Rose Madder

“Get up.” He took another step toward her and pulled the gun from the waistband of his jeans.

“We’ve got some things to talk about.”

“Yes, you’re certainly right about that,” she said, but she didn’t turn and she didn’t rise. She only knelt there with moonlight and shadows lying across her back in zebra-stripes.

“Mind me, goddam you!” He took another step toward her. The nails of the hand not holding the gun were now digging into his palms like white-hot metal shavings. And still she did not turn. Still she did not get up.

“Erinyes from the maze!” she said in her soft, melodious voice.

“Ecce taurus! Behold the bull!” But still she did not rise, still she did not turn to behold him.

“I’m no bull, you cunt!” he shouted, and tore at the mask with the ends of his fingers. It wouldn’t budge. It no longer seemed stuck to his face or melted to his face; it seemed to be his face. How can that be? he asked himself in bewilderment. How can that possibly be? It’s just some kid’s gimcrack amusement-park prize! He had no answer to the question, but the mask wouldn’t come off no matter how hard he yanked at it, and he knew with sickening surety that if he raked his nails into it, he would feel pain. He would bleed. And yes, there was just the one eyehole, and that one seemed to have moved right into the center of his face. His vision through this eyehole had darkened; the formerly bright moonlight had become cloudy.

“Take it off me!” he bawled at her.

“Take it off me, you bitch! You can, can’t you? I know you can! Don’t you fuck with me anymore, either! Don’t you DARE fuck with me!” He stumbled the rest of the way to where she knelt and clutched her shoulder. The toga’s single strap shifted,and what he saw beneath horrified him into a small, strangled gasp. The skin was as black and rotten as the rinds of the fruits decaying into the earth around the base of the tree-the ones so far gone they were now on the verge of liquefying.

“The bull has come from the maze,” Rose said, and floated to her feet with a limber grace he had never seen or suspected in her.

“And so now Erinyes may die. So it has been written; so shall it be.”

“The only one doing any dying here-” he began, and that was as far as he got. She turned, and when the bony light of the moon disclosed her, Norman shrieked. He fired the.45 twice into the ground between his feet without realizing it, then dropped it. He clapped his hands to his head and screamed, backing away, moving jerkily on legs he could now barely command. She answered his cry with one of her own. Rot swarmed across the upper swell of her bosom; her neck was as purple-black as that of a strangulation victim. The skin had cracked open in places and was oozing thick tears of yellow pus. Yet these signs of some far-advanced and obviously terminal disease weren’t what brought the screams raking out of his throat and bolting from his mouth in howling spates; they were not what broke through the eggshell surface of his insanity to let in a more terrible reality, like the unforgiving light of an alien sun. Her face did that. It was the face of a bat in which had been set the bright mad eyes of a rabid fox; it was the face of a supernally beautiful goddess seen in an illustration hidden within some old and dusty book like a rare flower in a weedy vacant lot; it was the face of his Rose, whose looks had always been lifted just slightly beyond plai

“Come closer yet, Norman,” the spider in the moonlight whispered to him, and before his mind broke entirely, Norman saw that its bug-filled, silk-stuffed mouth was trying to grin. More arms began to cram their way out through the toga’s armholes, and from beneath its short hem, as well, only they were not arms, not arms at all, and he screamed, he screamed, he screamed; it was oblivion he was screaming for, oblivion and an end to knowing and seeing, but oblivion would not come.

“Come closer,” it crooned, the not-arms reaching, the maw of a mouth yawning, “I want to talk to you.” There were claws at the ends of the black not-arms, filthy with bristles. The claws settled on his wrists, his legs, the swollen appendage which still throbbed in his crotch. One wriggled amorously into his mouth; the bristles scraped against his teeth and the insides of his cheeks. It grasped his tongue, tore it out, flapped it triumphantly before his one staring, glaring eye.

“I want to talk to you, and I want to talk to you right… up… CLOSE!” He made one last mad effort to pull free and was instead drawn into Rose Madder’s hungry embrace. Where Norman finally learned what it was like to be the bitten instead of the biter.

Rosie lay on the stairs with her eyes closed and her fists clenched above her head, listening to him scream. She tried not even to imagine what was going on out there, and she tried to remember that it was Norman who was screaming, Norman of the terrible pencil, Norman of the te

“Come forth, little Rosie! Come forth and be of good cheer! The bull is no more!” Slowly, on legs that felt numb and wooden, Rosie got first to her knees and then to her feet. She walked up the steps and stood on the ground. She didn’t want to look, but her eyes seemed to have a life of their own; they crossed the clearing while her breath stopped in her throat.

She let it out in a long, quiet sigh of relief. Rose Madder was still kneeling, still back-to. Lying before her was a shadowy bundle of what at first looked like rags. Then a white starfish shape tumbled out of the shadow and into the moonlight. It was a hand, and Rosie saw the rest of him then, like a woman who suddenly sees sense and coherence in a psychiatrist’s inkblot. It was Norman. He had been mutilated, and his eyes bulged from their sockets in a terminal expression of terror, but it was Norman, all right. Rose Madder reached up as Rosie watched and plucked a low-hanging fruit from the tree. She squeezed it in her hand-a very human hand, and quite lovely save for the black and spiritous spots floating just beneath her skin-so that first the juice ran out of her fist in a rose madder stream and then the fruit itself broke open in a wet, dark-red furrow. She plucked a dozen or so seeds out of the rich pulp and began to sow them in Norman Daniels’s torn flesh. The last one she poked into his one staring eye. There was a wet popping sound as she drove it home-the sound of someone stepping on a plump grape.

“What are you doing?” Rosie asked in spite of herself. She only managed to keep from adding, Don’t turn around, you can tell me without turning around! “seeding him.” Then she did something that made Rosie feel as if she had stepped into a

“Richard Racine” novel: leaned forward and kissed the corpse’s mouth. At last she drew back, took him in her arms, rose, and turned toward the white marble stairway leading into the earth. Rosie looked away, her heart thumping in her throat. “sweet dreams, you son-of-a-bastard,” Rose Madder said, and pitched Norman’s body down into the dark beneath the single chiselled word reading MAZE. Where, perchance, the seeds she had planted would take root and grow.