Rose Madder

"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so it was something of a relief for Rosie to discover that her desperate desire to get out of the storm had now superseded everything.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.

6

Rosie, 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 roofs 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.

Rosie stepped through the wide, cool doorway and into the temple. She stood at the back, tense, ready to dart out again at once if she saw... well... if she saw she didn't know what.

"Wendy" had told her not to sweat the ghosts, but Rosie thought the woman in the red dress could afford to be sanguine; she was back there, after all. She guessed it was warmer inside than out, but it didn't feel warmer-there was the deep chill of damp stone about the place, the chill of crypts and mausoleums, and for a moment she wasn't sure she could make herself walk up the shadowy aisle, scattered with long-dead drifts and swirls of autumn leaves, which lay ahead of her. It was just too cold... and cold in too many ways. She stood shivering and gasping for breath in short little pulls of air, with her arms crossed tightly over her br**sts and little ribbons of steam rising from her skin. She touched her left nipple with the tip of her finger and was not much surprised to find it was like touching a chip of rock. It was the thought of going back to the woman on the hill that got her moving-the thought of having to face Rose Madder empty-handed. She stepped into the aisle, moving slowly and carefully, listening to the distant howl of the infant. It sounded miles away, carried to her by some thin, magical communication. Go down and bring me my baby. Caroline. The name she had planned to give her own baby, the one Norman had beaten out of her, came easily and naturally to her mind. The fugitive throb in her br**sts began again. She touched them, and winced. They were tender. Her eyes were adjusting to the gloom now, and it occurred to her that the Temple of the Bull had a strangely Christian look to it-that it looked, in fact, quite a bit like the First Methodist Church of Aubreyville, where she had gone twice a week until she had married Norman. First Methodist was where that marriage had taken place, and it was from there that her father, mother, and kid brother had been buried after the road accident which had taken their lives. There were rows of old wooden pews, the ones at the back overturned and half-buried in drifts of cinnamon-smelling leaves. Closer down toward the front they were still upright, and ranked in neat rows. Lying on them at regular intervals were fat black books that might have been the Methodist Book of Hymns and Praise Rosie had grown up with. The next thing she became aware of-this as she walked down the center aisle like some strange naked bride-was the smell of the place. Under the good smell of the leaves which had blown in through the open door over the years there lurked a less pleasant odor. It was a little like mold, a little like mildew, a little like late-stage decay, and really not like any of those things. Old sweat, perhaps? Yes, perhaps. And perhaps other fluids, as well. Semen came to her mind. So did blood. After her awareness of the smell came the almost undeniable sensation of being watched by malevolent eyes. She sensed them studying her nakedness carefully, brooding over it, perhaps, marking each undraped curve and line, memorizing the movement of her muscles beneath her wet, sleek skin. Talk to you up close, the temple seemed to sigh to her beneath the hollow drumming of the rain and the crackle of the old leaves beneath her bare feet. Talk to you right up dose... but we won't have to talk long to say the things we need to say. Will we, Rosie? She stopped near the front of the temple and picked up one of the black books from where it lay in the second pew. When she opened it, a gasp of putrefaction so strong it almost choked her wafted up. The picture at the top of the page was a stark line drawing which had never appeared in the Methodist hymnals of her youth; it showed a woman on her knees, performing fellatio on a man whose feet were not feet at all, but hooves. His face was suggested rather than actually rendered, but Rosie saw a hideous similarity just the same... or thought she did. He looked like Norman's old partner Harley Bissington, who had always checked her hem so assiduously whenever she sat down. Below the drawing, the yellowed page was crammed with Cyrillic lettering, unreadable but familiar. It took her only a moment of thought to understand why; they were the same letters which had filled the newspaper Peter Slowik had been reading when she had approached the Travelers Aid booth and asked him for help. Then, with shocking suddenness, the drawing began to move, its lines seeming to crawl toward her white, rain-wrinkled fingers, leaving little snail-trails of sludge behind. It was alive, somehow. She slammed the book shut and her throat clenched at the wet squelching noise that came from inside it. She dropped it, and either the bang it made when it hit the pew or her own revolted cry woke a flutter of bats in the shadowy area she supposed was the choir loft. Several of them turned aimless figure-eights overhead, black wings dragging loathsomely plump brown bodies through the dank air, and then they retreated back into their holes. Ahead was the altar, and she was relieved to see a narrow door standing open to its left and letting in an oblong of clean white light. Yerrrr reeely Roww-zey, the tongueless voice of the temple whispered, bleakly amused. And yerrr Rowww-zey Reeel... come over here and I'll give yewww... a grrreat big feeeeel... She refused to look around; she kept her eyes fixed on the door and the daylight beyond it. The rain had abated, the hollow rushing sound from overhead now down to a steady low mutter. It's for men only, Rowww-zey, the temple whispered, and then added what Norman always said when he didn't want to answer one of her questions, but wasn't really mad at her, either: It's a guy thing. She looked into the altar area as she passed it, then quickly looked away. It was empty-there was no pulpit, no symbols, no arcane books-but she saw another hovering manta-shadow, this one lying on the bare stones. Its rusty color suggested to her that it was blood, and the size of the shadow suggested that a lot of it had been spilled here over the years. A lot. It's like the Roach Motel, Rowww-zie, the room whispered, and the leaves on the stone floor stirred, making a sound like laughter slipping between gumless teeth. They check in, but they don't check owwwwwt. She walked steadily toward the door, trying to ignore that voice, keeping her eyes fixed straight ahead. She half-expected it to slam shut in her face when she got close to it, but it didn't. No capering bogey with Norman's face leaped through it, either. She stepped out onto a small stone stoop, stepped into the cool smell of rain-freshened grass, and into air which had begun to warm again even though the rain had not completely stopped. Water dripped and rustled everywhere. Thunder boomed (but it was going-away thunder now, she felt sure). And the baby, of which she had not been aware for several minutes, resumed its distant wailing. The garden was divided into two parts-flowers on the left, veggies on the right-but it was all dead. Cataclysmically dead, and the lush greenery which surrounded it and the Temple of the Bull like encircling arms made that dead acre look so much the worse by contrast-like a corpse with its eyes open and its tongue lolling. Huge sunflowers with yellowy, fibrous stalks, brown centers, and curling, faded petals towered over everything else, like diseased turnkeys in a prison where all the inmates have died. The flowerbeds were full of blown petals that made her think, in an instant of nightmarish recall, of what she had seen when she had gone back to the cemetery where her family was buried a month after their interment. She had walked to the back of the little graveyard after putting fresh flowers on their graves, wanting to collect herself, and had been horrified to find drifts of rotting flowers piled in the declivity between the stone wall and the woods behind the cemetery. The stink of their dying perfume had made her think of what was happening to her mother and father and brother under the ground. How they were changing. Rosie looked hastily away from the flowers, but at first what she saw in the moribund vegetable patch was no better: one of the rows appeared to be full of blood. She wiped water out of her eyes, looked again, and sighed with relief. Not blood but tomatoes. A twenty-foot row of fallen, rotting tomatoes. Rosie. Not the temple this time. This was Norman's voice, it was right behind her, and she suddenly realized she could smell Norman's cologne. All my men wear English Leather or they wear nothing at all, she thought, and felt ice creep up her spine. He was behind her. Right behind her. Reaching for her. No. I don't believe that. I don't believe it even if I do. That was a completely stupid thought, of course, probably stupid enough to rate at least a small entry in the Guinness Book of Records, but it steadied her somehow. Moving slowly-knowing if she tried to go even a little faster she was apt to lose it completely-Rosie went down the three stone steps (much humbler even than those at the front of the building) and into the remains of what she mentally named Bull Gardens. The rain was still falling, but gently, and the wind had dropped to a sigh. Rosie walked down an aisle formed by two ranks of brown and leaning cornstalks (there was no way she was going to walk through those rotting tomatoes in her bare feet, feeling them burst beneath her soles), listening to the stony roar of a nearby stream. The sound grew steadily louder as she walked, and when she stepped out of the corn she saw the stream flowing past less than fifteen feet away. It was perhaps ten feet across and ordinarily shallow, judging from its mild banks, but now it was swollen with runoff from the downpour. Only the tops of the four large white stones which crossed it showed, like the bleached shells of turtles. The water of the stream was a tarry, lightless black. She walked slowly toward it, barely aware that she was squeezing her hair with her free hand, wringing the water out of it. As she drew close, she smelled a peculiar mineral odor coming up from the stream, heavily metallic yet oddly attractive. She was suddenly thirsty, very thirsty, her throat as parched as a hearthstone. You dassn't drink from it, no matter how much you want to. Dassn't. Yes, that was what she'd said; she'd told Rosie that if she wet so much as a finger in that water, she would forget everything she had ever known, even her own name. But was that such a bad deal? When you thought things over, was that really such a bad deal, especially when one of the things she could forget was Norman, and the possibility that he wasn't done with her yet, that he had killed a man because of her? She swallowed and heard a dust-dry click in her throat. Again, acting with almost no awareness of what she was doing, Rosie ran a hand up her side, over the swell of her breast, and across her neck, collecting moisture and then licking it out of her palm. This did not slake her thirst but only fully awakened it. The water gleamed a slick black as it flowed around the stepping-stones, and now that queerly attractive mineral smell seemed to fill her whole head. She knew how the water would taste-flat and airless, like some cold syrup-and how it would fill her throat and belly with strange salts and exotic bromides. With the taste of memoryless earth. Then there would be no more thoughts of the day when Mrs Pratt (white as snow she had been, except for her lips, which were the color of blueberries) had come to the door and told her that her family, her whole family, had been killed in a highway wreck, no more thoughts of Norman with the pencil or Norman with the tennis racket. No more images of the man in the doorway of The Wee Nip or the fat lady who had called the women at Daughters and Sisters welfare lesbians. No more dreams of sitting in the corner while the pain from her kidneys made her sick, reminding herself over and over to throw up in her apron if she had to throw up. Forgetting those things would be good. Some things deserved forgetting, and others-things like what he had done to her with the tennis racket-needed forgetting... except most people never got the chance, not even in a dream. Rosie was trembling all over now, her eyes welded to the water flowing past like transparent silks filled with smooth black ink; her throat burned like a brushfire and her eyes pulsed in their sockets and she could see herself going down flat on her belly, sticking her whole head into that blackness and drinking like a horse. You'd forget Bill, too, Practical-Sensible whispered, almost apologetically. You'd forget the green undertint in his eyes, and the little scar on his earlobe. These days some things are worth remembering, Rosie. You know that, don't you? With no further hesitation (she didn't believe even the thought of Bill would have been able to save her if she'd waited much longer), Rosie stepped onto the first stone with her hands held out to either side for balance. Red-tinted water dripped steadily from the damp ball of her nightgown, and she could feel the rock at the center of the bundle, like the pit in a peach. She stood with her left foot on the stone and her right on the bank, summoned up her courage, and put the foot behind her on the stone ahead of her. All right so far. She lifted her left foot and strode to the third stone. This time her balance shifted a little and she tottered to the right, waving her left arm to keep her balance while the babble of the strange water filled her ears. It was probably not as close as it seemed, and a moment later she was standing on the stones in the middle of the stream with her heartbeat thudding emphatically in her ears. Afraid she might freeze if she hesitated too long, Rosie stepped onto the last stone and then up to the dead grass of the far bank. She had taken only three steps toward the grove of bare trees ahead when she realized that her thirst had passed like a bad dream. It was as if giants had been buried alive here at some time in the past and had died trying to pull themselves out; the trees were their fleshless hands, reaching fruitlessly at the sky and silently speaking of murder. The dead branches were interlaced, creating strange, geometric patterns against the sky. A path led into them. Guarding it was a stone boy with a huge erect phallus. His hands were held straight up over his head, as if he were signalling that the extra point was good. As Rosie passed, his pupilless stone eyes rolled toward her. She was sure of it. Hey baby! the stone boy spat inside her head. Want to get down? Want to do the dog with me? She backed away from it, raising her own hands in a warding-off gesture, but the stone boy was just a stone boy again... if, that was, he had been anything else, even for a moment. Water dripped from his comically oversized penis. No problems maintaining an erection there, Rosie thought, looking at the stone boy's pupilless eyes and somehow too-knowing smile (had it been smiling before? Rosie tried to remember and found she couldn't). How Norman would envy you that. She hurried past the statue and along the path leading into the dead grove, restraining an urge to look over her shoulder and make sure the statue wasn't following her, wanting to put that stone harden to work. She didn't dare look. She was afraid her overstrained mind might see it even if it wasn't there. The rain had backed off to a hesitant drizzle, and Rosie suddenly realized she could no longer hear the baby. Perhaps it had gone to sleep. Perhaps the bull Erinyes had gotten tired of listening to it and gobbled it like a canape. In either case, how was she supposed to find it, if it didn't cry? One thing at a time, Rosie, Practical-Sensible whispered.

"Easy for you to say," Rosie muttered. She went on, listening to the rainwater drip from the dead trees and realizing-reluctantly-that she could see faces in the bark. It wasn't like lying on your back and looking at clouds, where your imagination did ninety per cent of the work; these were real faces. Screaming faces. To Rosie they looked like women's faces, for the most part. Women who had been talked to right up close. After she had walked a little way she rounded a bend and found the path blocked by a fallen tree which had apparently been struck by lightning at the height of the storm. One side was splintered and black. Several of the branches on that side still smoldered sullenly, like the ashes of a carelessly doused campfire. Rosie was afraid to climb over it; gouges and splinters and jags of wood stuck up all over the burst trunk. She began edging around it on the right, where the roots had torn out of the ground. She had gotten most of the way back to the path when one of the tree's roots suddenly jerked, quivered, then slid around her upper thigh like a dusty brown snake. Hey, baby! Want to do the dog? Want to do the dog, you bitch? The voice came drifting out of the crumbling dry cave of earth where the tree had so recently stood. The root slid higher on her thigh. Want to put all four on the floor, Rosie? That sound good? I'll be your back-door man, gobble you like a toasted-cheese sandwich. Or would you rather suck my AIDS-infected-"Let me go," Rosie said quietly, and pressed the crumpled wad of her nightgown against the root that was holding her. It loosened and fell away immediately. She hurried the rest of the way around the tree and resumed the path. The root had squeezed hard enough to leave a red ring on her thigh, but the mark faded quickly. She supposed she should have been terrified by what had just happened, that perhaps something meant for her to be terrified. If so, it hadn't worked. She decided that this was a pretty cutrate chamber of horrors, all in all, for someone who had lived with Norman Daniels for fourteen years.

7

Another five minutes brought her to the end of the path. It opened into a perfectly circular clearing, and within it was the only living thing in all this desolation. It was the most beautiful tree Rosie had ever seen in her life, and for several moments she actually forgot to breathe. She had been a faithful attendee of Methodist Little Folks Sunday School back in Aubreyville, and now she remembered the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and thought that if there really had been a Tree of Good and Evil standing at the center of that place, it must have looked just like this. It was densely dressed in long, narrow leaves of polished green, and its branches hung heavy with a perfect bounty of reddish-purple fruit. The falls surrounded the tree in a rose madder drift which exactly matched the color of the short gown worn by the woman Rosie hadn't dared to look at. Many of these falls were still fresh and plump; they had probably been struck from the tree in the storm which had just passed. Even those well advanced in rot looked almost unbearably sweet; Rosie's mouth cramped pleasurably at the thought of picking up one of those fruits and biting deeply into it. She thought the taste would be both tart and sweet, something like a stalk of rhubarb picked early in the morning, or raspberries taken from the bush the day before they came to perfect ripeness. As she looked at the tree, one of the fruits (to Rosie it looked no more like a pomegranate than it looked like a bureau drawer) dropped from an overloaded branch, struck the ground, and split open in rose madder folds of flesh. She could see the seeds amid its trickling juices. Rosie took a step toward the tree and stopped. She kept swinging back and forth between two poles: her mind's belief that all this had to be a dream, and her body's equally emphatic assertion that it couldn't be, that no one on earth had ever had a dream this real. Now, like a troubled compass needle caught in a landscape where there are too many mineral deposits, she swung doubtfully back toward the dream thesis. Standing to the left of the tree was something that looked like a subway entrance. Broad white steps led down into darkness. Above them was an alabaster plinth upon which a single word had been carved: MAZE. Really, this is too much, Rosie thought, but she walked toward the tree just the same. If this was a dream, it couldn't hurt to follow instructions; doing so might even hasten the moment when she finally woke up in her own bed, groping for the alarm-clock, wanting to silence its self-righteous yell before it could split her head open. How she would welcome its cry this time! She was chilly, her feet were dirty, she had been groped by a root, and ogled by a stone boy who, in a properly made world, would have been too young to know what the hell he was looking at. Most of all she felt that if she didn't get back to her room soon, she was apt to come down with a really wonderful cold, maybe even bronchitis. That would take care of her date on Saturday, and keep her out of the recording studio all next week as well. Not seeing the absurdity of believing one could become ill as the result of an excursion made in a dream, Rosie knelt down just beyond the fallen fruit. She surveyed it carefully, wondering again how it would taste (like nothing you found in the produce aisle of the A amp;P, that was for sure), then unfolded a corner of her nightgown. She tore off another chunk, wanting to provide herself with a square of cloth and succeeding better than she had expected to do. She laid it down, then began to pick seeds up off the ground, placing each one on the cloth she intended using to carry them. A good plan, too, she thought. Now if I only knew why I was carrying them. The tips of her fingers went numb right away, as if they had been shot full of Novocain. At the same time, the most wonderful aroma filled her nose. Sweet but not flowery, it made Rosie think of the pies, cakes, and cookies that had come from her gramma's stove. It made her think of something else, as well, something which was light-years from Gramma Weeks's kitchen with its faded linoleum and Currier amp; Ives prints: of how she had felt when Bill's hip brushed against hers as they were walking back to the Corn Building. She laid two dozen seeds on the square of cloth, hesitated, shrugged, and added two dozen more. Would that be enough? How could she know, when she didn't know what they were for to begin with? In the meantime, she'd better be moving. She could hear the baby again, but the cries were now little more than echoey whimpers-the sounds babies made when they were getting ready to give up and go to sleep. She folded the damp cloth over and then tucked the edges in, making a little envelope that reminded her of the seed-packets her dad had gotten from the Burpee Company late each winter, back in the days when she had still been a regular attendee at Little Folks Sunday School. She had now grown comfortable enough with her nakedness to be exasperated by it rather than ashamed: she wanted a pocket. Well, if wishes were pigs, bacon would always be on sa-The part of her that was practical and sensible realized what she was about to do with her rose madder-stained fingers less than a second before they would have been in her mouth. She snatched them away with her heart pounding and that sweet/tart smell filling her head. Don't taste the fruit, "Wendy" had told her. Don't taste the fruit or even put the hand that touches the seeds into your mouth! This place was full of traps. She got up, looking at her stained and tingling fingers as if she had never seen them before. She backed away from the tree standing in its circle of fallen fruit and spilled seeds. It's not the Tree of Good and Evil, Rosie thought. It's not the Tree of Life, either. I think this is the Tree of Death. A little gust of wind puffed past her, rustling through the pomegranate tree's long, polished leaves, and they seemed to rattle out her name in a hundred small, sarcastic whispers: Rosie-Rosie-Rosie! She knelt again, wishing for live grass, but there was none. She put down her nightgown with the rock inside it, placed the little packet of seeds on top of it, then snatched up big handfuls of wet, dead grass. She scrubbed the hand which had touched the seeds as well as she could. The rose madder stain faded but didn't disappear completely, and it remained bright beneath her nails. It was like looking at a birthmark which nothing will completely bleach out. Meantime, the baby's cries were becoming ever more occasional.

"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 penned up down here. Something was, of course: the bull Erinyes. Ahead were three free-standing stone walls facing her edge-on and running away into the gloom. Each was about twelve feet high, much too tall for her to see over. They glowed with that sullen green light, and Rosie nervously examined the four narrow passages they made. Which one? Somewhere far ahead of her, the baby continued to whimper... but the sound was fading relentlessly. It was like listening to a radio which is being slowly but steadily turned down.

"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 flannel shirt, the one she wore until it practically fell apart on her back, and then she peeled back her lips and let loose with the old ululating, yodeling cry. She was delighted, almost ecstatic, when it came out sounding just as it had in the old days, but there was something even better: it made her feel the way it had in the old days, like a combination of Wonder Woman, Supergirl, and Annie Oakley. And it still affected others as it had back then, it seemed; the baby had begun to cry again even before she had finished sending her schoolyard warwhoop into the stony dark. It was, in fact, screaming at the top of its lungs. Quick now, Rosie, you have to be. If she's really tired, she won't be able to manage that volume for very long. Rosie took a couple of steps forward, eyeing each of the four entrances to the maze, then walked past each of them, listening. The wail of the baby might have sounded a bit louder coming out of the third passageway. That could have been no more than imagination, but at least it was a place to begin. She started down it, bare feet slapping on the stone floor, then halted with her head cocked and her teeth working at her lower lip. Her old warcry had stirred up more than the baby, it seemed. Somewhere in here-how close or far away was impossible to tell because of the echo-hooves were running on rock. They moved at a lazy lope, seeming to grow closer, then fading a little, then growing closer again, then (somehow this was more frightening than the sound itself) stopping altogether. She heard a low, wet snort. It was followed by an even lower grunting sound. Then there was only the baby, its bellows already beginning to subside again. Rosie found herself able to imagine the bull all too well, a vast animal with a bristly hide and thick black shoulders humping grimly above its dropped head. It would have a gold ring in its nose, of course, like the Minotaur in her childhood book of myths, and the green light sweating out of the walls would reflect off that ring in tiny stitches of liquid light. Erinyes was standing quietly now in one of the passages ahead, its horns tipped forward. Listening for her. Waiting for her. She walked down the faintly glowing corridor, trailing one hand along the wall, listening for the baby and the bull. She kept an eye out for more droppings, too, but saw none. Not yet, anyway. After perhaps three minutes, the passage she was following emptied into a T-junction. The sound of the baby seemed slightly louder to the left (or do I just have a dominant ear to match my dominant hand? she wondered), so she turned in that direction. She had taken only two steps when she stopped short. All at once she knew what the seeds were for: she was Gretel underground, with no brother to share her fear. She went back to the T-junction, knelt, and unfolded one side of her packet. She placed a seed on the floor with the sharp end pointing back in the direction from which she had come. At least, she reflected, there were no birds down here to gobble up her backtrail. Rosie got to her feet and began walking again. Five paces brought her to a new passage. She peered down it and saw that it divided into three branches just a short way up. She chose the center branch, marking it with a pomegranate seed. Thirty paces and two turns later, this passage dead-ended in a stone wall upon which seven black words had been slashed: WANT TO DO THE DOG WITH ME? Rosie returned to the three-way junction, stooped to pick up her seed, and laid it at the head of a new path.

8

She had no idea how long it took her to find her way to the center of the maze in this fashion, because time quickly lost all meaning for her. She knew it couldn't have taken terribly long, because the baby's cries continued... although by the time Rosie began to get really close, they had become intermittent. Twice she heard the bull's hooves go thudding dully along the stone floor, once at a distance, once so close that she stopped short, hands clasped between her br**sts, as she waited for it to appear at the head of the passageway she was in. If she had to backtrail, she always picked up the last seed so she should suffer no confusion on her way back out. She had started with almost fifty; when she finally came around a corner and observed a much brighter green glow straight ahead, she was down to three. She walked to the end of the passageway and stood at its mouth, looking into a square stone-floored room. She glanced up briefly, looking for a roof, and saw only a cavernous blackness that made her dizzy. She looked down again, registered several more large pats of dung scattered across the floor, and then turned her attention to the center of the room. Lying there on a pad of blankets was a plump, fair-haired baby. Her eyes were swollen with crying and her cheeks were wet with tears, but she had fallen quiet again, at least for the time being. Her feet were in the air and she appeared to be trying to examine her toes. Every now and then she gave out a watery, sobbing little gasp. These sounds moved Rosie's heart in a way the baby's all-out wails had not been able to do; it was as if the infant knew somehow that she had been abandoned. Bring me my baby. Whose baby? Who is she, really? And who brought her here? She decided she didn't care about the answer to those questions, at least not now. It was enough that she was lying here, perfectly sweet and all alone, trying to comfort herself with her own toes in the chilly green light at the center of the maze. And that light can't be good for her, Rosie thought distractedly, hurrying toward the center of the room. It must be some kind of radiation. The baby turned her head, saw Rosie, and raised her arms toward her. The gesture won Rosie's heart completely. She wrapped the top blanket in the pile over the child's chest and belly, then picked her up. The infant looked to be about three months old. She put her arms around Rosie's neck and then dropped her head-dunk!-down on Rosie's shoulder. She began to sob again, but very weakly.

"That's all right," Rosie said, patting the tiny, blanket-wrapped back gently. She could smell the infant's skin, warm and sweeter than any perfume. She put her nose against the fine hair which floated around the perfectly made skull.

"That's all right, Caroline, everything's fine, we're going to get out of this nasty old-" She heard thudding hooves approaching from behind her and shut her mouth, praying that the bull hadn't heard her alien voice, praying that the hooves would turn and begin to fade as Erinyes chose some path that would lead it away from her again. This time that didn't happen. The hoofbeats grew closer-sharper, too, as the bull closed in. Then they stopped, but she could hear something big breathing hard, like a heavyset man who has just climbed a flight of stairs. Slowly, feeling old and stiff, Rosie turned toward the sound with the baby in her arms. She turned to Erinyes, and Erinyes was there. That bull would smell me and come running. That was what the woman in the red dress had told her... and something else. It's me it'd come to, but both of us'd get killed. Had Erinyes smelled her? Smelled her even though the moon was not full for her? Rosie didn't think so. She thought it was the bull's job to guard the baby-perhaps to guard whatever might be at the center of the maze-and that it had been drawn by the sound of the baby's cries, just as Rosie had been. Perhaps that mattered, perhaps it didn't. In any case, the bull was here, and it was the ugliest brute Rosie had ever seen in her life. It stood at the mouth of the passageway it had just run, somehow as unsettled in its shape as the temple she had passed through-it was as though she were looking at it through currents of clear, rapidly moving water. Yet the bull itself was, for the moment at least, completely still. Its head was lowered. One huge front hoof, cloven so deeply it almost looked like a gigantic bird's talon, pawed restlessly at the stone floor. Its shoulders overtopped Rosie's five-feet-six by at least four inches and she guessed its weight at two tons, minimum. The top of its dropped head was flat as a hammer and shiny as silk. Its horns were stubby, no more than a foot in length, but sharp and thick. Rosie had no trouble imagining how easily they would punch into her naked belly... or into her back, if she tried to run. She couldn't imagine how such a death would feel, however; not even after all her years with Norman could she imagine that. The bull raised its head slightly and she saw it did indeed have only one eye, a filmy blue thing, huge and freakish, above the center of its snout. As it lowered its head and began to thud its cloven hoof restlessly against the floor again, she understood something else, as well: it was getting ready to charge. The baby let out an earsplitting howl, almost directly into Rosie's ear, making her jump.

"Hush," she said, bouncing it up and down in her arms.

"Hush-a-baby, no fear, no fear." But there was fear, plenty of it. The bull standing over there in its narrow slot of doorway was going to unzip her guts for her and decorate these peculiar glowing walls with them. She supposed they would look black against the green, like the shapes which occasionally seemed to twist deep in the stone. There was nothing in this center chamber to hide behind, not so much as a single pillar, and if she ran for the passage she'd come out of, the blind bull would hear her feet on the stone and cut her off before she had gotten halfway-it would gore her, toss her against the wall, gore her again, and then trample her to death. The baby as well, if she managed to keep hold of it. One-eyed blind, but there ain't nothing wrong with his sense of smell. Rosie stood watching it with wide eyes, mesmerized by the tapping front hoof. When that tapping finally stopped-She looked down at the damp, crumpled ball of nightgown in her hand. The ball of nightgown with the rag-wrapped stone in the center. Nothing wrong with his sense of smell. She dropped to one knee, keeping her eyes trained on the bull and holding the baby against her shoulder with her right hand. She used the left to open out her nightgown. The piece she had wrapped around the rock had been a dark red, rich with

"Wendy Yarrow's" blood, but the downpour had washed much of it away, and the fabric was now a fading pink. Only the ears of cloth, where she had tied it over the rock, were brighter-were, in fact, rose madder. Rosie cupped the stone in her left hand, feeling the heft of it. Just as the bull's haunches flexed, she underhanded the stone, bowling it along the floor to the bull's left. Its head swung heavily in that direction, its nostrils flared, and it charged toward what it both heard and smelled. Rosie was on her feet again in a flash. She left the crumpled remnant of her nightgown lying beside the baby's pad of blankets. The little packet containing the last three pomegranate seeds was still in her hand, but Rosie wasn't aware of them. She was aware only of sprinting across the room toward the passageway she wanted, while behind her Erinyes charged the rock, kicked it aslant with one flying hoof, chased it down again, butted it with the flat hammer of its head, sent it flying into one of the other passages, and then chased after it, grunting thickly in its throat. She was sprinting, yes, but in slow motion, and now all this seemed like a dream again, because this was the way one always ran in dreams, especially the bad ones where the fiend was always just two steps behind. In nightmares, escape became an underwater ballet. She burst into the narrow corridor just as she heard the hoofbeats wheel around and begin to approach again. They came fast, bearing down on her, and as they closed in, Rosie screamed and clutched the yowling, frightened baby to her br**sts and ran for her life. It did no good. The bull was faster. It overtook her... and then passed by on the far side of the wall to her right. Erinyes had discovered the ruse of the stone in time to double back and catch her, but it had chosen the wrong passageway by one. Rosie hurried on, gasping, dry-mouthed, feeling the rapid rhythm of her heartbeat in her temples, her throat, her eyeballs. She hadn't the slightest idea of where she was, or in which direction she was traveling; now everything depended on the seeds. If she had forgotten so much as a single one, she might wander in here for hours, until the bull finally found her and ran her down. She reached a five-way junction, looked down, and saw no seed. She did see a gleaming, aromatic spatter of bullpiss, however, and it gave rise to a horribly plausible idea. Suppose there had been a seed? She couldn't remember dropping one here, true enough, so in itself the lack of one meant nothing. But she couldn't remember not dropping one, either. Suppose she had, and suppose the bull had picked it up on its hoof as it raced through the intersection with its head down and its short, sharp horns sorting through the air, spraying piss as it went? You can't think of that, Rosie-plausible or not, you can't think of it. You'll freeze, and eventually the bull will kill both of you. She dashed across the intersection, holding the baby's neck with one hand, not wanting her head to go whipping back and forth. The passage ran straight on for twenty yards, made a right-angle, then ran another twenty yards to a T-junction. She hurried down to it, telling herself not to lose her head if she found no seed there. In that case, she would simply retrace her steps to the five-way and try another choice, easy as pie, simple as could be, zero perspiration... if she kept her head, that was. And even as she was preparing herself with these thoughts, an alien, frightened voice at the back of her mind was moaning, Lost, this is what you get for leaving your husband, this is how it all turns out, lost in the maze, playing hide-and-seek with a bull in the dark, doing errands for madwomen... this is what happens to bad wives, to wives who get above their place in the scheme of things. Lost in the dark... She saw the seed, its sharp end pointing clearly into the righthand arm of the junction, and sobbed with relief. She kissed the baby's cheek and saw she had fallen asleep again.

9

Rosie turned right and began walking with Caroline-it was as good a name as any, surely-cradled in her arms. She never quite lost that nightmarish floating feeling, nor her fear that she would eventually come to an intersection she had forgotten to mark with a seed, but at every choosing-point the seed was there. Erinyes was there, too, however, and the thudding of his hooves on stone, sometimes far-off and muffled, sometimes close and terrifyingly sharp, reminded her of the time she and her parents had gone to New York City when she had been only five or six. The two things she remembered best about that trip were the Rockettes high-kicking their way across the stage at Radio City Music Hall, their legs moving in perfect unison, and the intimidating bustle and confusion of Grand Central Station, with its echoes and huge lighted signs and its tidal flows of people. The people in Grand Central had fascinated her much as the Rockettes had (and for many of the same reasons, although this idea would not come to her until later), but the sound of the trains had scared her badly, because you couldn't tell where they were coming from or where they were going. The disembodied squeals and rumbles swelled and faded, swelled and faded, sometimes distant, sometimes seeming to shake the very floor under one's feet. Listening to the bull Erinyes charge blindly through the maze brought that memory back with amazing clarity. Rosie understood that she, who had never wagered a single dollar on the state lottery or played a single card of church Bingo for a turkey or a set of glassware, was now running in a game of chance where the prize was her life and the forfeit would be her death... and the baby's death, too. She thought of the man in Portside, the one with the handsome, unreliable face and the game of three-card monte set up on top of his suitcase. Now she was the ace of spades. The cold fact was that the bull didn't necessarily need its ears or its sense of smell to find them; it might stumble upon them by dumb luck. But that didn't happen. Rosie came around a final corner and saw the stairs ahead. Gasping, crying, and laughing all at the same time, she hurried out of the passageway and ran for them. She climbed half a dozen, then turned and looked back. From here she could see the maze twisting and sprawling its way into the dimness, a right-and-left-angled confusion of turns, junctions, and blind alleys. Somewhere far off to the right she could hear Erinyes galloping. Galloping away. They were safe from it, and Rosie's shoulders sagged in relief. The voice of

"Wendy" filled her head: Ne'mine that-you get on back here with the child. You done good, but you ain't done yet. No, she certainly was not. She had over two hundred stairs to climb, this time with a child in her arms, and she was exhausted already. One at a time, dear, Practical-Sensible said. That's how you have to do it. One step at a time. Yes, yes. Ms P amp; S, Queen of the Twelve-Step Philosophy. Rose started up (one step at a time), looking over her shoulder from time to time and thinking half formed (can bulls climb stairs?) dreadful thoughts as the maze fell behind her. The baby grew heavier and heavier in her arms, as if some weird mathematical law had come into force here: the closer to the surface, the heavier the kid. She could see a starpoint of daylight above her, and she fixed her eyes on it. For awhile it seemed to mock her, growing no closer at all as her breath came faster and the blood pounded in her temples. For the first time in almost two weeks her kidneys really began to hurt again, throbbing in dull counterpoint to her laboring heart. She ignored all of these things-as well as she could, anyway-and kept her eyes fixed on the starpoint. At last it began to swell and to take on the shape of the opening at the top of the stairs. Five steps from the top, a paralyzing cramp sank into the big muscles of her right thigh, knotting the flesh from the back of her knee almost all the way up to her right buttock. When she reached down to massage her leg, it was at first like trying to knead stone. Groaning softly, her mouth pulled down in a trembling moue of pain, she worked on the muscles (this was something else she had done for herself many times during the years of her marriage) until they finally began to loosen. She flexed the leg at the knee, waiting to see if the cramp would seize her again. When it didn't, she cautiously climbed the last few stairs, favoring the leg as she went. At the top, she stood looking around with the dazed eyes of a miner who has, contrary to all his expectations, survived a terrible cave-in. The clouds had rolled away during her time underground, and the day was now filled with hazy summer light. The air was heavy and humid, but Rosie thought she had still never drawn a sweeter breath in her entire life. She turned her face, wet with sweat and tears, gratefully up to the faded blue denim she could see between the unravelling clouds. Somewhere in the distance thunder continued to rumble balefully, like a beaten bully making empty threats. That made her think of Erinyes, running in the darkness below, still looking for the woman who had invaded its domain and stolen its prize. Cherchez la femme, Rosie thought with a trace of a smile. You can cherchez all you want, big fella; this femme-not to mention her petite fille-is gone.

10

Rosie walked slowly away from the stairs. At the head of the path leading back into the grove of dead trees, she sat down with the baby in her lap. All she wanted was to regain her breath, but the hazy sun was warm on her back, and when she raised her head again, some small change in the lie of her shadow made her think she might have dozed a little. As she got to her feet, wincing at the pain that shot through the muscles of her right thigh, she heard the harsh, squabbling cry of many birds-they sounded like a big family having a rancorous argument at Sunday dinner. The child in her arms made a soft snorting sound as Rosie shifted her to a more comfortable position, blew a little spit-bubble between her pursed lips, then fell silent again. Rosie was both amused by and deeply envious of her placid, sleeping confidence. She started down the path, then stopped and looked back at the single living tree with its shiny green leaves, its bounty of deadly reddish-purple fruit, and the Classical Fables subway entrance standing nearby. She looked at these things for a long moment, filling her eyes and mind with them. They're real, she thought. How can things I see so clearly be anything but real? And I dozed off, I know I did. How can you go to sleep in a dream? How can you go to sleep when you're sleeping already? Forget it, Practical-Sensible said. That's the best thing, at least for the time being. Yes, probably it was. Rosie started off again, and when she reached the fallen tree blocking the path, she was amused and rather exasperated to see that her arduous detour around the snarl of roots could have been avoided: there was an easy path around the top of the tree. At least there is now, she thought as she went around it. Are you sure there was before, Rosie? The rocky babble of the black stream rose in her ears, and when she reached it, she saw that the level had already begun to drop and the stepping-stones no longer looked so perilously small; now they looked almost the size of floor-tiles, and the scent of the water had lost its ominously attractive quality. Now it just smelled like very hard water, the kind that would leave an orange ring around the tub and toilet-bowl. The squabble of the birds-You did, No I didn't, Yes you did-started up again, and she observed twenty or thirty of the largest birds she had ever seen in her life lined up along the peak of the temple's roof. They were much too big to be crows, and after a moment she decided they were this world's version of buzzards or vultures. But where had they come from? And why were they here? Without realizing she was doing it until the infant squirmed and protested in her sleep, Rosie hugged the baby tighter to her breast as she gazed at the birds. They all took off at the same instant, their wings flapping like sheets on a clothesline. It was as if they had seen her looking at them and didn't like it. Most of them flew off to roost in the dead trees behind her, but several remained in the hazy sky overhead, circling like bad omens in a western movie. Where did they come from? What do they want? More questions to which Rosie had no answers. She pushed them away and crossed the stream on the stones. As she approached the temple, she saw a neglected but faintly visible path leading around its stone flank. Rosie took it without a single moment of interior debate, although she was naked and both sides of the path were lined with thorn-bushes. She walked carefully, turning sideways to keep her hip from being scratched, holding (Caroline) the baby up and out of thorns" way. Rosie took one or two swipes in spite of her care, but only one-across her badly used right thigh-was deep enough to draw blood. As she came around the corner of the temple and glanced up at the front, it seemed to her that the building had changed somehow, and that the change was so fundamental that she wasn't quite able to grasp it. She forgot the idea for a moment in her relief at seeing

"Wendy" still standing beside the fallen pillar, but after she'd taken half a dozen steps toward the woman in the red dress, Rosie stopped and looked back, opening her eyes to the building, opening her mind to it. This time she saw the change at once, and a little grunt of surprise escaped her. The Temple of the Bull now looked stiff and unreal... two-dimensional. It made Rosie think of a line of poetry she'd read back in high school, something about a painted ship upon a painted ocean. The odd, unsettling sense that the temple was out of perspective (or inhabiting some strange, non-Euclidean universe where all the laws of geometry were different) had departed, and the building's aura of menace had departed with it. Now its lines looked straight in all the places where one expected such a building to look straight; there were no sudden turns or jags in the architecture to trouble the eye. The building looked, in fact, like a painting rendered by an artist whose mediocre talent and run-of-the-mill romanticism have combined to create a piece of bad art-the sort of picture which always seems to end up gathering dust in a basement corner or on an attic shelf, along with old issues of the National Geographic and stacks of jigsaw puzzles with a piece or two missing. Or in the seldom-browsed third aisle of a pawnshop, perhaps.

"Woman! You, woman!" She swung back toward

"Wendy" and saw her beckoning impatiently.

"Hurry up n get that baby over here! This ain't no tourist "traction!" Rosie ignored her. She had risked her life for this child, and she didn't intend to be hurried. She folded back the blanket and looked at a body which was as naked and female as her own. That was where the resemblance ended, however. There were no scars on the child, no marks that looked like the fading teeth of old traps. There was not, as far as Rosie could see, so much as a single mole on that small and lovely body. She traced a finger slowly up the baby's entire length, from ball of ankle to ball of hip to ball of shoulder. Perfect. Yes, perfect. And now that you have risked your life for her, Rosie, now that you've saved her from the dark and the bull and God knows what else that might have been down there, do you intend to turn her over to these two women? Both have some sort of disease working on them, and the one up on the hill has a mental problem, as well. A serious mental problem. Do you intend to give this kid to them? "she be all right," the brown-skinned woman said. Rosie wheeled in the direction of the voice.

"Wendy Yarrow" was now standing at her shoulder, and looking at Rosie with perfect understanding.

"Yes," she said, nodding as if Rosie had spoken her doubts aloud.

"I know what you're thinkin and I tell you it's all right. She mad, no doubt in the world "bout that, but her madness don't extend to the child. She knows that although she bore it, this child ain't hers to keep, no more than it's yours to keep." Rosie glanced toward the hill, where she could just see the woman in the chiton, standing by the pony and waiting for the outcome.

"What's her name?" she asked.

"The baby's mother? Is it-"

"Ne'mine," the brown woman in the red dress replied, cutting in quickly, as if to keep Rosie from speaking some word better left unsaid.

"Her name don't matter. Her state o" mind does. She a mighty impatient lady these days, along with all her other woes. We best be goin up with no more jabber." Rosie said, "I'd made up my mind to call my baby Caroline. Norman said I could. He didn't really care one way or the other." She began to cry. "seems like a nice enough name to me. A fine name. Don't you cry, now. Don't you carry on." She slipped an arm around Rosie's shoulders and they began walking up the hill. The grass whispered gently against Rosie's bare legs and tickled her knees.

"Will you listen to a piece o" my advice, woman?" Rosie looked at her curiously.

"I know advice is hard to take in matters o" sorrow, but think about my qualifications to give it: I was born in slavery, raised in chains, and ransomed to freedom by a woman who's not quite a goddess. Her." She pointed to the woman who stood silently watching and waiting for them. 'she's drunk the waters of youth, and she made me drink, too. Now we go on together, and I don't know "bout her, but sometimes when I look in the mirror I wish for wrinkles. I've buried my children, and their children, and their children's children into the fifth generation. I've seen wars come n go like waves on a beach that roll in n rub out the footprints and wash away the castles in the sand. I've seen bodies on fire and heads by the hundreds poked onto poles along the streets of the City of Lud, I've seen wise leaders assassinated and fools put up in their places, and still I live." She sighed deeply. "still I live, and if there's anything that qualifies me to give advice, it's that. Will you hear it? Answer quick. It's not advice I'd have her overhear, and we're drawin close."

"Yes, tell me," Rosie said.

"It's best to be ruthless with the past. It ain't the blows we're dealt that matter, but the ones we survive. Now remember, for your sanity's sake if not your life's, don't look at her!" The woman in red spoke these last words in an emphatic little mutter. Less than a minute later, Rosie was once more standing in front of the blonde woman. She fixed her eyes firmly on the hem of Rose Madder's chiton, and she didn't realize she was clutching the baby too tightly again until

"Caroline" wriggled in her arms and waved an indignant arm. The child had awakened and was looking up at Rosie with bright interest. Her eyes were the same hazy blue as the summer sky overhead.

"You've done well, so you have," that low and sweetly husky voice told her.

"I thank you. Now give her to me." Rose Madder held out her hands. They swarmed with shadows. And now Rosie saw something she liked even less: a thick, gray-green sludge was growing between the woman's fingers like moss. Or scales. Without thinking about what she was doing, Rosie held the baby against her. This time she wriggled more strongly, and voiced a short cry. A brown hand reached out and squeezed Rosie's shoulder.

"It's all right, I tell you. She'd never hurt it, and I'll have most the care of it until our journey's done. That won't be long, and then she'll turn the child over to... well, that part don't matter. For a little while longer, the baby's hers. Give it over, now." Feeling it was the hardest thing she'd ever had to do in a life full of hard things, Rosie held out the baby. There was a soft little grunt of satisfaction as the shadowy hands took her. The baby gazed up into the face which Rosie was forbidden to look at... and laughed.

"Yes, yes," the sweet, husky voice crooned, and there was something in it like Norman's smile, something that made Rosie feel like screaming.

"Yes, sweet one, it was dark, wasn't it? Dark and nasty and bad, oh yes, Mamma knows." The mottled hands lifted the baby against the rose madder gown. The child looked up, smiled, then laid her head on her mother's breast and closed her eyes again.

"Rosie," the woman in the chiton said. Her voice was musing, thoughtful, insane. The voice of a despot who will soon seize personal control of imaginary armies.

"Yes," Rosie nearly whispered. "really Rosie. Rosie Real."

"Y-Yes. I guess." "do you remember what I told you before you went down?"

"Yes," Rosie said.

"I remember very well." She wished she didn't.

"What was it?" Rose Madder asked greedily.

"What did I tell you, Rosie Real?"

""I repay.'"

"Yes. I repay. Was it bad for you, down in the dark? Was it bad for you, Rosie Real?" She thought this over carefully.

"Bad, but not the worst. I think the worst was the stream. I wanted to drink."

"There are many things in your life that you would forget?"

"Yes. I guess there are."

"Your husband?" She nodded. The woman with the sleeping baby against her breast spoke with a queer, flat assurance that chilled Rosie's heart.

"You shall be divorced of him." Rosie opened her mouth, found herself quite incapable of speech, and closed it again.

"Men are beasts," Rose Madder said conversationally. "some can be gentled and then trained. Some cannot. When we come upon one who cannot be gentled and trained-a rogue-should we feel that we have been cursed or cheated? Should we sit by the side of the road-or in a rocking chair by the bed, for that matter-bewailing our fate? Should we rage against ka? No, for ka is the wheel that moves the world, and the man or woman who rages against it will be crushed under its rim. But rogue beasts must be dealt with. And we must go about that task with hopeful hearts, for the next beast may always be different." Bill isn't a beast, Rosie thought, and knew she would never dare say that aloud to this woman. It was too easy to imagine this woman seizing her and tearing her throat out with her teeth.

"In any case, beasts will fight," Rose Madder said.

"That is their way, to lower their heads and rush at each other so they may try their horns. Do you understand?" Rosie suddenly thought she did understand what the woman was saying, and it terrified her. She raised her fingers to her mouth and touched her lips. They felt dry, feverish.

"There isn't going to be any fight," she said.

"There isn't going to be any fight, because they don't know about each other. They-"

"Beasts will fight," Rose Madder repeated, and then held something out to Rosie. It took her a moment to realize what it was: the gold armlet she'd been wearing above her right elbow.

"I... I can't."

"Take it," the woman in the chiton said with sudden harsh impatience.

"Take it, take it! And don't whine anymore! For the sake of every god that ever was, stop your stupid sheep's whining!" Rosie reached out with a trembling hand and took the armlet. Although it had been against the blonde woman's flesh, it felt cold. If she asks me to put it on, I don't know what I'll do, Rosie thought, but Rose Madder did not ask her to put it on. Instead she reached out with her mottled hand and pointed toward the olive tree. The easel was gone, and the picture-like the one in her room-had grown to an enormous size. It had changed, as well. It still showed the room on Trenton Street, but now there was no woman facing the door. The room was in darkness. Just a fluff of blonde hair and a single bare shoulder showed above the blanket on the bed. That's me, Rosie thought in wonder. That's me sleeping and having this dream.

"Go on," Rose Madder said, and touched the back of her head. Rosie took a step toward the picture, mostly to get away from even the lightest touch of that cold and awful hand. As she did, she realized she could hear-very faintly-the sound of traffic. Crickets jumped around her feet and ankles in the high grass.

"Go on, little Rosie Real. Thank you for saving my baby."

"Our baby," Rosie said, and was instantly horrified. A person who corrected this woman had to be insane herself. But the woman in the reddish-purple chiton sounded amused rather than angry when she replied.

"Yes, yes, if you like-our baby. Go on, now. Remember what you have to remember, and forget what you need to forget. Protect yourself while you are outside the circle of my regard." You bet, Rosie thought. And I won't be coming around, looking for favors, you can count on it. That would be like hiring Idi Amin to cater a garden-party, or Adolf Hitler to-The thought broke off as she saw the woman in the painting shift in her bed and pull the blanket up over her exposed shoulder. Not a painting, not anymore. A window.

"Go on," the woman in the red dress said softly.

"You done fine. Get gone before she change her mind "bout how she feel." Rosie stepped toward the picture, and from behind her Rose Madder spoke again, her voice neither sweet nor husky now but loud and harsh and murderous:

"And remember: I repay!" Rosie's eyes winced shut at this unexpected shout, and she lunged forward, suddenly sure that the woman in the chiton had forgotten the service Rosie had done her and had decided to kill her after all. She tripped over something (the bottom edge of the painting, perhaps?) and then there was a sense of falling. She had time to feel her stomach turn over like a circus tumbler, and then there was only darkness, rushing past her eyes and ears. In it she seemed to hear some ominous sound, distant but drawing closer. Perhaps it was the sound of trains in the deep tunnels beneath Grand Central Station, perhaps it was the rumble of thunder, or perhaps it was the bull Erinyes, running the blind depths of his maze with his head down and his short, sharp horns sorting the air. Then, for a little while, at least, Rosie knew nothing at all.

11

She floated silently and thoughtlessly, like an undreaming embryo in its placental sac, until seven o'clock in the morning. Then the Big Ben beside the bed tore her out of sleep with its ruthless howl. Rosie sat bolt-upright, flailing at the air with hands like claws and crying out something she didn't understand, words from a dream that was already forgotten: "don't make me look at you! Don't make me look at you! Don't make me! Don't make me!" Then she saw the cream-colored walls, and the sofa that was really just a loveseat with delusions of grandeur, and the light flooding in through the window, and used these things to lock in the reality she needed. Whoever she might have been or wherever she might have gone in her dreams, she was now Rosie McClendon, a single woman who recorded audio-books for a living. She had stayed for a long time with a bad man, but had left him and met a good one. She lived in a room at 897 Trenton Street, second floor, end of the hall, good view of Bryant Park. Oh, and one other thing. She was a single woman who never intended to eat another foot-long hotdog in her life, especially one smothered in sauerkraut. They did not agree with her, it seemed. She couldn't remember what she had dreamed (remember what you have to remember and forget what you need to forget) but she knew how it had started: with her walking into that damned painting like Alice going through the looking-glass. Rosie sat where she was for a moment, wrapping herself in her Rosie Real world as firmly as she could, then reached out for the relentless alarm-clock. Instead of gripping it, she knocked it onto the floor. It lay there, bawling its excited, senseless cry.

"Hire the handicapped, it's fun to watch em," she croaked. She leaned over and groped for the clock, fascinated all over again by the blonde hair she saw from the corner of her eye, locks so fabulously unlike those of that obedient little creepmouse Rose Daniels. She got hold of the clock, felt with her thumb for the stud that shut off the alarm, and then paused as something else registered. The breast pressing against her right forearm was naked. She silenced the alarm, then sat up with the clock still in her left hand. She pushed down the sheet and light blanket. Her bottom half was as bare as her top half.

"Where's my nightie?" she asked the empty room. She thought she had never heard herself sounding so exceptionally stupid... but of course, she wasn't used to going to bed with her nightgown on and waking up naked. Even fourteen years of marriage to Norman had not prepared her for anything quite that peculiar. She put the clock back on the nighttable, swung her legs out of bed-"Ow!" she cried, both startled and frightened by the pain and stiffness in her hips and thighs. Even her butt hurt.

"Ow, ow, OW!" She sat on the edge of the bed and gingerly flexed her right leg, then her left. They moved, but they hurt, especially the right one. It was as if she'd spent most of yesterday doing the granddaddy of all workouts, rowing machine, treadmill, StairMaster, although the only exercise she had taken was her walk with Bill, and that had been no more than a leisurely stroll. The sound was like the trains in Grand Central Station, she thought. What sound? For a moment she thought she almost had it-had something, anyway-and then it was gone again. She got slowly and cautiously to her feet, stood beside the bed for a moment, then walked toward the bathroom. Limped toward the bathroom. Her right leg felt as if she had actually strained it somehow, and her kidneys ached. What in God's name-? She remembered reading somewhere that people sometimes "ran" in their sleep. Perhaps that was what she had been doing; perhaps the jumble of dreams she couldn't quite remember had been so horrible that she'd actually made an effort to run away from them. She stopped in the bathroom doorway and looked back at her bed. The bottom sheet was rumpled, but not twisted or tangled or pulled loose, as she would have expected if she had been really active in her sleep. Rosie saw one thing she didn't like much, however, something that flashed her back to the bad old days with terrible and unexpected suddenness: blood. They were the prints of thin lines rather than drops, however, and they were too far down to have come from a punched nose or a split lip... unless, of course, her sleeping movements had been so vigorous she'd actually turned around in her bed. Her next thought was that she'd had a visit from the cardinal (this was how her mother had insisted Rosie speak of her menstrual periods, if she had to speak of them at all), but it was entirely the wrong time of the month for that. Is it your time, girl? Is the moon full for you?

"What?" she asked the empty room.

"What about the moon?" Again, something wavered, almost held, and then floated away before she could grasp it. She looked down at herself, and one mystery was solved, at least. She had a scratch on her upper right thigh, quite a nasty one, from the look. That was undoubtedly where the blood on the sheet had come from. Did I scratch myself in my sleep? Is that what-This time the thought which came into her mind held a little longer, perhaps because it wasn't a thought at all, but an image. She saw a naked woman-herself-edging carefully sideways along a path which was overgrown with thorn-bushes. As she turned on the shower and held one hand under the spray to test the temperature, she found herself wondering if you could bleed spontaneously in a dream, if the dream was vivid enough. Sort of like those people who bled from their hands and feet on Good Friday. Stigmata? Are you saying that on top of everything else, you're suffering stigmata? I'm not saying anything because I don't know anything, she answered herself, and how true that was. She supposed she could believe-just about barely-that a scratch might appear spontaneously on a sleeping person's skin, matching a scratch that was occurring at that same moment in the person's dream. It was a stretch, but not entirely out of the question. What was out of the question was the idea that a sleeping person could make the nightgown disappear right off her body simply by dreaming she was naked. (Take off that thing you're wearing. (I can't do that! I don't have anything on underneath! (I won't tell if you won't...) Phantom voices. One she recognized as her own, but the other? It didn't matter; surely it didn't. She had taken her nightgown off in her sleep, that was all, or perhaps in a brief waking interlude which she now remembered no better than her weird dreams about running around in the dark or using white stepping-stones to cross streams of black water. She had taken it off, and when she got around to looking, she would no doubt find it wadded up under the bed.

"Right. Unless I ate it, or someth-" She pulled back the hand which had been testing the water and looked at it curiously. There were fading reddish-purple stains on the tips of her fingers, and a slightly brighter residue of the same stuff under her nails. She raised the hand slowly to her face, and a voice deep down in her mind-not the voice of Practical-Sensible this time, at least she didn't think so-responded with unmistakable alarm. Dassn't put the hand that touches the seeds into your mouth! Dassn't, dassn't!

"What seeds?" Rosie asked, frightened. She smelled her fingers and caught just a ghost of an aroma, a smell that reminded her of baking and sweet cooked sugar."

What seeds? What happened last night? Is it-" She made herself stop there. She knew what she had been about to say, but didn't want to hear the question actually articulated, hanging in the air like unfinished business: Is it still happening? She got into the shower, adjusted the water until it was as hot as she could take it, and then grabbed the soap. She washed her hands with particular care, scrubbed them until she could not see so much as a trace of that rose madder stain, even under her nails. Then she washed her hair, beginning to vocalize as she did so. Curt had suggested nursery rhymes in different keys and vocal registers, and that was what she did, keeping her voice low so not to disturb the people above or below her. When she got out five minutes later and dried off, her body was starting to feel a little more like real flesh and a little less like something constructed out of barbed wire and broken glass. Her voice had almost returned to normal, as well. She started to put on jeans and a tee-shirt, remembered that Rob Lefferts was taking her to lunch, and put on a new skirt instead. Then she sat down in front of the mirror to plait her hair. It was slow going, because her back, shoulders, and upper arms were also stiff. Hot water had improved the situation but not entirely cured it. Yes, it was a good-sized baby for its age, she thought, so absorbed in getting the plait just right that what she was thinking did not even really register. But as she was finishing, she looked into the mirror which reflected the room behind her and saw something which widened her eyes. The morning's other, more minor discordancies slipped from her mind in an instant.

"Oh my God," Rosie said in a strengthless little voice. She got up and walked across the room on legs which felt as nerveless as stilts. In most regards the picture was just the same. The blonde woman still stood on top of her hill with her plaited hair hanging down between her shoulderblades and her left arm raised, but now the hand shading her eyes made sense, because the thunderheads which had overhung the scene were gone. The sky above the woman in the short gown was the faded blue denim of a humid day in July. A few dark birds which hadn't been there before circled in that sky, but Rosie hardly noticed them. The sky's blue because the storm is over, she thought. It ended while I was... well... while I was somewhere else. All she could remember for sure about that somewhere else was that it had been dark and scary. That was enough; she didn't want to remember any more, and she thought maybe she didn't want to have her picture re-framed, after all. She knew she had changed her mind about showing it to Bill tomorrow, or even mentioning it. It would be bad if he saw the change from overcast and thunderheads to hazy sunshine, yes, but it would be even worse if he saw no change at all. That would mean she was losing her mind. I'm not sure I want the damned thing anymore at all, she thought. It's scary. Do you want to hear something really hilarious? I think it might be haunted. She picked the unframed canvas up, holding the edges with her palms, denying her conscious mind access to the thought (careful Rosie don't fall in) that caused her to handle it that way. There was a tiny closet to the right of the door leading out into the hall, with nothing in it yet but the lowtop sneakers she'd been wearing when she left Norman and a new sweater made out of some cheap synthetic stuff. She had to put the picture down in order to open the door (she could have tucked it under her arm long enough to free one hand, of course, but somehow didn't like to do that), and when she picked it up again she paused, looking fixedly at it. The sun was out, definitely new, and there were big black birds circling in the sky above the temple, probably new, but wasn't there something else, as well? Some other change? She thought so, and she thought she wasn't seeing it because it wasn't an addition but a deletion. Something was gone. Something-I don't want to know, Rosie told herself brusquely. I don't even want to think about it, so there. Yes, so there. But she was sorry to feel the way she did, because she'd begun by thinking of the picture as her personal good-luck charm, a kind of rabbit's foot. And of one thing there was absolutely no doubt: it was thinking of Rose Madder, standing there so fearlessly on top of her hill, that had pulled her through on her first day in the recording studio, when she'd suffered the panic attack. So she didn't want to be having these unpleasant feelings about the picture, and most assuredly didn't want to be afraid of it... but she was. After all, the weather in oil-paintings usually didn't clear up overnight, and the amount of stuff you could see in them usually didn't grow and contract, as if some unseen projectionist were switching back and forth between lenses. She didn't know what she was going to do with the picture in the long run, but she knew where it was going to spend today and the coming weekend: in the closet, keeping her old sneaks company. She put it in there, propped it against the wall (resisting an urge to turn it around so it would also face the wall), and then closed the door. With that done, she slipped into her only good blouse, took her bag, and left the room. As she walked down the long, dingy corridor leading to the stairs, two words whispered up from the very bottom of her mind: I repay. She stopped at the head of the stairs, shivering so violently she almost dropped her bag, and for a moment her right leg ached almost all the way up to her buttock, as if she had been struck with a savage cramp. Then it passed, and she went quickly down to the first floor. I won't think about it, she told herself as she walked down the street to the bus stop. I don't have to if I don't want to, and I most definitely don't want to. I'll think about Bill instead. Bill, and his motorcycle.

12

Thinking about Bill got her to work and into the dark-toned world of Kill All My Tomorrows without a hitch, and at lunch there was even less time to think of the woman in the painting. Mr Lefferts took her to a tiny Italian place called Delia Femmina, the nicest restaurant Rosie had ever been in, and while she was eating her melon, he offered her what he called "a more solid business arrangement." He proposed signing her to a contract which would pay her eight hundred dollars a week for twenty weeks or twelve books, whichever came first. It wasn't the thousand a week Rhoda had urged her to hold out for, but Robbie also promised to put her together with an agent who would set her up with as many radio spots as she wanted.

"You can make twenty-two thousand dollars by the end of the year, Rose. More, if you want it... but why knock yourself out?" She asked him if she could have the weekend to think about it. Mr Lefferts told her she certainly could. Before he left her in the lobby of the Corn Building (Rhoda and Curt were sitting together on a bench by the elevator, gossiping like a couple of thieves), he held his hand out to her. She returned the gesture, expecting her hand to be shaken. Instead he took it in both of his, bowed, and kissed it. The gesture-no one had ever kissed her hand before, although she had seen it done in lots of movies-sent a shiver up her back. It was only as she sat in the recording booth, watching Curt thread up a fresh reel in the other room, that her thoughts returned to the picture which was now safely (you hope Rosie you hope) stashed away in her closet. Suddenly she knew what the other change had been, what had been subtracted from the picture: the armlet. The woman in the rose madder chiton had been wearing it above her right elbow. This morning her arm had been bare all the way to her shapely shoulder.

13

When she got back to her room that night, Rosie dropped to her knees and peered beneath her unmade bed. The gold armlet lay all the way in the back, standing on edge in the dark and gleaming softly. To Rosie it looked like the wedding ring of a giantess. Something else lay beside it: a small folded square of blue cloth. She'd found a piece of her missing nightgown after all, it seemed. There were reddish-purple spatters on it. These looked like blood, but Rosie knew they weren't; they were the spill of fruits better not tasted. She had scrubbed similar stains off her fingers this morning in the shower. The armlet was extremely heavy-a pound at least, perhaps even two. If it was made of the stuff it looked like it was made of, how much might it be worth? Twelve thousand dollars? Fifteen? Not bad, considering it had somehow come out of a painting she'd gotten by trading away a nearly worthless engagement ring. Still, she didn't like to touch it, and she put it on the nighttable beside the lamp. She held the little packet of blue cotton in her hand for a moment, sitting there like a teenager with her back propped against the bed and her feet crossed, and then she unfolded one side. She saw three seeds, three little seeds, and as Rosie looked at them with hopeless and unreasoning horror, those merciless words recurred, clanging in her head like iron bells: I repay.

Chapter VII. PICKNICKERS

1

Norman had been trolling for her. He lay awake late in his hotel room on Thursday night and across midnight's dark knife-edge into Friday morning. He turned off all the lights except for the fluorescent bar over the bathroom sink; it threw a diffuse glow across the room that he liked. It made him think of the way streetlights looked when you saw them through a heavy mist. He lay almost exactly as Rosie had lain before falling asleep on that same Thursday night, only with just one hand under his pillow instead of both. He needed the other to smoke with, and to convey the bottle of Glenlivet standing on the floor to his lips. Where are you, Rosie? he asked the wife who was no longer there. Where are you and where did you ever find the nerve to cut and run, a scared little creepmouse like you? It was this second question he cared about the most-how she had dared. The first one didn't matter all that much, not in any practical sense, because he knew where she was going to be on Saturday. A lion doesn't have to bother himself about where the zebra feeds; all he has to do is wait by the waterhole where it drinks. So far, so good, but still... how had she ever dared leave him in the first place? Even if there was no life for him beyond their final conversation, he wanted to know that. Had it been planned? An accident? An aberration born of a single impulse? Had anyone helped her (besides, that was, the late Peter Slowik and the Cavalcade of Cunts on Durham Avenue)? What had she been doing since she'd hit the bricks of this charming little city by the lake? Waitressing? Shaking farts out of sheets in some fleabag like this? He didn't think so. She was too lazy to do menial work, you only had to look at the way she kept house to see that, and she had no skills to do anything else. If you wore tits, that left just one other choice. She was out there someplace right now, selling it on some streetcorner. Of course she was; what else? God knew she was a lousy lay, screwing her had been about as exciting as f**king mud, but pu**y was something men would pay for even if it didn't do anything but lie there and drool a little after the rodeo was over. So yes, sure, she was probably out there selling it. He'd ask her about it, though. He would ask her everything. And when he had all the answers he needed, all the answers he ever wanted from the likes of her, he would wrap his belt around her neck so she couldn't scream, and then he would bite... and bite... and bite. His mouth and jaws still ached from what he had done to Thumper the Amazing Urban Jewboy, but he wouldn't let that stop him, or even slow him down. He had three Percodans at the bottom of his traveling bag, and he would take them before he went to work on his lost lamb, his sweet little rambling Rose. As for afterward, after it was over, after the Percs wore off... But he couldn't see that, and he didn't want to see that. He had an idea that there was going to be no after, only darkness. And that was all right. In fact, a long dose of darkness might be just what the doctor ordered. He lay in bed and drank the best Scotch in the world and burned one cigarette after another, watching the smoke drift up to the ceiling in silky reefs that turned blue when they passed through the soft white radiance from the bathroom, and he trolled for her. He trolled for her, and his hook slipped through nothing but water. There was nothing there and it was driving him crazy. It was as if she had been abducted by aliens, or something. At one point, quite drunk by then, he had dropped a live cigarette into his hand and clenched his fist around it, imagining it was her hand instead of his, that he was holding his hands over hers, clamping hers tight on the heat. And as the pain bit in and wisps of smoke curled out around his knuckles, he whispered, "Where are you, Rose? Where are you hiding, you thief?" Not long after that he drifted off. He woke up around ten on Friday morning, unrested and hungover and vaguely frightened. He had dreamed peculiar dreams all night long. In them he was still awake and still lying in his bed here on the ninth fioor of the Whitestone, and the light from the bathroom was still cutting softly through the darkness of his room, and the cigarette smoke was still rising through it in shifting blue membranes. Only in his dreams, he could see pictures like movies in the smoke. He could see Rose in the smoke. There you are, he thought as he watched her walk through a dead garden in a pelting rainstorm. Rose was naked for some reason, and he felt an unexpected bite of lust. He hadn't felt anything at the sight of her nakedness but weary revulsion for eight years or more, but now she looked different. Pretty good, in fact. It isn't that she's lost weight, he thought in the dream, although it looks like she has... a little, anyway. Mostly it's something about the way she's moving what she's got. What is it? Then it came to him. She had the look of a woman who's f**king someone and hasn't had anywhere near enough just yet. If it had even crossed his mind to doubt this assessment-to say What, Rosie? You got to be kidding, cousin-one look at her hair would have been enough to settle the question once and for all. She'd dyed it slut-blonde, as if she thought she was Sharon Stone, or maybe Madonna. He watched the smoke-Rose leave the weird dead garden and approach a stream so dark it looked more like ink than water. She crossed it on a path of stepping-stones, holding her arms out for balance, and he saw that she had some sort of wet, crumpled rag in one hand. It looked like a nightgown to Norman and he thought: Why don't you put it on, you brazen bitch? Or are you expecting your boyfriend to come by and give your ticket a punch? I'd like to see that. I really would. Tell you one thing-if I so much as catch you holding hands with a guy when I finally track you down, the cops are going to find his goddam trouser-rat sticking out of his ass**le like a birthday candle. No one came by, though-not in the dream, anyway. The Rose over his bed, the smoke-Rose, walked down a path through a grove of trees that looked as dead as... well, as dead as Peter Slowik. At last she came into a clearing where there was one tree which still looked alive. She knelt down, picked up a bunch of seeds, and wrapped them in what looked like another piece of her nightgown. With that done she got up, went to a set of stairs near the tree (in dreams you never knew what f**ked-up thing was going to happen next), and disappeared down them. He was waiting around for her to come back up when he began to feel a presence behind him, something as cold and chill as a draft from an open meat-locker. He'd handled some fairly scary people during his years as a cop-the PCP addicts he and Harley Bissington had had to deal with from time to time were probably the scariest-and you developed a sense of their presence after awhile. Norman was feeling that now. Someone was coming up behind him, and he never doubted for a moment that it was someone dangerous.

"I repay," a woman's voice whispered. It was a sweet voice, and soft, but it was terrifying, just the same. There was no sanity in it.

"Good for you, bitch," Norman said in his dream.

"You try to repay me and I'll change your whole f**king outlook." She screamed, a sound that seemed to go directly to the center of his head without even passing through his ears, and he sensed her lunging toward him with her hands out. He drew in a deep breath and blew the cigarette smoke apart. The woman disappeared. Norman felt her go. For a little while after that there was only darkness, with him floating peacefully in the middle of it, untouched by the fears and desires which haunted him when he was awake. He woke up at ten past ten on Friday morning and shifted his eyes from the clock by the bed to the hotel room ceiling, almost expecting to see phantom figures moving through decaying stacks of cigarette smoke. There were no figures, of course, phantom or otherwise. No smoke, for that matter-just the lingering smell of Pall Malls, in hoc signo vinces. There was only Detective Norman Daniels, lying here in a sweaty bed that smelled of tobacco and used booze. His mouth tasted as if he had spent the previous evening sucking the end of a freshly polished cordovan shoe, and his left hand hurt like a mad bastard. He opened it and saw a shiny blister in the center of his palm. He looked at it for a long time, while pigeons fluttered and cooed at each other on the shit-encrusted ledge that ran past his window. At last the memory of blistering himself with the cigarette came back, and he nodded. He'd done it because he couldn't see Rose no matter how hard he tried... and then, as if in compensation, he'd had crazy dreams about her all night long. He placed two fingers on the sides of the blister and squeezed, slowly increasing the pressure until it popped. He wiped his hand on the sheet, relishing the waves of stinging pain. He lay looking at his hand-watching it throb, almost-for a minute or so. Then he reached under his bed for his traveling bag. There was a Sucrets tin at the bottom, and in it were a dozen or so assorted pills. A few were speedy, but most were downers. As a general rule, Norman found he could get up with no pharmacological help at all; it was getting back down again that sometimes presented a problem. He took a Percodan with a small swallow of Scotch, then lay back, looking up at the ceiling and once again smoking one cigarette after another, stubbing them out in the overflowing ashtray when they were done. This time it wasn't Rose he was thinking of, at least not directly; this time it was the picnic he was considering, the one being thrown by her new friends. He had been to Ettinger's Pier, and what he saw there wasn't encouraging. It was large-a combination beach, picnic area, and amusement park-and he didn't see any way he could stake it out with any confidence of seeing her arrive or leave. If he'd had six men (even four, if they knew what they were doing), he would have felt differently, but he was on his own. There were three ways in, assuming she didn't come by boat, and he could hardly watch all three of them at the same time. That meant working the crowd, and working the crowd would be a bitchkitty. He wished he could believe that Rose would be the only one there tomorrow who would recognize him, but if wishes were pigs, bacon would always be on sale. He had to assume they would be looking for him, and he would also have to assume they had received pictures of him from one of their sister groups back home. He didn't know about the x, but he was coming to believe that the first two letters in fax stood for Fucked Again. That was one part of the problem. The other part was his own belief, backstopped by more than one bitter experience, that disguises were a recipe for disaster in situations like this. The only quicker, surer route to failure in the field was probably wearing the ever-popular wire, where you could lose six months" worth of surveillance and setup if a kid happened to be running a radio-controlled boat or racecar in the area where you were planning to bring the hammer down on some shitbag. All right, he thought. Don't bitch about it. Remember what old Whitey Slater used to say-the situation is what the situation is. How you're going to work around it is the only question. And don't even think of putting it off. Their goddam party is just twenty-four hours away, and if you miss her there, you could hunt for her until Christmas and not find her. In case you hadn't noticed, this is a big city. He got up, walked into the bathroom, and showered with his blistered hand stuck out through the shower curtain. He dressed in faded jeans and a nondescript green shirt, putting on his CHISOX cap and tucking the cheap sunglasses into his shirt pocket, at least for the time being. He took the elevator down to the lobby and went to the newsstand to get a paper and a box of Band-Aids. While he was waiting for the dope behind the counter to figure out his change, he looked over the guy's shoulder and through a glass panel at the back of the newsstand alcove. He could see the service elevators through this panel, and as he watched, one of them opened. Three chattering, laughing chambermaids stepped out. They were carrying their bags, and Norman guessed they were on their way to lunch. He had seen the one in the middle-slim, pretty, fluffy blonde hair-someplace else. After a moment it came to him. He had been on his way to check out Daughters and Sisters. The blonde had walked beside him for a little while. Red slacks. Cute little ass.

"Here you are, sir," the counterman said. Norman stuffed his change into his pocket without looking at it. Nor did he look at the trio of maids as he shouldered past them, not even at the one with the cute tush. He had cross-referenced her automatically, that was all-it was a cop reflex, a knee that jerked on its own. His conscious mind was fixed on one thing and one thing only: the best way to spot Rose tomorrow without being spotted himself. He was heading up the corridor toward the doors when he heard two words which he at first thought must have come out of his own head: Ettinger's Pier. His stride faltered, his heart kicked into overdrive, and the blister in the palm of his hand began to throb fiercely. It was a single missed step, that was all-that one little hesitation, and then he went on heading toward the revolving doors with his head down. Someone looking at him might have thought he'd felt a brief muscle-twinge in his knee or calf, no more than that, and that was good. He didn't dare falter, that was the hell of it. If the woman who'd spoken was one of the cunts from their clubhouse over on Durham Avenue, she might recognize him if he drew attention to himself... might have already recognized him, if the speaker of those two magic words was the little honey he'd crossed the street beside the other day. He knew it was unlikely-as a cop he'd had first-hand experience of how amazingly, numbingly unobservant most civilians were-but from time to time it did happen. Killers and kidnappers and bank-thieves who had eluded capture long enough to make the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List suddenly found themselves back in the slam, dropped by a 7-Eleven clerk who read True Detective or a meter maid who watched all the reality-crime shows on TV. He didn't dare stop, but- but he had to stop. Norman knelt abruptly to the left of the swinging door with his back to the women. He dropped his head and pretended to tie his shoe.

"-sorry to miss the concert, but if I want that car, I can't pass up the-" Out the door they went, but what Norman had heard convinced him: it was the picnic the woman was talking about, the picnic and the concert that was going to round off the day, some group called the Indian Girls, probably lezzies. So there was a chance that this woman knew Rosie. Not a good chance-lots of people who weren't tight with Daughters and Sisters would be at Ettinger's Pier tomorrow-but a chance, just the same. And Norman was a man who believed emphatically in the fickle finger of fate. The hell of it was, he did not yet know which of the three had been talking. Let it be Blondie, he prayed as he got quickly to his feet and went out through the swinging door. Let it be Blondie with the big eyes and the cute ass. Let it be her, what do you say? It was dangerous to follow, of course-you could never tell when one of them might glance idly around and win the super bonus round of Place the Face-but at this point he could do nothing else. He sauntered along behind them, his head casually turned to one side, as if the junkola in the shop windows he was passing was of vital interest to him.

"How are you making out on pillowcases today?" the tub of guts walking on the inside asked the other two.

"For once, they're all there," the older woman walking on the outside said.

"How about you, Pam?"

"I haven't counted yet, it's too depressing," Blondie replied, and they all laughed-those high, giggly sounds that always made Norman feel as if his fillings were cracking in his mouth. He stopped at once, looking in a window at a bunch of sporting goods, letting the maids pull ahead. It was her, all right-no question about it. Blondie was the one who had said the magic words Ettinger's Pier. Maybe it changed everything, maybe it changed nothing. Right now he was too excited to figure it out. It was certainly an amazing stroke of luck, though-the kind of miraculous, coincidental break you always hoped for when you were working a longshot case, the break that happened more often than anyone would ever believe. For now he would file this in the back of his mind and proceed with Plan A. He wouldn't even ask about Blondie back at the hotel, at least not yet. He knew her name was Pam, and that was plenty to start with. Norman walked to the bus stop, waited fifteen minutes for the airport shuttle, and then hopped on board. It was a long ride; the terminal was on the edge of the city. When he finally disembarked in front of Terminal A, he slipped on his dark glasses, crossed the street, and made his way to the longterm parking area. The first car he tried jumping had been there so long the battery was dead. The second one, a nondescript Ford Tempo, started all right. He told the man in the collection booth that he'd been in Dallas for three weeks and had lost the ticket. He was always losing them, he said. He lost laundry tickets, too, and he was always having to show his driver's license at Photomat when he stopped in to pick up his snapshots. The man in the collection booth nodded and nodded, the way you do at a boring story you've already heard about ten thousand times. When Norman humbly offered him an extra ten dollars in lieu of the ticket, the man in the collection booth perked up a little. The money disappeared. Norman Daniels drove out of longterm parking at almost exactly the same moment that Robbie Lefferts was offering his fugitive wife what he termed "a more solid business arrangement." Two miles down the road, Norman parked behind a beat-to-shit Le Sabre and swapped license plates. Another two miles on, he stopped at a Robo-Wash. He had a bet with himself that the Tempo would turn out to be dark blue, but he lost. It was green. He didn't think it mattered-the man in the collection booth had only taken his eyes off his little black-and-white TV when the tenspot had appeared under his nose-but it was best to play safe. It increased the comfort level. Norman turned on the radio and found an oldies station. Shirley Ellis was on, and he sang along as Shirley instructed, "If the first two letters are ever the same / Drop them both and say the name / Like Barry-Barry, drop the B, oh-Arry / That's the only rule that is contrary." Norman realized he knew every word of that stupid old song. What kind of world was it where you couldn't remember the f**king quadratic equation or the various forms of the French verb avoir two years after you got out of high school, but when you were getting on for forty years old you could still remember Nick-Nick-bo-bick, banana-fanna-fo-fick, fee-fi-mo-mick, Nick? What kind of world was that? One that's slipping behind me now, Norman thought serenely, and yes, that seemed to be the truth. It was like in those science fiction movies where the spacemen saw Earth dwindling in the viewscreens, first a ball, then a coin, then a tiny glowing dot, then all gone. That was what the inside of his head was like now-a spacecraft headed out on a five-year mission to explore new worlds and go where no man had gone before. The Starship Norman, approaching warp-speed. Shirley Ellis finished up and something by the Beatles came on. Norman twisted the radio's volume knob off so hard he broke it. He didn't want to listen to any of that hippy-dippy

"Hey Jude" crap today. He was still a couple of miles from where the real city began when he saw a place called The Base Camp ARMY SURPLUS LIKE YOU NEVER FIND! the sign out front read, and for some reason that made him burst out laughing. He thought it was in some ways the single most peculiar motto he'd seen in his whole life; it seemed to mean something, but it was impossible to say just what. Anyway, the sign didn't matter. The store probably had one of the things he was looking for, and that did. There was a big banner reading ALWAYS BE SAFE, NEVER BE SORRY over the middle aisle. Norman inspected three different kinds of "stun-gas," pepper-gas pellets, a rack of Ninja throwing-stars (the perfect weapon for home defense if you should happen to be attacked by a blind quadriplegic), gas guns that fired rubber bullets, slingshots, brass knuckles both plain and studded, blackjacks and bolas, whips and whistles. Halfway down this aisle was a glass case containing what Norman considered to be the only really useful item in The Base Camp. For sixty-three-fifty he purchased a taser which produced a large (although probably not the 90,000 volts promised on the label) wallop of juice between its two steel poles when the triggers were pushed. Norman considered this weapon every bit as dangerous as a small-caliber pistol, and the best part was that one did not have to sign one's name anywhere in order to purchase one.

"You wah niy-vole baddery widdat?" the clerk asked. He was a bullet-headed young man with a harelip. He wore a teeshirt which said BETTER TO HAVE A GUN AND NOT NEED ONE THAN NEED ONE AND NOT HAVE ONE. To Norman he looked like the sort of fellow whose parents might have been blood relatives. "dass waddit runs on-a niy-vole." Norman realized what the young man with the harelip was trying to say and nodded.