Rose Madder by Stephen King

She hurried past the statue and along the path leading into the dead grove, restraining an urge to look over her shoulder and make sure the statue wasn’t following her, wanting to put that stone harden to work. She didn’t dare look. She was afraid her overstrained mind might see it even if it wasn’t there.

The rain had backed off to a hesitant drizzle, and Rosie suddenly realized she could no longer hear the baby. Perhaps it had gone to sleep. Perhaps the bull Erinyes had gotten tired of listening to it and gobbled it like a canape. In either case, how was she supposed to find it, if it didn’t cry?

One thing at a time, Rosie, Practical-Sensible whispered.

‘Easy for you to say,’ Rosie muttered.

She went on, listening to the rainwater drip from the dead trees and realizing — reluctantly

— that she could see faces in the bark. It wasn’t like lying on your back and looking at clouds, where your imagination did ninety per cent of the work; these were real faces.

Screaming faces. To Rosie they looked like women’s faces, for the most part. Women who had been talked to right up close.

After she had walked a little way she rounded a bend and found the path blocked by a fallen tree which had apparently been struck by lightning at the height of the storm. One side was splintered and black. Several of the branches on that side still smoldered sullenly, like the ashes of a carelessly doused campfire. Rosie was afraid to climb over it; gouges and

splinters and jags of wood stuck up all over the burst trunk.

She began edging around it on the right, where the roots had torn out of the ground. She had gotten most of the way back to the path when one of the tree’s roots suddenly jerked, quivered, then slid around her upper thigh like a dusty brown snake.

Hey, baby! Want to do the dog? Want to do the dog, you bitch?

The voice came drifting out of the crumbling dry cave of earth where the tree had so recently stood. The root slid higher on her thigh.

Want to put all four on the floor, Rosie? That sound good? I’ll be your back-door man, gobble you like a toasted-cheese sandwich. Or would you rather suck my AIDS-infected —

‘Let me go,’ Rosie said quietly, and pressed the crumpled wad of her nightgown against the root that was holding her. It loosened and fell away immediately. She hurried the rest of the way around the tree and resumed the path. The root had squeezed hard enough to leave a red ring on her thigh, but the mark faded quickly. She supposed she should have been terrified by what had just happened, that perhaps something meant for her to be terrified. If so, it hadn’t worked. She decided that this was a pretty cutrate chamber of horrors, all in all, for someone who had lived with Norman Daniels for fourteen years.

7

Another five minutes brought her to the end of the path. It opened into a perfectly circular clearing, and within it was the only living thing in all this desolation. It was the most beautiful tree Rosie had ever seen in her life, and for several moments she actually forgot to breathe. She had been a faithful attendee of Methodist Little Folks Sunday School back in Aubreyville, and now she remembered the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and thought that if there really had been a Tree of Good and Evil standing at the center of that place, it must have looked just like this.

It was densely dressed in long, narrow leaves of polished green, and its branches hung heavy with a perfect bounty of reddish-purple fruit. The falls surrounded the tree in a rose madder drift which exactly matched the color of the short gown worn by the woman Rosie hadn’t dared to look at. Many of these falls were still fresh and plump; they had probably been struck from the tree in the storm which had just passed. Even those well advanced in rot looked almost unbearably sweet; Rosie’s mouth cramped pleasurably at the thought of picking up one of those fruits and biting deeply into it. She thought the taste would be both tart and sweet, something like a stalk of rhubarb picked early in the morning, or raspberries taken from the bush the day before they came to perfect ripeness. As she looked at the tree, one of the fruits (to Rosie it looked no more like a pomegranate than it looked like a bureau drawer) dropped from an overloaded branch, struck the ground, and split open in rose madder folds of flesh. She could see the seeds amid its trickling juices.

Rosie took a step toward the tree and stopped. She kept swinging back and forth between two poles: her mind’s belief that all this had to be a dream, and her body’s equally emphatic assertion that it couldn’t be, that no one on earth had ever had a dream this real. Now, like a troubled compass needle caught in a landscape where there are too many mineral deposits, she swung doubtfully back toward the dream thesis. Standing to the left of the tree was something that looked like a subway entrance. Broad white steps led down into darkness.

Above them was an alabaster plinth upon which a single word had been carved: MAZE.

Really, this is too much, Rosie thought, but she walked toward the tree just the same. If this was a dream, it couldn’t hurt to follow instructions; doing so might even hasten the moment when she finally woke up in her own bed, groping for the alarm-clock, wanting to silence its self-righteous yell before it could split her head open. How she would welcome its cry this

time! She was chilly, her feet were dirty, she had been groped by a root, and ogled by a stone boy who, in a properly made world, would have been too young to know what the hell he was looking at. Most of all she felt that if she didn’t get back to her room soon, she was apt to come down with a really wonderful cold, maybe even bronchitis. That would take care of her date on Saturday, and keep her out of the recording studio all next week as well.

Not seeing the absurdity of believing one could become ill as the result of an excursion made in a dream, Rosie knelt down just beyond the fallen fruit. She surveyed it carefully, wondering again how it would taste (like nothing you found in the produce aisle of the A&P, that was for sure), then unfolded a corner of her nightgown. She tore off another chunk, wanting to provide herself with a square of cloth and succeeding better than she had expected to do. She laid it down, then began to pick seeds up off the ground, placing each one on the cloth she intended using to carry them.

A good plan, too, she thought. Now if I only knew why I was carrying them.

The tips of her fingers went numb right away, as if they had been shot full of Novocain. At the same time, the most wonderful aroma filled her nose. Sweet but not flowery, it made Rosie think of the pies, cakes, and cookies that had come from her gramma’s stove. It made her think of something else, as well, something which was light-years from Gramma Weeks’s kitchen with its faded linoleum and Currier & Ives prints: of how she had felt when Bill’s hip brushed against hers as they were walking back to the Corn Building.

She laid two dozen seeds on the square of cloth, hesitated, shrugged, and added two dozen more. Would that be enough? How could she know, when she didn’t know what they were for to begin with? In the meantime, she’d better be moving. She could hear the baby again, but the cries were now little more than echoey whimpers — the sounds babies made when they were getting ready to give up and go to sleep.

She folded the damp cloth over and then tucked the edges in, making a little envelope that reminded her of the seed-packets her dad had gotten from the Burpee Company late each winter, back in the days when she had still been a regular attendee at Little Folks Sunday School. She had now grown comfortable enough with her nakedness to be exasperated by it rather than ashamed: she wanted a pocket. Well, if wishes were pigs, bacon would always be on sa —

The part of her that was practical and sensible realized what she was about to do with her rose madder-stained fingers less than a second before they would have been in her mouth.

She snatched them away with her heart pounding and that sweet/tart smell filling her head.

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