The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy (9 page)

Aunt Talitha tries to discourage Roland from seeking the Dark Tower. For generations, anyone who pursued that goal never came back, she says. When she sees he won't be dissuaded, she gives Roland her silver cross and asks him to lay it at the foot of the Tower should he ever get there.

During their visit, Susannah exhibits signs that she may be pregnant. Whether this is because of her relationship with Eddie or because of what
happened with the demon in the Speaking Circle won't be known for some time.

Though the
ka-tet
is invited to spend the night, Roland knows that leaving won't get any easier if they stay. Tull was a trap and he doesn't want River Crossing to be another, even if it is more benevolent. When Jake says he doesn't think it's right to leave without helping, Roland says that if you look too hard at the small rights close at hand, you lose sight of the bigger ones that stand farther off. This is a lesson Roland will have to unlearn someday.

To get to Lud, they first have to cross the Send Bridge. The three-quarter-mile span is a thousand years old and on the verge of collapse. Another bridge farther up the Mississippi-like river has already fallen. They pick a pedestrian walkway as the safest route, but even that has gaps and the wind makes the crossing risky. A strong gust threatens to sweep Oy away. Jake leaps after him, and Eddie, who is afraid of heights, comes to their rescue. Roland assists, too. Seeing Jake dangling from another bridge strikes a sensitive chord.

When they recover from this near miss, a man is standing nearby with a live grenade. Though Roland could shoot it from the man's hand, it's too big a risk. The explosion might bring the bridge down, and the man who calls himself Gasher seems ready to die. He offers a deal: he will let the others go free if they give him Jake. Eddie can't believe Roland is seriously considering this, but the gunslinger knows a standoff when he sees one and he quietly promises Jake that he will find him. Jake, who now trusts the gunslinger with his life, steps forward and allows himself to be taken.

The
ka-tet
now has two missions in Lud. They have to get Jake back and find the train that will carry them out of the city. Roland divides the group—in part out of necessity. Susannah can't navigate the rubble-filled (and booby-trapped) streets of Lud fast enough to keep up with Jake and Gasher. Eddie and Susannah are dispatched to find the train station while Roland goes after Jake. He's not alone. He has Oy, who can follow Jake's scent in dark places where Roland's tracking skills fail.

The streets of Lud are lined with thousands of bodies hanging from the speaker poles that broadcast war drums. The Pubes believe this sound comes from ghosts in the machine, a kind of dark god that demands sacrifice. When they hear them, they conduct a lottery to decide which of them will die next to appease the gods. This is a terrible trick perpetrated by the Grays, who have figured out how to make the Great Old Ones' machinery play the drums.

Eddie and Susannah have a showdown with a group of Pubes. Susannah kills for the first time. The mob is relentless at first, akin to the people of Tull,
but it dissipates after Eddie and Susannah shoot several more. One of their victims even apologizes to them once he discovers they are gunslingers and not Grays. Eddie and Susannah force two of the survivors to take them to the Cradle of Lud, the train station housing Blaine the Mono. The Pubes are terrified of Blaine, whom they consider a vengeful god, but Eddie and Susannah's guns carry more weight. They enter a street guarded by a statue of a turtle and reach the immense square where the Cradle of Lud is situated. Statues of the Guardians of the Beam parade around the top of the structure, along with a sixty-foot golden statue of Arthur Eld.

Inside, they find Blaine the Mono and discover that he is as insane as Shardik was. He is suffering from a split personality—something Susannah identifies with. One voice is the original voice of the train: Little Blaine. The real intelligence controlling Blaine exists in the collection of computers under Lud. Blaine is simply the last operating machine that can manifest the personality of these computers, which used to run all of the city's systems. Centuries of solitude and boredom have driven this artificial sentience mad. He is delighted to find people who might play a game of riddles with him. After he accepts the possibility that one last gunslinger might exist and learns about Roland, who knows many riddles from the Fair-Day contests in the days of Gilead, he is intrigued.

Gasher brings Jake to the inner sanctum of the Grays and their leader, the Tick-Tock Man, the great-grandson of the famed warrior David Quick. Quick led the last great army of the Grays against Lud and was successful in breaching their defenses. However, he died in a plane crash outside the city. The Tick-Tock Man rules his people with an iron fist, dispatching any who defy him.

Oy leads Roland to the inner sanctum and demonstrates his intelligence by going on reconnaissance missions through the ventilation shafts. The gunslinger tries to send a mental message to Jake but isn't convinced it will work because he isn't completely in
ka-tet
with them. Jake receives enough to know that Roland is nearby and wants him to create a distraction, which he does by turning some of Tick-Tock Man's henchmen against one another.

Jake is supposed to open the door for Roland, but in the chaos that follows, he is prevented from doing so. However, the door opens anyway—Blaine opens it because he wants to meet Roland and his remembered riddles and Jake with his book of riddles.

Oy leads the charge. Other than one woman, whom Roland allows to escape, the only survivor is the Tick-Tock Man. Jake shoots him in the head, but
his skull deflects the bullet. After Jake and Roland leave the Grays' headquarters, guided by Blaine, a wizard who calls himself Richard Fannin appears before the Tick-Tock Man and converts him from a strong, essential leader into a sniveling minion. Fannin is determined that the
ka-tet
not get any closer to the Dark Tower than they are now.

Reunited, the
ka-tet
solves Blaine's first puzzle, which permits them to board the train. Blaine agrees to take them to Topeka, where Mid-World ends and End-World begins. However, he decides to kill everyone remaining in Lud with poison and nerve gas. Since he was created to serve, he argues that he is doing what the people wanted. They turned him into a god through their desires, and he is acting as one now, deciding when they live and die. Susannah is forced to abandon her wheelchair in the rush to leave before the gas attack obliterates everyone.

Jake realizes that Blaine intends to commit suicide. Blaine is bored and his circuits are failing in ways that he can no longer repair. He has already talked his only companion, Patricia the Mono, into killing herself. He accelerates to a speed that is in the red zone for the tracks and switches off the sensors that would tell him if there are any breaches. It's been a decade since he last ran this route, and there's a good chance the track has failed since then. He uses computer-generated images to make himself invisible as he speeds up. His route takes them through postapocalyptic landscapes, some of which are the result of the Great Poisoning, places where the world is trying to heal, and some of which are so alien that they may not be in Mid-World at all. In a dream, Eddie was told that Blaine could travel across all universes.

Blaine demands riddles from the
ka-tet
, but Roland refuses, enraging the petulant train. It turns into a classic Western showdown, with Roland adopting the stance of a gunslinger ready to draw. Blaine comes to see reason. He isn't offering anything in return. He agrees to save their lives if they can stump him with a riddle before they cover the eight thousand miles to Topeka, which should take eight hours. He even apologizes when Roland accuses him of being rude.

Though King knew something of what came next, he ended the book on that cliffhanger. It would be several years before he returned to his
ka-tet
.