Stephen King – The Dark Tower

eagle-bird, not the hoo-hoo bird. The other patch was a name:RANDALL FLAGG .

Mordred discovered (also with no surprise) that he could read easily.

“Because, if you’re anything like your father—thered one, that is—then your mental

powers may exceed mere communication.” The man in the parka tittered. He didn’t want

Mordred to know he was afraid. Perhaps he’d convinced himself hewasn’t afraid, that he’d

come here of his own free will. Maybe he had. It didn’t matter to Mordred one way or the

other. Nor did the man’s plans, which jumbled and ran in his head like hot soup. Did the

man really believe the “thinking-cap” had closed off his thoughts? Mordred looked closer,

pried deeper, and saw the answer was yes. Very convenient.

“In any case, I believe a bit of protection to be very prudent. Prudence is always the wisest course; how else did I survive the fall of Farson and the death of Gilead? I wouldn’t want

you to get in my head and walk me off a high building, now would I? Although why would

you? You need me or someone, now that yon bucket of bolts has gone silent and you just a

bah-bo who can’t tie his own clout across the crack of his shitty ass!”

The stranger—who was really no stranger at all—laughed. Mordred sat in the chair and

watched him. On the side of the child’s cheek was a pink weal, for he’d gone to sleep with

his small hand against the side of his small face.

The newcomer said, “I think we can communicate very well if I talk and you nod for yes or

shake your head for no. Knock on your chair if you don’t understand. Simple enough! Do

you agree?”

Mordred nodded. The newcomer found the steady blue glare of those eyes

unsettling—trèsunsettling—but tried not to show it. He wondered again if coming here had

been the right thing to do, but he had tracked Mia’s course ever since she had kindled, and

why, if not for this? It was a dangerous game, agreed, but now there were only two

creatures who could unlock the door at the foot of the Tower before the Tower fell…which

it would, and soon, because the writer had only days left to live in his world, and the final Books of the Tower—three of them—remained unwritten. In the last one thatwas written

in that key world, Roland’s ka-tet had banished sai Randy Flagg from a dream-palace on an

interstate highway, a palace that had looked to Eddie, Susannah, and Jake like the Castle of

Oz the Great and Terrible (Oz the Green King, may it do ya fine). They had, in fact, almost

killed that bad old bumhug Walter o’ Dim, thereby providing what some would no doubt

call a happy ending. But beyond page 676 ofWizard and Glass not a word about Roland

and the Dark Tower had Stephen King written, and Walter considered this thereal happy

ending. The people of Calla Bryn Sturgis, the roont children, Mia and Mia’s baby: all those

things were still sleeping inchoate in the writer’s subconscious, creatures without breath pent behind an unfound door. And now Walter judged it was too late to set them free.

Damnably quick though King had been throughout his career—a genuinely talented writer

who’d turned himself into a shoddy (but rich) quick-sketch artist, a rhymeless Algernon

Swinburne, do it please ya—he couldn’t get through even the first hundred pages of the

remaining tale in the time he had left, not if he wrote day and night.

Too late.

There had been a day of choice, as Walter well knew: he had been atLe Casse Roi Russe,

and had seen it in the glass ball the Old Red Thing still possessed (although by now it no

doubt lay forgotten in some castle corner). By the summer of 1997, King had clearly

known the story of the Wolves, the twins, and the flying plates called Orizas. But to the

writer, all that had seemed like too much work. He had chosen a book of loosely

inter-locked stories calledHearts in Atlantis instead, and even now, in his home on

Turtleback Lane (where he had never seen so much as a single walk-in), the writer was

frittering away the last of his time writing about peace and love and Vietnam. It was true

that one character in what would be King’s last book had a part to play in the Dark Tower’s

history as it might be, but that fellow—an old man with talented brains—would never get a

chance to speak lines that really mattered. Lovely.

In the only world that really mattered, the true world where time never turns back and

there are no second chances (tell ya true), it was June 12th of 1999. The writer’s time had

shrunk to less than two hundred hours.

Walter o’ Dim knew he didn’t have quite that long to reach the Dark Tower, because time

(like the metabolism of certain spiders) ran faster and hotter on this side of things. Say five days. Five and a half at the outside. He had that long to reach the Tower with Mordred

Deschain’s birthmarked, amputated foot in his gunna…to open the door at the bottom and

mount those murmuring stairs…to bypass the trapped Red King…

If he could find a vehicle…or the right door…

Was it too late to become the God of All?

Perhaps not. In any case, what harm in trying?

Walter o’ Dim had wandered long, and under a hundred names, but the Tower had always

been his goal. Like Roland, he wanted to climb it and see what lived at the top. If anything

did.

He had belonged to none of the cliques and cults and faiths and factions that had arisen in

the confused years since the Tower began to totter, although he wore their siguls when it

suited him. His service to the Crimson King was a late thing, as was his service to John

Farson, the Good Man who’d brought down Gilead, the last bastion of civilization, in a tide

of blood and murder. Walter had done his own share of murder in those years, living a long

and only quasi-mortal life. He had witnessed the end of what he had then believed to be

Roland’s last ka-tet at Jericho Hill.Witnessed it? That was a little overmodest, by all the

gods and fishes! Under the name of Rudin Filaro, he had fought with his face painted blue,

had screamed and charged with the rest of the stinking barbarians, and had brought down

Cuthbert Allgood himself, with an arrow through the eye. Yet through all that he’d kept his

gaze on the Tower. Perhaps that was why the damned gunslinger—as the sun went down

on that day’s work, Roland of Gilead had been the last of them—had been able to escape,

having buried himself in a cart filled with the dead and then creeping out of the

slaughterpile at sundown, just before the whole works had been set alight.

He had seen Roland years earlier, in Mejis, and had just missed his grip on him there, too

(although he put that mostly down to Eldred Jonas, he of the quavery voice and the long

gray hair, and Jonas had paid). The King had told him then that they weren’t done with

Roland, that the gunslinger would begin the end of matters and ultimately cause the tumble

of that which he wished to save. Walter hadn’t begun to believe that until the Mohaine

Desert, where he had looked around one day and discovered a certain gunslinger on his

backtrail, one who had grown old over the course of falling years, and hadn’t completely

believed it until the reappearance of Mia, who fulfilled an old and grave prophecy by

giving birth to the Crimson King’s son. Certainly the Old Red Thing was of no more use to

him, but even in his imprisonment and insanity, he—it—was dangerous.

Still, until he’d had Roland to complete him—to make him greater than his own destiny,

perhaps—Walter o’ Dim had been little more than a wanderer left over from the old days, a

mercenary with a vague ambition to penetrate the Tower before it was brought down. Was

that not what had brought him to the Crimson King in the first place? Yes. And it wasn’t his

fault that the great scuttering spider-king had run mad.

Never mind. Here was his son with the same mark on his heel—Walter could see it at this very moment—and everything balanced. Of course he’d need to be careful. The thing in

the chair looked helpless, perhaps even thought itwas helpless, but it wouldn’t do to

underestimate it just because it looked like a baby.

Walter slipped the gun into his pocket (for the moment; only for the moment) and held his

hands out, empty and palms up. Then he closed one of them into a fist, which he raised to

his forehead. Slowly, never taking his eyes from Mordred, wary lest he should change