The Wind Through the Keyhole

Somewhere between the Green Palace and the Calla, on the Path of the Beam, the ka-tet comes down a rough road toward the River Whye. Oy keeps stopping to sit facing backward, nose in the air, which nags at something in Roland. At the river a big raft is moored under a barn-like ferry house, and Jake is already aboard in a wicker chair beside an old man in a straw hat.

The old man is Bix, the ferryman. He sees the sandalwood grips and goes down on one knee. He is somewhere past a hundred and twenty, remembers Gilead that was, feeds them fish popkins and wants news of Lud. “Time was a face on the water”, King writes at the Whye, and the book is about to prove it three times over.

Oy sniffs backward the whole way across, and Bix says what Roland has been half-remembering: the bumbler knows it is coming. A starkblast — a polar storm that comes down a Beam after a spell of false warmth, so sudden and so cold that birds freeze mid-flight and drop. Roland knows the posture from a woodcut in the storybook his mother read him, six bumblers sitting just so, illustrating a tale called “The Wind Through the Keyhole”. Bix gives them a day or two and points them at a deserted town with a stone meeting hall. If they meet Andy, he adds, no songs and no horoscope.

The ghost town has a broken signboard reading GOOK. “A gook is a deep well,” Roland says, and the ka-tet names the place after it. Roland and Eddie board the hall’s windows; Susannah rolls her chair into the enormous fireplace to open the damper and comes out black with soot and swearing in Detta’s voice. At the well on the common, she and Eddie hear a far thudding from the northwest like marching feet: trees going down ahead of the cold. Susannah tips herself out of the wheelchair so it can carry firewood. Oy is still in the street, staring at the storm, and Jake vaults the laden chair and runs for him. Roland holds Eddie back; the boy will be all right or he won’t. Jake comes back with a snarling bumbler clutched to his chest, the wind nearly carries them past the building, Roland catches him at the door, and it takes all of them to bar it.

Hours of wind and snapping trees. Jake asks for a story, and Roland offers two: one he lived, with his ka-mate Jamie DeCurry, and one his mother read to him.

Roland is a teenager, his mother not long dead, nursing the crippled Cort out of guilt, when his father calls him to a study where the fire is rarely lit. Gabrielle’s death stands on the record as suicide, unquestioned because her affair was known, and Steven Deschain, in mourning black, lays the blame on Rhea and the glass. He has work for his son. In Debaria, a salt-mining town southwest of Gilead, something is killing people — twenty-three dead by Vannay’s count — and witnesses describe a wolf that ran upright, a lion, a tyger. A skin-man. Roland and Jamie DeCurry, “Jamie Red-Hand” for the birthmark that colors one hand as if dipped in blood, are to find High Sheriff Hugh Peavy and kill it.

Their little special train derails short of the town; they free the horses and ride on. At Serenity, a walled retreat for women, the prioress Everlynne — a giantess in white, her hood winged like a gull — feeds them from an ironwood throne and jokes about eating them. Sister Fortuna, her face ruined, tells how a scaled two-legged thing bit the head off Sister Dolores a fortnight ago before Everlynne drove it off with the priory’s pellet gun. Everlynne knew Roland’s mother, who stayed here. Come back when the business is done, she says.

Debaria doubts the boys are old enough. Peavy asks for a sigul and gets one: the slug he once dug out of Steven Deschain’s arm, kept in a wooden box. On a cell wall Peavy chalks the attacks: they cluster between the town, the mines and the miners’ village of Little Debaria. Jamie thinks the skin-man is a saltie; Peavy thinks a miner met something in the deep new shaft.

At dawn the telephone rings: the Jefferson Ranch, fifteen or twenty dead. The family lie killed in the house and sixteen hands, the cook and sai Jefferson torn apart in the bunkhouse — the bloodiest thing Roland has ever seen. Outside, Jamie reads the tracks, which change from bear to bull-hoof to great cat to small cat to bare human feet, and a horse ridden in and out. The skin-man came as a man, so he knows what he is. From the tack room crawls the cook’s son, Bill Streeter, who remembers nothing.

Roland sends Jamie and Peavy’s men up to the salt camp to bring down every miner who can ride, letting slip that a boy saw something, and takes Bill back to town as bait. At a shepherd’s lean-to he rolls a bullet across his knuckles and puts the boy under. Bill saw a bear whose head brushed the bunkhouse ceiling, then a cat, then a screaming man — and of the man only his feet, with a ring tattooed around one ankle. He murmurs something about a white mark, and Roland lets it go. The deputies know the ring: a blue band from Beelie Stockade, the old militia prison, and perhaps four salties in ten carry one. Roland locks Bill in a mattress-lined cell and pays the blacksmith in gold for shells to fit his revolver, one of them pure silver. The boy is crying and asks for a story. “A person’s never too old for stories.” Roland begins.

Once upon a bye, on the edge of the Endless Forest, in the village of Tree, Tim Ross lives with his mother Nell and his father Big Ross, who cuts ironwood and promises his son his ax, his lucky coin, his plot and his place. When Tim is about eleven, Big Ross goes into the forest with his partner Big Kells and only Kells comes back, singed, with one word: dragon.

Taxes fall due to the Barony Covenanter and Nell cannot pay. Kells proposes, and she marries him to keep the house. He moves in a leather trunk with a brass lock, pulls Tim out of the Widow Smack’s school and sends him to the sawmill, and begins hitting Nell. In winter the Covenant Man rides in: gaunt, in black cloak and hat, a silver basin tied behind the saddle of his tall black horse. He lifts Tim onto the horse, learns what Kells is, and gives the boy a tiny key that opens anything once, with an invitation to his camp on the Ironwood Trail. That night Tim opens the trunk and finds, under the rags, his father’s lucky coin, untouched by any dragon.

At the Covenant Man’s fire Tim fills the silver basin and the tax-man passes over it a steel wand — “it started life as the gearshift of a Dodge Dart” — and in the water Tim watches Kells find the opened trunk and smash a jug into Nell’s forehead. Emptying the basin into a clear stream, he sees his father’s body under the water. The Covenant Man hands him Big Ross’s ax — Tim swears to bury it in Kells’s skull — and tells him to watch for the green sighe.

At home the posse cannot find Kells. The abandoned wand, passed over a pail of water, shows Tim a white-bearded old man in a conical yellow cap deep in the forest, and Nell with her sight restored. The widow cannot stop him, so she gives him bread and her late brother’s four-barreled gun with nine bullets.

Beyond the trail’s end a four-inch fairy glowing green, Armaneeta, leads him tussock by tussock into the Fagonard. The last tussock is the head of a dragon. Tim leaps clear, begs pardon on his knees, and she sinks; the sighe is gone. Marooned among giant reptiles, he blows the head off the first that charges, and the shaggy watchers on the bank kneel and cry Hile. They are the mudmen, a dying tribe of muties with plants growing from their skin, who can say only that word but can hear his thoughts. They feed him, mime a beard and a pointed cap when he asks after Maerlyn, give him a metal disc of the Old People and ferry him to the swamp’s far edge. He weeps, knowing they are doomed.

In the dark the disc speaks: DARIA, a North Central Positronics guidance module, who steers him north toward a Dogan where there is deep magic, breaking her own Directive Nineteen to do it. While he sleeps, six bumblers sit in a half-circle around him with their snouts raised north — the storybook picture — and far away a storm finds the Beam. At the Dogan a huge tyger with emerald eyes paces a cage. Frozen birds are already falling; DARIA shuts off for good. Under a tin bucket are the cage key and a mocking note signed RF/MB. Tim opens the cage, and the beast lets him take its collar. In a box are a white feather, a small brown bottle and a plain napkin that shakes out into a sheet, windproof and warm. Tim crawls under it, lifts the edge for the tyger, and the starkblast flattens the forest over them while they sleep. “Time is a keyhole”, he thinks, and vows that one day he will go to the Dark Tower.

In the morning he drips the bottle into the tyger’s mouth and on the fourth drop it is Maerlyn of the Eld. The tyger was a joke by the man who caged him — the Covenant Man, a long-lived servant of a far greater power — and the Red King himself, Maerlyn says, is caught at the top of the Dark Tower. Two orders: the rest of the bottle in Nell’s eyes, then the ax in her hands at once. The sheet, folded to a tablecloth, flies him home over the dead Fagonard.

Tree is battered but standing. Tim slips past the widow, apparently asleep by the fire, puts the drops in his mother’s eyes, and she sees. He gives her the ax. Then he finds the widow’s throat has been cut, and Kells, hidden in the house, takes him by the neck: bullets are too good for a meddler, the fire will do. The ax blade comes through Kells’s skull from behind. Nell has cut the rope.

Roland tells Bill that Tim carried the four-shot for ten years before he carried six-shooters and became ka-tet though not of the line of Eld: Tim Stoutheart. Then Jamie arrives with the salties. Twenty-one miners who can ride are herded into the saloon, two short shots apiece, boots off on the bar. Ten have blue rings; Roland locks them up. Old Steg Luka says all of them saw a thing of green pulsing light speaking from a crack in the new shaft, and someone went in there and came out changed. Roland steels the boy — “But he went on. I expect you to do the same.” — and loads the silver bullet. The ten file past the cell. Bill asks for a second pass with trouser legs raised, because the rings differ, and whispers a name.

Ollie Ang, whose ring is broken by a thick white scar, is pistol-whipped by Jamie and set upon by Luka, and in three seconds he is a man-high snake, a pooky, that bores through old Luka and bites the constable Wegg before Roland shoots it through the head with the silver bullet.

At Serenity, Everlynne agrees to keep Bill, and in her private rooms tells Roland that a man with a white face and black clothes came here and spoke with Gabrielle; Roland knows that man all too well. His mother went home to Gilead knowing her son would one day stand in this room, because ka is a wheel, and left him a letter. In a shaking hand: Steven had sent her to Serenity for life; Marten had told her that if she went back she would die at her son’s hand; she went because ka demanded it. Roland carries the letter for years, until it falls apart and he lets the wind take it. Next morning the train takes the boys home.

Roland finishes. Oy is asleep on his back by the fire. They bank it and sleep while the blast blows itself out. In the early afternoon Susannah has already unboarded a window: Gook is flattened to the ground, every building but the one they are in. She asks what else the letter said.

I forgive you everything. Can you forgive me?

He looks out at the leveled town and smiles. One more night, then they shoulder their gunna and follow the Beam toward Calla Bryn Sturgis.