by Stephen King
“Tell me what you want.”
6
They talked another twenty minutes, refining the plan surprisingly little- all of them seemed to understand that if they planned too much and things changed suddenly, they might freeze. Ka had swept them into this; it was perhaps best that they count on ka-and their own courage-to sweep them back out again.
Cuthbert was reluctant to involve Sheemie, but finally went along- the boy’s part would be minimal, if not exactly low-risk, and Roland agreed that they could take him with them when they left Mejis for good. A party of rive was as fine as a party of four, he said.
“All right,” Cuthbert said at last, then turned to Susan. “It ought to be you or me who talks to him.”
“I will.”
“Make sure he understands not to tell Coral Thorin so much as a word,” Cuthbert said. “It isn’t that the Mayor’s her brother; I just don’t trust that bitch.”
“I can give ye a better reason than Hart not to trust her,” Susan said. “My aunt says she’s taken up with Eldred Jonas. Poor Aunt Cord! She’s had the worst summer of her life. Nor will the fall be much better, I wot. Folk will call her the aunt of a traitor.”
“Some will know better,” Alain said. “Some always do.”
“Mayhap, but my Aunt Cordelia’s the sort of woman who never hears good gossip. No more does she speak it. She fancied Jonas herself, ye ken.”
Cuthbert was thunderstruck. “Fancied Jonas! By all the fiddling gods! Can you imagine it! Why, if they hung folk for bad taste in love, your auntie would go early, wouldn’t she?”
Susan giggled, hugged her knees, and nodded.
“It’s time we left,” Roland said. “If something chances that Susan needs to know right away, we’ll use the red stone in the rock wall at Green Heart.”
“Good,” Cuthbert said. “Let’s get out of here. The cold in this place eats into the bones.”
Roland stirred, stretching life back into his legs. “The important thing is that they’ve decided to leave us free while they round up and run. That’s our edge, and it’s a good one. And now-”
Alain’s quiet voice stopped him. “There’s another matter. Very important.”
Roland sank back down on his hunkers, looking at Alain curiously.
“The witch.”
Susan started, but Roland only barked an impatient laugh. “She doesn’t figure in our business, Al-I can’t see how she could. I don’t believe she’s a part of Jonas’s conspiracy-”
“Neither do I,” Alain said.
“-and Cuthbert and I persuaded her to keep her mouth shut about Susan and me. If we hadn’t, her aunt would have raised the roof by now.”
“But don’t you see?” Alain asked. “Who Rhea might have told isn’t really the question. The question is how she knew in the first place.”
“It’s pink,” Susan said abruptly. Her hand was on her hair, fingers touching the place where the cut ends had begun to grow out.
“What’s pink?” Alain asked.
“The moon,” she said, and then shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Brainless as Pinch and Jilly, I am… Roland? What’s wrong? What ails thee?”
For Roland was no longer hunkering; he had collapsed into a loose sitting position on the petal-strewn stone floor. He looked like a young man trying not to faint. Outside the mausoleum there was a bony rattle of fall leaves and the cry of a nightjar.
“Dear gods,” he said in a low voice. “It can’t be. It can’t be true.” His eyes met Cuthbert’s.
All the humor had washed out of the latter young man’s face, leaving a ruthless and calculating bedrock his own mother might not have recognized… or might not have wanted to.
“Pink,” Cuthbert said. “Isn’t that interesting-the same word your father happened to mention just before we left, Roland, wasn’t it? He warned us about the pink one. We thought it was a joke. Almost.”
“Oh!” Alain’s eyes flew wide open. “Oh, fuck!” he blurted. He realized what he had said while sitting leg-to-leg with his best friend’s lover and clapped his hands over his mouth. His cheeks flamed red.
Susan barely noticed. She was staring at Roland in growing fear and confusion. “What?” she asked. “What is it ye know? Tell me! Tell me!”
“I’d like to hypnotize you again, as I did that day in the willow grove,” Roland said. “I want to do it right now, before we talk of this more and drag mud across what you remember.”
Roland had reached into his pocket while she was speaking. Now he took out a shell, and it began to dance across the back of his hand once more. Her eyes went to it at once, like steel drawn to a magnet.
“May I?” he asked. “By your leave, dear.”
“Aye, as ye will.” Her eyes were widening and growing glassy. “I don’t know why ye think this time should be any different, but… “She stopped talking, her eyes continuing to follow the dance of the shell across Roland’s hand. When he stopped moving it and clasped it in his fist, her eyes closed. Her breath was soft and regular.
“Gods, she went like a stone,” Cuthbert whispered, amazed. “She’s been hypnotized before. By Rhea, I think.” Roland paused. Then: “Susan, do you hear me?”
“Aye, Roland, I hear ye very well.” “I want you to hear another voice, too.” “Whose?”
Roland beckoned to Alain. If anyone could break through the block in Susan’s mind (or find a way around it), it would be him.
“Mine, Susan,” Alain said, coming to Roland’s side. “Do you know it?” She smiled with her eyes closed. “Aye, you’re Alain. Richard Stock-worth that was.”
“That’s right.” He looked at Roland with nervous, questioning eyes- What shall I ask her?-but for a moment Roland didn’t reply. He was in two other places, both at the same time, and hearing two different voices.
Susan, by the stream in the willow grove: She says, “Aye, lovely, just so, it’s a good girl y’are,” then everything’s pink.
His father, in the yard behind the Great Hall: It’s the grapefruit. By which I mean it’s the pink one. The pink one.
7
Their horses were saddled and loaded; the three boys stood before them, outwardly stolid, inwardly feverish to be gone. The road, and the mysteries that lie along it, calls out to none as it calls to the young.
They were in the courtyard which lay east of the Great Hall, not far from where Roland had bested Cort, setting all these things in motion. It was early morning, the sun not yet risen, the mist lying over the green fields in gray ribbons. At a distance of about twenty paces, Cuthbert’s and Alain’s fathers stood sentry with their legs apart and their hands on the butts of their guns. It was unlikely that Marten (who had for the time being absented himself from the palace, and, so far as any knew, from Gilead itself) would mount any sort of attack on them-not here-but it wasn’t entirely out of the question, either.
So it was that only Roland’s father spoke to them as they mounted up to begin their ride east to Mejis and the Outer Arc.
“One last thing,” he said as they adjusted their saddle girths. “I doubt you’ll see anything that (ouches on our interests-not in Mejis-but I’d have you keep an eye out for a color of the rainbow. The Wizard’s Rain-how, that is.” He chuckled, then added: “It’s the grapefruit. By which I mean it’s the pink one.”
“Wizard’s Rainbow is just a fairy-tale,” Cuthbert said, smiling in response to Steven’s smile. Then-perhaps it was something in Steven Deschain’s eyes-Cuthbert’s smile faltered. “Isn’t it?”
“Not all the old stories are true, but I think that of Maerlyn’s Rainbow is,” Steven replied. “It’s said that once there were thirteen glass balls in it-one for each of the Twelve Guardians, and one representing the nexus-point of the Beams.”
“One for the Tower,” Roland said in a low voice, feeling gooseflesh. “One for the Dark Tower.”
“Aye, Thirteen it was called when I was a boy. We’d tell stories about the black ball ar
ound the fire sometimes, and scare ourselves silly… unless our fathers caught us at it. My own da said it wasn’t wise to talk about Thirteen, for it might hear its name called and roll your way. But Black Thirteen doesn’t matter to you three… not now, at least. No, it’s the pink one. Maerlyn’s Grapefruit.”
It was impossible to tell how serious he was… or if he was serious at all.
“If the other balls in the Wizard’s Rainbow did exist, most are broken now. Such things never stay in one place or one pair of hands for long, you know, and even enchanted glass has a way of breaking. Yet at least three or four bends o’ the Rainbow may still be rolling around this sad world of ours. The blue, almost certainly. A desert tribe of slow mutants-the Total Hogs, they called themselves-had that one less than fifty years ago, although it’s slipped from sight again since. The green and the orange are reputed to be in Lud and Dis, respectively. And, just maybe, the pink one.”
“What exactly do they do?” Roland asked. “What are they good for?”
“For seeing. Some colors of the Wizard’s Rainbow are reputed to look into the future. Others look into the other worlds-those where the demons live, those where the Old People are supposed to have gone when they left our world. These may also show the location of the secret doors which pass between the worlds. Other colors, they say, can look far in our own world, and see things people would as soon keep secret. They never see the good; only the ill. How much of this is true and how much is myth no one knows for sure.”
He looked at them, his smile fading.
“But this we do know: John Farson is said to have a talisman, something that glows in his tent late at night… sometimes before battles, sometimes before large movements of troop and horse, sometimes before momentous decisions are announced. And it glows pink.”
“Maybe he has an electric light and puts a pink scarf over it when he prays,” Cuthbert said. He looked around at his friends, a little defensively. “I’m not joking; there are people who do that.”
“Perhaps,” Roland’s father said. “Perhaps that’s all it is, or something like. But perhaps it’s a good deal more. All I can say of my own knowledge is that he keeps beating us, he keeps slipping away from us, and he keeps turning up where he’s least expected. If the magic is in him and not in some talisman he owns, gods help the Affiliation.”
“We’ll keep an eye out, if you like,” Roland said, “but Parson’s in the north or west. We’re going east.” As if his father did not know this.
“If it’s a bend o’ the Rainbow,” Steven replied, “it could be anywhere-east or south’s as likely as west. He can’t keep it with him all the time, you see. No matter how much it would ease his mind and heart to do so. No one can.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re alive, and hungry,” Steven said. “One begins using em; one ends being used by em. If Farson has a piece of the Rainbow, he’ll send it away and call it back only when he needs it. He understands the risk of losing it, but he also understands the risk of keeping it too long.”
There was a question which the other two, constrained by politeness, couldn’t ask. Roland could, and did. “You are serious about this. Dad? It’s not just a leg-pull, is it?”
“I’m sending you away at an age when many boys still don’t sleep well if their mothers don’t kiss them goodnight,” Steven said. “I expect to see all three of you again, alive and well-Mejis is a lovely, quiet place, or was when I was a boy-but I can’t be sure of it. As things are these days, no one can be sure of anything. I wouldn’t send you away with a joke and a laugh. I’m surprised you think it.”
“Cry your pardon,” Roland said. An uneasy peace had descended between him and his father, and he would not rupture it. Still, he was wild to be off. Pusher jigged beneath him, as if seconding that.
“I don’t expect you boys to see Maerlyn’s glass… but I didn’t expect to be seeing you off at fourteen with revolvers tucked in your bedrolls, either. Ka’s at work here, and where ka works, anything is possible.”
Slowly, slowly, Steven took off his hat, stepped back, and swept them a bow. “Go in peace, boys. And return in health.”
“Long days and pleasant nights, sai,” Alain said.
“Good fortune,” Cuthbert said.
“I love you,” Roland said.
Steven nodded. “Thankee-sai-I love you, too. My blessings, boys.” He said this last in a loud voice, and the other two men-Robert Allgood and Christopher Johns, who had been known in the days of his savage youth as Burning Chris-added their own blessings.
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.”<
br />
“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.