Rose Madder

8

She ran into the circular clearing and saw herself, kneeling by the one live tree, back turned, head bowed, as if in prayer or deep meditation. Not me, Rosie thought nervously. That's not really me. But it could have been. With her back turned, the woman kneeling at the base of the "pomegranate tree" could have been her twin. She was the same height, the same build, possessed of the same long legs and wide hips. She was wearing the same rose madder chiton-what the black woman had called a zat-and her hair fell down the center of her back to her waist in a blonde plait identical to Rosie's. The only difference was that both of this woman's arms were bare, because Rosie was wearing her armlet. That probably wasn't a difference Norman would notice, though. He'd never seen Rosie wearing such an item, and she doubted that he would have picked up on it in any case, not the way he was now. Then she saw something he might notice-the dark patches on the back of Rose Madder's neck and on her upper arms. They swarmed like hungry shadows. Rosie came to a halt, looking toward the woman who knelt facing the tree in the moonlight.

"I've come," she said uncertainly.

"Yes, Rosie," the other said in her sweet, greedy voice.

"You've come, but not yet quite far enough. I want you there." She pointed to the broad white steps leading downward beneath the word MAZE.

"Not far-a dozen steps should do, if you lie flat on them. Just far enough so that you won't have to see. You won't want to see this... although you can watch if you decide you do want to." She laughed. The sound was full of genuine amusement, and that, Rosie thought, was what made it so authentically awful.

"In any case," she resumed, "it may be well that you hear what passes between us. Yes, I think that may be very well."

"He may not think you're me, even in the moonlight." Again Rose Madder laughed. The sound of it made the hair on the nape of Rosie's neck stir.

"Why would he not, little Rosie?"

"You have... well... blemishes. Even in this light I can see them."

"Yes, you can," Rose Madder said, still laughing.

"You can, but he won't. Have you forgotten that Erinyes is blind?" Rosie thought to say, You're confused, ma'am, this is my husband we're talking about, not the bull in the maze. Then she remembered the mask Norman was wearing, and said nothing.

"Go quickly," Rose Madder said.

"I hear him coming. Down the steps, little Rosie... and pass not too close by me." She paused, then added in her terrible, thoughtful voice:

"It's not safe."

9

Norman jogged along the path, listening. There was a moment or two when he thought he heard Rose talking, but that could have been his imagination. It didn't matter in any case. If there was someone with her, he would take that person down, too. If he was lucky, it might be Dirty Gertie-maybe the overgrown diesel-dyke had found her way into this dream, too, and Norman could have the pleasure of putting a.45 slug into her fat left tit. The thought of shooting Gertie had gotten him almost running again. He was so close now he thought he could actually smell her-ghostly entwined aromas of Dove soap and Silk shampoo. He came around one final curve. I'm coming, Rose, he thought. Nowhere left to run, nowhere left to hide. I've come to take you home, dear.

10

It was chilly on the steps leading down to the maze, and Rosie noticed a smell that she had missed on her previous trip-a dank, decayed smell. Mingled in it were odors of feces and rotted meat and wild animal. That disquieting thought (can bulls climb stairs?) came to her again, but there was no real fear in it this time. Erinyes was no longer in the maze, unless the wider world-the world of the painting-was also a maze. Oh yes, that strange voice, the one which was not quite the voice of Practical-Sensible, said calmly. This world, all worlds. And many bulls in each one. These myths hum with truth, Rosie. That's their power. That's why they survive. She sprawled flat on the steps, breathing hard, heart pounding. She was terrified, but she also felt a certain bitter eagerness in herself, and knew it for what it was: just another mask for her rage. The hands in front of her face were closed into fists. Do it, she thought. Do it, kill the bastard, set me free. I want to hear him die. Rosie, you don't mean it! That was Practical-Sensible, sounding both horrified and sickened. Say you don't mean it! Except she couldn't, because part of her did. Most of her did.

11

The path he was on finished in a circular clearing, and here she was. Finally, here she was. His rambling Rose. Kneeling with her back to him, wearing that short red dress (he was almost sure it was red), wearing her whore-dyed hair down her back in a kind of pigtail. He stood where he was at the edge of the clearing, looking at her. It was Rose, all right, no question about that, yet she had nevertheless changed. Her ass was smaller, for one thing, but that wasn't the main thing. Her attitude had changed. And what did that mean? That it was time for a little attitude-adjustment, of course.

"Why'd you go and dye your goddam hair?" he asked her.

"You look like a f**king slut!"

"No, you don't understand," Rose said calmly, without turning.

"It was dyed before. It's always been blonde underneath, Norman. I dyed it to fool you." He took two big steps into the clearing, his rage rising as it always did when she disagreed with him or contradicted him, when anyone disagreed with him or contradicted him. And the things she had said tonight... the things she had said to him...

"The f**k you did!" he exclaimed.

"The f**k I didn't," she replied, and then compounded this astoundingly disrespectful statement with a contemptuous little laugh. But she did not turn around. Norman took another two steps toward her, then stopped again. His hands hung in fists at his sides. He scanned the clearing, remembering her murmuring voice as he approached. It was Gert he was looking for, or maybe the little cocksucker boyfriend, ready to shoot him with a popgun of his own, or just chunk a rock at him. He saw no one, which probably meant she'd been talking to herself, something she did at home all the time. Unless someone was crouching behind the tree in the center of the clearing, that was. It appeared to be the only living thing in this still-life, its leaves long and green and narrow, gleaming like the leaves of a freshly oiled avocado plant. Its boughs were weighted down with some weird fruit Norman wouldn't touch even in a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Lying beyond her folded legs was a wealth of windfalls, and the smell which simmered up from them made Norman think of the water in the stream. Fruit that smelled like that would either kill you or gripe you so bad you'd wish you were dead. Standing to the left of the tree was something which confirmed his belief that this was a dream. It looked like a goddam New York City subway entrance, one that had been carved in marble. Never mind that, though; never mind the tree and its pissy-smelling fruit, either. Rose was the important thing here, Rose and that little laugh of hers. He imagined it was her crack-snacking friends who had taught her to laugh like that, but it didn't matter. He was here to teach her something that did: that laughing like that was a very good way to get hurt. He was going to do that in this dream even if he couldn't in reality; he was going to do it even if he was lying on the floor of her room pumped full of police bullets and experiencing a death-delirium.

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

"We've got some things to talk about."

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

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

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

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

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

"Take it off me!" he bawled at her.

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

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

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

"The only one doing any dying here-" he began, and that was as far as he got. She turned, and when the bony light of the moon disclosed her, Norman shrieked. He fired the.45 twice into the ground between his feet without realizing it, then dropped it. He clapped his hands to his head and screamed, backing away, moving jerkily on legs he could now barely command. She answered his cry with one of her own. Rot swarmed across the upper swell of her bosom; her neck was as purple-black as that of a strangulation victim. The skin had cracked open in places and was oozing thick tears of yellow pus. Yet these signs of some far-advanced and obviously terminal disease weren't what brought the screams raking out of his throat and bolting from his mouth in howling spates; they were not what broke through the eggshell surface of his insanity to let in a more terrible reality, like the unforgiving light of an alien sun. Her face did that. It was the face of a bat in which had been set the bright mad eyes of a rabid fox; it was the face of a supernally beautiful goddess seen in an illustration hidden within some old and dusty book like a rare flower in a weedy vacant lot; it was the face of his Rose, whose looks had always been lifted just slightly beyond plainness by the timid hope in her eyes and the slight, wistful curve of her mouth at rest. Like lilies on a dangerous pond, these differing aspects floated on the face which turned toward him and then they blew away and Norman saw what lay beneath. It was a spider's face, twisted with hunger and crazy intelligence. The mouth that opened gave upon a repellent blackness afloat with silk tendrils to which a hundred bugs and beetles stuck fast, some dead and some dying. Its eyes were great bleeding eggs of rose madder red that pulsed in their sockets like living mud.

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

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

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

12

Rosie lay on the stairs with her eyes closed and her fists clenched above her head, listening to him scream. She tried not even to imagine what was going on out there, and she tried to remember that it was Norman who was screaming, Norman of the terrible pencil, Norman of the tennis racket, Norman of the teeth. Yet these things were overwhelmed by the horror of his screams, his agonized shrieks as Rose Madder... as she did whatever it was she was doing. After awhile-a long, long while-the screaming stopped. Rosie lay where she was, fists unrolling slowly but with her eyes still tightly shut, gasping in short, harsh snatches of air. She might have lain there for hours, had not the sweet, mad voice of the woman summoned her:

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

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

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

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

13

"Go back the way you came," Rose Madder said. She was standing by the stairs; Rosie stood on the far side of the clearing, at the head of the path, with her back turned. She didn't want even to risk looking at Rose Madder now, and she had discovered that she could not entirely trust her own eyes to do as she told them.

"Go back, find Dorcas and your man. She has something for you, and I would have more talk with you... but only a little. Then our time is finished. That will be a relief to you, I think."

"He's gone, isn't he?" Rosie asked, looking steadfastly along the moonlit path. "really gone."

"I suppose you'll see him in your dreams," Rose Madder said dismissively, "but what of that? The simple truth of things is that bad dreams are far better than bad wakings."

"Yes. That's so simple most people overlook it, I think."

"Go now. I'll come to you. And Rosie?"

"What?" "remember the tree."

"The tree? I don't-"

"I know you don't. But you will. Remember the tree. Now go." Rosie went. And didn't look back.

Chapter X. ROSIE REAL

1

Bill and the black woman-Dorcas, her name was Dorcas, not Wendy after all-were no longer on the narrow path behind the temple, and Rosie's clothes were gone, too. This raised no concern in her mind. She merely trudged around the building, looked up the hill, saw them standing beside the pony-trap, and started toward them. Bill came to meet her, his pale, distracted face full of concern.

"Rosie? All right?"

"Fine," she said, and put her face against his chest. As his arms went around her, she wondered how much of the human race understood about hugging-how good it was, and how a person could want to do it for hours on end. She supposed some did understand, but doubted that they were in the majority. To fully understand about hugging, maybe you had to have missed a lot of it. They walked up to where Dorcas stood, stroking the pony's white-streaked nose. The pony raised its head and looked at Rosie sleepily.

"Where's..." Rosie began, then stopped. Caroline, she'd almost said, Where's Caroline?

"Where's the baby?"

Then, boldly:

"Our baby?"

Dorcas smiled.

"Safe. In a safe place, don't you fret that, Miss Rosie. Your clothes're "round to the back of the cart. Go on and change, if you like. You be glad to get out of that thing you wearin now, I bet."

"That's a bet you'd win," Rosie said, and went around. She felt an indescribable sense of relief when the zat was off her skin. As she was zipping her jeans, she remembered something Rose Madder had told her.

"Your mistress says you have something for me."

"Oh!" Dorcas sounded startled.

"Oh, my! If I went n forgot that, she'd rip the skin right off me!" Rosie picked up her blouse, and when she pulled it down over her head, Dorcas was holding something out to her. Rosie took it and held it up curiously, tilting it this way and that. It was a cunningly made little ceramic bottle, not much bigger than an eyedropper. Its mouth had been sealed with a tiny sliver of cork. Dorcas looked around, saw Bill standing some distance away, looking dreamily down the hill at the ruins of the temple, and seemed satisfied. When she turned back to Rosie, she spoke in a voice which was low but emphatic.

"One drop. For him. After." Rosie nodded as if she knew exactly what Dorcas was talking about. It was simpler that way. There were questions she could ask, perhaps should ask, but her mind felt too tired to frame them.

"I could have give you less, only he may need another drop later on. But have a care, girl. This is dangerous stuff!" As if anything in this world is safe, Rosie thought.

"Tuck it away, now," Dorcas said, watching as Rosie slipped the tiny bottle into the watch-pocket of her jeans.

"And mind you keep quiet about it to him." She jerked her head in Bill's direction, then looked back at Rosie, her dark face set and grim. Her eyes looked momentarily pupilless in the darkness, like the eyes of a Greek statue.

"You know why, too, don't you?"

"Yes," Rosie said.

"This is woman's business." Dorcas nodded.

"That's right, that's just what it is."

"Woman's business," Rosie repeated, and in her mind she heard Rose Madder say Remember the tree. She closed her eyes.

2

The three of them sat at the top of the hill for some unknown length of time, Bill and Rosie together with their arms around each other's waist, Dorcas a little off to one side, near to where the pony still grazed sleepily. The pony looked up at the black woman every now and again, as if curious about why so many people were still up at this unaccustomed hour, but Dorcas took no notice, only sat with her arms clasped around her knees, looking wistfully up at the latening moon. To Rosie she looked like a woman mentally counting the choices of a lifetime and discovering that the wrong ones outnumbered the right ones... and not by only a few, either. Bill opened his mouth to speak on several occasions, and Rosie looked at him encouragingly, but each time he closed it again without saying a word. Just as the moon snagged in the trees to the left of the ruined temple, the pony raised its head again, and this time it gave voice to a low, pleased whinny. Rosie looked down the hill and saw Rose Madder coming. Strong, shapely thighs flashed in the pallid light of the fading moon. Her plaited hair swung from side to side like the pendulum in a grandfather clock. Dorcas gave a little grunt of satisfaction and got to her feet. Rosie herself felt a complex mixture of apprehension and anticipation. She put one hand on Bill's forearm and gazed at him earnestly. "don't look at her," she said.

"No," Dorcas agreed, "and don't ask no questions, Billy, even if she invites you to." He looked uncertainly from Dorcas to Rosie, then back to Dorcas again.

"Why not? Who is she, anyway? The Queen of the May?" "she's queen of whatever she wants to be queen of," Dorcas said, "and you better remember it. Don't look at her, and don't do anything to invite her temper. I can't say more'n that; there's no time. Put your hands in your lap, little man, and look at them. Don't you take your eyes off them."

"But-"

"If you look at her, you'll go mad," Rosie said simply. She looked at Dorcas, who nodded.

"It is a dream, isn't it?" Bill asked.

"I mean... I'm not dead, am I? Because if this is the afterlife, I think I'd just as soon skip it." He looked beyond the approaching woman and shivered.

"Too noisy. Too much screaming."

"It's a dream," Rosie agreed. Rose Madder was very close now, a slim straight figure walking through jackstraws of light and shadow. The latter turned her dangerous face into the mask of a cat, or perhaps a fox.

"It's a dream where you have to do exactly as we say."

"Rosie and Dorcas Says instead of Simon Says."

"Yep. And Dorcas Says put your hands in your lap and look at them until one of us tells you it's all right to stop."

"May I?" he asked, giving her a sly up-from-under-the-lids glance that she thought was really a look of dazed perplexity.

"Yes," Rosie said desperately.

"Yes-you-may, just for God's sake keep your eyes off her!" He folded his fingers together and dropped his eyes obediently. Now Rosie could hear the whicker of approaching footsteps, the silky sound of grass slipping across skin. She dropped her own eyes. A moment later she saw a pair of bare moon-silvery legs come to a stop before her. There was a long silence, broken only by the calling of some insomniac bird in the far distance. Rosie shifted her eyes to the right and saw Bill sitting perfectly still beside her, looking at his folded hands as assiduously as a Zen student who has been placed next to the master at morning devotions. At last, shyly, without looking up, she said: "dorcas gave me what you wanted me to have. It's in my pocket."

"Good," that sweet, slightly husky voice answered.

"That's good, Rosie Real." A mottled hand floated into her field of vision, and something dropped into Rosie's lap. It flashed a single glint of gold in the pale late light.

"For you," Rose Madder said.

"A souvenir, if you like. Do with it as you will." Rosie plucked it out of her lap and looked at it wonderingly. The words on it-Service, Loyalty, Community-made a triangle around the ringstone, which was a circle of obsidian. This was now marked by one bright spot of scarlet. It turned the stone into a baleful watching eye. The silence spun out, and there was an expectant quality to it. Does she want to be thanked? Rosie wondered. She wouldn't do that... but she would tell the truth of her feelings.

"I'm glad he's dead," she said, softly and unemphatically.

"It's a relief."

"Of course you're glad and of course it is. You shall go now, back to your Rosie Real world, with this beast. He's a good one, I judge." A hint of something-Rosie would not let herself believe it could be lust-crept into the voice of the other.

"Good hocks. Good flanks." A pause.

"Fine loins." Another pause, and then one of her mottled hands came down and caressed Bill's tumbled, sweaty hair. He drew in a breath at her touch, but did not look up.

"A good beast. Protect him and he'll protect you." Rosie looked up then. She was terrified of what she might see, but nevertheless unable to stop herself. "don't you call him a beast again," she said in a voice that shook with fury.

"And get your diseased hand off him." She saw Dorcas wince in horror, but saw it only in the corner of her eye. The bulk of her attention was focused on Rose Madder. What had she expected from that face? Now that she was looking at it in the waning moonlight, she couldn't exactly say. Medusa, perhaps. A Gorgon. The woman before her was not that. Once (and not so long ago, either, Rosie thought) her face had been one of extraordinary beauty, perhaps a face to rival Helen of Troy's. Now her features were haggard and beginning to blur. One of those dark patches had overspread her left cheek and brushed across her brow like the underwing of a starling. The hot eye glittering out of that shadow seemed both furious and melancholy. It wasn't the face Norman had seen, that much she knew, but she could see that face lurking beneath-in a way it was as if she had put this one on for Rosie's benefit, like makeup-and it made her feel cold and ill. Underneath the beauty was madness... but not just madness. Rosie thought: It's a kind of rabies-she's being eaten up with it, all her shapes and magics and glamours trembling at the outer edge of her control now, soon it's all going to crumble, and if I look away from her now, she's apt to fall on me and do whatever she did to Norman. She might regret it later, but that wouldn't help me, would it? Rose Madder reached down again, and this time it was Rosie's head she touched-first her brow, then her hair, which had had a long day and was now coming loose from its plait.

"You're brave, Rosie. You've fought well for your... your friend. You're courageous, and you have a good heart. But may I give you one piece of advice before I send you back?" She smiled, perhaps in an effort to be engaging, but Rosie's heart stopped momentarily before skittering madly onward. When Rose Madder's lips drew back, disclosing a hole in her face that was nothing at all like a mouth, she no longer looked even remotely human. Her mouth was the maw of a spider, something made for eating insects which weren't even dead, but only stung into insensibility.

"Of course." Rosie's lips felt numb and distant. The mottled hand stroked smoothly along her temple. The spider's mouth grinned. The eyes glittered.

"Wash the dye out of your hair," Rose Madder whispered.

"You weren't meant to be a blonde." Their eyes met and held. Rosie discovered she couldn't drop hers; they were locked on the other woman's face. At one corner of her vision she saw Bill continuing to look grimly down at his hands. His cheeks and brow glimmered with sweat. It was Rose Madder who looked away. "dorcas."

"Ma'am?"

"The baby-?"

"Be ready when you are."

"Good," said Rose Madder.

"I'm eager to see her, and it's time we went along. Time you went along, too, Rosie Real. You and your man. I can call him that, you see. Your man, your man. But before you go..." Rose Madder held her arms out. Slowly, feeling almost hypnotized, Rosie got to her feet and entered the offered embrace. The dark patches growing in Rose Madder's flesh were hot and fevery-Rosie fancied she could almost feel them squirming against her own skin. Otherwise, the woman in the chiton-in the zat-was as cold as a corpse. But Rosie was no longer afraid. Rose Madder kissed her cheek, high up toward the jaw, and whispered, "I love you, little Rosie. I wish we'd met at a better time, when you might have seen me in a better light, but we have done as well as we could. We have been well-met. Just remember the tree."

"What tree?" Rosie asked frantically.

"What tree?" But Rose Madder shook her head with inarguable finality and stepped back, breaking their embrace. Rosie took one last look into that uneasy, demented face, and thought again of the vixen and her cubs.

"Am I you?" she whispered.

"Tell me the truth-am I you?" Rose Madder smiled. It was just a small smile, but for a moment Rosie saw a monster glimmering in it, and she shuddered.

"Never mind, little Rosie. I'm too old and sick to deal with such questions. Philosophy is the province of the well. If you remember the tree, it will never matter, anyway."

"I don't understand-" "shhh!" She put a finger to her lips.

"Turn around, Rosie. Turn around and see me no more. The play has ended." Rosie turned, bent, put her hands over Bill's hands (they were still clasped, his fingers a tense, woven knot between his thighs), and pulled him to his feet. Once more the easel was gone, and the picture which had been on it-her apartment at night, indifferently rendered in muddy oils-had grown to enormous size. Once more it wasn't really a picture at all, but a window. Rosie started toward it, intent on nothing but getting through it and leaving the mysteries of this world behind for good. Bill stopped her with a tug on the wrist. He turned back to Rose Madder, and spoke without allowing his eyes to rise any higher than her br**sts.