Stephen King's the Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance Revised and Updated (2 page)

As I say, her concordance was never meant to be published; it was created solely as a writer’s tool. But, even with most of my mind preoccupied by the writing of my tale, I was aware of how good it was, how interesting and
readable
it was. I also became aware, as time passed and the actual publication of the final three volumes grew closer, of how valuable it might be to the Constant Reader who’d read the first three or four volumes of the series, but some years ago.

In any case, it was Robin Furth who inventoried the goods I had on sale, and replaced all the dim overhead lights so I could see everything clearly and find my way from Housewares to Appliances without getting lost . . . or from Gilead to Calla Bryn Sturgis, if you prefer. That in no way makes her responsible for my errors—of which I’m sure there are many—but it
is
important that she receive credit for all the good work she has done on my behalf. I found this overview of In-World, Mid-World, and End-World both entertaining and invaluable.

So, I am convinced, will you.

January 26, 2003

This book had its first stirrings more than twenty years ago. I was fourteen, and I was spending the summer with my grandparents in Maine. I have always been obsessed by books, and so that July I arrived with a stack of them. Top of the pile wasn’t
The Gunslinger.
No. Not yet. But it was a novel called
’Salem’s Lot.

I can still remember the feeling I had when I read that book. My body was on the tiny, weedy beach of Patten Pond, but the rest of me was in the Marsten House, or crouched by Mark Petrie’s side as he held up a glow-in-the-dark cross to ward off the vampire at his window. I climbed on the Greyhound Bus behind Father Callahan—my hand burned and my mouth still tasting Barlow’s blood—and the two of us set off for that unknown destination of Thunderclap, a haunted place on the lip of End-World.
³

I closed the novel and, still caught in that dream-web, I began to walk back toward home. And there, in the pine woods, with my feet deep in leaf mould and my skin still smelling of pond water, I saw myself as an adult. I was grown-up, and I was working for Stephen King. I didn’t know exactly what I was doing, but I knew it had to do with books, and Father Callahan, and with that dreaded place called Thunderclap. The vision was so vivid, so convincing, and so quickly over. I held on to the feeling of it long enough to write my first horror story (it wasn’t very good), but as the vision faded, I began to doubt what I had seen. I buried that vision, lost the story, and didn’t think about either for two decades. That is, until one day when I went to check my mail in the English department office at the University of Maine. As I was sorting through the grade sheets and memos, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Burt Hatlen, one of my professors. Stephen King needed a temporary research assistant, he said. Would I be interested . . .

Sometimes, art imitates life, and sometimes life imitates art, and sometimes the two of them blend to such a degree that we can’t figure out where one ends and the other begins. For months before my chat with Burt, I’d been dreaming about roses, moons with demon faces, and huge, imposing, smoke-colored Towers. I didn’t think I was losing my mind, but then there was the tall, lanky, ghostlike man pacing at my writing-room door. He seemed to want to get through to our world, to
need
to get through to our world, and for some reason he thought I
could help him. And every time I laid out my tarot cards, my future came out Towers.

Ka
is a wheel, its one purpose is to turn, and so often it brings us back to just where we started. Twenty years had passed since I boarded that bus to Thunderclap, but in Roland’s world, in the world of the Tower quest, twenty years in the past, or twenty years in the future, are only just a doorway apart. I climbed back on that Greyhound Bus only to find myself, as a young girl, still sitting behind Callahan. I’d never really disembarked in the first place.

Pere Callahan waited in Calla Bryn Sturgis, on the border of Thunderclap, and Roland had to reach him. All he needed was somebody from our world to help crack open Steve’s doorway. I knew many of Steve’s other works, I loved fantasy and horror, and I had those rather sinister initials that implied I might be good for writing something other than academic essays. All that remained for me to do was open Roland’s biography and read that first, all-important line.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed . . .

It is now 2012, and I have lived in Roland’s world for more than twelve years. During that time I’ve collected much of the myth, history, and folklore of Mid-World. Just as, when you wake up from a dream, you try to capture what you saw during your night travels, the book that follows is my attempt to capture my journey with Roland. My goal, when I started, was to make a doorway between worlds. I hope that I have, at least, made a small window.

R.F.
March 12, 2003
(revisited July 16, 2006 and again, June 27, 2012)

“There’s nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world.”

Roland Deschain
The Wind Through the Keyhole,
31

Like all Dark Tower fans, I always hoped that Stephen King would return to Mid-World after the seventh, and seemingly final, installment of the Dark Tower saga. Hence, in 2009, when Steve told me that he had another idea for a Dark Tower story, I was delighted. At that point, the novel had the working title
Black Wind.
The title alone was intriguing, since as every Tower junkie knows, the winds of Mid-World are intrinsically linked to
sai
King’s artistic inspiration. As he says in
Song of Susannah,
“the wind blows and the story comes.” In
Black Wind,
however, that wind would have special significance, since it linked three stories, three eras of Mid-World history, and two vastly different periods in Roland’s life.

By 2010, Steve had begun writing in earnest. The title,
Black Wind,
had become
The Wind Through the Keyhole,
and the story was firmly placed between
Wizard and Glass
and
Wolves of the Calla.
Since it wasn’t technically a gunslinger novel—Steve had set out instead to write a fairy tale—he thought that the subtitle would be
A Novel of Mid-World.
In those early days, Steve sent me a beautiful epigraph that he wanted to place at the beginning of the book:

We live our short lives on one side of the door; on the other is all of eternity. Time is the wind that blows through the keyhole.

Eventually both the subtitle and the epigram were cut, but I wanted to record them here, in this guide to all things Mid-World. Hence, the epigram appears at the beginning of this volume, and the old title is here too, along with
The Wind Through the Keyhole’
s many new characters, magical objects, fantastic places, games, words, and maps. Longtime readers will notice that my map of Mid-World’s Beams has also altered. The Lion-Eagle Beam now runs north to south, which is fitting, since the starkblasts of North’rd Barony begin in the land of endless snows, which is also where Aslan, Guardian of Gilead’s Beam, resides.

To me,
The Wind Through the Keyhole
is a very special novel. Throughout so much of the Dark Tower series Roland remains aloof: a character we love but don’t fully understand, a reticent loner whose battle scars are so numerous that we can’t help but feel that he has a thick layer of protective scar tissue over his
heart. Yet in
The Wind Through the Keyhole
we not only see the world through Roland’s eyes, but we gain a sense of how Roland sees himself. In both
Wizard and Glass
and
The Wind Through the Keyhole,
Roland’s adventures with his American
ka-tet
serve as frame stories for tales about Roland’s younger days. But while in
Wizard and Glass
Roland’s autobiographical adventure is recounted in the third person by an unseen narrator, in
The Wind Through the Keyhole,
Roland tells his story in his own voice. In this novel, Roland is not just a young gunslinger-prodigy with dazzlingly quick reflexes and a precociously subtle sense of battle strategy. He is a young man struggling to make sense of the decisions he has made in his life, and to cope with the terrible consequences of his actions. Over the course of the novel, he comes closer to making peace between his conflicting emotions and allegiances. Somehow, his rigid sense of duty to the way of the gun and his resulting rage against Gabrielle Deschain for betraying her husband and her Barony, must sit beside the profound but confusing grief he feels over the accidental shooting of his mother.

Just as in
Wizard and Glass,
Roland’s encounter with a thinny prompts him to tell his American
ka-tet
about his coming-of-age test and the trials he faced in Hambry soon after he won his guns, so in
The Wind Through the Keyhole,
the starkblast which sweeps along the Path of the Beam inspires Roland to recount two interlinked tales. All three narratives—the frame story of Roland’s
tet
traveling along the path of the Beam, the autobiographical adventure in which Roland and his
ka
-mate Jamie DeCurry hunt for the skin-man of Debaria, and the folktale about Tim Ross, who discovered that his father had been murdered by his jealous best friend, are all linked by the sound of Mid-World’s winds. But to Roland, the ferocious starkblast is not merely a catalyst for talespinning. That powerful storm is intrinsically bound to his memory of his mother and to his guilt over her death.

All that Roland knows about starkblasts—from the unseasonable warmth that precedes them to the erratic behavior of bumblers that warns farmers of impending disaster—was passed on to him by Gabrielle. Hence it is not surprising that, at the beginning of the novel, everything that Roland knows about starkblasts has been suppressed, just as his grief and guilt over his matricide has been suppressed. It is not until the ferryman Bix points out the approaching storm’s many warning signs that the door of memory opens and Roland recalls both the autobiographical tale of “The Skin-Man,” which took place shortly after Gabrielle’s passing, and “The Wind Through the Keyhole,” the folktale which his mother often read to him in the tower bedroom of his childhood.

From the outset of “The Skin-Man,” we know that fifteen-year-old Roland is struggling with an overwhelming grief. Though he has not been back from Hambry for very long, Roland has appointed himself as nurse to his old teacher Cort. Roland claims that he nurses Cort out of respect (after all, Cort never recovered from Roland’s coming-of-age battle against him), but his father suspects a darker motivation. Roland is searching for absolution for his accidental murder of his mother. In order to remove Roland from the unhealthy atmosphere of Gilead, and to try to get the boy to expiate his sense of sin in a more fitting manner, Steven Deschain sends Roland and his
ka
-mate Jamie DeCurry to Debaria, so that the boys can track down the bloodthirsty skin-man who has been terrorizing that western barony.

On the way to Debaria, Roland and Jamie stop at Serenity, the women’s retreat where Roland’s mother stayed after her betrayal of her husband and her city. There they not only see the terrible wounds inflicted upon one of the skin-man’s few surviving victims, but they meet the retreat’s prioress, the flamboyant but warm giantess, Everlynne of Serenity. Even this early in the tale, Roland begins to question the view of reality imparted to him by his father and the other gunslingers. After all, Everlynne is not the man-hating vixen that he has been led to believe she would be, but a vivacious, brave, and welcoming woman who maintained her respect for Roland’s dead mother despite her crimes. In fact, she calls our young gunslinger
son-of-Gabrielle
rather than
son-of-Steven,
which is the more usual form of address in patriarchal Mid-World.

Once in Debaria, Roland must once again face the division between his mind and his heart. In order to catch the skin-man, he must play the role of adult gunslinger. This means operating with the intellect and instincts of a hunter, though it goes against the more humane instincts of the boy. Faced with the horrors of the skin-man’s attacks, Roland decides that the only way he will be able to catch the shapeshifting killer is by setting a trap, baited with the only living person to have seen the skin-man in his human form—an eleven-year-old boy named Bill Streeter. Roland’s
ka
-mate, Jamie DeCurry, is very uncomfortable with Roland’s decision to use Young Bill in this way. As Roland says, “It was a thing [Jamie]’d never have done himself, even if he’d though of it. Which is why my father had put me in charge. Not because I’d done well in Mejis—I hadn’t, not really—and not because I was his son, either. Although in a way, I suppose that was it. My mind was like his: cold.”

Like any general, Roland-the-gunslinger knows that in war, the innocent are often sacrificed. But the way he describes the reason for his position of leadership is harsh. Though he was the youngest gunslinger ever to win his guns, and though as little more than an adolescent, he had defeated the brutal Big Coffin Hunters of Hambry, Roland does not think it is his bravery or his heroism or his skill that has made Steven Deschain put him in charge of this mission. Gilead’s
dinh
let him lead the hunt for Debaria’s skin-man because Roland is cold-minded and cold-blooded, just like the best of the
tet
of the gun.

But despite the coldness required by his calling, the young Roland tries to keep alive his own humanity. Although Roland puts Young Bill at risk, he tries to minimize that risk. He takes the boy to Debaria’s jail—the most defendable building in the town—and locks the two of them in together. (If the skin-man tries to attack Billy, then Roland will defend the boy with his life.) While in that jail cell, listening to the wailing of the simoom outside, Roland tells Young Bill the story of another young boy—Tim Ross—who like Billy had to face terrible dangers in order to bring his father’s killer to justice. Like Bill Streeter, Tim Ross was of low birth, but because of his bravery he not only became a gunslinger, but became the legendary hero, Tim Stoutheart. It is little wonder then, that in order to screw up his courage and face the skin-man, Young Bill pretends that he is Tim Stoutheart.