The Road to The Dark Tower (39 page)

One mystery introduced in
Insomnia
that the
Dark Tower
doesn’t clearly resolve is the nature of the green man who talks to Lois.
¹⁷
She feels he is a force of good, perhaps the counterpart to the Crimson King at the level of Higher Purpose—an agent of the White,
¹⁸
perhaps analogous to the Turtle in
It,
which might account for its green color.

Rose Madder
has only passing relevance to the
Dark Tower
series. According to the coda of
Song of Susannah,
though, King’s fictional version of himself was under the
Dark Tower
’s influence when he wrote the book. “I have an idea for a novel about a lady who buys a picture in a pawnshop and then kind of falls into it. Hey, maybe it’ll be Mid-World she falls into, and she’ll meet Roland.” [DT6]

Rose Madder
was written immediately after
Insomnia,
so it’s not surprising that Mid-World crept into the story. The woman named Rose Madder, whom Rosie meets in the painting, could be her twin. Wendy Yarrow, a victim of Rosie’s husband’s abuse, is twinned with Dorcas,
¹⁹
Rose Madder’s intermediary. Wendy and Dorcas are black women whose diction is reminiscent of Detta Walker’s.

Dorcas is conversant with Mid-World geography and history. She tells Rosie, “I’ve seen bodies on fire and heads by the hundreds poked onto poles along the streets of the City of Lud.” Rose Madder knows about Mid-World philosophy, telling Rosie that repaying each other for their actions is their balance, their ka. “Should we rage against ka? No, for ka is the wheel that moves the world, and the man or woman who rages against it will be crushed under its rim.”

When Rosie’s husband, Norman, finally confronts Rose Madder, he thinks hers “was the face of a supernally beautiful goddess seen in an illustration hidden within some old and dusty book like a rare flower in a weedy vacant lot.” Readers of the
Dark Tower
series already know that Jake found a wild rose in a weedy vacant lot, and Roland believes it is the Tower’s representation in Jake, Eddie and Odetta’s world.

Rosie saves a baby as part of her service to Rose Madder. Readers speculated that this infant might be important to the
Dark Tower
series, perhaps even be Susannah’s child, but neither the child nor Rose Madder ever appear again. The infant does bear something in common with Mordred, son of Mia: Though Rose Madder gave birth to the girl child, she won’t get to raise it and is to turn it over to someone, but who that is, King never specifies.

The book’s other minor ties to the
Dark Tower
include a framed photograph of Susan Day, the activist decapitated in
Insomnia,
and Cynthia Smith—one of Rosie’s friends from the Daughters and Sisters shelter for battered women—who goes on to encounter Tak in
Desperation
. Roland and Susannah traverse a maze beneath the Castle on the Abyss that brings to mind the one Rosie maneuvers to rescue the baby from the Minotaur.

In the fictional journal at the end of
Song of Susannah,
King calls the book “a real tank-job, at least in the sales sense.” He says he doesn’t like it “because I lost the song.” In
On Writing,
he described it—and
Insomnia
—as a “stiff, trying-too-hard” novel.

Unlike most of the other nonseries books, it’s only in retrospect that these two novels’ place in the mosaic of the
Dark Tower
universe becomes clear.
Desperation
and
The Regulators
²⁰
share a unique twinning
relationship and take place in different realties—different levels of the Tower, as it were.

Desperation, Nevada, is situated among the Desatoya Mountains, the location of Eluria in the novella “The Little Sisters of Eluria.” While Tak can be traced back to the China Pit mines in
The Regulators,
his appearance is described firsthand in
Desperation
. He was unleashed upon the world when the miners broke through a wall between dimensions.

From Mia’s description of the creatures in the infinite todash spaces between universes, it seems that Tak is probably such an entity, akin to the beings that occupy the fissures outside Lud and Fedic. That Tak speaks the same language of the unformed used by the Little Sisters and the Manni supports this notion. He may also be related to the monster in
It
.

The authors of
The Stephen King Universe
speculate that the Outsider in
Bag of Bones,
the evil force that enhances Sara Tidwell’s vengeful power, is another of these creatures. Jo Noonan says, “She’s let one of the Outsiders in, and they’re very dangerous.” Since
Bag of Bones
is set in Derry and in western Maine, both thin places, and Mike Noonan’s summer house, Sara Laughs, reappears in
The Dark Tower
as Cara Laughs, this may be a valid assumption, although Mike Noonan believes the Outsider is Death.

Some of Tak’s power is invested in small icons called can-tah, the little gods like the turtle sigul hidden in the bowling bag Jake picked up in the vacant lot. Tak is also known as Can Tak, or “big god.” He mentions the can toi, another name for the low men, creatures from between the Prim and the natural world.

In
The Regulators
Audrey Wyler escapes Tak by taking Seth to her imaginary safe place in Mohonk in 1982. This kind of todash trip in time and space is reminiscent of Mia’s journeys to the allure of the Castle on the Abyss, where she and Susannah find respite from New York.

After accepting an invitation to write a stand-alone
Dark Tower
novella, King had difficulty coming up with a story, but once he got going he had a hard time keeping it from turning into a novel. In its introduction in
Everything’s Eventual,
he writes:

I was about to give up when I woke one morning thinking about
The Talisman,
and the great pavilion where Jack Sawyer first glimpses the Queen of the Territories. . . . I started to visualize that tent in ruins . . . but still filled with whispering women. Ghosts. Maybe vampires. Little Sisters. Nurses of death instead of life. Composing a story from that central image was amazingly difficult. I had lots of space to move around in—Silverberg wanted short novels, not short stories—but it was still hard. [EE]

The Little Sisters, whose tent is currently set up near the Desatoya Mountains where the China Pit mine is located in
Desperation,
are vampires, Old Ones. They can go about in the daylight, but they cast no shadows.
²¹
Their vocabulary incorporates the language of the unformed used by Tak and by characters in the
Dark Tower
series. At this early point in his quest, Roland doesn’t recognize the words they speak.

The story also introduces the little doctors, parasitic bugs that facilitate healing. Their presence indicates that the old vampires aren’t far away, hence their nickname “Grandfather fleas.” Mia hears them scuttling beneath the table in the dream banquet hall where she feeds, and Oy kills a few of them at the Dixie Pig in 1999. (Eluria’s saloon is the Bustling Pig.) In
Insomnia,
Ralph has a vision of similar creatures pouring from his late wife’s head. He decides that they are part of the black aura, the deathbag known as todana that surrounds dying people.

It’s impossible to identify exactly when in Roland’s quest this story occurs. The only indication of a date comes from Eluria’s law office register, where the most recent entry is marked 12/
FE
/99, a designation Roland doesn’t recognize. All that can be said is that it takes place after the final battle at Jericho Hill and before Roland picks up the man in black’s trail. He has been traveling alone for at least ten months, but probably far longer. He looks at least twenty years older than John Norman, who is a teenager.

Shortly after he enters the abandoned town of Eluria, he is confronted by a threatening group of Slow Mutants. Roland attributes their mutations to their having worked in the radium mines beneath the mountains, but similar creatures worked as overseers near the Crimson King’s Big Combination, and their proximity to this Rube Goldberg–like
power-generating station may have caused their transformation. Roland hasn’t grown callous enough to shoot them in cold blood, but he also hasn’t fully developed the gunslinger skills he displays by the time he reaches Tull. He allows a mutant to sneak up behind him and knock him out, a mistake he would never make in later years.
²²
He thinks ka must be a cruel mistress if his quest to find the Dark Tower is to end at the hands of one such as these.

When Roland wakes up, suspended in a harness inside a vast silk tent, he thinks he’s dead. He hears bugs singing; when they stop, his pain returns. A female voice speaks to him, and the first person he thinks of is Susan Delgado. The Little Sisters, who remind him of Rhea of Cöos, are dressed like nuns and wear the sigul of the Dark Tower, a bloodred rose, on their uniforms. From the outside, their pavilion looks like an aging MASH tent but, like the Black House, it is vast on the inside.

The Sisters are ka-tet. They serve the doctors who in turn serve them by healing patients for the vampires to feed on. All that protects Roland is a religious medallion he picked up from a dead boy in the village square. Either its gold or its reference to God keeps the Sisters at bay. It identifies him as brother to John Norman, the boy in the hospital bed next to him, who is from Delain, sometimes known jestingly as Dragon’s Lair or Liar’s Heaven. All tall tales, including one about the last dragon killed by King Roland, perhaps, were said to originate there.

To keep him from escaping, the Sisters drug Roland’s food and force-feed it to him. The youngest of the six Sisters, Jenna, who is special owing to her bloodline, befriends Roland. Sister Mary, the group’s nominal leader, resents Jenna’s position. Jenna supplies Roland with an herbal remedy to counter the drug’s effects.

After the Sisters get a Slow Mutant to remove John’s protective medallion, Roland is the only human left for them to feed on. Jenna returns Roland’s guns on the night he must escape and brings with her an army of little doctors, held in command by the Dark Bells of her headdress. Roland is glad to see that Jenna can touch John’s medallion, but it burns her hands and she can only tolerate it briefly. Roland kisses her injured hands, making her cry. Roland hasn’t yet buried his sensitive side.

Jenna decides to leave the other Sisters and go with Roland. She confesses that she has supped of blood but plans to give it up. The other
Sisters tell her she’s damned. She says, “If there’s to be damnation, let it be of my choosing, not theirs.” Roland knows a little about damnation himself, and his lessons on that topic are just beginning.

Sister Mary intercepts them outside Eluria. Neither Roland’s weapons nor his hands are any use against her, but ka intervenes on his behalf. A dog with a cross-shaped patch of fur attacks the vampire leader, destroying her.

Roland and Jenna don’t get very far that night because Roland is still weak from his injuries. Jenna tells him the remaining three Sisters will move on; their canniness in this respect accounts for how they have survived for so long. He kisses Jenna, who has never been kissed as a woman before. In his dreams, the cross-marked dog leads him to the Dark Tower.

Jenna underestimates her power to exist free from her group. “Ka was a wheel; it was also a net from which none ever escaped.” Overnight she reverts to primal form: a swarm of little doctors who come together one last time to greet Roland before scattering.

Roland moves on westward, alone, leaving Eluria behind like countless other towns on his path.

The story doesn’t greatly impact the
Dark Tower
series. Rather, it is a snippet that reveals Roland at a transitional, vulnerable phase. He’s alone, but he doesn’t shun companionship. His skills are still developing, and he’s prone to making potentially lethal mistakes, but he is growing to understand that ka may want him to succeed.

In “Low Men in Yellow Coats,” the opening section of
Hearts in Atlantis,
King starts tying together the clues he’s been leaving in previous books. The story introduces Breakers—people sought by the Crimson King for some unknown but undoubtedly sinister purpose—into the
Dark Tower
mythos.
²³
Ted Brautigan, an escaped super-Breaker, spends most of the novel evading the low men, who want to return him to his task.

When Ted shows up at the boardinghouse where Bobby Garfield and his mother live, he has just escaped from Devar-Toi, the Breakers’ prison. Roland’s old friend Sheemie from Mejis made a hole that Ted passed
through, sending him to Connecticut in 1960. Most of Ted’s history isn’t told in this short novel, but he fills in the backstory in
The Dark Tower
.

Ted was born with extrasensory powers, but for most of his young life he couldn’t find any use for them. He volunteered to help Army Intelligence during World War II, but his talents threatened the hawks that wanted to fight, and he was turned away. Not only is Ted psychic, but he can also enhance the powers of others and can briefly pass on some of his own talent to those he comes in contact with.