Don’t taste the fruit, ‘Wendy’ had told her. Don’t taste the fruit or even put the hand that touches the seeds into your mouth!
This place was full of traps.
She got up, looking at her stained and tingling fingers as if she had never seen them before.
She backed away from the tree standing in its circle of fallen fruit and spilled seeds.
It’s not the Tree of Good and Evil, Rosie thought. It’s not the Tree of Life, either. I think this is the Tree of Death.
A little gust of wind puffed past her, rustling through the pomegranate tree’s long, polished leaves, and they seemed to rattle out her name in a hundred small, sarcastic whispers: Rosie-Rosie-Rosie!
She knelt again, wishing for live grass, but there was none. She put down her nightgown with the rock inside it, placed the little packet of seeds on top of it, then snatched up big handfuls of wet, dead grass. She scrubbed the hand which had touched the seeds as well as she could. The rose madder stain faded but didn’t disappear completely, and it remained bright beneath her nails. It was like looking at a birthmark which nothing will completely bleach out. Meantime, the baby’s cries were becoming ever more occasional.
‘Okay,’ Rosie muttered to herself, getting up. ‘Just keep your damned fingers out of your
mouth. You’ll be all right if you do that!’
She walked to the stairs which led beneath the white stone and stood at the head of them for a moment, dreading the darkness and trying to nerve herself up to face it. The alabaster stone with MAZE carved into its surface no longer looked like a plinth to her; it looked like a marker standing at the end of a narrow, open grave.
The baby was down there, though, whimpering as babies do when no one comes to comfort them and they finally set about doing the job as well as they can themselves. It was that lonely, self-comforting sound which finally set her feet in motion. No baby should have to cry itself to sleep in such a lonely place.
Rosie counted steps as she went down. At seven she passed beneath the overhang and the stone. At fourteen she looked over her shoulder at the white rectangle of light she was leaving behind, and when she faced forward again, that shape hung before her eyes in the screening darkness like a bright ghost. She went down and down, bare feet slapping on stone. There would be no talking herself out of the terror which now filled her heart, no talking herself through it, either. She would be doing well just to live with it.
Fifty steps. Seventy-five. A hundred. She stopped at a hundred and twenty-five, realizing she could see again.
That’s nuts, she thought. Imagination, Rosie, that’s all.
It wasn’t, though. She raised a hand slowly toward her face. It and the little packet of seeds it held glowed a dull, witchy green. She raised her other hand, the one holding the rock in the remains of her nightgown, beside it. She could see, all right. She turned her head first one way, then the other. The walls of the stairwell were glowing with a faint green light. Black shapes rose and twisted lazily in it, as if the walls were actually the glass faces of aquaria in which dead things twisted and floated.
Stop it, Rosie! Stop thinking that way!
Except she couldn’t. Dream or no dream, panic and blind retreat were now very close.
Don’t look, then!
Good idea. Great idea. Rosie dropped her eyes to the dim X-ray ghosts of her own feet and resumed her descent, now whispering her count under her breath. The green light continued to brighten as she went down, and by the time she reached two hundred and twenty, the last step, it was as if she were standing on a stage lit with low-level green gels. She looked up, trying to steel herself for what she might see. The air down here was moving, damp but fresh enough . . . yet it brought her a smell she didn’t much like. It was a zoo smell, as if something wild were penned up down here. Something was, of course: the bull Erinyes.
Ahead were three free-standing stone walls facing her edge-on and running away into the gloom. Each was about twelve feet high, much too tall for her to see over. They glowed with that sullen green light, and Rosie nervously examined the four narrow passages they made.
Which one? Somewhere far ahead of her, the baby continued to whimper . . . but the sound was fading relentlessly. It was like listening to a radio which is being slowly but steadily turned down.
‘Cry!’ Rosie shouted, then cringed from the returning echoes of her own voice: ‘Iy! . . . iy! .
. . iy!’
Nothing. The four passages — the four entrances to the maze — gawped silently at her, like narrow vertical mouths wearing identical expressions of prissy shock. Not far inside the second from the right, she saw a dark pile of something.
You know damned well what that is, she thought. After fourteen years of listening to Norman and Harley and all their friends, you’d have to be pretty stupid not to know bullshit when you see it.
This thought and the memories that went with it — memories of those men sitting around in the rec room, talking about the job and drinking beer and talking about the job and
smoking cigarettes and talking about the job and telling jokes about niggers and spicks and taco-benders and then talking about the job a little more — made her angry. Instead of denying the emotion, Rosie went against a lifetime of self-training and welcomed it. It felt good to be angry, to be anything other than terrified. As a kid she’d had a really piercing playground yell, the sort of high, drilling cry that could shatter window-glass and almost rupture eyeballs. She had been scolded and shamed out of using it around the age of ten, on the grounds that it was unladylike as well as brain-destroying. Now Rosie decided to see if she still had it in her repertoire. She drew the damp underground air into her lungs, all the way to the bottom, closed her eyes, and remembered playing Capture the Flag behind Elm Street School or Red Rover and Texas Rangers in Billy Calhoun’s jungly, overgrown back yard. For a moment she thought she could almost smell the comforting aroma of her favorite flannel shirt, the one she wore until it practically fell apart on her back, and then she peeled back her lips and let loose with the old ululating, yodeling cry.
She was delighted, almost ecstatic, when it came out sounding just as it had in the old days, but there was something even better: it made her feel the way it had in the old days, like a combination of Wonder Woman, Supergirl, and Annie Oakley. And it still affected others as it had back then, it seemed; the baby had begun to cry again even before she had finished sending her schoolyard warwhoop into the stony dark. It was, in fact, screaming at the top of its lungs.
Quick now, Rosie, you have to be. If she’s really tired, she won’t be able to manage that volume for very long.
Rosie took a couple of steps forward, eyeing each of the four entrances to the maze, then walked past each of them, listening. The wail of the baby might have sounded a bit louder coming out of the third passageway. That could have been no more than imagination, but at least it was a place to begin. She started down it, bare feet slapping on the stone floor, then halted with her head cocked and her teeth working at her lower lip. Her old warcry had stirred up more than the baby, it seemed. Somewhere in here — how close or far away was impossible to tell because of the echo — hooves were running on rock. They moved at a lazy lope, seeming to grow closer, then fading a little, then growing closer again, then (somehow this was more frightening than the sound itself) stopping altogether. She heard a low, wet snort. It was followed by an even lower grunting sound. Then there was only the baby, its bellows already beginning to subside again.
Rosie found herself able to imagine the bull all too well, a vast animal with a bristly hide and thick black shoulders humping grimly above its dropped head. It would have a gold ring in its nose, of course, like the Minotaur in her childhood book of myths, and the green light sweating out of the walls would reflect off that ring in tiny stitches of liquid light. Erinyes was standing quietly now in one of the passages ahead, its horns tipped forward. Listening for her. Waiting for her.