by Stephen King
“But none of that actually happened,” King says, watching Marlowe waddle back toward the kitchen, where he will check his dish again before taking one of his increasingly long naps. The house is empty except for the two of them, and under those circumstances he often talks to himself. “I mean, you know that, don’t you? That none of it actually happened?”
He supposes he does, but it was so odd for Jake to die like that. Jake is in all his notes, and no surprise there, because Jake was supposed to be around until the very end. All of them were, in fact. Of course no story except a bad one, one that arrives DOA, is ever completely under the writer’s control, but this one is so out of control it’s ridiculous. It really is more like watching something happen—or listening to a song—than writing a damned made-up story.
He decides to make himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch and forget the whole damned thing for another day. Tonight he will go to see the new Clint Eastwood movie, Bloodwork, and be glad he can go anywhere, do anything. Tomorrow he’ll be back at his desk, and something from the film may slip out into the book—certainly Roland himself was partly Clint Eastwood to start with, Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name.
And … speaking of books …
Lying on the coffee-table is one that came via FedEx from his office in Bangor just this morning: The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Browning. It contains, of course, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” the narrative poem that lies at the root of King’s long (and trying) story. An idea suddenly occurs to him, and it brings an expression to his face that stops just short of outright laughter. As if reading his feelings (and possibly he can; King has always suspected dogs are fairly recent émigrés from that great I-know-just-how-you-feel country of Empathica), Marlowe’s own fiendish grin appears to widen.
“One place for the poem, old boy,” King says, and tosses the book back onto the coffee-table. It’s a big ’un, and lands with a thud. “One place and one place only.” Then he settles deeper in the chair and closes his eyes. Just gonna sit here like this for a minute or two, he thinks, knowing he’s fooling himself, knowing he’ll almost certainly doze off. As he does.
CHAPTER I:
THE THING UNDER THE CASTLE
ONE
They did indeed find a good-sized kitchen and an adjoining pantry at ground-level in the Arc 16 Experimental Station, and not far from the infirmary. They found something else, as well: the office of sai Richard P. Sayre, once the Crimson King’s Head of Operations, now in the clearing at the end of the path courtesy of Susannah Dean’s fast right hand. Lying atop Sayre’s desk were amazingly complete files on all four of them. These they destroyed, using the shredder. There were photographs of Eddie and Jake in the folders that were simply too painful to look at. Memories were better.
On Sayre’s wall were two framed oil-paintings. One showed a strong and handsome boy. He was shirtless, barefooted, tousle-haired, smiling, dressed only in jeans and wearing a docker’s clutch. He looked about Jake’s age. This picture had a not-quite-pleasant sensuality about it. Susannah thought that the painter, sai Sayre, or both might have been part of the Lavender Hill Mob, as she had sometimes heard homosexuals called in the Village. The boy’s hair was black. His eyes were blue. His lips were red. There was a livid scar on his side and a birthmark on his left heel as crimson as his lips. A snow-white horse lay dead before him. There was blood on its snarling teeth. The boy’s marked left foot rested on the horse’s flank, and his lips were curved in a smile of triumph.
“That’s Llamrei, Arthur Eld’s horse,” Roland said. “Its image was carried into battle on the pennons of Gilead, and was the sigul of all In-World.”
“So according to this picture, the Crimson King wins?” she asked. “Or if not him then Mordred, his son?”
Roland raised his eyebrows. “Thanks to John Farson, the Crimson King’s men won the In-World lands long ago,” he said. But then he smiled. It was a sunny expression so unlike his usual look that seeing it always made Susannah feel dizzy. “But I think we won the only battle that matters. What’s shown in this picture is no more than someone’s wishful fairytale.” Then, with a savagery that startled her, he smashed the glass over the frame with his fist and yanked the painting free, ripping it most of the way down the middle as he did so. Before he could tear it to pieces, as he certainly meant to do, she stopped him and pointed to the bottom. Written there in small but nonetheless extravagant calligraphy was the artist’s name: Patrick Danville.
The other painting showed the Dark Tower, a sooty-gray black cylinder tapering upward. It stood at the far end of Can’Ka No Rey, the field of roses. In their dreams the Tower had seemed taller than the tallest skyscraper in New York (to Susannah this meant the Empire State Building). In the painting it looked to be no more than six hundred feet high, yet this robbed it of none of its dreamlike majesty. The narrow windows rose in an ascending spiral around it just as in their dreams. At the top was an oriel window of many colors—each, Roland knew, corresponding to one of the Wizard’s glasses. The inmost circle but one was the pink of the ball that had been left for awhile in the keeping of a certain witch-woman named Rhea; the center was the dead ebony of Black Thirteen.
“The room behind that window is where I would go,” Roland said, tapping the glass over the picture. “That is where my quest ends.” His voice was low and awestruck. “This picture wasn’t done from any dream, Susannah. It’s as if I could touch the texture of every brick. Do you agree?”
“Yes.” It was all she could say. Looking at it here on the late Richard Sayre’s wall robbed her breath. Suddenly it all seemed possible. The end of the business was, quite literally, in sight.
“The person who painted it must have been there,” Roland mused. “Must have set up his easel in the very roses.”
“Patrick Danville,” she said. “It’s the same signature as on the one of Mordred and the dead horse, do you see?”
“I see it very well.”
“And do you see the path through the roses that leads to the steps at the base?”
“Yes. Nineteen steps, I have no doubt. Chassit. And the clouds overhead—”
She saw them, too. They formed a kind of whirlpool before streaming away from the Tower, and toward the Place of the Turtle, at the other end of the Beam they had followed so far. And she saw another thing. Outside the barrel of the Tower, at what might have been fifty-foot intervals, were balconies encircled with waist-high wrought-iron railings. On the second of these was a blob of red and three tiny blobs of white: a face that was too small to see, and a pair of upraised hands.
“Is that the Crimson King?” she asked, pointing. She didn’t quite dare put the tip of her finger on the glass over that tiny figure. It was as if she expected it to come to life and snatch her into the picture.
“Yes,” Roland said. “Locked out of the only thing he ever wanted.”
“Then maybe we could go right up the stairs and past him. Give him the old raspberry on the way by.” And when Roland looked puzzled at that, she put her tongue between her lips and demonstrated.
This time the gunslinger’s smile was faint and distracted. “I don’t think it will be so easy,” he said.
Susannah sighed. “Actually I don’t, either.”
They had what they’d come for—quite a bit more, in fact— but they still found it hard to leave Sayre’s office. The picture held them. Susannah asked Roland if he didn’t want to take it along. Certainly it would be simple enough to cut it out of the frame with the letter-opener on Sayre’s desk and roll it up. Roland considered the idea, then shook his head. There was a kind of malevolent life in it that might attract the wrong sort of attention, like moths to a bright light. And even if that were not the case, he had an idea that both of them might spend too much time looking at it. The picture might distract them or, even worse, hypnotize them.
In the end, maybe it’s just another mind-trap, he thought. Like Insomnia.
“We’ll leave it,”
he said. “Soon enough—in months, maybe even weeks—we’ll have the real thing to look at.”
“Do you say so?” she asked faintly. “Roland, do you really say so?”
“I do.”
“All three of us? Or will Oy and I have to die, too, in order to open your way to the Tower? After all, you started alone, didn’t you? Maybe you have to finish that way. Isn’t that how a writer would want it?”
“That doesn’t mean he can do it,” Roland said. “Stephen King’s not the water, Susannah—he’s only the pipe the water runs through.”
“I understand what you’re saying, but I’m not sure I entirely believe it.”
Roland wasn’t completely sure he did, either. He thought of pointing out to Susannah that Cuthbert and Alain had been with him at the true beginning of his quest, in Mejis, and when they set out from Gilead the next time, Jamie DeCurry had joined them, making the trio a quartet. But the quest had really started after the battle of Jericho Hill, and yes, by then he had been on his own.
“I started lone-john, but that’s not how I’ll finish,” he said. She had been making her way quite handily from place to place in a rolling office-chair. Now he plucked her out of it and settled her on his right hip, the one that no longer pained him. “You and Oy will be with me when I climb the steps and enter the door, you’ll be with me when I climb the stairs, you’ll be with me when I deal with yon capering red goblin, and you’ll be with me when I enter the room at the top.”
Although Susannah did not say so, this felt like a lie to her. In truth it felt like a lie to both of them.
TWO
They brought canned goods, a skillet, two pots, two plates, and two sets of utensils back to the Fedic Hotel. Roland had added a flashlight that provided a feeble glow from nearly dead batteries, a butcher’s knife, and a handy little hatchet with a rubber grip. Susannah had found a pair of net bags in which to store this little bit of fresh gunna. She also found three cans of jellylike stuff on a high shelf in the pantry adjacent to the infirmary kitchen.
“It’s Sterno,” she told the gunslinger when he inquired. “Good stuff. You can light it up. It burns slow and makes a blue flame hot enough to cook on.”
“I thought we’d build a little fire behind the hotel,” he said. “I won’t need this smelly stuff to make one, certainly.” He said it with a touch of contempt.
“No, I suppose not. But it might come in handy.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, but …” She shrugged.
Near the door to the street they passed what appeared to be a janitor’s closet filled with piles of rickrack. Susannah had had enough of the Dogan for one day and was anxious to be out, but Roland wanted to have a look. He ignored the mop buckets and brooms and cleaning supplies in favor of a jumble of cords and straps heaped in a corner. Susannah guessed from the boards on top of which they lay that this stuff had once been used to build temporary scaffoldings. She also had an idea what Roland wanted the strappage for, and her heart sank. It was like going all the way back to the beginning.
“Thought I was done with piggybackin,” she said crossly, and with more than a touch of Detta in her voice.
“It’s the only way, I think,” Roland said. “I’m just glad I’m whole enough again to carry your weight.”
“And that passage underneath’s the only way through? You’re sure of that?”
“I suppose there might be a way through the castle—” he began, but Susannah was already shaking her head.
“I’ve been up top with Mia, don’t forget. The drop into the Discordia on the far side’s at least five hundred feet. Probably more. There might have been stairs in the long-ago, but they’re gone now.”
“Then we’re for the passage,” he said, “and the passage is for us. Mayhap we’ll find something for you to ride in once we’re on the other side. In another town or village.”
Susannah was shaking her head again. “I think this is where civilization ends, Roland. And I think we better bundle up as much as we can, because it’s gonna get cold.”
Bundling-up materials seemed to be in short supply, however, unlike the foodstuffs. No one had thought to store a few extra sweaters and fleece-lined jackets in vacuum-packed cans. There were blankets, but even in storage they had grown thin and fragile, just short of useless.
“I don’t give a bedbug’s ass,” she said in a wan voice. “Just as long as we get out of this place.”
“We will,” he said.
THREE
Susannah is in Central Park, and it’s cold enough to see her breath. The sky overhead is white from side to side, a snow-sky. She’s looking down at the polar bear (who’s rolling around on his rocky island, seeming to enjoy the cold just fine) when a hand snakes around her waist. Warm lips smack her cold cheek. She turns and there stand Eddie and Jake. They are wearing identical grins and nearly identical red stocking caps. Eddie’s says MERRY across the front and Jake’s says CHRISTMAS. She opens her mouth to tell them “You boys can’t be here, you boys are dead,” and then she realizes, with a great and singing relief, that all that business was just a dream she had. And really, how could you doubt it? There are no talking animals called billy-bumblers, not really, no taheen-creatures with the bodies of humans and the heads of animals, no places called Fedic or Castle Discordia.
Most of all, there are no gunslingers. John Kennedy was the last, her chauffeur Andrew was right about that.
“Brought you hot chocolate,” Eddie says and holds it out to her. It’s the perfect cup of hot chocolate, mit schlag on top and little sprinkles of nutmeg dotting the cream; she can smell it, and as she takes it she can feel his fingers inside his gloves and the first flakes of that winter’s snow drift down between them. She thinks how good it is to be alive in plain old New York, how great that reality is reality, that they are together in the Year of Our Lord—
What Year of Our Lord?
She frowns, because this is a serious question, isn’t it? After all, Eddie’s an eighties man and she never got any further than 1964 (or was it ’65?). As for Jake, Jake Chambers with the word CHRISTMAS printed on the front of his happy hat, isn’t he from the seventies? And if the three of them represent three decades from the second half of the twentieth century, what is their commonality? What year is this?
“NINETEEN,” says a voice out of the air (perhaps it is the voice of Bango Skank, the Great Lost Character),“this is NINETEEN, this is CHASSIT. All your friends are dead.”
With each word the world becomes more unreal. She can see through Eddie and Jake. When she looks down at the polar bear she sees it’s lying dead on its rock island with its paws in the air. The good smell of hot chocolate is fading, being replaced by a musty smell: old plaster, ancient wood. The odor of a hotel room where no one has slept for years.
No, her mind moans. No, I want Central Park, I want Mr. MERRY and Mr. CHRISTMAS, I want the smell of hot chocolate and the sight of December’s first hesitant snowflakes, I’ve had enough of Fedic, In-World, Mid-World, and End-World. I want My-World. I don’t care if I ever see the Dark Tower.
Eddie’s and Jake’s lips move in unison, as if they are singing a song she can’t hear, but it’s not a song; the words she reads on their lips just before the dream breaks apart are
FOUR
“Watch out for Dandelo.”
She woke up with these words on her own lips, shivering in the early not-quite-dawn light. And the breath-seeing part of her dream was true, if no other. She felt her cheeks and wiped away the wetness there. It wasn’t quite cold enough to freeze the tears to her skin, but just-a-damn-bout.
She looked around the dreary room here in the Fedic Hotel, wishing with all her heart that her dream of Central Park had been true. For one thing, she’d had to sleep on the floor— the bed was basically nothing but a rust-sculpture waiting to disintegrate—and her back was stiff. For another, the blankets she’d used as a makeshift mattress and the ones she’d wrapped around her had all torn to
rags as she tossed and turned. The air was heavy with their dust, tickling her nose and coating her throat, making her feel like she was coming down with the world’s worst cold. Speaking of cold, she was shivering. And she needed to pee, which meant dragging herself down the hall on her stumps and half-numbed hands.
And none of that was really what was wrong with Susannah Odetta Holmes Dean this morning, all right? The problem was that she had just come from a beautiful dream to a world
(this is NINETEEN all your friends are dead)
where she was now so lonely that she felt half-crazy with it. The problem was that the place where the sky was brightening was not necessarily the east. The problem was that she was tired and sad, homesick and heartsore, griefstruck and depressed. The problem was that, in this hour before dawn, in this frontier museum-piece of a hotel room where the air was full of musty blanket-fibers, she felt as if all but the last two ounces of fuck-you had been squeezed out of her. She wanted the dream back.
She wanted Eddie.
“I see you’re up, too,” said a voice, and Susannah whirled around, pivoting on her hands so quickly she picked up a splinter.
The gunslinger leaned against the door between the room and the hall. He had woven the straps into the sort of carrier with which she was all too familiar, and it hung over his left shoulder. Hung over his right was a leather sack filled with their new possessions and the remaining Orizas. Oy sat at Roland’s feet, looking at her solemnly.
“You scared the living Jesus out of me, sai Deschain,” she said.
“You’ve been crying.”
“Isn’t any of your nevermind if I have been or if I haven’t.”
“We’ll feel better once we’re out of here,” he said. “Fedic’s curdled.”
