Rose Madder

  He hit the door again.

  On the sixth hit--or maybe it was lucky seven, he'd lost count--the lock tore free and Norman catapulted into the room. She was in here, both of them were, had to be, but for the moment he saw neither. Sweat ran into his eyes, momentarily blurring his vision. The room looked empty, but it couldn't be. They hadn't gone out the window; it was closed and locked

  He charged across the room, running through the listless light thrown by the fog-wrapped streetlamp outside, swinging his head from side to side, Ferdinand's horns goring the air. Where was she? The bitch! Where in Christ's name could she have gone?

  He spotted an open door on the far side of the room, and the closed lid of a commode. He chased across to it and stood peering into the bathroom. Empty. Unless--

  He drew the pistol and fired two shots through the shower curtain, opening a pair of surprised black eyes in the flower-patterned vinyl. Then he rattled it back on its rings. The tub was empty. The bullets had blown a couple of porcelain tiles off the wall; that was the extent of the damage. But maybe that was all right. He hadn't wanted to shoot her, anyway.

  No, but where had she gone?

  Norman charged back into the room, dropped to his knees (wincing at the pain but not really feeling it), and swept the muzzle of the gun back and forth under the bed. Nothing. He pounded his fist on the floor in frustration.

  He started toward the window in spite of what his eyes had told him, because the window was all that was left . . . or so he thought until he saw light--bright light, moonlight, it looked like--spilling out of another open door, one he had trampled right past during his first charge into the room.

  Moonlight? Is that what you think you're seeing? Are you nuts, Normie? I don't know if you remember, but it's foggy outside, son. Foggy. And even if this was the night of the fullest full moon of the century, that's a closet. A second-floor closet, in fact.

  Maybe it was, but he had come to believe that his sweat-smelling, greasy-haired, crotchgrabbing, cockgobbling poor excuse for a father didn't automatically know everything about everything. Norman knew that moonlight spilling out of a second-floor closet didn't make much sense . . . but that was what he was seeing.

  He walked slowly toward the door with the pistol dangling from his hand and stood in the flood of radiance. He looked through the eyeholes of the mask (except now, queerly, it seemed like just one eyehole that both his eyes were looking through) and stared into the closet.

  There were hooks sticking out of the room's bare plank sides and empty hangers dangling from the metal bar running down the middle, but the closet's back wall was gone. Where it should have been was a moonlit hillside overgrown with tall grass. He could see fireflies stitching random lines of light in a dark blur of trees. The clouds sliding across the sky looked like lamps when they passed near or in front of the moon, which wasn't full but close to it. At the bottom of the hill was a sort of ruin. To Norman it looked like a busted-down old plantation-house, or perhaps an abandoned church.

  I've gone completely crazy, he thought. Either that or she's knocked me out somehow and this is all some kind of nutty dream.

  No, he didn't accept that. Wouldn't accept that.

  "COME BACK HERE, ROSE!" he screamed into the closet ... which was, strictly speaking, no longer a closet at all. "COME BACK, YOU BITCH!"

  Nothing. Only that improbable vista . . . and a tiny breath of breeze, fragrant with grass and flowers, to prove it wasn't an eerily perfect optical illusion.

  And something else: the sound of crickets.

  "You stole my bank card, you bitch," Norman said in a low voice. He reached up and grabbed one of the coathooks jutting out of the board wall, looking like a straphanging commuter in a subway car. Beyond him was a strange, moonlit world, but any fear he might have felt was buried in outrage. "You stole it and I want to talk to you about it. Right . . . up ... close. "

  He stepped into the closet and ducked under the bar, knocking a couple of coathangers to the wood floor. He stood where he was for just a moment longer, looking into, the other world he could see stretching before him.

  Then he went forward.

  There was a sense of stepping down a bit, the way you sometimes had to do in old houses where the floor of the various rooms were no longer quite matched, but that was all. One step and he was no longer on boards, no longer in anyone's second-floor room; he was standing on grass and that fragrant breeze was hushing all around him. It slipped into the eyehole (yes, there was only one of them now; he didn't know how that could be, but after the step he'd just taken it didn't seem all that strange), refreshing his bruised and sweaty skin. He grasped the sides of the mask, meaning to slip it up for awhile so he could treat his whole face to a taste of that breeze, but the mask wouldn't budge. It wouldn't budge at all.

  IX

  I REPAY

  1

  Bill looked around the moonwashed hilltop with the careful gaze of one completely unable to credit what he is seeing. One hand went to his swollen throat and began to rub it. Rosie could already see bruises unfolding there like fans.

  A night breeze touched her brow like a concerned hand. It was soft and warm and fragrant with summer. There was no foggy dampness in it, no dank tang of the great lake which lay to the east of the city.

  "Rosie? Is this really happening?"

  Before she could think what sort of answer she might give to that question, an urgent voice--one she knew--intervened.

  "Woman! You, woman!"

  It was the lady in red, except now she was wearing a plain gown--blue, Rosie thought, although it was impossible to be sure in the moonlight. "Wendy Yarrow" was standing halfway down the hill.

  "Git him down here! No time to waste! T'other be here in a minute, n you got things to do! Important things!"

  Rosie still had Bill by the arm. She tried to lead him forward but he resisted, looking down the hill at "Wendy" with alarm. Behind them--muffled but still horribly close--Norman roared her name. It made Bill jump, but didn't get him moving.

  "Who is that, Rosie? Who's that woman?"

  "Never mind. Come on!"

  She didn't just tug his arm this time; she yanked on it, feeling frantic. He moved with her, but they had only gone a dozen steps or so before he doubled over, coughing so hard his eyes bulged. Rosie took the opportunity to rake down the zipper on the jacket he'd loaned her. She stripped the garment off and dropped it in the grass. The sweater followed. The blouse under it was sleeveless, and she slipped the armlet on. She felt an immediate surge of power, and as far as she was concerned, the question of whether that feeling was real or only in her mind was moot. She grabbed one quick look back over her shoulder, half-expecting to see Norman bearing down on her, but he wasn't, at least not yet. She saw only the pony-cart, the pony itself, untethered and cropping at the moon-silvered grass, and the same easel she had seen before. The picture had changed again. The back-to figure in it was no longer a woman, for one thing--it looked like a horned demon. It was a demon, she supposed, but it was also a man. It was Norman, and she remembered seeing the horns jutting up from his head in a brief, bright gunflash.

  "Girl, why you so slow? Move!"

  She slipped her left arm around Bill, whose coughing fit had begun to ease, and assisted him down to where "Wendy" was impatiently waiting. By the time Rosie got him there, she was mostly carrying him.

  "Who're ... you?" Bill asked the black woman when they reached her, and then promptly fell into another coughing fit.

  "Wendy" ignored the question and slipped her own arm around him, supporting the side that kept leaning away from Rosie. And when she spoke, it was Rosie she spoke to. "I put her spare zat around the side of the temple, so that's all right ... but we got to be quick! There ain't one single moment to waste!"

  "I don't know what you're talking about," Rose said, but in some part of her mind she thought that perhaps she did. "What's a zat?"

  "Never mind your questions now," the black woman said. "We best s
tep lively."

  With Bill supported between them, they went down the slope toward the Temple of the Bull (it was really quite amazing how it all came flooding back, Rosie thought). Their shadows walked beside them. The building loomed over them--seemed to loom toward them, actually, like something that was alive and hungry. Rose was deeply grateful when "Wendy" turned to the right, leading them around the side.

  Behind the temple, dangling from one of the massed thorn-bushes like a garment hanging from a closet hook, was the spare zat. Rosie looked at it with dismay but no surprise. It was a rose madder chiton, the twin of the one the woman with the sweet, insane voice had been wearing.

  "Put it on," the black woman said.

  "No," Rosie said faintly. "No, I'm afraid to."

  "COME BACK HERE, ROSE!"

  Bill jumped at the sound of that voice and turned his head, his eyes wide, his skin paler than the moonlight could account for, his lips trembling. Rosie was also afraid, but she felt her anger beneath her fear, like a large shark circling under a small boat. She had held onto the desperate hope that Norman wouldn't be able to follow them through, that the picture would snap closed behind them somehow. Now she knew that hadn't happened. He'd found it, and would be with them in this world soon enough, if he wasn't already.

  "COME BACK, YOU BITCH!"

  "Put it on," the woman repeated.

  "Why?" Rose asked, but her hands had already gone to her blouse and pulled it over her head. "Why do I have to?"

  "Because it's the way she wants it, and what she wants, she gets." The black woman looked at Bill, who was staring at Rosie. "Turn your back," she told him. "You c'n look at her naked in your world til your eyes fall out, for all of me, but not in mine. Turn your back, if you know what's good for you."

  "Rosie?" Bill said uncertainly. "It is a dream, isn't it?"

  "Yes," she said, and there was a coldness in her voice--a sort of spontaneous calculation--she had never heard there before. "Yes, that's right. Do as she says."

  He turned so abruptly he looked like a soldier executing an about-face. Now he was looking down the narrow path which led along the back of the building.

  "Take off that tit-harness, too," the black woman said, poking an impatient thumb at Rosie's bra. "Can't wear it under a zat."

  Rosie unhooked her bra and took it off. Then she pushed off her sneakers, still laced, and removed her jeans. She stood in her plain white underwear and looked a question at "Wendy," who nodded.

  "Yep, those too."

  Rosie pushed her underpants down, then carefully plucked the gown--the zat--from where it hung. The black woman stepped forward to help her.

  "I know how to put it on, get out of my way!" Rosie snapped at her, and slipped the chiton over her head like a shirt.

  Wendy looked at her with assessing eyes, making no move to step forward again even when Rosie had a brief difficulty with the zat's shoulder-strap. When it was fixed, Rosie's right shoulder was bare and the armlet gleamed above her left elbow. She had become a mirror image of the woman in the picture.

  "You can turn around, Bill," Rosie said.

  He did. He looked her up and down carefully, his eyes lingering for an extra moment or two on the shapes of her nipples against the finely woven cloth. Rosie didn't mind. "You look like someone else," he said at last. "Someone dangerous."

  "That's the way things are in dreams," she said, and once again she heard coldness and calculation in her voice. She hated that sound . . . but she liked it, too.

  "Do you need me to tell you what to do?" the black woman asked.

  "No, of course not."

  Rosie raised her voice then, and the cry that came from her was both musical and savage, not her voice at all, the voice of the other . . . except it was her voice, too; it was.

  "Norman!" she called. "Norman, I'm down here!"

  "Jesus Christ, Rosie, no!" Bill gasped. "Are you nuts?"

  He tried to grasp her shoulder and she shook his hand away impatiently, giving him a warning look. He stepped back from it, much as "Wendy Yarrow" had done.

  "This is the only way, and it's the right way. Besides . . ." She looked at "Wendy" with a flicker of uncertainty. "I won't really have to do anything, will I?"

  "No," the woman in the blue gown said. "Mistress gonna do it all. If you tried to get in her way--or if you even tried to help her with her business--she'd mos likely make you sorry. All you got to do is what that bastard up there thinks any woman do, anyway."

  "Lead him on," Rosie murmured, and her eyes swam with silver moonlight.

  "That's right," the other replied. "Lead him down the path. Down the garden path."

  Rosie pulled in breath and called to him again, feeling the armlet burn against her flesh like some strange, deliriously sweet fire, liking the sound of the voice coming out of her throat, so loud, like her old Texas Rangers warcry in the maze, the one she'd used to get the baby crying again. "Down heee-eeeere, Norman!"

  Bill, staring at her. Frightened. She didn't like seeing that look in his face, but she wanted to see it there. She did. He was a man, wasn't he? And sometimes men had to learn what it was to be afraid of a woman, didn't they? Sometimes it was a woman's only protection.

  "Now go on," the black woman said. "I'll stay here with your man. We'll be safe; the other one'll go through the temple."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Because they always do," the black woman said simply. "Remember what he is."

  "A bull."

  "That's right; a bull. And you're the maid who waves the silk hat to draw him on. Just remember that if he catch you, there ain't any 'falias to distract him off. If he catch you, he kill you. That's flat. There's nothing me or my mistress could do to keep him from it. He wants to fill up his mouth with your blood."

  I know that better than you do, Rosie thought. I've known it for years.

  "Don't go, Rosie," Bill said. "Stay here with us."

  "No."

  She pushed past him, feeling one of the thorns rake her thigh, and the pain was as sweet to her as her shout had been. Even the sensation of blood slipping down her skin was sweet.

  "Little Rosie."

  She turned back.

  "You have to get ahead of him at the end. Do you know why?"

  "Yes, of course I do."

  "What did you mean when you said he's a bull?" Bill asked. He sounded worried, pettish ... and yet Rosie had never loved him more than she did then, and she thought she never would. His face was so pale and seemed so defense-less.

  He began to cough again. Rosie put a hand on his arm, terribly afraid he might shrink away from her, but he didn't. Not yet, anyway.

  "Stay here," she said. "Stay here and be perfectly still." The she hurried away. He caught one moonlit flip of the chiton's skirt at the far end of the temple, where the path appeared to open out, and then she was gone.

  A moment later her cry rose in the night again, light and yet somehow awful:

  "Norman, you look so silly in that mask . . . " A pause, and then: "I'm not afraid of you anymore, Norman . . ."

  "Christ, he'll kill her," Bill muttered.

  "Maybe," the woman in the blue dress replied. "Somebody is going to get killed tonight, that's for . . ." She quit, then, her eyes wide and glittering, her head cocked.

  "What do you h--"

  A brown hand shot out and covered his mouth. It didn't squeeze hard, but Bill sensed it could; it felt full of steel springs. A haunting belief, almost a certainty, rose in his mind as he felt her palm pressing his lips and the pads of her fingers on his cheek: this wasn't a dream. As much as he wanted to believe it was, he simply couldn't do it.

  The black woman stood on tiptoe and pressed against him like a lover, still holding his mouth shut.

  "Hush, " she whispered in his ear. "He comin."

  He could hear the rustle of grass and foliage now, and then heavy, grunting inhales with a whistle buried deep in each one. It was a sound he could normally have associated with men much he
avier than Norman Daniels--men in the three-hundred- to three-hundred-and-fifty-pound range.

  Or with a large animal.

  The black woman slowly removed her hand from Bill's mouth and they stood there, listening to the creature's approach. Bill put an arm around her, and she one around him. They stood so, and Bill became queerly certain that Norman--or whatever Norman had become--wouldn't go through the building, after all. He--it--would come around here, and see them. It would paw the ground for a moment, its hammerhead lowered, and then it would chase them down this narrow, hopeless path, overbear them, trample them, gore them.

  "Shhhhh ..." she breathed.

  "Norman, you idiot . . ."

  Drifting to them like smoke, like moonlight.

  "You're such a fool . . . did you really think you could catch me? Silly old bull!"

  There was a burst of high, mocking laughter. The sound made Bill think of spun glass and open wells and empty rooms at midnight. He shuddered and felt gooseflesh ripple his arms.

  From in front of the temple there was an interval of quiet (broken only by a puff of breeze that briefly moved the thorn-bushes like a hand combing through tangled hair), and silence from where Rosie had been calling him. Overhead, the bony disk of the moon sailed behind a cloud, fringing its edges with silver. The sky sprawled with stars, but Bill recognized none of the constellations they made. Then:

  "Norrr-munnnn . . . don't you want to taaalllk to me?"

  "Oh, I'll talk to you," Norman Daniels said, and Bill felt the black woman jerk against him in surprise as his own heart took a large, nasty leap from his chest into his throat. That voice had come from no more than twenty yards away. It was as if Norman had been making those clumsy movements on purpose, allowing them to track his progress, and then, when quiet suited him better, he had become utterly quiet. "I'll talk to you up close, you cunt."

  The black woman's finger was on his lips, admonishing him to be quiet, but Bill didn't need the message. Their eyes locked, and he saw that the black woman was also no longer sure that Norman would go through the building.

  The silence spun out, creating what felt like an eternity. Even Rosie seemed to be waiting.

  Then, from a little farther away, Norman spoke again. "Boo, you old sonofabitch," he said. "What you doing here?"