Rose Madder (38 page)

Nothing. The four passages—the four entrances to the maze—gawped silently at her, like narrow vertical mouths wearing identical expressions of prissy shock. Not far inside the second from the right, she saw a dark pile of something.

You know damned well what that is,
she thought.
After fourteen years of listening to Norman and Harley and all their friends, you'd have to be pretty stupid not to know bullshit when you see it.

This thought and the memories that went with it—memories of those men sitting around in the rec room, talking about the job and drinking beer and talking about the job and smoking cigarettes and talking about the job and telling jokes about niggers and spicks and taco-benders and then
talking about the job a little more—made her angry. Instead of denying the emotion, Rosie went against a lifetime of self-training and welcomed it. It felt
good
to be angry, to be anything other than terrified. As a kid she'd had a really piercing playground yell, the sort of high, drilling cry that could shatter window-glass and almost rupture eyeballs. She had been scolded and shamed out of using it around the age of ten, on the grounds that it was unladylike as well as brain-destroying. Now Rosie decided to see if she still had it in her repertoire. She drew the damp underground air into her lungs, all the way to the bottom, closed her eyes, and remembered playing Capture the Flag behind Elm Street School or Red Rover and Texas Rangers in Billy Calhoun's jungly, overgrown back yard. For a moment she thought she could almost smell the comforting aroma of her favorite flannel shirt, the one she wore until it practically fell apart on her back, and then she peeled back her lips and let loose with the old ululating, yodeling cry.

She was delighted, almost ecstatic, when it came out sounding just as it had in the old days, but there was something even better: it made her
feel
the way it had in the old days, like a combination of Wonder Woman, Supergirl, and Annie Oakley. And it still affected others as it had back then, it seemed; the baby had begun to cry again even before she had finished sending her schoolyard warwhoop into the stony dark. It was, in fact, screaming at the top of its lungs.

Quick now, Rosie, you have to be. If she's really tired, she won't be able to manage that volume for very long.

Rosie took a couple of steps forward, eyeing each of the four entrances to the maze, then walked past each of them, listening. The wail of the baby might have sounded a bit louder coming out of the third passageway. That could have been no more than imagination, but at least it was a place to begin. She started down it, bare feet slapping on the stone floor, then halted with her head cocked and her teeth working at her lower lip. Her old warcry had stirred up more than the baby, it seemed. Somewhere in here—how close or far away was impossible to tell because of the echo—hooves were running on rock. They moved at a lazy lope, seeming to grow closer, then fading a little, then growing closer again, then (somehow this was more frightening than the sound itself) stopping altogether. She heard a low, wet snort. It was followed by an even lower grunting sound. Then
there was only the baby, its bellows already beginning to subside again.

Rosie found herself able to imagine the bull all too well, a vast animal with a bristly hide and thick black shoulders humping grimly above its dropped head. It would have a gold ring in its nose, of course, like the Minotaur in her childhood book of myths, and the green light sweating out of the walls would reflect off that ring in tiny stitches of liquid light. Erinyes was standing quietly now in one of the passages ahead, its horns tipped forward. Listening for her. Waiting for her.

She walked down the faintly glowing corridor, trailing one hand along the wall, listening for the baby and the bull. She kept an eye out for more droppings, too, but saw none. Not yet, anyway. After perhaps three minutes, the passage she was following emptied into a T-junction. The sound of the baby seemed slightly louder to the left
(or do I just have a dominant ear to match my dominant hand?
she wondered), so she turned in that direction. She had taken only two steps when she stopped short. All at once she knew what the seeds were for: she was Gretel underground, with no brother to share her fear. She went back to the T-junction, knelt, and unfolded one side of her packet. She placed a seed on the floor with the sharp end pointing back in the direction from which she had come. At least, she reflected, there were no birds down here to gobble up her backtrail.

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.

S
he 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 corner 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!
—down on 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
always
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.