JAKE
printed on the side. King doesn’t specifically link this to Jake Chambers, but it’s an old saxophone, and Jake left New York for Mid-World nearly twenty years before the events in
Insomnia
.

Ralph first encounters Patrick Danville with his mother in a park. Ralph “touches” the boy—an ability similar to the one Jake acquires in Mid-World—and sees that his mother is a victim of domestic violence. He doesn’t realize the significance of the boy’s rose-pink aura and isn’t aware that Patrick is at the center of everything going on in Derry. Ralph and Lois save his life twice, during Charles Pickering’s attack on a women’s shelter and later when Ed tries to crash his plane into the Derry Civic Center.
¹⁵

Patrick is at the Civic Center because his babysitter cut her hand and canceled at the last minute. His mother planned for weeks to see feminist Susan Day speak, so she’s forced to bring him with her. Ralph believes that the babysitter’s injury wasn’t an accident. Something is willing to move heaven and earth to make sure Patrick is there that day.

While they wait for the lecture to start, Patrick draws a picture of the Dark Tower in the middle of a field of roses. At the top of the Tower he colors a man in a red robe, whom he calls the Red King, looking down at a gunslinger named Roland with an expression of mingled hate and fear. Patrick dreams about Roland sometimes. “He’s a King, too.”
¹⁶

Patrick is one of the Great Ones whose lives always serve the Purpose. His life affects not only all Short-Timers, but also those on many levels above and below the Short-Time world. Because Ed is without designation, only he can harm Patrick. If Patrick dies before his time, the Tower of all existence will fall. Lachesis tells Ralph that the consequences of this are “beyond your comprehension. And beyond ours as well.”

When Patrick escapes from the Civic Center unharmed, “matters both Random and Purposeful resumed their ordained courses. Worlds which had trembled for a moment in their orbits now steadied, and in one of those worlds, in a desert that was the apotheosis of all deserts, a man named Roland turned over in his bedroll and slept easily once again beneath the alien constellations.”

King gives no definite indication of the role Patrick will play in Roland’s quest except to say that he would save two people. It would be
another decade before he entered the
Dark Tower
series, by which time he is at least a teenager, perhaps older. How he became a prisoner in the basement of Dandelo’s cabin on Odd Lane within the Dark Tower’s shadow is never explained.

In
Insomnia,
King lays out the structure of his multiverse, symbolized by the levels of the Tower. The nature of the Tower is dual, both personal and universal. It represents individual lives but also all the different planes of existence.

Short-Time creatures like Ralph and Lois occupy the first two floors of the Tower. Clotho tells them there are elevators that Short-Timers are not ordinarily allowed to use. Ralph tells him that he has seen a vision of the Tower, and it doesn’t have an elevator but rather “a narrow staircase festooned with cobwebs and doorways leading to God knows what.” He wonders if God is in the penthouse and the devil is stoking coal in the boiler room, reminiscent of the Crimson King’s Big Combination. Clotho and Lachesis don’t confirm or deny this.