Rose Madder (63 page)

“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 out 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
'falias
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.” The 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 could 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.”

D
iscovering 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 doesn'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 his 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?