Rose Madder Read online

  "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.

  X

  ROSIE REAL

  1

  Bill and the black woman--Dorcas, her name was Dorcas, not Wendy after all--were no longer on the narrow path behind the temple, and Rosie's clothes were gone, too. This raised no concern in her mind. She merely trudged around the building, looked up the hill, saw them standing beside the pony-trap, and started toward them.

  Bill came to meet her, his pale, distracted face full of concern.

  "Rosie? All right?"

  "Fine," she said, and put her face against his chest. As his arms went around her, she wondered how much of the human race understood about hugging--how good it was, and how a person could want to do it for hours on end. She supposed some did understand, but doubted that they were in the majority. To fully understand about hugging, maybe you had to have missed a lot of it.

  They walked up to where Dorcas stood, stroking the pony's white-streaked nose. The pony raised its head and looked at Rosie sleepily.

  "Where's ..." Rosie began, then stopped. Caroline, she'd almost said, Where's Caroline? "Where's the baby?" Then, boldly: "Our baby?"

  Dorcas smiled. "Safe. In a safe place, don't you fret that, Miss Rosie. Your clothes're 'round to the back of the cart. Go on and change, if you like. You be glad to get out of that thing you wearin now, I bet."

  "That's a bet you'd win," Rosie said, and went around. She felt an indescribable sense of relief when the zat was off her skin. As she was zipping her jeans, she remembered something Rose Madder had told her. "Your mistress says you have something for me."

  "Oh!" Dorcas sounded startled. "Oh, my! If I went n forgot that, she'd rip the skin right off me!"

  Rosie picked up her blouse, and when she pulled it down over her head, Dorcas was holding something out to her. Rosie took it and held it up curiously, tilting it this way and that. It was a cunningly made little ceramic bottle, not much bigger than an eyedropper. Its mouth had been sealed with a tiny sliver of cork.

  Dorcas looked around, saw Bill standing some distance away, looking dreamily down the hill at the ruins of the temple, and seemed satisfied. When she turned back to Rosie, she spoke in a voice which was low but emphatic. "One drop. For him. After."

  Rosie nodded as if she knew exactly what Dorcas was talking about. It was simpler that way. There were questions she could ask, perhaps should ask, but her mind felt too tired to frame them.

  "I could have give you less, only he may need another drop later on. But have a care, girl. This is dangerous stuff!"

  As if anything in this world is safe, Rosie thought.

  "Tuck it away, now," Dorcas said, watching as Rosie slipped the tiny bottle into the watch-pocket of her jeans. "And mind you keep quiet about it to him." She jerked her head in Bill's direction, then looked back at Rosie, her dark face set and grim. Her eyes looked momentarily pupilless in the darkness, like the eyes of a Greek statue. "You know why, too, don't you?"

  "Yes," Rosie said. "This is woman's business."

  Dorcas nodded. "That's right, that's just what it is."

  "Woman's business," Rosie repeated, and in her mind she heard Rose Madder say Remember the tree.

  She closed her eyes.

  2

  The three of them sat at the top of the hill for some unknown length of time, Bill and Rosie together with their arms around each other's waist, Dorcas a little off to one side, near to where the pony still grazed sleepily. The pony looked up at the black woman every now and again, as if curious about why so many people were still up at this unaccustomed hour, but Dorcas took no notice, only sat with her arms clasped around her knees, looking wistfully up at the latening moon. To Rosie she looked like a woman mentally counting the choices of a lifetime and discovering that the wrong ones outnumbered the right ones ... and not by only a few, either. Bill opened his mouth to speak on several occasions, and Rosie looked at him encouragingly, but each time he closed it again without saying a word.

  Just as the moon snagged in the trees to the left of the ruined temple, the pony raised its head again, and this time it gave voice to a low, pleased whinny. Rosie looked down the hill and saw Rose Madder coming. Strong, shapely thighs flashed in the pallid light of the fading moon. Her plaited hair swung from side to side like the pendulum in a grandfather clock.

  Dorcas gave a little grunt of satisfaction and got to her feet. Rosie herself felt a complex mixture of apprehension and anticipation. She put one hand on Bill's forearm and gazed at him earnestly. "Don't look at her," she said.

  "No," Dorcas agreed, "and don't ask no questions, Billy, even if she invites you to."

  He looked uncertainly from Dorcas to Rosie, then back to Dorcas again. "Why not? Who is she, anyway? The Queen of the May?"

  "She's queen of whatever she wants to be queen of," Dorcas said, "and you better remember it. Don't look at her, and don't do anything to invite her temper. I can't say more'n that; there's no time. Put your hands in your lap, little man, and look at them. Don't you take your eyes off them."

  "But--"

  "If you look at her, you'll go mad," Rosie said simply. She looked at Dorcas, who nodded.

  "It is a dream, isn't it?" Bill asked. "I mean ... I'm not dead, am I? Because if this is the afterlife, I think I'd just as soon skip it." He looked beyond the approaching woman and shivered. "Too noisy. Too much screaming."

  "It's a dream," Rosie agreed. Rose Madder was very close now, a slim straight figure walking through jackstraws of light and shadow. The latter turned her dangerous face into the mask of a cat, or perhaps a fox. "It's a dream where you have to do exactly as we say."

  "Rosie and Dorcas Says instead of Simon Says."

  "Yep. And Dorcas Says put your hands in your lap and look at them until one of us tells you it's all right to stop."

  "May I?" he asked, giving her a sly up-from-under-the-lids glance that she thought was really a look of dazed perplexity.

  "Yes," Rosie said desperately. "Yes-you-may, just for God's sake keep your eyes off her!"

  He folded his fingers together and dropped his eyes obediently.

  Now Rosie could hear the whicker of approaching footsteps, the silky sound of grass slipping across skin. She dropped her own eyes. A moment later she saw a pair of bare moon-silvery legs come to a stop before her. There was a long silence, broken only by the calling of some insomniac bird in the far distance. Rosie shifted her eyes to the right and saw Bill sitting perfectly still beside her, looking at his folded hands as assiduously as a Zen student who has been placed next to the master at morning devotions.

  At last, shyly, without looking up, she said: "Dorcas gave me what you wanted me to have. It's in my pocket."

  "Good," that sweet, slightly husky voice answered. "That's good, Rosie Real." A mottled hand floated into her field of vision, and something dropped into Rosie's lap. It flashed a single glint of gold in the pale late light. "For you," Rose Madder said. "A souvenir, if you like. Do with it as you will."

  Rosie plucked it out of her lap and looked at it wonderingly. The words on it--Service, Loyalty, Community--made a triangle around the ringstone, which was a circle of obsidian. This was now marked by one bright spot of scarlet. It turned the stone into a baleful watching eye.

  The silence spun out, and there was an expectant quality to it. Does she want to be thanked? Rosie wondered. She wouldn't do that ... but she would tell the truth of her feelings. "I'm glad h
e's dead," she said, softly and unemphatically. "It's a relief."

  "Of course you're glad and of course it is. You shall go now, back to your Rosie Real world, with this beast. He's a good one, I judge." A hint of something--Rosie would not let herself believe it could be lust--crept into the voice of the other. "Good hocks. Good flanks." A pause. "Fine loins." Another pause, and then one of her mottled hands came down and caressed Bill's tumbled, sweaty hair. He drew in a breath at her touch, but did not look up. "A good beast. Protect him and he'll protect you."

  Rosie looked up then. She was terrified of what she might see, but nevertheless unable to stop herself. "Don't you call him a beast again," she said in a voice that shook with fury. "And get your diseased hand off him."

  She saw Dorcas wince in horror, but saw it only in the comer of her eye. The bulk of her attention was focused on Rose Madder. What had she expected from that face? Now that she was looking at it in the waning moonlight, she couldn't exactly say. Medusa, perhaps. A Gorgon. The woman before her was not that. Once (and not so long ago, either, Rosie thought) her face had been one of extraordinary beauty, perhaps a face to rival Helen of Troy's. Now her features were haggard and beginning to blur. One of those dark patches had overspread her left cheek and brushed across her brow like the underwing of a starling. The hot eye glittering out of that shadow seemed both furious and melancholy. It wasn't the face Norman had seen, that much she knew, but she could see that face lurking beneath--in a way it was as if she had put this one on for Rosie's benefit, like makeup--and it made her feel cold and ill. Underneath the beauty was madness ... but not just madness.

  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.

  3

  There 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 tu 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.