Stephen King - The Dark Tower 4 - Wizard And Glass (1997)

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THE DARK TOWER IV
STEPHEN
KING
wizard and glass
ILLUSTRATIONS BY DAVE MCKEAN
A PLUME BOOK
PLUME
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam 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 Alcorn 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 Dutton Signet,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.
A limited hardcover edition was published by Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Inc., Hampton Falls, NH.
First Plume Printing, November, 1997 10 987654321
Copyright © Stephen King, 1997
Illustrations copyright © Dave McKean, 1997
All rights reserved
acknowledgments
The lyrics from "The Green Door," words by Marvin Moore, music by Bob Davis,
copyright © 1956 Alley Music Corp. and Trio Music Co., Inc. Copyright renewed. All
rights reserved. Used by permission. The lyrics from "Whole Lot-ta Shakin' Goin' On"
by Dave Williams and Sonny David, copyright © 1957.
^^ REGISTERED TRADEMARK——MARCA REGISTRADA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
King, Stephen
Wizard and glass / Stephen King, p. cm. — (The Dark Tower ; 4)
ISBN 0-452-27917-8 I. Series: King, Stephen. Dark Tower ; 4.
PS3561.I483W59 1997
813'.54—dc21 97-15995
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Times Roman Designed by Jesse Cohen
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.
BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS
OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION,
PENGUIN PUTNAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10014.
This book is dedicated to Julie Eugley and
Marsha DeFilippo. They answer the mail, and
most of the mail for the last couple of years has
been about Roland of Gilead—the gunslinger.
Basically, Julie and Marsha nagged me back
to the word processor. Julie, you nagged the
most effectively, so your name comes first.
CONTENTS
ARGUEMENT
PROLOGUE
BLAINE
PART ONE
RIDDLES
PART TWO
SUSAN
PART THREE
COME, REAP
PART FOUR
ALL GOD'S CHILLUN GOT SHOES
AFTERWORD
ILLUSTRATIONS
Rose
All hail the crimson king!
Her arms and belly and breasts breaking out in gooseflesh
Cuthbert, meanwhile, had already reloaded
But he and his love were no longer children
Smiling lips revealed cunning little teeth
There they died together-o
Of the three of them, only Roland saw her
It cut the old man's throat efficiently enough
A flash as the big-bang exploded
The dark tower rearing to the sky
The wicked witch of the East
ARGUEMENT
Wizard and Glass is the fourth volume of a longer tale inspired by Robert
Browning's narrative poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came."
The first volume, The Gunslinger, tells how Roland of Gilead pursues and at last
catches Walter, the man in black, who pretended friendship with Roland's father
but who actually served Marten, a great sorcerer. Catching the half-human Walter
is not Roland's goal but only a means to an end: Roland wants to reach the Dark
Tower, where he hopes the quickening de-struction of Mid-World may be halted,
perhaps even reversed.
Roland is a kind of knight, the last of his breed, and the Tower is his ob-session,
his only reason for living when first we meet him. We learn of an early test of
manhood forced upon him by Marten, who has seduced Roland's mother. Marten
expects Roland to fail this test and to be "sent west," his fa-ther's guns forever
denied him. Roland, however, lays Marten's plans at nines, passing the test . . .due
mostly to his clever choice of weapon.
We discover that the gunslinger's world is related to our own in some fundamental
and terrible way. This link is first revealed when Roland meets Jake, a boy from
the New York of 1977, at a desert way station. There are doors between Roland's
world and our own; one of them is death, and that is how Jake first reaches Mid-
World, pushed into Forty-third Street and run over by a car. The pusher was a man
named Jack Mort . . . except the thing hiding inside of Mort's head and guiding his
murderous hands on this par-ticular occasion was Roland's old enemy, Walter.
Before Jake and Roland reach Walter, Jake dies again ... this time be-cause the
gunslinger faced with an agonizing choice between this symbolic son and the Dark
Tower, chooses the Tower. Jake's last words before plung-ing into the abyss are
"Go, then—there are other worlds than these."
The final confrontation between Roland and Walter occurs near the Western Sea.
In a long night of palaver, the man in black tells Roland's future with a strange
Tarot deck. Three cards—The Prisoner, The Lady of the Shadows, and Death
("but not for you, gunslinger")—are especially called to Roland's attention.
The second volume, The Drawing of the Three, begins on the edge of the Western
Sea not long after Roland awakens from his confrontation with his old nemesis
and discovers Walter long dead, only more bones in a place of bones. The
exhausted gunslinger is attacked by a horde of carnivorous "lobstrosities," and
before he can escape them, he has been seriously wounded, losing the first two
fingers of his right hand. He is also poisoned by their bites, and as he resumes his
trek northward along the Western Sea, Roland is sickening ... perhaps dying.
On his walk he encounters three doors standing freely on the beach. These open
into our city of New York, at three different whens. From 1987, Roland draws
Eddie Dean, a prisoner of heroin. From 1964, he draws Odetta Susannah Holmes,
a woman who has lost her lower legs in a subway mis-hap . . . one that was no
accident. She is indeed a lady of shadows, with a vi-cious second personality
hiding within the socially committed young black woman her friends know. This
hidden woman, the violent and crafty Detta Walker, is determined to kill both
Roland and Eddie when the gunslinger draws her into Mid-World.
Between these two in time, once again in 1977, Roland enters the hellish mind of
Jack Mort, who has hurt Odetta/Detta not once but twice. "Death," the man in
black told Roland, "but not for you, gunslinger." Nor is Mort the third of whom
Walter foretold; Roland prevents Mort from murdering Jake Chambers, and
shortly afterward Mort dies beneath the wheels of the same train which took
Odetta's legs in 1959. Roland thus fails to draw the psy-chotic into Mid-World ...
but, he thinks, who would want such a being in any case?
Yet there's a price to be paid for rebellion against a foretold future; isn't there
always? Ka, maggot, Roland's old teacher, Cort, might have said; Such is the great
wheel, and always turns. Be not in front of it when it does, or you 'II be crushed
under it, and so make an end to your stupid brains and use-less bags of guts and
water.
Roland thinks that perhaps he has drawn three in just Eddie and Odetta, since
Odetta is a double personality, yet when Odetta and Detta merge as one in
Susannah (thanks in large part to Eddie Dean's love and courage), the gun-slinger
knows it's not so. He knows something else as well: he is being tor-mented by
thoughts of Jake, the boy who, dying, spoke of other worlds. Half of the
gunslinger's mind, in fact, believes there never was a boy. In prevent-ing Jack
Mort from pushing Jake in front of the car meant to kill him, Roland has created a
temporal paradox which is tearing him apart. And, in our world, it is tearing Jake
Chambers apart as well.
The Wastelands, the third volume of the series, begins with this paradox. After
killing a gigantic bear named either Mir (by the old people who went in fear of it)
or Shardik (by the Great Old Ones who built it... for the bear turns out to be a
cyborg), Roland, Eddie, and Susannah backtrack the beast and dis-cover Path of
the Beam. There are six of these beams, running between the twelve portals which
mark the edges of Mid-World. At the point where the beams cross—at the center
of Roland's world, perhaps the center of all worlds—the gunslinger believes that
he and his friends will at last find the Dark Tower.
By now Eddie and Susannah are no longer prisoners in Roland's world. In love
and well on the way to becoming gunslingers themselves, they are full participants
in the quest and follow him willingly along the Path of the Beam.
In a speaking ring not far from the Portal of the Bear, time is mended, paradox is
ended, and the real third is at last drawn. Jake reenters Mid-World at the
conclusion of a perilous rite where all four—Jake, Eddie, Susannah, and
Roland—remember the faces of their fathers and acquit themselves hon-orably.
Not long after, the quartet becomes a quintet, when Jake befriends a billy-bumbler.
Bumblers, which look like a combination of badger, raccoon, and dog, have a
limited speaking ability. Jake names his new friend Oy.
The way of the pilgrims leads them toward Lud, an urban wasteland where the
degenerate survivors of two old factions, the Pubes and the Grays, carry on the
vestige of an old conflict. Before reaching the city, they come to a little town
called River Crossing, where a few antique residents still remain. They recognize
Roland as a remnant of the old days, before the world moved on, and honor him
and his companions. After, the old people tell them of a monorail train which may
still run from Lud and into the wastelands, along the Path of the Beam and toward
the Dark Tower.
Jake is frightened by this news, but not really surprised; before being drawn away
from New York, he obtained two books from a bookstore owned by a man with
the thought-provoking name of Calvin Tower. One is a book of riddles with the
answers torn out. The other, Charlie the Choo-Choo, is a children's book about a
train. An amusing little tale, most might say . . . but to Jake, there's something
about Charlie that isn't amusing at all. Something frightening. Roland knows
something else: in the High Speech of his world, the word char means death.
Aunt Talitha, the matriarch of the River Crossing folk, gives Roland a silver cross
to wear, and the travellers go their course. Before reaching Lud, they discover a
downed plane from our world—a German fighter from the 1930s. Jammed into the
cockpit is the mummified corpse of a giant, almost certainly the half-mythical
outlaw David Quick.
While crossing the dilapidated bridge which spans the River Send, Jake and Oy
are nearly lost in an accident. While Roland, Eddie, and Susannah are distracted
by this, the party is ambushed by a dying (and very dangerous) out-law named
Gasher. He abducts Jake and takes him underground to the Tick-Tock Man, the
last leader of the Grays. Tick-Tock's real name is Andrew Quick; he is the great-
grandson of the man who died trying to land an air-plane from another world.
While Roland (aided by Oy) goes after Jake, Eddie and Susannah find the Cradle
of Lud, where Blaine the Mono awakes. Blaine is the last above-ground tool of the
vast computer-system which lies beneath the city of Lud, and it has only one
remaining interest: riddles. It promises to take the trav-ellers to the monorail's final
stop if they can solve a riddle it poses them. Otherwise, Blaine says, the only trip
they'll be taking will be to the place where the path ends in the clearing ... to their
deaths, in other words. In that case they'll have plenty of company, for Blaine is
planning to release stocks of nerve-gas which will kill everyone left in Lud: Pubes,
Grays, and gun-slingers alike.
Roland rescues Jake, leaving the Tick-Tock Man for dead ... but An-drew Quick is
not dead. Half blind, hideously wounded about the face, he is rescued by a man
who calls himself Richard Fannin. Fannin, however, also identifies himself as the
Ageless Stranger, a demon of whom Roland has been warned by Walter.
Roland and Jake are reunited with Eddie and Susannah in the Cradle of Lud, and
Susannah—with a little help from "dat bitch" Detta Walker—is able to solve
Blaine's riddle. They gain access to the mono, of necessity ig-noring the horrified
warnings of Blaine's sane but fatally weak undermind (Eddie calls this voice Little
Blaine), only to discover that Blaine means to commit suicide with them aboard.
The fact that the actual mind running the mono exists in computers falling farther
and farther behind them, running be-neath a city which has become a slaughtering-
pen, will make no difference when the pink bullet jumps the tracks somewhere
along the line at a speed in excess of eight hundred miles an hour.
There is only one chance of survival: Blaine's love of riddles. Roland of Gilead
proposes a desperate bargain. It is with this bargain that The Waste-lands ends; it
is with this bargain that Wizard and Glass begins.
romeo: Lady, by yonder blessed moon I vow,
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops—
juliet: O, swear not by the moon, th' inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.
romeo: What shall I swear by?
juliet: Do not swear at all.
Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the god of my idolatry,
And I'll believe thee.
Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare
On the fourth day, to [Dorothy's] great joy, Oz sent for her, and when she entered
the Throne Room, he greeted her pleasantly.
"Sit down; my dear. I think I have found a way to get you out of this country."
"And back to Kansas?" she asked eagerly.
"Well, I'm not sure about Kansas," said Oz, "for I haven't the faintest notion which
way it lies...."
The Wizard of Oz L. Frank Baum
摘要:

THEDARKTOWERIVSTEPHENKINGwizardandglassILLUSTRATIONSBYDAVEMCKEANAPLUMEBOOKPLUMEPublishedbythePenguinGroupPenguinPutnamInc.,375HudsonStreet,NewYork,NewYork10014,U.S.A.PenguinBooksLtd,27WrightsLane,LondonW85TZ,EnglandPenguinBooksAustraliaLtd,Ringwood,Victoria,AustraliaPenguinBooksCanadaLtd,10AlcornAv...

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