The Road to The Dark Tower (14 page)

Through the doorway, he sees that Detta has Eddie tied up at the
mercy of the lobstrosities. He recognizes it as a trick to get him to come back to the beach. She could kill Roland by shooting his helpless body, but she wants more than that.

With intuition that defies logic, Roland knows what he needs to do. Jack Mort, who caused both of Odetta’s life-altering injuries, isn’t meant to join his ka-tet, much to Roland’s relief. Mort represents death, not for Roland but for the individual entities that call themselves Odetta Holmes and Detta Walker. His plan is risky, and he needs Mort’s cooperation to pull it off.

Once Mort realizes he has been possessed by another entity, his conscious mind faints, which is a great relief to Roland, who is repulsed by the man’s worm pit of a mind.
⁸
Roland has complete control over Mort’s body and memories, and uses him as a reference book for the information he needs to replenish his supply of ammunition and get his much-needed medication.

His first destination is a gun shop, where he finds more bullets than he could ever have imagined. Because he doesn’t have a gun permit, Roland is forced to orchestrate an elegant scam involving a couple of police officers
⁹
and the shop owner. He can’t imagine needing the two hundred bullets he can afford with Mort’s money, but he can’t deny the temptation to have them. He also takes the cops’ guns, intending them for Eddie and Odetta, when and if she is ever ready to bear arms. He enjoys the sensation of being able to hold a weapon in a whole right hand again.

Next, Roland commits what the pharmacist believes to be the first penicillin robbery in history. Though he has to use his guns to control the situation, it’s not really a robbery. After getting two hundred doses of Keflex, Roland leaves behind Mort’s Rolex watch in payment. He even exhibits concern for the general safety of bystanders, something he didn’t do in Tull.

His material tasks completed, Roland has one more job in Jack Mort’s body. He hijacks a cop car and lets Mort drive to the Greenwich Village station where he pushed Odetta Holmes.
¹⁰
The police officers who follow Mort are more worthy of Roland’s admiration than the ones at the gun shop. One cop almost takes down Mort, but the bullet is stopped by his cigarette lighter—perhaps placed there by ka—which he carried to curry favor with his superiors at work. Lighter fluid catches fire in Mort’s pocket. Roland guides the burning man toward the coming subway train,
not knowing for sure if it was the same train that struck Odetta, but knowing all the same because this is the way of ka.

Everything must come together in a split second. Roland projects a message to his Lady of Shadows, calling her by both her names. When she turns to look, Roland jumps Mort’s body onto the tracks, where the train cuts him in half at the waist a split second after Roland crosses back to Mid-World with his boxes of bullets and antibiotics but without the cops’ guns.

As Mort’s body is divided, Odetta and Detta split into two physical entities and struggle with each other and the implications of what they witnessed through their own eyes and through Jack Mort’s. Odetta embraces Detta and says, “I love you,” at which the two become one again. This new person, whole for the first time since Jack Mort dropped a brick on her head, a woman of heart-stopping beauty, takes Roland’s guns down to the beach to save Eddie from the lobstrosities.

The woman formed from Odetta and Detta adopts their middle name, Susannah, and will soon take Eddie’s last name for her own. She’s exactly what Roland hoped for: someone who possesses the strengths of her antecedents. At times she will revert to Detta, especially when she wants to distance herself emotionally from something or requires the heart and mind of a killer when in battle. Roland is never convinced that he has completely cured Susannah, and readily accepts the appearance of Mia as a new personality. Walter said she had “at least” two faces. “You can burn away warts by painting them with silver metal . . . but in a person prone to warts, they’ll come back.” [DT5]

Roland believes that Susannah is the third person he was meant to draw from New York. Her very nature is three: “I who was; I who had no right to be but was; I am the woman who you have saved.” However, by killing Jack Mort, Roland has set up conditions for Jake, the real third person drawn to his ka-tet, to return to Mid-World.

After they reach the end of the beach, the trio travels through the hills, leaving the Western Sea behind. Roland dreams of the Tower again and hears its voices summoning him.

It stood on the horizon of a vast plain the color of blood in the violent setting of a dying sun. He couldn’t see the stairs which spiraled up and up and up within its brick shell, but he could see the
windows which spiraled up along that staircase’s way, and saw the ghosts of all the people he had ever known pass through them. Up and up they marched, and an arid wind brought him the sound of voices calling his name.

Eddie knows that the gunslinger would sacrifice his new companions if his quest called for it, and tells Roland his brother taught him that if you kill what you love you’re damned. Roland thinks he may already be damned for having sacrificed Jake but he sees the possibility of redemption. He isn’t necessarily doomed by his inflexibility and narrow focus. He promises Eddie that he wouldn’t consider sacrificing them—would not have sacrificed Jake—if there was only this world to win. His mission is to save everything there is. “We are going to go, Eddie. We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end we will stand.”

Roland and Eddie have a grudging respect for each other. They understand one another’s strengths, but they also know each other’s weaknesses. Though Eddie is destined to become a gunslinger as deadly as Roland—and he has already proven himself in battle—he hasn’t yet lost his heart to the Tower. He has discovered love and despises Roland’s callousness and single-mindedness.

In the weeks to come, Roland will instruct Eddie—and Susannah—in survival. Eddie will teach Roland about friendship and love. For his part, Roland has felt and seen the steel within Eddie, but his sarcastic humor and weak, insecure character annoy him. He’s predisposed toward this irritation because he’s been through it before with Cuthbert Allgood. Though they would be loath to admit it, the two men complete each other in much the same way Detta and Odetta complete Susannah. They counterbalance each other throughout the arduous journey ahead of them. Susannah is the wild card. Roland and Eddie know something of her constituent parts, but they still have to acquaint themselves with the composite person who has arisen from their ashes.

Critic Tony Magistrale says that Roland progresses toward a fuller realization of his heroic potential in this book. He’s still violent, but the level of violence is more appropriate to the behavior of a hero.
¹¹
The book is richer because it expands its scope beyond Roland by introducing two new major characters.

By the time he finished writing
The Drawing of the Three,
King had a
rough idea of what would transpire in the next two volumes. “This work seems to be my own Tower, you know. These people haunt me, Roland most of all.” For the first time, he raises the possibility that Roland won’t reach the Tower, though someone from his group surely will.

In the afterword, King says that he still doesn’t know what the Tower is or what awaits Roland when he reaches it. Roland himself wonders if it represents damnation or salvation. All King knows is that the Tower, whatever it is, is closer.

The haunting would continue for five more years, until King again heard the song of the Turtle and led his ka-tet to the Path of the Beam that leads to the Dark Tower.

¹
Unless otherwise specified, all quotes in this chapter come from
The Drawing of the Three
.

²
Not only has time moved on in Roland’s world, but geography is also unstable. Though he is heading north, the Western Sea is on his right-hand side.

³
“
No one but the best ever held this baby in his hand,
Eddie thought.
Until now, at least
.” Eddie’s low self-esteem rears its head.

⁴
He lost his guns to the Little Sisters in Eluria, but here, on the beach, he actually permits it to happen.

⁵
Eddie mistakenly calls her affliction schizophrenia, something he only knows about from movies like
The Three Faces of Eve
. Roland repeats this diagnosis to Father Callahan, and Callahan, who should know better, doesn’t correct him.

⁶
It won’t be the last time Roland lies awake waiting for her to do something. When Mia appears, Roland spends nights tracking her on her quests for food.

⁷
Jake and Eddie see this car parked outside Calvin Tower’s bookstore in
Wolves of the Calla
.

⁸
Not so long ago, Roland might have identified somewhat with the cold-blooded killer. Pop psychology says people hate in others things they resent about themselves.

⁹
Though he identifies the cops as gunslingers, Roland isn’t impressed with their performance. To one, he says, “You’re a dangerous fool who should be sent west. . . . You have forgotten the face of your father.”

¹⁰
King says that this happened three years before, but this timeline is clearly 1977, since Mort was about to kill Jake. Odetta lost her legs in 1959. Also, King calls this Christopher Street station. In
Song of Susannah,
Odetta says that the A train never stopped at Christopher Street. “It was just another little continuity mistake, like putting Co-Op City in Brooklyn.” King the author’s mistakes become the realities of Eddie’s and Odetta’s worlds.

¹¹
Tony Magistrale,
Stephen King: The Second Decade,
Twayne Publishers, 1992.

Chapter 4
THE WASTE LANDS (REDEMPTION)

“The Drawers are places of desolation,” he said.
“The Drawers are the waste lands.”
¹

“Perhaps even the damned may be saved.”

[DT2]

 In his introduction to the excerpt of
The Waste Lands
²
that appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
in late 1990, King said that some five weeks have elapsed since the end of
The Drawing of the Three
. However, by the time the book was published the following year, he had revised that estimate to a lengthier and vaguer “some months.” The newly formed trio has been at their present camp for two months, resting and recovering from their ordeals on the Western Sea, now about sixty miles behind them.

Eddie has rediscovered his childhood hobby of whittling, a pastime that reminds him of his late brother, Henry, who, as Roland points out, still visits him often. Henry shamed him into stopping whittling because he was good at it, and any sign of skill in Eddie made Henry nervous. Henry had no hidden talents or ambitions. Rather, he was content to rob Eddie of any aspirations he might have. Eddie has to remind himself that he’s forever free of his older brother’s passive-aggressive domination. If he wants to carve, he doesn’t need to fear being ridiculed. “Beating heroin was child’s play compared to beating your childhood.”

Everything serves the Beam; Eddie’s rediscovered hobby will soon become as important a skill as knowing how to shoot.

After working with them during the intervening months, Roland understands why he’s been given two such unusual traveling companions.
Eddie and Susannah are born gunslingers. They learn their lessons quickly; not only how to handle weapons, but how to hunt and navigate by the unfamiliar constellations in his world—basic survival skills.