The Road to The Dark Tower (62 page)

Following the ashes of days-old fires, the gunslinger pursues the man in black.

He may be gaining, and it may be that the man in black knows the secret of the Dark Tower, which stands at the root of time. For it is not ultimately the man in black which the gunslinger seeks; it is the Tower.

The dark days have come.

The world has moved on.

“The Oracle and the Mountain”

SYNOPSIS: This is the third tale of Roland, the last gunslinger, and his quest for the Dark Tower which stands at the root of time.

Time is the problem; the dark days have come and the world has moved on. Demons haunt the dark and monsters walk in empty places. The time of light and knowledge has passed, and only remnants—and revenants—remain.

Against this twilit landscape, the gunslinger pursues the man in black into the desert, leaving behind the town of Tull, where the man he pursues—if he is a man—set him a snare . . .

Three-quarters of the way across the desert he comes upon the husk of a way station that served the stagelines years (or centuries, or millennia) ago.

Yet there is life here; not the man in black but a puzzling young boy named Jake, who has no understanding of how he came to be there. The gunslinger hypnotizes the boy and hears a puzzling, disquieting tale: Jake remembers a great city whose harbor is guarded by “a lady with a torch”; he remembers going to a private school and wearing a tie; he remembers yellow vehicles that pedestrians could hire.

And he remembers being killed.

Pushed from behind in front of an oncoming vehicle (called a “Cadillac”), Jake was run over. Who pushed him?

It was the man in black, he says.

There is water enough at the way station for two pilgrims to continue onward, across the rest of the desert to the foothills . . . and the mountains beyond. And in the cellar of the way station, Roland discovers a Speaking Demon in the wall which tells him: “Go slow, gunslinger. Go slow past the Drawers. While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.”

According to the old ways, a Speaking Demon may only speak through the mouth of a corpse; reaching into the wall, Roland discovers a jawbone which he takes with him.

As Jake and the gunslinger continue toward the mountains, the campfire remnants of the man in black grow fresher. And as Jake sleeps, the gunslinger works laboriously over the figures in his own past: Gabrielle, his mother . . . Marten, the sorcerer-physician who may have been the half-brother of the man in black . . . Roland, his father
¹
 . . . Cort, his teacher . . . Cuthbert, his friend . . . and David, the falcon, “God’s gunslinger.”

He remembers the death of a traitor, the cook Hax, by hanging . . . and how he and Cuthbert broke bread beneath the hanged man’s feet as an offering to the rooks. He remembers “the good man,” in whose service Hax died, “the good man” who has ushered in this dark age. The good man. Marten. His mother’s lover . . . and the man in black?

As Jake and the gunslinger reach the first hilly upswells marking the far edge of the desert, the boy points upward and, far above and miles beyond, the gunslinger sees the man in black, climbing up and up toward what the gunslinger feels may be another killing ground.

The man in black has set him snares before on this terrible progress toward the Tower.

Roland fears the boy Jake may be another—and Roland has come to love him.

“The Slow Mutants”

SYNOPSIS: This is the fourth tale of Roland, the last gunslinger, and his quest for the Dark Tower which stands at the root of time. Time is the problem: the dark days have come and the world has moved on. Demons haunt the dark and monsters walk in empty places. The time of light and knowledge has passed.

Against this twilit landscape, the gunslinger pursues the man in black into the desert. . . .

The campfire remnants of the man in black grow fresher. And as Jake sleeps,
the gunslinger works laboriously over the figures in his own past: Gabrielle, his mother . . . Marten, the sorcerer-physician who may have been the half-brother of the man in black . . . Roland, his father . . . Cort, his teacher . . . Cuthbert, his friend . . . and David, the falcon, “God’s gunslinger.”

He remembers the execution of a traitor, the cook Hax, by hanging and “the good man” who has ushered in this new dark age. The good man. Marten. His mother’s lover. The half-brother of the man in black . . . or is he the man in black himself?

Roland and Jake follow the man in black into the mountains toward what the gunslinger feels may be another killing ground. The man in black has set him snares before on this terrible progress toward the Tower. Roland fears Jake may be another—and Roland has come to love him.

His fears for Jake are nearly justified on their first night in the foothills when Jake is nearly caught in the toils of a sexual vampire that has been caught for eons in a cage of Druid stones. This unformed sexual creature is also an oracle, and after taking mescaline, the gunslinger approaches it. In exchange for a sexual encounter that nearly kills him, the oracle provides disquieting information.

“Three is the number of your fate,” the oracle tells Roland. “The first is young, dark-haired. He stands on the brink of robbery and murder. A demon has infested him. The name of the demon is HEROIN. The second comes on wheels; her mind is iron, but her heart and eyes are soft. The third comes in chains.”

The oracle will tell Roland no more of these three, but speaks grimly of the boy Jake’s future: “The boy is your gateway to the man in black. The man in black is your gate to the three. The three are your way to the Tower . . . some, gunslinger, live on blood. Even, I understand, the blood of young boys.”

The gunslinger asks if there is no way Jake can be saved from the mysterious and terrible fate of being killed a second time. The oracle responds that there is one: if Roland gives up his quest of the Tower, the boy may be saved—and this the gunslinger cannot do.

They climb into the mountains together, and the gunslinger finally confronts the man in black standing on a ledge where a mountain river gushes out of a dark fault in the stone. The man in black, almost within reach, mockingly promises Roland the answers he has sought for twelve years.

Answers, he says, on the other side. Just the two of us.

He disappears into the blackness under the mountains, leaving the gunslinger his final decision: give over, and save the boy he has come to love and his own soul, or push on in search of the Tower . . . and be damned forever.

The gunslinger begins to climb toward the dark opening from which the river spills, the opening which leads under the mountains . . . and Jake, the boy, his sacrifice, follows.

They go into the darkness together.

“The Gunslinger and the Dark Man”

SYNOPSIS: This is the fifth tale of Roland, the last gunslinger, and his quest for the Dark Tower which stands at the root of time. . . .

As they pursue the man in black, Roland the gunslinger recalls his strange, marked past: his mother, Gabrielle, Marten, the court sorcerer who may have somehow been transformed into the man in black he now pursues (and who, as the charismatic Good Man, pulled down the last kingdom of light), Cort, his teacher, Cuthbert, his friend, and David, the falcon, “God’s gunslinger.”

In spite of his own fears and Jake’s growing premonition of doom, the two of them plunge into the passageway after the dark man. In that darkness the gunslinger recalls the great lighted balls and fetes of his childhood . . . and his mother’s growing enchantment with Marten, the sorcerer. They follow a river in the dark, and this leads them to an old rail-line . . . and a handcar.

Flying through the dark, the gunslinger tells Jake of his coming of age, a combat-rite of manhood which he attempted early, horrifyingly early, due more than anything else to his growing realization that Marten and his mother have become lovers. He wished to challenge Marten, he tells Jake obliquely, but he could only do that as a man . . . even if the combat-rite ended in his premature exile from the kingdom he had always known.

In the horrifying combat which followed, Roland bested Cort, his teacher, by using David, his falcon, as his weapon. Jake is unimpressed by the story.
It was a game, wasn’t it?
he says.
Do grown men always have to play games?

On their sixth day/night under the mountains, they encounter the Slow Mutants, horrible, starving subhuman creatures who subsist on whatever they may find . . . including human flesh. They fight their way through them, thanks to Jake’s courage and Roland’s sandalwood-inlaid guns.

Perhaps a week’s travel further on (in the darkness, both Jake and the gunslinger find time nearly incalculable), they come to a trestle which bridges a wide chasm through which the river has cut its path. The trestle is old and rotted but they can see daylight on the far side. They begin to walk across, leaving the handcar behind.

They have nearly negotiated all of the harrowing passage when the man in black appears at the exit-point. Almost simultaneously, the rotted metal ties Jake has been standing on give way. He falls . . . and dangles by one hand. And, from a mere thirty yards ahead, the man in black issues his challenge to Roland, the last gunslinger. “Come now . . . or catch me never.”

After a moment of agonizing choice, the gunslinger leaves Jake to fall into the abyss, electing to follow the man in black; even at the price of his soul, he is unable to give up his quest for the Tower.

“Go then,” Jake calls to him as he falls. “There are other worlds than these.”

The gunslinger emerges. The man in black is there. And the gunslinger follows him in broken boots to the place of counseling.

¹
At this time, King called Roland’s father Roland as well.

APPENDIX VI:
“CHILDE ROWLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME”

by Robert Browning

(See Edgar’s song in
“Lear”
)

I.

My first thought was, he lied in every word,

That hoary cripple, with malicious eye

Askance to watch the working of his lie

On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford

Suppression of the glee that pursed and scored

Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

II.

What else should he be set for, with his staff?

What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare

All travellers who might find him posted there,

And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh

Would break, what crutch ’gin write my epitaph

For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare,

III.

If at his counsel I should turn aside

Into that ominous tract which, all agree,

Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly

I did turn as he pointed: neither pride

Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,

So much as gladness that some end might be.

IV.

For, what with my whole world-wide wandering,

What with my search drawn out thro’ years, my hope

Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope

With that obstreperous joy success would bring,

I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring

My heart made, finding failure in its scope.

V.

As when a sick man very near to death

Seems dead indeed, and feels begin and end

The tears and takes the farewell of each friend,

And hears one bid the other go, draw breath

Freelier outside (“since all is o’er,” he saith,

“And the blow fallen no grieving can amend;”)

VI.

While some discuss if near the other graves

Be room enough for this, and when a day

Suits best for carrying the corpse away,

With care about the banners, scarves and staves:

And still the man hears all, and only craves

He may not shame such tender love and stay.