Dark Tower VII, The (v. 7)

by Stephen King

  XVI

  Not it! I fancied Cuthbert’s reddening face

  Beneath its garniture of curly gold,

  Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold

  An arm to mine to fix me to the place,

  The way he used. Alas, one night’s disgrace!

  Out went my heart’s new fire and left it cold.

  XVII

  Giles then, the soul of honour—there he stands

  Frank as ten years ago when knighted first,

  What honest man should dare (he said) he durst.

  Good—but the scene shifts—faugh! what hangman hands

  Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands

  Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst!

  XVIII

  Better this present than a past like that:

  Back therefore to my darkening path again!

  No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain.

  Will the night send a howlet or a bat?

  I asked: when something on the dismal flat

  Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train.

  XIX

  A sudden little river crossed my path

  As unexpected as a serpent comes.

  No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms;

  This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath

  For the fiend’s glowing hoof—to see the wrath

  Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.

  XX

  So petty yet so spiteful! All along,

  Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it;

  Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit

  Of mute despair, a suicidal throng:

  The river which had done them all the wrong,

  Whate’er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit.

  XXI

  Which, while I forded—good saints, how I feared

  To set my foot upon a dead man’s cheek,

  Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek

  For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard!

  —It may have been a water-rat I speared,

  But, ugh! it sounded like a baby’s shriek.

  XXII

  Glad was I when I reached the other bank.

  Now for a better country. Vain presage!

  Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage,

  Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank

  Soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank

  Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage—

  XXIII

  The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque,

  What penned them there, with all the plain to choose?

  No footprint leading to that horrid mews,

  None out of it. Mad brewage set to work

  Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk

  Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.

  XXIV

  And more than that—a furlong on—why, there!

  What bad use was that engine for, that wheel,

  Or brake, not wheel—that harrow fit to reel

  Men’s bodies out like silk? With all the air

  Of Tophet’s tool, on earth left unaware

  Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel.

  XXV

  Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood,

  Next a marsh it would seem, and now mere earth

  Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth,

  Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood

  Changes and off he goes!) within a rood—

  Bog, clay and rubble, sand, and stark black dearth.

  XXVI

  Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,

  Now patches where some leanness of the soil’s

  Broke into moss, or substances like boils;

  Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him

  Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim

  Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

  XXVII

  And just as far as ever from the end!

  Naught in the distance but the evening, naught

  To point my footstep further! At the thought,

  A great black bird, Apollyon’s bosom friend,

  Sailed past, not best his wide wing dragon-penned

  That brushed my cap—perchance the guide I sought.

  XXVIII

  For, looking up, aware I somehow grew,

  ’Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place

  All round to mountains—with such name to grace

  Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view.

  How thus they had surprised me—solve it, you!

  How to get from them was no clearer case.

  XXIX

  Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick

  Of mischief happened to me, God knows when—

  In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then

  Progress this way. When, in the very nick

  Of giving up, one time more, came a click

  As when a trap shuts—you’re inside the den.

  XXX

  Burningly it came on me all at once,

  This was the place! those two hills on the right,

  Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight;

  While to the left a tall scalped mountain … Dunce,

  Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce,

  After a life spent training for the sight!

  XXXI

  What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?

  The round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart,

  Built of brown stone, without a counterpart

  In the whole world. The tempest’s mocking elf

  Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf

  He strikes on, only when the timbers start.

  XXXII

  Not see? because of night perhaps?—why day

  Came back again for that! before it left

  The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:

  The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay,

  Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay,—

  ‘Now stab and end the creature—to the heft!’

  XXXIII

  Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled

  Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears

  Of all the lost adventurers, my peers—

  How such a one was strong, and such was bold,

  And such was fortunate, yet each of old

  Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

  XXXIV

  There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met

  To view the last of me, a living frame

  For one more picture! In a sheet of flame

  I saw them and I knew them all. And yet

  Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,

  And blew. ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.’

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Sometimes I think I have written more about the Dark Tower books than I have written about the Dark Tower itself. These related writings include the ever-growing synopsis (known by the quaint old word Argument) at the beginning of each of the first five volumes, and afterwords (most totally unnecessary and some actually embarrassing in retrospect) at the end of all the volumes. Michael Whelan, the extraordinary artist who illustrated both the first volume and this last, proved himself to be no slouch as a literary critic as well when, after reading a draft of Volume Seven, he suggested—in refreshingly blunt terms—that the rather lighthearted afterword I’d put at the end was jarring and out of place. I took another look at it and realized he was right.

  The first half of that well-meant but off-key essay can now be found as an introduction to the first four volumes of the series; it’s called “On Being Nineteen.” I thought of leaving Volume Seven without any afterword at all; of letting Roland’s discovery at the top of his Tower be my last word on the matter. Then I realized that I had one more thing to say, a thing that actually needed to be sa
id. It has to do with my presence in my own book.

  There’s a smarmy academic term for this—“metafiction.” I hate it. I hate the pretentiousness of it. I’m in the story only because I’ve known for some time now (consciously since writing Insomnia in 1995, unconsciously since temporarily losing track of Father Donald Callahan near the end of ’Salem’s Lot) that many of my fictions refer back to Roland’s world and Roland’s story. Since I was the one who wrote them, it seemed logical that I was part of the gunslinger’s ka. My idea was to use the Dark Tower stories as a kind of summation, a way of unifying as many of my previous stories as possible beneath the arch of some über-tale. I never meant that to be pretentious (and I hope it isn’t), but only as a way of showing how life influences art (and vice-versa). I think that, if you have read these last three Dark Tower volumes, you’ll see that my talk of retirement makes more sense in this context. In a sense, there’s nothing left to say now that Roland has reached his goal … and I hope the reader will see that by discovering the Horn of Eld, the gunslinger may finally be on the way to his own resolution. Possibly even to redemption. It was all about reaching the Tower, you see—mine as well as Roland’s—and that has finally been accomplished. You may not like what Roland found at the top, but that’s a different matter entirely. And don’t write me any angry letters about it, either, because I won’t answer them. There’s nothing left to say on the subject. I wasn’t exactly crazy about the ending, either, if you want to know the truth, but it’s the right ending. The only ending, in fact. You have to remember that I don’t make these things up, not exactly; I only write down what I see.

  Readers will speculate on how “real” the Stephen King is who appears in these pages. The answer is “not very,” although the one Roland and Eddie meet in Bridgton (Song of Susannah) is very close to the Stephen King I remember being at that time. As for the Stephen King who shows up in this final volume … well, let’s put it this way: my wife asked me if I would kindly not give fans of the series very precise directions to where we live or who we really are. I agreed to do that. Not because I wanted to, exactly—part of what makes this story go, I think, is the sense of the fictional world bursting through into the real one—but because this happens to be my wife’s life as well as mine, and she should not be penalized for either loving me or living with me. So I have fictionalized the geography of western Maine to a great extent, trusting readers to grasp the intent of the fiction and to understand why I treated my own part in it as I did. And if you feel a need to drop in and say hello, please think again. My family and I have a good deal less privacy than we used to, and I have no wish to give up any more, may it do ya fine. My books are my way of knowing you. Let them be your way of knowing me, as well. It’s enough. And on behalf of Roland and all his katet—now scattered, say sorry—I thank you for coming along, and sharing this adventure with me. I never worked harder on a project in my life, and I know—none better, alas—that it has not been entirely successful. What work of make-believe ever is? And yet for all of that, I would not give back a single minute of the time that I have lived in Roland’s where and when. Those days in Mid-World and End-World were quite extraordinary. Those were days when my imagination was so clear I could smell the dust and hear the creak of leather.

  Stephen King

  August 21, 2003