The Road to The Dark Tower (48 page)

Roland knew Walter as a member of Marten’s entourage. As John Farson, he is responsible for the downfall of Gilead, the last bastion of civilization. He barely misses Roland in Mejis and, under the name Randolph Filaro, he fought against the last gunslingers in Jericho Hill and killed Roland’s childhood friend Cuthbert with an arrow through the eye.

Roland encounters him near the end of Gilead’s reign when Dennis
and Thomas from Delain are pursuing him to bring him to justice for his crimes in their kingdom, but he doesn’t make the connection.

After Gilead’s fall, Roland casts about for the man in black, understanding that he is the way to the Dark Tower. How he comes by this knowledge or where he first picked up Walter’s trail is never revealed. Walter’s fires leave peculiar ideograms that Roland tracks across the desert.
³⁰
They please Roland because they confirm his essential humanity.

Walter sets traps for Roland along the way, including Sylvia Pittston in Tull, Jake in the desert and Father Callahan with Black Thirteen in Calla Bryn Sturgis. Callahan tells Walter he is cruel and is surprised to see genuine hurt in his eyes. “I am what ka and the King and the Tower have made me. We all are. We’re caught.” When Callahan suggests that Roland is above ka, Walter recoils, as if struck. Callahan realizes he’s blasphemed, and with Walter that’s no mean feat. “No one’s above ka, false priest. The room at the top of the Tower is empty. I know it.”

Walter isn’t above ka. When Roland catches him after years of pursuit, he, like a leprechaun, must perform certain duties, which include showing Roland his future and explaining the nature of the universe and the Tower. He could have killed Roland during their long night of palaver, but he feared what would have happened to the Tower if he had. Besides, he needs Roland to complete the transaction that would give rise to Mordred.

Roland and Walter/Marten/Flagg are opposite sides of the same coin. Flagg believes that Roland completes him, making him greater than his own destiny. Before Roland, Walter had been little more than a wanderer left over from the old days, a mercenary who had done his share of murder with a vague ambition to penetrate the Tower before it was brought down.

Now his goal is to become Walter of End-World, Walter of All-World. Like Roland, he wants to climb the Tower and see what—if anything—lives at the top. He wants to use Mordred, whom he helped create and whom he fears, to attain the Tower and dethrone the Crimson King so he can rule the chaos that will follow its downfall. His plan is to allow Mordred to kill Roland and then kill Mordred himself and take his valuable red heel, the key to the Tower. In his last moments, he realizes that he’s been mistaken all along, for it is the red mark, the hourglass on the spider form’s belly, that would have granted him access.

He despises Roland, who has stood against him at every turn. In frustration, he loses sight of his goal.

“ ’Tisn’t the Dark Tower at all, if you want the truth; it’s Roland,” he tells Mordred. “I want him dead. . . . For the long and dusty leagues he’s chased me; for all the trouble he’s caused me . . . for his presumption in refusing to give over his quest no matter what obstacles were placed in his path; most of all for the death of his mother, whom I once loved . . . or at least coveted . . . All I know is that Roland of Gilead has lived too long and
I want that son of a bitch in the ground
.” [DT7]

Walter meets his match in the baby Mordred Deschain. The wizard believes he’s taken preventive measures against Mordred, but they are ineffective. Mordred thinks Walter is a “fool who was too full of his own past exploits to sense his present danger . . . Walter had also grown old, although he was too vain to realize it. Old and lethally sure of himself. Old and lethally stupid.”

In his final moments, Walter understands that he has vastly underestimated Mordred’s powers. As punishment for allowing his hatred to blind him, Mordred symbolically forces Walter to pluck out his eyes and give them to Mordred. Walter o’Dim becomes Walter the Blind. His centuries of knowledge pass into Mordred as he is consumed. In his final moments, he learns what “almost mortal” means.

[T]hough we must keep our fingers away from his mouth (he snaps, this one; snaps like a crocodile), we are allowed to pity him a little. If ka is a train then this nasty little lycanthrope is its most vulnerable hostage. Not tied to the tracks like little Nell but strapped to the train’s very nose. [DT7]

Mordred Deschain has four parents—Roland, Susannah, Mia (daughter of none) and the Crimson King. Both of his fathers are killers. Walter o’Dim arranged his conception to foil Roland’s quest and as an heir to the Crimson King’s throne. From birth, Mordred has few imperatives other than to survive, to eat and to kill his White father.

Walter o’Dim plans to let Mordred deal with Roland, but then he intends to use the red birthmark on Mordred’s left heel to gain access to the Dark Tower, where he will confront the Crimson King and perhaps defeat him. Mordred’s Red father used to bear the same mark on his heel, but he scorched it off, thereby imprisoning himself on one of the Tower’s balconies.

Mordred’s conception began when Roland exchanged sex for information with the oracle in the mountains. Roland’s seed was preserved by the old people’s science while the demon elemental turned itself inside out into its female aspect. The egg is Susannah’s, from when she was raped in the ring of stones during Jake’s return to Mid-World.

Mia, who possesses Susannah, nourishes Mordred—it is her pregnancy and not Susannah’s. The Crimson King somehow reimpregnated her, either by his physical presence or via preserved sperm.

Mia drew Mordred’s name from Susannah’s mind. In legend, King Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon, used Merlin’s wizardry to sleep with the wife of one of his enemies. Mordred, the son of Uther’s illegitimate daughter, grows up to lead a rebellion against Arthur, and the two kill each other on the battlefield.

“King of Kings he might be, or destroyer of worlds, but he embarked upon life as had so many before him, squalling with outrage.” [DT7] Mordred Deschain is born with a mouth full of teeth, a head full of black hair and a fully erect penis. He grows much more quickly than a normal child, reminiscent of the children in
The Village of the Damned,
a movie Bobby Garfield sees with Ted Brautigan in
Hearts in Atlantis
. “[T]hey grew up faster than normal kids, they were super-smart, they could make people do what they wanted . . . and they were ruthless.” [HA]

He has two physical forms: human and black widow spider. The transformation between these forms requires large amounts of energy. As a spider, his birthmark becomes a red hourglass on his belly; this symbol is the real key to the Dark Tower. A white node rises from the spider’s back, containing his human face with blue sparks of eyes identical to Roland’s. As a spider, which is closer to his true form, his metabolism runs hot and fast. His thoughts become dark, primitive urges uncolored by emotion.

Shortly after he’s born he transforms into spider form and sucks the life from his surrogate mother. Susannah shoots off one of his legs. In human form, this injury translates to an open wound on his arm that seeps
blood and will never heal. Mordred mentally screams at Susannah, “I’ll pay you back. My father and I, we’ll pay you back!”

Mia expects her “chap” to become the avatar of every gunslinger that ever was. He’s an A-bomb of a Breaker and can possibly destroy the remaining Beams by himself. Mordred has no maternal thoughts toward Susannah, referring to her as “the brown bitch.” He has Mia’s thoughts and memories and many stolen from Susannah, as well. Still, he knows more than he has any right to, and doesn’t know why he has this knowledge or how he came by it. Understanding how to use machinery—the creations of man, not gods—is one of his talents. He is a child that knows both too much and too little.

He’s both vulnerable and mortal. “[E]ven gods could die once their divinity had been diluted with human blood.” As a twenty-pound child, he is more than a match for Walter o’Dim, but he still needs a diaper.

He is the last miracle to ever be spawned by the still-standing Dark Tower, the wedding of the rational and the irrational, the natural and the supernatural, and yet he is alone and he is always hungry. Destiny might have intended him to rule a chain of universes, or destroy them all, but so far he has succeeded in establishing dominion over nothing but one old domestic robot who has now gone to the clearing at the end of the path. [DT7]

He hates Roland for no other reason than he was bred to do so and to rule in his Red father’s place, but his hate is tinctured by sadness and loneliness and love. He will remain outside of Roland’s circle—it is his ka—and he resents the ka-tet’s connection, something he will never have. From his vantage point spying on the gunslingers, though, he considers himself part of the ka-tet. He shares their khef and feels what they do.

Part of him—he attributes it to “the gullible voice of his mother”—longs to go to Roland and call him father and call the others his siblings. He knows the gunslingers would probably kill him the moment they saw him, but if they welcomed him into their circle he would have to accept Roland as dinh in both of its meanings—leader and father—something he will never do.

He feels no more loyalty to the Crimson King than to Roland. He hears
the music of the Tower, but what Roland hears in a major key, he hears in a minor. Where Roland hears many voices, Mordred hears only one, the Crimson King, telling him to kill the others and join him. The voice says they will destroy the Dark Tower and rule todash together for eternity.

He follows the ka-tet and plots his revenge. He could have turned them in to the keepers of Devar-Toi, but he wants the privilege of killing Roland for himself. He needs meat to grow, and soon he’ll need to switch his diet to human flesh if he is to develop. He calls rooks to him when he’s hungry, and they have no choice but to come. To keep from choking on this rough food, he must convert to his spider form. By the time he reaches the size of a nine-year-old boy, starvation has made him haggard and thin. His skin is discolored and covered with sores.

Plodding through the deadly cold, he conserves energy by staying in his human form, even though he would have been less vulnerable to the elements in his spider form. His complicated genetic inheritance allows him to survive where a human would not. The only thing stopping him from giving up and returning to his Red father’s castle is hatred. He cries in the darkness at the thought that Roland and Susannah have each other when he has no one.

When he leaves Dandelo’s cabin, he looks about twenty years old, tall, straight and fair. In spider form, he unwisely consumes Dandelo’s dead, poisonous horse, sickening himself. He relies on his single-minded determination and obsession to force himself to eat enough to keep up his strength so he can maintain control over his shape-shifting. The poison that is slowly killing him in human form would be fanned by his spider’s faster metabolism and would kill him rapidly.

Not since the Prim receded had there been such a creature as Mordred Deschain, who was part human and part of that rich and potent soup. The being whose coming had been prophesied for thousands of years (mostly by the Manni folk, and usually in frightened whispers), the being who would grow to be half-human and half-god, the being who would oversee the end of humanity and the return of the Prim . . . that being had finally arrived as a naïve and bad-hearted child who had grown to a young man and was now dying from a bellyful of poisoned horsemeat. [DT7]

He knows he’s dying and his opportunity for revenge is running out. He still thinks he can defeat Roland, though, and wants him to realize that his son killed him mere hours before he reached his precious Tower. He’s willing to take a couple of bullets if necessary, but the Crimson King helps him, sending out a pulse from the Tower that lulls Patrick, Roland’s ill-chosen night watch, to sleep.

So focused is he on Roland that Mordred forgets the third member of Roland’s party. Oy intercepts Mordred, giving Roland time to regain his wits and draw his weapons. Roland offers to let him go free in exchange for Oy’s life, but it is a moot point—Mordred will die soon, regardless of what he does. He thrusts Oy aside and attacks, but in spite of Mia’s wishes for him, he’s no match for a real gunslinger. He dies in a hail of his father’s bullets, falls into Roland’s campfire and burns.

Ka could have had no part in this, and Stephen King surely did not conceive it; what writer worth his salt would ever concoct such an end for the villain of the piece? [DT7]

The King is in the Tower, eating bread and honey! The Breakers in the basement, making all the money! [BH]

The Crimson King is Roland’s greatest enemy and has been his ancestors’ foil for generations. When Walter o’Dim, one of his chief knights, greets Mordred in Fedic, he claims that the Crimson King, like Roland, is a descendent of Arthur Eld, which makes them distant cousins, or perhaps twins. “Hile, Mordred Deschain, son of Roland and of the Crimson King whose name was once hiled from End-World to Out-World; hile you son of two fathers, both of them descended from Arthur Eld.” [DT7]

Also known as Ram Abbalah,
³¹
the Crimson King believes that he will survive the Dark Tower’s collapse to rule the ensuing todash chaos. Unwilling to wait for the Beams supporting the Tower to decay naturally, the Crimson King has been trying to bring about its downfall “for time out of mind, maybe forever.” [BH] In two hundred years, his Breakers have destroyed two of the five remaining Beams and severely weakened two others.