Once the group is reunited, Jake's and Roland's mental anguish ends. During this crossing over, Susannah has sex with the demon, distracting it while Eddie continues to carve the key which will allow Jake safe passage to Mid-World. This portal ends in a 'speaking ring' in Roland's world. Jake is able to pass into Roland's world using the key to open a door in an abandoned haunted house on Dutch Hill in his place and time. Jake abruptly leaves school and finds a key in a littered vacant lot where grows a single red rose. Eddie must carve a key that will open the door to New York in 1977. Roland burns Walter's jawbone and the key to his and Jake's dilemma is revealed-but to Eddie Dean, not Roland. In 1977 New York, Jake Chambers is experiencing exactly the same crippling mental divide, which is causing alarm at his private school, and angering Jake's cocaine-abusing father. It is soon discovered that when Roland saved Jake from being killed by Jack Mort in 1977 (in The Drawing of the Three), he inadvertently created a paradox Jake did not die and thus did not appear in Mid-World and travel with Roland.

However, he also remembers passing through the desert alone and never meeting Jake. Roland remembers meeting Jake Chambers in the way station and letting him fall to his death in the mountains (as depicted in The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger). Roland now reveals to his ka-tet (group of people bound together by fate/destiny) that his mind has become divided and is slowly losing his sanity. The three gunslingers follow the Path of the Beam inland to Mid-World. After an encounter with a gigantic cyborg bear named Shardik, they discover one of the six mystical Beams that hold the world together. Roland, Susannah, and Eddie have moved east from the shore of the Western Sea, and into the woods of Out-World. The story begins five weeks after the end of The Drawing of the Three.

Dark tower the waste lands