Rose Madder (67 page)

Rosie thought:
It's a kind of rabies—she's being eaten up with it, all her shapes and magics and glamours trembling at the outer edge of her control now, soon it's all going to crumble, and if I look away from her now, she's apt to fall on me and do whatever she did to Norman. She might regret it later, but that wouldn't help me, would it?

Rose Madder reached down again, and this time it was Rosie's head she touched—first her brow, then her hair, which had had a long day and was now coming loose from its plait.

“You're brave, Rosie. You've fought well for your . . . your friend. You're courageous, and you have a good heart. But may I give you one piece of advice before I send you back?”

She smiled, perhaps in an effort to be engaging, but Rosie's heart stopped momentarily before skittering madly onward. When Rose Madder's lips drew back, disclosing a hole in her face that was nothing at all like a mouth, she no longer looked even remotely human. Her mouth was the maw of a spider, something made for eating insects which weren't even dead, but only stung into insensibility.

“Of course.” Rosie's lips felt numb and distant.

The mottled hand stroked smoothly along her temple. The spider's mouth grinned. The eyes glittered.

“Wash the dye out of your hair,” Rose Madder whispered. “You weren't meant to be a blonde.”

Their eyes met and held. Rosie discovered she couldn't
drop hers; they were locked on the other woman's face. At one corner of her vision she saw Bill continuing to look grimly down at his hands. His cheeks and brow glimmered with sweat.

It was Rose Madder who looked away. “Dorcas.”

“Ma'am?”

“The baby—?”

“Be ready when you are.”

“Good,” said Rose Madder. “I'm eager to see her, and it's time we went along. Time you went along, too, Rosie Real. You and your
man.
I can call him that, you see. Your
man,
your
man.
But before you go . . .”

Rose Madder held her arms out.

Slowly, feeling almost hypnotized, Rosie got to her feet and entered the offered embrace. The dark patches growing in Rose Madder's flesh were hot and fevery—Rosie fancied she could almost feel them squirming against her own skin. Otherwise, the woman in the chiton—in the
zat
—was as cold as a corpse.

But Rosie was no longer afraid.

Rose Madder kissed her cheek, high up toward the jaw, and whispered, “I love you, little Rosie. I wish we'd met at a better time, when you might have seen me in a better light, but we have done as well as we could. We have been well-met. Just remember the tree.”

“What tree?” Rosie asked frantically.
“What
tree?” But Rose Madder shook her head with inarguable finality and stepped back, breaking their embrace. Rosie took one last look into that uneasy, demented face, and thought again of the vixen and her kits.

“Am I you?” she whispered. “Tell me the truth—am I you?”

Rose Madder smiled. It was just a small smile, but for a moment Rosie saw a monster glimmering in it, and she shuddered.

“Never mind, little Rosie. I'm too old and sick to deal with such questions. Philosophy is the province of the well. If you remember the tree, it will never matter, anyway.”

“I don't understand—”

“Shhh!”
She put a finger to her lips. “Turn around, Rosie. Turn around and see me no more. The play has ended.”

Rosie turned, bent, put her hands over Bill's hands (they were still clasped, his fingers a tense, woven knot between
his thighs), and pulled him to his feet. Once more the easel was gone, and the picture which had been on it—her apartment at night, indifferently rendered in muddy oils—had grown to enormous size. Once more it wasn't really a picture at all, but a window. Rosie started toward it, intent on nothing but getting through it and leaving the mysteries of this world behind for good. Bill stopped her with a tug on the wrist. He turned back to Rose Madder, and spoke without allowing his eyes to rise any higher than her breasts.

“Thank you for helping us,” he said.

“You're very welcome,” Rose Madder said composedly. “Repay me by treating her well.”

I
repay,
Rosie thought, and shuddered again.

“Come on,” she said, tugging Bill's hand. “Please, let's go.”

He lingered a moment longer, though. “Yes,” he said. “I'll treat her well. I've got a pretty good idea of what happens to people who don't. Better than I want, maybe.”

“It's such a pretty man,” Rose Madder said thoughtfully, and then her tone changed—it became distraught, almost distracted. “Take him while you still can, Rosie Real! While you still can!”

“Go on!” Dorcas cried. “You two get out of here
right now!”

“But give me what's mine before you go!”
Rose Madder screamed. Her voice was squealing and unearthly.
“Give it to me, you bitch!”
Something—not an arm, something too thin and bristly to be an arm—flailed in the moonlight and slid along the madly shrinking flesh of Rosie McClendon's forearm.

With a scream of her own, Rosie pulled the gold armlet off and flung it at the feet of the looming, writhing shape before her. She was aware of Dorcas throwing her arms around that shape, trying to restrain it, and Rosie waited to see no more. She seized Bill by the arm and yanked him through the window-sized painting.

T
here was no sensation of tripping, but she fell rather than walked out of the painting, just the same. So did Bill. They
landed on the closet floor side by side in a long, trapezoidal patch of moonlight. Bill rapped his head against the side of the door, hard enough to hurt, by the sound, but he seemed unaware of it.

“That was no dream,” he said. “Jesus,
we were in the picture!
The one you bought on the day I met you!”

“No,” she said calmly. “Not at all.”

Around them, the moonlight began to simultaneously brighten and contract. At the same time it lost its linear shape and quickly became circular. It was as if a door were slowly irising closed behind them. Rosie felt an urge to turn and see what was happening, but she resisted it. And when Bill started to turn his head, she placed her palms gently against his cheeks and turned his face back to hers.

“Don't,” she said. “What good would it do? Whatever happened is over now.”

“But—”

The light had contracted to a blindingly bright spotlight around them now, and Rosie had the crazy idea that if Bill took her in his arms and danced her across the room, that bright beam of light would follow them.

“Never mind,” she said. “Never mind any of it. Just let it go.”

“But where's Norman, Rosie?”

“Gone,” she said, and then, as an almost comic afterthought: “My sweater and the jacket you loaned me, too. The sweater wasn't much, but I'm sorry about the jacket.”

“Hey,” he said, with a kind of numb insouciance, “don't sweat the small stuff.”

The pinspot shrank to a cold and furiously blazing matchhead of light, then to a needlepoint, and then it was gone, leaving just a white dot of afterimage floating in front of her eyes. She looked back into the closet. The picture was exactly where she had put it following her first trip to the world inside it, only it had changed again. Now it showed only the hilltop and the temple below by the last rays of the waning moon. The stillness of this scene—and the absence of any human figure—made it look more classical than ever to Rosie.

“Christ,” Bill said. He was rubbing his swollen throat. “What happened, Rosie? I just can't figure out what
happened.”

Not too much time could have passed; down the hall, the tenant Norman had shot was still screaming his head off.

“I ought to go see if I can help that guy,” Bill said, struggling to his feet. “Will you call an ambulance? And the cops?”

“Yes. I imagine they're both on the way already, but I'll make the calls.”

He went to the door, then looked back doubtfully, still massaging his throat. “What'll you tell the police, Rosie?”

She hesitated a moment, then smiled. “Dunno . . . but I'll think of something. These days invention on short notice is my strong suit. Go on, now. Do your thing.”

“I love you, Rosie. That's the only thing I'm sure of anymore.”

He went before she could reply. She followed a step or two after him, then stopped. From down the hall she could now see a hesitant, bobbing light that had to be a candle. Someone said: “Holy cow! Is he shot?” Bill's murmured reply was lost in another howl from the injured man. Injured, yes, but probably not too badly. Not if he could produce a noise level that high.

Unkind,
she told herself, picking up the handset of her new telephone and punching 911. Perhaps it was, but it might also be simple realism. Rosie didn't think it mattered either way. She'd started to see the world in a new perspective, she supposed, and her thought about the yelling man down the hall was just one sign of that new perspective at work. “It doesn't matter as long as I remember the tree,” she said, without even being aware that she had spoken.

The phone on the other end of her call was picked up after a single ring. “Hello, 911, this call is being recorded.”

“Yes, I'm sure. My name is Rosie McClendon, and my residence is 897 Trenton Street, second floor. My upstairs neighbor needs an ambulance.”

“Ma'am, can you tell me the nature of his—”

She could, she most certainly could, but something else struck her then, something she hadn't understood before but did now, something that needed doing right this second. She dropped the phone back into its cradle and slipped the first two fingers of her right hand into the watch-pocket of her jeans. That little pocket was sometimes convenient, but it was irritating, too—just one more visible sign of the world's half-conscious prejudice against southpaws like her. It was a
world made by and for righthanders, as a general rule, and full of similar little inconveniences. But that was all right; if you were a lefty, you just learned to cope, that was all. And it could be done, Rosie thought. As that old Bob Dylan song about Highway 61 said, oh yes, it could be very easily done.

She tweezed out the tiny ceramic bottle Dorcas had given her, looked at it fixedly for two or three seconds, then cocked her head to listen out the door. Someone else had joined the group at the end of the hall, and the man who had been shot (at last Rosie assumed it was he) was speaking to them in a gaspy, weepy little voice. And in the distance, Rosie could hear sirens coming this way.

She went into the kitchenette area and opened her tiny refrigerator. Inside was a package of bologna with three or four slices left, a quart of milk, two cartons of plain yogurt, a pint of juice, and three bottles of Pepsi. She took one of these latter, twisted off the cap, and stood it on the counter. She snatched another quick look over her shoulder, half-expecting to see Bill in the doorway.
(What are you doing?
he would ask.
What are you mixing up there?).
The doorway was empty, however, and she could hear him at the end of the hallway, speaking in the calm, considering voice she had already come to love.

Using her nails, she pulled the sliver of cork from the mouth of the tiny bottle. Then she held it up, wafting it back and forth under her nostrils like a woman smelling a bottle of perfume. What she smelled was not perfume, but she knew the scent—bitter, metallic, but oddly attractive, just the same—at once. The little bottle contained water from the stream which ran behind the Temple of the Bull.

Dorcas:
One drop. For him. After.

Yes, only one; more would be dangerous, but one might be enough. All the questions and all the memories—the moonlight, Norman's terrible shrieks of pain and horror, the woman he had been forbidden to look at—would be gone. So would her fear that those memories might eat away at his sanity and their budding relationship like corroding acid. That might turn out to be a specious worry—the human mind was tougher and more adaptable than most people would ever believe, if fourteen years with Norman had taught her nothing else it had taught her that, but was it a chance she wanted to take? Was it, when things might just
as easily go the other way? Which was more dangerous, his memories or this liquid amnesia?

Have a care, girl. This is dangerous stuff!

Rosie's eyes drifted from the tiny ceramic bottle to the sink drain, and then, slowly, back to the bottle again.

Rose Madder:
A good beast. Protect him and he'll protect you.

Rosie decided that the terminology of that last might be contemptuous and wrong, but the idea was right. Slowly, carefully, she tilted the ceramic bottle over the neck of the Pepsi-Cola bottle, and let a single drop fall from the one to the other.

Plink.

Now dump the rest down the sink, quick.

She started to, then remembered the rest of what Dorcas had said: I
could have give you less, only he may need another drop later on.

Yes, and what about me?
she asked herself, driving the minuscule cork back into the neck of the bottle and returning it to that inconvenient watch-pocket.
What about me? Will I need a drop or two later on, to keep me from going nuts?

She didn't think she would. And besides . . .

“Those who don't learn from the past are condemned to repeat the bastard,” she muttered. She didn't know who had said that, but she knew it was too plausible to ignore. She hurried back to the phone, holding the doctored Pepsi in one hand. She punched 911 again, and got the same operator with the same opening gambit: watch yourself, lady, this call is being recorded.