The Wind Through the Keyhole (The Dark Tower, #4.5)

by Stephen King

It seemed to him that if the wrong man stepped into the marriage-loop with a woman, it was a noose instead of a ring.

Pray for rain all you like, but dig a well as you do it. In the end, he kept silent.

Tim went forward on his own. He knelt. He slipped one hand into the linen shroud’s overlap and found his da’s hand. It was cold, but Tim did not hesitate to entwine his warm and living fingers with the dead ones. This was the way the two of them had held hands when Tim was only a sma’ one, and barely able to toddle. In those days, the man walking beside him had seemed twelve feet tall, and immortal.

This Hot Stokes would nail shut with short blows of his hammer, each blow terrible in its finality.

Time is a keyhole, he thought as he looked up at the stars. Yes, I think so. We sometimes bend and peer through it. And the wind we feel on our cheeks when we do—the wind that blows through the keyhole—is the breath of all the living universe.