Rose Madder (34 page)

But can you say it doesn't feel
dangerous,
Rosie?
Now there
was
a touch of anxiety in Practical-Sensible's voice.
Never mind evil, or badness, or whatever you want to call it. Can you say it doesn't feel
dangerous?

No, she
couldn't
say that, but on the other hand, there was danger everywhere. Just look at what had happened to Anna Stevenson's ex-husband.

Except she didn't
want
to look at what had happened to Peter Slowik; she didn't want to go back down what was sometimes called Guilty Street in Therapy Circle. She wanted to think about Saturday, and what it might feel like to be kissed by Bill Steiner. Would he put his hands on her shoulders, or around her waist? What, exactly, would his mouth feel like on hers? Would he . . .

Rosie's head slipped over to the side. Thunder rumbled. The crickets hummed, louder than ever, and now one of them began to hop across the floor toward the bed, but Rosie didn't notice. This time the string tethering her mind to her body had broken, and she floated away into darkness.

A
flash of light woke her, not purple this time but a brilliant white. It was followed by thunder—not a rumble but a roar.

Rosie sat up in bed, gasping, clutching the top blanket to her neck. There was another flash, and in it she saw her table, the kitchen counter, the little sofa that was really not much more than a loveseat, the door to the tiny bathroom standing open, the daisy-printed shower curtain run back on its rings. The light was so bright and her eyes so unprepared that she continued to see these things even after the room had fallen dark again, only with the colors reversed. She realized she could still hear the baby crying, but the crickets had stopped. And a wind was blowing. That she could feel as well as hear. It lifted her hair from her temples, and she heard the rattle-slither-flump of pages. She had left the Xeroxed sides of the next “Richard Racine” novel on the table, and the wind had sent them cascading all over the floor.

This is no dream,
she thought, and swung her feet out of bed. As she did, she looked toward the window and her breath stuck solid in her throat. Either the window was gone, or the wall had become
all
window.

In any case, the view was no longer of Tremont Street and
Bryant Park; it was of a woman in a rose madder chiton standing on top of an overgrown hill, looking down at the ruins of a temple. But now the hem of her short gown was rippling against the woman's long, smooth thighs; now Rosie could see the fine blonde hairs which had escaped her plait wavering like plankton in the wind, and the purple-black thunderheads rushing across the sky. Now she could see the shaggy pony's head move as it cropped grass.

And if it was a window, it was wide open. As she watched, the pony poked its muzzle into her room, sniffed at the floorboards, found them uninteresting, pulled back, and began to crop on its own side once more.

More lightning, another roll of thunder. The wind gusted again, and Rosie heard the spilled pages stirring and swirling around in the kitchen alcove. The hem of her nightgown fluttered against her legs as she got up and walked slowly toward the picture which now covered the whole wall from floor to ceiling and side to side. The wind blew back her hair, and she could smell sweet impending rain.

It won't be long now, either,
she thought.
I'm going to get drenched. We all are, I guess.

ROSE, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING
?
Practical-Sensible screamed.
WHAT IN GOD'S NAME ARE Y—

Rosie squashed the voice—at that moment it seemed she had heard enough of it to last her a lifetime—and stopped before the wall that was no longer a wall. Just ahead, no more than five feet away, was the blonde woman in the chiton. She hadn't turned, but Rosie could now see the little tilts and adjustments of her upraised hand as she looked down the hill, and the rise and fall of her barely glimpsed left breast as she breathed.

Rosie took a deep breath and stepped into the picture.

I
t was at least ten degrees cooler on the other side, and the high grass tickled her ankles and shins. For a moment, she thought she heard a baby crying again, very faintly, but then the sound was gone. She looked back over her shoulder, expecting to see her room, but it was gone, too. A gnarled old olive tree spread its roots and branches at the place where
she had stepped through into this world. Beneath it she saw an artist's easel with a stool in front of it. Standing open on the stool was a painter's box full of brushes and colors.

The canvas propped on the easel was exactly the size of the picture Rosie had bought in the Liberty City Loan & Pawn. It showed her room on Trenton Street, as seen from the wall where she had hung Rose Madder. There was a woman, clearly Rosie herself, standing in the middle of the room, facing the door which gave on the second-floor hallway. Her posture and position were not quite the same as the posture and position of the woman looking down on the ruined temple—her hand was not upraised, for instance—but it was close enough to frighten Rosie badly. There was something else frightening about the picture, as well: the woman had on dark blue tapered slacks and a pink sleeveless top. This was the outfit Rosie had already planned to wear when she went motorcycling with Bill.
I'll have to wear something different,
she thought wildly, as if by changing her clothes in the future she could change what she was seeing now.

Something nuzzled her upper arm, and Rosie gave a small scream. She turned and saw the pony looking at her with apologetic brown eyes. Overhead, thunder rumbled.

A woman was standing beside the trim pony-cart to which the shaggy little beast was harnessed. She was wearing a many-layered red robe. It was ankle-length but gauzy, almost transparent; Rosie could see the warm tints of her
café-au-lait
skin through its artful layers. Lightning flared across the sky, and for a moment Rosie again saw what she had first seen in the painting not long after Bill had brought her back from Pop's Kitchen: the shadow of the cart lying on the grass, and the shadow of the woman growing out of it.

“Don't you worry, now,” the woman in the red robe said. “Radamanthus the
least
of your worries. He don't bite nothing but grass and clover. He's just gettin a little smell on you, that's all.”

Rosie felt a sudden, overwhelming sense of relief as she realized that this was the woman Norman had always referred to (in tones of aggrieved bitterness) as “that slutty high-yellow gal.” It was Wendy Yarrow, but Wendy Yarrow was dead, and so this was a dream, Q.E.D. No matter how realistic it felt or how realistic the details might be (wiping
a tiny bit of moisture off her upper arm, for instance, left there by the pony's enquiring muzzle), it was a dream.

Of course it is,
she told herself.
No one actually steps through pictures, Rosie.

That had little or no power over her. The idea that the woman attending the cart was the long-dead Wendy Yarrow did, however.

The wind gusted, and once again the sound of the crying baby came to her. Now Rosie saw something else: sitting on the pony-cart's seat was a large basket made of green woven rushes. Fluffs of silk ribbon decorated the handle, and there were silk bows on the corners. The hem of a pink blanket, clearly hand-woven, hung over the end.

“Rosie.”

The voice was low and sweetly husky. Nevertheless, it sent a scutter of gooseflesh up Rosie's back. There was something wrong with it, and she had an idea that wrongness might be something only another woman could hear—a man heard a voice like that, immediately thought about sex, and forgot everything else. But there
was
something wrong with it.
Badly
wrong.

“Rosie,” it said again, and suddenly she knew: it was as if the voice were striving to be human. Striving to remember
how
to be human.

“Girl, don't you look straight at her,” the woman in the red robe said. She sounded anxious. “That's not for the likes of you.”

“No, I don't want to,” Rosie said. “I want to go home.”

“I don't blame you, but it's too late for that,” the woman said, and stroked the pony's neck. Her dark eyes were grave and her mouth was tight. “Don't touch her, either. She don't mean you no harm, but she ain't got good control of herself no more.” She tapped her temple with one finger.

Rosie turned reluctantly toward the woman in the chiton, and took a single step forward. She was fascinated by the texture of the woman's back, her bare shoulder, and the lower part of her neck. The skin was finer than watered silk. But farther up on her neck . . .

Rosie didn't know what those gray shadows lurking just below her hairline could be, and didn't think she
wanted
to know. Bites were her first wild thought, but they weren't bites. Rosie knew bites. Was it leprosy? Something worse? Something contagious?

“Rosie,” the sweet, husky voice said for the third time, and there was something in it that made Rosie feel like screaming, the way that seeing Norman smile had sometimes made her feel like screaming.

This woman is mad. Whatever else is wrong with her—the patches on her skin—is secondary to that. She is mad.

Lightning flashed. Thunder rumbled. And, on the fitfully gusting wind, from the direction of the ruined temple at the foot of the hill, came the distant wail of an infant.

“Who are you?” she asked. “Who are you, and why am I here?”

For an answer, the woman held out her right arm and turned it over, revealing an old white ring of scar on the underside. “This one bled quite a bit, then got infected,” she said in her sweetly husky voice.

Rosie held out her own arm. It was the left instead of the right, but the mark itself was exactly the same. A small but terrible packet of knowledge came to her then: if she were to put on the short rose madder chiton, she would wear it so that her right shoulder was bare instead of her left, and if she were to own the gold armlet, she would clasp it above her left elbow instead of her right.

The woman on the hill was her mirror image.

The woman on the hill was—

“You're
me,
aren't you?” Rosie asked. And then, as the woman with the plaited hair shifted slightly, she added in a shrill, shaking voice: “Don't turn around, I don't want to see!”

“Don't jump so fast,” Rose Madder said in a strange, patient voice.
“You're
really Rosie,
you're
Rosie Real. Don't forget that when you forget everything else. And don't forget one other thing: I
repay.
What you do for me I will do for you. And that's why we were brought together. That is our balance. That is our
ka.”

Lightning ripped the sky; thunder cracked; wind hissed through the olive tree. The tiny blonde hairs which had escaped from Rose Madder's plait wavered wildly. Even in this chancey light they looked like filaments of gold.

“Go down now,” Rose Madder said. “Go down and bring me my baby.”

T
he child's cry drifted up to them like something which had labored here from another continent, and Rosie looked down at the ruined temple, whose perspective still seemed strangely and unpleasantly skewed, with new fear. Also, her breasts had begun to throb, as they had often throbbed in the months following her miscarriage.

Rosie opened her mouth, not sure of the words that would come out, only knowing they would be some sort of protest, but a hand gripped her shoulder before she could speak. She turned. It was the woman in red. She shook her head warningly, tapped her temple again, and pointed down the hill at the ruins.

Rosie's right wrist was seized by another hand, one as cold as a gravestone. She turned back and realized at the last moment that the woman in the chiton had turned around and was now facing her. Quickly, with confused thoughts of Medusa filling her mind, Rosie cast her eyes down so as not to see the face of the other. She saw the back of the hand gripping her wrist instead. It was covered with a dark gray blotch that made her think of some hovering ocean predator (a manta ray, of course). The fingernails looked dark and dead. As Rosie watched, she saw a small white worm wriggle out from beneath one of them.

“Go now,” Rose Madder said. “Do for me what I cannot do for myself. And remember: I
repay.”

“All right,” Rosie said. A terrible, perverse desire to look up into the other woman's face had seized her. To see what was there. Perhaps to see her own face swimming beneath the dead gray shadows of some ailment that made you crazy even as it ate you alive. “All right, I'll go, I'll try, just don't make me look at you.”

The hand let go of her wrist . . . but slowly, as if it would clamp tight again the instant its owner sensed any weakening on Rosie's part. Then the hand turned and one dead gray finger pointed down the hill, as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had pointed out one particular grave marker to Ebenezer Scrooge.

“Go on, then,” Rose Madder said.

Rosie started slowly down the hill, eyes still lowered, watching her bare feet slip through the high, rough grass. It wasn't until a particularly vicious crack of thunder tore through the air and she looked up, startled, that she realized the woman in the red robe had come with her.

“Are you going to help me?” Rosie asked.

“I c'n only go that far.” The woman in red pointed toward the fallen pillar. “I got what she got, only so far it hasn't done much more than brush me.”

She held out an arm, and Rosie saw an amorphous pink blotch squirming on her flesh—
in
her flesh—between the wrist and the forearm. There was a similar one in the cup of her palm. This one was almost pretty. It reminded Rosie of the clover she had found between the floorboards in her room. Her room, the place she had counted on to be her refuge, seemed very distant to her now. Perhaps
that
was the dream, that whole life, and this was the only reality.