Rose Madder

by Stephen King

  All this went through her mind in an instant. Then, screaming--perhaps in terror, perhaps in defiance, probably in both--she leaped forward with her hands out in front of her like Supergirl, going over the tree and landing on her left shoulder. She did a somersault, sprang dizzily up, and saw Norman staring at her over the fallen trunk. His hands were clutched on the fire-blackened stubs of two branches, and he was panting harshly. The breeze puffed and she could smell something besides sweat and English Leather coming from him.

  "You started smoking again, didn't you?" she said.

  The eyes below the flower-decked rubber horns regarded her with complete unreason. The lower half of the mask was twitching spastically, as if the man buried inside it were trying to smile. "Rose," the bull said. "Stop this."

  "I'm not Rose," she said, then gave an exasperated little laugh, as if he were really the stupidest creature alive--el toro dumbo. "I'm Rosie. Rosie Real. But you're not real anymore, Norman ... are you? Not even to yourself. But it doesn't matter now, not to me, because I'm divorced of you."

  She turned then, and fled.

  7

  You're not real anymore, he thoughtas he went around the top of the tree, where there was plenty of room for easy passage. She had left the far side of the deadfall running full-out, but when he regained the path again, Norman only jogged. It was really all he needed to do. The interior voice, the one that had never let him down, told him that the path ended up ahead, not far from here. This should have delighted him, but he kept hearing what she had said before turning her pretty little tail into his gaze this last time.

  I'm Rosie Real, but you're not real anymore, not even to yourself ... I'm divorced of you.

  Well, he thought, that last part's close, at least. There is going to be a divorce, but it's going to be on my terms, Rose.

  He jogged on a little while, then stopped, wiping an arm across his forehead, not surprised when it came away sweaty, not even thinking of it, really, although he was still wearing the mask.

  "Better come back, Rose!" he called. "Last chance!"

  "Come get me," she called in return, and her voice sounded subtly different now, although just how it was different he could not have said. "Come get me, Norman, it's not far now." "

  No, it wouldn't be. He'd chased her damned near halfway across the country, and then he'd chase her into another world, or a dream, or some damned thing, but now she was all out of running room.

  "Nowhere left to go, sweetcakes, " Norman said, and began to walk toward the sound of her voice, his hands rolling into fists as he went.

  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 emptied into 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 fucking 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 fuck you did!" he exclaimed.

  "The fuck 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 fuck with me anymore, either! Don't you DARE fuck with me!"

  He stumbled the rest of the way to where she knelt and clutched her shoulder. The toga's single strap shifted, and what he saw beneath horrified him into a small, strangled gasp. The skin was as black and rotten as the rinds of the fruits decaying into the earth around the base of the tree--the ones so far gone they were now on the verge of liquifying.

  "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 whil
e 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."