The Road to The Dark Tower (34 page)

Roland’s watch is losing a few minutes each day. Susannah hopes that his eagerness to complete his quest won’t make him careless. If he makes the right mistake at the wrong moment, neither of them will see the Dark Tower. Back on the Path of the Beam, they find wood that will burn, and
are warm for the first time since Fedic. Keeping pace behind them, Mordred is so cold that he lines his mouth with straw to keep them from hearing his teeth chatter. Only hatred stops him from turning back to his red father’s castle.

The poisoned lands cause serious health problems for those who linger or pass through. The Breakers and minders in Devar-Toi had severe acne problems. Roland develops a dry, harsh cough. A cancerous tumor grows beside Susannah’s mouth. As Detta, she asks Roland to remove it, but he advises her to wait. Ironically, this cancer will provide her with the clue she needs to solve the riddle of how to get back to Eddie.

After several nights without fire, Roland and Oy corral a herd of deer out of the woods. Roland and Susannah kill ten, from which they make food, clothing and medicine that cures Roland’s cough. Roland isn’t much of a tailor,
²⁴
so Susannah resews his stitches. Each of them now has a leather vest, a pair of leggings, a coat and a pair of mittens.

Susannah cuts weeks from their uphill struggle through the snowfields by making Roland a pair of snowshoes. She’s pleased by her contribution, and can let Roland pull her along on a travois—like he had once been pulled along the beach—without feeling too much guilt. Still, it takes them three weeks to crest the hill and start downward again. She dreams nightly about Eddie and Jake. Eddie tells her she must let Roland go on alone. Jake reminds her to beware of Dandelo.

Mordred falls farther and farther behind, struggling to eat, to catch up and to stay warm.

They reach two recently plowed roads, the intersection of Odd Lane and Tower Road. One of the cottages clustered nearby looks lived-in. Susannah wants to keep going, but Roland feels obligated to warn whomever lives there about Mordred, who will not pass by.

An old man, introducing himself as Joe Collins, comes out to greet them. If Collins looks decrepit, his horse, Lippy,
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blind in both eyes and malnourished, is the ugliest quadruped Susannah has ever seen. Some of her good cheer melts away at the sight of it.

Collins has an ice machine, a hot-air furnace and electricity thanks to a generator. A robot changes the propane tanks periodically. He’s the first person they’ve met since Ben Slightman who possesses modern conveniences, a potential warning sign Roland and Susannah overlook. As long ago as the days of Mejis, Roland found out that people with access to
luxuries like ice should not be trusted because they have likely traded their souls for them.

Collins invites them to take cover in his house from the approaching blizzard. He has lived at Odd Lane for nearly seventeen years. The Polaroid photograph of the Dark Tower tacked haphazardly to the wall seems to Susannah almost sacrilegious. Roland is paralyzed with awe. Collins saw the Tower as recently as two years ago. Even walking, Roland can reach it in a few weeks.

Susannah is suspicious of inconsistencies in the story Collins tells them during dinner. He denies that the white lands are known as Empathica. She doubts much of his tale about how he came to live in this cottage, and she thinks she hears something crying. The only part she believes is when he tells about hiding in the cellar when the Crimson King blazed past in his own portable storm on his final pilgrimage to the Dark Tower six months earlier. He says he felt like “potential snack food.” Time is beyond relative in Mid-World, so it’s not clear what this six-month time span corresponds to for Roland. It hasn’t been six months since the liberation of Algul Siento.

Roland seems unaware anything is wrong. He encourages Collins to tell them jokes from his old stand-up routine and doesn’t seem to mind Collins’s lowbrow sense of humor, which is barely better than Eddie’s. Soon Roland and Susannah are laughing uncontrollably. The sore beside Susannah’s mouth starts bleeding, so she retreats to the bathroom to get a styptic pencil and Band-Aids. Here, she finds a note that says,
RELAX! HERE COMES THE DEUS EX MACHINA!
The message urges her to think about Odd Lane and then look for something the note’s author left her in the medicine cabinet.

She rearranges the letters in “Odd Lane” to get “Dandelo,” which Eddie and Jake had warned them about. In the living room, Roland is almost choking with laughter. Collins, feeding off their emotions, has grown almost twenty years younger in the few minutes she’s been out of the room.

Before she shoots Dandelo, the emotional vampire’s face changes into that of a psychotic clown. King seems to be leaving hints that connect the
Dark Tower
series and
It
. Pennywise often presented himself as a clown, and a member of the ka-tet that fought It was called Stutterin’ Bill, the same name as the robot who fills Collins’s propane tanks. The encounter with Dandelo is reminiscent of Beverly Marsh’s experience with Pennywise.
Mrs. Kersh—Pennywise in disguise—claimed that her father, Bob Gray, one of It’s aliases, loved his jokes. It came from a place outside the Earth, perhaps in one of the todash spaces between universes. (Henry Bowers thinks that It “came from the spaces between the stars.”)

Pennywise and Dandelo both feed on emotions—fear and imagination. Dandelo, however, doesn’t
seem
to have an existence that extends into the multiverse, like Pennywise did. To that extent, It is more akin to Tak and, possibly, the Crimson King, who disappeared into the deadlights after being bested by Ralph Roberts in
Insomnia
. In 1977, King told Roland and Eddie, “When I open my eyes to your world, he [the Crimson King] sees me. . . .
It
.”

Roland falls to his knees and won’t get up until Susannah forgives him for being taken in. Inside the medicine cabinet, they find an envelope addressed to them. The note calls the gunslinger Childe Roland, an ancient, formal term Roland says describes a knight—or a gunslinger—on a quest. “We never used it among ourselves, for it means holy, chosen by ka. We never liked to think of ourselves in such terms.” The message says, “You saved my life. I’ve saved yours. All debts are paid.”

They also find a photocopy of Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” with several stanzas circled
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depicting the liar, set with his staff to waylay travelers. Susannah realizes that this poem was King’s inspiration. Stanza XVI tells of how Cuthbert and Roland fell out over Susan Delgado. They wonder if Browning is also in some way responsible for their existence since the poet wrote about the gunslinger a century before King wrote the
Dark Tower
series. Was Browning an earlier channel for Gan?

Dandelo’s main supply of emotional energy was Patrick Danville, whom Roland and Susannah find in the cellar. The boy’s mind is terribly damaged. Dandelo fed him barely enough to stay alive, while consuming his laughter, tears and fears several times a week.

Unwilling to stay in the house—which degrades after Dandelo dies—they hole up in the barn for three days until the blizzard passes. Stutterin’ Bill clears the road after the storm and gives them a ride to Federal Outpost 19, which is as far as his programming will let him go. Some of the monitors in the outpost still work, but the one that used to show the Tower has gone out. “I don’t think the Red King liked being on television,” Bill says.

Dandelo had forbidden Bill from repairing the computer glitch that caused him to stutter; Roland gives him permission to fix it. Behind the outpost, Bill shows them vehicles that could carry them the last hundred miles of their journey, but Roland wants to walk. “I’m not ready to be there yet. . . . I need a little more time to prepare my mind and my heart. Mayhap even my soul.” Now that the Tower is within his grasp, he’s lost a little of the imperative that has driven him for a thousand years. When he thought Walter was within his grasp at the way station, he ran to confront him. Now he needs more time. The temptation to run will come upon him again soon, though.

They take a pull-cart for their provisions and a battery-powered vehicle for Susannah. Five days at a comfortable pace will get them to the Tower. He’d like to arrive around sunset if possible, for that’s when he’s always seen it in his dreams.

Susannah suffers frequent bouts of weeping. Only Roland is meant to reach the Tower, and she doesn’t know what is to become of her, Patrick and Oy. She dreams about Eddie and Jake waiting for her in New York, trying to tell her something. She sees product brands that tell her they aren’t in Keystone Earth, and she begins to realize that this is where she needs to go.
²⁷
Given her power to imagine things and have them manifest, it is possible that her repeated dreams of Christmas in Central Park turn this fantasy into her future reality.

Her dream also features a door decorated with two crossed pencils with the erasers cut off and the words
THE ARTIST
, a clue that Patrick is involved. In Dandelo’s pantry, Roland found pencils like these. Dandelo removed the erasers because Patrick’s drawings make things real and unreal, although he doesn’t know it.

She needs to find this door before she sees any part of the Tower, or her choice between it and the door will be harder. She’s worried that Eddie won’t know her, or that he’ll turn out to be a junkie. Even worse, she worries that Eddie will recognize her but deny it because that would be easier than trying to deal with how they could possibly know each other.

Her way to the door is through Patrick. Susannah tests her theory by having him erase the cancerous sore beside her mouth in his portrait of her. Roland had drawn her, Eddie and Jake. Now Patrick has drawn her, too.

Patrick draws a doorway to her specifications and copies onto it the
symbols she dreamt. If he doesn’t get these siguls exactly right, the door will either not open or open some place she doesn’t want to go. When Roland shows Patrick how to put the doorway into the context of their surroundings, it materializes before them. Susannah invites Patrick to come with her but he, like the Breakers, is a misfit, afraid of going someplace new.

Susannah tries to distance herself from Roland by bringing Detta forward when it’s time to leave. Roland reminds her that she hasn’t asked Oy if he will go with her. If she asks as Detta, he’ll surely stay. Susannah puts Detta away, but Oy decides to stay with “Ollan.” He still has a job to do, one assigned to him by Eddie: protect Roland from Mordred.

Roland wants her to stay even though he knows he is to complete his journey alone. He’s only had companions for a brief time during his epic quest, but now he seems afraid to go on without her. He warns that her dreams may be tricks and she might pass through the doorway into todash space, but Susannah has made her decision. If she is lost, then “I’ll light the darkness with thoughts of those I love,” she responds. Roland starts to beg her to stay, but she doesn’t want to remember him this way. She can’t bear to see him on his knees.

She has no second thoughts, believing that Oy and Patrick will soon meet the same fate as Jake and Eddie. She kisses Roland good-bye and tastes death in the breath of a thousand years and ten thousand miles. “But not for you gunslinger. For others, but never for you. May I escape your glammer and may I do fine.”

She rides through the doorway into Central Park in a world that is close enough to the real one that in time she won’t know the difference. The first person she sees is Eddie. Before she approaches him, she discards Roland’s gun, which looks like it hasn’t been used in decades. She is still enough of a gunslinger to regret throwing away such a weapon, but she’s doesn’t pause or look back once she does.

Eddie Toren from White Plains, a city about thirty miles from New York, doesn’t know her, but he knows her name. He’s been dreaming of her for months. He loves her already, though he doesn’t understand how that can be. Eddie’s younger brother, Jake, has been dreaming of her, too. It’s the only reason Eddie knows he isn’t going crazy. Susannah knows the enormous force of ka is working in her favor this time.

She tells Eddie that they may end up working for Tet Corporation,
which still had about thirty years of work ahead of it in 1999. Susannah takes Eddie’s familiar, well-loved hand. She thinks she will die of joy.

“Did they live happily ever after? There was happiness and they did live.”

ROLAND HAS ONE MORE OBSTACLE before reaching the Tower: Mordred. His monster son is still following but he is dying, poisoned from eating Dandelo’s horse. His time to act is running out. He must kill Roland before he reaches the Tower the following day.

The Tower calls out to Roland, but he’s so disheartened, lonely and tired that even its lovely song can’t lift him. He says cruel words to Oy, and when he later apologizes, Oy ignores him. King knows Oy is supposed to die, but the fictional writer thinks Oy seems fine, good to go all the way to the Dark Tower.

Shortly after noon, Roland sees the first wild rose growing by the side of the road. Light pink on the outside, it darkens to a fierce red on the inside—the exact color of heart’s desire. He falls on his knees before it, tipping his ear to listen to the rose’s singing. In its heart he sees a yellow center so bright he can’t look directly at it: Gan’s gateway. Unlike the rose in the vacant lot, this one is healthy and full of light and love. The field of roses is a living force field feeding the Beams with their songs and their perfume. In turn, the Beams feed the roses.