The Dark Tower V: The missing key

Note: I didn’t have this book, so it took a little while to get, by then I had started in on some other books and some stupid house-building project. Check out the other installments to refresh you mind.

THE WOLVES OF THE CALLA

There’s a few main plot lines driving this book, which all add up to this becoming the transition to conclusion.

1. The battle for a little town of Calla Bryn Sturgis against the “Wolves” sent from Thunderclap to steal every other child only to return them “roont” or basically useless. Roland and his gang stumble upon the town on their journey to the tower, and like all good gunslingers, offer their “hard calibers” for the fight.

2. The protection of the rose (the embodiment of what is good, what is true in all worlds) that currently resides in a empty lot in New York circa 1977 (I think that’s the year, we have 4 characters from 4 different times in New York, easy to get them messed up.

3. The development of a new personality for Susannah, due to ill-fated pregnancy by a demon. Mia, daughter of none, is born within her head and determined to see the pregnancy through.

4. The introduction of Father Don Callahan, a character from King’s book Salem Lot, who has traveled through alcoholism and the “lost highways” to the Calla. His story introduces us more closely to some of the evil we will encounter in the final two books.

That’s the gist of it.

That being said, King slips something in here, something that slipped right past me the first time I read this book. The second time, admittedly I was looking for signs of things that come at the end of the last book, I was stunned when I read the passage below. In a dream that Roland has from his past, King alludes to a key to the entire journey. Then he moves on. The best readers probably caught this section and wondered why it was here. Like I said, I didn’t remember this at all. Anyways, here is a small sampling from Roland’s dream.

Cuthbert Allgood, who had once ridden into the Barony of Mejis with a rook’s skull mounted on the pommel of his saddle. “The lookout,” he had called it, and talked to it just as though it were alive, for such was his fancy and sometimes he drove Roland half-mad with his foolishness, and here he is under the burning sun, staggering toward him with a smoking revolver in one hand and Eld’s Horn in the other, blood-bolted and half-blinded and dying … but still laughing. Ah, dear gods, laughing and laughing.

“Roland!” he cries. “We’ve been betrayed! We’re outnumbered! Our backs are to the sea! We’ve got them right where we want em! Shall we carge?”

And Roland understands he is right. If their quest for the Dark Tower is really to end here on Jericho Hill – betrayed by one of their own and then overwhelmed by this barbaric remnant of John Farson’s army – then let it end splendidly.

“Aye!” he shouts. “Aye, very well. Ye of the castle, to me! Gunslingers, to me! To me, I say!”

“As for the gunslingers, Roland,” Cuthbert says, “I am here. And we are the last.”

Roland first looks at him, then embraces him under that hideous sky. He can feel Cuthbert’s burning body, its suicidal trembling thinness. And yet he’s laughing. Bert is still laughing.

“All right,” Roland says hoarsely, looking around at his few remaining men. “We’re going into them. And will accept no quarter.”

“Nope, no quarter, absolutely none,” Cuthbert says.

“We will not accept their surrender if offered.”

“Under no circumstances,” Cuthbert agrees, laughing harder than ever. “Not even should all two thousand lay down their arms.”

“Then blow that fucking horn.”

Cuthbert raises the horn to his bloody lips and blows a great blast – the final blast, for when it drops from his fingers a minute later (or perhaps it’s five, or ten; time has no meaning in that final battle), Roland will let it lie in the dust. In his grief and bloodlust he will forget all about Eld’s Horn.


Next up: The Song of Susannah. This one’s a little shorter and once I find it wherever it’s packed away, I get to reading through it.