The Road to The Dark Tower (18 page)

¹⁰
Deepneau is distantly related to Ed Deepneau from
Insomnia,
the man who became the Crimson King’s tool.

¹¹
The book discusses how riddles are perhaps the oldest of all the games people still play today, and tells the story of Samson’s wedding-day riddle, but the account is inaccurate. It sets the story at Samson’s wedding to Delilah, but according to the Bible, it took place when Samson was supposed to marry a Philistine woman. Samson’s riddle of the lion and honey is a complex play on words that derives from the fact that “lion” and “honey” are outwardly identical in Hebrew.

¹²
The key isn’t the only thing Jake will find in this lot that proves crucial to their quest. The bowling bag that allows them to carry Black Thirteen in the Calla will also materialize in this lot for him to find on a future journey.

¹³
The roses growing near the Tower are so firmly rooted that their thorns sever another of Roland’s fingers when he tries to pick one.

¹⁴
The ability Jake and Susannah get when they wield their siguls is a more powerful version of Andy McGee’s “push” in
Firestarter,
which was created by science, not magic. Andy McGee’s power also damages him physically when he uses it, in the same way that using mechanical doorways (like the one the Wolves use to get to the Calla) sickens people. As King says in
Wolves of the Calla,
“Gods leave siguls. Men leave machines.”

¹⁵
Co-Op City is really in the Bronx, not Brooklyn, so Jake’s world isn’t Keystone Earth, even though the rose exists here. Jake and Eddie may or may not come from the same reality.

¹⁶
Though Lud is twinned with New York, its location in Mid-World is comparable to St. Louis. Eddie jokes, “Today we’re studying Wacky Geography in Mid-World. You see, boys and girls, in Mid-World you start in New York, travel southeast to Kansas, and then continue along the Path of the Beam until you come to the Dark Tower . . . which happens to be smack in the middle of everything.”

¹⁷
When Jake arrives in Mid-World, his digital watch displays an impossible time and runs backward. Roland comments that “as a rule no timepiece did very good work these days.” The Tet Corporation gives Roland one that works fairly well until he gets close to the Tower.

¹⁸
Oy is based on King’s Welsh corgi, Marlowe.

¹⁹
At least 105 years old, she is reminiscent of Mother Abigail from
The Stand
. Unwin was the name of the original publisher of
The Lord of the Rings
.

²⁰
Jake’s housekeeper, Greta Shaw, had a copy, too. In High Speech, “char” means “death,” as in the charyou tree that was Susan Delgado’s destiny, which may be an omen.

²¹
Eddie and Jake see the resemblance to the George Washington Bridge in New York. Roland will see that bridge from the window of the boardroom at the Tet Corporation’s office and agree.

²²
King credits having read
The Quincunx
by Charles Palliser as his inspiration for Gasher’s dialect. [DT6]

²³
Eddie is apoplectic when he discovers what’s going on. “You’re killing each other over a piece of music that was never even released as a single!”

²⁴
In that story, people in a village take part in an annual lottery in which the person who draws a piece of paper with a black circle on it is stoned to death. King discusses “The Lottery” briefly in
Danse Macabre,
saying that it turns the concept of the outsider into something symbolic, created arbitrarily by the bad luck of the draw.

²⁵
“ ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.”

²⁶
“He ended up betraying me, but he was a good friend for quite some time, anyway, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for him.”

²⁷
Edward Bryant,
Locus
magazine, December 1991.

Chapter 5
WIZARD AND GLASS (REGARD)

“You have the right to know all those things, I suppose, and I’ll tell them to you . . . but not now. It’s a very long story. I never expected to tell it to anyone, and I’ll only tell it once.”

“When?” Eddie persisted.

“When the time is right,” Roland said, and with that they had to be content.

[DT3]

I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights . . . One taste of the old time sets all to right!
¹

 For six long years, King left Roland, Jake, Eddie, Susannah and Oy on board Blaine the Mono, hurtling toward seemingly certain death. Part of his reticence about tackling the follow-up book came from his knowledge that a large section of it would be about the heat and passion of teen love, and he wasn’t sure he knew the truth of that anymore. “Suspense is relatively easy,” he writes. “Love is hard.”

He told an audience at the University of Maine in Orono, “At first I thought it would be extremely short: The train crashed and they all died.” Instead, he produced the longest book of the series in an amazingly short amount of time—six months.

Wizard and Glass
starts by repeating the section of
The Waste Lands
explaining the rules of the riddle challenge. Blaine, the insane monorail, loves to solve riddles. “What’s happening to the rest of the world is happening to me, I reckon,” he says. If the ka-tet can’t stump him before they reach Topeka, he will commit suicide by smashing into the terminus barrier, going faster than the speed of sound, taking them with him.
²

To Eddie, everything in Roland’s world is a riddle. You don’t shoot with your hand, but with your mind. Roland thinks they have a chance to win. Why else would Jake have purchased a book of riddles from Calvin Tower’s bookstore just before he was drawn into Roland’s world?

When the contest begins, the route map indicates they have nearly
eight hours until the end of the line. Time moves differently in Mid-World and aboard Blaine, though. Roland tries to tempt the monorail into slowing down with the promise of harder, more interesting jokes, but Blaine knows the story of Scheherazade,
³
even if Roland doesn’t.

Blaine’s knowledge reaches beyond Mid-World; he knows about New York, Marilyn Monroe and Raquel Welch. He recognizes one of Roland’s puzzles as having originated in England.
⁴
Roland learned most of his repertoire from Cort during the Fair-Days of his youth. He isn’t surprised to discover that his old tutor may have known about other worlds, probably from the Manni who lived on the perimeter of Gilead.

The first sign that Blaine might have a weakness comes when he thinks Edith Bunker is a real person rather than a TV character.
⁵
Roland uses up most of their time before giving the others a chance. It only takes Jake a few minutes to go through the hardest entries his riddle book has to offer, with no success. The fact that the answers had been ripped from the back of this book is perhaps a subtle hint from ka that normal riddles with sensible answers weren’t the way to defeat Blaine, a clue reinforced in
Charlie the Choo-Choo
.

Susannah passes her turn and Blaine skips over Eddie, asking instead if Roland remembers any more Fair-Day riddles. Blaine mocks Eddie repeatedly during the trip, perhaps sensing that his wisecracks pose the greatest challenge.

Blaine and Roland both take riddles seriously, and they have often been serious business in classic fiction all the way back to the Greeks and the story of Oedipus, who had to answer the Sphinx’s riddle at the gate of Thebes to gain entry. The penalty for failure was to be eaten by the Sphinx. When Oedipus correctly answered the challenge—a riddle that Roland uses against Blaine—the beast committed suicide by throwing itself from the city walls, in contrast to Blaine’s threat of suicide if no one can stump him.

Eddie often irritates Roland with his illogical jokes. He wonders if Blaine might react similarly. Then he realizes that the clue to winning against Blaine comes from
Charlie the Choo-Choo
. Charlie’s song began, “Don’t ask me silly questions, / I won’t play silly games. / I’m just a simple choo-choo train / And I’ll always be the same.”

He launches into a string of school-yard jokes that annoy Blaine, who is irritated by having to lower himself to Eddie’s level. He cannot refuse
to answer, though, because the rules stipulate that no one can “cry off.” The contest must be played to the end. The train lurches each time Eddie poses a joke. Little Blaine warns Eddie that he is killing Big Blaine, but that’s exactly Eddie’s intent.
⁶

A dead-baby joke defeats Blaine. He can’t answer, and Roland won’t allow him to crash the train with a joke unanswered. Like a verbal gunslinger, Eddie shoots more inane jokes from the hip, answering himself while he prepares the next. He doesn’t have to stop to reload—he is an endless font of tasteless humor. Blaine dies in a blaze of hateful words, and no one is seriously injured when the train coasts into the barricade at the end of the track and derails.

In eight hours, Roland has covered more territory than he has in a thousand years wandering in search of the Tower. The world they find when they climb out of the train is more familiar to Eddie, Susannah and Jake than to Roland, though.

They are in Topeka, but in this version of reality a superflu virus known as Captain Trips
⁷
emptied the world a year before Eddie was drawn from New York. As Jake once said to Roland, there are “more worlds than these,” some mostly the same as Earth, others radically different. The three New Yorkers may have all come from different Earths, not just from different times in the same one. In this Topeka, they encounter subtle differences from the world they knew, things like baseball team names, car models and soft drinks.
⁸

They see no indication of the Beam. Roland tells them that though the Tower exists in all worlds, it may not be accessible from them all. In fact, there are only two worlds of cosmic importance: Roland’s place of In-World, Mid-World, End-World and the one real Earth, known as Keystone Earth, which is probably at the highest level—level 19—of the Tower of all Earths.

They hear a distant, mournful wail, which Roland recognizes as a “thinny,” a place where “the fabric of existence is almost entirely worn away.” These dangerous pockets have increased in number since the Dark Tower’s force began to fail. “[T]hey are sores on the skin of existence, able to exist because things are going wrong. Things in all worlds.” Blaine probably took them through a thinny to cross between worlds.

Eddie finds a modern, light wheelchair to replace the one Susannah left behind in their mad scramble to board Blaine. Before they set out,

Concerning Twins

King and coauthor Peter Straub introduced the concept of Twinners, people who have one-to-one counterparts in an alternate reality, in
The Talisman.
While the
Dark Tower
series doesn’t make the same use of this notion, twins feature prominently in the two central realities, Keystone Earth and Mid-World, themselves twins of a sort.

Early on, Roland sees strong similarities between Eddie and his old ka-mate Cuthbert. While under the gunslinger’s hypnotic spell, fictional King refers to them almost interchangeably when Roland and Eddie visit him in 1977. Jake resembles another of Roland’s childhood friends, Alain Johns. Both were strong in the touch. Susannah is twinned with the demon Mia who inhabits her body and steals her child, but she was already dual-natured, consisting of Odetta Holmes and Detta Walker. “If we are not used to such twinnings yet, I reckon that we never will be.” [DT7]

Mordred Deschain is referred to as a twin because of his dual paternity and nature. The Crimson King also exists in two forms, Ram Abbalah and his physical form trapped in the Tower.

Even lesser characters have doubles. Twins are the rule rather than the exception in Calla Bryn Sturgis, and it is their essence that feeds the Breakers. Henchick of the Manni in Mid-World becomes Harrigan of the Church of the Holy God-Bomb in New York. Though Father Callahan and Ted Brautigan are both from America-side, their itinerate lives are strikingly similar and both are characters in books in some realities. Simple-minded Sheemie Ruiz is twinned with Bryan Smith, the driver of the van that struck Stephen King.

Places are also twinned. The Mohaine Desert is geographically similar to the Mohave. Mejis is twinned with Mexico. Residents of Stoneham, Maine, have the same last names as many of those in Calla Bryn Sturgis, and some of the towns’ buildings are alike. New York is twinned with Lud. The Dixie Pig’s kitchen is identical to the one in Castle Discordia where Mia feeds.

And what of Roland Deschain? Who is his twin? The gunslinger is, perhaps, twinned with the wordslinger, the writer from Maine. Both are the sorts of men who would straighten pictures in strange hotel rooms. When Roland and Eddie visit King, Eddie observes that Roland could pass for King’s father. Why else would the gunslinger share the pain of King’s accident injuries if they weren’t empathically linked?