Rose Madder (37 page)

It was as if giants had been buried alive here at some time in the past and had died trying to pull themselves out; the trees were their fleshless hands, reaching fruitlessly at the sky and silently speaking of murder. The dead branches were interlaced, creating strange, geometric patterns against the sky. A path led into them. Guarding it was a stone boy with a huge erect phallus. His hands were held straight up over his head, as if he were signalling that the extra point was good. As Rosie passed, his pupilless stone eyes rolled toward her. She was sure of it.

Hey baby!
the stone boy spat inside her head.
Want to get down? Want to do the dog with me?

She backed away from it, raising her own hands in a warding-off gesture, but the stone boy was just a stone boy again . . .
if, that was, he had been anything else, even for a moment. Water dripped from his comically oversized penis.
No problems maintaining an erection there,
Rosie thought, looking at the stone boy's pupilless eyes and somehow too-knowing smile (had it been smiling before? Rosie tried to remember and found she couldn't).
How Norman would envy you that.

She hurried past the statue and along the path leading into the dead grove, restraining an urge to look over her shoulder and make sure the statue wasn't following her, wanting to put that stone hardon to work. She didn't dare look. She was afraid her overstrained mind might see it even if it wasn't there.

The rain had backed off to a hesitant drizzle, and Rosie suddenly realized she could no longer hear the baby. Perhaps it had gone to sleep. Perhaps the bull Erinyes had gotten tired of listening to it and gobbled it like a canapé. In either case, how was she supposed to find it, if it didn't cry?

One thing at a time, Rosie,
Practical-Sensible whispered.

“Easy for
you
to say,” Rosie whispered.

She went on, listening to the rainwater drip from the dead trees and realizing—reluctantly—that she could see faces in the bark. It wasn't like lying on your back and looking at clouds, where your imagination did ninety per cent of the work; these were real faces.
Screaming
faces. To Rosie they looked like women's faces, for the most part. Women who had been talked to right up close.

After she had walked a little way she rounded a bend and found the path blocked by a fallen tree which had apparently been struck by lightning at the height of the storm. One side was splintered and black. Several of the branches on that side still smoldered sullenly, like the ashes of a carelessly doused campfire. Rosie was afraid to climb over it; gouges and splinters and jags of wood stuck up all over the burst trunk.

She began edging around it on the right, where the roots had torn out of the ground. She had gotten most of the way back to the path when one of the tree's roots suddenly jerked, quivered, then slid around her upper thigh like a dusty brown snake.

Hey, baby! Want to do the dog? Want to do the dog, you bitch?

The voice came drifting out of the crumbling dry cave of earth
where the tree had so recently stood. The root slid higher on her thigh.

Want to put all four on the floor, Rosie? That sound good? I'll be your back-door man, gobble you like a toasted-cheese sandwich. Or would you rather suck my AIDS-infected—

“Let me go,” Rosie said quietly, and pressed the crumpled wad of her nightgown against the root that was holding her. It loosened and fell away immediately. She hurried the rest of the way around the tree and resumed the path. The root had squeezed hard enough to leave a red ring on her thigh, but the mark faded quickly. She supposed she should have been terrified by what had just happened, that perhaps something
meant
for her to be terrified. If so, it hadn't worked. She decided that this was a pretty cutrate chamber of horrors, all in all, for someone who had lived with Norman Daniels for fourteen years.

A
nother five minutes brought her to the end of the path. It opened into a perfectly circular clearing, and within it was the only living thing in all this desolation. It was the most beautiful tree Rosie had ever seen in her life, and for several moments she actually forgot to breathe. She had been a faithful attendee of Methodist Little Folks Sunday School back in Aubreyville, and now she remembered the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and thought that if there really
had
been a Tree of Good and Evil standing at the center of that place, it must have looked just like this.

It was densely dressed in long, narrow leaves of polished green, and its branches hung heavy with a perfect bounty of reddish-purple fruit. The falls surrounded the tree in a rose madder drift which exactly matched the color of the short gown worn by the woman Rosie hadn't dared to look at. Many of these falls were still fresh and plump; they had probably been struck from the tree in the storm which had just passed. Even those well advanced in rot looked almost unbearably sweet; Rosie's mouth cramped pleasurably at the thought of picking up one of those fruits and biting deeply into it. She thought the taste would be both tart and sweet, something like a stalk of rhubarb picked early in the morning,
or raspberries taken from the bush the day before they came to perfect ripeness. As she looked at the tree, one of the fruits (to Rosie it looked no more like a pomegranate than it looked like a bureau drawer) dropped from an overloaded branch, struck the ground, and split open in rose madder folds of flesh. She could see the seeds amid its trickling juices.

Rosie took a step toward the tree and stopped. She kept swinging back and forth between two poles: her mind's belief that all this had to be a dream, and her body's equally emphatic assertion that it couldn't be, that no one on earth had ever had a dream this real. Now, like a troubled compass needle caught in a landscape where there are too many mineral deposits, she swung doubtfully back toward the dream thesis. Standing to the left of the tree was something that looked like a subway entrance. Broad white steps led down into darkness. Above them was an alabaster plinth upon which a single word had been carved:
MAZE.

Really, this is too much,
Rosie thought, but she walked toward the tree just the same. If this
was
a dream, it couldn't hurt to follow instructions; doing so might even hasten the moment when she finally woke up in her own bed, groping for the alarm-clock, wanting to silence its self-righteous yell before it could split her head open. How she would welcome its cry this time! She was chilly, her feet were dirty, she had been groped by a root and ogled by a stone boy who, in a properly made world, would have been too young to know what the hell he was looking at. Most of all she felt that if she didn't get back to her room soon, she was apt to come down with a really wonderful cold, maybe even bronchitis. That would take care of her date on Saturday, and keep her out of the recording studio all next week as well.

Not seeing the absurdity of believing one could become ill as the result of an excursion made in a dream, Rosie knelt down just beyond the fallen fruit. She surveyed it carefully, wondering again how it would taste (like nothing you found in the produce aisle of the A&P, that was for sure), then unfolded a corner of her nightgown. She tore off another chunk, wanting to provide herself with a square of cloth and succeeding better than she had expected to do. She laid it down, then began to pick seeds up off the ground, placing each one on the cloth she intended using to carry them.

A good plan, too,
she thought.
Now if I only knew
why I
was carrying them.

The tips of her fingers went numb right away, as if they had been shot full of Novocain. At the same time, the most wonderful aroma filled her nose. Sweet but not flowery, it made Rosie think of the pies, cakes, and cookies that had come from her gramma's stove. It made her think of something else, as well, something which was light-years from Gramma Weeks's kitchen with its faded linoleum and Currier & Ives prints: of how she had felt when Bill's hip brushed against hers as they were walking back to the Corn Building.

She laid two dozen seeds on the square of cloth, hesitated, shrugged, and added two dozen more. Would that be enough? How could she know, when she didn't know what they were for to begin with? In the meantime, she'd better be moving. She could hear the baby again, but the cries were now little more than echoey whimpers—the sounds babies made when they were getting ready to give up and go to sleep.

She folded the damp cloth over and then tucked the edges in, making a little envelope that reminded her of the seed-packets her dad had gotten from the Burpee Company late each winter, back in the days when she had still been a regular attendee at Little Folks Sunday School. She had now grown comfortable enough with her nakedness to be exasperated by it rather than ashamed: she wanted a pocket. Well, if wishes were pigs, bacon would always be on sa—

The part of her that was practical and sensible realized what she was about to do with her rose madder–stained fingers less than a second before they would have been in her mouth. She snatched them away with her heart pounding and that sweet/tart smell filling her head.
Don't taste the fruit,
“Wendy” had told her.
Don't taste the fruit or even put the hand that touches the seeds into your mouth!

This place was full of traps.

She got up, looking at her stained and tingling fingers as if she had never seen them before. She backed away from the tree standing in its circle of fallen fruit and spilled seeds.

It's not the Tree of Good and Evil,
Rosie thought.
It's not the Tree of Life, either. I think this is the Tree of Death.

A little gust of wind puffed past her, rustling through the pomegranate tree's long, polished leaves, and they seemed to
rattle out her name in a hundred small, sarcastic whispers:
Rosie-Rosie-Rosie!

She knelt again, wishing for live grass, but there was none. She put down her nightgown with the rock inside it, placed the little packet of seeds on top of it, then snatched up big handfuls of wet, dead grass. She scrubbed the hand which had touched the seeds as well as she could. The rose madder stain faded but didn't disappear completely, and it remained bright beneath her nails. It was like looking at a birthmark which nothing will completely bleach out. Meantime, the baby's cries were becoming ever more occasional.

“Okay,” Rosie muttered to herself, getting up. “Just keep your damned fingers out of your mouth. You'll be all right if you do that!”

She walked to the stairs which led beneath the white stone and stood at the head of them for a moment, dreading the darkness and trying to nerve herself up to face it. The alabaster stone with
MAZE
carved into its surface no longer looked like a plinth to her; it looked like a marker standing at the end of a narrow, open grave.

The baby was down there, though, whimpering as babies do when no one comes to comfort them and they finally set about doing the job as well as they can themselves. It was that lonely, self-comforting sound which finally set her feet in motion. No baby should have to cry itself to sleep in such a lonely place.

Rosie counted steps as she went down. At seven she passed beneath the overhang and the stone. At fourteen she looked over her shoulder at the white rectangle of light she was leaving behind, and when she faced forward again, that shape hung before her eyes in the screening darkness like a bright ghost. She went down and down, bare feet slapping on stone. There would be no talking herself out of the terror which now filled her heart, no talking herself through it, either. She would be doing well just to live with it.

Fifty steps. Seventy-five. A hundred. She stopped at a hundred and twenty-five, realizing she could see again.

That's nuts,
she thought.
Imagination, Rosie, that's all.

It wasn't, though. She raised a hand slowly toward her face. It and the little packet of seeds it held glowed a dull, witchy green. She raised her other hand, the one holding the rock in the remains of her nightgown, beside it. She could see, all right. She turned her head first one way, then the
other. The walls of the stairwell were glowing with a faint green light. Black shapes rose and twisted lazily in it, as if the walls were actually the glass faces of aquaria in which dead things twisted and floated.

Stop it, Rosie! Stop thinking that way!

Except she couldn't. Dream or no dream, panic and blind retreat were now very close.

Don't look, then!

Good idea.
Great
idea. Rosie dropped her eyes to the dim X-ray ghosts of her own feet and resumed her descent, now whispering her count under her breath. The green light continued to brighten as she went down, and by the time she reached two hundred and twenty, the last step, it was as if she were standing on a stage lit with low-level green gels. She looked up, trying to steel herself for what she might see. The air down here was moving, damp but fresh enough . . . yet it brought her a smell she didn't much like. It was a zoo smell, as if something wild were penned up down here. Something was, of course: the bull Erinyes.

Ahead were three free-standing stone walls facing her edge-on and running away into the gloom. Each was about twelve feet high, much too tall for her to see over. They glowed with that sullen green light, and Rosie nervously examined the four narrow passages they made. Which one? Somewhere far ahead of her, the baby continued to whimper . . . but the sound was fading relentlessly. It was like listening to a radio which is being slowly but steadily turned down.

“Cry!”
Rosie shouted, then cringed from the returning echoes of her own voice.
“Iy! . . . iy! . . . iy!”