Stephen King's the Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance Revised and Updated (6 page)

In the final three books of the Dark Tower series, Roland and his friends extend the scope of their quest. While keeping their ultimate goal in mind, they set out to accomplish a number of specific tasks that, when taken together, simultaneously halt the erosion of the Beams, frustrate the apocalyptic plans of the Crimson King, and work for the common good. First, in
Wolves of the Calla,
they destroy the robotic, green-cloaked horsemen who have been stealing children from Mid-World’s borderlands for more than six generations.
¹²
By so doing, they not only liberate the people of the Callas but undermine the efficiency of the Breakers—those prisoners of the Crimson King who have been forced to erode the Beams with the equivalent of psychic battery acid. Second, in
Song of Susannah,
Jake and Callahan manage to put Black Thirteen, the most evil of Maerlyn’s magic balls, out of commission. And third, with the help of John Cullum (their Stoneham, Maine,
dan-tete
), Roland and Eddie begin to lay plans for the Tet Corporation, a company created to undermine the powers of the evil Sombra Corporation and to protect both the wild Rose, found in New York City’s Vacant Lot, and our
kas-ka Gan,
Stephen King, creator of our tale.
¹³

By accomplishing these tasks, our
tet
remains true to the Way of Eld, which demands that gunslingers protect the weak and vulnerable from those who would oppress or exploit them. Yet in defending the White against the ever-encroaching tide of the Outer Dark, our
tet
(like our author) comes under the shadow of
ka-shume,
the shadow of death.
¹⁴
In
The Dark Tower,
Roland and his friends destroy the Devar-Toi, or Breaker prison, and free the Breakers.
¹⁵
They halt the erosion of the Beams (which we are assured will regenerate), but Eddie Dean pays for this victory with his life. Not long after, when Roland and Jake travel to the year 1999 so that they can save their maker, Stephen King, from his predetermined collision with a Dodge minivan, Jake Chambers heaves his last breath. It seems that
ka
demands a life for a life, and though Stephen King survives his terrible accident, Jake does not.

And it is here, on Slab City Hill in Lovell, Maine, by the prostrate and profoundly injured body of our
kas-ka Gan,
and by the side of our gunslinger Roland, who grieves over the corpse of his adopted son, that I would like to pause. It is not a comfortable place to be—either for
sai
King, who lies bleeding in a ditch, or for us, who are unable to help—but it is an important place. Like Detta Walker’s
Drawers,
this little patch of road in the year 1999 (when the
ka
of our world and the
ka
of Roland’s world are united) is a place of power. It is a doorway between the rational and irrational worlds, a place where the veil is at its thinnest. And it is in this place where life and death meet that Roland accomplishes something worth discussing. By sacrificing what he loves above all else in order to save the life of the man who created his universe—a man who must live if the story of the Dark Tower is to exist in any world—Roland does what we assume is impossible. He stops the wheel of
ka
and alters its path.

Throughout the final three books of the Dark Tower series, we are told that, in the Keystone World we inhabit, there are no do-overs. Once an event has taken place, it cannot be changed. Yet it seems that this “truth” is not necessarily true. At the end of
Song of Susannah,
we are given Stephen King’s obituary—ostensibly taken from the
Portland Sunday Telegram
—which states that King died at 6:02
PM
on Saturday, June 20, 1999, at Northern Cumberland Memorial Hospital in Bridgton, Maine. Yet Stephen King didn’t die. As we all know, he survived (albeit with terrible injuries) and returned to his computer keyboard to finish the last three books of his Dark Tower saga. On one level of the Tower, King’s life was saved by paramedics and doctors, and that most fickle of mistresses, Lady Luck. But on another level, the one that we all inhabit when our
rational minds switch off and our imaginations wake up, Stephen King was saved by his characters.

When I was nineteen, I read a play by the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello. The play was called
Six Characters in Search of an Author.
In it, six characters—all of whom have been abandoned by their original creator—go in search of a new person to pen their story. The person they turn to is a theater manager, already in the process of staging a different play. At first, the theater manager thinks these characters are either mad or joking, but as their traumatic story begins to unfold, he finds himself drawn into it. But no matter how the new playwright (for that is what he becomes) tries to bend the plot or alter the characters’ temperaments, he can’t. You see, the story already exists, from beginning to end, and the characters who live within its unwritten pages stubbornly hold on to their unique identities. What they want, and what they demand, is a writer who is willing to stand and be true—a person able to
facilitate
their tale and give it life, tragic as that tale turns out to be.

A number of years ago, in a writers’ magazine, I read a firsthand account of an author’s experience creating a character, and that, too, has remained with me. The author of the article (who was writing for an audience of apprentice authors) told of her experience with a character she called Bird. And though I lost the article long ago (which, like so many things in my life, I put in a place that at the time I had deemed “safe”), I still remember Bird. You see, Bird saved his author’s life.

The story began when the author in question received a grant to finish her novel. She and her husband went to a remote cottage where the isolation and quiet would be perfect for the task at hand. However, it was winter, the cottage was old and cold, and the journey had been long. The woman and her husband shut the door and windows, turned on the stove, and decided to take a nap.

What felt like hours later, the writer was roused by Bird shaking her. Groggily, she opened her eyes and there was her character, standing by the bed. Bird put his hands by his throat. “I can’t breathe!” he said. And then suddenly, the author realized what had happened. The old cottage was much less drafty than it had originally seemed, and the fire had eaten almost all of the oxygen. She and her husband, unconscious beside her, were asphyxiating.

Almost unable to move, the writer rolled onto the floor, crawled to the door, and managed to push it open. Fresh winter air wafted into the room, and both she and her husband survived. But only because of Bird. The explanation this author gave for her paranormal experience was this: She hadn’t finished telling Bird’s story yet, and Bird couldn’t survive without the umbilical cord of thought which connected them. In order to live, Bird needed
her
to live, and Bird was determined to exist in the world. Self-serving heroism? Perhaps. But does that lessen the act’s importance? Definitely not. Especially as far as the author was concerned.

I once read an article about the early-twentieth-century French explorer Alexandra David-Neel. Evidently, while she studied with monks in Tibet, she learned how to create thought-forms by focused concentration. These thought-forms, which spring from the imagination of the creator, eventually gain an independent existence and can even (if they are especially powerful) become visible to other
people. For me, characters are a kind of thought-form. An author creates them (or facilitates their passage into our world), but then the characters exist in the minds of many. They can live well beyond the lifespan of their creators; they can even exist independently of the book or story they originally inhabited. Think of Hamlet or Heathcliff or Dracula. Or of Roland Deschain.

There are some Dark Tower fans out there (including some very close to my heart) who like it when Stephen King appears in his films, but who are not comfortable with him entering his fiction. The reason? When King enters his own stories and his characters are shown to be just characters, it breaks the spell. When you think about it, such a reaction—even among devoted Tower junkies—isn’t so surprising. Given the world we are expected to live in, where fact is supposed to be fact and fiction is supposed to be fiction, the two of them as separate as our waking lives and our dreaming lives, the events that take place in the final two books of the Dark Tower cycle are bound to confound us. The traditional
suspension of disbelief,
which we put on like a thinking cap whenever we sit down to read a fantasy adventure of any kind, isn’t enough anymore. We have to allow the magic of
that
world—the world of the book—into
our
world, where we must earn a living, pay rent, eat, argue, and worry. In other words, those barriers we erect for our self-protection—barriers which separate our imaginative lives from our mundane ones—begin to break down. And if we’re not careful, the guardrails of the rationalist, no-nonsense universe begin to snake out of control. And if those rails disappear, then we can free-fall into
todash
space, that no-place between worlds where monsters lurk.

As normal, functioning adults, we can’t believe in surreal experiences any more than we can maintain that clapping our hands will bring Tinkerbell back to life. After all, we left all that behind in grade school. Or did we?

For me, the scenes where Stephen King’s characters enter his life,
and change it,
are very powerful. They are powerful because they express the secret relationship King has with his creations. As every writer knows, writing is a two-way street. We may give birth to our characters, but our characters also change us. When Steve King writes about Eddie and Roland visiting him in Bridgton and then, many years later, Roland and Jake coming to him in his hour of deepest need, he is spinning a yarn, but he is also sharing with us the secret story that, in some deep part of his mind, he is telling himself. For the members of Roland’s
ka-tet,
saving Stephen King is essential. But for Stephen King, his characters call him back from the void. Their need explains his survival. Some people have guardian angels. Authors have characters. This may be a strange thing to say, but all of you out there who write know it’s true.

I suppose I have always believed that reality is a subjective affair. Of course, there are always events outside ourselves that are concrete and real, and that—small as we are—we cannot change. Yet in the backs of our minds, there is a voice that takes our experience in the world and weaves a story from it, for good or dis. And I suppose that it is this doorway, the doorway of the imagination, that is the ultimate Door to Anywhere. It gives us hope when there seems to be no hope, and it allows us to enter worlds that our rationalist culture tells us are unreal. I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly glad the rationalists are wrong.

And so, my fellow Constant Readers, on this note, I will leave you. During my
1,396 days living and working in Mid-World,
¹⁶
I, too, have changed. But that’s the nature of both life and fiction, isn’t it?
Ka
turns, and the world moves on. If we’re lucky, we move on with it.

Cam-a-cam-mal,

Pria-toi,

Gan delah.

(White Over Red,

Thus Gan Wills Ever.)

I wish you well.

Robin of the Calvins
January 26, 2005
Tell Gan Thankya.

. . . finally only three remained of the old world, three like dreadful cards from a terrible deck of tarot cards: gunslinger, man in black, and the Dark Tower.

I:140
*

There’s only three boxes to a man. . . . Best and highest is the head, with all the head’s ideas and dreams. Next is the heart, with all our feelings of love and sadness and joy and happiness. . . . In the last box is all what we’d call low-commala: have a fuck, take a shit, maybe want to do someone a meanness for no reason . . .

V:630–31

AARON JAFFORDS

See
JAFFORDS, AARON

ABAGAIL, MOTHER

In the alternate version of KANSAS which our
tet
traveled through in
Wizard and Glass,
JAKE CHAMBERS found a note tucked under a camper windshield. The note read, “The old woman from the dreams is in Nebraska. Her name is Abagail.” Although our
tet
never meets this 108-year-old black woman, her path is nevertheless linked to Roland’s. In STEPHEN KING’s novel
The Stand,
this daughter of a former slave is a Warrior of the WHITE, and her archenemy is the evil RANDALL FLAGG.

In
Song of Susannah,
we discover that Mother Abagail’s world is definitely linked to Roland’s. Both the Red Death (the plague which devastated the END-WORLD town of FEDIC) and the superflu (the disease which wiped out
99 percent of the people in Abagail’s version of Earth) are both physical manifestations of a metaphysical illness. As the GREAT OLD ONES’ technology fails and the mechanical BEAMS collapse, such viruses and plagues are breaking out on many levels of the TOWER.

IV:624, VI:405

ABRAHAM, DAUGHTER OF

See
TASSENBAUM, IRENE

ADAMS, DIEGO

See
CALLA BRYN STURGIS CHARACTERS
: RANCHERS

ADAMS, RICHARD

See
GUARDIANS OF THE BEAM
: SHARDIK

ADAMS, SAREY

See
ORIZA, SISTERS OF

**AFFILIATION

The Affiliation
was the name given to the network of political and military alliances that united MID-WORLD’s baronies during Roland’s youth. By the time Roland reached adulthood, the Affiliation was in tatters, due in large part to the bloody rebellions and terrible betrayals staged by THE GOOD MAN (JOHN FARSON) and his followers.