Stephen King – The Dark Tower

Yet some of you who have provided the ears without which no tale can survive a single day

are likely not so willing. You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been

proven to you. You are the unfortunate ones who still get the lovemaking all confused with

the paltry squirt that comes to end the lovemaking (the orgasm is, after all, God’s way of

telling us we’ve finished, at least for the time being, and should go to sleep). You are the

cruel ones who deny the Grey Havens, where tired characters go to rest. You say you want

to know how it all comes out. You say you want to follow Roland into the Tower; you say

that is what you paid your money for, the show you came to see.

I hope most of you know better.Want better. I hope you came to hear the tale, and not just

munch your way through the pages to the ending. For an ending, you only have to turn to

the last page and see what is there writ upon. But endings are heartless. An ending is a

closed door no man (or Manni) can open. I’ve written many, but most only for the same

reason that I pull on my pants in the morning before leaving the bedroom—because it is the

custom of the country.

And so, my dear Constant Reader, I tell you this: You can stop here. You can let your last

memory be of seeing Eddie, Susannah, and Jake in Central Park, together again for the first

time, listening to the children’s choir sing “What Child Is This.” You can be content in the

knowledge that sooner or later Oy (probably a canine version with a long neck, odd

gold-ringed eyes, and a bark that sometimes sounds eerily like speech) will also enter the

picture. That’s a pretty picture, isn’t it?I think so. And pretty close to happily ever after, too.

Close enough for government work, as Eddie would say.

Should you go on, you will surely be disappointed, perhaps even heartbroken. I have one

key left on my belt, but all it opens is that final door, the one marked

.

What’s behind it won’t improve your love-life, grow hair on your bald spot, or add five

years to your natural span (not even five minutes). There is no such thing as a happy ending.

I never met a single one to equal “Once upon a time.”

Endings are heartless.

Ending is just another word for goodbye.

Two

Would you still?

Very well, then, come. (Do you hear me sigh?) Here is the Dark Tower, at the end of End-World. See it, I beg.

See it very well.

Here is the Dark Tower at sunset.

Three

He came to it with the oddest feeling of remembrance; what Susannah and Eddie

calleddéjà vu .

The roses of Can’-Ka No Rey opened before him in a path to the Dark Tower, the yellow

suns deep in their cups seeming to regard him like eyes. And as he walked toward that

gray-black column, Roland felt himself begin to slip from the world as he had always

known it. He called the names of his friends and loved ones, as he had always promised

himself he would; called them in the gloaming, and with perfect force, for no longer was

there any need to reserve energy with which to fight the Tower’s pull. To give

in—finally—was the greatest relief of his life.

He called the names of hiscompadres andamoras, and although each came from deeper in

his heart, each seemed to have less business with the rest of him. His voice rolled away to

the darkening red horizon, name upon name. He called Eddie’s and Susannah’s. He called

Jake’s, and last of all he called his own. When the sound of it had died out, the blast of a

great horn replied, not from the Tower itself but from the roses that lay in a carpet all

around it. That horn was thevoice of the roses, and cried him welcome with a kingly blast.

In my dreams the horn was always mine,he thought.I should have known better, for mine

was lost with Cuthbert, at Jericho Hill.

A voice whispered from above him:It would have been the work of three seconds to bend

and pick it up. Even in the smoke and the death. Three seconds. Time, Roland—it always

comes back to that.

That was, he thought, the voice of the Beam—the one they had saved. If it spoke out of

gratitude it could have saved its breath, for what good were such words to him now? He

remembered a line from Browning’s poem:One taste of the old times sets all to rights .

Such had never been his experience. In his own, memories brought only sadness. They

were the food of poets and fools, sweets that left a bitter aftertaste in the mouth and throat.

Roland stopped for a moment still ten paces from the ghostwood door in the Tower’s base,

letting the voice of the roses—that welcoming horn—echo away to nothing. The feeling

ofdéjà vu was still strong, almost as though he had been here after all. And of course he had been, in ten thousand premonitory dreams. He looked up at the balcony where the Crimson

King had stood, trying to defy ka and bar his way. There, about six feet above the cartons

that held the few remaining sneetches (the old lunatic had had no other weapons after all, it seemed), he saw two red eyes, floating in the darkening air, looking down at him with

eternal hatred. From their backs, the thin silver of the optic nerves (now tinted red-orange

with the light of the leaving sun) trailed away to nothing. The gunslinger supposed the

Crimson King’s eyes would remain up there forever, watching Can’-Ka No Rey while their

owner wandered the world to which Patrick’s eraser and enchanted Artist’s eye had sent

him. Or, more likely, to the spacebetween the worlds.

Roland walked on to where the path ended at the steel-banded slab of black ghostwood.

Upon it, a sigul that he now knew well was engraved three-quarters of the way up:

Here he laid two things, the last of his gunna: Aunt Talitha’s cross, and his remaining

sixgun. When he stood up, he saw the first two hieroglyphics had faded away:

UNFOUNDhad becomeFOUND .

He raised his hand as if to knock, but the door swung open of its own accord before he

could touch it, revealing the bottom steps of an ascending spiral stairway. There was a

sighing voice—Welcome, Roland, thee of Eld. It was the Tower’s voice. This edifice was

not stone at all, although it might look like stone; this was a living thing, Gan himself,

likely, and the pulse he’d felt deep in his head even thousands of miles from here had

always been Gan’s beating life-force.

Commala, gunslinger. Commala-come-come.

And wafting out came the smell of alkali, bitter as tears. The smell of…what? What,

exactly? Before he could place it the odor was gone, leaving Roland to surmise he had

imagined it.

He stepped inside and the Song of the Tower, which he had always heard—even in Gilead,

where it had hidden in his mother’s voice as she sang him her cradle songs—finally ceased.

There was another sigh. The door swung shut with a boom, but he was not left in blackness.

The light that remained was that of the shining spiral windows, mixed with the glow of

sunset.

Stone stairs, a passage just wide enough for one person, ascended.

“Now comes Roland,” he called, and the words seemed to spiral up into infinity. “Thee at

the top, hear and make me welcome if you would. If you’re my enemy, know that I come

unarmed and mean no ill.”

He began to climb.

Nineteen steps brought him to the first landing (and to each one thereafter). A door stood

open here and beyond it was a small round room. The stones of its wall were carved with

thousands of overlapping faces. Many he knew (one was the face of Calvin Tower, peeping

slyly over the top of an open book). The faces looked at him and he heard their murmuring.

Welcome Roland, you of the many miles and many worlds; welcome thee of Gilead, thee

of Eld.

On the far side of the room was a door flanked by dark red swags traced with gold. About

six feet up from the door—at the exact height of his eyes—was a small round window,

little bigger than an outlaw’s peekhole. There was a sweet smell, and this one he could

identify: the bag of pine sachet his mother had placed first in his cradle, then, later, in his first real bed. It brought back those days with great clarity, as aromas always do; if any