“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 Cöos. 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.”