Rose Madder

“Okay,” Rosie muttered to herself, getting up.

“Just keep your damned fingers out of your mouth. You’ll be all right if you do that!” She walked to the stairs which led beneath the white stone and stood at the head of them for a moment, dreading the darkness and trying to nerve herself up to face it. The alabaster stone with MAZE carved into its surface no longer looked like a plinth to her; it looked like a marker standing at the end of a narrow, open grave. The baby was down there, though, whimpering as babies do when no one comes to comfort them and they finally set about doing the job as well as they can themselves. It was that lonely, self-comforting sound which finally set her feet in motion. No baby should have to cry itself to sleep in such a lonely place. Rosie counted steps as she went down. At seven she passed beneath the overhang and the stone. At fourteen she looked over her shoulder at the white rectangle of light she was leaving behind, and when she faced forward again, that shape hung before her eyes in the screening darkness like a bright ghost. She went down and down, bare feet slapping on stone. There would be no talking herself out of the terror which now filled her heart, no talking herself through it, either. She would be doing well just to live with it. Fifty steps. Seventy-five. A hundred. She stopped at a hundred and twenty-five, realizing she could see again. That’s nuts, she thought. Imagination, Rosie, that’s all. It wasn’t, though. She raised a hand slowly toward her face. It and the little packet of seeds it held glowed a dull, witchy green. She raised her other hand, the one holding the rock in the remains of her nightgown, beside it. She could see, all right. She turned her head first one way, then the other. The walls of the stairwell were glowing with a faint green light. Black shapes rose and twisted lazily in it, as if the walls were actually the glass faces of aquaria in which dead things twisted and floated. Stop it, Rosie! Stop thinking that way! Except she couldn’t. Dream or no dream, panic and blind retreat were now very close. Don’t look, then! Good idea. Great idea. Rosie dropped her eyes to the dim X-ray ghosts of her own feet and resumed her descent, now whispering her count under her breath. The green light continued to brighten as she went down, and by the time she reached two hundred and twenty, the last step, it was as if she were standing on a stage lit with low-level green gels. She looked up, trying to steel herself for what she might see. The air down here was moving, damp but fresh enough… yet it brought her a smell she didn’t much like. It was a zoo smell, as if something wild were pe

“Cry!” Rosie shouted, then cringed from the returning echoes of her own voice:

“Iy!… iy!… iy!” Nothing. The four passages-the four entrances to the maze-gawped silently at her, like narrow vertical mouths wearing identical expressions of prissy shock. Not far inside the second from the right, she saw a dark pile of something. You know damned well what that is, she thought. After fourteen years of listening to Norman and Harley and all their friends, you’d have to be pretty stupid not to know bullshit when you see it. This thought and the memories that went with it-memories of those men sitting around in the rec room, talking about the job and drinking beer and talking about the job and smoking cigarettes and talking about the job and telling jokes about niggers and spicks and taco-benders and then talking about the job a little more-made her angry. Instead of denying the emotion, Rosie went against a lifetime of self-training and welcomed it. It felt good to be angry, to be anything other than terrified. As a kid she’d had a really piercing playground yell, the sort of high, drilling cry that could shatter window-glass and almost rupture eyeballs. She had been scolded and shamed out of using it around the age of ten, on the grounds that it was unladylike as well as brain-destroying. Now Rosie decided to see if she still had it in her repertoire. She drew the damp underground air into her lungs, all the way to the bottom, closed her eyes, and remembered playing Capture the Flag behind Elm Street School or Red Rover and Texas Rangers in Billy Calhoun’s jungly, overgrown back yard. For a moment she thought she could almost smell the comforting aroma of her favorite fla