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

by Stephen King

Roland considered. “Mayhap I’ll tell you two, since it’s long until dawn and we can sleep tomorrow away, if we like. These tales nest inside each other. Yet the wind blows through both, which is a good thing. There’s nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world.”

“Do you know stories that start, ‘Once upon a bye, before your grandfather’s grandfather was born’?” “They all start that way. At least, the ones my da’ told me. Before he said I was too old for stories.” “A person’s never too old for stories, Bill. Man and boy, girl and woman, never too old. We live for them.”

He studied his feet for a bit, and when he looked up again, he was smiling. It made him almost as handsome as he’d been as a youth . . . but never so handsome as Jack Ross. “Tomorrow, then. But no longer. They have a saying in the West’rds, my dear. ‘Look not long at what’s offered, for every precious thing has wings and may fly away.’”

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. He prayed that wasn’t the case here. He already knew he couldn’t like his mother’s new husband, let alone love him, but perhaps his mother could do both. Women were different. They had larger hearts.

“Can my mother see again? Even a little?” Tim knew the answer from sai Cosington’s face before she opened her mouth. “Not yet, son. You must pray.” Tim thought of telling her what his father had sometimes said: Pray for rain all you like, but dig a well as you do it. In the end, he kept silent.

When he emerged, he saw that the path once more entered the woods, but he wouldn’t be there for long. Not far ahead, the great old trees pulled back and the long, long upslope he had been climbing ended in a clearing far larger than the one where the bumblers had danced. There an enormous tower made of metal girders rose into the sky. At the top was a blinking red light. “You have almost reached your destination,” Daria said. “The North Forest Kinnock Dogan is three wheels ahead.”

He felt awe as he looked up at those stars, but also a deep and abiding contentment, such as he had felt as a child, awakening in the night, safe and warm beneath his quilt, drowsing half in and half out of sleep, listening to the wind sing its lonely song of other places and other lives. 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.

At some point he slipped away himself, into a rest that was deep and satisfying and untroubled by dreams. As he went, he felt that he was very wee, and flying on the wind that blew through time’s keyhole. Away from the edge of the Great Canyon, over the Endless Forest and the Fagonard, above the Ironwood Trail, past Tree—just a brave little nestle of lights from where he rode the wind—and farther, farther, oh, very much farther, across the entire reach of Mid-World to where a huge ebony Tower reared itself into the heavens. I will go there! Someday I will! It was his last thought before sleep took him.

“Stand back now, Billy. And remember the face of your father. He watches you from the clearing.”

There was a little more, words I traced over and over during my wandering years after the disastrous battle at Jericho Hill and the fall of Gilead. I traced them until the paper fell apart and I let the wind take it—the wind that blows through time’s keyhole, ye ken. In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn’t it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.

In the High Speech, Gabrielle Deschain’s final message to her son looks like this: The two most beautiful words in any language are : I forgive.