Also by Stephen King
NOVELS
Carrie
Salems Lot
The Shining
The Stand
The Dead Zone
Firestarter
Cujo
THE DARK TOWER I:
The Gunslinger
Christine
Pet Sematary
Cycle of the Werewolf
The Talisman ( with Peter Straub )
It
The Eyes of the Dragon
Misery
The Tommyknockers
THE DARK TOWER II:
The Drawing of the Three
THE DARK TOWER III:
The Waste Lands
The Dark Half
Needful Things
Geralds Game
Dolores Claiborne
Insomnia
Rose Madder
Desperation
The Green Mile
THE DARK TOWER IV:
Wizard and Glass
Bag of Bones
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Dreamcatcher
Black House ( with Peter Straub )
From a Buick 8
AS RICHARD BACHMAN
Rage
The Long Walk
Roadwork
The Running Man
Thinner
The Regulators
COLLECTIONS
Night Shift
Different Seasons
Skeleton Crew
Four Past Midnight
Nightmares and Dreamscapes
Hearts in Atlantis
Everythings Eventual
SCREENPLAYS
Creepshow
Cats Eye
Silver Bullet
Maximum Overdrive
Pet Sematary
Golden Years
Sleepwalkers
The Stand
The Shining
Rose Red
Storm of the Century
NONFICTION
Danse Macabre
On Writing
Dark Tower related in bold
THE DARK TOWER V: WOLVES OF THE CALLA Copyright 2003 by Stephen King
Illustrations 2003 by Bernie Wrightson
Book design by Thomas Canty and Robert K. Wiener
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Acknowledgments Someone Saved My Life Tonight by Elton John and Bernie Taupin 1975 Happenstance Limited and Rouge Booze, Inc. All Rights in U.S. administered by WB Music Corp. All Rights outside U.S. administered by Muziekuitgeverij Artemis B.V. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS U.S. INC., Miami, FL 33014
The Wandering Boy Song/ATV Tunes LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
The Magnificent Seven MGM Consumer Products, a division of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Home Entertainment LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. Used by permission.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2003104355
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-5510-3
ISBN-10: 0-7432-5510-0
FIRST TRADE EDITION
Distributed by Simon & Schuster, Inc. SCRIBNER 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020
DONALD M. GRANT, PUBLISHER, INC. Post Office Box 187, Hampton Falls, NH 03844
www.grantbooks.com
Visit us on the World Wide Web: http://www.SimonSays.com
This book is for Frank Muller, who hears the voices in my head.
Contents
Illustrations
The Final Argument
Wolves of the Calla is the fifth volume of a longer tale inspired by Robert Brownings 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 blackhe who pretended friendship with Rolands 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 Rolands 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 Martens plans at nines, mostly due to his choice of weapon in his manhood test.
Steven Deschain, Rolands father, sends his son and two friends (Cuthbert Allgood and Alain Johns) to the seacoast barony of Mejis, mostly to place the boy beyond Walters reach. There Roland meets and falls in love with Susan Delgado, who has fallen afoul of a witch. Rhea of the Cos is jealous of the girls beauty, and particularly dangerous because she has obtained one of the great glass balls known as the Bends o the Rainbowor the Wizards 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 gunslingers 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 Rolands 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 cars driver was a man named Enrico Balazar. The pusher was a criminal sociopath named Jack Mort, Walters representative on the New York level of the Dark Tower.
Before Jake and Roland reach Walter, Jake dies againthis time because the gunslinger, faced with an agonizing choice between this symbolic son and the Dark Tower, chooses the Tower. Jakes last words before plunging into the abyss are Go, thenthere 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 Rolands future with a Tarot deck of strange device. Three cardsthe Prisoner, the Lady of Shadows, and Death (but not for you, gunslinger)are especially called to Rolands 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 Deans love and courage), the gunslinger knows its 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.