into the office. He’s a Welsh Corgi, with short legs and big ears, and a pretty old guy now,
with his own aches and pains, not to mention the eye he lost to cancer the previous year.
The vet said he probably wouldn’t make it back from that one, but he did. What a good guy.
What atough guy. And when he raises his head from his necessarily low perspective to look
at the writer, he’s wearing his old fiendish grin.How’s it goin, bubba? that look seems to
say.Gettin any good words today? How do ya?
“I do fine,” he tells Marlowe. “Hangin in. How areyou doin?”
Marlowe (sometimes known as The Snoutmaster) waggles his arthritic rear end in
response.
“You again.”That’s what I said to him. And he asked, “Do you remember me?” Or maybe
he said it—“You remember me.” I told him I was thirsty. He said he didn’t have anything
to drink, he said sorry, and I called him a liar. And I was right to call him a liar because he wasn’t sorry a bit. He didn’t care a row of pins if I was thirsty because Jake was dead and
he tried to put it on me, son of a bitch tried to put the blame on me —
“But none of that actually happened,” King says, watching Marlowe waddle back toward
the kitchen, where he will check his dish again before taking one of his increasingly long
naps. The house is empty except for the two of them, and under those circumstances he
often talks to himself. “I mean, youknow that, don’t you? That none of it actually
happened?”
He supposes he does, but it was soodd for Jake to die like that. Jake is in all his notes, and no surprise there, because Jake was supposed to be around until the very end. All of them
were, in fact. Of course no story except a bad one, one that arrives DOA, is evercompletely
under the writer’s control, but this one is soout of control it’s ridiculous. It reallyis more like watching something happen—or listening to a song—than writing a damned made-up
story.
He decides to make himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch and forget the
whole damned thing for another day. Tonight he will go to see the new Clint Eastwood
movie,Bloodwork, and be glad he can go anywhere, do anything. Tomorrow he’ll be back
at his desk, and something from the film may slip out into the book—certainly Roland
himself was partly Clint Eastwood to start with, Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name.
And…speaking of books…
Lying on the coffee-table is one that came via FedEx from his office in Bangor just this
morning:The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Browning . It contains, of course,
“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” the narrative poem that lies at the root of King’s
long (and trying) story. An idea suddenly occurs to him, and it brings an expression to his
face that stops just short of outright laughter. As if reading his feelings (and possibly he can; King has always suspected dogs are fairly recent émigrés from that great
I-know-just-how-you-
feel country of Empathica), Marlowe’s own fiendish grin appears to widen.
“One place for the poem, old boy,” King says, and tosses the book back onto the
coffee-table. It’s a big ’un, and lands with a thud. “One place and one place only.” Then he
settles deeper in the chair and closes his eyes.Just gonna sit here like this for a minute or two, he thinks, knowing he’s fooling himself, knowing he’ll almost certainly doze off. As
he does.
Chapter I:
The Thing Under the Castle
One
They did indeed find a good-sized kitchen and an adjoining pantry at ground-level in the Arc 16 Experimental Station, and not far from the infirmary. They found something else, as
well: the office of sai Richard P. Sayre, once the Crimson King’s Head of Operations, now
in the clearing at the end of the path courtesy of Susannah Dean’s fast right hand. Lying
atop Sayre’s desk were amazingly complete files on all four of them. These they destroyed,
using the shredder. There were photographs of Eddie and Jake in the folders that were
simply too painful to look at. Memories were better.
On Sayre’s wall were two framed oil-paintings. One showed a strong and handsome boy.
He was shirtless, barefooted, tousle-haired, smiling, dressed only in jeans and wearing a
docker’s clutch. He looked about Jake’s age. This picture had a not-quite-pleasant
sensuality about it. Susannah thought that the painter, sai Sayre, or both might have been
part of the Lavender Hill Mob, as she had sometimes heard homosexuals called in the
Village. The boy’s hair was black. His eyes were blue. His lips were red. There was a livid
scar on his side and a birthmark on his left heel as crimson as his lips. A snow-white horse
lay dead before him. There was blood on its snarling teeth. The boy’s marked left foot
rested on the horse’s flank, and his lips were curved in a smile of triumph.
“That’s Llamrei, Arthur Eld’s horse,” Roland said. “Its image was carried into battle on
the pennons of Gilead, and was the sigul of all In-World.”
“So according to this picture, the Crimson King wins?” she asked. “Or if not him then
Mordred, his son?”
Roland raised his eyebrows. “Thanks to John Farson, the Crimson King’s men won the
In-World lands long ago,” he said. But then he smiled. It was a sunny expression so unlike
his usual look that seeing it always made Susannah feel dizzy. “But I thinkwe won the only
battle that matters. What’s shown in this picture is no more than someone’s wishful
fairy-tale.” Then, with a savagery that startled her, he smashed the glass over the frame
with his fist and yanked the painting free, ripping it most of the way down the middle as he
did so. Before he could tear it to pieces, as he certainly meant to do, she stopped him and
pointed to the bottom. Written there in small but nonetheless extravagant calligraphy was
the artist’s name:Patrick Danville .
The other painting showed the Dark Tower, a sooty-gray black cylinder tapering upward.
It stood at the far end of Can’-Ka No Rey, the field of roses. In their dreams the Tower had
seemed taller than the tallest skyscraper in New York (to Susannah this meant the Empire
State Building). In the painting it looked to be no more than six hundred feet high, yet this robbed it of none of its dreamlike majesty. The narrow windows rose in an ascending spiral
around it just as in their dreams. At the top was an oriel window of many colors—each,
Roland knew, corresponding to one of the Wizard’s glasses. The inmost circle but one was
the pink of the ball that had been left for awhile in the keeping of a certain witch-woman
named Rhea; the center was the dead ebony of Black Thirteen.
“The room behind that window is where I would go,” Roland said, tapping the glass over
the picture. “That is where my quest ends.” His voice was low and awestruck. “This picture wasn’t done from any dream, Susannah. It’s as if I could touch the texture of every brick.
Do you agree?”
“Yes.” It was all she could say. Looking at it here on the late Richard Sayre’s wall robbed
her breath. Suddenly it all seemed possible. The end of the business was, quite literally, in sight.
“The person who painted it must have been there,” Roland mused. “Must have set up his
easel in the very roses.”
“Patrick Danville,” she said. “It’s the same signature as on the one of Mordred and the
dead horse, do you see?”
“I see it very well.”
“And do you see the path through the roses that leads to the steps at the base?”
“Yes. Nineteen steps, I have no doubt. Chassit. And the clouds overhead—”
She saw them, too. They formed a kind of whirlpool before streaming away from the
Tower, and toward the Place of the Turtle, at the other end of the Beam they had followed
so far. And she saw another thing. Outside the barrel of the Tower, at what might have been
fifty-foot intervals, were balconies encircled with waist-high wrought-iron railings. On the
second of these was a blob of red and three tiny blobs of white: a face that was too small to see, and a pair of upraised hands.
“Is that the Crimson King?” she asked, pointing. She didn’t quite dare put the tip of her
finger on the glass over that tiny figure. It was as if she expected it to come to life and
snatch her into the picture.
“Yes,” Roland said. “Locked out of the only thing he ever wanted.”
“Then maybe we could go right up the stairs and past him. Give him the old raspberry on