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

Nell and forces Tim to give up his schooling and go to work at the sawmill.
    The Barony Covenanter is more than a taxman—he’s a wizard who doesn’t seem to age. He enjoys squeezing money out of people, but he also likes using the truth to hurt them. He identifies Tim as a likely victim, but also sees the potential to use him in a grander scheme. He gives Tim a magic key that will open Kells’s trunk, in which the boy finds his father’s lucky coin, which should have been destroyed by the dragon.
    When Tim accepts the Covenant Man’s invitation to visit his camp, he discovers the truth about his father’s death. There was no dragon. Bern Kells murdered him and secreted the body in a cold stream. One reason his drinking has resumed is that he’s worried the woodcutters who work that patch will return to it and discover the body, revealing his crime. The Covenant Man shows Tim a vision in a basin of water: Bern Kells flying into a rage when he finds his trunk unlocked. He beats Nell so badly she goes blind. The Covenant Man gives Tim a gift: Jack Ross’s ax, which Kells threw across the stream after the murder. This is how he works: he winds Tim into a frenzy, identifies his enemy, arms him and sends him homeward.
    However, Kells runs away, so Tim can’t kill his evil stepfather. His teacher, Widow Smack, knows who the Covenant Man is—an enchanter from the court of Gilead. Marten Broadcloak, in other words, though she doesn’t know his name. Tim raises a posse against Bern Kells and sees to the return of his father’s body for burial. Then the Covenant Man sends another vision. If Tim goes into the Endless Forest and finds Maerlyn, he will be rewarded with a cure for his mother’s blindness. Widow Smack can’t talk Tim out of acting on this vision, so she provides him with food, a light and a gun that had once belonged to her brother. The Covenant Man won’t anticipate that Tim will go on his mission armed.
    King said he wanted to write a fairy tale, though one that didn’t necessarily contain a real fairy. “The Wind Through the Keyhole” does feature a fairy, a naked, flying green woman only four inches tall who will doubtless conjure mental images of Tinker Bell. The
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, named Armaneeta, is beautiful, delightful, seductive—and malign. Like a siren, she leads Tim through the Endless Forest into the Fagonard Swamp, where she strands him on a tussock surrounded by all manner of dangerous creatures, including a dragon.
    Tim is determined to die fighting. In that moment, he is transformed into a gunslinger. Like Roland, his mouth becomes a rictus grin as he shoots for the first time, killing a creature that emerges from the swamp. The gunshot draws the attention of the closest thing to human residents Fagonard has. At first Tim thinks of them as mudmen but later he realizes they are closer to plants. Living in the swamp for so long has made them take on its appearance. They are slow mutants, but benevolent ones, and probably doomed to extinction.
    They respect Tim as a gunslinger and hile him. Tim uses their reaction to his advantage, asking for their service as bondsmen. They can understand him, and, though they can’t speak, they communicate in sign language. They try to warn him of a pending starkblast, but he doesn’t understand. He gets the sense, though, that something is going to happen that will kill them.
    Using a makeshift boat, they transport him from the tussock to the end of the swamp, depositing him on solid ground. They give Tim food and water and a device (produced by North Central Positronics) that will lead him north, to where he hopes to find Maerlyn in a magic house where time stands still.
    For the next few days, Tim heads north through the forest, following the Beam of the Lion. The direction finder, Daria, Tim discovers, can talk, providing helpful information, though some of its data is protected by Directive