Rose Madder (64 page)

Because they'll come, Daddy,
Norman told the voice. He was shaken by this ghost's insistence and surety, but would not admit it.
The cops will come and they will take me down. They'll take me down before I so much as smell her perfume. And because she said fuck to me. Because she's
turned into a whore. I can tell it just by the way she talks now.

Never mind how she talks, you idiot! If she's gone rotten, leave her to spoil on the ground with her friends! Maybe it isn't too late to shut this thing down before it explodes in your face.

He actually considered it . . . and then raised his eyes to the temple and read the words chiselled over the door,
SHE WHO STEALS HER HUSBAND'S BANK CARD SHALL NOT BE SUFFERED TO LIVE
, they read.

Doubt fled. He would listen to his craven, crotchgrabbing father no more. He passed through the yawning doorway and into the damp darkness beyond. Dark . . . but not too dark to see. Powdery shafts of moonlight fell steeply in through the narrow windows, illuminating a ruin that looked spookily like the church where Rose and her folks had worshipped back in Aubreyville. He walked through drifts of fallen leaves, and when a flock of whirling, squealing bats descended through the moonbeams to flutter about his face, he only flapped his arms, waving them away. “Get out, you sons of whores,” he muttered.

As he emerged onto a small stone stoop through the door to the right of the altar, he saw a fluff of something hanging from a bush. He leaned over, pulled it free, held it up in front of his eyes. It was hard to be sure in this light, but he thought it was red or pink. Had she been wearing clothes of such a color? He thought she'd had jeans on, but everything was mixed up in his mind. Even if it
had
been jeans, she'd taken off the jacket the cocksucker had loaned her, and maybe underneath—

There was a soft sound behind him, like a pennant rippling in a breeze. Norman turned and a brown bat flew into his face, snapping at him with its whiskery mouth as its wings battered against his cheeks.

His hand had dropped to the butt of the gun. Now he let go of it and seized the bat, crumpling the bones in its wings back against its body like a lunatic concertina player. He twisted it against itself and tore it in two with such force that its rudimentary guts fell out on his shoes. “Shoulda stayed out of my face, asshole,” Norman told it, and then flung the pieces back into the temple's shadows.

“You're great at killing bats, Norman.”

Jesus Christ, that was
close—
that was right behind him!
He spun around so fast this time that he almost lost his balance and tumbled off the stone stoop.

The ground behind the temple sloped toward a stream, and standing there halfway down, in what looked like the world's deadest garden, was his sweet little rambling Rose—just standing there in the moonlight, looking up at him. Three things struck him in rapid succession. The first was that she was no longer wearing jeans, if she ever had been; she was wearing a minidress that looked like it belonged at a frathouse toga-party. The second was that she had changed her hair. It was blonde and pulled back from her face.

The third thing was that she was beautiful.

“Bats and women,” she said coldly. “That's about it for you, isn't it? I almost feel sorry for you, Norman. You're a miserable excuse for a man. You're
not
a man, not really. And that stupid mask you're wearing will never make you into one.”

“I'LL KILL YOU, YOU BITCH!
”
Norman jumped from the stoop and sprinted down the hill toward where she stood, his horned shadow trailing along beside him over the dead grass in the bony moonlight.

F
or a moment she stood where she was, frozen in place, every muscle in her body seemingly locked down as he rushed forward, screaming inside the hideous mask he was wearing. What got her moving was a sudden gruesome image—sent by Practical-Sensible, she had an idea—of the tennis racket he'd used on her, its handle wet with blood.

She turned then, the skirt of the
zat
flaring, and ran for the stream.

The stones, Rosie . . . if you fall in
that
water . . .

But she wasn't going to. She was really Rosie, she was Rosie Real, and she wasn't going to. Not, that was, unless she let herself think about what would happen if she did. The smell of the water came to her powerfully enough to make her eyes sting . . . and to make her mouth cramp with desire. Rosie reached up with her left hand, pinched her nostrils shut between the knuckles of her second and third fingers,
and jumped onto the second stone. From there she leaped to the fourth, and from there to the other bank. Easy. Nothing to it. At least until her feet went out from under her and she went sprawling full-length and started to slide back down on the slippery grass toward the black water.

N
orman saw her fall and laughed. She was going to get wet, it looked like.

Don't worry, Rose,
he thought.
I'll fish you out, and I'll pat you dry. Yes indeed.

Then she was up again, clawing at the bank and casting one terrified glance back over her shoulder . . . except it wasn't him she appeared to be afraid of; she was looking at the water. As she got up, he caught a flash of her butt, as bare as the day she'd been born, and the most amazing thing happened: he started getting hard in his pants.

“Coming, Rose,” he panted. Yes, and maybe soon he'd be coming in another way, as well. Coming as she was going, you might say.

He hurried down to the stream, trampling the delicate prints of Rose's feet beneath Hump Peterson's square-toed boots, reaching the edge of the running water just as Rosie gained the top of the other bank. She stood there for a moment, looking back, and this time it was clearly him she was looking at. Then she did something that brought him to a dead halt, momentarily too amazed to move.

She gave him the finger.

She did it right, too, kissing the tip of it at him before running for the grove of dead trees ahead.

Did you see that, Norm old buddy?
ze bool asked from its place inside his head.
The bitch just flipped you off. Did you see it?

“Yes,” he breathed. “I saw it. I'll take care of it, too. I'll take care of everything.”

But he had no intention of charging wildly across the stream, and maybe falling in. There was something about the water Rose hadn't liked, and he'd do well to be very careful; to watch his step in the most literal sense. The damned brook might be full of those little South American fish with
the big teeth, the ones that could strip a whole cow down to its skeleton on a good day. He didn't know if you could be killed by things in a delusion, but this felt less like make-believe all the time.

She flashed her ass at me,
he thought.
Her
bare
ass. Maybe I've got something to flash at her . . . don't they say turnabout's fair play?

Norman wrinkled his lips back from his teeth, making a grisly expression that wasn't a grin, and put one of Hump's boots on the first white stone. The moon sailed behind a cloud as he did. When it came out again, it caught Norman halfway across the little stream. He looked down at the water, at first just curious, then fascinated and horrified. The moonlight penetrated the water no more than it would have penetrated a flowing stream of mud, but that wasn't what took the breath out of him and brought him to a stop. The moon reflected up at him in that black water wasn't the moon at all. It was a bleached and grinning human skull.

Have a drink of
this
shit, Normie,
the skull on the surface of the water whispered.
Hell, take a goddamned
bath,
if you want. Just forget all this foolishness. Drink and you will. Drink and it will never trouble you again; nothing will.

It sounded so plausible, so right. He looked up, perhaps to see if the moon in the sky looked as much like a skull as the one in the water, and instead saw Rose. She was standing at the place where the path entered a grove of dead trees, beside a statue of a kid with his arms up and his crank hanging out in front of him.

“You're not getting away that easy,” he breathed. “I don't—”

The stone boy moved then. Its arms came down and seized Rosie's right wrist. Rosie screamed and beat fruitlessly against its two-handed grip. The stone boy was grinning, and as Norman watched, it stuck out its marble tongue and waggled it at Rosie suggestively.

“Attaboy,” Norman whispered. “Hold her—just hold her.”

He jumped up on the other bank and ran for his wayward wife, big hands outstretched.

“W
ant to do the dog with me?” the stone boy enquired of her in a grating, uninflected voice. The hands clamping her wrist were all angles and squeezing, bitter weight. She looked over her shoulder and saw Norman leap onto the bank, the horns of the mask he had on digging at the night air. He stumbled on the slick grass but did not fall. For the first time since realizing it was Norman in the police car, she felt close to panic. He was going to get her, and then what? He'd bite her to pieces and she would die screaming, with the smell of his English Leather in her nostrils. He would—

“Want to do the
dog?”
the stone boy spat. “Want to get
down,
Rosie, do some low-ridin, put all
four
on the fl—”

“No!”
she shrieked, her fury spilling out again, spreading across her thoughts like a red curtain.
“No, leave me alone, quit that high-school bullshit and leave me
ALONE
!”

She swung with her left hand, not thinking of how much it was going to hurt to drive her fist into the face of a marble statue . . . and it did not, in fact, hurt at all. It was like hitting something spongy and rotten with a battering ram. She caught just a momentary glimpse of a new expression—astonishment replacing lust—and then the thing's smirking face shattered into a hundred dough-colored fragments. The heavy, pinching pressure of its hands left her wrist, but now there was Norman, Norman almost on top of her, head lowered, breath slobbering in and out through the mask, hands reaching.

Rosie turned, feeling one of his outstretched fingers skate over the
zat's
single shoulder-strap, and bolted.

Now it would be a footrace.

S
he ran as she had when she was a girl, before her practical, sensible mother had begun the weighty task of teaching Rose Diana McClendon what was ladylike and what was not (running, especially once you were at an age where you had
breasts bouncing in front of you when you did it, was definitely not). She went all out, in other words, with her head down and her fisted hands pumping at her sides. She was aware of Norman at her heels to begin with, less aware of his starting to slip back, at first by mere feet, then by yards. She could hear him grunting and blowing even when he had fallen behind a little, and he sounded exactly as Erinyes had sounded in the maze. She was aware of her own lighter breathing, and of the plait bouncing up and down and side to side on her back. Mostly, though, what she was aware of was a mad exhilaration, of blood filling her head until she felt it must burst, but bursting would be ecstasy. She looked up once and saw the moon racing with her, speeding through the starshot sky behind the branches of dead trees that stood here like the hands of giants who had been buried alive and had died struggling to disinter themselves. Once, when Norman growled at her to stop running and quit being such a cunt, she actually laughed.
He thinks I'm playing hard to get,
she thought.

Then she came around a bend in the path and saw the lightning-struck tree blocking her course. There was no time to swerve, and if she tried to put on the brakes she would succeed only in being impaled on one or more of the tree's dead, jutting branches. Even if she avoided that, there was Norman. She had gotten ahead of him a little, but if she stopped, even for a moment, he would be on her like a dog on a rabbit.

All this went through her mind in an instant. Then, screaming—perhaps in terror, perhaps in defiance, probably in both—she leaped forward with her hands out in front of her like Supergirl, going over the tree and landing on her left shoulder. She did a somersault, sprang dizzily up, and saw Norman staring at her over the fallen trunk. His hands were clutched on the fire-blackened stubs of two branches, and he was panting harshly. The breeze puffed and she could smell something besides sweat and English Leather coming from him.

“You started smoking again, didn't you?” she said.

The eyes below the flower-decked rubber horns regarded her with complete unreason. The lower half of the mask was twitching spastically, as if the man buried inside it were trying to smile. “Rose,” the bull said. “Stop this.”

“I'm not
Rose,”
she said, then gave an exasperated little
laugh, as if he were really the stupidest creature alive—
el toro dumbo.
“I'm
Rosie.
Rosie Real. But
you're
not real anymore, Norman . . . are you? Not even to yourself. But it doesn't matter now, not to me, because I'm divorced of you.”

She turned then, and fled.

Y
ou're not real anymore,
he thought as he went around the top of the tree, where there was plenty of room for easy passage. She had left the far side of the deadfall running full-out, but when he regained the path again, Norman only jogged. It was really all he needed to do. The interior voice, the one that had never let him down, told him that the path ended up ahead, not far from here. This should have delighted him, but he kept hearing what she had said before turning her pretty little tail into his gaze this last time.