to Sam the Miller of Eastar'd Barony. At age 13 Walter set out for a life on the road, but was raped by a fellow wanderer; author Bev Vincent hypothesized in The Road to the Dark Tower that Flagg's later actions toward Delain in The Eyes of the Dragon may have been revenge for the abuse he suffered as a child. Resisting the temptation to crawl back home, Padick instead moves toward his destiny; he learns various forms of magic, achieving a quasi-immortality. After centuries of wreaking havoc Flagg attracts the attention of the Crimson King, who adopts him as his emissary. In 2012, King published a new story from The Dark Tower entitled The Wind Through the Keyhole. Here Flagg is depicted as the Covenant Man: central villain of the book's story within a story, "The Wind Through the Keyhole", a legend from Mid-World set years before the series' beginning. He is the Barony's "tax collector" from Gilead, attempting to collect taxes from residents of the small town of Tree. The Covenant Man sends the story's protagonist, a young boy named Tim, on a perilous quest through the Endless Forest to save his mother; unbeknownst to Tim, the Covenant Man is supplying him with false prophecies and misinformation as part of a cruel practical joke. However, Tim succeeds in his journey; he saves his mother after encountering the wizard Maerlyn, who has been imprisoned in the form of a "tyger". While the Covenant Man is not explicitly identified as Flagg, with only the initials "RF/MB" in his signature as identification and at one point being referred to as 'the man in the black cloak', Stephen King confirmed in an interview with Bev Vincent for his book The Dark Tower Companion that the two are one and the same. Hearts in Atlantis In Hearts in Atlantis (1999), Raymond Fiegler is identified near the novel's end as leader of an activist group when he prevents Carol Gerber from retrieving an unexploded bomb on a college campus. King never identifies Fiegler as Flagg, but Christopher Golden and Hank Wagner suggest in The Complete Stephen King Universe that there is little doubt Fiegler is Flagg. Golden and Wagner cite evidence such as Fiegler's ability to make himself appear "dim", an ability shared by Flagg in Eyes of the Dragon, his manipulation of Carol Gerber and her activist friends and Flagg's frequent use of