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.
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.’