The Road to The Dark Tower (47 page)

Father Callahan was one of King’s tragic figures, last seen riding out of town in shame like a failed gunslinger sent into exile, on a self-destructive path. King occasionally discussed returning to the priest’s story to explore what became of him after the night he failed his faith. However, King later said that the time for a sequel to
’Salem’s Lot
had passed, leaving Callahan in limbo.

Nearly thirty years on, King allowed Father Callahan to find his redemption at the end of his journey along the road to the Dark Tower.

When Patrick Danville was a four-year-old boy in Derry, Maine, the Crimson King sent Ed Deepneau to kill him. Ralph Roberts first sees him playing in a park with his mother, Sonia. Ralph notes that Patrick’s face had an extraordinary translucence, a beauty that was enhanced by the rose-colored aura revolving about his head. He has a hook-shaped scar across the bridge of his nose
²⁴
caused by a fall when he was eight months old. His rosy aura is scarlet around the scar.

Named after his grandfather, Patrick is a burgeoning artist, making families out of Play-Doh and creating intricate crayon drawings. Sonia knows her son is special and that the world tried to root out people like him.

His father drinks too much and abuses his mother. Ralph and Lois Chasse save Patrick and Sonia twice, once at a halfway house, where young Patrick perceives them as angels. The second time is during Ed Deepneau’s assault on the Derry Civic Center. Patrick wouldn’t have been there that day except his babysitter was injured, probably not by accident. The Crimson King wanted Patrick where Ed could get at him.

He sometimes has ideas for pictures that he is compelled to draw. While he and his mother wait in the Civic Center for Susan Day, the main speaker, to take the stage, he falls under one of these compulsions. The drawing he creates features a soot-colored tower in a field of vivid red roses. A hatefully jealous man in a red robe looks down at a gunslinger from the top of the tower. He identifies the two people as “the Red King” and Roland, who is also a king. Patrick dreams about Roland sometimes. The drawing sends a chill through Sonia.

Ralph and Lois know only that Patrick is one of the Great Ones, someone whose life always serves Purpose. His life affects those on many levels above and below the Short-Time world, and his life will have more impact on reality than Caesar, Hitler or Winston Churchill, according to Clotho and Lachesis. If he were to be killed before his time, the Tower would fall and even the bald docs can’t comprehend the full implications of that happening.

After Ralph stops Ed, Clotho and Lachesis tell him that Patrick is safe and that eighteen years in the future he will save the lives of two men, one of them crucial to maintaining the balance between Random and Purpose.

Roland learns about Patrick from the Calvins at Tet Corporation, who know about him from studying
Insomnia
. They say that Roland should look for him when he returns to End-World. He could be the key to the Dark Tower.

Roland sees Patrick’s name on two paintings in Sayre’s office in Fedic. One depicts Mordred with Arthur Eld’s horse, which is dead. The other shows the Dark Tower. “It is as if I could touch the texture of every brick. The person who painted it must have been there. Must have set up his easel in the very roses.” [DT7] Roland later realizes that Patrick hasn’t done these paintings yet and that Sayre collected them from some future world through a doorway, which means that Patrick survived after Roland sent him back toward Outpost 19.

Susannah and Roland find Patrick imprisoned in the basement of Dandelo’s hut in Empathica. He’s so scrawny he reminds Susannah of a concentration camp prisoner. No one knows how long he’s been there. His hair hangs all the way to his shoulders, but he has only the faintest haze of a beard on his cheeks. He looks seventeen; Roland thinks he might be as old as thirty. According to Clotho and Lachesis’s story, he should be around twenty-two.

He communicates only through grunts and sign language; Dandelo pulled out his tongue and has been regularly feeding on his emotions. Patrick received the bare minimum of food necessary to keep him alive, and his mind has been terribly damaged.

Roland and Susannah discover his artistic skill. He seems to have no need for erasers, for either he doesn’t make mistakes or he incorporates them into his drawings in a way that makes them little acts of genius. His pictures give him all the voice he needs. He produces them with harrowing clarity, rapidly and with clear pleasure. Drawing had always made him happy, but Susannah and Roland show him that his pictures could make others happy, too. Susannah uncovers Patrick’s real talent when she gets him to erase the cancerous blemish from her portrait. He can uncreate by erasing; he can also create by drawing, something both she and Roland should have noticed when he drew a picture of some buffalo and the herd seemed closer after he completed the drawing, because he drew them that way.

He provides Susannah with the mechanism for escaping End-World
by drawing a doorway for her. Given the choice of going with her or staying with Roland, he chooses to stay. “Scared to go sumplace new,” he writes. His tongueless mouth will brand him in another place. Even here, he smiles with his teeth closed to hide the dark hole in his mouth. Drawing is all he has; everything else has been taken from him—his home world as well as his mother and his tongue and whatever brains he might once have had.

His time in Mid-World has not been completely detrimental to him; he has acquired some of the touch and can project thoughts and ideas to Roland.

He is eager to please, slow-witted and naïve, but his hands are as talented as Roland’s. Patrick appreciates his own skill with a young man’s arrogance that is disturbingly familiar to the gunslinger. Roland believes Patrick has a third eye that looks out from his imagination, seeing everything. His portrait of the Crimson King is genius. Challenged, the boy soars above himself.

Patrick makes a pigment from a paste of saliva, rose petals and Roland’s blood and puts in two daubs for the Crimson King’s eyes. When he’s finished he seems fascinated, as if he can see Gan’s face in his work. Erasing the Crimson King removes Roland’s final barrier to attaining the Dark Tower.

Patrick is immune to the fate that accompanies most of Roland’s fellow travelers because he has never been ka-tet. Even so, he represents all those who died along the way on Roland’s quest, and the gunslinger won’t see one more innocent perish for his cause. He sends Patrick back to find Stutterin’ Bill and possibly to a doorway to America-side. “Here the darkness hides him from my storyteller’s eye and he must go on alone.”

“You may not have been [Roland’s] greatest enemy, Walter Padick . . . but you were his oldest.” He heard for the first time in a thousand years the name a boy from a farm in Delain had once answered to: Walter Padick. Walter, son of Sam the Miller in the Eastar’d Barony. He who had run away from home at thirteen, been raped in the ass by another wanderer a year later and yet had somehow withstood the temptation to go crawling back. [DT7]

For centuries before the Crimson King enlisted him, Flagg stirred up trouble in Delain, causing wars and revolutions during the reigns of numerous kings. These may have been acts of revenge for his treatment as a child.

As the court wizard in Delain, he murdered King Roland so he could put the king’s easily influenced son on the throne. He possessed a ball that enabled him to see the past and future—like one of the Wizard’s Rainbow—and the ability to make himself dim so he could sneak about the castle undetected.

In one version of Earth—another level of the Tower—Randall Flagg represented the forces of evil against those aligned with Mother Abigail in a cataclysmic confrontation.

Stephen King and Randall Flagg have a lifelong relationship. In 1969, King wrote a poem called “The Dark Man” on the back of a place mat in a diner. Later published in
Ubris,
a University of Maine literary magazine, the poem tells of a man who wanders the country like a vagabond, riding the rails, observing everything. The poem turns dark when the narrator confesses to rape and murder.

a savage sacrifice

and a sign to those who creep in

fixed ways:

i am a dark man.
²⁵

“[T]hat idea of the guy never left my mind. The thing about him that really attracted me was the idea of the villain as somebody who was always on the outside looking in and hated people who had good fellowship and good conversation and friends.”
²⁶
He didn’t belong to any of the “cliques and cults and faiths and factions that had arisen in the confused years since the Tower began to totter,” though he pretended to when it suited him.

This fifteen-hundred-year-old, nearly immortal man in black goes by many names and weaves a fabric of truth mixed with lies. He creates a multiplicity of aliases that makes it seem like the gunslinger has more enemies than he really does: Marten the enchanter, Walter o’Dim, John Farson, Randall Flagg and numerous others. He often travels in disguise, but always he is a grinning, laughing man. “I’m a man of many handles,” Flagg
tells the Tick-Tock Man. “I have been called the Ageless Stranger. . . . I’ve also been called Merlin or Maerlyn—and who cares, because I was never that one, although I never denied it, either. I am sometimes called the Magician . . . or the Wizard.”
²⁷
Much of what he says about himself cannot be trusted. As Browning wrote, “My first thought was, he lied in every word.”

In certain provinces to the south even of Garlan
²⁸
he had been known as Walter Hodji, the latter word meaning both “dim” and “hood.” He often adopts aliases with the initials R. F., as in Richard Fanin and Raymond Fiegler, the name he used when he showed Carol Gerber the trick of becoming dim.

In the synopses at the beginning of each of the last three stories that make up
The Gunslinger
as they originally appeared in F&SF, King’s idea of the relationship between Walter and Marten evolves. Before “The Oracle and the Mountains,” he writes, “Marten, the sorcerer physician who may have been the half brother of the man in black.” Before “The Slow Mutants” he adds, “Or is he the man in black himself?” And before the final story, he says, “The court sorcerer who may have somehow been transformed into the man in black he now pursues, and who, as the charismatic Good Man [i.e., Farson], pulled down the last kingdom of light.” See Appendix V.

A description of his appearance would be meaningless, as he can take whatever form suits him. When Roland sees him as Walter, he sports a handsome, regular face, bearing “none of the marks and twists which indicate a person who has been through awesome times and who has been privy to great and unknown secrets.” He has a pallid complexion, ragged, matted black hair, a high forehead, dark and brilliant eyes, a nondescript nose and full and sensual lips. To others, when he drops his hood, he has the snarling face of a human weasel.

Flagg’s face is fair and broad browed but not, for all its pleasant looks, in any way human. His cheeks are rosy.

[H]is blue-green eyes sparkled with a gusty joy far too wild to be sane; his blue-black hair stood up in zany clumps like the feathers of a raven; his lips, lushly red, parted to reveal the teeth of a cannibal. . . . His voice is whispery, penetrating. His laughter chilled the skin; it was like the howl of a wolf. . . . His smiles do not
broaden his face but instead contract his features into a narrow and spiteful grimace. [DT3]

Walter is the farthest minion of the Dark Tower . . . or rather of he who dwells there: the Crimson King. He calls his master Legion,
²⁹
a name he takes for himself as Flagg in
The Stand
and also used by Linoge in
Storm of the Century
and Munshun in
Black House
. This shouldn’t imply that Linoge and Munshun are different aspects of Walter/Flagg, but rather that they are parts of the larger EVIL that serves the Crimson King. Mia tells Susannah that Walter can best be described as the Crimson King’s Prime Minister. Sayre of Sombra Corporation reports to him, as do the Big Coffin Hunters in Mejis.

He claims never to have seen his master, who came to him in a dream thousands of years ago and imbued him with his duty. He’s terrified of his master. “To speak of [him] is to speak of the ruination of one’s own soul.” He has done many errands for the Crimson King, including enlisting Mia as a vessel to bear Mordred, but his primary task has been to confound Roland, from his earliest days in Gilead and every step along the way. “You see, someone has taken you seriously,” he tells Roland when they meet the first time.

The note the man in black leaves Allie in Tull is signed Walter o’Dim, which is how he normally thinks of himself. Roland doesn’t make the connection among all these creatures until near the end of his quest, but it doesn’t matter. He addresses each one in turn as necessity requires.

Roland first knew of him as Marten, a man who served as Gilead’s court magician and counselor. Marten seduced his mother, Gabrielle, and tried to manipulate Roland into condemning himself to exile, but instead authored Roland’s early advance to manhood. He’s a man of many neat tricks, but isn’t as clever as he thinks. He regularly underestimates Roland, who remembers him as a glutton behind a grave ascetic’s exterior.