it do ya fine). They had, in fact, almost killed that bad old bumhug Walter o' Dim, thereby providing what some would no doubt call a happy ending. But beyond page 676 of Wizard and Glass not a word about Roland and the Dark Tower had Stephen King written, and Walter considered this the real happy ending. The people of Calla Bryn Sturgis, the roont children, Mia and Mia's baby: all those things were still sleeping inchoate in the writer's subconscious, creatures without breath pent behind an unfound door. And now Walter judged it was too late to set them free.
Damnably quick though King had been throughout his career-a genuinely talented writer who'd turned himself into a shoddy (but rich) quick-sketch artist, a rhymeless Algernon Swinburne, do it please ya-he couldn't get through even the first hundred pages of the remaining tale in the time he had left, not if he wrote day and night.
Too late.
There had been a day of choice, as Walter well knew: he had been at he Casse Roi Russe, and had seen it in the glass ball the Old Red Thing still possessed (although by now it no doubt lay forgotten in some castle corner). By the summer of 1997, King had clearly known the story of the Wolves, the twins, and the flying plates called Orizas. But to the writer, all that had seemed like too much work. He had chosen a book of loosely interlocked stories called Hearts in Atlantis instead, and even now, in his home on Turtleback Lane (where he had never seen so much as a single walk-in), the writer was frittering away the last of his time writing about peace and love and Vietnam. It was true that one character in what would be King's last book had a part to play in the Dark Tower's history as it might be, but that fellow-an old man with talented brains-would never get a chance to speak lines that really mattered. Lovely.
In the only world that really mattered, the true world where time never turns back and there are no second chances (tell ya true), it was June 12th of 1999. The writer's time had shrunk to less than two hundred hours.
Walter o' Dim knew he didn't have quite that long to reach the Dark Tower, because time (like the metabolism of certain spiders) ran faster and hotter on this side of things. Say five days.
Five and a half at the outside. He had that long to reach the Tower with Mordred Deschain's birthmarked, amputated foot in his gunna... to open the door at the bottom and mount those murmuring stairs... to bypass the trapped Red King...
If he could find a vehicle... or the right door...
Was it too late to become the God of All?
Perhaps not. In any case, what harm in trying?
Walter o' Dim had wandered long, and under a hundred names, but the Tower had always been his goal. Like Roland, he wanted to climb it and see what lived at the top. If anything did.
He had belonged to none of the cliques and cults and faiths and factions that had arisen in the confused years since the Tower began to totter, although he wore their siguls when it suited him. His service to the Crimson King was a late thing, as was his service to John Farson, the Good Man who'd brought down Gilead, the last bastion of civilization, in a tide of blood and murder. Walter had done his own share of murder in those years, living a long and only quasi-mortal life. He had witnessed the end of what he had then believed to be Roland's last ka-tet at Jericho Hill. Witnessed it? That was a little overmodest, by all the gods and fishes! Under the name of Rudin Filaro, he had fought with his face painted blue, had screamed and charged with the rest of the stinking barbarians, and had brought down Cuthbert Allgood himself, with an arrow through the eye. Yet through all that he'd kept his gaze on the Tower. Perhaps that was why the damned gunslinger-as the sun went down on that day's work, Roland of Gilead had been the last of them-had been able to escape, having buried himself in a cart filled with the dead and then creeping out of the slaughterpile at sundown, just before the whole works had been set alight.
He had seen Roland years earlier, in Mejis, and had just missed his grip on him there, too