The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower, #2)

by Stephen King

He walked out of nowhere toward nowhere, a man from another time who, it seemed, had reached a point of pointless ending.

Written upon it in black letters two-thirds of the way up, written in the high speech, were two words: THE PRISONER

Oh, there were all sorts of things to wonder about, but the truth was simple: here stood this door alone on an endless stretch of beach, and it was for only one of two things: opening or leaving closed.

Because the difference between seeing and not seeing can be the difference between living and dying.

It wasn’t a door. It was eyes. Insane as it might seem, he was looking at part of a carriage that flew through the sky. He was looking through someone’s eyes. Whose? But he knew. He was looking through the eyes of the prisoner.

with the single-minded and incurious resolve that had driven him across the desert and all the years before the desert in the wake of the man in black, the gunslinger stepped through the doorway. 2

For another, he was Roland. If dying was required, he intended to die as Roland. He would die crawling toward the Tower, if that was what was required.

The gunslinger reached into the prisoner’s pocket and closed the prisoner’s fingers over a coin. Roland went back through the door.

To try the coin both ways was only half the experiment, wasn’t it? He took one of the shells from his cartridge belt and folded it over the coin in his hand. Roland stepped back through the door.

Roland put his head back, closed his eyes and thanked God. God and Eddie Dean.

“Probably death,” the gunslinger said. “But before that happens, I don’t think you’ll be bored. I want you to join me on a quest. Of course, all will probably end in death—death for the four of us in a strange place. But if we should win through . . .” His eyes gleamed. “If we win through, Eddie, you’ll see something beyond all the beliefs of all your dreams.” “What thing?” “The Dark Tower.”

“You said four. Who are the other two?” “I know them not, for they have yet to be drawn.” “As I was drawn. Or as you’d like to draw me.”

The gunslinger smiled. “On the way to the Dark Tower,” he said, “anything is possible.”

This particular portal between the worlds had closed forever.

“What did you think I was doing?” he nearly snarls. “Calling Red Lobster for take-out?”

Roland said nothing, but heard the voice of Cort in his mind: Fault always lies in the same place, my fine babies: with him weak enough to lay blame.

“It’s ka,” he said, facing Eddie patiently. “What’s ka?” Eddie’s voice was truculent. “I never heard of it. Except if you say it twice you come out with the baby word for shit.” “I don’t know about that,” the gunslinger said. “Here it means duty, or destiny, or, in the vulgate, a place you must go.”

“I don’t discuss philosophy. I don’t study history. All I know is what’s past is past, and what’s ahead is ahead. The second is ka, and takes care of itself.”

“There are great wonders ahead,” Roland said. “Great adventures. More than that, there is a quest to course upon, and a chance to redeem your honor. There’s something else, too. You could be a gunslinger. I needn’t be the last after all. It’s in you, Eddie. I see it. I feel it.”

If you have given up your heart for the Tower, Roland, you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast. To be a beast is perhaps bearable, although the man who has become one will surely pay hell’s own price in the end, but what if you should gain your object?

To pay hell is one thing. But do you want to own it?

The reason she didn’t remember was simple. She wasn’t one woman but two. And one of them was dangerous.

Death was not for him; death was become him. The Prisoner, the Lady. Death was the third. He was suddenly filled with the certainty that he himself was the third.

Who was to say that he had not sculpted the cosmos today, or might not at some future time?

One of these men had been a creature the gunslinger believed to be a demon himself, a creature that pretended to be a man and called itself Flagg.

In matters of the Tower, fate became a thing as merciful as the lighter which had saved his life and as painful as the fire the miracle had ignited.

She was here. She was there, in the gunslinger’s eyes. She heard the oncoming train. Odetta! she screamed, suddenly understanding everything: what she was and when it had happened. Detta! she screamed, suddenly understanding everything: what she was and who had done it. A brief sensation of being turned inside out . . . and then a much more agonizing one. She was being torn apart.

she was whole. She was Odetta Holmes, but the other—? Hurry up, bitch! Detta yelled . . . but it was still her own voice; she and Detta had merged. She had been one; she had been two; now the gunslinger had drawn a third from her.

“I who was; I who had no right to be but was; I am the woman who you have saved. “I thank you, gunslinger.”

They looked toward Susannah, but she slept on, undisturbed. Once there had been a woman named Odetta Susannah Holmes; later, there had been another named Detta Susannah Walker. Now there was a third: Susannah Dean.

“Even the damned love,” he said.

The Tower. He would come to the Dark Tower and there he would sing their names; there he would sing their names; there he would sing all their names.

There I will sing all their names!