The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy (20 page)

The low men drag Ted back to his duties as a Breaker—though readers still don't know what this means. In the closing section of
Hearts in Atlantis
,
“Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling,” Bobby gets a message from Ted. The envelope contains rose petals, and Bobby senses the multiverse all spinning on the axis of the Tower. He understands that Ted has once again escaped from the low men.

Another connection between
Hearts in Atlantis
and the Dark Tower series is a man named Raymond Fiegler, another name for Randall Flagg. Fiegler was the leader of a fringe group that Bobby's childhood girlfriend, Carol Gerber, joined. Fiegler had the power of becoming dim or not being seen.

T
HE
P
LANT

There are a few tenuous ties between this unfinished novel and the Dark Tower series. Carlos Detweiller prays to the god Abbalah, which is another name for the Crimson King. He also utters words from the language of the unformed and mentions opopanax, the name of the feather used to call meetings in Calla Bryn Sturgis and a word that haunts Jack Sawyer in
Black House
.

B
LACK
H
OUSE

Black House
represents the first time that Stephen King allowed another writer to contribute to the Dark Tower mythos: Peter Straub. Though
The Talisman
has tenuous ties to the series, there is no question that
Black House
is a Dark Tower novel.

It was Straub's suggestion that he and King use elements from the Dark Tower. He was curious about what Breakers were and who the Crimson King was, and writing this book with King was one way to find those things out. Via the character Parkus, the nature of Breakers is spelled out. For the past two hundred years (a period those at the upper levels call the Age of Poisoned Thought and roughly the same amount of time the Wolves have been raiding the Callas), the Crimson King (aka Ram Abbalah) has been gathering people with psychic powers from the Earth and the Territories. He is using them to speed up the destruction of the Beams. One of the six Beams 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 calls the gunslingers an ancient war guild of Gilead and says that it is their job to protect the Beams. As a
ka-tet
, they are capable of countering the Breakers, but they are mostly gone now. He knows of one gunslinger who has created at least three more of his kind. This last group of gunslingers is
the final hope for the Tower to stand until the end of its natural days. If the Crimson King can break the Beams before Roland and his
ka-tet
reach the Tower, he will never have to confront them, which is why he has stepped up his search for Breakers.

Only a small percentage of the children he captures are sufficiently talented to become Breakers. Those who don't qualify are sent as slave labor to power the Big Combination, An-tak, the Forge of the King, his energy source located in End-World, from which he powers evil in many different universes. An End-World demon called Mr. Munshun possesses Charles Burnside, an aging serial killer, using him to kidnap children. Any the Crimson King can't use, Mr. Munshun is allowed to eat.

Jack Sawyer, now a police officer in Wisconsin, has forgotten his adventure retrieving the Talisman. After seeing it in a newspaper article, he is haunted by the word “opopanax,” the name of the feather used to call meetings in Calla Bryn Sturgis. He is responsible for finding the latest kidnap victim, Tyler Marshall, who has the potential to be as powerful a Breaker as Ted Brautigan, who Munshun calls the Chief Breaker. If Jack can't save Tyler, he has to kill him before Munshun can take him through the Black House, a portal to Mid-World, where he will be swept off to End-World on a monorail much like Blaine and Patricia, both of which are now gone. One more Breaker like Tyler might be all the Crimson King needs to bring down the Tower. His mother collapses after he is taken, rambling about the Crimson King. She also dreams of the Dark Tower in a field of roses.

Jack meets Sophie, the Queen of the Territories, in a tent that once belonged to the Little Sisters of Eluria. It may be the last such tent of a dozen or more that once existed in the Territories, On-World and Mid-World. Sophie tells Jack that even the Little Sisters serve the Beam, though Jack has no idea what that means.

Speedy's twin in the Territories explains the nature of the multiverse to Jack after leading him to an abandoned Speaking Circle like the ones encountered by Roland and his
ka-tet
. He says that there are “da fan” worlds—a number beyond telling, all bound together by the Dark Tower, the axle upon which many wheels spin. Ram Aballah, the Crimson King, wants to bring down the Tower. His physical being is trapped there, but he thinks his other manifestation will be freed from his court, Can-tah Abbalah, if the Tower falls.

With the rescue of Ty Marshall, the Crimson King feels a deep pain in his gut. Something fundamental has changed in his plans. Parkus thinks Jack
Sawyer might end up having some part to play in the “business of the Tower” but he did not.

F
ROM A
B
UICK
8

The mysterious driver of the unusual Buick that is abandoned in Pennsylvania was probably a low man, one of the
can toi
. The car itself is a portal to another universe. An even more tenuous connection is the fact that one of the characters in the book, Sandy Dearborn, shares a name with the alias Roland assumes in
Wizard and Glass
, Will Dearborn. Dearborn was Western novelist Louis L'Amour's middle name.

E
VERYTHING'S
E
VENTUAL

This collection contains two stories with strong ties to the Dark Tower series. The first is the novella “The Little Sisters of Eluria,” which is discussed earlier in this book. It is a stand-alone Dark Tower story that relates one of Roland's adventures after the fall of Gilead but before he finds the man in black's trail.

When the short story “Everything's Eventual” was published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
in 1997, there was no reason to suspect that it had anything to do with the Dark Tower. However, as King developed the concept of Breakers in
Hearts in Atlantis
and
Black House
, he came to realize that the protagonist of “Everything's Eventual,” Dinky Earnshaw, was a Breaker. A subtler crossover between the story and the series is the fact that Dinky knew Skipper Brannigan, who was a friend of a friend of Eddie Dean's brother, Henry. His name comes up when Henry and his friends are discussing who they'd want on their side in a fight. Skipper Brannigan was Dinky's tormentor at the grocery store where he gathered shopping carts, and Dinky was responsible for Skipper's death.

Dinky is hired to become an e-mail assassin by Trans Corporation, which turns out to be a subsidiary of North Central Positronics. His setup is reminiscent of Algul Siento. He is provided with accommodations and anything he wants if he performs mysterious work on behalf of this shady organization. Dinky's employer, a man named Sharpton, employs people who look for those with powers like Dinky has. Low men, in other words.

At the end of the story, Dinky writes a lethal e-mail message that contains the word “Excalibur,” which is the name of Arthur Eld's sword, the metal from which was used to make Roland's guns. Dinky runs away from his safe house but, as revealed in
The Dark Tower
, low men caught him and took him to Thunderclap.

T
HE
C
OLORADO
K
ID

At first glance, King's short crime novel
The Colorado Kid
has no obvious connection to the Dark Tower series. However, readers pointed out what seemed to be an error in the story: there were no Starbucks franchises in Denver in 1980. In response, King wrote the following on his official Web site in October 2005: “Don't assume that's a mistake on my part. The Constant Readers of the Dark Tower series may realize that that is not necessarily a continuity error, but a clue.” In other words, King is implying that the novel takes place in the same kind of universe where there are Takuro Spirit cars and Nozz-A-La soft drinks.

One of the story's biggest mysteries is how the Colorado Kid made it from Colorado to Maine in an impossibly short period of time. The answer could be that he went through a magic or scientific portal. Or, like Jack Sawyer, he may have crossed into another reality where distances are shorter and time moves at a different pace.

U
R

This novella was published as a Kindle-only eBook in 2009. It has subsequently been made available for other eBook devices and has been released on audio. The story involves a college English professor named Wesley Smith who is shamed into buying a Kindle. However, the one that arrives is pink (the color of a rose?) and has a special feature that allows him to access books and newspapers from parallel universes. When Wesley uses these features, the screen shows an ominous black tower instead of the typical author caricature.

In the alternate realities, famous authors were born and died on different dates and produced works beyond those that are known in our “ur,” the name the device gives to each possible time line or level of the Tower. Wesley is also able to access newspapers from the future.

After he changes the future, two “low men in yellow coats” chastise him for causing unfixable damage to the time line. Wesley understands that they aren't really men and that underneath they are reptiles or birds—or both. They wear badges featuring the Crimson King's red eye on their lapels, only these eyes are alive and watching him. The low men tell him that he has no idea what he did. “The Tower trembles; the worlds shudder in their courses. The rose feels a chill, as of winter.”

When Wesley mentions the Tower he saw on the screen, the low men say that all things serve the Tower. Wesley responds that that means he also serves
the Tower, to which they have no answer. The story's unanswered question is who sent the Kindle to him. Was it, perhaps,
ka
?

M
ILE
81

The mud-covered station wagon that materializes at a closed rest stop along the Maine Turnpike is a “low men” vehicle that is actually alive and hungry, like the car in
From a Buick 8
.

11/22/63

Though King took measures to keep
11/22/63
from being an overt Dark Tower novel, many of its concepts are familiar to readers of the series. Most obvious is the use of a portal to travel to a different time. It is a North Central Positronics kind of door, always arriving at the same place and time, rather than a magic door, which can be aimed. The lead character, Jake Epping, spends a few months in Derry, which is a significant location in the Dark Tower universe.

The entire concept for
11/22/63
is laid out in
Wolves of the Calla
. Using Black Thirteen and the Unfound Door, a person could go back to Dallas on November 22, 1963, and see whether Oswald acted alone or was part of a larger conspiracy, Father Callahan says. “And perhaps you could change what happened that day. If there was ever a watershed moment in American life, that was it. Change that, change everything that came after. Vietnam…the race riots…everything.” Eddie replies, “But, Pere…what if you did it and changed things for the worse? I think it takes a great man to make a great mistake. And besides, someone who came after him might have been a really bad guy. Some Big Coffin Hunter who never got a chance because of Lee Harvey Oswald, or whoever it was.”

There are other more incidental connections. Eddie Dean saw Kubrick film
The Shining
(though he's never heard of Stephen King). Nigel the robot is reading
The Dead Zone
and has an extensive collection of King books, including
Hearts in Atlantis
. The word
“cujo”
means “sweet one” in Mejis. For an extensive look at the myriad crossovers found in King's work, including those in books not directly connected to the Dark Tower series, see
The Complete Stephen King Universe
by Stanley Wiater, Christopher Golden and Hank Wagner.