The Road to The Dark Tower (41 page)

Jack is haunted by the word “opopanax,” the same word applied to the feather used to call meetings in Calla Bryn Sturgis,
³²
after he reads about it in the local paper. He resists pleas to help with the serial killer investigation until he has a dream encounter with his old friend Speedy, who tries to explain why Ty Marshall is important. Speedy’s ominous message is that if Jack can’t bring the boy back, he has to kill him. One more Breaker might be all the Crimson King needs to bring down the Tower.

None of this means much to Jack, but it inspires him to action. Judy thinks Jack can save Ty, who she believes is still alive. When they finally meet in the psychiatric hospital, Jack falls in love with her, or rather with her Twinner, Sophie, the Queen of the Territories. Jack leaps to the Territories, where he is reunited with Speedy’s Twinner, Parkus, who explains what’s really going on in French County.

He meets Sophie in a pavilion that reminds him of the place where his mother’s Twinner, the former queen, lay dying. This tent—a hospital to some and a twin to the room Judy occupied on the other side—is less elegant. It belongs to the Little Sisters of Eluria, perhaps the last one of the dozen or more that once existed in “the Territories, On-World, and Mid-World.” Sophie tells Jack about the vampire nurses whose patients never get well. “Don’t fear, Jack—they also serve the Beam. All things serve the Beam.” He has no idea what the Beam is.

Parkus leads them to an abandoned speaking circle like the many encountered by Roland and his ka-tet. “The Demon may be long gone, but the legends say such things leave a residue that may lighten the tongue.” He educates Jack on the nature of existence. “You asked how many worlds. The answer, in the High Speech, is da fan: worlds beyond telling. . . . There is a Tower that binds them in place. Think of it as an axle upon which many wheels spin, if you like. And there is an entity that would bring this Tower down. Ram Abbalah.”

Parkus says the Crimson King is a physical being trapped in the Tower,
³³
but he has another manifestation that lives in Can-tah Abbalah, the Court of the Crimson King. If the King successfully destroys the Tower, he believes he will be free to wander in the chaos that remains, known as din-tah, the furnace. Some parts of Mid-World have fallen into that furnace already, according to Parkus.

If readers were confused about why the Crimson King wants Breakers, Parkus sets the record straight. For the last two centuries
³⁴
he has
been gathering mind readers (the most common), precognates, teleports, world jumpers like Jack and telekinetics (the rarest and most valuable), mostly from Earth and the Territories. “This collection of slaves—this gulag—is his crowning achievement. We call them Breakers.” The Crimson King is using them to speed up the destruction of the Beams. Of the six, one collapsed on its own thousands of years ago, part of the ordinary course of decay. Since starting their work, the Breakers have destroyed two Beams and weakened two others. Only one (Gan’s Beam) still has its original strength.

Parkus tells Jack that the job of protecting the Beams belonged to the gunslingers, “an ancient war guild of Gilead.” They possess a “powerful psychic force . . . one fully capable of countering the Crimson King’s Breakers.” Though the gunslingers are mostly gone, Parkus has heard that the one surviving member of the line of Eld has made at least three new gunslingers, though he doesn’t know how. “If Roland were still alone, the Breakers would have toppled the Tower long since.” This new band of gunslingers is the last hope for those who want the Tower to stand, or fall in its own time.

If the Crimson King can break the Beams before Roland and his ka-tet reach the Tower, he will never have to confront them. This is why he has stepped up his search for Breakers. The low men, his knights-errant, perform many duties, but their chief job is to find psychically talented children. He also enlists the help of people like Burnside, the serial killer in French Landing. The Crimson King lets him kill and eat all the children he wants, as long as he turns over any potential Breakers to the demon who possesses him, Mr. Munshun, a quasi-immortal creature similar to Walter—though less artful—who delivers them to the Crimson King.
³⁵

Parkus tells Jack he must either rescue or kill Tyler because he is one of the two most powerful Breakers in all the history of all the worlds, analogous to a nuclear weapon. The other is Ted Brautigan, of whom Munshun says to Ty, “All the boys like the Chief Breaker . . . Perhaps he’ll tell you tales of his many escapes.”

Jack has some residual power from touching the Talisman, but it’s not enough for him to defeat the Crimson King. “But it may be enough for you to take on Mr. Munshun—to go into the furnace-lands and bring Tyler out.”

Knowing that he
must
win does not mean that he
will
win. “Proud empires and noble epochs have gone down in defeat, and the Crimson King may burst out of the Tower and rage through world after world, spreading chaos.”

Burny delivers Ty to Mr. Munshun, the Eye of the King, who plans to take him to End-World on a monorail. “Once there were two others . . . Patricia and Blaine. They’re gone. Went crazy. Committed suicide.” This helps put
Black House
in the context of the
Dark Tower
books. In Mid-World, these events occur after
Wizard and Glass,
and most likely after
Song of Susannah,
because the Forge was still visible to Susannah from Castle Discordia’s ramparts.

With the assistance of a ragtag band of erudite motorcycle gang members, Jack frees Ty from Mr. Munshun and gets the boy to use his Breaking powers to destroy the Big Combination. “Up, up in his high, faraway confinement, the Crimson King feels a deep pain in his gut and drops into a chair, grimacing. Something, he knows, something fundamental, has changed in his dreary fiefdom.”

In the end, Jack Sawyer is seriously wounded by an old enemy and survives the shooting only by leaping to the Territories, where he must remain. Parkus teases readers by saying, “This business of the Tower is moving toward its climax. I believe Jack Sawyer may have a part to play in that, although I can’t say for sure.” Readers speculated that Jack would show up in the final books of the series, but perhaps King and Straub have other plans for him. Peter Straub has said on numerous occasions that he anticipates that there will be a third
Talisman
book sometime in the future, this one set mostly in the Territories.

Whatever his destiny, Jack Sawyer appears no more on the road to the Dark Tower.

¹
Stanley Wiater, Christopher Golden and Hank Wagner,
The Stephen King Universe,
Renaissance Books, 2001.

²
For example, the authors postulate that the young boy Jim Gardiner meets on the beach in
The Tommyknockers,
whose mother was killed by a drunk driver, is Jack Sawyer from
The Talisman
. Events seen later in
Black House
do not support this theory. Jack says that his mother died more than five years after he rescued her with the Talisman and implies that it was from a relapse of her cancer.

³
“The Hardcase Speaks,” published in
Contraband
number 2, December 1971. “The Dark Man” and “The Hardcase Speaks” are collected in
The Devil’s Wine,
edited by Tom Piccirilli, CD Publications, 2004.

⁴
Quotes in each section come from the book under discussion unless otherwise specified.

⁵
A reference to an H. P. Lovecraft many-formed character who often takes the guise of a human being while serving the purposes of the elder gods. He is known to use deceit, manipulation and propaganda to achieve his goals, and claims to have a thousand masks. He is also known as the Crawling Chaos and the Black Man.

⁶
A reference to the
Necronomicon
invented by H. P. Lovecroft.

⁷
The Crimson King and Flagg/Walter suffer numerous eye injuries in their long lives.

⁸
Ralph Roberts calls his adventure “Short-Time Life on Harris Avenue, A Tragic-Comedy in Three Acts.”

⁹
The Crimson King knows who his future enemies will be. He tried to scare King away from writing at the age of seven and periodically made attempts on King’s life.

¹⁰
They call themselves the “physicians of last resort.” Ralph names them after the Greek Fates. Clotho spun the thread of each life, Lachesis measured it and Atropos snipped it. Fate is nearly synonymous with ka.

¹¹
The four constants are Life, Death, the Purpose and the Random.

¹²
They may be agents of Higher Purpose and Higher Random, though it’s also possible that above a certain level there is no Random.

¹³
Ralph thinks of Joe Wyzer, Lois and himself as the “Three Insomniacs of the Apocalypse.” The elderly leaders of Tet Corporation dubbed themselves the “Old Farts of the Apocalypse.”

¹⁴
From
Pet Sematary,
the book that made the existence of
The Gunslinger
widely known.

¹⁵
Benjamin Hanscomb of
It
designed the new Civic Center after the original was destroyed in the flood of 1985.

¹⁶
“Once there was a king. . . . But kings are done, lad. In the world of light, anyway,” Roland thinks in
The Gunslinger
(revised edition).

¹⁷
When Ralph defeats the Crimson King, there is a titanic green flash so bright that “for one moment it was as if the Emerald City of Oz had exploded around him.” The Emerald Palace shows up in
Wizard and Glass,
written two years after
Insomnia
was published.

¹⁸
At one point, Ralph covers Lois’s eyes. “His fingers flashed a momentary white so bright it was almost blinding. Must be the white they’re always talking about in the detergent commercials, he thought.”

¹⁹
Dorcas is the name of a biblical character, a disciple from Joppa whose name translates to Tabitha, which is Stephen King’s wife’s name. According to Acts, Dorcas was a woman full of good works and charitable deeds.

²⁰
The Regulators
was published under King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman, who some might call King’s dark twin. Bachman’s wife, Claudia Inez Bachman, becomes the author of
Charlie the Choo-Choo
in later books in the
Dark Tower
series, although a
y
is added to her name to give it nineteen characters.

²¹
In
Black House,
Sophie says, “The Little Sisters don’t come out when the sun shines,” but this proves untrue.

²²
Norma Deepneau surprises him from behind in the lobby of the Black Tower housing the Tet Corporation in 1999. At the time, Roland thinks it hasn’t happened since he was a teenager.

²³
When “Low Men in Yellow Coats” was adapted as the movie
Hearts in Atlantis,
all references to low men and Breakers were removed from the script because of the complexities that would have been required to explain the
Dark Tower
mythos to a mainstream audience.

²⁴
In
It,
both Eddie and Ben think they see the figure of a turtle drawn in chalk on the sidewalk, but it turns out to be just a hopscotch grid.

²⁵
The car in
From a Buick 8
fits this description, and its driver resembles a low man, but King, in keeping with the book’s theme of unexplained mysteries, doesn’t explicitly connect the Buick to low men. However, its trunk is a portal to another world.
From a Buick 8
is identified at the front of
Wolves of the Calla
as having ties to the
Dark Tower
series.

²⁶
The Big Coffin Hunters in
Wizard and Glass,
though human, are also regulators.
The Regulators
is a fictional movie, but its stars, John Payne and Karen Steele, are real and did costar in one film.

²⁷
Peter Straub, personal communication, July 12, 2000.

²⁸
Coogan’s Bluff
. King has often said that Roland was inspired by Clint Eastwood.

²⁹
Dinky remembers a TV show he watched one summer. “
Golden Years,
it was called. You probably don’t remember it. Anyway, there was a guy on that show who used to say, ‘Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.’ ”
The Golden Years
was written by King.

³⁰
Interview with Jeff Zaleski,
Publishers Weekly,
August 20, 2001.

³¹
Ibid.

³²
In
The Plant,
Carlos Detweiller, who prayed to the god Abbalah and utters words from the language of the unformed, also mentions opoponax [sic], which is ironic because the newspaper article in
Black House
mentions “opopanax” as a word that was missed in a spelling bee.

³³
Parkus says the Crimson King is “Tower-pent,” echoing the term “prison-pent” from
Look Homeward, Angel,
the Thomas Wolfe book that also contains the phrase “a stone, a leaf, an unfound door.”