The Road to the Dark Tower by Bev Vincent

Author:Bev Vincent [Vincent, Bev]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction, Literary, Horror, History and criticism, Literary Criticism, Biography & Autobiography, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fantasy Fiction; American
ISBN: 9780451213044
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2004-09-28T06:00:00+00:00

* * *

King promises to continue the story, no matter how it comes out, but he chastises Roland for his anger. “Save your hate for those who deserve it. I didn’t make your ka any more than I made Gan or the world and we both know it.”

Roland is devastated that he has to leave Jake’s dying to Oy and Irene, a woman they met less than an hour earlier, to deal with two men he doesn’t like. While he’s making sure King won’t surrender if Death calls on the way to the hospital, Jake, whom he loved even more than Susan Delgado, answers that same call. In one of the series’ greatest ironies, Jake sacrificed his life to save Stephen King in 1999, thereby allowing King to finish writing the series in 2003, including the section depicting Jake’s death in 1999, which will happen again and again as Roland repeats the quest cycle until he gets it right. In the words of Andre Linoge from Storm of the Century, “Hell is repetition.”16

Roland sends Irene away until the accident scene is cleared, trusting her to return because she is a companion of the Beam. In the woods, he digs a shallow grave for Jake and says a Manni prayer over him. He thinks Oy might decide to perish at Jake’s grave, but the bumbler rejoins Roland at the roadside before Irene returns in her own car.17 Oy’s decision strengthens Roland’s resolve.

Jake asked Irene to drive Roland to New York, and she agrees to do so. On the first night, she watches the TV news long enough to learn that King survived his accident.18 Later, she finds Roland sitting on the stoop in the dark. “I’m afraid to go to sleep,” he tells her. “I’m afraid my dead friends will come to me, and that seeing them will kill me.” This is a very different Roland from the man who was able to push thoughts of his upcoming sacrifice of Jake from his mind and sleep dreamlessly in the desert.

The second night, they make love in a motel in Harwich, Connecticut—the former home of Bobby Garfield and Ted Brautigan. King does not say whether Roland straightens any of the room’s pictures. Afterward, she dreams of the field of roses and the Tower and hears the voices of Roland’s lost friends. Roland has transferred some of his touch to her temporarily, like Ted Brautigan did with Bobby Garfield. Her part in the adventure is almost over, though, and soon she will return to her husband and her former life.

Roland’s pain is with King now, so they walk from Irene’s New York apartment to the high-rise at 2 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza housing the Tet Corporation. The building stuns him. It’s not his Dark Tower, but it’s the Tower’s representation in this Keystone World, just as the rose represented a field filled with them.

Irene draws his attention to the pocket park outside the building that contains a fountain and a turtle sculpture, the place where Susannah and Mia rested after stealing Trudy Damascus’s shoes.

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