‘Richard Racine’ novel on the table, and the wind had sent them cascading all over the floor.
This is no dream, she thought, and swung her feet out of bed. As she did, she looked toward the window and her breath stuck solid in her throat. Either the window was gone, or the wall had become all window.
In any case, the view was no longer of Trenton Street and Bryant Park; it was of a woman in a rose madder chiton standing on top of an overgrown hill, looking down at the ruins of a temple. But now the hem of her short gown was rippling against the woman’s long, smooth thighs; now Rosie could see the fine blonde hairs which had escaped her plait wavering like plankton in the wind, and the purple-black thunderheads rushing across the sky. Now she could see the shaggy pony’s head move as it cropped grass.
And if it was a window, it was wide open. As she watched, the pony poked its muzzle into her room, sniffed at the floorboards, found them uninteresting, pulled back, and began to crop on its own side once more.
More lightning, another roll of thunder. The wind gusted again, and Rosie heard the spilled pages stirring and swirling around in the kitchen alcove. The hem of her nightgown fluttered against her legs as she got up and walked slowly toward the picture which now covered the whole wall from floor to ceiling and side to side. The wind blew back her hair, and she could smell sweet impending rain.
It won’t be long now, either, she thought. I’m going to get drenched. We all are, I guess.
ROSE, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? Practical-Sensible screamed. WHAT IN GOD’S NAME ARE Y —
Rosie squashed the voice — at that moment it seemed she had heard enough of it to last her a lifetime — and stopped before the wall that was no longer a wall. Just ahead, no more than five feet away, was the blonde woman in the chiton. She hadn’t turned, but Rosie could now see the little tilts and adjustments of her upraised hand as she looked down the hill, and the rise and fall of her barely glimpsed left breast as she breathed.
Rosie took a deep breath and stepped into the picture.
4
It was at least ten degrees cooler on the other side, and the high grass tickled her ankles and shins. For a moment, she thought she heard a baby crying again, very faintly, but then the sound was gone. She looked back over her shoulder, expecting to see her room, but it was gone, too. A gnarled old olive tree spread its roots and branches at the place where she had stepped through into this world. Beneath it she saw an artist’s easel with a stool in front of it.
Standing open on the stool was a painter’s box full of brushes and colors.
The canvas propped on the easel was exactly the size of the picture Rosie had bought in the Liberty City Loan & Pawn. It showed her room on Trenton Street, as seen from the wall where she had hung Rose Madder. There was a woman, clearly Rosie herself, standing in the middle of the room, facing the door which gave on the second-floor hallway. Her posture and position were not quite the same as the posture and position of the woman looking down on the ruined temple — her hand was not upraised, for instance — but it was close enough to frighten Rosie badly. There was something else frightening about the picture, as well: the woman had on dark blue tapered slacks and a pink sleeveless top. This was the outfit Rosie had already planned to wear when she went motorcycling with Bill. I’ll have to wear something different, she thought wildly, as if by changing her clothes in the future she could change what she was seeing now.
Something nuzzled her upper arm, and Rosie gave a small scream. She turned and saw the pony looking at her with apologetic brown eyes. Overhead, thunder rumbled.
A woman was standing beside the trim pony-cart to which the shaggy little beast was harnessed. She was wearing a many-layered red robe. It was ankle -length but gauzy, almost transparent; Rosie could see the warm tints of her café-au-lait skin through its artful layers.
Lightning flared across the sky, and for a moment Rosie again saw what she had first seen in the painting not long after Bill had brought her back from Pop’s Kitchen: the shadow of the
cart lying on the grass, and the shadow of the woman growing out of it.
‘Don’t you worry, now,’ the woman in the red robe said. ‘Radamanthus the least of your worries. He don’t bite nothing but grass and clover. He’s just gettin a little smell on you, that’s all.’
Rosie felt a sudden, overwhelming sense of relief as she realized that this was the woman Norman had always referred to (in tones of aggrieved bitterness) as ‘that slutty high-yellow gal.’ It was Wendy Yarrow, but Wendy Yarrow was dead, and so this was a dream, Q.E.D.
No matter how realistic it felt or how realistic the details might be (wiping a tiny bit of moisture off her upper arm, for instance, left there by the pony’s enquiring muzzle), it was a dream.
Of course it is, she told herself. No one actually steps through pictures, Rosie.
That had little or no power over her. The idea that the woman attending the cart was the long-dead Wendy Yarrow did, however.
The wind gusted, and once again the sound of the crying baby came to her. Now Rosie saw something else: sitting on the pony-cart’s seat was a large basket made of green woven rushes. Fluffs of silk ribbon decorated the handle, and there were silk bows on the corners.
The hem of a pink blanket, clearly hand-woven, hung over the end.
‘Rosie.’
The voice was low and sweetly husky. Nevertheless, it sent a scutter of gooseflesh up Rosie’s back. There was something wrong with it, and she had an idea that wrongness might be something only another woman could hear — a man heard a voice like that, immediately thought about sex, and forgot everything else. But there was something wrong with it. Badly wrong.
‘Rosie,’ it said again, and suddenly she knew: it was as if the voice were striving to be human. Striving to remember how to be human.
‘Girl, don’t you look straight at her,’ the woman in the red robe said. She sounded anxious.
‘That’s not for the likes of you.’
‘No, I don’t want to,’ Rosie said. ‘I want to go home.’
‘I don’t blame you, but it’s too late for that,’ the woman said, and stroked the pony’s neck.
Her dark eyes were grave and her mouth was tight. ‘Don’t touch her, either. She don’t mean you no harm, but she ain’t got good control of herself no more.’ She tapped her temple with one finger.
Rosie turned reluctantly toward the woman in the chiton, and took a single step forward.
She was fascinated by the texture of the woman’s back, her bare shoulder, and the lower part of her neck. The skin was finer than watered silk. But farther up on her neck . . .
Rosie didn’t know what those gray shadows lurking just below her hairline could be, and didn’t think she wanted to know. Bites were her first wild thought, but they weren’t bites.
Rosie knew bites. Was it leprosy? Something worse? Something contagious?
‘Rosie,’ the sweet, husky voice said for the third time, and there was something in it that made Rosie feel like screaming, the way that seeing Norman smile had sometimes made her feel like screaming.
This woman is mad. Whatever else is wrong with her — the patches on her skin — is secondary to that. She is mad.
Lightning flashed. Thunder rumbled. And, on the fitfully gusting wind, from the direction of the ruined temple at the foot of the hill, came the distant wail of an infant.
‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘Who are you, and why am I here?’
For an answer, the woman held out her right arm and turned it over, revealing an old white ring of scar on the underside. ‘This one bled quite a bit, then got infected,’ she said in her sweetly husky voice.
Rosie held out her own arm. It was the left instead of the right, but the mark itself was
exactly the same. A small but terrible packet of knowledge came to her then: if she were to put on the short rose madder chiton, she would wear it so that her right shoulder was bare instead of her left, and if she were to own the gold armlet, she would clasp it above her left elbow instead of her right.
The woman on the hill was her mirror image.