‘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 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.