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The Dark Tower V
Wolves of the Calla
Stephen King
ILLUSTRATED BY
Bernie Wrightson
Does not include Bernie Wrightson's 12 full-color illustrations, which will appear in the finished book.
THE DARK TOWER V:
WOLVES OF THE CALLA
The publication of Wolves of the Calla, the first of the final three books in the Dark Tower series, is the most anticipated event in
Stephen King's legendary career.
The world's bestselling author returns to his beloved Dark Tower series—an epic, inspired by The Lord of the Rings, that King
initiated more than thirty years ago. Now, Scribner and Donald M. Grant Publishers Inc. present the fifth installment of the series in
a handsome edition, complete with twelve full-color illustrations by acclaimed comic book/fantasy artist Bernie Wrightson.
Wolves of the Calla continues the adventures of Roland, the last gunslinger and survivor of a civilized world that has "moved on."
Roland's quest is ka, an inevitable destiny—to reach and perhaps save the Dark Tower, which stands at the center of everywhere
and everywhen. This pursuit brings Roland, with the three others who've joined his quest, to Calla Bryn Sturgis, a town in the
shadow of Thunderclap, beyond which lies the Dark Tower. Before advancing, however, they must face the evil wolves of
Thunderclap, who threaten to destroy the Calla by abducting its young.
With the recent mainstream success of the Harry Potter books, Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, and the Lord of the Rings film
trilogy, serial fantasy is bigger than ever—and the exciting, action-packed Wolves of the Calla, delivered in a beautiful, illustrated
edition, is sure to be an enormous treat for fans both new and old.
Stephen King is the author of more than forty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. Among his most recent are From a Buick 8,
Everything's Eventual, and Dreamcatcher. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.
CONTENTS
The Final Argument
Prologue: Roont
Part 1: ToDash -- Chapter I: The Face on the Water
Chapter II: New York Groove
Chapter III: Mia
Chapter IV: Palaver
Chapter V: OVERHOLSER
Chapter VI: The Way of the Eld
Chapter VII: Todash
Part Two: Telling Tales -- Chapter I: The Pavilion
Chapter II: Dry Twist
Chapter III: The Priest's Tale (New York)
Chapter IV: The Priest's Tale Continued (Highways in Hiding)
Chapter V: The Tale of Gray Dick
Chapter VI: Gran-pere's Tale
Chapter VII: Nocturne, Hunger
Chapter VIII: Took's Store; The Unfound Door
Chapter IX: The Priest's Tale Concluded (Unfound)
Part Three: The Wolves -- Chapter I: Secrets
Chapter II: The Dogan, Part I
Chapter III: The Dogan, Part 2
Chapter IV: The Pied Piper
Chapter V: The Meeting of the Folken
Chapter VI: Before the Storm
Chapter VII: The Wolves
Epilogue: The Doorway Cave
Author's Note
Author's Afterword
Copyright
Scan and Proof Notes
This book is for Frank Muller, who hears the voices in my head.
The finished book will include twelve full-color illustrations by Bernie Wrightson. A list of the illustrations
will appear on this page.
Contents -Prev / Next
The Final Argument
Wolves of the Calla is the fifth volume of a longer tale inspired by Robert Browning's narrative poem "Childe
Roland to the Dark Tower Came." The sixth, Song of Susannah, will be published in 2004. The seventh and
last, The Dark Tower, will be published later that same year.
The first volume, The Gunslinger, tells how Roland Deschain of Gilead pursues and at last catches Walter,
the man in black— he who pretended friendship with Roland's father but actually served the Crimson King in
far-off End-World. Catching the half-human Walter is for Roland a step on the way to the Dark Tower, where
he hopes the quickening destruction of Mid-World and the slow death of the Beams may be halted or even
reversed. The subtitle of this novel is RESUMPTION.
The Dark Tower is Roland's obsession, his grail, his only reason for living when we meet him. We learn of
how Marten tried, when Roland was yet a boy, to see him sent west in disgrace, swept from the board of the
great game. Roland, however, lays Marten's plans at nines, mostly due to his choice of weapon in his
manhood test.
Steven Deschain, Roland's father, sends his son and two friends (Cuthbert Allgood and Alain Johns) to the
seacoast barony of Mejis, mostly to place the boy beyond Walter's reach. There Roland meets and falls in
love with Susan Delgado, who has fallen afoul a witch. Rhea of the Coos is jealous of the girl's beauty, and
particularly dangerous because she has obtained one of the great glass balls known as the Bends o' the
Rainbow… or the Wizard's Glasses. There are thirteen of these in all, the most powerful and dangerous being
Black Thirteen. Roland and his friends have many adventures in Mejis, and although they escape with their
lives (and the pink Bend o' the Rainbow), Susan Delgado, the lovely girl at the window, is burned at the
stake. This tale is told in the fourth volume, Wizard and Glass. The subtitle of this novel is REGARD.
In the course of the tales of the Tower we discover that the gunslinger's world is related to our own in
fundamental and terrible ways. The first of these links is revealed when Jake, a boy from the New York of
1977, meets Roland at a desert way station long years after the death of Susan Delgado. There are doors
between Roland's world and our own, and one of them is death. Jake finds himself in this desert way station
after being pushed into Forty-third Street and run over by a car. The car's driver was a man named Enrico
Balazar. The pusher was a criminal sociopath named Jack Mort, Walter's representative on the New York
level of the Dark Tower.
Before Jake and Roland reach Walter, Jake dies again… this time because the gunslinger, faced with an
agonizing choice between this symbolic son and the Dark Tower, chooses the Tower. Jake's last words before
plunging 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 Tarot deck of strange device. Three cards—the Prisoner, the
Lady of Shadows, and Death ("but not for you, gunslinger")—are especially called to Roland's attention.
The Drawing of the Three (subtitled RENEWAL) begins on the shore of the Western Sea not long after
Roland awakens from his confrontation with Walter. The exhausted gunslinger is attacked by a horde of
carnivorous "lobstrosities," and before he can escape, he has lost two fingers of his right hand and has been
seriously infected. Roland resumes his trek along the shore of the Western Sea, although he is sick and
possibly dying.
On his walk he encounters three doors standing freely on the beach. These open into 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 lost her legs when a sociopath named Jack Mort pushed her in front of a
subway train. She is the Lady of Shadows, with a violent "other" hidden in her brain. 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.
Roland thinks that perhaps he has drawn three in just Eddie and Odetta, since Odetta is really two
personalities, yet when Odetta and Detta merge as one into Susannah (largely thanks to Eddie Dean's love
and courage), the gunslinger knows it's not so. He knows something else, as well: he is being tormented by
thoughts of Jake, the boy who spoke of other worlds at the time of his death.
The Waste Lands, subtitled REDEMPTION, begins with a paradox: to Roland, Jake seems both alive and
dead. In the New York of the late 1970s, Jake Chambers is haunted by the same question: alive or dead?
Which is he? After killing a gigantic bear named either Mir (so called by the old people who went in fear of
it) or Shardik (by the Great Old Ones who built it), Roland, Eddie, and Susannah backtrack the beast and
discover the Path of the Beam known as Shardik to Maturin, Bear to Turtle. There were once 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 (and all worlds), stands the Dark Tower, the nexus of all where
and when.
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 Roland, the last seppe-sai
(death-seller), along the Path of Shardik, the Way of Maturin.
In a speaking ring not far from the Portal of the Bear, time is mended, paradox is ended, and the real third is
drawn. Jake reenters Mid-World at the end of a perilous rite where all four—Jake, Eddie, Susannah, and
Roland—remember the faces of their fathers and acquit themselves honorably. 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 the city of Lud, where the degenerate survivors of two old
factions carry on an endless conflict. Before reaching the city, in the little town of River Crossing, they meet
a few ancient survivors of the old days. They recognize Roland as a fellow survivor of those days before the
world moved on, and honor him and his companions. The Old People also tell them of a monorail train which
may still run from Lud and into the waste lands, along the Path of the Beam and toward the Dark Tower.
Jake is frightened by this news but not surprised; before being drawn 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 story with dark echoes of
Mid-World. For one thing, the word char means death in the High Speech Roland grew up speaking in
Gilead.
Aunt Talitha, the matriarch of River Crossing, gives Roland a silver cross to wear, and the travelers go their
course. While crossing the dilapidated bridge which spans the River Send, Jake is abducted by a dying (and
very dangerous) outlaw named Gasher. Gasher takes his young prisoner underground to the Tick-Tock Man,
the last leader of the faction known as the Grays.
While Roland and Oy go after Jake, Eddie and Susannah find the Cradle of Lud, where Blaine the Mono
awakes. Blaine is the last above ground tool of a vast computer system that lies beneath Lud, and Blaine has
only one remaining interest: riddles. It promises to take the travelers to the monorail's final stop… if they can
pose it a riddle it cannot solve. Otherwise, Blaine says, their trip will end in death: charyou tree.
Roland rescues Jake, leaving the Tick-Tock Man for dead. Yet Andrew 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.
The pilgrims continue their journey from the dying city of Lud, this time by monorail. The fact that the actual
mind run-ning the mono exists in computers falling farther and farther behind them will make no difference
one way or the other when the pink bullet jumps the decaying tracks somewhere along the Path of the Beam
at a speed in excess of eight hundred miles an hour. Their one chance of survival is to pose Blaine a riddle
which the computer cannot answer.
At the beginning of Wizard and Glass, Eddie does indeed pose such a riddle, destroying Blaine with a
uniquely human weapon: illogic. The mono comes to a stop in a version of Topeka, Kansas, which has been
emptied by a disease called "superflu." As they recommence their journey along the Path of the Beam (now
on an apocalyptic version of Interstate 70), they see disturbing signs, ALL HAIL THE CRIMSON KING,
advises one. WATCH FOR THE WALKING DUDE, advises another. And, as alert readers will know, the
Walkin Dude has a name very similar to Richard Fannin.
After telling his friends the story of Susan Delgado, Roland and his friends come to a palace of green glass
which has been constructed across 1-70, a palace that bears a strong resemblance to the one Dorothy Gale
sought in The Wizard of Oz. In the throne-room of this great castle they encounter not Oz the Great and
Terrible but the Tick-Tock Man, the great city of Lud's final refugee. With Tick-Tock dead, the real Wizard
steps forward. It's Roland's ancient nemesis, Marten Broadcloak, known in some worlds as Randall Flagg, in
others as Richard Fannin, in others as John Farson (the Good Man). Roland and his friends are unable to kill
this apparition, who warns them one final time to give up their quest for the Tower ("Only misfires against
me, Roland, old fellow," he tells the gunslinger), but they are able to banish him.
After a final trip into the Wizard's Glass and a final dreadful revelation—that Roland of Gilead killed his own
mother, mistaking her for the witch named Rhea—the wanderers find themselves once more in Mid-World
and once more on the Path of the Beam. They take up their quest again, and it is here that we will find them
in the first pages of Wolves of the Calla.
This argument in no way summarizes the first four books of the Tower cycle; if you have not read those
books before commencing this one, I urge you to do so or to put this one aside. These books are but parts of a
single long tale, and you would do better to read them from beginning to end rather than starting in the
middle.
"Mister, we deal in lead." —Steve McQueen, in The Magnificent Seven
