Rose Madder

“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 would 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-mu

“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-mu

“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.”

Discovering 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 didn’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-mu

“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.