Stephen King - The Dark Tower 3 - The Waste Lands

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THE ROSE

IT BEGAN TO OPEN before his eyes. It disclosed a dark scarlet furnace, petal

upon secret petal, each blazing with its own secret fury. Jake had never seen

anything so beautiful, so intensely and utterly alive. Now, as he stretched one

grime-streaked hand out toward this won-der, the voices began to sing his own

name . . . and a dreadful, deadly fear began to steal in toward the center of

his heart. It was as cold as black ice and as heavy as stone.

There was something wrong here. He could feel it pulsing in dis-cord, like a

deep and ugly scratch across some formerly priceless work of art. . . . Then the

heart of the rose opened before him, exposing a bright yellow dazzle of light.

... It was a sun: a vast forge blazing at the center of this rose growing in the

alien grass.

The fear returned, only now it had become outright terror. It's right, he

thought incoherently, everything here is right, but it could go wrong. ...

THE WASTE LANDS

STEPHEN KING

THE DARK TOWER III

ILLUSTRATED BY NED DAMERON

A PLUME BOOK

PLUME Published by the Penguin Group 1

Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcom Avenue,

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

Published by Plume, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin

Boots USA Inc.

First Plume Printing, January, 1992

published by Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Inc.

ABKCO Music, Inc. All rights

reserved. Used by permission.

Excerpts from "The Waste Land" in Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot,

S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Excerpt from "Hand in Glove" by Robert Aickman used by permission of the

author's agent, the Kirby

McCauley Literary Agency.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

King, Stephen, 1947-

The waste lands / Stephen King : illustrated by Ned Dameron.

p. cm. — (The Dark tower : 3) ISBN 0-452-26740-4

I. Title. II. Series: King, Stephen, 1947- Dark tower : 3.

PS3561.1483W37 1992

813'.54—dc20

91-32460

CIP

Printed in the United States of America Set in New Caledonia

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this

publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,

or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of

both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are

the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any

resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales w entirely

coincidental.

BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR

SERVICES. FOR

INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN BOOKS USA INC.,

375 HUDSON

STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YOHK 10014.

This third volume of the tale is gratefully dedicated to my son OWEN PHILIP

KING: Khef, Ka, and Ka-tet.

CONTENTS

ARGUMENT 1

BOOK ONE JAKE: FEAR IN A HANDFUL OF DUST

I. BEAR AND BONE

II. KEY AND ROSE

III. DOOR AND DEMON

BOOK TWO LUD: A HEAP OF BROKEN IMAGES

IV. TOWN AND KA-TET

V. BRIDGE AND CITY

VI. RIDDLE AND WASTE LANDS 391

ILLUSTRATIONS

MIR EMBRACED THE TREE

"HOLD ME STILL, ROLAND"

THE DARK TOWER

KEY AND ROSE

"CHARLIE THE CHOO-CHOO"

THE PLASTER MAN ROARED

ROLAND KNELT BEFORE HER

"BETTER DUCK, DEARIE!"

HE FIRED . . .

BLAINE THE MONO

CRUISED ON LEATHER WINGS

PRANCING AND CAVORTING

ARGUMENT

The Waste Lands is the third volume of a longer tale inspired by and to some

degree dependent upon Robert Browning's narrative poem "Childe Roland to the

Dark Tower Came."

The first volume, The Gunslinger, tells how Roland, the last gun-slinger in a

world which has "moved on," pursues and finally catches the man in black, a

sorcerer named Walter who falsely claimed the friendship of Roland's father in

the days when the unity of Mid-World still held. Catching this half-human

spell-caster is not Roland's ultimate goal but only another landmark along the

road to the powerful and mysterious Dark Tower, which stands at the nexus of

time.

Who, exactly, is Roland? What was his world like before it moved on? What is the

Tower and why does he pursue it? We have only frag-mentary answers. Roland is

clearly a land of knight, one of those charged with holding (or possibly

redeeming) a world Roland remembers as being "filled with love and light." Just

how closely Roland's memory resembles the way that world actually was is very

much open to question, however.

We do know that he was forced to an early trial of manhood after discovering

that his mother had become the mistress of Marten, a much greater sorcerer than

Walter; we know that Marten orchestrated Roland's discovery of his mother's

affair, expecting Roland to fail his test of manhood and be "sent West" into the

wastes; we know that Roland laid Marten's plans at nines by passing the test.

We also know that the gunslinger's world is related to our own in some strange

but fundamental way, and that passage between the worlds is sometimes possible.

At a way station on a long-deserted coach-road running through the desert,

Roland meets a boy named Jake who died in our world, a boy who was, in fact,

pushed from a mid-Manhattan street corner and into the path of an oncoming car.

Jake Chambers died with the man in black—Walter—peering down at him, and awoke

in Roland's world.

Before they reach the man in black, Jake dies again . . . this time because the

gunslinger, faced with the second most agonizing choice of his life, elects to

sacrifice this symbolic son. Given a choice between the Tower and the child,

Roland chooses the Tower. Jake's last words to the gunslinger before plunging

into the abyss are: "Go, then—there are other worlds than these."

The final confrontation between Roland and Walter occurs in a dusty Golgotha of

decaying bones. The man in black tells Roland's future with a deck of Tarot

cards. Three very strange cards—The Prisoner, The Lady of the Shadows, and Death

("but not for you, gunslinger")—are called especially to Roland's attention.

The second volume, The Drawing of the Three, begins on the edge of the Western

Sea not long after Roland's confrontation with Walter has ended. An exhausted

gunslinger awakes in the middle of the night to discover that the incoming tide

has brought a horde of crawling, carnivo-rous creatures—"lobstrosities"—with it.

Before he can escape their lim-ited range, Roland has been seriously wounded by

these creatures, losing the first two fingers of his right hand to them. He is

also poisoned by the venom of the lobstrosities, and as the gunslinger resumes

his journey north along the edge of the Western Sea, he is sickening . . .

perhaps dying.

He encounters three doors standing freely upon the beach. Each door opens—for

Roland and Roland alone—upon our world; upon the city where Jake lived, in fact.

Roland visits New York at three points along our time continuum, both in an

effort to save his own life and to draw the three who must accompany him on his

road to the Tower.

Eddie Dean is The Prisoner, a heroin addict from the New York of the late 1980s.

Roland steps through the door on the beach of his world and into Eddie Dean's

mind as Eddie, serving a man named Enrico Balazar as a cocaine mule, lands at

JFK airport. In the course of their harrowing adventures together, Roland is

able to obtain a limited quantity of penicillin and to bring Eddie Dean back to

his own world. Eddie, a junkie who discovers he has been kidnapped to a world

where there is no junk (or Popeye's fried chicken, for that matter), is less

than overjoyed to be there.

The second door leads Roland to The Lady of the Shadows—actually two women in

one body. This time Roland finds himself in the New York of the early 1960s and

face to face with a young wheelchair-bound civil-rights activist named Odetta

Holmes. The woman hidden inside Odetta is the crafty and hate-filled Detta

Walker. When this double woman is pulled into Roland's world, the results are

volatile for Eddie and the rapidly sickening gunslinger. Odetta believes that

what's happening to her is either a dream or a delusion; Detta, a much more

brutally direct intellect, simply dedicates herself to the task of killing

Roland and Eddie whom she sees as torturing white devils.

Jack Mort, a serial killer hiding behind the third door (the New York of the

mid-1970s), is Death. Mort has twice caused great changes in the life of Odetta

Holmes/Detta Walker, although neither of them knows it. Mort, whose modus

operandi is to either push his victims or drop some-thing on them from above,

has done both to Odetta during the course of his mad (but oh so careful) career.

When Odetta was a child, he dropped a brick on her head, sending the little girl

into a coma and also occasioning the birth of Detta Walker, Odetta's hidden

sister. Years later, in 1959, Mort encounters Odetta again and pushes her into

the path of an oncoming subway train in Greenwich Village. Odetta survives Mort

again, but at a price: the oncoming train severed both legs at the knee. Only

the presence of a heroic young doctor (and, perhaps, the ugly but indomitable

spirit of Detta Walker) saves her life ... or so it would seem. To Roland's eye,

these interrelationships suggest a power greater than mere coincidence; he

believes the titanic forces, which surround the Dark Tower, have begun to gather

once again.

Roland learns that Mort may stand at the heart of another mystery as well, one

which is also a potentially mind-destroying paradox. For the victim Mort is

stalking at the time the gunslinger steps into his life is none other than Jake,

the boy Roland met at the way station and lost under the mountains. Roland has

never had any cause to doubt Jake's story of how he died in our world, or any

cause to question who Jake's murderer was—Walter, of course. Jake saw him

dressed as a priest as the crowd gathered around the spot where he lay dying,

and Roland has never doubted the description.

Nor does he doubt it now; Walter was there, oh yes, no doubt about that. But

suppose it was Jack Mort, not Walter, who pushed Jake into the path of the

oncoming Cadillac? Is such a thing possible? Roland can't say, not for sure, but

if that is the case, where is Jake now? Dead? Alive?

Caught somewhere in time? And if Jake Chambers is still alive and well in his

own world of Manhattan in the mid-1970s, how is it that Roland still remembers

him?

Despite this confusing and possibly dangerous development, the test of the

doors—and the drawing of the three—ends in success for Roland. Eddie Dean

accepts his place in Roland's world because he has fallen in love with The Lady

of the Shadows. Detta Walker and Odetta Holmes, the other two of Roland's three,

are driven together into one personality combining elements of both Detta and

Odetta when the gunslinger is finally able to force the two personalities to

acknowledge each other. This hybrid is able to accept and return Eddie's love.

Odetta Susannah Holmes and Detta Susannah Walker thus become a new woman, a

third woman: Susannah Dean.

Jack Mort dies beneath the wheels of the same subway—that fabled A-train—which

took Odetta's legs fifteen or sixteen years before. No great loss there.

And for the first time in untold years, Roland of Gilead is no longer alone in

his quest for the Dark Tower. Cuthbert and Alain, his lost companions of yore,

have been replaced by Eddie and Susannah . . . but the gunslinger has a way of

being bad medicine for his friends. Very bad medicine, indeed.

The Waste Lands takes up the story of these three pilgrims on the face of

Mid-World some months after the confrontation by the final door on the beach.

They have moved some fair way inland. The period of rest is ending, and a period

of learning has begun. Susannah is learning to shoot . . . Eddie is learning to

carve . . . and the gunslinger is learning how it feels to lose one's mind, a

piece at a time.

(One further note: My New York readers will know that I have taken certain

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摘要：

THEROSEITBEGANTOOPENbeforehiseyes.Itdisclosedadarkscarletfurnace,petaluponsecretpetal,eachblazingwithitsownsecretfury.Jakehadneverseenanythingsobeautiful,sointenselyandutterlyalive.Now,ashestretchedonegrime-streakedhandouttowardthiswonder,thevoicesbegantosinghisownname...andadreadful,deadlyfearbega...

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