Rose Madder by Stephen King

Oh yes. It was Norman, all right, Norman when he had still been the Ghost of Beatings Yet to Come, Norman leaning against the phone pole on the corner of State Street and Highway 49 in downtown Aubreyville (downtown Aubreyville, now there was a joke), Norman watching the cars go by while the sound of the Bee Gees singing ‘You Should Be Dancing’

came drifting out of Finnegan’s Pub, where the door had been chocked open and the Seeburg turned up loud.

The wind dropped momentarily and Rosie could hear the baby crying again. It didn’t sound hurt, exactly; rather as if it might be very hungry. The faint howls got her eyes off that wretched carving and got her bare feet moving, but just before she passed into the temple doorway, she looked up again . . . she couldn’t help herself. The boy-Norman was gone, if he had ever been there at all. Now she saw carved words directly above her. SUCK MY AIDS-INFECTED COCK, they said.

Nothing stays steady in dreams, she thought. They’re like water.

She looked back over her shoulder and saw ‘Wendy,’ still standing by the fallen pillar, looking bedraggled in the collapsed cobwebs of her dress. Rosie raised the hand that wasn’t holding the wadded nightgown in a tentative wave. ‘Wendy’ raised her own hand in return, then just stood watching, seemingly oblivious of the pelting rain.

Rosie stepped through the wide, cool doorway and into the temple. She stood at the back, tense, ready to dart out again at once if she saw . . . well . . . if she saw she didn’t know what.

‘Wendy’ had told her not to sweat the ghosts, but Rosie thought the woman in the red dress could afford to be sanguine; she was back there, after all.

She guessed it was warmer inside than out, but it didn’t feel warmer — there was the deep chill of damp stone about the place, the chill of crypts and mausoleums, and for a moment she wasn’t sure she could make herself walk up the shadowy aisle, scattered with long-dead drifts and swirls of autumn leaves, which lay ahead of her. It was just too cold . . . and cold in

too many ways. She stood shivering and gasping for breath in short little pulls of air, with her arms crossed tightly over her breasts and little ribbons of steam rising from her skin. She touched her left nipple with the tip of her finger and was not much surprised to find it was like touching a chip of rock.

It was the thought of going back to the woman on the hill that got her moving — the thought of having to face Rose Madder empty-handed. She stepped into the aisle, moving slowly and carefully, listening to the distant howl of the infant. It sounded miles away, carried to her by some thin, magical communication.

Go down and bring me my baby.

Caroline. The name she had planned to give her own baby, the one Norman had beaten out of her, came easily and naturally to her mind. The fugitive throb in her breasts began again.

She touched them, and winced. They were tender.

Her eyes were adjusting to the gloom now, and it occurred to her that the Temple of the Bull had a strangely Christian look to it — that it looked, in fact, quite a bit like the First Methodist Church of Aubreyville, where she had gone twice a week until she had married Norman. First Methodist was where that marriage had taken place, and it was from there that her father, mother, and kid brother had been buried after the road accident which had taken their lives. There were rows of old wooden pews, the ones at the back overturned and half –

buried in drifts of cinnamon-smelling leaves. Closer down toward the front they were still upright, and ranked in neat rows. Lying on them at regular intervals were fat black books that might have been the Methodist Book of Hymns and Praise Rosie had grown up with.

The next thing she became aware of — this as she walked down the center aisle like some strange naked bride — was the smell of the place. Under the good smell of the leaves which had blown in through the open door over the years there lurked a less pleasant odor. It was a little like mold, a little like mildew, a little like late-stage decay, and really not like any of those things. Old sweat, perhaps? Yes, perhaps. And perhaps other fluids, as well. Semen came to her mind. So did blood.

After her awareness of the smell came the almost undeniable sensation of being watched by malevolent eyes. She sensed them studying her nakedness carefully, brooding over it, perhaps, marking each undraped curve and line, memorizing the movement of her muscles beneath her wet, sleek skin.

Talk to you up close, the temple seemed to sigh to her beneath the hollow drumming of the rain and the crackle of the old leaves beneath her bare feet. Talk to you right up dose . . . but we won’t have to talk long to say the things we need to say. Will we, Rosie?

She stopped near the front of the temple and picked up one of the black books from where it lay in the second pew. When she opened it, a gasp of putrefaction so strong it almost choked her wafted up. The picture at the top of the page was a stark line drawing which had never appeared in the Methodist hymnals of her youth; it showed a woman on her knees, performing fellatio on a man whose feet were not feet at all, but hooves. His face was suggested rather than actually rendered, but Rosie saw a hideous similarity just the same . . .

or thought she did. He looked like Norman’s old partner Harley Bissington, who had always checked her hem so assiduously whenever she sat down.

Below the drawing, the yellowed page was crammed with Cyrillic lettering, unreadable but familiar. It took her only a moment of thought to understand why; they were the same letters which had filled the newspaper Peter Slowik had been reading when she had approached the Travelers Aid booth and asked him for help.

Then, with shocking suddenness, the drawing began to move, its lines seeming to crawl toward her white, rain-wrinkled fingers, leaving little snail-trails of sludge behind. It was alive, somehow. She slammed the book shut and her throat clenched at the wet squelching noise that came from inside it. She dropped it, and either the bang it made when it hit the pew

or her own revolted cry woke a flutter of bats in the shadowy area she supposed was the choir loft. Several of them turned aimless figure-eights overhead, black wings dragging loathsomely plump brown bodies through the dank air, and then they retreated back into their holes. Ahead was the altar, and she was relieved to see a narrow door standing open to its left and letting in an oblong of clean white light.

Yerrrr reeely Roww-zey, the tongueless voice of the temple whispered, bleakly amused.

And yerrr Rowww-zey Reeel . . . come over here and I’ll give yewww . . . a grrreat big feeeeel

. . .

She refused to look around; she kept her eyes fixed on the door and the daylight beyond it.

The rain had abated, the hollow rushing sound from overhead now down to a steady low mutter.

It’s for men only, Rowww-zey, the temple whispered, and then added what Norman always said when he didn’t want to answer one of her questions, but wasn’t really mad at her, either: It’s a guy thing.

She looked into the altar area as she passed it, then quickly looked away. It was empty —

there was no pulpit, no symbols, no arcane books — but she saw another hovering manta-shadow, this one lying on the bare stones. Its rusty color suggested to her that it was blood, and the size of the shadow suggested that a lot of it had been spilled here over the years. A lot.

It’s like the Roach Motel, Rowww-zie, the room whispered, and the leaves on the stone floor stirred, making a sound like laughter slipping between gumless teeth. They check in, but they don’t check owwwwwt.

She walked steadily toward the door, trying to ignore that voice, keeping her eyes fixed straight ahead. She half-expected it to slam shut in her face when she got close to it, but it didn’t. No capering bogey with Norman’s face leaped through it, either. She stepped out onto a small stone stoop, stepped into the cool smell of rain-freshened grass, and into air which had begun to warm again even though the rain had not completely stopped. Water dripped and rustled everywhere. Thunder boomed (but it was going-away thunder now, she felt sure).