Stephen King's the Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance Revised and Updated
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III:276, IV:326, IV:650, IV:664, E:195, V:78–80 (described), V:81, V:86, V:89, V:90, V:204, V:388, V:392, VII:20–21, VII:33, VII:589, VII:742, VII:801 (Vannay the Wise), VII:829, W:37, W:40, W:42, W:44, W:46, W:47, W:54, W:65–66 (indirect), W:98, W:285, W:288
VANNAY’S FAMILY AND ASSOCIATES:
**WALLACE: Wallace, son of Vannay, was one of Roland’s childhood friends. We learn about Wallace’s existence in the 2003 version of The Gunslinger. (We don’t learn his name until Wolves of the Calla.) Like the TAVERY twins, Wallace was a child prodigy. While still a boy, he died of the falling sickness, also known as King’s Evil. V:78–79
VAUGHN, SAM
See KING, STEPHEN
VECHHIO, RUDY
See BALAZAR, ENRICO: BALAZAR’S MEN
VELE, MRS. CORETTA
See KING, STEPHEN: FAN MAIL/HATE MAIL
VENN, RUPERT
See TREE VILLAGE CHARACTERS
VERDON, HENRY
See KING, STEPHEN
VERONE, TIO
See BALAZAR, ENRICO
VERRILL, CHUCK
See KING, STEPHEN
VI CASTIS COMPANY
This is the name of the corrupt mining company that destroyed all of the freehold mines north of RITZY. The BIG COFFIN HUNTERS were part of this conspiracy.
IV:265
VINCENT, COL
See BALAZAR, ENRICO: BALAZAR’S MEN
VOICE NUMBER ONE
See TOWER, CALVIN
VOICE NUMBER TWO
See TET CORPORATION: FOUNDING FATHERS: DEEPNEAU, AARON
VOICE OF THE BEAM
See GAN
VOTER REGISTRATION BOYS
See DEAN, SUSANNAH: ODETTA HOLMES AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: VOTER REGISTRATION BOYS
VULTURE GUARDIAN
See GUARDIANS OF THE BEAM
W
WALKER, DETTA
See DEAN, SUSANNAH: SUSANNAH’S OTHER SELVES
WALKIN’ DUDE
See WALTER: WALTER’S ALIASES
WALKING WATERS OF EAST DOWNE
See MID-WORLD FOLKLORE
WALK-INS
Walk-ins are people (and sometimes animals) that seem to walk in to our world from other wheres or whens. Often they are dressed in old-fashioned clothes and speak indecipherable languages. Some of these walk-ins are disfigured (JOHN CULLUM calls them ROONT, or ruined) and are probably either SLOW MUTANTS or CHILDREN OF RODERICK. Others have a bleeding hole in the center of their forehead and appear to be CAN-TOI servants of the CRIMSON KING.
In Song of Susannah, we find out that the towns near LOVELL, MAINE, are plagued by walk-ins. In the final book of the Dark Tower series, we discover that these walk-ins are entering our world through the doorway of CARA LAUGHS, the home which the writer STEPHEN KING is destined to buy. Obviously, our kas-ka Gan uses his imagination to create DOORWAYS BETWEEN WORLDS, doorways which the walk-ins can use.
VI:151–54, VI:161, VI:170–71, VI:172, VI:180–81 (center), VI:182, VI:285, VI:301, VI:397–98, VI:407, VI:409, VII:46, VII:49, VII:50, VII:116, VII:129–30 (taheen), VII:131, VII:173, VII:305, VII:433, VII:434, VII:438
BIRDS: VI:153
CHEVIN OF CHAYVEN: See MUTANTS: CHILDREN OF RODERICK
ONE-EYED WOMAN WITH DEAD CHILD: See MUTANTS: CHILDREN OF RODERICK
WOMAN WITH BALD HEAD AND BLEEDING EYE IN FOREHEAD:
VI:153, VI:171
WALK-INS, CHURCH OF THE
See MAINE (STATE OF): OXFORD COUNTY: STONEHAM: STONEHAM CORNERS: LOVELL-STONEHAM CHURCH OF THE WALK-INS, in OUR WORLD PLACES
WALLACE
See VANNAY
**WALTER (THE DARK MAN, THE MAN IN BLACK, WALTER OF ALL-WORLD, WALTER OF END-WORLD, WALTER O’DIM, THE CRIMSON KING’S PRIME MINISTER, WALTER PADICK, WALTER HODJI, WALTER FARDEN, WALTER THE BLIND)
As far back as The Gunslinger, Walter O’Dim (also known as the Man in Black) has been Roland’s nemesis. Under the name MARTEN BROADCLOAK, he served as STEVEN DESCHAIN’s betraying sorcerer, the man who seduced Roland’s mother and shamed Roland into taking his test of manhood years too early. While in the service of JOHN FARSON, he helped to bring down GILEAD, the last bastion of civilization, in a tide of blood and murder.22 Under the name RUDIN FILARO, he fought with the BLUE-FACED BARBARIANS at JERICHO HILL and shot CUTHBERT ALLGOOD through the eye with an arrow.
An accomplished sorcerer and a devoted servant of the Outer Dark, Walter has many infernal skills. In the first book of the Dark Tower series, we saw him restore the weed-eater NORT to life. In The Drawing of the Three we learn that in his incarnation as RANDALL FLAGG, he is able to change men into dogs.
Although a sorcerer, Walter often functions as a kind of trickster, leading Roland into the darkest regions of his own soul. It is Walter who tempts Roland to let JAKE fall into the abyss below the CYCLOPEAN MOUNTAINS, and it is often Walter’s taunting voice that Roland hears in his head, mocking and deriding his desire to live—and pursue his quest—honorably.
Among Walter’s infernal skills is that of prophecy. In the bone-strewn wastes of the GOLGOTHA, located near the shores of the WESTERN SEA, he reads Roland’s future with a stacked deck of tarot cards. During this reading he foretells the drawing of the Three, and tells Roland the perils he will have to face on his way to the DARK TOWER. Walter also gives our gunslinger an overwhelming vision of the universe, and a sense of the immensity of the Tower itself. At the end of the first book of the series, Roland wakes up from a short sleep to find that he has aged a decade and that Walter is only a pile of bones. Roland takes Walter’s jaw as a talisman. Later on in the series we learn that, although Walter pretended to die in the golgotha, he did not actually travel to the clearing at the end of the path. Oh, no. He is too much of a survivor to meet such a simple end.
Changing both his name and his face, Walter can travel through time and between worlds, spreading destruction and disaster like plague or poison. As MOTHER ABAGAIL states in the related novel The Stand, whereas ordinary mortals wish to live and create, dark creatures such as Walter (aka Randall Flagg) only want to uncreate or destroy. Wherever goodness or hope exists, or wherever tragedy has taken place and the forces of the WHITE are needed to rebuild human society, Walter will turn up, dragging his shadow of chaos behind him.
In the provinces south of GARLAN, Walter was known as Walter Hodji, the latter word meaning both “dim” and “hood.” When Roland and his tet met him in the GREEN PALACE back in Wizard and Glass, he claimed to be both OZ THE GREEN KING and Randall Flagg, the demonic sorcerer whose nefarious deeds are recorded in STEPHEN KING’s novels The Eyes of the Dragon and The Stand.
Although CONSTANT READERS have long been familiar with Walter and his multiple masks (many of which begin with the initials R.F.), not until the seventh book of the Dark Tower series do we find out the true identity of this multifaced sorcerer. Born Walter Padick, the son of a simple miller in DELAIN, a town located in the EASTAR’D BARONY of a world much like Roland’s, Walter chose at a young age to avoid the path most humans travel. At the age of thirteen he ran away from home and refused to return even after being raped by a fellow wanderer. Instead, he pursued his dark destiny, using and abusing his magical powers so that he gained a kind of quasi-immortality. Despite having belonged to numerous cliques and cults through the ages, often espousing conflicting causes, Walter, like Roland, has only ever had one ultimate goal. He longs to climb to the top of the Dark Tower and enter the room at its summit. However, whereas Roland wants to hold palaver with whatever god controls that linchpin of existence, Walter secretly hopes to take up residence there and become God of All.
By the time our series begins, Walter has taken up another cause in pursuit of his own secret ambition and has become the prime minister of the mad CRIMSON KING. In the name of the Lord of Discordia, Walter convinces MIA to give up her immortality so that she can give birth to MORDRED, who (according to legend) is destined to murder Walter’s longtime enemy and ultimate rival, Roland. However, in creating Mordred (whose amputated
foot he hopes to use to unlock the Tower), Walter finally overplays his hand. Once Mordred realizes Walter’s true intentions, he eats him.
One of the most interesting ideas added to Walter’s palaver with Roland in the 2003 version of The Gunslinger is the theme of RESUMPTION, a word which we see on one of the new opening pages of the revised volume. Roland believes that his quest for the Tower has been continuous, but Walter implies that it has not. Roland has been repeating the same quest over and over, he just never recalls it. At the end of the Dark Tower series, we learn that Walter is right. Roland is caught in a time loop, constantly reliving the period from the fall of Jericho Hill (or perhaps from his time in the MOHAINE DESERT) to his reaching the Dark Tower. Walter implies that Roland is damned to repeat his own history over and over because he never remembers and never learns. In the final book of the series, Roland proves his nemesis wrong.
I:11–14, I:16–17, I:20–21, I:23, I:29, I:30, I:33–39 (Nort’s story), I:42, I:54–56 (Pittston), I:58, I:64, I:73–74, I:76–77, I:78–79, I:82–84, I:86, I:87, I:90, I:93, I:94, I:95, I:112–13, I:119, I:122, I:130, I:131, I:136, I:137, I:138, I:139, I:140, I:142–43, I:149, I:174, I:176–77, I:184, I:186, I:190–216, II:15, II:16, II:20, II:25, II:30, II:31, II:36, II:40, II:55, II:101, II:104, II:316, II:318, II:319, II:324, II:397, III:38, III:41, III:42, III:43, III:46–47, III:48, III:59–62, III:94, III:103–6, III:107, III:172, III:226, III:261, III:417, IV:7, IV:65, IV:106, IV:404–8, IV:421, IV:423 (and The Good Man), IV:597, IV:624 (the dark man in the west), E:146, E:209, V:314, V:410, V:412 (as Maerlyn/Marten/Flagg), V:460–65 (“I am what ka and the King and the Tower have made me”), V:470, V:702, VI:239–40, VI:245–55 (prime minister of the Crimson King), VI:282, VI:283, VI:284, VI:288, VI:337, VI:405, VII:13 (O’Dim), VII:106, VII:107, VII:141 (Crimson King’s chancellor), VII:148, VII:171–87, VII:188, VII:192, VII:250, VII:442, VII:515, VII:518, VII:531, VII:535, VII:762, VII:829, VII:830
WALTER’S ALIASES:
**BROADCLOAK, MARTEN: Although Marten Broadcloak was STEVEN DESCHAIN’s sorcerer, he was actually an enemy of the AFFILIATION. In a carefully orchestrated bit of treachery, Marten seduced Roland’s mother, GABRIELLE, and then exposed the shameful affair so that Roland—raging that his father had been cuckolded and dishonored—would face his test of manhood years too early. Marten’s hope was that Roland would fail his test and be sent west, into exile. To Marten’s chagrin, Roland succeeded in besting his teacher CORT and won his guns at the unheard-of age of fourteen.
In Wizard and Glass, we learn that Gabrielle conspired to kill her husband, Steven Deschain. It seems most likely that her poisoned knife came from Marten. This plot also failed, though at the eventual cost of Gabrielle’s life. (Not long after this event, Roland shot her.) In The Gunslinger, we learn that Marten was delivered into Roland’s hands by the Man in Black posing as a sorcerer named Walter. However the person delivered to Roland must have been an imposter, since later in the series we learn that Marten and Walter are the same man.
In the 2003 Gunslinger, Marten’s identity takes a further twist. Marten is still Steven Deschain’s sorcerer, but he is now also his foremost counselor. But unbeknownst to the elder Deschain, Marten is simultaneously his many-faced enemy.
As JOHN FARSON’s wizard, Marten is actually the force behind the revolutions tearing MID-WORLD’s Affiliation apart. (In the early books of the series KING implies that Marten and Farson may be the same creature, but later this proves not to be true.) Walter is simultaneously the penitent Walter that Roland knew in his youth, and Walter O’Dim, otherwise known as the Man in Black. Hence, like all of his alter egos, Marten is an evil agent of the CRIMSON KING. I:86, I:94, I:95, I:106 (as the good man), I:125, I:131, I:140 (killed), I:151–52, I:159–61, I:164, I:167, I:172, I:173, I:175, I:205–6 (possessed by Walter), I:213, II:103, II:250, II:362, III:41, III:44, III:124, III:417, IV:7, IV:65, IV:107, IV:110–12, IV:163, IV:164, IV:165, IV:223, IV:258, IV:275 (and voice of thinny in Eyebolt Canyon), IV:436, IV:619 (with Farson), IV:647–49 (claims to be Flagg), IV:652–56, IV:665, V:36, V:412 (as Walter/Maerlyn/Flagg), VII:178, VII:184, VII:822, VII:824, W:37, W:250–51, W:297–98, W:299, W:300, W:306 (son of a bitch)
COVENANT MAN (BARONY COVENANTER): The Covenant Man, also known as the Barony Covenanter, was the official tax collector for the BARONY of NEW CANAAN as well as the NORTH’RD BARONY, where the village of TREE was located. He had been the tax collector in those parts for as long as anyone could remember. Every year he arrived on his tall black horse, dressed in his flapping black cloak and black gloves. Tied to his saddle (which was inscribed with silver siguls and was worth more than a woodcutter made in a lifetime of risking his neck) was a BASIN of pure silver. The Covenanter looked as thin as Old Scrawny Death, but this didn’t stop him from marking a new fence here, a cow or three added to a herd there. The money he collected was taken in the name of GILEAD, and those who could not pay had their plots repossessed and were turned out on the land, also in the name of Gilead.
The Covenanter’s physical presence was as abhorrent as his calling. His body smelled of old sweat and his breath was rank. His husky voice—which sounded like a deaf man trying to sing a lullaby—issued from a mouth full of large white teeth. The man’s eyes didn’t blink and his lips were as red as those of a woman who had painted her mouth with madder.
As TIM ROSS realized soon after the Covenant Man gave him a magic key to open his stepfather’s trunk (a key that would only work once, which meant that Tim’s spying would inevitably be discovered), the Covenanter liked to play with people, but he was the kind of person who enjoyed breaking his toys. Thanks to the Covenanter’s gift, Tim found his father’s lucky coin in BERN KELLS’s trunk (proof that BIG ROSS hadn’t been incinerated by a DRAGON as Kells claimed, but murdered by his partner), but it also set off the chain of events which led to NELL ROSS (now Nell Kells) being beaten into blindness by her cruel and drunken second husband.
As the WIDOW SMACK stated so eloquently, the Covenanter left only ruin and weeping in his wake. Any help he gave—from showing Tim his father’s corpse floating in a stream on the COSINGTON-MARCHLY STAKE to giving the boy glimpses of his future in one of his silver scrying vessels—was always double-edged. Although the vision Tim had of meeting the magician MAERLYN eventually came true, as did Maerlyn’s gift which restored Nell’s sight, the way these events unfolded was nothing like what Tim had foreseen when he waved the Covenanter’s magic wand (probably made from the gear shift of an old Dodge Dart) over a battered silver PAIL. Tim’s quest to find Maerlyn—which led him through the heart of the ENDLESS FOREST and into the FAGONARD swamp—was fraught with danger, and those beings that the Covenanter implied would help (such as the SIGHE ARMANEETA) turned out to be treacherous. Even Maerlyn, who Tim found near the NORTH FOREST KINNOCK DOGAN, was under a spell that made him look like a man-eating tyger rather than a wise magician. (Luckily, Tim did not shoot the mage with his four-shot pistol.)
We can’t help but think that the Covenanter’s true skill was wrapping just enough truth in a web of dangerous lies, and of making his cruel play appear to be altruism. No matter what the circumstances, the Covenanter’s goal was always the same—to trap the unwary and destroy them. It was only luck that saved Tim from the jaws of a dragon, and then again from the certain death of the STARKBLAST. Or then again, perhaps it was ka. After all, despite his low birth, Tim was destined to become TIM STOUTHEART, one of Mid-World’s finest gunslingers.
One of the most interesting aspects of Tim Ross’s story is that—although it is a fairy tale and takes place in the land of once upon a bye—the Covenanter’s true identity turns out to be none other than that of Roland’s longtime face-shifting enemy, WALTER O’DIM/MARTEN BROADCLOAK. Although when we read the tale we take the Covenant Man’s identity at face value—after all, we know that O’Dim can travel to different levels of the TOWER and has lived far longer than one human lifetime—it is also important to contemplate the possibility that Roland inserted his enemy into
the tale, and by so doing, made a conscious critique of the political situation of his time.
The grown-up Roland who travels with EDDIE, SUSANNAH, JAKE and OY has encountered O’Dim in many different guises, and knows that the sorcerer served both JOHN FARSON and the CRIMSON KING. Yet even as a young man, Roland knew that Broadcloak’s forked tongue was responsible not only for his own personal tragedy, but also for the hatred and suspicion with which so many people regarded the tet of the gun. Hence, it is little surprise that young Roland, like the older Roland, chose to cast Broadcloak as the evil Barony Covenanter—the man who made the good people of Tree resent Gilead so deeply.
Although “The Wind Through the Keyhole” is a fairy tale, it is also history in disguise. Just as Broadcloak betrayed the gunslingers he was supposed to serve, so the Covenant Man poisoned the name and reputation of Gilead by squeezing taxes out of the people of Tree in the name of the ancient Covenant they held with Arthur ELD. Even in the land of fairy tale, people whispered that the Covenanter’s taxes weren’t fair, and that, even if Arthur Eld had existed, he was long dead and the Covenant had been paid a dozen times over, in blood as well as silver. Like Broadcloak, the Covenanter knew full well that he was creating a situation in which people were longing for someone like John Farson to appear and actively challenge the rule of In-World. W:112, W:113, W:114, W:117, W:120, W:123, W:126 (old You Know Who), W:131–37 (sowing bad will; 136 foul breath), W:138, W:139, W:140, W:141 (never ages), W:144 (indirect), W:145–48 (Tim goes in search of him), W:148–64 (153 magic wand, magic basin; 160 wanting to know secrets is his vice), W:167 (chary man), W:168–69 (poisoning the name of Eld as Maerlyn), W:170, W:172 (found Big Ross’s corpse), W:173, W:175 (great description), W:179, W:180–83 (leaving Dodge Dart stick, pail), W:184, W:185, W:187 (Widow Smack gives Tim a gun, calls Covenant Man a devil), W:188, W:189, W:191, W:192 W:195, W:196, W:198, W:200, W:206, W:207 (indirect), W:223 (indirect), W:226, W:236 (indirect), W:237–38, W:239 (man in black), W:241, W:242, W:247–49, W:250–51, W:258, W:259, W:264