So the three of them rode toward their end of the Great Road, while summer lay all about them, breathless as a gasp. Roland looked up and saw something that made him forget all about the Wizard’s Rainbow. It was his mother, leaning out of her apartment’s bedroom window: the oval of her face surrounded by the timeless gray stone of the castle’s west wing. There were tears coursing down her cheeks, but she smiled and lifted one hand in a wide wave. Of the three of them, only Roland saw her.

He didn’t wave back.

8

“Roland!” An elbow struck him in the ribs, hard enough to dispel these memories, brilliant as they were, and return him to the present. It was Cuthbert. “Do something, if you mean to! Get us out of this deadhouse before I shiver the skin right off my bones!”

Roland put his mouth close by Alain’s ear. “Be ready to help me.”

Alain nodded.

Roland turned to Susan. “After the first time we were together an-tet, you went to the stream in the grove.”

“Aye.”

“You cut some of your hair.”

“Aye.” That same dreaming voice. “So I did.”

“Would you have cut it all?”

“Aye, every lick and lock.”

“Do you know who told you to cut it?”

A long pause. Roland was about to turn to Alain when she said, “Rhea.” Another pause. “She wanted to fiddle me up.”

“Yes, but what happened later? What happened while you stood in the doorway?”

“Oh, and something else happened before.”

“What?”

“I fetched her wood,” said she, and said no more.

Roland looked at Cuthbert, who shrugged. Alain spread his hands. Roland thought of asking the latter boy to step forward, and judged it still wasn’t quite time.

“Never mind the wood for now,” he said, “or all that came before. We’ll talk of that later, mayhap, but not just yet. What happened as you were leaving? What did she say to you about your hair?”

“Whispered in my ear. And she had a Jesus-man.”

“Whispered what?”

“I don’t know. That part is pink.”

Here it was. He nodded to Alain. Alain bit his lip and stepped forward. He looked frightened, but as he took Susan’s hands in his own and spoke to her, his voice was calm and soothing.

“Susan? It’s Alain Johns. Do you know me?”

“Aye-Richard Stockworth that was.”

“What did Rhea whisper in your ear?”

A frown, faint as a shadow on an overcast day, creased her brow. “I can’t see. It’s pink.”

“You don’t need to see,” Alain said. “Seeing’s not what we want right now. Close your eyes so you can’t do it at all.”

“They are closed,” she said, a trifle pettishly. She’s frightened, Roland thought. He felt an urge to tell Alain to stop, to wake her up, and restrained it.

“The ones inside,” Alain said. “The ones that look out from memory. Close those, Susan. Close them for your father’s sake, and tell me not what you see but what you hear. Tell me what she said.”

Chillingly, unexpectedly, the eyes in her face opened as she closed those in her mind. She stared at Roland, and through him, with the eyes of an ancient statue. Roland bit back a scream.

“You were in the doorway, Susan?” Alain asked.

“Aye. So we both were.”

“Be there again.”

“Aye.” A dreaming voice. Faint but clear. “Even with my eyes closed I can see-the moon’s light. ’tis as big as a grapefruit.”

It’s the grapefruit, Roland thought. By which I mean, it’s the pink one.

“And what do you hear? What does she say?”

“No, I say.” The faintly petulant voice of a little girl. “First I say, Alain. I say 'And is our business done?' and she says 'Mayhap there’s one more little thing,' and then… then…”

Alain squeezed gently down on her hands, using whatever it was he had in his own, his touch, sending it into her. She tried feebly to pull back, but he wouldn’t let her. “Then what? What next?”

“She has a little silver medal.”

“Yes?”

“She leans close and asks if I hear her. I can smell her breath. It reeks o’ garlic. And other things, even worse.” Susan’s face wrinkled in distaste. “I say I hear her. Now I can see. I see the medal she has.”

“Very well, Susan,” Alain said. “What else do you see?”

“Rhea. She looks like a skull in the moonlight. A skull with hair.”

“Gods,” Cuthbert muttered, and crossed his arms over his chest.

“She says I should listen. I say I will listen. She says I should obey. I say I will obey. She says ‘Aye, lovely, just so, it’s a good girl y’are.’ She’s stroking my hair. All the time. My braid.” Susan raised a dreaming, drowning hand, pale in the shadows of the crypt, to her blonde hair. “And then she says there’s something I’m to do when my virginity’s over. ‘Wait,’ she says, ‘until he’s asleep beside ye, then cut yer hair off yer head. Every strand. Right down to yer very skull.’”

The boys looked at her in mounting horror as her voice became Rhea’s-the growling, whining cadences of the old woman of the Coos. Even the face-except for the coldly dreaming eyes-had become a hag’s face.

“Cut it all, girl, every whore’s strand of it, aye, and go back to him as bald as ye came from yer mother! See how he likes ye then!”

She fell silent. Alain turned his pallid face to Roland. His lips were trembling, but still he held her hands.

“Why is the moon pink?” Roland asked. “Why is the moon pink when you try to remember?”

“It’s her glam.” Susan seemed almost surprised, almost gay. Confiding. “She keeps it under her bed, so she does. She doesn’t know I saw it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Aye,” Susan said, then added simply: “She would have killed me if she knew.” She giggled, shocking them all. “Rhea has the moon in a box under her bed.” She lilted this in the singsong voice of a small child.

“A pink moon,” Roland said.

“Aye.”

“Under her bed.”

“Aye.” This time she did pull her hands free of Alain’s. She made a circle with them in the air, and as she looked up at it, a dreadful expression of greed passed over her face like a cramp. “I should like to have it, Roland. So I should. Lovely moon! I saw it when she sent me for the wood. Through her window. She looked… young.” Then, once again: “I sh’d like to have such a thing.”

“No-you wouldn’t. But it’s under her bed?”

“Aye, in a magic place she makes with passes.”

“She has a piece of Maerlyn’s Rainbow,” Cuthbert said in a wondering voice. “The old bitch has what your da told us about-no wonder she knows all she does!”

“Is there more we need?” Alain asked. “Her hands have gotten very cold. I don’t like having her this deep. She’s done well, but…”

“I think we’re done.”

“Shall I tell her to forget?”

Roland shook his head at once-they were ka-tet, for good or ill. He took hold of her fingers, and yes, they were cold.

“Susan?”

“Aye, dear.”

“I’m going to say a rhyme. When I finish, you’ll remember everything, as you did before. All right?”

She smiled and closed her eyes again. “Bird and bear and hare and fish…”

Smiling, Roland finished, “Give my love her fondest wish.”

Her eyes opened. She smiled. “You,” she said again, and kissed him. “Still you, Roland. Still you, my love.”

Unable to help himself, Roland put his arms around her.

Cuthbert looked away. Alain looked down at his boots and cleared his throat.