The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy by Bev Vincent Page A

make a silver bullet, on Vannay’s advice. He spends the rest of the time at the jailhouse with Young Bill, bringing him food and candy, helping him to be brave. Finally, as the hours grow long, he tells the boy the story of “The Wind Through the Keyhole,” one that Gabrielle Deschain used to read to him when he was younger.Soon after he finishes, Jamie returns with wagons containing twenty-one miners, one of whom may be the skin-man. Roland screens out those who don’t have the Beelie Stockade tattoo and parades the remaining ten in front of Young Bill, who is safely behind bars. If Bill can’t identify the skin-man, Roland plans to lock them all up until one changes.
    The oldest miner in the group, Steg Luka, tells Roland they discovered a crack with a pulsing light at the bottom of a mine. A voice from the crack invites men to enter it. Luka thinks it’s a voice from the Old People. The foreman ordered the crack plugged, but someone has been at the rocks. He believes that person went to the other side and was changed.
    On the second pass, Billy sees something in one of the tattoos that registers in his mind. The culprit also carries a watch, which Luka thinks must have come from inside the crack. The miner quickly changes shape, becoming a poisonous snake like the one in Roland’s story. He kills two more people before Roland slays him with the silver bullet, mirroring his ancestor, Arthur Eld, who once killed a monstrous snake called Saita. In death, the skin-man reverts to human form, passing through a number of creatures along the way.
    One of the responsibilities of being a gunslinger is to take part in the celebrations that follow a victory. Roland and Jamie fulfill their duty and, as a bonus, Jamie loses his virginity that night after they dispose of the skin-man’s body. Roland visits with Prioress Everlynne to see if she will take in the orphaned Bill Streeter. She agrees and then gives Roland a message his mother left for him. He learns that Gabrielle Deschain knew that she would die by her son’s hand if she returned to Gilead and went back anyway, believing it was the role
ka
had cast for her. She’d still been in Marten’s thrall. The wizard had tried to see her at Serenity, but Everlynne had sent him packing. He may have been able to communicate with her anyway. Gabrielle’s message reveals her tenuous grasp on sanity, but it offers Roland something he may have needed: her forgiveness.
    The centerpiece of the novel is the story of another gunslinger, a young boy named Tim Ross who lived in Tree Village on the edge of the Endless Forest. People in that region of Mid-World earned a living by chopping down the ironwood trees at the edge of the forest and selling them to Gilead.
    Tim’s father, Jack Ross, and his partner, Bern Kells, were lifelong friends who worked a patch of the forest. As the story begins, Tim finds himself in a plight similar to that of Susan Delgado in
Wizard and Glass
. Jack Ross is killed—by a dragon, according to Kells—which means Tim and his mother, Nell, are in danger of losing their home to the greedy Barony Covenanterwhen he comes to collect the annual taxes in a few months. Susan Delgado’s solution to her problem was to become Mayor Hart Thorin’s jilly. Nell Ross’s solution is to accept Bern Kells’s marriage proposal. She doesn’t love him, but she thinks she can put up with him, especially if it means she and Tim won’t end up homeless. After they marry, Kells sells his house and moves in with Nell and Tim.
    Kells is an alcoholic who becomes violent when he drinks. He’s been on the wagon for some time, convinced to get sober by his wife, who died in childbirth. Tim takes it as a bad sign that Kells can’t find a new woodcutting partner and that many of the other woodsmen didn’t attend the wedding. Things go from bad to worse after the wedding. He returns to his old ways, abuses