Rosie got to her feet and began walking again. Five paces brought her to a new passage. She peered down it and saw that it divided into three branches just a short way up. She chose the center branch, marking it with a pomegranate seed. Thirty paces and two turns later, this passage dead-ended in a stone wall upon which seven black words had been slashed: WANT TO DO THE DOG WITH ME?
Rosie returned to the three-way junction, stooped to pick up her seed, and laid it at the head of a new path.
8
She had no idea how long it took her to find her way to the center of the maze in this fashion, because time quickly lost all meaning for her. She knew it couldn't have taken terribly long, because the baby's cries continued ... although by the time Rosie began to get really close, they had become intermittent. Twice she heard the bull's hooves go thudding dully along the stone floor, once at a distance, once so close that she stopped short, hands clasped between her breasts, as she waited for it to appear at the head of the passageway she was in.
If she had no backtrail, she always picked up the last seed so she should suffer no confusion on her way back out. She had started with almost fifty; when she finally came around a comer and observed a much brighter green glow straight ahead, she was down to three.
She walked to the end of the passageway and stood at its mouth, looking into a square stone-floored room. She glanced up briefly, looking for a roof, and saw only a cavernous blackness that made her dizzy. She looked down again, registered several more large pats of dung scattered across the floor, and then turned her attention to the center of the room. Lying there on a pad of blankets was a plump, fair-haired baby. Her eyes were swollen with crying and her cheeks were wet with tears, but she had fallen quiet again, at least for the time being. Her feet were in the air and she appeared to be trying to examine her toes. Every now and then she gave out a watery, sobbing little gasp. These sounds moved Rosie's heart in a way the baby's all-out wails had not been able to do; it was as if the infant knew somehow that she had been abandoned.
Bring me my baby.
Whose baby? Who is she, really? And who brought her here?
She decided she didn't care about the answer to those questions, at least not now. It was enough that she was lying here, perfectly sweet and all alone, trying to comfort herself with her own toes in the chilly green light at the center of the maze.
And that light can't be good for her, Rosie thought distractedly, hurrying toward the center of the room. It must be some kind of radiation.
The baby turned her head, saw Rosie, and raised her arms toward her. The gesture won Rosie's heart completely. She wrapped the top blanket in the pile over the child's chest and belly, then picked her up. The infant looked to be about three months old. She put her arms around Rosie's neck and then dropped her head--clunk!--downon Rosie's shoulder. She began to sob again, but very weakly.
"That's all right," Rosie said, patting the tiny, blanket-wrapped back gently. She could smell the infant's skin, warm and sweeter than any perfume. She put her nose against the fine hair which floated around the perfectly made skull. "That's all right, Caroline, everything's fine, we're going to get out of this nasty old--"
She heard thudding hooves approaching from behind her and shut her mouth, praying that the bull hadn't heard her alien voice, praying that the hooves would turn and begin to fade as Erinyes chose some path that would lead it away from her again. This time that didn't happen. The hoofbeats grew closer--sharper, too, as the bull closed in. Then they stopped, but she could hear something big breathing hard, like a heavy-set man who has just climbed a flight of stairs.
Slowly, feeling old and stiff, Rosie turned toward the sound with the baby in her arms. She turned to Erinyes, and Erinyes was there.
That bull would smell me and come running. That was what the woman in the red dress had told her ... and something else. It's me it'd come to, but both of us'd get killed. Had Erinyes smelled her? Smelled her even though the moon was not full for her? Rosie didn't think so. She thought it was the bull's job to guard the baby--perhaps to guard whatever might be at the center of the maze--and that it had been drawn by the sound of the baby's cries, just as Rosie had been. Perhaps that mattered, perhaps it didn't. In any case, the bull was here, and it was the ugliest brute Rosie had ever seen in her life.
It stood at the mouth of the passageway it had just run, somehow as unsettled in its shape as the temple she had passed through--it was as though she were looking at it through currents of clear, rapidly moving water. Yet the bull itself was, for the moment at least, completely still. Its head was lowered. One huge front hoof, cloven so deeply it almost looked like a gigantic bird's talon, pawed restlessly at the stone floor. Its shoulders overtopped Rosie's five-feet-six by at least four inches and she guessed its weight at two tons, minimum. The top of its dropped head was flat as a hammer and shiny as silk. Its horns were stubby, no more than a foot in length, but sharp and thick. Rosie had no trouble imagining how easily they would punch into her naked belly ... or into her back, if she tried to run. She couldn't imagine how such a death would feel, however; not even after all her years with Norman could she imagine that.
The bull raised its head slightly and she saw it did indeed have only one eye, a filmy blue thing, huge and freakish, above the center of its snout. As it lowered its head and began to thud its cloven hoof restlessly against the floor again, she understood something else, as well: it was getting ready to charge.
The baby let out an earsplitting howl, almost directly into Rosie's ear, making her jump.
"Hush," she said, bouncing it up and down in her arms. "Hush-a-baby, no fear, no fear."
But there was fear, plenty of it. The bull standing over there in its narrow slot of doorway was going to unzip her guts for her and decorate these peculiar glowing walls with them. She supposed they would look black against the green, like the shapes which occasionally seemed to twist deep in the stone. There was nothing in this center chamber to hide behind, not so much as a single pillar, and if she ran for the passage she'd come out of, the blind bull would hear her feet on the stone and cut her off before she had gotten halfway--it would gore her, toss her against the wall, gore her again, and then trample her to death. The baby as well, if she managed to keep hold of it.
One-eyed blind, but there ain't nothing wrong with his sense of smell.
Rosie stood watching it with wide eyes, mesmerized by the tapping front hoof. When that tapping finally stopped--
She looked down at the damp, crumpled ball of nightgown in her hand. The ball of nightgown with the rag-wrapped stone in the center.
Nothing wrong with his sense of smell.
She dropped to one knee, keeping her eyes trained on the bull and holding the baby against her shoulder with her right hand. She used the left to open out her nightgown. The piece she had wrapped around the rock had been a dark red, rich with "Wendy Yarrow's" blood, but the downpour had washed much of it away, and the fabric was now a fading pink. Only the ears of cloth, where she had tied it over the rock, were brighter--were, in fact, rose madder.
Rosie cupped the stone in her left hand, feeling the heft of it. Just as the bull's haunches flexed, she underhanded the stone, bowling it along the floor to the bull's left. Its head swung heavily in that direction, its nostrils flared, and it charged toward what it both heard and smelled.
Rosie was on her feet again in a flash. She left the crumpled remnant of her nightgown lying beside the baby's pad of blankets. The little packet containing the last three pomegranate seeds was still in her hand, but Rosie wasn't aware of them. She was aware only of sprinting across the room toward the passageway she wanted, while behind her Erinyes charged the rock, kicked it aslant with one flying hoof, chased it down again, butted it with the flat hammer of its head, sent it flying into one of the other passages, and then chased after it, grunting thickly in its throat. She was sprinting, yes, but in slow motion, and now all this seemed like a dream again, because this was the way one a
lways ran in dreams, especially the bad ones where the fiend was always just two steps behind. In nightmares, escape became an underwater ballet.
She burst into the narrow corridor just as she heard the hoofbeats wheel around and begin to approach. again. They came fast, bearing down on her, and as they closed in, Rosie screamed and clutched the yowling, frightened baby to her breasts and ran for her life. It did no good. The bull was faster. It overtook her ... and then passed by on the far side of the wall to her right. Erinyes had discovered the ruse of the stone in time to double back and catch her, but it had chosen the wrong passageway by one.
Rosie hurried on, gasping, dry-mouthed, feeling the rapid rhythm of her heartbeat in her temples, her throat, her eyeballs. She hadn't the slightest idea of where she was, or in which direction she was traveling; now everything depended on the seeds. If she had forgotten so much as a single one, she might wander in here for hours, until the bull finally found her and ran her down.
She reached a five-way junction, looked down, and saw no seed. She did see a gleaming, aromatic spatter of bullpiss, however, and it gave rise to a horribly plausible idea. Suppose there had been a seed? She couldn't remember dropping one here, true enough, so in itself the lack of one meant nothing. But she couldn't remember not dropping one, either. Suppose she had, and suppose the bull had picked it up on its hoof as it raced through the intersection with its head down and its short, sharp horns sorting through the air, spraying piss as it went?
You can't think of that, Rosie--plausible or not, you can't think of it. You'll freeze, and eventually the bull will kill both of you.
She dashed across the intersection, holding the baby's neck with one hand, not wanting her head to go whipping back and forth. The passage ran straight on for twenty yards, made a right-angle, then ran another twenty yards to a T-junction. She hurried down to it, telling herself not to lose her head if she found no seed there. In that case, she would simply retrace her steps to the five-way and try another choice, easy as pie, simple as could be, zero perspiration ... if she kept her head, that was. And even as she was preparing herself with these thoughts, an alien, frightened voice at the back of her mind was moaning, Lost, this is what you get for leaving your husband, this is how it all turns out, lost in the maze, playing hide-and-seek with a bull in the dark, doing errands for madwomen ... this is what happens to bad wives, to wives who get above their place in the scheme of things. Lost in the dark ...
She saw the seed, its sharp end pointing clearly into the righthand arm of the junction, and sobbed with relief. She kissed the baby's cheek and saw she had fallen asleep again.
9
Rosie turned right and began walking with Caroline--it was as good a name as any, surely--cradled in her arms. She never quite lost that nightmarish floating feeling, nor her fear that she would eventually come to an intersection she had forgotten to mark with a seed, but at every choosing-point the seed was there. Erinyes was there, too, however, and the thudding of his hooves on stone, sometimes far-off and muffled, sometimes close and terrifyingly sharp, reminded her of the time she and her parents had gone to New York City when she had been only five or six. The two things she remembered best about that trip were the Rockettes high-kicking their way across the stage at Radio City Music Hall, their legs moving in perfect unison, and the intimidating bustle and confusion of Grand Central Station, with its echoes and huge lighted signs and its tidal flows of people. The people in Grand Central had fascinated her much as the Rockettes had (and for many of the same reasons, although this idea would not come to her until later), but the sound of the trains had scared her badly, because you couldn't tell where they were coming from or where they were going. The disembodied squeals and rumbles swelled and faded, swelled and faded, sometimes distant, sometimes seeming to shake the very floor under one's feet. Listening to the bull Erinyes charge blindly through the maze brought that memory back with amazing clarity. Rosie understood that she, who had never wagered a single dollar on the state lottery or played a single card of church Bingo for a turkey or a set of glassware, was now running in a game of chance where the prize was her life and the forfeit would be her death ... and the baby's death, too. She thought of the man in Portside, the one with the handsome, unreliable face and the game of three-card monte set up on top of his suitcase. Now she was the ace of spades. The cold fact was that the bull didn't necessarily need its ears or its sense of smell to find them; it might stumble upon them by dumb luck.
But that didn't happen. Rosie came around a final comer and saw the stairs ahead. Gasping, crying, and laughing all at the same time, she hurried out of the passageway and ran for them. She climbed half a dozen, then turned and looked back. From here she could see the maze twisting and sprawling its way into the dimness, a right-and-left-angled confusion of turns, junctions, and blind alleys. Somewhere far off to the right she could hear Erinyes galloping. Galloping away. They were safe from it, and Rosie's shoulders sagged in relief.
The voice of "Wendy" filled her head: Ne'mine that--you get on back here with the child. You done good, but you ain't done yet.
No, she certainly was not. She had over two hundred stairs to climb, this time with a child in her arms, and she was exhausted already.
One at a time, dear, Practical-Sensible said. That's how you have to do it. One step at a time.
Yes, yes. Ms. P & S, Queen of the Twelve-Step Philosophy.
Rose started up (one step at a time), looking over her shoulder from time to time and thinking half formed
(can bulls climb stairs?)
dreadful thoughts as the maze fell behind her. The baby grew heavier and heavier in her arms, as if some weird mathematical law had come into force here: the closer to the surface, the heavier the kid. She could see a starpoint of daylight above her, and she fixed her eyes on it. For awhile it seemed to mock her, growing no closer at all as her breath came faster and the blood pounded in her temples. For the first time in almost two weeks her kidneys really began to hurt again, throbbing in dull counterpoint to her laboring heart. She ignored all of these things--as well as she could, anyway--and kept her eyes fixed on the starpoint. At last it began to swell and to take on the shape of the opening at the top of the stairs.
Five steps from the top, a paralyzing cramp sank into the big muscles of her right thigh, knotting the flesh from the back of her knee almost all the way up to her right buttock. When she reached down to massage her leg, it was at first like trying to knead stone. Groaning softly, her mouth pulled down in a trembling moue of pain, she worked on the muscles (this was something else she had done for herself many times during the years of her marriage) until they finally began to loosen. She flexed the leg at the knee, waiting to see if the cramp would seize her again. When it didn't, she cautiously climbed the last few stairs, favoring the leg as she went. At the top, she stood looking around with the dazed eyes of a miner who has, contrary to all his expectations, survived a terrible cave-in.
The clouds had rolled away during her time underground, and the day was now filled with hazy summer light. The air was heavy and humid, but Rosie thought she had still never drawn a sweeter breath in her entire life. She turned her face, wet with sweat and tears, gratefully up to the faded blue denim she could see between the unravelling clouds. Somewhere in the distance thunder continued to rumble balefully, like a beaten bully making empty threats. That made her think of Erinyes, running in the darkness below, still looking for the woman who had invaded its domain and stolen its prize. Cherchez la femme, Rosie thought with a trace of a smile. You can cherchez all you want, big fella; this femme--not to mention her petite fille--is gone.
10
Rosie walked slowly away from the stairs. At the head of the path leading back into the grove of dead trees, she sat down with the baby in her lap. All she wanted was to regain her breath, but the hazy sun was warm on her back, and when she raised her head again, some small change in the lie of her shadow made her think she might have dozed a little.
r /> As she got to her feet, wincing at the pain that shot through the muscles of her right thigh, she heard the harsh, squabbling cry of many birds--they sounded like a big family having a rancorous argument at Sunday dinner. The child in her arms made a soft snorting sound as Rosie shifted her to a more comfortable position, blew a little spit-bubble between her pursed lips, then fell silent again. Rosie was both amused by and deeply envious of her placid, sleeping confidence.
She started down the path, then stopped and looked back at the single living tree with its shiny green leaves, its bounty of deadly reddish-purple fruit, and the Classical Fables subway entrance standing nearby. She looked at these things for a long moment, filling her eyes and mind with them.
They're real, she thought. How can things I see so clearly be anything but real? And I dozed off, I know I did. How can you go to sleep in a dream? How can you go to sleep when you're sleeping already?
Forget it, Practical-Sensible said. That's the best thing, at least for the time being.
Yes, probably it was.
Rosie started off again, and when she reached the fallen tree blocking the path, she was amused and rather exasperated to see that her arduous detour around the snarl of roots could have been avoided: there was an easy path around the top of the tree.
At least there is now, she thought as she went around it. Are you sure there was before, Rosie?
The rocky babble of the black stream rose in her ears, and when she reached it, she saw that the level had already begun to drop and the stepping-stones no longer looked so perilously small; now they looked almost the size of floor-tiles, and the scent of the water had lost its ominously attractive quality. Now it just smelled like very hard water, the kind that would leave an orange ring around the tub and toilet-bowl.