Rose Madder

IX. I REPAY

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 step 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 but 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

“/alias 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 defenseless. 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.” Then 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 would normally have associated with men much heavier 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?” Bill looked at the black woman. She shook her head slightly, indicating that she didn’t understand, either. He realized a horrible thing: he needed to cough. The throbbing tickle behind his soft palate was almost overpowering. He dropped his mouth into the crook of his arm and tried to keep it back in his throat, aware of the woman’s concerned eyes on him. I can’t hold it for long, he thought. Christ, Norman, why don’t you move? You were fast enough before. As if in reply to this thought:

“Norr-munnn! You’re so fucking SLOWWW, Norr-munnn!”

“Bitch,” the thick voice on the other side of the temple said.

“Oh you bitch.” Shoes, gritting on crumbled stone. A moment later Bill heard echoing footfalls and realized that Norman was inside the building which the black woman had called a temple. He realized something else as well: the urge to cough had passed, at least for the time being. He leaned close to the woman in the blue dress and whispered into her ear:

“What do we do now?” Her whispered reply tickled his own ear:

“Wait.”

Discovering that the mask seemed to have become part of his flesh scared him for a moment or two, and badly, but before fright could escalate into panic, Norman saw something a short distance away that distracted him from the subject of the mask entirely. He hurried down the slope a little way and knelt. He picked up the sweater, looked at it, flung it aside. Then he picked up the jacket. It was the one she had been wearing, all right. A motorcycle jacket. The guy had a scoot and she’d been out riding with him, probably with her crotch pretty well banged into his ass. Jacket’s too big for her, he thought. He loaned it to her. The thought infuriated him, and he spat on it before flinging it aside, leaping to his feet, and looking wildly around.

“You bitch,” he murmured.

“You dirty, cheating bitch.”

“Norman!” It came drifting out of the darkness, stopping his breath in his throat for a second. Close, he thought. Holy shit, she’s close, I think she’s in that building. He stood stock-still, waiting to see if she’d yell again. After a moment, she did.

“Norman, I’m down here!” His hands went to the mask again, but this time they did not pull; they caressed.

“Viva ze bool,” Norman said into it, and started down the hill toward the ruins of the building at the bottom. He thought he could see tracks going that way-broken swatches of high grass that might be places where feet had come down, anyway-but the moonlight made it difficult to tell for sure. Then, as if to confirm his direction, her maddening, mocking cry came again: “down heee-eeeere, Norman!” As if she wasn’t afraid of him at all; as if she couldn’t wait for him to get there, in fact. Bitch! “stay where you are, Rose,” he said.

“Just stay put, that’s the main thing.” He still had the cop’s gun stuffed into the waistband of his jeans, but it didn’t loom large in his plans. He didn’t know if you could fire a gun in a hallucination or not, and he had absolutely no desire to find out. He wanted to talk to his little rambling Rose much more personally than any gun would allow.

“Norman, you look so silly in that mask… I’m not afraid of you anymore, Norman You’re going to discover that’s a passing fad, you bitch, he thought.

“Norman, you idiot!” All right, maybe she wasn’t in the building; she might already have gone through it to the other side. It didn’t matter. If she thought she could outrun him on a level playing-field, she was going to get the surprise of her life. The last surprise of her life.

“You’re such a fool… did you really think you could catch me? Silly old bull!” He moved to his right a little, trying to be quiet now, reminding himself that it wouldn’t help to behave like, ha-ha, a bull in a china shop. He stopped near the foot of the cracked steps leading up to the temple (that was what it was, he saw that now, a temple like in one of those Greek fairy-tales that guys used to make up back then when they weren’t too busy butt-punching each other) and surveyed it. The building was clearly abandoned and falling into ruin, but this place didn’t feel spooky; it felt weirdly like home.

“Norrr-munnnn… don’t you want to taaalllk to me?”

“Oh, I’ll talk to you,” he said. I’ll talk to you right up close, you cunt.” He caught sight of something in the high, tangled grass to the right of the steps: a big stone face in the weeds, staring raptly into the sky. Five paces took Norman to it, and he stared fixedly down at it for ten seconds or more, wanting to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. He was. The huge tumbled head bore the face of his father, and his empty eyes snarled with idiot moonlight.

“Boo, you old sonofabitch,” he said softly.

“What you doing here?” The stone father made no reply, but his wife did.

“Norrrr-munnnn… you’re so fucking SLOWWW, Norrr-munnnn!” Nice language they taught her to use, too, the bull remarked, only now it was making its remarks from inside Norman’s head. These are great people she’s got in with, no doubt about that-they’ve changed her whole life.

“Bitch,” he said in a thick, trembling voice.

“Oh you bitch.” He wheeled away from the stone face in the grass, resisting an urge to go back and spit on it the way he had on the jacket… or to unzip his jeans and take a piss on it. No time for games now. He hurried up the cracked steps toward the black entrance to the temple. Each time his foot came down, it sent agonizing pain up his leg, up Ms back, into his violated lower jaw. It felt like only the mask was holding his jaw in place now, and it hurt like a mad bastard. He wished he’d brought the Charlie-David cops” aspirin with him. How could she do that, Normie? the voice came whispering up from deep inside. It still sounded like his father’s voice, but Norman couldn’t remember ever hearing his father sound so unsure of himself, so worried. How could she dare do that? What’s happened to her? He stopped with his foot on the top step, face aching, his lower jaw feeling as loose as a tire with the lug-nuts working free. I don’t know and I don’t care, he told the ghost-voice. But I’ll tell you one thing, Daddy-if that’s who you are-when I find her, I’m going to unhappen it in a helluva hurry. That you can take to the bank. Are you sure you want to try that? the voice asked, and Norman, in the act of starting forward, stopped again, listening, head cocked. You know what might be wiser? it asked. It might be wiser to just call it a draw. I know how that sounds, but I’m giving you the benefit of my thinking just the same, Normie. If I was the one with my hands on the controls, I’d turn around and go back the way I came. Because nothing’s right here. It’s all hinky as hell, in fact. I don’t know what it is, but I know what it feels like-a trap. And if you walk into it you may have a lot more to worry about than a wiggly jaw or a mask that doesn’t want to come off. Why don’t you turn around and go back the way you came? See if you can’t find your way back into her rented room and maybe wait for her there? 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.

For 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.

Norman saw her fall and laughed. She was going to get wet, it looked like. Don’t worry, Rosie, 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.

“Want 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.

She 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.

You’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. That 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. I’m Rosie Real, but you’re not real anymore, not even to yourself… I’m divorced of you. Well, he thought, that last part’s close, at least. There is going to be a divorce, but it’s going to be on my terms, Rose. He jogged on a little while, then stopped, wiping an arm across his forehead, not surprised when it came away sweaty, not even thinking of it, really, although he was still wearing the mask.

“Better come back, Rose!” he called.

“Last chance!”

“Come get me,” she called in return, and her voice sounded subtly different now, although just how it was different he could not have said.

“Come get me, Norman, it’s not far now.” No, it wouldn’t be. He’d chased her damned near halfway across the country, and then he’d chased her into another world, or a dream, or some damned thing, but now she was all out of running room.

“Nowhere left to go, sweetcakes,” Norman said, and began to walk toward the sound of her voice, his hands rolling into fists as he went.

She ran into the circular clearing and saw herself, kneeling by the one live tree, back turned, head bowed, as if in prayer or deep meditation. Not me, Rosie thought nervously. That’s not really me. But it could have been. With her back turned, the woman kneeling at the base of the “pomegranate tree” could have been her twin. She was the same height, the same build, possessed of the same long legs and wide hips. She was wearing the same rose madder chiton-what the black woman had called a zat-and her hair fell down the center of her back to her waist in a blonde plait identical to Rosie’s. The only difference was that both of this woman’s arms were bare, because Rosie was wearing her armlet. That probably wasn’t a difference Norman would notice, though. He’d never seen Rosie wearing such an item, and she doubted that he would have picked up on it in any case, not the way he was now. Then she saw something he might notice-the dark patches on the back of Rose Madder’s neck and on her upper arms. They swarmed like hungry shadows. Rosie came to a halt, looking toward the woman who knelt facing the tree in the moonlight.

“I’ve come,” she said uncertainly.

“Yes, Rosie,” the other said in her sweet, greedy voice.

“You’ve come, but not yet quite far enough. I want you there.” She pointed to the broad white steps leading downward beneath the word MAZE.

“Not far-a dozen steps should do, if you lie flat on them. Just far enough so that you won’t have to see. You won’t want to see this… although you can watch if you decide you do want to.” She laughed. The sound was full of genuine amusement, and that, Rosie thought, was what made it so authentically awful.

“In any case,” she resumed, “it may be well that you hear what passes between us. Yes, I think that may be very well.”

“He may not think you’re me, even in the moonlight.” Again Rose Madder laughed. The sound of it made the hair on the nape of Rosie’s neck stir.

“Why would he not, little Rosie?”

“You have… well… blemishes. Even in this light I can see them.”

“Yes, you can,” Rose Madder said, still laughing.

“You can, but he won’t. Have you forgotten that Erinyes is blind?” Rosie thought to say, You’re confused, ma’am, this is my husband we’re talking about, not the bull in the maze. Then she remembered the mask Norman was wearing, and said nothing.

“Go quickly,” Rose Madder said.

“I hear him coming. Down the steps, little Rosie… and pass not too close by me.” She paused, then added in her terrible, thoughtful voice:

“It’s not safe.”

Norman jogged along the path, listening. There was a moment or two when he thought he heard Rose talking, but that could have been his imagination. It didn’t matter in any case. If there was someone with her, he would take that person down, too. If he was lucky, it might be Dirty Gertie-maybe the overgrown diesel-dyke had found her way into this dream, too, and Norman could have the pleasure of putting a.45 slug into her fat left tit. The thought of shooting Gertie had gotten him almost running again. He was so close now he thought he could actually smell her-ghostly entwined aromas of Dove soap and Silk shampoo. He came around one final curve. I’m coming, Rose, he thought. Nowhere left to run, nowhere left to hide. I’ve come to take you home, dear.

It was chilly on the steps leading down to the maze, and Rosie noticed a smell that she had missed on her previous trip-a dank, decayed smell. Mingled in it were odors of feces and rotted meat and wild animal. That disquieting thought (can bulls climb stairs?) came to her again, but there was no real fear in it this time. Erinyes was no longer in the maze, unless the wider world-the world of the painting-was also a maze. Oh yes, that strange voice, the one which was not quite the voice of Practical-Sensible, said calmly. This world, all worlds. And many bulls in each one. These myths hum with truth, Rosie. That’s their power. That’s why they survive. She sprawled flat on the steps, breathing hard, heart pounding. She was terrified, but she also felt a certain bitter eagerness in herself, and knew it for what it was: just another mask for her rage. The hands in front of her face were closed into fists. Do it, she thought. Do it, kill the bastard, set me free. I want to hear him die. Rosie, you don’t mean it! That was Practical-Sensible, sounding both horrified and sickened. Say you don’t mean it! Except she couldn’t, because part of her did. Most of her did.

The path he was on finished in a circular clearing, and here she was. Finally, here she was. His rambling Rose. Kneeling with her back to him, wearing that short red dress (he was almost sure it was red), wearing her whore-dyed hair down her back in a kind of pigtail. He stood where he was at the edge of the clearing, looking at her. It was Rose, all right, no question about that, yet she had nevertheless changed. Her ass was smaller, for one thing, but that wasn’t the main thing. Her attitude had changed. And what did that mean? That it was time for a little attitude-adjustment, of course.

“Why’d you go and dye your goddam hair?” he asked her.

“You look like a fucking slut!”

“No, you don’t understand,” Rose said calmly, without turning.

“It was dyed before. It’s always been blonde underneath, Norman. I dyed it to fool you.” He took two big steps into the clearing, his rage rising as it always did when she disagreed with him or contradicted him, when anyone disagreed with him or contradicted him. And the things she had said tonight… the things she had said to him…

“The fuck you did!” he exclaimed.

“The fuck I didn’t,” she replied, and then compounded this astoundingly disrespectful statement with a contemptuous little laugh. But she did not turn around. Norman took another two steps toward her, then stopped again. His hands hung in fists at his sides. He scanned the clearing, remembering her murmuring voice as he approached. It was Gert he was looking for, or maybe the little cocksucker boyfriend, ready to shoot him with a popgun of his own, or just chunk a rock at him. He saw no one, which probably meant she’d been talking to herself, something she did at home all the time. Unless someone was crouching behind the tree in the center of the clearing, that was. It appeared to be the only living thing in this still-life, its leaves long and green and narrow, gleaming like the leaves of a freshly oiled avocado plant. Its boughs were weighted down with some weird fruit Norman wouldn’t touch even in a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Lying beyond her folded legs was a wealth of windfalls, and the smell which simmered up from them made Norman think of the water in the stream. Fruit that smelled like that would either kill you or gripe you so bad you’d wish you were dead. Standing to the left of the tree was something which confirmed his belief that this was a dream. It looked like a goddam New York City subway entrance, one that had been carved in marble. Never mind that, though; never mind the tree and its pissy-smelling fruit, either. Rose was the important thing here, Rose and that little laugh of hers. He imagined it was her crack-snacking friends who had taught her to laugh like that, but it didn’t matter. He was here to teach her something that did: that laughing like that was a very good way to get hurt. He was going to do that in this dream even if he couldn’t in reality; he was going to do it even if he was lying on the floor of her room pumped full of police bullets and experiencing a death-delirium.

“Get up.” He took another step toward her and pulled the gun from the waistband of his jeans.

“We’ve got some things to talk about.”

“Yes, you’re certainly right about that,” she said, but she didn’t turn and she didn’t rise. She only knelt there with moonlight and shadows lying across her back in zebra-stripes.

“Mind me, goddam you!” He took another step toward her. The nails of the hand not holding the gun were now digging into his palms like white-hot metal shavings. And still she did not turn. Still she did not get up.

“Erinyes from the maze!” she said in her soft, melodious voice.

“Ecce taurus! Behold the bull!” But still she did not rise, still she did not turn to behold him.

“I’m no bull, you cunt!” he shouted, and tore at the mask with the ends of his fingers. It wouldn’t budge. It no longer seemed stuck to his face or melted to his face; it seemed to be his face. How can that be? he asked himself in bewilderment. How can that possibly be? It’s just some kid’s gimcrack amusement-park prize! He had no answer to the question, but the mask wouldn’t come off no matter how hard he yanked at it, and he knew with sickening surety that if he raked his nails into it, he would feel pain. He would bleed. And yes, there was just the one eyehole, and that one seemed to have moved right into the center of his face. His vision through this eyehole had darkened; the formerly bright moonlight had become cloudy.

“Take it off me!” he bawled at her.

“Take it off me, you bitch! You can, can’t you? I know you can! Don’t you fuck with me anymore, either! Don’t you DARE fuck with me!” He stumbled the rest of the way to where she knelt and clutched her shoulder. The toga’s single strap shifted,and what he saw beneath horrified him into a small, strangled gasp. The skin was as black and rotten as the rinds of the fruits decaying into the earth around the base of the tree-the ones so far gone they were now on the verge of liquefying.

“The bull has come from the maze,” Rose said, and floated to her feet with a limber grace he had never seen or suspected in her.

“And so now Erinyes may die. So it has been written; so shall it be.”

“The only one doing any dying here-” he began, and that was as far as he got. She turned, and when the bony light of the moon disclosed her, Norman shrieked. He fired the.45 twice into the ground between his feet without realizing it, then dropped it. He clapped his hands to his head and screamed, backing away, moving jerkily on legs he could now barely command. She answered his cry with one of her own. Rot swarmed across the upper swell of her bosom; her neck was as purple-black as that of a strangulation victim. The skin had cracked open in places and was oozing thick tears of yellow pus. Yet these signs of some far-advanced and obviously terminal disease weren’t what brought the screams raking out of his throat and bolting from his mouth in howling spates; they were not what broke through the eggshell surface of his insanity to let in a more terrible reality, like the unforgiving light of an alien sun. Her face did that. It was the face of a bat in which had been set the bright mad eyes of a rabid fox; it was the face of a supernally beautiful goddess seen in an illustration hidden within some old and dusty book like a rare flower in a weedy vacant lot; it was the face of his Rose, whose looks had always been lifted just slightly beyond plainness by the timid hope in her eyes and the slight, wistful curve of her mouth at rest. Like lilies on a dangerous pond, these differing aspects floated on the face which turned toward him and then they blew away and Norman saw what lay beneath. It was a spider’s face, twisted with hunger and crazy intelligence. The mouth that opened gave upon a repellent blackness afloat with silk tendrils to which a hundred bugs and beetles stuck fast, some dead and some dying. Its eyes were great bleeding eggs of rose madder red that pulsed in their sockets like living mud.

“Come closer yet, Norman,” the spider in the moonlight whispered to him, and before his mind broke entirely, Norman saw that its bug-filled, silk-stuffed mouth was trying to grin. More arms began to cram their way out through the toga’s armholes, and from beneath its short hem, as well, only they were not arms, not arms at all, and he screamed, he screamed, he screamed; it was oblivion he was screaming for, oblivion and an end to knowing and seeing, but oblivion would not come.

“Come closer,” it crooned, the not-arms reaching, the maw of a mouth yawning, “I want to talk to you.” There were claws at the ends of the black not-arms, filthy with bristles. The claws settled on his wrists, his legs, the swollen appendage which still throbbed in his crotch. One wriggled amorously into his mouth; the bristles scraped against his teeth and the insides of his cheeks. It grasped his tongue, tore it out, flapped it triumphantly before his one staring, glaring eye.

“I want to talk to you, and I want to talk to you right… up… CLOSE!” He made one last mad effort to pull free and was instead drawn into Rose Madder’s hungry embrace. Where Norman finally learned what it was like to be the bitten instead of the biter.

Rosie lay on the stairs with her eyes closed and her fists clenched above her head, listening to him scream. She tried not even to imagine what was going on out there, and she tried to remember that it was Norman who was screaming, Norman of the terrible pencil, Norman of the tennis racket, Norman of the teeth. Yet these things were overwhelmed by the horror of his screams, his agonized shrieks as Rose Madder… as she did whatever it was she was doing. After awhile-a long, long while-the screaming stopped. Rosie lay where she was, fists unrolling slowly but with her eyes still tightly shut, gasping in short, harsh snatches of air. She might have lain there for hours, had not the sweet, mad voice of the woman summoned her:

“Come forth, little Rosie! Come forth and be of good cheer! The bull is no more!” Slowly, on legs that felt numb and wooden, Rosie got first to her knees and then to her feet. She walked up the steps and stood on the ground. She didn’t want to look, but her eyes seemed to have a life of their own; they crossed the clearing while her breath stopped in her throat.

She let it out in a long, quiet sigh of relief. Rose Madder was still kneeling, still back-to. Lying before her was a shadowy bundle of what at first looked like rags. Then a white starfish shape tumbled out of the shadow and into the moonlight. It was a hand, and Rosie saw the rest of him then, like a woman who suddenly sees sense and coherence in a psychiatrist’s inkblot. It was Norman. He had been mutilated, and his eyes bulged from their sockets in a terminal expression of terror, but it was Norman, all right. Rose Madder reached up as Rosie watched and plucked a low-hanging fruit from the tree. She squeezed it in her hand-a very human hand, and quite lovely save for the black and spiritous spots floating just beneath her skin-so that first the juice ran out of her fist in a rose madder stream and then the fruit itself broke open in a wet, dark-red furrow. She plucked a dozen or so seeds out of the rich pulp and began to sow them in Norman Daniels’s torn flesh. The last one she poked into his one staring eye. There was a wet popping sound as she drove it home-the sound of someone stepping on a plump grape.

“What are you doing?” Rosie asked in spite of herself. She only managed to keep from adding, Don’t turn around, you can tell me without turning around! “seeding him.” Then she did something that made Rosie feel as if she had stepped into a

“Richard Racine” novel: leaned forward and kissed the corpse’s mouth. At last she drew back, took him in her arms, rose, and turned toward the white marble stairway leading into the earth. Rosie looked away, her heart thumping in her throat. “sweet dreams, you son-of-a-bastard,” Rose Madder said, and pitched Norman’s body down into the dark beneath the single chiselled word reading MAZE. Where, perchance, the seeds she had planted would take root and grow.

“Go back the way you came,” Rose Madder said. She was standing by the stairs; Rosie stood on the far side of the clearing, at the head of the path, with her back turned. She didn’t want even to risk looking at Rose Madder now, and she had discovered that she could not entirely trust her own eyes to do as she told them.

“Go back, find Dorcas and your man. She has something for you, and I would have more talk with you… but only a little. Then our time is finished. That will be a relief to you, I think.”

“He’s gone, isn’t he?” Rosie asked, looking steadfastly along the moonlit path. “really gone.”

“I suppose you’ll see him in your dreams,” Rose Madder said dismissively, “but what of that? The simple truth of things is that bad dreams are far better than bad wakings.”

“Yes. That’s so simple most people overlook it, I think.”

“Go now. I’ll come to you. And Rosie?”

“What?” “remember the tree.”

“The tree? I don’t-”

“I know you don’t. But you will. Remember the tree. Now go.” Rosie went. And didn’t look back.