Rose Madder (35 page)

“Those are the only two I got, at least for now,” she said, “but they're enough to keep me out of there. That bull would smell me and come running. It's me it'd come to, but both of us'd get killed.”

“What bull?” Rosie asked, mystified and afraid. They had almost reached the fallen pillar.

“Erinyes. He guards the temple.”

“What temple?”

“Don't waste time with man's questions, woman.”

“What are you talking about? What are man's questions?”

“Ones you already know the answers to. Come on over here.”

“Wendy Yarrow” was standing by the moss-encrusted end segment of the fallen pillar and looking impatiently at Rosie. The temple loomed close by. Looking at it hurt Rosie's eyes in the same way that looking at a movie screen where the picture had gone out of focus hurt them. She saw subtle bulges where she was sure there were none; she saw folds of shadow which disappeared when she blinked her eyes.

“Erinyes is one-eyed, and that one eye is blind, but there ain't nothing wrong with his sense of smell. Is it your time, girl?”

“My . . . time?”

“Time of the
month!”

Rosie shook her head.

“Good, because we'd'a been done before we was begun if
you was. I ain't, neither, ain't had no womanblood since the sickness started to show. Too bad, because that blood would be best. Still—”

The most monstrous crack of thunder yet split the air open just above their heads, and now icy droplets of rain began to fall.

“We got to hurry!” the woman in red told her. “Tear off two pieces of your nightgown—a strip for a bandage and a swatch big enough to wrap a stone in with enough left over to tie it up. Don't argue, and don't go askin no more questions, neither. Just do it.”

Rosie bent down, took hold of the hem of her cotton nightgown, and tore a long, wide strip up the side, leaving her left leg bare almost all the way to the hip.
When I walk, I'm going to look like a waitress in a Chinese restaurant,
she thought. She tore a narrower strip from the side of this, and when she looked up, she was alarmed to see that “Wendy” was holding a long and wicked-looking double-sided dagger. Rose couldn't think where it might have come from, unless the woman had had it strapped to her thigh, like the heroine in one of those sweet-savage Paul Sheldon novels, stories where there was a reason, no matter how farfetched, for everything that happened.

That's probably just where she had it, too,
Rosie thought. She knew that she herself would want a knife if she was traveling in the company of the woman in the rose madder chiton. She thought again about how the woman who
was
traveling in her company had tapped the side of her head with one finger and told Rosie not to touch her.
She don't mean you no harm,
“Wendy Yarrow” had said,
but she ain't got good control of herself no more.

Rosie opened her mouth to ask the woman standing by the fallen pillar what she intended doing with that knife . . . and then closed her lips again. If a man's questions were ones you already knew the answers to, then that was a man's question.

“Wendy” seemed to feel her eyes and looked up at her. “It's the big piece you'll want first,” she said. “Be ready with it.”

Before Rosie could answer, “Wendy” had pierced her own skin with the tip of the dagger. She hissed a few words Rosie didn't understand—maybe a prayer—and then drew a fine line across her forearm, one that matched her dress. It fattened
and began to run as the skin and underlying tissue drew back, allowing the wound to gape.

“Oooh, that hurt
bad!”
the woman moaned, then held out the hand with the dagger in it. “Give it to me. The big piece, the big piece!”

Rosie put it in her hand, confused and frightened but not nauseated; the sight of blood did not do that to her. “Wendy Yarrow” folded the strip of cotton cloth into a pad, which she placed over the wound, held, then turned over. Her purpose did not appear to be compression; she only wanted to soak the cloth with her blood. When she handed it back to Rosie, the cotton which had been cornflower blue when Rosie lay down in her Trenton Street bed was a much darker color . . . but a familiar one. Blue and scarlet had combined to make rose madder.

“Now find a rock and tie that piece of cloth around it,” she said to Rosie. “When you got that done, take off that thing you're wearing and wrap it around both.”

Rosie stared at her with wide eyes, far more shocked by this order than she had been by the sight of the blood pouring off the woman's arm. “I can't do that!” she said. “I don't have anything on underneath!”

“Wendy” grinned humorlessly. “I won't tell if you won't,” she said. “Meantime, gimme that other 'un before I bleed to death.”

Rosie handed her the narrower strip of cloth, this one still blue, and the brown-skinned woman began to wrap it swiftly around her wounded arm. Lightning exploded on their left like some monstrous firework. Rosie heard a tree go over with a long, rending crash. This sound was followed by a cannonade of thunder. Now she could smell a coppery odor on the air, like pennies that had been flash-fried. Then, as if the lightning had ripped open the sky's bag of waters, the rain arrived. It fell in cold torrents driven almost horizontal by the wind. Rosie saw it hit the pad of cloth in her hand, making it steam, and saw the first runnels of pink, bloody water coming out of it and trickling down her fingers. It looked like strawberry Kool-Aid.

Without any further thought about what she was doing or why, Rosie reached over her shoulder, grasped the back of her nightgown, bowed forward, and stripped it off over her head. She was immediately standing in the world's coldest shower, gasping for breath as the rain needled her cheeks
and shoulders and unprotected back. Her skin tightened and then broke out in hundreds of tiny hard goosepimples; they covered her from neck to heels.

“Ai!” she cried in a desperate, breathless little voice. “Oh, ai! So
cold!”

She dropped her nightgown, still mostly dry, over the hand holding the bloody rag and spied a rock the size of a cinnamon bun lying between two of the fallen pillar's segments. She picked it up, dropped to her knees, and then spread her nightgown over her head and shoulders, much as a man caught in an unexpected shower might use his newspaper as a makeshift tent. Under this temporary protection she wrapped the bloodsoaked rag around the rock. She was left with two long, sticky ears, and these she tied together, wincing with disgust as “Wendy's” rain-thinned blood ran out of them and pattered to the ground. With the rock tied in the rag, she wrapped her nightgown (no longer even close to dry) around the whole thing, as instructed. Most of the blood was going to wash out anyway, she knew. This wasn't a shower, or even a downpour. This was a flood.

“Go on!” the brown-skinned woman in the red dress told her. “Go on in the temple! Walk right through it, and don't stop for nothing! Don't pick nothing up, and don't believe in anything you see or hear. It's a ghos place, no doubt about that, but even in the Temple of the Bull there ain't no ghos can hurt a livin woman.”

Rosie was shivering wildly, water in her eyes doubling her vision, water dripping from the tip of her nose, drops of water hanging from the lobes of her ears like exotic jewelry. “Wendy” stood facing her, hair plastered to her brow and cheeks, dark eyes blazing. Now she had to shout in order to make herself heard over the relentlessly rising wind.

“Pass through the door on the other side of the altar and you gonna find yourself in a garden where all the plants n flowers are dead! Acrost the garden you gonna see a grove of trees, all of
them
dead, too, all cept one! In between the garden and the grove there runs a stream! You dassn't drink from it, no matter how much you might want to—
dassn't
—or even touch it! Use the steppin-stones to get acrost! Wet so much as a single finger in that water, you gonna forget everythin you ever knew, even your own name!”

Electricity raced through the clouds in a glare of light,
turning the thunderheads into strangulated goblin faces. Rosie had never been so cold in her life, or so aware of her heart's strange exhilaration as it tried to force a flush of heat to her rain-chilled skin. And the thought came to her again: this was no more a dream than the water cascading down from the sky was a sprinkle.

“Go in the grove! Into the dead trees! The one tree still livin is a pom'granate tree! Gather the seeds that you find in the fruit around the base of that tree, but don't taste the fruit or even put the hand that touches the seeds into your mouth! Go down the stairs by the tree and into the halls beneath! Find the baby and bring her out, but 'ware the bull! 'Ware the bull Erinyes! Now go! Hurry!”

She was afraid of the Temple of the Bull, with its curiously twisted perspectives, so it was something of a relief for Rosie to discover that her desperate desire to get out of the storm had now superseded everything. She wanted to get away from the wind and rain and lightning, but she also wanted to be under cover in case the rain decided to turn to hail. She found the idea of being naked in a hailstorm, even if it
was
a dream, extremely unpleasant.

She went a few steps, then turned back to look at the other woman. “Wendy” looked as naked as Rosie did herself, her gauzy red gown now plastered to her body like paint.

“Who's Erinyes?”
Rosie shouted.
“What is he?”
She ventured a glance at the temple over her shoulder, almost as if she expected the god to come at the sound of her voice. No god appeared; there was only the temple, shimmering in the downpour.

The brown-skinned woman rolled her eyes.
“Why you act so stupid, girl?”
she yelled back. “Go
on, now! Go on while you still can!”
And she pointed wordlessly at the temple, much as her mistress had done.

R
osie, naked and white, holding the soaked ball of her nightgown against her stomach to protect it as much as she could, started toward the temple. Five paces took her to the fallen stone head lying in the grass. She peered down at it, expecting to see Norman. Of course it would be Norman,
and she might as well be prepared for it. That was the way things worked in dreams.

Except it wasn't. The receding hairline, fleshy cheeks, and luxurious David Crosby moustache belonged to the man who had been leaning in the doorway of The Wee Nip tavern on the day Rosie had gotten lost looking for Daughters and Sisters.

I'm lost again,
she thought.
Oh boy, am I.

She walked past the fallen stone head with its empty eyes that seemed to be weeping and the long wet strand of weed that lay across its cheek and brow like a green scar and it seemed to be whispering from behind her as she approached the strangely configured temple:
Hey baby wanna get it on nice tits whaddaya say wanna get it on wanna do some low ridin wanna do the dog whaddaya say?

She walked up the steps, which were slippery and treacherous with overgrown vines and creepers, and seemed to sense that head rolling on its stone cranium, squelching muddy water up from the soaked earth, wanting to watch the flex of her bare bottom as she climbed toward the darkness.

Don't think about it, don't think about it, don't think.

She resisted the urge to run—both from the rain and from that imagined stare—and went on picking her way, avoiding the places where the stone had been cracked open by the elements, leaving jagged gaps where one might twist or even break an ankle. Nor was that the worst possibility; who knew what sorts of poisonous things might be coiled up in those dark places, waiting to sting or bite?

Water dripped from her shoulderblades and ran straight down the course of her spine and she was colder than ever, but she nevertheless stopped on the top step, looking at the carving above the temple's wide, dark doorway. She hadn't been able to see it in her picture; it had been lost in the darkness under the roof's overhang.

It showed a hard-faced boy leaning against what could have been a telephone pole. His hair fell over his forehead and the collar of his jacket was turned up. A cigarette hung from his lower lip and his slouched, hipshot posture proclaimed him as Mr. Totally Cool, Late Seventies Edition. And what else did that posture say?
Hey baby
was what it said.
Hey baby hey baby, want to get down? Want to do some low riding? Want to do the dog with me?

It was Norman.

“No,” she whispered. It was almost a moan. “Oh, no.”

Oh
yes.
It was Norman, all right, Norman when he had still been the Ghost of Beatings Yet to Come, Norman leaning against the phone pole on the corner of State Street and Highway 49 in downtown Aubreyville (downtown Aubreyville, now
there
was a joke), Norman watching the cars go by while the sound of the Bee Gees singing “You Should Be Dancing” came drifting out of Finnegan's Pub, where the door had been chocked open and the Seeburg turned up loud.

The wind dropped momentarily and Rosie could hear the baby crying again. It didn't sound hurt, exactly; rather as if it might be very hungry. The faint howls got her eyes off that wretched carving and got her bare feet moving, but just before she passed into the temple doorway, she looked up again . . . she couldn't help herself. The boy-Norman was gone, if he had ever been there at all. Now she saw carved words directly above her.
SUCK MY AIDS-INFECTED COCK,
they said.

Nothing stays steady in dreams,
she thought.
They're like water.

She looked back over her shoulder and saw “Wendy,” still standing by the fallen pillar, looking bedraggled in the collapsed cobwebs of her dress. Rosie raised the hand that wasn't holding the wadded nightgown in a tentative wave. “Wendy” raised her own hand in return, then just stood watching, seemingly oblivious of the pelting rain.