The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy by Bev Vincent Read Free Book Online Page A

place years apart in different cities. Mort isn’t interested in Roland, and Roland can’t take being inside the killer’s head for any longer than necessary. Fortunately, Mort’s consciousness faints, allowing Roland free rein of his body and complete access to his mind and all the information it contains.
    His objective in New York is twofold: get ammunition and antibiotics to fight his infection. He has a third item on his checklist, too, though that one requires Detta to emerge from the hills and to look through the door at the right moment.
    To his horror, Roland realizes that Mort’s next target is Jake Chambers. He wonders if this is a form of punishment: to witness Jake’s first death without being able to stop it. Regardless of what it means for his quest, he won’t stand aside and let Jake be sacrificed a second time. He steps forward long enough to make Mort miss his chance. Roland is improving. His brief exposure to Eddie and Odetta has made him more aware of the way his quest impacts the lives of others.
    Throughout his adventures during this trip to New York, Roland has to worry about Eddie, who fell asleep while watching for Odetta and was captured by Detta. She hog-ties him and leaves him at the high-water line for the lobstrosities, hoping that this will draw Roland back so she can shoot him. Roland can’t let her see what he sees when he looks through the door until he’s ready, though, so he proceeds with his mission and resists the temptation to check up on the situation on the beach.
    Nothing goes smoothly. At the gun shop, he is stymied by the fact that, though he has enough money to buy more bullets than he could imagine ever needing, he requires a carry permit to purchase them, and Jack Mort doesn’t have one. He has to concoct an elaborate plan involving two rather stupid police officers who are keeping an eye on the gun shop in hopes of catching the owner selling weapons to criminals. Roland tells them the clerk robbed him. Once they are inside the shop, he disarms the police officers and “robs” the store, taking all the bullets he needs, but paying for them.
    He proceeds around the corner to the pharmacy, where he pulls off the first penicillin heist in history, leaving behind Mort’s gold Rolex as payment for the Keflex. To maintain order, he has to shoot one of the guns he confiscated from the cops, which attracts the attention of more police officers.
    For the final part of his plan, Roland has Jack Mort lead him to the subway station where he pushed Odetta. A patrol officer shoots Mort, but his cigarette lighter saves him—an unlikely happenstance, but the sort of thing that occurs frequently when the Dark Tower is involved. Roland forces Mort to jump in front of the oncoming train and yells for Detta and Odetta to look at the moment the train cuts Mort’s body in half at the waist.
    The traumatic experience causes the woman to split into two factions that fight for control of her body. Odetta offers love and forgiveness and, as a result, a new entity is born: Susannah, who has Detta’s “fight until you drop” stamina tempered by Odetta’s calm humanity. She demonstrates her abilities as a gunslinger by taking Roland’s guns to the beach to rescue Eddie from the lobstrosities.
    Roland now has two companions. Though he was meant to draw three, he now believes that Susannah, who is three people in one, represents the three. Eddie still doesn’t trust Roland completely. He knows that he and Susannah could still be sacrificed, and Roland doesn’t deny this. He’s already damned for letting Jake fall, but would sacrifice someone else if it meant he could save everything—not just his own world, but all worlds.
    Though it would be several years before he returned to the Dark Tower series, King lays out the general shape of the next two books in the afterword to
The Drawing of the Three
. He even gives the