The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy (29 page)

I
SSUE
7: _______________________________________________

C
HARYOU
T
REE
, P
ART
II: C
OME
R
EAP

The story of how Arthur Eld attempted to stop the annual human sacrifices across Mid-World but was unable to do so. His solution was to institute a lottery system where one random person would be selected for sacrifice in a public celebration in Gilead. However, agents of the Prim capitalized on Queen Rowena's jealousy over the fact that Emmanuelle Deschain had given birth to Arthur's only male heir, manipulating her into surrendering her soul in exchange for having Emmanuelle selected as the sacrifice and the promise of becoming pregnant by Arthur. Instead, her pregnancy was like that of Susannah Dean's (or Mia's), and the child that she ultimately gives birth to is a creature similar to Mordred Deschain. The palace guards kill the monster after it sucks the life from Queen Rowena. Enraged, Arthur thrusts the carcass into the crowd waiting below and uses this abomination to put an end to the Reaptide tradition of the charyou tree.

T
HE
L
ONG
R
OAD
H
OME

Original release dates:
February 2008 through June 2008 (5 issues)

Credits:

•
Creative Director and Executive Director:
Stephen King

•
Plotting and Consultation:
Robin Furth

•
Script:
Peter David

•
Art:
Jae Lee and Richard Isanove

•
Lettering:
Chris Eliopoulos

The Long Road Home begins exactly where The Gunslinger Born left off, after Susan Delgado's death. Though the story of the boys' return to Gilead and Roland's obsession with the pink orb from the Wizard's Rainbow was told briefly in
Wizard and Glass
, this series greatly expands on the tale and introduces elements absent from King's novels.

Roland insists on burying Susan. He blames the grapefruit for her death and shoots it. The glass does not shatter—it turns into something alive that rebuilds itself. It then wraps itself around Roland's face and sucks his essence inside.

The gunshot attracts the attention of the Hambry posse, led by Clay Reynolds, the only surviving Big Coffin Hunter. Cuthbert and Alain slow him down by shooting his horse. They drag Roland's limp body with them until they reach a dilapidated bridge with missing slats. In
The Dark Tower
, Roland told his
ka-tet
about cutting a bridge that would have inconvenienced Sheemie Ruiz, who was following them, though they didn't know it. In this story, Alain and Cuthbert cut the bridge to prevent the posse from catching up with them—after one of their horses breaks a leg during the crossing and must be put down.

Sheemie Ruiz is distraught over his failure to save Susan. When he gets lost, he ends up at one of North Central Positronics' Dogans, where his presence activates a long-dormant robot. The robot experiments on Sheemie, giving him new powers that will come into play shortly and again much later in Roland's adventures.

Roland's trapped mind travels to Thunderclap, where he encounters Marten. He sees a vision of Oy and one of himself alone as an older man. Marten tells him he killed his friends one by one. When Alain attempts to use his touch to rescue Roland, the orb sends him todash and Cuthbert is left behind to handle the mutant wolves that kill their remaining horses. Marten has no use for Alain, so he sends him back. More mutant wolves attack. Roland emerges from his trance long enough to kill one of the wolves with his bare hands.

Alain is injured and perhaps poisoned by another of the beasts. Cuthbert fires into the woods, thinking more wolves are coming, but shoots Sheemie instead. Sheemie accepts the wounds as punishment for failing Susan. However, the wounds aren't fatal and Sheemie's new powers give him the ability to heal himself and Alain.

Marten carries Roland to the Castle of the Crimson King. He presents himself in a nearly human form, but he has the avatar of the third eye of his minions in his forehead. Roland is totally irreverent in the face of this evil figure. The Crimson King calls Roland his cousin, explaining that Arthur Eld had affairs after Queen Rowena went barren. One of Arthur's jillies was one of the Great Old Ones of the Prim. While Steven and Roland are direct descendants of the line of Eld, Arthur Eld is the Crimson King's father. He is the rightful sovereign because he was born first.

The Crimson King explains his motives: he wants the kingdom restored to the chaos that existed before the Dark Tower came to be. Steven Deschain's guns, the ones Roland will inherit, are the keys to the Tower since they originated from within it. The Crimson King wants Roland to help him claim the throne at the top of the Tower and destroy all the universes so the Prim will
once again run rampant. Marten knows that Roland will never go along and advises the Crimson King to kill and eat Roland and steal Steven's guns when Gilead falls to Farson.

Sheemie enters the grapefruit and arrives in time to snatch Roland from the Crimson King's clutches just as he is about to be killed. Sheemie uses his power of teleportation to spirit them away and escape from the grapefruit. Roland awakens, but has little recollection of what transpired inside the glass. Yet he remains fascinated by it.

The boys walk the rest of the way home only to discover that everyone thinks they're dead. Farson spread rumors of their demise to demoralize the people of Gilead. Roland is reunited with his father and learns that his mother is at a woman's retreat in Debaria. He does not turn over the pink orb to his father. Alain and Cuthbert keep his secret.

E
XTRA
F
EATURES
:

I
SSUE
1: _______________________________________________

W
ELCOME TO THE
D
OGAN
, P
ART
I: T
HE
G
HOSTLY
Q
UEEN

After reporting on the development of a new territory that arose from the Prim in the Borderlands region called Thunderclap, a land of nightmares, where the Great Ones were rumored to have built a fortress from which they hoped to launch an attack on Gan—the Dark Tower, in other words—this essay picks up the story of Arthur Eld after the deaths of Emmanuelle Deschain (mother of his heir), Queen Rowena, and the monstrous spawn. Arthur descends into a paranoid period of mourning, distraught over the loss of the woman he loved (Emmanuelle, not Rowena) and fearing an attack from his enemies in the Prim. He blames himself for Rowena's restless spirit when he hears reports of her ghost wandering the halls and grounds of the castle,
cradling the bloody pieces of her spider child in her arms. Arthur encounters her for the first time in the center of a forest clearing while hunting deer. He dismounts from his horse, Llamrei, and follows the specter into the forest to a Druit circle where he finds an ironwood door labeled
THE KING
, reminiscent of the ones Roland found on the beach. Following Rowena, he opens the door and finds himself in an alternate world where the Great Poisoning had obliterated everything. She leads him to a Dogan, where he is ambushed by a legion of robots.

I
SSUE
2: _______________________________________________

W
ELCOME TO THE
D
OGAN
, P
ART
II: T
HE
E
VIL
U
FFI

Arthur's knights follow his tracks through the forest to try to discover why he didn't return from his hunting trip. They are unable to find any trace of him or his horse, and the ghost of Queen Rowena stops haunting the halls of the castle at the same time. The people of Gilead wonder if the ghost dragged him off to the punishment pits of Na'ar and pray for his safe return. Reports of sightings of his animated corpse start coming in, and a young woman accuses the reanimated king of accosting her, spearing her in the stomach and making off with her young child. The corpse of the baby was found on her hearth two days later. Arthur is joined in terrorizing the countryside by the reanimated spirits of any of his knights who had fallen in battle. Gunslingers sent out to stop the terror were killed and drained of their blood. Some people believed that these creatures were evil uffis—shape-shifters in the guise of the king and his men—and that the intent was to destroy the peace and unity of All-World.

Two of Arthur's knights, Bertrand Allgood (ancestor to Cuthbert) and Alfred Johns (ancestor to Alain) believe the Great Ones from the Prim are behind this scheme. They return to the place where their king had last been seen and find the freestanding door, though it is locked. They wait until the posse of vampire riders in the guise of their fallen friends returns. The two gunslingers follow them through the door just before it closes again. They follow the horses to the Dogan, where they discover the golems in stasis chambers under the supervision of a tall robot. The droid wheels in a gurney bearing Arthur Eld, who was sedated but alive. The helmet it places on Arthur's head creates a link to the golems in their chambers, drawing upon his memories to create two more uffis—that resemble Allgood and Johns.

Q&A: P
ETER
D
AVID WITH
M
ARC
S
TROM

The man responsible for the scripts of the Dark Tower graphic novels answers questions about The Long Road Home.

Q&A: R
OBIN
F
URTH WITH
F
RANK
D
EANGELO
IV

Stephen King's research assistant discusses The Long Road Home and how the story this series tells arises out of the existing material in the Dark Tower novels.

T
HE
L
ONG
R
OAD
H
OME
M
IDNIGHT
L
AUNCH

A one-page report on the midnight launch of The Long Road Home at Midtown Comics in Manhattan, attended by Jae Lee and Peter David.

I
SSUE
3: _______________________________________________

W
ELCOME TO THE
D
OGAN
, P
ART
III: C
ITY OF THE
D
EAD

Arthur Eld, who has been missing from Gilead for three months, awakens in the Dogan to find two entities hovering over him—a droid and Arthur Eld's ghoulish double. He doesn't know that his kingdom has fallen into anarchy. His citizens have fled to safer havens and harriers once again prey on travelers. His only hope for salvation comes in the form of Sir Alfred Johns and Sir Bertrand Allgood, who have tracked their
dinh
to the Dogan in time to see a droid produce their uffis (evil twins), designed to join the terror campaign being waged against New Canaan. The vampiric versions of Eld, Allgood and Johns arrive at Gilead, impervious against all efforts to stop them from entering the castle, where the false king takes his place at the banquet table. The real Arthur Eld, however, is in possession of a Manni plumb bob, one of the arcane devices they use to travel between worlds. They have no control over where the plumb bob will take them but
ka
exerts its hand, sending them to Can'-Ka No Rey, the rose-filled fields around the Dark Tower. The Tower's twelve Guardians arrive in answer to Gan's summons to bear Arthur and his two knights back to Gilead, where they exile the uffi to their proper level of the Tower.

T
HE
M
AKING OF
A C
OVER

A two-page illustrated essay showing each stage of Jae Lee and Richard Isanove's work in creating a cover for this issue of The Long Road Home.

D
ARK
T
OWER ON THE
R
OAD BY
F
RANK
D
EANGELO
IV

Peter David discusses (and sometimes refuses to discuss) the story that remains to be told in The Long Road Home.

I
SSUE
4: _______________________________________________

M
ID
-W
ORLD
M
UTANTS

A pictorial essay detailing the major kinds of animal and human mutations that developed as a result of the Great Poisoning. Animals covered include deer, dogs, horses, insects, rats and wolves. Human mutations include the slow mutants, the Children of Roderick and the Wasteland Mutants.

I
SSUE
5: _______________________________________________

I
NVOKING THE
G
UARDIANS

A scholarly discourse on the Guardians of the Beam, whose exact nature and origins are unknown. Some see them as magical or spiritual forces. Other speculate that they are no more than cyborgs created by the Old People to atone for the great evil their culture perpetrated against the Earth and use as evidence blueprints discovered in North Central Positronics Dogans in the Borderlands. The true believers explain this apparent discrepancy by arguing that the cyborgs are mechanical avatars that focus the sacred powers of the true Guardians, akin to the
can-tah
stones that represent the Beams. The Guardians oversee the White aspect of the portals, and their opposites, the hermaphroditic demon elementals, represent the Outer Dark at these gateways to other worlds. Instead of being baptized, each child born in Mid-World undergoes a ceremony known as the Invocation of the Guardians. At the conclusion of this ritual, one of the parents may dream of a particular Guardian that will give the child a second, secret, powerful name.