The Road to The Dark Tower (21 page)

After their victory, the bloodred moon rises and Roland realizes how the Wizard’s Glass misdirected him into believing Susan was safe. “Sometimes it sees a future that’s already happening.” He watches in the glass as Susan is taken into town, tied on the back of a cart. The people of Hambry are in a frenzy, believing Susan was a traitor and that her death will bring life for their crops. Cordelia throws the first torch onto the cornshucks surrounding her. Rhea is only a second behind her. With her final breaths, Susan screams her love for Roland.

Roland remains in a trance while Cuthbert and Alain take him back to Gilead. Along the way, he eats and drinks but does not speak or sleep and cannot be separated from the Wizard’s Glass. He wasn’t traveling inside the glass, he says later, but rather inside his head, where everyone has a Wizard’s Glass.

When they reach the outskirts of Gilead, the ball comes to life and shows him everything that happened in Mejis. “It showed me these things not to teach or enlighten, but to hurt and wound. The remaining pieces of the Wizard’s Rainbow are all evil things. Hurt enlivens them, somehow.”

At home, he keeps the glass from his father. It continues to show him the Dark Tower, but he also sees the fall of Gilead to Farson. Their triumph in Mejis only bought the Affiliation another couple of years.

EDDIE, SUSANNAH AND JAKE are amazed by Roland’s story. “To have gone through all that . . . and
at fourteen,
” Susannah says. They see the gunslinger in a new light, understanding better how and why his emotions have been stripped away.

Roland feels better for having told the story. Jake hugs him, and Eddie thinks it’s probably the first hug the gunslinger has received in a long time.
²⁶
Eddie had been afraid Roland was going to tell him that he had killed Susan himself, for his “damned Tower.” Susannah realizes that Roland believes that’s exactly what he did.

They continue along the interstate, asking questions. Jake asks what became of Sheemie. Roland says he followed them, though he doesn’t know how. When they left in search of the Dark Tower, Sheemie started out with them as a sort-of squire. He understands how the boy managed to keep up with them when he later learns of Sheemie’s teleportation skills.

Jake spots a note left under a vehicle’s windshield wiper. “The old woman from the dreams is in Nebraska. Her name is Abigail.
²⁷
The dark man is in the west. Maybe Vegas.”
²⁸

They encounter four pairs of shoes
²⁹
and a set of four booties lined up on the road before them. The footwear is tailored for the gunslingers’ individual personalities. Susannah’s are designed to fit over her stumps. The three erstwhile New Yorkers immediately make the connection to
The Wizard of Oz
.
³⁰
Jake clicks the heels of his red leather oxfords together, to no effect. They tell Roland the story—which Eddie and Susannah had mentioned to him near Shardik’s portal—and he identifies with Dorothy’s desire to get back home again. The ka-tet wants that, too, but for them home is the Path of the Beam. They carry their new footwear toward the Emerald Palace. Ka will tell them when to use the shoes.

A flag bearing the Crimson King’s eye flies over the palace. A gate of neonlike tubes blocks their way. Each bar is a different color, representing the thirteen Wizard’s balls. Living creatures—fish, birds, horses—swim within the colored lights, some disquietingly human, perhaps symbolic of the twelve guardians.

The interstate expires beyond this barrier. Jake senses they can get through the gate using their shoes. Once they successfully train Oy to click his heels together, the black bar explodes. On the other side, omens and warnings attempt to discourage them from their path.

They enter the palace and find a chamber that is a cross between the Wizard of Oz’s domain and Blaine’s Barony Coach. The putative Wizard greets them in Blaine’s voice over a PA system. As in
The Wizard of Oz,
doglike Oy pulls away the curtain to reveal the Tick-Tock Man. Eddie and Susannah kill him before he can do anything, never stopping to consider that the only way he could have gotten here ahead of them is by magic, perhaps through a door.

The real wizard sits behind them: Randall Flagg, whom Roland knew as Marten, the betrayer in his father’s court. Marten reminds Roland that they met during the last days of Gilead, when his first ka-tet was preparing to go west in search of the Tower. “I know you saw me, but I doubt you knew until now that I saw you, as well.”

Like Lucifer tempting Christ, Flagg promises Roland and the others an easier life if they would just “give over this stupid and hopeless quest for the Tower.” To a man, woman, child and billy-bumbler, the members of the ka-tet all answer “No.”

Roland’s Mid-World gun is useless against Flagg, so he draws Jake’s father’s gun. His maimed hand fails him briefly and the gun sight gets caught in his belt buckle long enough for Flagg to disappear, leaving the pink Wizard’s Glass behind. Flagg was genuinely taken by surprise and if Roland hadn’t faltered, the wizard might have been killed—or so he later claimed.

Winning the Emerald Palace returns them to the Path of the Beam. The voice of ka tells Roland he can’t continue until he tells the last scene of his story. The only way to show his friends the truth is to take them inside the Wizard’s Glass. Everything around them is tinged pink. When they travel via Black Thirteen, a black pall clouds their vision. As in her later todash trips, Susannah’s legs are restored to her.

“I lost my one true love at the beginning of my quest for the Dark Tower. Now look into this wretched thing, if you would, and see what I lost not long after.”

After he got back from Mejis, the ball showed Roland an assassination plot against his father. Farson’s agents passed a poisoned knife to the castle’s chief of domestic staff, who was to pass it on to the actual assassin, Roland’s mother. The toxin came from Garlan, the same place Flagg got the poison he used against King Roland of Delain. Roland reported the intermediary to his father, but decided to give his mother a chance to stop
her foolishness, recover her sanity and return to her husband’s side. “He has saved her from herself once, he will tell her, but he cannot do it again.”

Filled with dread, Eddie, Jake, Susannah and Oy follow the young Roland and see with their own eyes what Roland can’t bear to tell them.

Roland’s mother stole the grapefruit to give to Marten as a consolation prize for failing to murder her husband. Inside Gabrielle Deschain’s chamber, the ka-tet sees what Roland does not—a pair of shoes beneath the drapes near the window. A shadowy figure appears with a snakelike object in its hands. The ka-tet believes it is Rhea of Cöos, still bearing the decaying body of her dead snake, Ermot, come to retrieve the Wizard’s Glass and punish the boy who caused her so much trouble.

Roland sees her reflection in the ball. He turns and fires at the figure, which transforms back into his mother. In her hands she carries a belt she had made for him.
³¹
It’s a scenario befitting any Greek tragedy: Roland used his father’s guns to kill his mother.

Rhea appears to the ka-tet in the pink ball, first as the Wicked Witch of the East, again beseeching them to cry off their quest. Like any good deceiver, she tempts them with the truth, telling them to ask Roland what happened to Cuthbert, Alain or Jamie. “He never had a friend he didn’t kill, never had a lover who’s not dust in the wind!”

The pink ball—the only real thing in this group vision—self-destructs, returning them to Mid-World. Roland tells them he saw Rhea once more and, without elaborating, implies that he killed her.

Time has slipped again and they have no way to tell how much. They’ve apparently been walking during the vision: The Emerald Palace is at least thirty miles behind them. The cloud pattern tells them that they are back on the path to the Tower.

In their packs they find food and drink, provided by ka or Flagg (or, according to Eddie, the Keebler Elves). They find a message from Flagg: “Next time I won’t leave. Renounce the Tower.” Beneath it, a sketch of a cloud emitting a bolt of lightning, the symbol for Thunderclap.

Roland suggests that the others should consider Flagg’s advice, since he has a reputation for getting his friends killed. “I’m aware this is probably my last chance to love. . . . For the first time since I turned around in a dark room and killed my mother, I may have found something more important than the Tower.”

However, ka has changed the New Yorkers. They don’t want to go
back to the worlds they came from—and how would they get there if they did? In Stephen Donaldson’s
Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever,
the protagonist is drawn from the normal world into a fantasy land and refuses to believe or participate in what happens to him there. Eddie, Susannah and Jake not only believe in their situation, but they also make the quest their own. Hand in hand, the four travelers, with Oy two paces ahead, return to the Path of the Beam, leaving their red shoes behind in a pile as they continue on the road to the Dark Tower.

While the contemporary action in
Wizard and Glass
takes Roland and his ka-tet much closer to their destination—they start at the beginning of Mid-World and arrive close to where End-World begins, traveling farther in a few hours than Roland has covered in a millennium—that part of the journey does not demand much growth from its participants, which is the normal result of a quest. Travelers must usually scratch and claw for every inch of progress, but King put his cast on an express train and rocketed them halfway across the continent.
³²

Through his story, Roland lays himself bare as he explains how he came to be the hardened loner the members of his ka-tet met when they arrived through their respective doors. His development since leaving Mejis isn’t growth; it’s attrition. It will take this ragtag group of erstwhile New Yorkers—and one billy-bumbler—to help him recover his soul.

Cleansing the soul to attain the purity required to achieve a goal is another element of questing. Roland willingly accepts responsibility for his crimes—killing his mother and causing Susan Delgado’s death—though the members of his ka-tet do not blame him for his actions. His decision to forsake the woman he loved to undertake a seemingly impossible quest to save all existence impresses on his followers the seriousness of their task.

The story of
Wizard and Glass
is tragedy upon tragedy. The star-crossed lovers are straight out of Shakespeare, and Roland’s matricide owes a debt to the ancient Greeks. That Gabrielle Deschain—who betrayed her husband and planned to execute him with her own hands—perhaps earned her death does not mitigate the tragedy. Just as no parent should live to see a child die, no child should have to live knowing he was the instrument of a parent’s demise. “A man doesn’t get past such a thing,” Roland says. “Not ever.”

In an online interview at the
Dark Tower
Web site in 1997, Peter Straub said the flashback “offers a nice counter-rhythmic backwash to the
surging forward progress of the saga as a whole.” Fans and reviewers expressed admiration for King’s literary style in this flashback section while simultaneously admitting to impatience at wanting him to get on with the contemporary story. “I think this is a very interesting way to tell a story, that is, by literalizing the story-telling,” Straub said, comparing the technique to one Joseph Conrad used in
Heart of Darkness
.
³³

In 1994, King said he knew the remainder of the series, and in the afterword to
Wizard and Glass,
he outlines the general shape of the final three books. He could never have foreseen how his own personal version of ka would intervene. In July 1999, King’s world was turned upside-down when he was struck by a Dodge minivan. The incident changed his life, but it also provided inspiration for his writing and became an important plot element in the finale of the
Dark Tower
series.

¹
Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Unless otherwise specified, the quotes in this chapter are from
Wizard and Glass
.

²
This is reminiscent of the game of riddles Bilbo Baggins and Gollum play beneath the mountain in
The Hobbit
.

³
One of the inspirations King used in
Misery
—as long as Paul Sheldon continued to work on his next
Misery
novel, Annie had reason to keep him alive.

⁴
In the original version of
The Gunslinger,
Walter claims to have come from England.

⁵
Archie Bunker’s wife from
All in the Family
in the 1970s.

⁶
Susannah tells Little Blaine that the world would be a better place with his “big brother” gone. These words must resonate with Eddie, whose world was likely better off without Henry, his big brother.

⁷
The same flu that ravaged the world in
The Stand,
a book that introduced an evil man named Randall Flagg. Roland is familiar with Flagg—more familiar than he realizes—from the final days of Gilead. He believes Flagg is a demon. “Hot on his heels had come two young men who looked desperate and yet grim, men named Dennis and Thomas”—two characters from
The Eyes of the Dragon,
which also featured a demonic wizard called Flagg.