Back at the Whitestone, he went upstairs without asking anyone about Blondie with the cute little ass. He would not have trusted himself to ask for a glass of club soda in his current condition. His newly shaven head was pounding like a steel-forge, his eyes were beating in their sockets, his teeth hurt and his jaws throbbed. Worst of all, his mind now seemed to be bobbing along above him like a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; it felt as if it were tethered to the rest of him by a single fragile thread and might break away at any moment. He had to lie down. To sleep. Maybe then his mind would go back inside his head, where it belonged. As for Blondie, his best course would be to treat her as an ace in the hole, something to be used only if absolutely necessary. Break Glass in Case of Emergency.
Norman went back to bed at four o’clock on Friday afternoon. The throbbing behind his temples was no longer anything resembling a hangover; it was now one of the headaches he called his ‘specials.’ He got them frequently when he was working hard, and since Rose had
left and his big drug-case had heated up, two a week weren’t unusual. As he lay in bed looking up at the ceiling, his eyes ran and his nose leaked and he could see funny bright zigzag patterns pulsing around the edges of things. The pain had reached the point where it felt like there was some horrible fetus in the middle of his head, trying to be born; the point where there was nothing to do but hunker down and wait for it to be over, and the way you did that was by getting through the moments one at a time, going from one to the next the way a person might use stepping-stones to cross a stream. That tugged some hazy memory far back in his mind, but it couldn’t get past the relentless throbbing, and Norman let it go. He rubbed his hand back and forth across the top of his head. The smoothness up there felt like nothing that could be a part of him; it was like touching the hood of a freshly waxed car.
‘Who am I?’ he asked the empty room. ‘Who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing? Who am I?’
Before he could stab at an answer to any of these questions he fell asleep. The pain followed him for quite a distance into its dreamless depths, like a bad idea that won’t let go, but finally Norman left it behind. His head sagged to one side on his pillow, and a wetness which was not precisely tears ran out of his left eye and left nostril and trickled down his cheek. He began to snore thickly.
When he woke up twelve hours later, at four o’clock on Saturday morning, his headache was gone. He felt fresh and energized, as he almost always did after one of his specials. He sat up, put his feet on the floor, and looked out the window at darkness. The pigeons were out there on the ledge, cooing to each other even in their sleep. He knew, completely and surely and without any doubt, that this day was going to see the end of it. Probably the end of him, as well, but that was a minor matter. Just knowing there would be no more headaches, not ever, made that seem like a fair trade.
Across the room, his new motorcycle jacket hung over a chair like a black and headless ghost.
Wake up early, Rose, he thought almost tenderly. Wake up early, honeybunch, and get a good look at the sunrise, why don’t you? You ought to get the best look you can, because it’s the last one you’re ever going to see.
2
Rosie woke at a few minutes past four on Saturday morning and fumbled for the lamp by the bed, terrified, sure that Norman was in the room with her, sure she could smell his cologne, all my men wear English Leather or they wear nothing at all.
She almost knocked the lamp onto the floor in her panicky efforts to make a light, but when it was finally on (with the base hanging halfway over oblivion) her fear subsided quickly. It was just her room, small and neat and sane, and the only thing she could smell was the faint, bedwarm fragrance of her own skin. No one was here but her . . . and Rose Madder, of course. But Rose Madder was safely put away in the closet, where she undoubtedly still stood with one hand raised to shade her eyes, looking down at the ruins of the temple.
I was dreaming about him, she thought as she sat up. I was having another nightmare about Norman, that’s why I woke up so scared.
She pushed the lamp back on the table. It clinked against the armlet. Rose picked it up and looked at it. Strange, how hard it was to remember
(what you have to remember)
how she’d come by this trinket. Had she bought it in Bill’s shop, because it looked like the one the woman in her picture was wearing? She didn’t know, and that was troubling. How could you forget
(what you need to forget)
a thing like that?
Rosie lifted the circlet, which felt as heavy as gold but was probably just gilded potmetal, and looked across the room through it, like a woman looking through a telescope.
As she did, a fragment of her dream came back, and she realized it hadn’t been about Norman at all. It had been about Bill. They had been on his motorcycle, but instead of taking her to a picnic place by the lake, he had driven her down a path that wound deeper and deeper into a sinister forest of dead trees. After awhile they came into a clearing, and in the clearing was a single live tree, laden with fruit the color of Rose Madder’s chiton.
Oh, what a great first course! Bill had cried cheerily, hopping off his motorcycle and hurrying toward the tree. I’ve heard about these — eat one and you can see out of the back of your head, eat two and you live forever!
That was where the dream had crossed the line from the merely unsettling into real nightmare country. She knew somehow that the fruit of that tree wasn’t magic but horribly poisonous and she ran to him, wanting to stop him before he could bite into one of the tempting fruits. But Bill wouldn’t be convinced. He merely put an arm around her, gave her a little hug, and said, Don’t be silly, Rosie — I know pomegranates, and these aren’t them.
That was when she’d awakened, shivering madly in the dark and thinking not about Bill but about Norman . . . as if Norman were lying in bed someplace near and thinking about her.
This idea made Rosie cross her arms over her breasts and hug herself. It was all too possible that he was doing just that. She put the armlet back down on the table, hurried into the bathroom, and turned on the shower.
Her troubling dream of Bill and the poisoned fruit, her questions about where or how she might have come by the armlet, and her confused feelings about the picture she’d bought, then unframed, then hidden away in the closet like a secret . . . all these things faded behind a larger and more immediate concern: her date. It was today, and every time she thought of that she felt something like a hot wire in her chest. She was both afraid and happy, but more than anything else she was curious. Her date. Their date.
If he even comes, a voice inside whispered ominously. It could have all been a joke, you know. Or you might have scared him off.
Rosie started to step into the water, and realized just in the nick of time that she was still wearing her panties.
‘He’ll come,’ she murmured as she bent and slipped them off. ‘He’ll come, all right. I know he will.’
As she ducked under the spray and reached for the shampoo, a voice far back in her mind
— a very different voice, this time — whispered, Beasts will fight.
‘What?’ Rosie froze with the plastic bottle in one hand. She was frightened and didn’t quite know why. ‘What did you say?’
Nothing. She couldn’t even remember exactly what it was that she’d thought, only that it was something else about that damned picture, which had gotten into her head like the chorus of a song you can’t forget. As she began to lather her hair, Rosie decided abruptly to get rid of it. The thought of doing that made her feel better, like the thought of quitting some bad habit