The Drawing of the Three
Chapters - Stephen King
Prologue: Prologue: The Sailor
Roland Deschain awakens on the beach of the Western Sea, his legs numb and his mind still clouded from the long palaver with the man in black. A lobstrosity - a nightmarish shelled creature that crawls up from the waves asking garbled questions - attacks him, biting off the first two fingers of his right hand and a chunk of his right foot including the great toe. Roland kills the creature by crushing it with a rock, but discovers his guns were wetted by the tide and his ammunition is unreliable. Wounded, feverish, and carrying only a handful of possibly usable shells, he retreats above the high-tide line to tend his injuries and await dawn.
POV: Roland Deschain·Mentioned: Walter o'Dim, Jake Chambers
Part: The Prisoner
Chapter 1: The Door
Roland Deschain spends his first morning back on the strand cleaning his salt-soaked guns and sorting his shells into twenty he hopes are dry and thirty-seven he knows are ruined. He sleeps sixteen hours; at dawn the next day infection has bloomed red up his wrist and he begins walking north. After three hours and roughly four miles he can go no further on his feet, and around three o'clock of that same long delirious day, crawling, he reaches a freestanding door of ironwood standing on the strand above the high-tide line. Its gold knob is filigreed with a baboon's face, and two words in the High Speech are written upon it: THE PRISONER. When Roland opens the door, he finds himself looking through the eyes of a young dark-haired man on an aeroplane heading for New York - Eddie Dean, a heroin addict smuggling two pounds of cocaine for a man called Enrico Balazar.
POV: Roland Deschain·On page: Eddie Dean·Mentioned: Walter o'Dim, Jake Chambers
Chapter 2: Eddie Dean
Roland steps through the door and finds himself riding inside the mind of Eddie Dean on a flight from Nassau to New York. He learns that Eddie has two pounds of cocaine strapped under his arms, that the supplier is a New York gangster named Enrico Balazar, and that Eddie is being squeezed because Balazar is sitting on his addict brother Henry. Roland watches Eddie through the eyes of the first-class stewardess Jane Dorning and realises she has already marked him for the customs inspectors. To test whether things can cross from this world to his own, Roland takes a half-eaten tuna sandwich back through the door and finds it waiting on the sand. He returns and begins to think his way toward a plan: he can carry the cocaine through the door himself, leaving Eddie clean to face the ritual Roland thinks of as Clearing the Customs.
POV: Eddie Dean·On page: Roland Deschain·Mentioned: Enrico Balazar
Chapter 3: Contact and Landing
As the aeroplane begins its descent over Long Island, Roland tests how things travel back between the worlds. He pockets a coin from Eddie's pocket and steps back to the strand, then returns with the coin closed around a cartridge from his belt. The coin makes the trip; the cartridge does not, falling at the foot of the door on the beach side. He has his answer: living things and held things can cross one way, but only what is closed in Eddie's hand will come back. Then Roland breaks his careful silence and speaks directly to Eddie for the first time, identifying himself and warning him that the stewardesses know. The plane settles. Eddie pretends a sudden gut cramp, ducks into the first-class lavatory, and locks the door. With the captain pounding for him to come out, Eddie turns and finds the doorway open onto the grey strand. Roland cuts the masking tape girdle off him; Eddie steps through, drops his trousers, and goes back through as if he had simply been on the toilet. The captain breaks the door in moments later to find him pretending innocence. The customs men march him off the aeroplane and down the jetway.
POV: Eddie Dean·On page: Roland Deschain
Chapter 4: The Tower
Eddie sits half-naked in a small white interrogation room at Kennedy as seven customs agents work him over for two hours. With Roland's steady presence behind his eyes he holds his ground, demanding a blood test for everyone in the room or his release. They have no evidence and let him go. A cab carries Eddie home to his building in Co-Op City, tailed by an unmarked customs car and a pizza van. While he stands waiting on the pavement, Roland steps back across to the strand to drag the bagged cocaine into a rocky cleft above the high-tide line, hides it under saw-grass, and discovers that the door now follows wherever he goes. The pizza van pulls up; behind the wheel is Jack Andolini, beside him Col Vincent. Eddie learns that Balazar has taken Henry into the bar for his own safety, and that the apartment has been turned over for any sign of the goods. Andolini takes Eddie into Manhattan in the van. As they pull up at the kerb Roland recoils at the red neon shape above the door, mistaking it for the Tower of his own quest until Eddie explains it is only a sign. At the chapter's last beat Eddie and the gunslinger walk into The Leaning Tower together.
POV: Eddie Dean·On page: Roland Deschain, Jack Andolini·Mentioned: Enrico Balazar
Chapter 5: Showdown and Shoot-Out
Inside Balazar's office Eddie is taunted with a tower of cards while the drug lord's gentlemen play Trivial Pursuit in the back room with Henry on the nod between them. Henry is given his final fix and dies slumped over the board. Eddie offers to fetch a sample of the cocaine from the bar's private bathroom; Jack Andolini is sent in to search it; Claudio Andolini, Jack's younger brother, strips Eddie and gives him a body cavity search, finding nothing. Eddie steps into the bathroom alone, opens the door to the strand, and lures Jack through. On the beach side the lobstrosities tear Jack apart while Eddie, naked, steps back through into the bathroom with Roland. They strip the secret panel of Balazar's medicine cabinet, find a stash of sample Keflex packets, and at that moment overhear 'Cimi Dretto telling Balazar that Henry is dead. The gunfight begins instantly. Eddie fires Roland's revolver naked through the smoke; Roland fights from the floor with a fouled hand and a cheap automatic taken from a dead man. Balazar, 'Cimi, Claudio, Tricks Postino, Jimmy Haspio, Dario, Big George Biondi, and finally Kevin Blake all die, but not before Kevin lobs Henry's severed head through the doorway at Eddie. With the SWAT squad coming through the bar, Roland offers Eddie a choice: stay and answer for the bodies, or come with him toward the Dark Tower. Eddie hands him the packets of Keflex and steps through. On the strand Roland closes the door forever and dry-swallows two of the capsules himself as Eddie collapses into withdrawal.
POV: Roland Deschain·On page: Eddie Dean, Enrico Balazar, Jack Andolini
Part: Shuffle
Part: The Lady of Shadows
Chapter 1: Detta and Odetta
The chapter introduces Odetta Holmes, a wealthy, educated black civil-rights activist in 1964 New York, and her hidden second self, Detta Walker, who is crude, violent, sexually compulsive, and given to petty theft. Odetta's chauffeur, Andrew Feeny, drives her home from the airport after a campaign in Oxford, Mississippi; she is exhausted, headachy, and aware only of having lost a few hours she cannot account for. Her doorman Howard helps her into her building. Since August 1959, when she was shoved in front of the A-train at Christopher Street, she has had no legs below the knees and longer and more frequent stretches of missing time. Detta, meanwhile, surfaces in flashes - a child stealing a china plate from a wedding present and smashing it in The Drawers, a teenager in a burnt-orange dress taunting fraternity boys at a roadhouse - and neither half of the woman knows the other exists.
POV: Susannah Dean
Chapter 2: Ringing the Changes
Outside Sisters of Mercy, the intern George Shavers and the ambulance driver Julio Estevez recall the night a few years earlier when they had brought in a black woman who had lost her legs to the A-train, and how during the ride her cultured voice had kept lurching into a snarling, foul-mouthed second voice they could not account for. In the present, Roland reaches a second freestanding door on the strand. It is marked THE LADY OF SHADOWS. He opens it and finds himself riding inside Detta Walker, who is shoplifting costume jewellery in Macy's. Detta senses him at once, screams, and fights him with a fury Eddie had never shown. The store detective Jimmy Halvorsen gives chase as Roland forces her wheelchair the wrong way down an aisle, into a changing room, and through the doorway. At the chapter's last beat Roland wheels the Lady through onto the strand.
POV: Susannah Dean·On page: Roland Deschain, Eddie Dean
Chapter 3: Odetta On the Other Side
The woman who arrives on the strand is not the snarling thief Roland was riding but Odetta Holmes, calm and bewildered. Her last memory is sitting in her dressing gown watching the midnight news after coming home from Oxford; she has no recollection of Macy's, of the rings on her own fingers, or of being moved. Eddie kneels beside her chair, embraces her as she weeps, and is already beginning to fall in love with her as he tries to explain where she is. Odetta listens politely and then says No: she believes she is in a coma in Oxford after a deputy's billy-club, or perhaps that she has gone mad. She tells Eddie the story of the brick that struck her at five, dropped from a condemned building in Elizabethtown after a taxi driver had refused to pick up her family. Roland drags himself off to find water and comes back with the skins full, sicker than when he left. While Odetta dozes by her chair he warns Eddie privately that she is not the woman he brought through the door - she is two women in the same body, and the other one is as dangerous as the lobstrosities.
POV: Roland Deschain·On page: Eddie Dean, Susannah Dean
Chapter 4: Detta On the Other Side
In the night, Susannah's dark personality, Detta Walker, wakes believing she has been kidnapped by two white men. She crawls to Roland's gunbelts, steals a revolver, and tries to shoot the sleeping Eddie in the head. Roland has anticipated this and loaded the guns with spent casings, so they only click. Detta reverses the gun and bludgeons Eddie, cracking his jaw, before Roland tackles her and the two men tie her into her wheelchair. Eddie is horrified by the transformation. The next day they push on north, Detta sabotaging their progress at every turn - jamming the chair's brake to spill herself, throwing her weight to upset it, refusing to eat the lobstrosity meat. The journey is a nightmare as Roland's infection worsens. At last Detta collapses in a fit and wakes as the calm, puzzled Odetta - just as Roland himself faints from fever.
POV: Roland Deschain·On page: Eddie Dean, Susannah Dean
Part: Reshuffle
Part: The Pusher
Chapter 1: Bitter Medicine
Roland Deschain enters the mind of Jack Mort, a seemingly respectable accountant who is secretly a serial killer who pushes strangers in front of traffic for sexual pleasure. Roland is horrified to discover that Mort was responsible for both of Susannah Dean's tragedies - he dropped the brick that struck her as a child, and he pushed her in front of the subway train. Even more shocking, Mort is preparing to push a boy into traffic - and the boy is Jake Chambers Chambers, whose death in our world sent him to Roland's world. Roland seizes control of Mort's body just in time to prevent Jake's murder. He faints from the revelation that the man in black's Tarot card of Death referred not to a separate person but to himself through Mort - the three who must be drawn are the Prisoner, the Lady, and Death.
POV: Roland Deschain·On page: Jack Mort, Jake Chambers·Mentioned: Susannah Dean
Chapter 2: The Honeypot
On the strand Detta Walker has wakened in her right mind and laid up in a shadowed cleft above the beach floored with the brittle bones of some long-gone predator's kills. She watches Eddie searching the slopes for the woman he calls Odetta, waits for him to fall asleep beside the wheelchair, and then crawls down. She had thought to smash his skull with a rock, but realises that if she kills him Roland's quest dies with him and her one way back to her own world dies as well. Instead she braids a length of rope into three running slip-knots while he sleeps, drops the first noose around his neck, and trusses him hand, foot, and throat in a hog-tie that will strangle him if he straightens his legs. Through the still-open door she catches a glimpse of Roland in another man's body holding a frightened druggist at gunpoint. She drags Eddie below the high-tide line as honeypot for the lobstrosities, remembering Eddie's own brother Henry talking about the Viet Cong tactic of gut-shooting an American and leaving him to scream as bait for the men who would try to save him. Then she crawls back to her cleft to wait for Roland to come back through the door and bargain for the bait's life.
POV: Susannah Dean·On page: Eddie Dean, Roland Deschain, Jack Mort
Chapter 3: Roland Takes His Medicine
Riding inside the body of Jack Mort, the serial pusher, Roland takes a cab to Clements' Guns and Sporting Goods on West Forty-Ninth, studies a Shooter's Bible until he finds a Winchester .45 cartridge that matches his own, and tries to buy three boxes. The dishonest clerk Fat Johnny Holden refuses, since Mort has no permit. Roland slides Mort's wallet under the counter with his foot, walks outside, and fetches the two patrolmen drinking coffee at the kerb - Carl Delevan and George O'Mearah. He spins them a story about the clerk picking his pocket and the clerk's illegal concealed Magnum. While the cops bend to retrieve the wallet Roland cracks their heads together, takes their gunbelts and four boxes of shells, handcuffs the weeping clerk, and pays for the ammunition in cash from Mort's billfold. Then he walks around the corner into Katz's Drugs, where the chemist Katz is on the phone abusing a Valium-addicted customer named Mrs Rathbun. The elderly security guard Ralph Lennox reaches for his revolver; Roland shoots it out of his hand. In the curved security mirror Roland sees a customer creeping up behind him with a knife and shoots the blade out of his fist as well. He demands a large bottle of Keflex without a prescription. Katz's acne-scarred assistant fills a bottle of two hundred capsules. Roland leaves Mort's gold Rolex on the counter as payment and walks out into the street.
POV: Roland Deschain·On page: Jack Mort, Eddie Dean, Susannah Dean
Chapter 4: The Drawing
Outside Katz's Drugs two younger and faster patrolmen, Andy Staunton and Norris Weaver, intercept Mort. Staunton fires; the bullet smashes a silver Dunhill lighter in Mort's breast pocket and saves both their lives. Mort's clothes begin to burn. Roland feigns death, then takes the cops' guns and runs for the Christopher Street subway station, the same station where Mort once pushed Odetta in front of the A-train. On the platform, with his shirt and hair alight and an A-train roaring in, Roland calls telepathically to the women on the beach: look through the door, both of you, now. Then he pushes Mort's body past the warning line and dives over the edge himself, cradling the boxes of shells and the bottle of Keflex against his belly. As Roland turns Mort's head he sees Odetta and Detta both at once through the door; the train cuts Mort in half at the waist, and at that instant Roland leaps back through. On the strand the two women are locked face to face by their own hands at one another's throats, and in that locked moment of seeing they merge into a new whole woman - Susannah Dean. Roland tries to drag the trussed and strangling Eddie back from the lobstrosities and fails; Susannah picks up his revolvers and blows the creatures off Eddie one by one. Then she takes Roland's knife and cuts Eddie free. Days later, in the wooded hills well inland, Roland steadies the revolver over a fallen log with his good left hand and drops a deer at the edge of a pool; his maimed right hand is still too clumsy for gutting and Susannah finishes the job for him. That night the Tower comes back into his dreams. He shows Eddie the jawbone of Walter and tells him it once spoke and will speak again, and weeps as he admits he will sacrifice them both for the Tower if he must.
POV: Roland Deschain·On page: Eddie Dean, Susannah Dean, Jack Mort·Mentioned: Walter o'Dim