The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy (7 page)

She won't eat, but allows herself to be pushed along the beach. Roland thinks that Eddie will be okay now because he has someone to look after—a surrogate for his brother—and he sees the early signs that Eddie is falling in love.

Eddie is taken completely by surprise when Detta emerges that night. Whereas Odetta refuses to acknowledge the truth, Detta fervently believes things that never happened, most of them terrible. She accuses Eddie and Roland of raping her and trying to poison her.

Roland is getting sick again—the antibiotics only knocked back the infection without eliminating it—but he is alert enough to warn Eddie that Odetta is two women in one body. Because Roland believes that Eddie needs a lesson in how dangerous Detta can be, he allows Detta to steal his unloaded gun while they sleep. She tries to shoot Eddie and hits him in the head with the gun when that fails. This is the way Cort taught Roland important lessons.

Detta remains in control of the body as they struggle toward the third doorway. She does everything possible to impede their progress, just to be contrary. Even strapped to the chair, she manages to throw the hand brake and upset herself. She tries to bite any fingers that get within reach. At night she screams if Roland and Eddie fall asleep. Eddie is getting sick, too, from malnourishment caused by a constant diet of lobstrosity meat. Roland is too weak to push the chair and finally grows too weak to even walk. Fortunately, Odetta reasserts control. Since she is more cooperative, Eddie can take her ahead to the next door and come back with the chair for Roland.

They have a dilemma, though. In addition to the lobstrosities, there are wild creatures in the nearby hills. Roland has a gun to defend himself while Eddie and Odetta are gone, but Odetta will need to stay by herself for a couple of days while Eddie comes back for Roland. Roland tells Eddie not to leave his gun with her, but Eddie is in love and ignores Roland's advice. When they arrive at the doorway marked
THE PUSHER
, Odetta is missing. Eddie worries that an animal might have killed her, but Roland knows that she is lurking in the hills, a creature more dangerous than any wildcat or lobstrosity. And armed.

This time, Roland wants Eddie to come with him through the doorway, where he'll be safe, but Eddie refuses to abandon Odetta. Roland enters the mind of sociopath Jack Mort, a CPA who amuses himself by dropping bricks on people and pushing them in front of cars. He was responsible for both of Odetta's traumas, even though they took place years apart in different cities. Mort isn't interested in Roland, and Roland can't take being inside the killer's head for any longer than necessary. Fortunately, Mort's consciousness faints, allowing Roland free rein of his body and complete access to his mind and all the information it contains.

His objective in New York is twofold: get ammunition and antibiotics to fight his infection. He has a third item on his checklist, too, though that one requires Detta to emerge from the hills and to look through the door at the right moment.

To his horror, Roland realizes that Mort's next target is Jake Chambers. He wonders if this is a form of punishment: to witness Jake's first death without being able to stop it. Regardless of what it means for his quest, he won't stand aside and let Jake be sacrificed a second time. He steps forward long enough to make Mort miss his chance. Roland is improving. His brief exposure to Eddie and Odetta has made him more aware of the way his quest impacts the lives of others.

Throughout his adventures during this trip to New York, Roland has to worry about Eddie, who fell asleep while watching for Odetta and was captured by Detta. She hog-ties him and leaves him at the high-water line for the lobstrosities, hoping that this will draw Roland back so she can shoot him. Roland can't let her see what he sees when he looks through the door until he's ready, though, so he proceeds with his mission and resists the temptation to check up on the situation on the beach.

Nothing goes smoothly. At the gun shop, he is stymied by the fact that, though he has enough money to buy more bullets than he could imagine ever needing, he requires a carry permit to purchase them, and Jack Mort doesn't have one. He has to concoct an elaborate plan involving two rather stupid police officers who are keeping an eye on the gun shop in hopes of catching the owner selling weapons to criminals. Roland tells them the clerk robbed him. Once they are inside the shop, he disarms the police officers and “robs” the store, taking all the bullets he needs, but paying for them.

He proceeds around the corner to the pharmacy, where he pulls off the first penicillin heist in history, leaving behind Mort's gold Rolex as payment for the Keflex. To maintain order, he has to shoot one of the guns he confiscated from the cops, which attracts the attention of more police officers.

For the final part of his plan, Roland has Jack Mort lead him to the subway station where he pushed Odetta. A patrol officer shoots Mort, but his cigarette lighter saves him—an unlikely happenstance, but the sort of thing that occurs frequently when the Dark Tower is involved. Roland forces Mort to jump in front of the oncoming train and yells for Detta and Odetta to look at the moment the train cuts Mort's body in half at the waist.

The traumatic experience causes the woman to split into two factions that fight for control of her body. Odetta offers love and forgiveness and, as a result, a new entity is born: Susannah, who has Detta's “fight until you drop” stamina tempered by Odetta's calm humanity. She demonstrates her abilities as a gunslinger by taking Roland's guns to the beach to rescue Eddie from the lobstrosities.

Roland now has two companions. Though he was meant to draw three, he now believes that Susannah, who is three people in one, represents the three. Eddie still doesn't trust Roland completely. He knows that he and Susannah could still be sacrificed, and Roland doesn't deny this. He's already damned for letting Jake fall, but would sacrifice someone else if it meant he could save everything—not just his own world, but all worlds.

Though it would be several years before he returned to the Dark Tower series, King lays out the general shape of the next two books in the afterword to
The Drawing of the Three
. He even gives the titles of the books.
The Waste Lands
, he says, would detail half of their quest to reach the Dark Tower, and
Wizard and Glass
would be mostly about Roland's past, an enchantment and a seduction. He even raises the possibility that Roland won't make it to the Tower.

He doesn't mention Jake Chambers.

B
y the end of the 1980s, the Dark Tower series was generally available to Stephen King's fans.
The Gunslinger
was issued in trade paperback in 1988 and
The Drawing of the Three
in 1989. King also recorded audio versions of these two books, the first he had ever narrated. As the years went by, he mentioned his intention to write
The Waste Lands
, but he didn't finish the book until 1991. In the book's afterword, he admitted that he had problems getting back to the series, using a metaphor drawn from
The Waste Lands
to explain: the key Eddie shapes to open the doorway between Mid-World and Earth. “It seems to take more and more whittling to make each successive key fit each successive lock.”

An excerpt from
The Waste Lands
called “The Bear” appeared in the December 1990 issue of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
. The limited edition and limited-trade hardcover came out in August 1991, and a trade paperback edition was issued in January 1992.

The title of the book is a literary allusion to the poem “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot. The titles of the two halves of the novel are quotes from that poem: “Fear in a Handful of Dust” and “A Heap of Broken Images.” Several characters quote from the poem as well. Another meaning of the title is a reference to Detta Walker's “Drawers,” the place where she destroyed her aunt's special plate. Roland generalizes the word to mean any place of self-destruction. Lost places that are spoiled, useless or desolate. However, he also thinks these are powerful places where people can reinvent themselves.

The novel covers about twenty-five days in Mid-World, leading up to the beginning of autumn. In the first half, Roland finishes assembling his
ka-tet
. He has Eddie Dean and Susannah (who has adopted Eddie's last name), both of whom are proving to have all the characteristics of gunslingers, but he needs one more person: Jake Chambers. He feels the need to atone for letting
him fall in the chasm beneath the mountains so he could catch up with the man in black, but he is also suffering from a mental schism brought about by killing Jack Mort. He has two sets of memories: one in which he found Jake in the Way Station and allowed him to die and another in which the Way Station was empty and the boy was never part of his life. He believes this is another trap the man in black set for him. Bringing Jake back to Mid-World is the only way to keep from going insane.

Soon after the
ka-tet
is assembled, they face the first test of their mettle. They must pass through a city where an ages-old civil war still rages. The group is split up for one very long day and, as will happen on a number of occasions in the future, each person in the
ka-tet
will have an important part to play in resolving the crisis and getting everyone back together again alive and well. Though the conflict has little to do with Roland's quest to save the Dark Tower, it is important for the group's morale. They are forced to realize that, though Roland is their
dinh
(leader), they are more than just children to a symbolic father. They are warriors, individually vital to the completion of the mission, which by now has become their own. As Eddie Dean tells Roland, if the gunslinger should die in his sleep, they would mourn him, but then they would pick up and carry on in his stead, even if they don't have much chance of succeeding without him.

Then, after the
ka-tet
completes their mission, King leaves them stranded on a train rocketing across Mid-World at more than eight hundred miles per hour, trying their best to outwit the insane computer intelligence controlling their fate in a battle of riddles.