The Road to The Dark Tower (40 page)

He becomes aware that he is being watched by a certain kind of person. Men, mostly, who like loud clothes, rare steak and fast cars painted in colors as garish as their outfits. They wear special hats to block the psychic powers of those they pursue. Their symbols—astrological icons and the occasional red eye—are marked on fences, sidewalks, sometimes near hopscotch grids.
²⁴
They think upside-down pictures—especially pet posters—are the height of humor. Some people say their shoes don’t touch the ground.

Their cars look like normal vehicles, but they aren’t—they are as alien as the low men. Bobby believes the cars are alive. “If you tried to steal one, the steering wheel might turn into a snake and strangle you; the seat might turn into a quicksand pool and drown you.”
²⁵

Their long coats are reminiscent of the ones men sometimes wear in movies like
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
or
The Magnificent Seven
. They’re regulators, like in the movie with John Payne and Karen Steele—or the novel by Richard Bachman.
²⁶

These are the low men who work for the Crimson King. They wear his red eye on their lapels like a badge. They are loyal servants, not very bright, but effective. Their outlandish clothing and vehicles are disguises that cause most people to willfully ignore them. “A little of what’s under the camouflage seeps through, and what’s underneath is ugly.” They are can toi, a cross between the beastlike taheen and humans. They worship humanity, take human names, disguise themselves to look human, and believe they will replace humans after the Tower falls.

Ted becomes a Breaker when he answers a job ad after wandering aimlessly for most of his life. By the time he’s hustled through a doorway to Thunderclap, he realizes the offer of vast amounts of money is a trick. He accepts his new life without much protest. Finally being able to use
his powers is like scratching an impossible-to-reach itch. He knows he’s part of the process of breaking something, but at first he doesn’t care to know what.

From a low man he befriends, he discovers what he’s doing and how his very presence is facilitating the universe’s destruction, so he escapes. He shows up at the boardinghouse in Connecticut carrying his worldly possessions in a few mismatched suitcases and brown paper shopping bags with handles.

He befriends Bobby Garfield and hires him to watch for signs of the low men, who he knows will come after him. Bobby turns a blind eye when the signs start appearing because he’s afraid Ted will leave, but Ted already knows that the low men are getting close. He goes into fugues when they approach. His pupils dilate and constrict rapidly. He utters strange sayings, like, “One feels them first at the back of one’s eyes,” and, more tellingly, “All things serve the Beam.” When Bobby touches him, he hears a bell tolling in his head, like todash chimes.

Ted’s talents encompass what Roland calls the touch. Like Jake, Ted is mostly scrupulous about how he uses this power. He tells Bobby, “[F]riends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.” His insight isn’t infallible, though. He never realizes that Bobby doesn’t like root beer.

Ted introduces Bobby to the world of grown-up books, including
The Lord of the Flies,
which Jake was assigned to read, and
Ring Around the Sun
by Clifford D. Simak, a book that King acknowledges in the afterword to
The Gunslinger
as probably the inspiration for his concept of multiple universes.

When the low men finally catch up to Ted, he willingly goes with them to save Bobby’s life. The low men are tempted to bring Bobby along as a gift for the Crimson King, but Ted is smarter than any low man and convinces them that he will cooperate if they don’t harm Bobby. “If I give you what you want instead of forcing you to take it, I may be able to speed things up by fifty years or more. As you say, I’m a Breaker, made for it and born to it. There aren’t many of us. You need every one, and most of all you need me. Because I’m the best.” He also mentions the gunslinger who has reached the borderlands of End-World. The low men are unimpressed.

In the summer of 1965, Bobby gets a message from Ted, an envelope that emits a sweet smell and contains rose petals of the deepest, darkest red he has ever seen. He has one of those moments of understanding,
perhaps transmitted to him by Ted. “There are other worlds than this, millions of worlds, all turning on the spindle of the Tower. And then he thought: He got away from them again. He’s free again. The petals left no room for doubt.”

Ted probably sent this letter after he escorted Susannah to Fedic. Bobby senses that Ted is not in this world or time, that he ran in another direction. When last seen in
The Dark Tower,
Ted and those Breakers willing to follow him were headed toward Calla Bryn Sturgis, where they planned to seek forgiveness for their part in the loss of the village’s children, work as an act of contrition and perhaps someday find a doorway back to their own world.

Bobby is reunited with his childhood girlfriend, Carol Gerber, who was supposedly killed years earlier. She lives under an assumed name and tells Bobby that she’s good at not being seen, a trick she learned from Raymond Fiegler, another incarnation of Randall Flagg, a creature familiar with fringe groups like the one Carol belonged to. Of Ted, Carol says, “For an old guy, he sure knows how to push the right buttons, doesn’t he?” Bobby responds, “Maybe that’s what a Breaker does.”

When it was first published a few months after
Wizard and Glass,
few people suspected that “Everything’s Eventual” was somehow related to the
Dark Tower,
but by the time King and Peter Straub started work on
Black House
in 2000, King had decided that Dinky Earnshaw, the story’s e-mail assassin protagonist, was a Breaker.
²⁷

Dinky is a high school dropout with a new job that seems like a step up from gathering shopping carts at the grocery store or delivering pizza. He has a house stocked with anything he asks for, and he gets an allowance. His situation sounds similar to the way the Breakers are treated in Devar-Toi. The only condition is that he must throw away any money he has left over at the end of each week.

Dinky was watching a Clint Eastwood movie
²⁸
when he received a call from the mysterious Mr. Sharpton offering him this rather unique position. Sharpton describes himself as “two parts headhunter, two parts talent scout, and four parts walking, talking destiny.” He knows a lot about
Dinky, but the biggest secret he knows is that Dinky was somehow involved in the death of Skipper Brannigan, his old nemesis from the Kart Korral at the grocery store and a friend of a friend of Eddie Dean’s brother, Henry.

Dinky has a rare power involving an intuitive understanding of special, lethal designs and shapes. As a child, he could kill flies by making circles and triangles with his fingers. When the neighbor’s dog terrorized him, he killed it by drawing his special symbols on the sidewalk in chalk, reminiscent of the way low men communicate with each other. The dog didn’t die immediately—the effect was similar to what happened when Atropos, the agent of Random from
Insomnia,
snipped a victim’s balloon cord.

Sharpton, who works for Trans Corporation, a subsidiary of North Central Positronics, employs a group of people—low men—who look for people like Dinky with extrasensory talents: precogs, postcogs, people with telepathy, pyrokinesis or telempathy. “They can actually see fellows and gals like you, Dink, the way certain satellites in space can see nuclear piles and power-plants. . . . They crisscross the country . . . looking for that bright yellow glow. Looking for matchheads in the darkness.” Sharpton estimates that there are no more than a few thousand “trannies” in the entire world. He tells Dinky he wants to help him sharpen and focus his talent and use it for the betterment of mankind. Like Richard Sayre, Sharpton is a convincing liar.

Sharpton sends Dinky to Peoria, where he is tested and programmed for his new task, but no one tells him what his work is. He’s set up in a nice house with its fringe benefits and $70-a-week allowance. “There’s not a whole lot of cash in it, at least to begin with, but there’s a lot of satisfaction,” Sharpton tells him. When Ted and Dinky compare notes in Devar-Toi, they decide the Crimson King is trying to bring about the end of creation on the budget plan.

He’s left to his own devices, cut off from friends and family who might ask awkward questions. One night, his mission comes to him in a dream. His computer contains all the tools he needs: a folder with every mystical, magical symbol he’s ever imagined and thousands more. A modem connects him to a database of potential targets. He devises and sends special e-mail messages—sometimes he has to resort to regular mail—only mildly curious about what happens to the intended recipients.

One day, he accidentally sees a story about one of his victims, a man who committed suicide. Dinky starts feeling a little paranoid about his job.
²⁹
After doing research on a library computer, he realizes he’s a serial murderer, but he doesn’t stop. Like Ted Brautigan, he’s had an itch all his life that he’s finally able to scratch. He rationalizes that his watchers would be suspicious if his work habits changed.

Someone intervenes to help him, but the story doesn’t reveal who. Perhaps it is ka, or Stephen King, assisting his creation. Dinky composes one of his “eventual” e-mail message for Sharpton. The special word he adds to make it work is “Excalibur,” another subtle link to the
Dark Tower
. It’s the name of Arthur Eld’s sword, from which Roland’s guns are made. After he kills Sharpton he tries to run away, but the low men catch him and take him to Devar-Toi.

The Talisman
’s ties to the
Dark Tower
series are tenuous. The Territories, where Jack Sawyer travels when he’s not in America, are a borderland near Mid-World, a place akin to the region where the Callas are located. The primary conceptual relationship between
The Talisman
and the
Dark Tower
is the notion of twins, as mentioned previously.

Peter Straub calls
The Talisman
“all but” a
Dark Tower
book.
³⁰
The Agincourt, the Black Hotel in California that contains the Talisman, is an axis of all universes and could be the Dark Tower’s representation in that reality. Jack is one of a few people who can enter it because he is single natured. His equivalent (Twinner) in every other reality except his own has died.

Twins aren’t as important to
Black House
as they are to
The Talisman
. Parkus tells Jack Sawyer, “You’ve got to get that idea out of your mind.” The Crimson King’s search for Breakers drives the plot of
Black House,
as in “Low Men in Yellow Coats.” It was Straub’s idea to incorporate the
Dark Tower
mythos into
Black House
. “One of the reasons [I suggested it] is that I wanted to know what that stuff was. I had no idea what a ‘Breaker’ was, what the Tower was, what the Crimson King was.”
³¹

When it comes to reaping Breakers, the Crimson King is indiscriminate. He casts a wide net for children, knowing that a small percentage of
those he catches have the talent he needs. Those who don’t qualify are enslaved to run the Big Combination, an enormous skyscraper reaching into the clouds and spanning miles in each direction that has consumed billions of children over thousands of years, his terrible power source in End-World. It appears to fuel evil—despots, pedophiles, tyrants and torturers—in the great numberless string of universes.

The Crimson King uses minions like the low men or Ed Deepneau when he wants to operate in America. In
Black House,
his End-World henchman, Mr. Munshun, possesses an aged serial killer named Charles Burnside. Burnside thinks of the Big Combination as an engine that turns wheels that turn bigger wheels that power engines of destruction. Roland knows it as An-tak, the King’s Forge, and it is responsible for the red glow Susannah sees in the distance from the ramparts of Castle Discordia. Burnside worries that it may be hell itself. “It runs on blood and terror and never takes a day off.”

Jack Sawyer, now a grown man, has forgotten everything that happened to him twenty years ago during his quest to find the Talisman that saved his mother’s life. His mother starred in old B movies that often featured gunslingerlike characters. One of her films was a comic Western, another blend of genres of the kind King set out to create with the
Dark Tower
series.

Ka needs Jack, a successful LAPD homicide detective, to resolve a crisis in French Landing, a small town in Wisconsin familiar to him through one of his cases. Unsettling reminders of his past cause him to take early retirement and he moves to French Landing, as yet unaware of the evil Black House that is a portal to End-World—the doorway to Abbalah, the entrance to hell. Abbalah is another name for the Crimson King, but its use is limited to
Black House
and
The Plant
.

Though there’s a serial killer at large in the area, the real crisis is the disappearance of Tyler Marshall, who has the potential to be as powerful a Breaker as Ted Brautigan. While wandering around her missing son’s room, Judy Marshall mutters, “Saw the eye again. It’s a red eye.
His
eye. Eye of the King.” Her words seem nonsensical. “Abbalah-doon, the Crimson King! Rats in their ratholes! Abbalah Munshun! The King is in the Tower, eating bread and honey! The Breakers in the basement, making all the money!” She dreams of a Dark Tower standing in a field of roses. Her husband has her committed because of her erratic behavior.