Rose Madder (66 page)

“Come closer,”
it crooned, the not-arms reaching, the maw of a mouth yawning,
“I want to talk to you.”
There were claws at the ends of the black not-arms, filthy with bristles. The claws settled on his wrists, his legs, the swollen appendage which still throbbed in his crotch. One wriggled amorously into his mouth; the bristles scraped against his teeth and the insides of his cheeks. It grasped his tongue, tore it out, flapped it triumphantly before his one staring,
glaring eye.
“I want to talk to you, and I want to talk to you right . . . up . . .
CLOSE!”

He made one last mad effort to pull free and was instead drawn into Rose Madder's hungry embrace.

Where Norman finally learned what it was like to be the bitten instead of the biter.

R
osie lay on the stairs with her eyes closed and her fists clenched above her head, listening to him scream. She tried not even to imagine what was going on out there, and she tried to remember that it was
Norman
who was screaming, Norman of the terrible pencil, Norman of the tennis racket, Norman of the teeth.

Yet these things were overwhelmed by the horror of his screams, his agonized shrieks as Rose Madder . . .

. . . as she did whatever it was she was doing.

After awhile—a long,
long
while—the screaming stopped.

Rosie lay where she was, fists unrolling slowly but with her eyes still tightly shut, gasping in short, harsh snatches of air. She might have lain there for hours, had not the sweet, mad voice of the woman summoned her:

“Come forth, little Rosie! Come forth and be of good cheer! The bull is no more!”

Slowly, on legs that felt numb and wooden, Rosie got first to her knees and then to her feet. She walked up the steps and stood on the ground. She didn't want to look, but her eyes seemed to have a life of their own; they crossed the clearing while her breath stopped in her throat.

She let it out in a long, quiet sigh of relief. Rose Madder was still kneeling, still back-to. Lying before her was a shadowy bundle of what at first looked like rags. Then a white starfish shape tumbled out of the shadow and into the moonlight. It was a hand, and Rosie saw the rest of him then, like a woman who suddenly sees sense and coherence in a psychiatrist's inkblot. It was Norman. He had been mutilated, and his eyes bulged from their sockets in a terminal expression of terror, but it was Norman, all right.

Rose Madder reached up as Rosie watched and plucked a low-hanging fruit from the tree. She squeezed it in her
hand—a very human hand, and quite lovely save for the black and spiritous spots floating just beneath her skin—so that first the juice ran out of her fist in a rose madder stream and then the fruit itself broke open in a wet, dark-red furrow. She plucked a dozen or so seeds out of the rich pulp and began to sow them in Norman Daniels's torn flesh. The last one she poked into his one staring eye. There was a wet popping sound as she drove it home—the sound of someone stepping on a plump grape.

“What are you
doing?”
Rosie asked in spite of herself. She only managed to keep from adding,
Don't turn around, you can tell me without turning around!

“Seeding him.” Then she did something that made Rosie feel as if she had stepped into a “Richard Racine” novel: leaned forward and kissed the corpse's mouth. At last she drew back, took him in her arms, rose, and turned toward the white marble stairway leading into the earth.

Rosie looked away, her heart thumping in her throat.

“Sweet dreams, you son-of-a-bastard,” Rose Madder said, and pitched Norman's body down into the dark beneath the single chiselled word reading
MAZE.

Where, perchance, the seeds she had planted would take root and grow.

“G
o back the way you came,” Rose Madder said. She was standing by the stairs; Rosie stood on the far side of the clearing, at the head of the path, with her back turned. She didn't want even to risk looking at Rose Madder now, and she had discovered that she could not entirely trust her own eyes to do as she told them. “Go back, find Dorcas and your man. She has something for you, and I would have more talk with you . . . but only a little. Then our time is finished. That will be a relief to you, I think.”

“He's gone, isn't he?” Rosie asked, looking steadfastly along the moonlit path. “Really gone.”

“I suppose you'll see him in your dreams,” Rose Madder said dismissively, “but what of that? The simple truth of things is that bad dreams are far better than bad wakings.”

“Yes. That's so simple most people overlook it, I think.”

“Go now. I'll come to you. And Rosie?”

“What?”

“Remember the tree.”

“The tree? I don't—”

“I know you don't. But you will. Remember the tree. Now go.”

Rosie went. And didn't look back.

B
ill and the black woman—Dorcas, her name was Dorcas, not Wendy after all—were no longer on the narrow path behind the temple, and Rosie's clothes were gone, too. This raised no concern in her mind. She merely trudged around the building, looked up the hill, saw them standing beside the pony-trap, and started toward them.

Bill came to meet her, his pale, distracted face full of concern.

“Rosie? All right?”

“Fine,” she said, and put her face against his chest. As his arms went around her, she wondered how much of the human race understood about hugging—how good it was, and how a person could want to do it for hours on end. She supposed some did understand, but doubted that they were in the majority. To fully understand about hugging, maybe you had to have missed a lot of it.

They walked up to where Dorcas stood, stroking the pony's white-streaked nose. The pony raised its head and looked at Rosie sleepily.

“Where's . . .” Rosie began, then stopped.
Caroline,
she'd almost said,
Where's Caroline?
“Where's the baby?” Then, boldly: “
Our
baby?”

Dorcas smiled. “Safe. In a safe place, don't you fret that, Miss Rosie. Your clothes're 'round to the back of the cart. Go on and change, if you like. You be glad to get out of that thing you wearin now, I bet.”

“That's a bet you'd win,” Rosie said, and went around. She felt an indescribable sense of relief when the
zat
was off her skin. As she was zipping her jeans, she remembered something Rose Madder had told her. “Your mistress says you have something for me.”

“Oh!”
Dorcas sounded startled. “Oh, my! If I went n forgot that, she'd rip the skin right off me!”

Rosie picked up her blouse, and when she pulled it down over her head, Dorcas was holding something out to her. Rosie took it and held it up curiously, tilting it this way and that. It was a cunningly made little ceramic bottle, not much
bigger than an eyedropper. Its mouth had been sealed with a tiny sliver of cork.

Dorcas looked around, saw Bill standing some distance away, looking dreamily down the hill at the ruins of the temple, and seemed satisfied. When she turned back to Rosie, she spoke in a voice which was low but emphatic. “One drop. For him. After.”

Rosie nodded as if she knew exactly what Dorcas was talking about. It was simpler that way. There were questions she could ask, perhaps
should
ask, but her mind felt too tired to frame them.

“I could have give you less, only he may need another drop later on. But have a care, girl. This is dangerous stuff!”

As if anything in this world is safe,
Rosie thought.

“Tuck it away, now,” Dorcas said, watching as Rosie slipped the tiny bottle into the watch-pocket of her jeans. “And mind you keep quiet about it to
him.”
She jerked her head in Bill's direction, then looked back at Rosie, her dark face set and grim. Her eyes looked momentarily pupilless in the darkness, like the eyes of a Greek statue. “You know why, too, don't you?”

“Yes,” Rosie said. “This is woman's business.”

Dorcas nodded. “That's right, that's just what it is.”

“Woman's business,” Rosie repeated, and in her mind she heard Rose Madder say
Remember the tree.

She closed her eyes.

T
he three of them sat at the top of the hill for some unknown length of time, Bill and Rosie together with their arms around each other's waist, Dorcas a little off to one side, near to where the pony still grazed sleepily. The pony looked up at the black woman every now and again, as if curious about why so many people were still up at this unaccustomed hour, but Dorcas took no notice, only sat with her arms clasped around her knees, looking wistfully up at the latening moon. To Rosie she looked like a woman mentally counting the choices of a lifetime and discovering that the wrong ones outnumbered the right ones . . . and not by only a few, either. Bill opened his mouth to speak on several occasions,
and Rosie looked at him encouragingly, but each time he closed it again without saying a word.

Just as the moon snagged in the trees to the left of the ruined temple, the pony raised its head again, and this time it gave voice to a low, pleased whinny. Rosie looked down the hill and saw Rose Madder coming. Strong, shapely thighs flashed in the pallid light of the fading moon. Her plaited hair swung from side to side like the pendulum in a grandfather clock.

Dorcas gave a little grunt of satisfaction and got to her feet. Rosie herself felt a complex mixture of apprehension and anticipation. She put one hand on Bill's forearm and gazed at him earnestly. “Don't look at her,” she said.

“No,” Dorcas agreed, “and don't ask no questions, Billy, even if she invites you to.”

He looked uncertainly from Dorcas to Rosie, then back to Dorcas again. “Why not? Who is she, anyway? The Queen of the May?”

“She's queen of whatever she wants to be queen of,” Dorcas said, “and you better remember it. Don't look at her, and don't do anything to invite her temper. I can't say more'n that; there's no time. Put your hands in your lap, little man, and look at them. Don't you take your eyes off them.”

“But—”

“If you look at her, you'll go mad,” Rosie said simply. She looked at Dorcas, who nodded.

“It
is
a dream, isn't it?” Bill asked. “I mean . . . I'm not dead, am I? Because if this is the afterlife, I think I'd just as soon skip it.” He looked beyond the approaching woman and shivered. “Too noisy. Too much screaming.”

“It's a dream,” Rosie agreed. Rose Madder was very close now, a slim straight figure walking through jackstraws of light and shadow. The latter turned her dangerous face into the mask of a cat, or perhaps a fox. “It's a dream where you have to do exactly as we say.”

“Rosie and Dorcas Says instead of Simon Says.”

“Yep. And Dorcas Says put your hands in your lap and look at them until one of us tells you it's all right to stop.”

“May I?” he asked, giving her a sly up-from-under-the-lids glance that she thought was really a look of dazed perplexity.

“Yes,” Rosie said desperately. “Yes-you-may, just for God's sake
keep your eyes off her!”

He folded his fingers together and dropped his eyes obediently.

Now Rosie could hear the whicker of approaching footsteps, the silky sound of grass slipping across skin. She dropped her own eyes. A moment later she saw a pair of bare moon-silvery legs come to a stop before her. There was a long silence, broken only by the calling of some insomniac bird in the far distance. Rosie shifted her eyes to the right and saw Bill sitting perfectly still beside her, looking at his folded hands as assiduously as a Zen student who has been placed next to the master at morning devotions.

At last, shyly, without looking up, she said: “Dorcas gave me what you wanted me to have. It's in my pocket.”

“Good,” that sweet, slightly husky voice answered. “That's good, Rosie Real.” A mottled hand floated into her field of vision, and something dropped into Rosie's lap. It flashed a single glint of gold in the pale late light. “For you,” Rose Madder said. “A souvenir, if you like. Do with it as you will.”

Rosie plucked it out of her lap and looked at it wonderingly. The words on it—
Service, Loyalty, Community
—made a triangle around the ringstone, which was a circle of obsidian. This was now marked by one bright spot of scarlet. It turned the stone into a baleful watching eye.

The silence spun out, and there was an expectant quality to it.
Does she want to be thanked?
Rosie wondered. She wouldn't do that . . . but she would tell the truth of her feelings. “I'm glad he's dead,” she said, softly and unemphatically. “It's a relief.”

“Of course you're glad and of course it is. You shall go now, back to your Rosie Real world, with this beast. He's a good one, I judge.” A hint of something—Rosie would not let herself believe it could be lust—crept into the voice of the other. “Good hocks. Good flanks.” A pause. “Fine loins.” Another pause, and then one of her mottled hands came down and caressed Bill's tumbled, sweaty hair. He drew in a breath at her touch, but did not look up. “A good beast. Protect him and he'll protect you.”

Rosie looked up then. She was terrified of what she might see, but nevertheless unable to stop herself. “Don't you call him a beast again,” she said in a voice that shook with fury. “And get your diseased hand off him.”

She saw Dorcas wince in horror, but saw it only in the corner of her eye.
The bulk of her attention was focused on Rose Madder. What had she expected from that face? Now that she was looking at it in the waning moonlight, she couldn't exactly say. Medusa, perhaps. A Gorgon. The woman before her was not that. Once (and not so long ago, either, Rosie thought) her face had been one of extraordinary beauty, perhaps a face to rival Helen of Troy's. Now her features were haggard and beginning to blur. One of those dark patches had overspread her left cheek and brushed across her brow like the underwing of a starling. The hot eye glittering out of that shadow seemed both furious and melancholy. It wasn't the face Norman had seen, that much she knew, but she could see that face lurking beneath—in a way it was as if she had put this one on for Rosie's benefit, like makeup—and it made her feel cold and ill. Underneath the beauty was madness . . . but not
just
madness.