The Road to The Dark Tower

by Vincent, Bev

  He feels like he is standing on the edge of a great mystery. On the fence around the lot he sees graffiti mentioning Bango Skank, the Turtle and the Beam, and senses the coming of the White. When he relates the episode to the ka-tet later, Roland says, “What happened to you in that lot was the most important thing ever to happen in your life, Jake. In all our lives.”

  After he climbs over the fence, he finds a key that is the same shape as the one Eddie is carving.12 He also sees the dusty pink wild rose growing among a mass of purple-paint-coated grass. In the vision Walter enabled, Roland saw a blade of purple grass but never got far enough to see the rose.

  Jake understands that the rose is in danger and feels the overwhelming need to protect it—the same force that drives Roland to the Dark Tower. A voice tells him the rose doesn’t need to be guarded against normal injury—it can protect itself from being plucked or crushed.13 This rose will draw the ka-tet back to New York again and again in the coming months.

  Within the pages of Charlie the Choo-Choo, Jake discovers several clues. First is the train itself, which is supposedly benign but appears evil in the illustrations. The passengers on board look as if they’re afraid they’ll never get off alive. The president of the Railway Company is Raymond Martin, a subtle reference to Marten, the wizard from Gilead. The engineer’s daughter is named Susannah. The other engineers mock Charlie’s driver, saying, “He cannot understand that the world has moved on.”

  * * *

  The Ubiquitous Bango Skank

  Peter Straub originally created Bango Skank for The Talisman but never used him in that book. In a personal communication, King said that Bango keeps popping up in his work like “a kind of graffiti boogeyman.” Jake notices his repeat appearances and muses, “Man, that guy Bango gets around.” Susannah calls him the Great Lost Character and identifies him as one of the voices that speaks to her in her dreams of being reunited with Eddie and Jake in Central Park.

  When he’s not around, the ka-tet notices his absence. On the graffiti-free streets of Pleasantville in Algul Siento, they note, “If Bango Skank had been here, his mark had been erased.”

  Graffiti is a recurring element in the series, providing information and warnings. In King’s short story “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away,” the main character, a traveling salesman, obsessively collects snippets of graffiti from his travels. As early as The Talisman, characters receive graffiti warnings: GOOD BIRDS MAY FLY; BAD BOYS MUST DIE. THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE: GO HOME.

  The ka-tet sees signs of Bango Skank in the following locations:

  On the fence around the vacant lot containing the rose defacing a drawing of the Turtle Bay Condominiums

  On the back of a road sign outside Topeka

  In the Topeka jail cell where Father Callahan spends time after hitting bottom

  In Co-Op City

  In the bathroom at the hotel where Mia and Susannah hide. His message there is BANGO SKANK AWAITS THE KING

  In the lavatory at the New York public library where Father Callahan travels in 1977

  In the tunnel to the Fedic doorway behind the Dixie Pig (BANGO SKANK ’84)

  * * *

  Jake underlines all the passages that resonate with him.

  The key Jake finds in the empty lot calms the feuding voices in his head and also gives him the power to persuade others in the same way the Turtle sigul Susannah finds in the bowling bag in 1999 does for her.14 It also facilitates a telepathic link between Jake and Eddie. Jake transmits a message to Eddie—whom he has never met, it must be remembered—suggesting his carving will calm Roland’s mind, too. Roland, tormented to the point of welcoming death to bring silence to his mind, weeps with relief when Eddie gives him the wooden key to hold.

  Jake receives a dream message to go to Co-Op City, Eddie’s old neighborhood.15 In the dream, Eddie is about thirteen, the age he would have been in Jake’s time. The young Eddie is to be Jake’s guide to the doorway he has been seeking, the one that will return him to Mid-World. Before heading for Brooklyn the next day, Jake steals his father’s Ruger and a half-full box of shells, as if he knows his destiny is to become a gunslinger.

  Meanwhile Roland, Eddie and Susannah reach the boundary of Mid-World and see Lud’s skyline in the distance.16 Time is moving slower in Jake’s world than in Mid-World. Later, the ka-tet will discover that in Keystone Earth—the primary American reality where time moves in only one direction and all deaths are final—time runs faster and faster than in Mid-World, putting additional pressure on them.17

  Two doors are needed to birth Jake back into Roland’s world, both located in “thin” and “attractive” places. One is in a dilapidated house in Dutch Hill, significant, perhaps, because Calvin Tower is of Dutch heritage. The other is in a speaking circle, where Eddie uses his hand-carved key to try to open a portal he sketches in the ground. The term “drawing” has two meanings in this context: Jake is being drawn into Mid-World through a doorway that is itself a drawing. This duality appears again when Patrick Danville draws a doorway for Susannah.

  “Roland” beats Bango to the punch, leaving his mark outside the “real” tower in NYC. (Ron J. Martirano, 2004)

  The demon doorkeeper guarding the passage between worlds is the oracle that Roland and Jake encountered in the mountains, though it has pulled itself inside out to change from its female aspect to male. On Earth-side, the doorkeeper is the condemned house itself, which is reminiscent of the black hotel in Point Venuti, California, from The Talisman. As soon as Jake enters it, he realizes he’s left his world.

  Eddie is the midwife for Jake’s rebirth. The magnitude of his responsibility overwhelms him, amplifying his insecurities. His key doesn’t work, and Roland strikes him when he says he doesn’t care about forgetting the face of his father. The gunslinger deals his harsh lessons, confronting Eddie with his fears of failure, forcing him to decide. “Come from the shadow of yourself, if you dare.” Eddie comes very close to shooting Roland before he breaks down.

  Susannah hates Roland for what he did to the man she loves. “Sometimes I hate myself,” Roland says, but Susannah won’t let him escape with that thin confession. “Don’t ever stop you, though, do it?” The words come from deep within her. The voice is Detta’s.

  Roland returns the key to Eddie to complete. Eddie apologizes for being afraid, but Roland doesn’t want an apology; he wants Eddie to remember his lessons. “[H]ere was the last of Eddie’s childhood, expiring painfully among the three of them.” The gunslinger adds this little death to the scorecard of things he’s done in the name of the Tower. It’s a bill he’s not sure he will ever be able to pay, but he manages to reassure Eddie, and goes so far as to tell Eddie that he loves him.

  The demon, drawn by their presence in the speaking circle, appears in male form, so it falls to Susannah to divert it. Sex is its weapon, but also its weakness. Eddie struggles to finish his key and keep the door open while his wife is being sexually assaulted by an invisible entity. Jake scrambles on the other side to find the key he dropped, as the doorkeeper approaches. Eddie and Jake project messages back and forth, encouraging each other, but it is the voice of the rose that calms Jake, a powerful force that wants him to succeed.

  Roland plucks Jake from the jaws of death, lifting him up instead of letting him fall like he did before. Jake arrives without his pants and sneakers, but otherwise intact. The voices he and Roland have been hearing are silenced. What happens to Susannah during her long sexual struggle with the demon is left open, but it clearly will have serious implications in the future.

  The ka-tet becomes complete four days after Jake’s rebirth when the boy is adopted by a billy-bumbler, a creature resembling a badger crossed with a raccoon.18 He can speak, but usually only repeats what he hears. Roland has been told that bumblers are good luck. Dubbed Oy by Jake, he gradually becomes an integral part of the group and his heroic actions will be crucial to the completion of their quest.

  A few days from the decaying city of Lud
, the ka-tet stops in River Crossing, where they spend a pleasant day in the company of a group of old people who remember the world before it moved on. The foursome won’t see another meal like the one they are served here until they reach Calla Bryn Sturgis. After dinner, Susannah displays the first signs that her encounter with the demon may have yielded more than Roland anticipated. She considers the possibility that she’s pregnant, but dismisses it and doesn’t mention it to anyone else. Though they are a closely knit group, each member of the ka-tet will keep at least one secret from his or her companions.

  River Crossing’s matriarch, Aunt Talitha Unwin,19 tells them about conditions in Lud, a fortress-refuge where two factions continue a generations-old civil war that isolated the city from the world. The degenerate combatants use technological relics of the Great Old Ones against each other. She advises Roland to circle around the city, but he is loath to leave the path of the Beam. Also, if they bypass Lud, they will miss Blaine the Mono, whom Jake fears but knows intuitively is an important part of their quest without realizing that Blaine is the only way for them to cross the poisoned territory beyond Lud.

  The old folk of River Crossing remember the sleek pink train that once traveled out from Lud faster than the speed of sound across the wastelands, reminiscent of the blasted lands near Conger Road in Black House and a similar region in The Talisman. These wastelands and the proliferation of mutant humans and animals seem to indicate that Roland’s world had a nuclear war in its past. In some areas the mutations are lessening, as in Mejis. Roland says this Old War took place more than a thousand years ago, which puts it at about the same time as the fall of Gilead.

  Their discussions at an end, Roland and his group take their leave. Even staying overnight would be a mistake, for the people of River Crossing, like the oracle in the mountain, could never be satisfied. The longer they stayed, the harder it would be to break away. Roland would find himself becalmed again, like he was in Tull.

  As a parting gift, Aunt Talitha gives Roland a silver cross, asking him to wear it and lay it at the foot of the Dark Tower. The gunslinger accepts her gift, but makes no promise as to its ultimate destination. This sigul of an olden age will come in handy later on and will ultimately reach the Tower on America-side via a member of Tet Corporation.

  On the way to Lud, the group encounters the wreck of a Nazi airplane. Eddie wonders if aircraft that disappear in the Bermuda Triangle end up in Mid-World. The pilot was the fabled outlaw prince David Quick, leader of the army that attacked Lud nearly a century before. Later, the Tick-Tock Man will ask Jake if he is a “Not-See”; his mispronunciation of “Nazi” is also a phrase that forms the opening question in stanza XXXII of Browning’s poem: “Not see? because of night perhaps?”

  During a break in their travels, the foursome takes turns retelling their stories up to that point. Jake shows the others Charlie the Choo-Choo, which they examine in detail. Eddie and Susannah recognize the book from their respective childhoods,20 though both remember losing their copies, Susannah after being hit by Jack Mort’s brick. Ka has been trying to place the book into their hands, but other forces may be working to keep it away from them. Roland dismisses the riddle book, perhaps because intuition tells him it isn’t important.

  Before they reach Lud and whatever challenges that city poses for them, they must first solve the riddle of the decrepit, rusting bridge that spans the Send River.21 Eddie’s recent retelling of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, about people who die together when the bridge they’re crossing collapses, adds to their nervousness. This bridge is a three-quarter-mile-long shattered maze of steel and concrete, perhaps as old as Roland. The scene where the ka-tet crosses the bridge, evading holes and navigating tilted walkways is a cross between Larry Underhill’s trek though the Lincoln Tunnel to escape New York in The Stand, and Roland and Jake’s earlier experience on the trestle.

  While King seems to foreshadow that Eddie’s acrophobia will be the source of any trouble they have during the crossing, the wind is what brings about their crisis. A strong gust sweeps Oy over the edge while they are navigating the gap in the middle, and Jake leaps to his rescue. Eddie functions like a gunslinger, running to Jake’s rescue mindless of his fear.

  While all attention is focused on saving Jake and Oy, an intruder, Gasher by name, arrives wielding a hand grenade.22 He threatens to kill everyone—himself included—unless they turn Jake over to him. It’s another Mexican standoff. Jake demonstrates his faith in Roland by choosing to go with Gasher, trusting that Roland won’t let him down this time.

  Roland sends Eddie and Susannah to find Blaine, while he and Oy follow Jake’s trail through the booby-trapped streets of Lud. The warlike drum track from a ZZ Top song emanates from speakers hanging around the city, once part of a public address system for emergency announcement during some ancient war. The city’s residents hear within the drumbeats an invitation to commit ritual murder.23 They sacrifice themselves by lottery to appease the ghosts they believe responsible for the noise, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s famous short story “The Lottery.”24 From each speaker pole hangs a “grisly garland of corpses.” Thousands of bodies line the streets, a scene familiar to Dorcas from Rose Madder.

  In this section, King deftly juggles three parallel story lines, following Jake and Gasher, Roland and Oy, and Eddie and Susannah simultaneously. Each subplot is a crucial part of the gunslingers’ mission in Lud, and each has its own thread and building tension. The Fellowship of the Ring was similarly split into fragments during Frodo’s journey to the Tower. This is the first time the ka-tet is subdivided, but it won’t be the last.

  Eddie and Susannah encounter a simulacrum of Roland’s universe—six streets radiating from a central square. They follow the street whose entrance is guarded by a giant turtle, a logical choice since they are on the path of the Bear heading in the direction of the Turtle. Susannah kills a human being for the first time, shooting a childlike dwarf—one of the Pubes—who approaches with a grenade hidden behind his back. She and Eddie kill several others before the mob dissipates.

  They force two Pubes to lead them to the Cradle of Lud. Atop the station’s roof they see the Guardians of the Beam and a statue of Arthur Eld, the father of all gunslingers, the King Arthur of Roland’s land. The Pubes are afraid of Blaine, who they believe is the most dangerous of Lud’s ghosts. Inside, Eddie and Susannah find the monorail, made by North Central Positronics, who was also responsible for Shardik. From the front, the train looks like it has a face, reminiscent of Charlie the Choo-Choo.

  Blaine, who hasn’t run in a decade, is more than the train; he’s the voice of Lud, the one who brought the city’s technology back to life, deliberately driving its residents to battle. His brain is a vast array of computers buried in the city’s bowels. Like Susannah, he has two personalities: Big Blaine, a brash, confrontational lover of puzzles, and Little Blaine, a conscience who speaks only when Big Blaine isn’t paying attention. Little Blaine begs Eddie and Susannah not to disturb the train, who apparently isn’t aware of his alter ego.

  When Blaine comes to life, Little Blaine disappears, afraid Big Blaine will kill him. Blaine is angry at being awakened and a little out of touch with reality. He thinks the doorways between worlds are closed and believes gunslingers haven’t walked Mid-World or In-World in three centuries.

  After Eddie convinces Blaine they really are from New York, the games begin. The monorail doesn’t care where they came from; he just wants to hear some good riddles. The penalty for failure is death.

  Meanwhile, Gasher takes Jake deeper into the bowels of Lud to the lair of the Tick-Tock Man, “a cross between a Viking warrior and a giant from a child’s fairy tale,” named, perhaps, after a Harlan Ellison story.25 He was once Andrew Quick, the great-grandson of David Quick, and he rules with an iron fist. To Jake, he’s the only person in Lud who “seemed wholly vital, wholly healthy, and wholly alive.” Tick-Tock doesn’t have a short fuse; he has no fuse at all. Jake easily angers him and is batt
ered as a reward for his pertness.

  Oy picks up Jake’s scent and leads Roland through the decaying city. The ka-tet can communicate with each other telepathically, though their power most often manifests as a kind of knowing—the “touch,” Roland calls it, likening it to sending out his ka. His old friend Alain was strong with it, and Jake’s touch is growing, too. Roland tries to see through Jake’s eyes, but he can’t establish contact for fear that Jake will inadvertently reveal something to Tick-Tock.

  Roland knows how intelligent some billy-bumblers can be. He sends Oy to scout the room where Jake is being held. Oy reports the number of people in the room by tapping on the floor. The gunslinger finally contacts Jake and tells him to create a diversion. Jake imitates Eddie in Balazar’s lair, turning Tick-Tock’s suspicions on his own men.

  Oy breaks into the chamber through a ventilation grid and attacks Tick-Tock with the same determination and disregard for his own well-being that he will later use against Mordred. Tick-Tock bends Oy almost to the breaking point; Mordred will break Oy’s spine in the bumbler’s final battle. Though Oy survives, Roland knew it was possible that he was asking one member of his ka-tet to sacrifice himself for the sake of another, which indicates that, although he is evolving, Roland hasn’t yet reached a point where he won’t risk another being’s life to further his goals.

  Jake is distracted from opening the door to admit Roland, but it opens anyway, triggered remotely by Blaine. Jake joins the ranks of gunslingers when he shoots Tick-Tock Man with his father’s gun. The wound only appears to be fatal, though.