Wizard and glass - Stephen King [4]
I would have given both of these folks what they wanted—a summary of Roland’s further adventures—if I could have done, but alas, I couldn’t. I had no idea of how things were going to turn out with the gunslinger and his friends. To know, I have to write. I once had an outline, but I lost it along the way. (It probably wasn’t worth a tin shit, anyway.) All I had was a few notes (“Chussit, chissit, chassit, something-something-basket” reads one lying on the desk as I write this). Eventually, starting in July of 2001, I began to write again. I knew by then I was no longer nineteen, nor exempt from any of the ills to which the flesh is heir. I knew I was going to be sixty, maybe even seventy. And I wanted to finish my story before the bad Patrol Boy came for the last time. I had no urge to be filed away with The Canterbury Tales and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
The result—for better or worse—lies before you, Constant Reader, whether you reading this are starting with Volume One or are preparing for Volume Five. Like it or hate it, the story of Roland is now done. I hope you enjoy it.
As for me, I had the time of my life.
Stephen King
January 25, 2003
19
REGARD
ARGUMENT
Wizard and Glass is the fourth volume of a longer tale inspired by Robert Browning’s narrative poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.”
The first volume, The Gunslinger, tells how Roland of Gilead pursues and at last catches Walter, the man in black, who pretended friendship with Roland’s father but who actually served Marten, a great sorcerer. Catching the half-human Walter is not Roland’s goal but only a means to an end: Roland wants to reach the Dark Tower, where he hopes the quickening destruction of Mid-World may be halted, perhaps even reversed.
Roland is a kind of knight, the last of his breed, and the Tower is his obsession, his only reason for living when first we meet him. We learn of an early test of manhood forced upon him by Marten, who has seduced Roland’s mother. Marten expects Roland to fail this test and to be “sent west,” his father’s guns forever denied him. Roland, however, lays Marten’s plans at nines, passing the test . . . due mostly to his clever choice of weapon.
We discover that the gunslinger’s world is related to our own in some fundamental and terrible way. This link is first revealed when Roland meets Jake, a boy from the New York of 1977, at a desert way station. There are doors between Roland’s world and our own; one of them is death, and that is how Jake first reaches Mid-World, pushed into Forty-third Street and run over by a car. The pusher was a man named Jack Mort . . . except the thing hiding inside of Mort’s head and guiding his murderous hands on this particular occasion was Roland’s old enemy, Walter.
Before Jake and Roland reach Walter, Jake dies again . . . this time because the gunslinger, faced with an agonizing choice between this symbolic son and the Dark Tower, chooses the Tower. Jake’s last words before plunging into the abyss are “Go, then—there are other worlds than these.”
The final confrontation between Roland and Walter occurs near the Western Sea. In a long night of palaver, the man in black tells Roland’s future with a strange Tarot deck. Three cards—The Prisoner, The Lady of the Shadows, and Death (“but not for you, gunslinger”)—are especially called to Roland’s attention.
The second volume, The Drawing of the Three, begins on the edge of the Western Sea not long after Roland awakens from his confrontation with his old nemesis and discovers Walter