2004 The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower

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 ha d 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 sense serves us as a time machine, it’s that of smell.

Then, like the bitter call of the alkali, it was gone.

The room was unfurnished, but a single item lay on the floor. He advanced to it and picked it up. It was a small cedar clip, its bow wrapped in a bit of blue silk ribbon. He had seen

such things long ago, in Gilead; must once have worn one himself. When the sawbones cut a newly arrived baby’s umbilical cord, separating mother from child, such a clip was put on above the baby’s navel, where it would stay until the remainder of the cord fell off, and the

clip with it. (The navel itself was called tet-ka can Gan.) The bit of silk on this one told that it had belonged to a boy. A girl’s clip would have been wrapped with pink ribbon.

’Twas my own,he thought. He regarded it a moment longer, fascinated, then put it

carefully back where it had been. Where it belonged. When he stood up again, he saw a baby’s face

(Can this be my darling bah-bo? If you say so, let it be so!)

among the multitude of others. It was contorted, as if its first breath of air outside the womb had not been to its liking, already fouled with death. Soon it would pronounce judgment on its new situation with a squall that would echo throughout the apartments of Steven and Gabrielle, causing those friends and servants who heard it to smile with relief. (Only Marten Broadcloak would scowl.) The birthing was done, and it had been a livebirth,

tell Gan and all the gods thankya. There was an heir to the Line of Eld, and thus there was still the barest outside chance that the world’s rueful shuffle toward ruin might be reversed.

Roland left that room, his sense ofdéjà vu stronger than ever. So was the sens e that he had entered the body of Gan himself.

He turned to the stairs and once more began to climb.

his father, but as a much younger man. Later on that face had become cruel—events and responsibilities had turned it so. But not here. Here, Steven Deschain’s eyes were those of a

man looking on something that pleases him more than anything else ever has, or ever could.

Here Roland smelled a sweet and husky aroma he knew for the scent of his father’s shaving soap. A phantom voice whispered,Look, Gabby, look you! He’s smiling! Smiling at me! And he’s got a new tooth!

On the floor of the fourth room was the collar of his first dog, Ring-A-Levio. Ringo, for short. He’d died when Roland was three, which was something of a gift. A boy of three was

still allowed to weep for a lost pet, even a boy with the blood of Eld in his veins. Here the

gunslinger that was smelled an odor that was wonderful but had no name, and knew it for the smell of the Full Earth sun in Ringo’s fur.

Perhaps two dozen floors above Ringo’s Room was a scattering of breadcrumbs and a

limp bundle of feathers that had once belonged to a hawk named David—no pet he, but certainly a friend. The first of Roland’s many sacrifices to the Dark Tower. On one section

of the wall Roland saw David carved in flight, his stubby wings spread above all the gathered court of Gilead (Marten the Enchanter not least among them). And to the left of

the door leading onto the balcony, David was carved again. Here his wings were folded as he fell upon Cort like a blind bullet, heedless of Cort’s upraised stick.

Old times.

Old times and old crimes.

Not far from Cort was the laughing face of the whore with whom the boy had sported that night. The smell in David’s Room was her perfume, cheap and sweet. As the gunslinger drew it in, he remembered touching the whore’s pubic curls and was shocked to remember

now what he had remembered then, as his fingers slid toward her slicky-sweet cleft: being fresh out of his baby’s bath, with his mother’s hands upon him.

He began to grow hard, and Roland fled that room in fear.

Six

There was no more red to light his way now, only the eldritch blue glow of the

windows—glass eyes that were alive, glass eyes that looked upon the gunless intruder. Outside the Dark Tower, the roses of Can’-Ka No Rey had closed for another day. Part of

his mind marveled that he should be here at all; that he had one by one surmounted the obstacles placed in his path, as dreadfully single-minded as ever.I’m like one of the old people’s robots, he thought.One that will either accomplish the task for which it has been

made or beat itself to death trying .

Another part of him was not surprised at all, however. This was the part that dreamed as

the Beams themselves must, and this darker self thought again of the horn that had fallen from Cuthbert’s fingers—Cuthbert, who had gone to his death laughing. The horn that

might to this very day lie where it had fallen on the rocky slope of Jericho Hill.

And of course I’ve seen these rooms before! They’re telling my life, after all.

Indeed they were. Floor by floor and tale by tale (not to mention death by death), the rising rooms of the Dark Tower recounted Roland Deschain’s life and quest. Each held its

memento; each its signature aroma. Many times there was more than a single floor devoted to a single year, but there was always at least one. And after the thirty-eighth room (which is nineteen doubled, do ya not see it), he wished to look no more. This one contained the charred stake to which Susan Delgado had been bound. He did not enter, but looked at the face upon the wall. That much he owed her.Roland, I love thee! Susan Delgado had screamed, and he knew it was the truth, for it was only her love that rendered her recognizable. And, love or no love, in the end she had still burned.

This is a place of death,he thought,and not just here .All these rooms. Every floor.

Yes, gunslinger,whispered the Voice of the Tower.But only because your life has made it so.

After the thirty-eighth floor, Roland climbed faster.

Seven

Standing outside, Roland had judged the Tower to be roughly six hundred feet high. But as he peered into the hundredth room, and then the two hundredth, he felt sure he must have climbed eight times six hundred. Soon he would be closing in on the mark of distance his friends from America-side had called a mile. That was more floors than there possibly

could be—no Tower could be a mile high!—but still he climbed, climbed until he was nearly running, yet never did he tire. It once crossed his mind that he’d never reach the top; that the Dark Tower was infinite in height as it was eternal in time. But after a moment’s

consideration he rejected the idea, for it was his life the Tower was telling, and while that life had been long, it had by no means been eternal. And as it had had a beginning (marked by the cedar clip and the bit of blue silk ribbon), so it would have an ending.

Soon now, quite likely.

The light he sensed behind his eyes was brighter now, and did not seem so blue. He passed a room containing Zoltan, the bird from the weed-eater’s hut. He passed a room containing

the atomic pump from the Way Station. He climbed more stairs, paused outside a room containing a dead lobstrosity, and by now the light he sensed wasmuch brighter and no longer blue.

It was…

He was quite sure it was…

It was sunlight. Past twilight it might be, with Old Star and Old Mother shining from above the Dark Tower, but Roland was quite sure he was seeing—or sensing—sunlight.

He climbed on without looking into any more of the rooms, without bothering to smell their aromas of the past. The stairwell narrowed until his shoulders nearly touched its curved stone sides. No songs now, unless the wind was a song, for he heard it soughing.

He passed one final open door. Lying on the floor of the tiny room beyond it was a pad from which the face had been erased. All that remained were two red eyes, glaring up.

I have reached the present. I have reached now.

Yes, and there was sunlight, commala sunlight inside his eyes and waiting for him. It was hot and harsh upon his skin. The sound of the wind was louder, and that sound was also harsh. Unforgiving. Roland looked at the stairs curving upward; now his shoulderswould touch the walls, for the passage was no wider than the sides of a coffin. Nineteen more stairs, and then the room at the top of the Dark Tower would be his.

“I come!” he called. “If’ee hear me, hear me well!I come! ”

He took the stairs one by one, walking with his back straight and his head held up. The other rooms had been open to his eye. The final one was closed off, his way blocked by a ghostwood door with a single word carved upon it. That word was

ROLAND.

He grasped the knob. It was engraved with a wild rose wound around a revolver, one of those great old guns from his father and now lost forever.

Yet it will be yours again,whispered the voice of the Tower and the voice of the roses—these voices were now one.

What do you mean?

To this there was no answer, but the knob turned beneath his hand, and perhaps that was an answer. Roland opened the door at the top of the Dark Tower.

He saw and understood at once, the knowledge falling upon him in a hammerblow, hot as the sun of the desert that was the apotheosis of all deserts. How many times had he climbed

these stairs only to find himself peeled back, curved back, turned back? Not to the beginning (when things might have been changed and time’s curse lifted), but to that

moment in the Mohaine Desert when he had finally understood that his thoughtless, questionless quest would ultimately succeed? How many times had he traveled a loop like the one in the clip that had once pinched off his navel, his own tet-ka can Gan? How many timeswould he travel it?

“Oh, no!”he screamed.“Please, not again! Have pity! Have mercy!”

The hands pulled him forward regardless. The hands of the Tower knew no mercy.

They were the hands of Gan, the hands of ka, and they knew no mercy.

He smelled alkali, bitter as tears. The desert beyond the door was white; blinding; waterless; without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon. The smell beneath the alkali was that of the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death.

But not for you, gunslinger. Never for you. You darkle. You tinct. May I be brutally frank?You go on.

And each time you forget the last time.For you, each time is the first time.

He made one final effort to draw back: hopeless. Ka was stronger.

Roland of Gilead walked through the last door, the one he always sought, the one he always found. It closed gently behind him.

Eight

The gunslinger paused for a moment, swaying on his feet. He thought he’d almost passed out. It was the heat, of course; the damned heat. There was a wind, but it was dry and

brought no relief. He took his waterskin, judged how much was left by the heft of it, knew he shouldn’t drink—it wasn’t time to drink—and had a swallow, anyway.

For a moment he had felt he was somewhere else. In the Tower itself, mayhap. But of course the desert was tricky, and full of mirages. The Dark Tower still lay thousands of wheels ahead. That sense of having climbed many stairs and looked into many rooms where many faces had looked back at him was already fading.

I will reach it,he thought, squinting up at the pitiless sun.I swear on the name of my father that I will.

And perhaps this time if you get there it will be different,a voice whispered—surely the voice of desert delirium, for what other time had there ever been? He was what he was and where he was, just that, no more than that, no more. He had no sense of humor and little imagination, but he was steadfast. He was a gunslinger. And in his heart, well-hidden, he still felt the bitter romance of the quest.

You’re the one who never changes,Cort had told him once, and in his voice Roland could have sworn he heard fear…although why Cort should have been afraid of him—a boy—Roland couldn’t tell.It’ll be your damnation, boy. You’ll wear out a hundred pairs of

boots on your walk to hell.

And Vannay:Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.

And his mother:Roland, must you always be so serious? Can you never rest?

Yet the voice whispered it again

(different this time mayhap different)

and Rolanddid seem to smell something other than alkali and devil-grass. He thought it might be flowers.

He thought it might be roses.

He shifted his gunna from one shoulder to the other, then touched the horn that rode on his belt behind the gun on his right hip. The ancient brass horn had once been blown by Arthur Eld himself, or so the story did say. Roland had given it to Cuthbert Allgood at Jericho Hill, and when Cuthbert fell, Roland had paused just long enough to pick it up again, knocking the deathdust of that place from its throat.

This is your sigul,whispered the fading voice that bore with it the dusk-sweet scent of roses, the scent of home on a summer evening—O lost!—a stone, a rose, an unfound door; a stone, a rose, a door.

This is your promise that things may be different, Roland—that there may yet be rest. Even salvation.

A pause, and then:

If you stand. If you are true.

He shook his head to clear it, thought of taking another sip of water, and dismissed the idea.

Tonight. When he built his campfire over the bones of Walter’s fire. Then he would drink. As for now…

As for now, he would resume his journey. Somewhere ahead was the Dark Tower. Closer, however, much closer, was the man (washe a man? was he really?) who could perhaps tell

him how to get there. Roland would catch him, and when he did, that man would talk—aye, yes, yar, tell it on the mountain as you’d hear it in the valley: Walter would be caught, and

Walter would talk.

Roland touched the horn again, and its reality was oddly comforting, as if he had never touched it before.

Time to get moving.

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

June 19, 1970–April 7, 2004:

I tell God thankya.