The Road to The Dark Tower (29 page)

King tells Roland and Eddie that Susannah’s baby will kill her if they don’t reach her in time and that Black Thirteen must be destroyed. If it wakes, it will become the most dangerous thing in the universe. “Take the ball to the double Tower,” he says.
²⁸
Since King hasn’t written this part of the story yet, this advice must come from deep within him, via ka.

He tells Roland he is allowed to send a letter to himself, perhaps even a small package, but only once. The message he chooses to convey is another key, which he sends to Jake. Roland wakes King from his hypnotic trance with an order to forget everything except in the depths of his mind.

CALLAHAN, JAKE AND OY pursue Mia’s trail. In New York, they encounter Reverend Earl Harrigan, Henchick’s twin and pastor of the Church of the Holy God-Bomb. He tells them that Susannah, who communicated with him via her Dogan microphone, got into a taxi less than half an hour ago. They visit the skyscraper on the site of the former vacant lot and discover the wild rose is still there in a flower garden in the lobby, behind velvet ropes where it receives sun through the building’s tall windows. Many of those who pass it on their way to work weep. A sign says
GIVEN BY THE TET CORPORATION
,
IN HONOR OF THE BEAM FAMILY
,
AND IN MEMORY OF GILEAD
.

Jake checks for messages at the hotel where Susannah stayed and is given the note King sent upon emerging from Roland’s hypnotic trance. The writing on the envelope is in half-script and half-printing.
²⁹
Inside the envelope is a hotel card key and a message that begins, “This is the truth,” echoing Jake’s essay.

Jake and Callahan realize Black Thirteen is still in Susannah’s room, and the Crimson King’s men will come back for it when Mia shows up without it. “I thought I was rid of it,” Callahan says. “Some bad pennies just keep turning up.” The card key gets them into Mia’s room—they don’t have any doubt which room is hers—and Jake guesses the safe combination. He arms himself with Orizas, which he learned to use in the Calla. The Wizard’s Glass tries to get Callahan to kill Jake. Jake, Callahan, Oy and a passing maid all invoke the name of God to quiet it. Their victory here renews Callahan’s faith and emboldens him for their coming mission.

Callahan steals the maid’s tip money and they take a taxi to a building with the safest storage in New York—the “double Tower.” They purchase enough tokens to store Black Thirteen indefinitely in a basement locker of the World Trade Center.
³⁰
Jake jokes that the locker is safe unless “the building falls down on top of it.” Without realizing it, Jake and Callahan have solved the problem of Black Thirteen. “Even a ball filled with deep magic wouldn’t be much good underneath a hundred and ten stories of concrete and steel.”

Callahan worries that their enemies at the Dixie Pig might pick the location of the locker from their minds. “It might be a bad idea for us to be taken alive.” Both Jake and Callahan believe this is their night to die. Callahan hears Jake’s last rites before they enter the restaurant.

Jake lays out a general plan of attack for their assault. Like the man who trained him, he knows to allow room for improvisation. He gives Callahan his father’s Ruger and arms himself with Orizas, but Oy finds another weapon that will help them immeasurably in the Dixie Pig: the scrimshaw turtle talisman that Susannah left behind in the gutter while Mia was distracted.

A FORTUITOUS TRAFFIC JAM caused by a bus—in other words, an event orchestrated by ka—prompts Mia’s taxi driver to drop her off a block short of the Dixie Pig. On the street, she encounters a singer performing “Man of Constant Sorrow,” a song Susannah associates with her days of social activism and that she sang for the people of the Calla. After all she’s been through with Roland, Susannah knows that hearing that
song can’t be a coincidence. Mia, without Susannah’s influence, offers the man $50 to play it again. The song transports Susannah back to Odetta’s experiences in Oxford, Mississippi, and Mia feels their glorious hope and love, exalted by the simplicity of what they believe.

Mia sees how deeply she’s been misled when she asks Susannah what her mother was like. Susannah shows her a simple scene of coming home from school to find her mother waiting with warm gingerbread in the oven. From that moment, Mia understands what motherhood could be if allowed to run its course uninterrupted. “I agreed to mortality but I missed most of what makes the short-time life worthwhile, haven’t I?” (“Short-Timers” is how immortals describe mortals, a term used by the bald docs in
Insomnia
and by the ghosts in
Kingdom Hospital
. The creature in
It
also comments on the short lives mortals lived.)

During Mia’s momentary distraction, Susannah throws the scrimshaw turtle into the gutter, entrusting ka to get it to the ka-tet. Detta—Susannah’s other demon—emerges to suggest that they might use Mia’s mothering instinct to turn her into an ally.

Susannah’s attempts to keep her labor under control reach their limits. The system overloads. She flips the Chap switch from
ASLEEP
to
AWAKE
, but it’s not enough. The only solution is to increase the Labor Force, going all the way to ten, sending Mia into full labor.

Inside the Dixie Pig, the smell of roasting meat greets them. The restaurant is full of low men and women, and vampires. Sayre is there, too, with a hole in his forehead, looking like he had been shot at close range. Blood swims there but never overflows the “wound.” He claps for Mia and the others join in, crying, “Hile, Mia!” and “Hile, Mother.” Strange bugs scamper beneath the table, echoing the cheer in bug language that Mia hears in her head.

Detta takes momentary control and pulls the masks from a low woman. Beneath, she has the face of a red rat with yellow teeth growing up the outside of her cheeks. Detta tries to stay in charge, but Mia is stronger and takes over again.

Sayre humiliates Mia in front of his minions, forcing her to lick his boots.
³¹
“You have been an excellent custodian . . . but we must also remember that it was Roland of Gilead’s gilly [that is, Susannah] who actually bred the child.”

Behind a tapestry, she sees a dozen of the man/woman-beast hybrids called taheen dining on the roasting corpse of a human baby. The restaurant’s specialty is “long pork,” a euphemism for roasted human flesh. The kitchen is a twin of the one from Castle Discordia where Mia fed in her dreams.

Mia and Susannah rendezvous briefly on the castle ramparts.
³²
Mia finally accepts that she’s been misled. Her epiphany is reminiscent of Harold Lauder’s eleventh-hour realization that Flagg had misled him in
The Stand
. She begs Susannah to help her get away with her chap, even if it means escaping into the todash darkness. Wandering forever in darkness with her son by her side is better than the alternative. “And if there’s no way for us to be free,” Mia says, “kill us.”

As they pass through a doorway between New York and Fedic, Susannah overhears the password. Though it is in a strange language, she knows she could repeat it. She is taken to a room in the Fedic Dogan filled with hospital beds, one of which is occupied by Mia in her corporeal form and is covered with the bugs Susannah saw in the Dixie Pig. These are the same parasitic little doctors used by the Little Sisters of Eluria to heal their patients.

Susannah and Mia are connected by something straight out of
Star Trek
. The link is required to transfer the fetus to Mia, so she can accomplish the final labor and push the baby out. After Mia delivers, neither Susannah nor Mia will be needed. Susannah is slated to appear on the menu at the Dixie Pig. She screams in pain as the baby is transmitted to Mia to be born. “And on the wings of that song, Mordred Deschain, son of Roland (and one other, o can you say Discordia), came into the world.”

THE STORY ENDS here. The book, though, contains a coda: Stephen King’s journal from three days after he meets Roland and Eddie through the date of his accident, less than three weeks after Mia gives birth to Mordred.

He records the process of returning to work on the
Dark Tower
series and the journey to publication of the constituent stories followed by
The Gunslinger
. Nine years after Roland and Eddie’s visit, he decides to give Roland some friends and starts
The Drawing of the Three
. “It seems to me
that a lot of the other things I’ve written (especially
It
) are like ‘practice shots’ for this story.” He decides it’s a good book, but “in many ways it seems like I didn’t write the damn thing at all, that it just flowed out of me . . . the wind blows, the cradle rocks, and sometimes it seems to me that none of this stuff is mine, that I’m nothing but Roland of Gilead’s fucking secretary.”

Two years later, he quits drinking, and a couple of years after that he gets a dozen roses for his birthday and hears the call to start
The Waste Lands
. There are hardly any strikeouts or retakes. Other than a few continuity glitches, the huge manuscript is clean. He expresses concern over Susannah’s pregnancy, but reassures himself that he won’t have to deal with that for another book or two. He knows the fans are going to howl at the cliff-hanger ending. The book feels like the high point of his make-believe life, perhaps even better than
The Stand
.

He gets fan mail from a seventy-six-year-old cancer victim who asks how the series will end. He feels bad because he can’t answer her. “I have no more idea what’s inside that damned Tower than . . . well, than
Oy
does! . . . The wind blows and the story comes. Then it stops blowing, and all I can do is wait, the same as you. . . . They think I’m in charge, every one of them from the smartest of the critics to the most mentally challenged reader. And that’s a real hoot. Because I’m not.”

The coda takes readers through his work on
Wizard and Glass
and discusses arguments he has with his wife about the dangers of his long walks along the narrow country roads near their lake house. He’s pleased to see Flagg show up again and muses that he may turn out to be Walter, Roland’s old nemesis. “I can see now how to a greater or lesser degree, every story I’ve ever written is about this story. . . . Writing this story is the one that always feels like coming home.”

But it also feels dangerous. He is aware of some anticreative force to which he’s more vulnerable when he’s working on this series. He’s worried he might die of a heart attack while writing, and he doesn’t want to leave behind an unfinished work.
³³
“
The Dark Tower
is my
uber
story, no question about that.”

He sees the series’ influence in other books. In mid-1999, though he is between
Dark Tower
books, he dreams more and more about baby Mordred, Discordia and June 19, 1999. He and Tabby continue to argue again about his walking route. The coda ends with a clipping from the
Portland
Telegram
announcing King’s accident on June 19, 1999. In this timeline, King succumbs to his injuries.
³⁴

While characters may have encountered their own creator in fiction before, the
Dark Tower
series may be the first to explore the implications of what happens to characters if their creator dies before they reach the end of their story.

King remarked in 1994 that he knew the general layout of the rest of the series; he said in a personal communication that he had an accident in mind for his fictional counterpart, but nothing as dramatic as what would befall him five years later.
³⁵
Reality, which is often stranger than fiction, stepped in and provided King with unexpected material that would dramatically influence his magnum opus.

Everyone faces mortality. Everyone has work they want to accomplish before they reach the clearing at the end of the path. By inserting himself and his accident into the series, King acknowledges how important finishing Roland’s quest is to him.

¹
Unless otherwise specified, all quotes in this chapter come from
Song of Susannah
.

²
They will discover before long that they have another deadline in 1999, but the only vague notion Roland has of that situation is his worsening arthritis.

³
The Beam of the Wolf and Elephant, according to Pimli Prentiss in
The Dark Tower
. Roland believes it might be the Fish-Rat Beam.

⁴
Part of their prayer includes “Over-can-tah,” bringing to mind the language of the unformed and Tak.

⁵
Oy dutifully accepted this plan but cried tears of sorrow at the thought of being separated from Jake.

⁶
This building really exists and is somewhat as King describes it, though it is only sixteen stories tall instead of the seventy to eighty stories in
The Dark Tower
. The nearby pocket park with the turtle statue also exists in this region of New York, known as Turtle Bay.

⁷
Perhaps a symbolic name. Saul had a strange encounter on the road to Damascus that changed his life. Trudy works for Guttenberg, Furth, and Patel. Robin Furth is King’s research assistant. Surendra and Geeta Patel are friends to whom
From a Buick 8
was dedicated.

⁸
Named for Stephen Maturin, a character in seafaring novels by Patrick O’Brian. Maturin describes a fictitious species of turtle that he discovers in the South Pacific. Jack Aubrey, for whom
Testudo
(“tortoise” in Latin)
aubreii
was named, is Maturin’s friend. According to an e-mail message from King’s office posted at Anthony Schwethelm’s Dark Tower Compendium Web site, King has a pet turtle named Maturin that he had recently discovered is actually female.