Stephen King – The Dark Tower

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