The Road to The Dark Tower (28 page)

Roland and Eddie take the shopkeeper and John Cullum, the only surviving customer, with them as they retreat out the back of the store. Cullum, the first of two useful people ka delivers to Roland in the general store, is an army veteran who follows Roland’s instructions without question. He sets fire to the storeroom, preventing the attackers from coming through the building. If they circle around the building, Roland and Eddie will pick them off.

Approaching sirens give Roland, Eddie and Cullum the distraction they need to retreat farther. Cullum takes them across the lake on his motorboat. During the crossing, King implies for the first time within the text
¹⁴
that one of the ka-tet will die, and it will be either Eddie or Roland. Eddie reminds himself to ask Roland something later but he “never got the chance; before the question occurred to him again, death had slipped between them.”

Cullum, a cottage caretaker, asks Roland and Eddie if they are “walk-ins,” which is what locals call the strangers who have appeared over the past two or three years. They wear old clothing or are naked, and some speak unknown languages. From Cullum’s description, Roland recognizes some as Slow Mutants. Not all of the walk-ins are friendly.

Like any good caretaker, Cullum is familiar with visitors and locals alike. He shows Roland and Eddie where Tower and Deepneau are staying and agrees with Eddie’s suggestion that the first walk-ins appeared at
about the same time Stephen King moved to nearby Bridgton. As they part, Roland tells Cullum he’d be wise to take a short vacation to keep Andolini off his trail.

For someone supposedly in fear of his life, Tower hasn’t been keeping a very low profile—he’s been out in the community buying books. Eddie is mad enough to kill him. Roland tells Eddie that if Roland could manage not to kill the whining and self-involved young drug addict he met many months ago, then Eddie should be able to resist killing Tower.

Time on this side is speeding up. Tower’s contract with Balazar expires in less than a week. When they arrive at cabin number 19, Deepneau is alone. Roland asks the retired lawyer to draw up a contract of sale, but Tower has changed his mind again and Deepneau thinks it will probably take torture tactics to make him reconsider. “We will convince him,” Roland states.

Eddie launches into Tower when he returns from his latest book expedition. Roland doesn’t interfere—Eddie understands Tower. They share addictions. The combination of Eddie’s rage and Deepneau’s calm counsel brings Tower around. He interrogates Roland in High Speech.

Deepneau and Eddie exchange pleasantries while Roland and Tower go outside to talk. When Eddie mentions that he’s from Co-Op City in Brooklyn, Deepneau says that Co-Op City is in the Bronx.
¹⁵
Eddie feels overwhelmed by all the worlds and the column of truth with a hole in it.
¹⁶
As the endgame draws near, this hole becomes more and more obvious to him.

Roland closes the deal with Tower. “It isn’t every day I get called the scum of the earth by a man who promises to make me a millionaire and also to relieve me of my heart’s heaviest burden,” Tower says before signing the paper that gives ownership of the vacant lot to the ka-tet.

Roland operates on Eddie to remove a bullet in his lower leg from the shoot-out. Roland tells Eddie pain rises from the heart to the head and puts a belt in his mouth to catch the pain.
¹⁷
Eddie turns down the painkillers Deepneau offers; they’re too close to heroin for comfort.

While Eddie reminisces about scenes like this from countless Westerns,
¹⁸
he makes the connection between their battle in Calla Bryn Sturgis and
The Magnificent Seven,
and even thinks of actors who would play him and Roland in the movie version of their quest, an exercise often undertaken at online
Dark Tower
fan sites.

After the procedure, Tower explains to Eddie why he priced his copy of
’Salem’s Lot
so high. The book had a low first printing, and the dust jacket refers to Father Callahan as Cody. The book’s original price was raised and then lowered again, so most first editions have a price-clipped dust jacket. “Suppose this man King becomes famous or critically acclaimed? I admit the chances are small, but suppose that did happen. Available first editions of his second book are so rare that, instead of being worth seven hundred and fifty dollars, my copy might be worth ten times that.”
¹⁹

Eddie convinces Roland to go to Bridgton to visit King. He trusts that by the time they get there, ka will tell them why they need to go. This is the last time Eddie or Roland see Tower or Deepneau. The partings have begun. “It’s the end-game now. . . . All I’ve worked for and waited for all the long years. The end is coming. I feel it. Don’t you?” Roland asks. However, the gunslinger’s feelings are ambivalent. He says, “It’s as if, after all these years, the quest itself has become the point for me, and the end is frightening.”

IN A DREAM, Susannah hears several obituaries on the news. One of them is the future death of Stephen King, but since she wasn’t in the cave when Roland showed
’Salem’s Lot
to the others, the name means nothing to her. She won’t remember hearing this or realize its significance until they reach Blue Heaven.

She receives a mental message from Eddie telling her to burn up as much of the day as she can while he and Roland complete their business in Maine. When Mia has a panic attack in the now-crowded hotel lobby on the way to her birthing rendezvous at the Dixie Pig, Susannah sees her opportunity to barter information for cooperation.

They retreat to a bathroom stall. Mia’s confidence in Sayre is shaken when Detta tells her that Roland and Eddie survived the ambush in Maine. They take another todash voyage, this time to Fedic, the ghost town between the inner and outer keeps of the Castle on the Abyss. Susannah finds one of the Wolves’ masks near Patricia the Mono’s station. This is where they brought the twins stolen from the Callas. A one-way doorway underneath the castle led them to the Calla side of Thunderclap.

Magic doors worked in both directions, but North Central Positronics has never been able to master that feat with technology; their doors can only go one way. Some technological doorways lead to endless todash spaces between universes that contain monsters—such as Tak and It, perhaps—like the rats between the walls of a house. People who end up in these places may wander in darkness for years, but ultimately something always finds and devours them. The Crimson King reserved one for his worst enemies.

Keeping Eddie’s request in mind, Susannah entices Mia, who hasn’t had anyone to talk to for centuries, to tell the rest of her story, a kind of Scheherazade in reverse. When Mia came to Fedic two thousand years earlier, around the time Andy the robot was built, the city was alive, but most people were either sterile or gave birth to mutants. She saw one perfect baby and knew that her destiny was to bear and raise such a child. Then came the Red Death,
²⁰
and the few people who were untouched by the plaguelike disease left Fedic on Patricia the Mono.

Trapped in Fedic, Mia spent centuries alone until the Crimson King’s men came, with the endlessly bleeding hole in their foreheads, followed by Walter, Sayre’s boss, who told her the Crimson King would give her a child. In the Dogan of all Dogans, the headquarters of North Central Positronics, Walter made Mia mortal. She doesn’t remember how her transition from demon to the world of flesh was accomplished. It was a Faustian bargain—give up near immortality to become a woman who can carry a baby, but is unable to conceive one.

Mia believes she’s part of ancient prophecy: “He who ends the line of Eld shall conceive a child of incest with his daughter, and the child will be marked, by his red heel shall you know him.” Susannah reminds Mia that she isn’t Roland’s daughter, but Mia asks if she understands all the implications of the word “dinh.”

Mia admits that she was the oracle and that she had met Jake and Roland before. She never mentions being involved in impregnating Susannah. Possibly she has no memory of it, but it’s just as likely that the male demon was a different creature and by then she had become what Susannah accuses her of being: a receptacle or an incubator. The baby is to be transmitted to Mia cell by cell like a blood transfusion. Susannah enrages Mia with her persistent and demanding questions, so she returns
them to the hotel bathroom. Susannah hasn’t burned up the entire day, but she’s dragged it out until dusk.

ON THE WAY to Stephen King’s house, Eddie suggests that if they could convince Susannah’s godfather, Moses Carver, to merge Tet Corporation and Holmes Dental, he could turn the new company into one of the richest corporations in the history of the world with their knowledge of the future. One of its missions would be to keep Sombra and North Central Positronics from becoming strong and perhaps save all the Beams that haven’t yet been broken. The company could also set up a mechanism to take care of the immortal rose forever.

Nearing Bridgton, Eddie and Roland feel like they are approaching an awesome source of power. King represents one of the two surviving Beams supporting the Tower. The rose represents the other. The gunslingers realize the full implication of finding
’Salem’s Lot;
they are literally going to meet their maker.

Both creator and creation react strongly upon meeting. Roland becomes physically ill. King thinks he’s having a breakdown and tries to run away from them. He recognizes Roland,
²¹
but he hasn’t yet imagined Eddie. “You’d be gunslingers, if you were real,” he says. “Gunslingers seeking the Dark Tower.” Then he faints. King, their god and creator, isn’t immortal. Eddie sees a faint black nimbus around him, like the colored halos Ralph sees in
Insomnia
. Roland calls it todana, the deathbag. Ka has marked King. Some of his stories might be immortal, though.

The three men size each other up. Eddie thinks King is likable enough for a god, but he is responsible for the deaths of people like his sister and brother. For his part, King is afraid that Roland has come to kill him.
²²
“Believe me when I tell you this,” Roland says. “Killing you is the very last thing we’d ever want to do, sai King.” He asks King the three questions that he asked of the people of Calla Bryn Sturgis, changing the last one to reflect the fact that he and Eddie are now seeking succor instead of offering it.

King confides to Eddie that he gave up on the
Dark Tower
series because he doesn’t much care for Roland. The story was going to be his
Lord of the Rings,
his
Gormenghast
. “One thing about being twenty-two is that you’re never short of ambition. It didn’t take me long to see that it
was just too big for my little brain. . . . Also, I lost the outline.”
²³
He relegated the manuscript to a box of busted stories in the basement.

King says the book has “maybe the best opening line I ever wrote.” He knows the story only as far as Roland’s palaver with the man in black.
²⁴
The gunslinger reacts when King mentions his betrayal of Jake beneath the mountains. “No need to look so ashamed, Mr. Deschain. It was me after all. I was the one who made you do it.” A few minutes later, he recants. He says Roland, who started out as a version of Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name, became a problem. “When you let the kid drop, that was the capper.”

Roland says, “You said you made me do that.” King responds, “I lied, brother.” Roland thinks there is another reason why King stopped writing. Something doesn’t want him to work on this particular story. Perhaps the low men stole his outline.

Seeking clues to help them on their quest, Roland interrogates King about things from their recent past. King recognizes the name Claudia y Inez Bachman, but not as the author of
Charlie the Choo-Choo
. She’s his pseudonym Richard Bachman’s wife. The
y
doesn’t mean anything to him, but Eddie knows it is there to make her part of the ka-tet of nineteen. All King knows about 19 is that prime numbers have always fascinated him.
²⁵

King knows Roland’s hypnotizing trick with the bouncing bullet but still succumbs to it. He says the story of the Dark Tower “just comes. It blows into me—that’s the good part—and then it comes out when I move my fingers. Never from the head. Comes out the navel.” King isn’t ka—he’s just an intermediary—and he hates some of the things ka makes him do, like writing Susan Delgado’s death.

The Crimson King first tried to terrorize King when he was seven during a panic attack he had when he and his brother were banished to the barn as punishment for trying to run away, but Cuthbert—or Eddie, his twin—freed him. From that time on, he had a fear of spiders and associated them with the Crimson King, whom he calls the Lord of the Spiders. Over the years, the Lord of Discordia tried many times to kill King or convince him to stop writing. Sometimes others stepped in to save him; sometimes he stepped aside.

Roland asks him why he stopped writing his story. King responds, “I don’t want to be Gan.
²⁶
I turned aside from Dis, I should be able to turn
aside from Gan, as well. . . . When I open my eyes to your world, he sees me.”

Roland tells the hypnotized author to listen for the song of the Turtle, the cry of the Bear. Then he must begin writing again, starting with Roland losing his fingers. He is to write until he’s tired, and then rest until he hears the Turtle’s song again. The ka-tet will try to protect him when he’s working. Eddie suggests Roland hypnotize King into stopping smoking and drinking, but Roland thinks he’s meddled with his mind—and ka itself—as much as he dares.
²⁷