Song of Susannah
Chapters - Stephen King
Chapter 1: Beamquake
In the aftermath of the battle with the Wolves, Roland Deschain and his ka-tet gather at the rectory to plan their next move. Susannah Dean has vanished through the Unfound Door, taking Black Thirteen with her, and a Beamquake signals the collapse of another Beam holding the Dark Tower. Henchick of the Manni agrees to bring his men to the Doorway Cave at dawn to help open the door, though Eddie Dean is desperate to go immediately. Roland, Eddie, Jake Chambers, and Father Callahan play Watch Me through the night while waiting for morning. A sense of dread settles over them as they realise only two Beams remain.
POV: Eddie Dean·On page: Roland Deschain, Jake Chambers, Oy, Father Callahan, Henchick, Rosalita Munoz·Mentioned: Susannah Dean, Mia
Chapter 2: The Persistence of Magic
The Manni arrive and trek up to the Doorway Cave, where Henchick uses the Branni bob to demonstrate that magic still lingers despite the loss of Black Thirteen. The group forms a circle around the Unfound Door, channelling their combined force through Jake Chambers, who struggles to open it. When the door finally bursts open, ka reshuffles the plan: Jake, Father Callahan, and Oy are hurled through into 1999 New York, while Roland Deschain and Eddie Dean are sucked through a second opening into 1977 Maine, where gunfire immediately greets them. The ka-tet is split across two whens and two wheres.
POV: Roland Deschain·On page: Eddie Dean, Jake Chambers, Oy, Father Callahan, Henchick
Chapter 3: Trudy and Mia
Trudy Damascus witnesses Susannah Dean materialise on a Second Avenue sidewalk, growing legs before her eyes. The desperate Mia steals Trudy's shoes and threatens her with a sharpened Oriza plate before disappearing. Trudy reports the mugging to police but is dismissed as delusional. Returning to the scene, she discovers a strange humming near the site of the former vacant lot, now 2 Hammarskjöld Plaza, and finds her newspaper discarded in a nearby park beside a metal turtle sculpture. The encounter leaves Trudy shaken, haunted by bad dreams of something tipping toward catastrophe.
POV: Susannah Dean·On page: Mia
Chapter 4: Susannah's Dogan
Susannah's memory of recent events is unreliable, fractured by Mia's hijacking of her body. She recalls being driven up to the Doorway Cave, lowering her wheelchair from the bucka-waggon, and leaving Eddie's ring at the foot of the path as a sigul so the Wolves cannot scent him. Now in New York, with Mia desperate to halt the labour, Susannah retreats into her mental Dogan, a visualised control room of dials and screens. There she turns down the EMOTIONAL TEMP and LABOR FORCE dials and flips the chap to ASLEEP, easing Mia's pains even as warning lights flare and the floor begins to crack. She imagines a microphone and records a message to Eddie, telling him she is alive, that it is June 1999, and that she loves him. Returning to the park bench, Detta comes forward and forces a reluctant Mia to sit and palaver.
POV: Susannah Dean·On page: Mia
Chapter 5: The Turtle
Mia agrees to palaver with Susannah but wants somewhere private with a telephone, where her allies can reach her. Rolling down the lining of the bowling bag that holds Black Thirteen, Susannah finds a small scrimshaw turtle, the twin of the metal turtle sculpture in the park - an ancient sigul tied to the Beam of the Turtle. Holding it makes her feel safe, and she discovers it mesmerises anyone who sees it. She uses its power on a Swedish diplomat, Mats van Wyck, ordering him to rent a room at the Plaza-Park Hotel under her name and handing over his cash. Walking into the future-shocked lobby, she checks into room 1919, the turtle entrancing the Eurasian desk clerk, who weeps and warns that the King of the Eye is coming and the Tower will fall. Susannah locks Black Thirteen and the Oriza plates in the room safe before she and Mia settle in to palaver.
POV: Susannah Dean·On page: Mia·Mentioned: The Crimson King
Chapter 6: The Castle Allure
Richard Sayre calls the hotel room and confirms to Mia that the Crimson King's people will let her raise the chap, though his promise sounds hollow. He cruelly informs Susannah Dean that Roland Deschain and Eddie Dean are walking into an ambush in 1977 Maine. Susannah realises with horror that Mia betrayed them by sharing information gleaned from Father Callahan's memories about where the Unfound Door would deliver them. Mia locks Susannah away in the mental brig and leaves the hotel, heading for the Dixie Pig on Lexington and Sixty-first Street, where terrible surgeons wait to deliver the baby.
POV: Susannah Dean·On page: Mia, Richard Sayre·Mentioned: Mordred Deschain, The Crimson King, Steven Deschain
Chapter 7: The Ambush
Roland Deschain and Eddie Dean arrive in 1977 East Stoneham, Maine, and are immediately ambushed by Jack Andolini and a small army of gunmen sent by Enrico Balazar. Two women in the general store are killed in the crossfire. Roland and Eddie fight their way through the store with the help of a local man in a flannel shirt, John Cullum, and the shopkeeper Chip McAvoy. They flood the storeroom with diesel fuel and ignite it, while a crashed logging truck provides crucial cover. The trio escapes out the back with Cullum guiding them to safety across the lake.
POV: Roland Deschain·On page: Eddie Dean, John Cullum, Jack Andolini·Mentioned: Mordred Deschain, The Crimson King
Chapter 8: A Game of Toss
Eddie Dean, Roland Deschain, and John Cullum take refuge in Cullum's cosy lakeside cottage, where Eddie gets his wounds tended and swallows some leftover Percodan. Eddie questions Cullum about the writer Stephen King, whose novel Salem's Lot features Father Father Callahan as a character. Cullum identifies King as a real person living in nearby Bridgton, which deepens the mystery of fiction bleeding into reality. Eddie begins to grasp a staggering possibility about King's role in their existence. Cullum leads them to the Dimity Road cabin where Calvin Tower and Aaron Deepneau are hiding.
POV: Eddie Dean·On page: Roland Deschain, John Cullum
Chapter 9: Eddie Bites His Tongue
Eddie Dean confronts Calvin Tower, who has reneged on his promise to sell the vacant lot containing the rose. Tower has been foolishly browsing local bookshops instead of lying low, despite Father Callahan's urgent warning. Through tense negotiation, Tower grudgingly agrees to sell the lot and signs the deed of transfer, largely because Deepneau convinces him it is the right thing to do. Eddie also secures a verbal agreement about protecting the lot through legal means. The document is signed with Roland Deschain and Eddie as witnesses, transferring ownership to the Tet Corporation.
POV: Eddie Dean·On page: Roland Deschain, John Cullum, Calvin Tower·Mentioned: Steven Deschain
Chapter 10: Susannah-Mio, Divided Girl of Mine
Locked in her mental prison, Susannah sinks into a feverish dream-newsreel in which Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley read out a roll of the assassinated and the dead - Kennedy, Diem and Nhu, Bobby, John-John, Martin Luther King, and finally Stephen King, struck down by a minivan near his home in Lovell, Maine. Cronkite's closing litany names Roland, Eddie and Jake among the dead and pronounces all Discordia. She wakes in her Dogan to dark screens, a cracking floor and shrieking machinery, and catches a badly broken contact from Eddie urging her to burn up the day and hold on. Mia then walks her through the ghost-town of Fedic, past the Good-Time Saloon to the Arc 16 Experimental Station, the Fedic Dogan whose long room of beds and steel hoods is the production line for the Calla Wolves and the chap-extraction trade. There Mia lays out the bargain that made her mortal: Walter o'Dim, calling himself Walter of End-World and of All-World, offered her five to seven years with a son in exchange for her near-eternal discorporate state, with a demon-elemental as the conduit that passed Roland's seed through Susannah's womb cell by cell into Mia's. The chap, Mordred, is being readied as the Crimson King's weapon against the line of Eld, and the door between Fedic and the Calla side of Thunderclap is the road the Wolves ride. Furious but bound, Mia hurls them back to room 1919. Out in the Plaza-Park lobby at dusk, Mia flounders onto Second Avenue, where the Rev. Earl Harrigan of the Church of the Holy God-Bomb is arguing a parking ticket with Officer Benzyck. Susannah ducks into the Dogan, seizes the microphone and bends Harrigan through the scrimshaw turtle; the preacher hails Mia a cab bound for the Dixie Pig at Lex and Sixty-first.
POV: Susannah Dean·On page: Mia, Eddie Dean·Mentioned: Walter o'Dim, Mordred Deschain, The Crimson King
Chapter 11: The Writer
Roland Deschain and Eddie Dean drive to Bridgton, Maine, drawn by an overwhelming force they sense along the Beam. They find Stephen King at his modest lakeside home. King recognises Roland with shock, having created him as a fictional character years ago, and faints. Once revived, King tells them the story of The Dark Tower as he wrote it, from the desert to Jake Chambers's death beneath the mountains. He admits he stopped writing because Roland frightened him and something seemed to push back against the story. Roland and Eddie realise King is a key to the Tower's survival, the living twin of the rose.
POV: Roland Deschain·On page: Eddie Dean, Stephen King·Mentioned: Walter o'Dim, The Crimson King, Cuthbert Allgood
Chapter 12: Jake and Callahan
Jake Chambers and Father Callahan crash-land on Second Avenue in 1999 New York, near the site of the rose. After Oy nearly gets hit by a taxi, Jake draws his gun in a fury before being calmed by street preacher Earl Harrigan. Harrigan tells them Susannah Dean passed through earlier and directs them to the Plaza-Park Hotel. At the hotel, Jake finds a magic MagCard and message left under the name Stephen King. They use the card to enter room 1919, where they confront the malevolent pull of Black Thirteen. Callahan prays the ball back to sleep, and they decide to hide it somewhere safe for Roland Deschain.
POV: Jake Chambers·On page: Father Callahan, Oy·Mentioned: The Crimson King
Chapter 13: Hile, Mia, Hile, Mother
Mia arrives at the Dixie Pig, paralysed by New York's chaos but guided forward by Susannah Dean's reluctant help. While waiting, Susannah shares a memory of her mother offering gingerbread, which devastates Mia with its vision of ordinary motherhood. A busker plays 'Man of Constant Sorrow', unlocking powerful memories of the 1964 Mississippi civil rights struggle that overwhelm Mia. Susannah releases the labour and drops the scrimshaw turtle into the gutter as a sigul for her friends. Inside the Dixie Pig, Mia is greeted by Richard Sayre and a crowd of low men and vampires, but Sayre's promises prove as hollow as Susannah warned.
POV: Susannah Dean·On page: Mia, Richard Sayre, Mordred Deschain·Mentioned: Walter o'Dim, The Crimson King
Epilogue: Coda: Pages from a Writer's Journal
The epilogue consists of journal entries by Stephen King spanning 1977 to 1999, chronicling his relationship with The Dark Tower story. He describes finding the manuscript in his garage, selling chapters to Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the story's explosive hold on his imagination. The entries reveal his struggles with alcoholism and his growing unease that something actively opposes the story's completion. The final entry, dated June 19, 1999, ends with King heading out for a walk on Route 7. A newspaper clipping follows, reporting that Stephen King was struck and killed by a van driven by Bryan Smith on Slab City Hill.
On page: Stephen King