Rose Madder (60 page)

Instead of the terror Norman had always roused in her, she felt a return of the rage she'd experienced in Hale's car and then at the police station. This time it seemed almost to engulf her.
“Let him alone, Norman!”
she screamed.
“Get your fucking hands off him!”

“Shut up, you whore!” came out of the darkness, but she
could hear surprise as well as anger in Norman's voice. Until now she'd never given him a single command—not in the entire course of their marriage—or spoken to him in such a tone.

And something else—there was a band of dull heat above the place where Bill had been touching her. It was the armlet. The gold armlet the woman in the chiton had given her. And in her mind, Rosie heard her snarl
Stop your stupid sheep's whining!
at her.

“Quit it, I'm warning you!”
she screamed at Norman, and then started toward the place from which the choking sounds and the effortful grunts were coming. She went with her hands held out before her like the hands of a blind woman, her lips drawn back from her teeth.

You're not going to choke him,
she thought.
You're not, I won't let you. You should have gone away, Norman. You should have gone away and left us alone while you still could.

Feet, drumming helplessly against the wall just ahead of her, and she could imagine Norman holding Bill up against it, lips drawn back in his biting smile, and suddenly she was a glass woman filled with a pale red liquid, and that liquid was pure and untinctured fury.

“You shit, didn't you hear me?
PUT HIM DOWN, I SAID!”

She reached out with her left hand, which now felt as strong as an eagle's talon. The armlet was burning fiercely—she felt she should almost be able to see it, even through her sweater and the jacket Bill had loaned her, glowing like a dull ember. But there was no pain, only a kind of dangerous exhilaration. She grabbed the shoulder of the man who had beaten her for fourteen years and dragged him backward. It was astoundingly easy. She squeezed his arm through the slippery waterproof fabric of his coat, then whipped her own arm out and slung him off into the darkness. She heard the rapid rattle of his stumbling feet, then a thud, then an explosion of breaking glass. Cal Coolidge, or whoever it was in the picture over there, had taken a dive.

She could hear Bill coughing and gagging. She groped for him with splayed fingers, found his shoulders, and settled her hands upon them. He was hunched over, tearing for each breath and immediately coughing it back out. This didn't surprise her. She knew how strong Norman was.

She slipped her right hand down his left arm and grasped him above the elbow. She was afraid to use her left hand, afraid she might hurt him with it. She could feel power humming
in it, throbbing through it. Perhaps the most terrifying thing about the sensation was how much she liked it.

“Bill,” she whispered. “Come on. Come with me.”

She had to get him upstairs. She didn't know exactly why, not yet, but she did not doubt at all that when she needed to know, the knowing would come. But he didn't move. He only leaned on his hands, coughing and making those gagging noises.

“Come on, goddammit!”
she whispered in a harsh peremptory voice . . . and she had come so close to saying
you,
as in
Come on, goddam you,
And she knew who she sounded like, oh yes indeed, even in these desperate circumstances, she knew very well.

He got moving, though, and for now that was all that mattered. Rosie led him across the vestibule with the confidence of a seeing-eye dog. He was still coughing and half-retching, but he was able to walk.

“Halt!”
Norman shouted from his part of the darkness. He sounded both official and desperate. “Halt, or I'll shoot!”

No you won't, that would spoil all your fun,
she thought, but he
did
shoot, the dead cop's .45 slanted up at the ceiling, the sound terrific in the enclosed space of the vestibule, the smell of burnt cordite sharp enough to make the eyes water. There was also a momentary shutterflash of reddish-yellow light, so bright it printed afterimages on her eyes like tattoos, and she supposed that was why he'd done it: to get a look at the landscape, and a look at where she and Bill were in that landscape. At the foot of the stairs, in fact.

Bill made a choked vomiting sound and staggered against her, sending her into the wall of the staircase. As she struggled to keep from going to her knees, she heard a rush of footsteps in the dark as Norman came for them.

S
he lunged up the first two steps, hauling Bill with her. He paddled with his feet, trying to help; perhaps he even did, a little. As Rosie gained the second step, she flung her left hand out behind her and swept the coat-tree across the foot of the stairs like a roadblock. As Norman crashed into it and began cursing, she let go of Bill, who slumped but did not
fall. He was still gagging and she sensed him bending over again, trying to get his breath back, trying to get his windpipe to work again.

“Hang in,” she murmured. “Just hang in there, Bill.”

She went up two stairs, then came back down on the other side of him, so she could use her left arm. If she was going to get him to the top of the stairs, she'd need all the power the gold armlet was putting out. She slipped her arm around his waist, and suddenly it was easy. She started to go up with him, breathing hard and canted over to the right, like a woman counterbalancing a heavy weight, but not gasping or buckling in the knees. She had an idea she could have hauled him up a high ladder like this, if that had been required. Every now and then he'd put a foot down and push, trying to help, but mostly his toes just dragged up the risers and across the carpeted stair-levels. Then, as they reached the tenth step—the halfway point, by her count—he started to help a little more. That was good, because there was a splintering sound from behind and below them as the coat-tree snapped beneath Norman's two hundred and twenty pounds. Now she could hear him coming again, not on his feet—at least it didn't sound that way—but crawling on his hands and knees.

“You don't want to play with me, Rose,” he panted. How far behind? She couldn't tell. And while the coat-tree had slowed him down, Norman wasn't dragging a man who was hurt and only three-quarters conscious. “Stop right where you are. Quit trying to run. I only want to talk to y—”

“Stay away!”
Sixteen . . . seventeen . . . eighteen. The light was off up here, too, and with no windows it was as dark as a mineshaft. Then she was staggering forward, the foot that had been searching for the nineteenth step finding only more level going. Apparently there were only eighteen stairs in the flight, not twenty. How marvellous. They had made it to the top ahead of him; at least they had managed to do that much.
“Stay away from me, Nor—”

A thought struck her then, one so terrible that it froze her where she was. She sucked the last syllable of her husband's name back into herself like someone who has been punched in the stomach.

Where were her keys? Had she left them dangling from the lock in the outside door?

She let go of Bill so she could feel in the left hand pocket of the leather jacket he had loaned her, and as she did, Norman's
hand closed softly and persuasively around her calf, like the coil of a snake which squeezes its prey rather than poisoning it with venom. Without thinking, she kicked powerfully backward with her other foot. The sole of her sneaker connected squarely with Norman's already battered nose, and he gave voice to a sick howl of pain. This changed to a yell of surprise as he grabbed for the bannister, missed it, and toppled backward into the darkened stairwell. Rosie heard a double crash as he somersaulted twice, heels over head.

Break your neck!
she screamed silently at him as her hand closed on the comforting round shape of the keyring in her jacket pocket—she had stuck it in there after all, thank Christ, thank God, thank all the angels in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Break your neck, let it end right here in the dark, break your stinking neck, die and leave me alone!

But no. She could already hear him stirring and moving around down there, and then he was cursing her, and then there was the unmistakable marching thud of his knees as he started crawling up the stairs again, calling her all his names—cunt and dyke and whore and bitch—as he came.

“I can walk,” Bill said suddenly. His voice was pinched and small, but she was grateful to hear it just the same. “I can walk, Rosie, let's get to your room. The crazy bastard is coming again.”

Bill started coughing. Below them—but not much below—Norman laughed. “That's right, Sunny Jim, the crazy bastard is coming again. The crazy bastard is going to poke your eyeballs right out of your fucking head and then make you eat them. I wonder how they'll taste?”

“STAY AWAY, NORMAN!”
Rosie shrieked, and began to guide Bill down the pitch-black hall. Her left arm was still wrapped around his midsection; with her right hand she felt the wall, trailing her fingers along it, hunting for her door. Her left hand was a fist against Bill's side with the only three keys she had so far accumulated in this new life—front door key, mailbox key, and room key—clutched in it.
“STAY AWAY, I'M WARNING YOU!”

And from the dark behind her—still on the stairs but now very close to the top of them again—the ultimate absurdity came floating:
“Don't you
DARE
warn me, you
BITCH!”

The wall notched in to a door that had to be hers. She let go of Bill, picked out the key that opened this one—unlike the one to the front door, her room key had a square head—and
then jabbed it at the lock in the dark. She could no longer hear Norman. Was he on the stairs? In the hall? Right behind them, and reaching toward the sounds of Bill's choked breathing? She found the lock, pressed her right index finger over the vertical slot of the keyway as a guide, then brought the key to it. It wouldn't go in. She could feel the tip of it pressing into the slot, but it refused to budge beyond that point. She felt panic starting to rip at her mind with busy little rat-teeth.

“It won't go in!” she panted at Bill. “It's the right key but it won't go in!”

“Turn it over. You're probably trying it upside-down.”

“Say, what's going on down there?” This was a new voice, farther down the hall and above them. Probably on the third-floor landing. It was followed by the fruitless
click-click-click
of a light switch. “And why're the lights out?”

“Stay
—” Bill shouted, and immediately started coughing again. He made a terrific grinding sound in his throat, trying to clear his voice.
“Stay where you are! Don't come down here! Call the p—”

“I
am
the police, fuckstick,” a soft, strangely muffled voice said from the darkness right beside them. There was a low, thick grunt, a sound that was both eager and satisfied. Bill was jerked away from her just as she finally managed to run her room key into its slot.

“No!”
she screamed, flailing in the dark with her left hand. On her upper arm, the circlet was hotter than ever.
“No, leave him alone!
LEAVE HIM ALONE!”

She grasped smooth leather—Bill's jacket—and then it slipped away. The horrible choking sounds, the sounds of someone whose throat is being packed tight with fine sand, began again. Norman laughed. This sound was also muffled. Rosie stepped toward it, arms in front of her, hands splayed and questing. She touched the shoulder of Bill's jacket, reached over it, and touched something gruesome—it felt like dead flesh that was also somehow alive. It was lumpy . . . rubbery . . .

Rubbery.

He's wearing a mask,
Rosie thought.
Some kind of mask.

Then her left hand was seized and pulled into a humid dampness that she had just time to recognize as his mouth before his teeth clamped down on her fingers and she was bitten all the way to the bone.

The pain was terrific, but once again her reaction to it was not fear and the helpless urge to give in, to let Norman have his way as Norman had always had his way, but a rage so great it was like insanity. Instead of trying to pull free of his grinding, baleful teeth, she folded her fingers at the second knuckle, pressing the pads of her fingers against the gumline inside his front teeth. Then she set the heel of her preternaturally strong left hand against his chin and pulled.

There was a strange creaking sensation under her hand, the sound a board under a man or woman's knee might make just before it snapped. She felt Norman jerk, heard him make a hollow interrogative sound which seemed to consist solely of vowels—
Aaaoouuuu?
—and then his lower face slid forward like a bureau drawer, coming dislocated from the hinges of his jaw. He screamed in agony and Rosie pulled her bleeding hand free, thinking
That's what you get for biting, you bastard, try to do it now.

She heard him go reeling backward, tracking him by his screams and the sound of his shirt sliding along the wall.
Now he'll use the gun,
she thought as she turned back to Bill. He leaned against the wall, a darker shape in the darkness, coughing desperately again.

“Hey, you guys, come on, a joke's a joke and enough's enough.” It was the man from upstairs, sounding petulant and put-out, only now he sounded as if he was
downstairs,
at the far end of this hallway, and Rosie's heart filled with foreknowing even as she twisted the key in the lock and shoved her door open. She didn't sound like herself at all when she screamed, she sounded like the other one.