‘Shut up, you whore!’ came out of the darkness, but she could hear surprise as well as anger in Norman’s voice. Until now she’d never given him a single command — not in the entire course of their marriage — or spoken to him in such a tone.
And something else — there was a band of dull heat above the place where Bill had been touching her. It was the armlet. The gold armlet the woman in the chiton had given her. And in her mind, Rosie heard her snarl Stop your stupid sheep’s whining! at her.
‘Quit it, I’m warning you!’ she screamed at Norman, and then started toward the place from which the choking sounds and the effortful grunts were coming. She went with her hands held out before her like the hands of a blind woman, her lips drawn back from her teeth.
You’re not going to choke him, she thought. You’re not, I won’t let you. You should have gone away, Norman. You should have gone away and left us alone while you still could.
Feet, drumming helplessly against the wall just ahead of her, and she could imagine Norman holding Bill up against it, lips drawn back in his biting smile, and suddenly she was a glass woman filled with a pale red liquid, and that liquid was pure and untinctured fury.
‘You shit, didn’t you hear me? PUT HIM DOWN, I SAID!’
She reached out with her left hand, which now felt as strong as an eagle’s talon. The armlet was burning fiercely — she felt she should almost be able to see it, even through her sweater and the jacket Bill had loaned her, glowing like a dull ember. But there was no pain, only a kind of dangerous exhilaration. She grabbed the shoulder of the man who had beaten her for fourteen years and dragged him backward. It was astoundingly easy. She squeezed his arm through the slippery waterproof fabric of his coat, then whipped her own arm out and slung him off into the darkness. She heard the rapid rattle of his stumbling feet, then a thud, then an explosion of breaking glass. Cal Coolidge, or whoever it was in the picture over there, had taken a dive.
She could hear Bill coughing and gagging. She groped for him with splayed fingers, found his shoulders, and settled her hands upon them. He was hunched over, tearing for each breath and immediately coughing it back out. This didn’t surprise her. She knew how strong Norman was.
She slipped her right hand down his left arm and grasped him above the elbow. She was afraid to use her left hand, afraid she might hurt him with it. She could feel power humming in it, throbbing through it. Perhaps the most terrifying thing about the sensation was how much she liked it.
‘Bill,’ she whispered. ‘Come on. Come with me.’
She had to get him upstairs. She didn’t know exactly why, not yet, but she did not doubt at all that when she needed to know, the knowing would come. But he didn’t move. He only leaned on his hands, coughing and making those gagging noises.
‘Come on, goddamit!’ she whispered in a harsh peremptory voice . . . and she had come so close to saying you, as in Come on, goddam you! And she knew who she sounded like, oh yes indeed, even in these desperate circumstances, she knew very well.
He got moving, though, and for now that was all that mattered. Rosie led him across the vestibule with the confidence of a seeing-eye dog. He was still coughing and half-retching, but he was able to walk.
‘Halt!’ Norman shouted from his part of the darkness. He sounded both official and desperate. ‘Halt, or I’ll shoot!’
No you won’t, that would spoil all your fun, she thought, but he did shoot, the dead cop’s
.45 slanted up at the ceiling, the sound terrific in the enclosed space of the vestibule, the smell of burnt cordite sharp enough to make the eyes water. There was also a momentary shutterflash of reddish-yellow light, so bright it printed afterimages on her eyes like tattoos, and she supposed that was why he’d done it: to get a look at the landscape, and a look at where she and Bill were in that landscape. At the foot of the stairs, in fact.
Bill made a choked vomiting sound and staggered against her, sending her into the wall of the staircase. As she struggled to keep from going to her knees, she heard a rush of footsteps in the dark as Norman came for them.
12
She lunged up the first two steps, hauling Bill with her. He paddled with his feet, trying to help; perhaps he even did, a little. As Rosie gained the second step, she flung her left hand
out behind her and swept the coat-tree across the foot of the stairs like a roadblock. As Norman crashed into it and began cursing, she let go of Bill, who slumped but did not fall. He was still gagging and she sensed him bending over again, trying to get his breath back, trying to get his windpipe to work again.
‘Hang in,’ she murmured. ‘Just hang in there, Bill.’
She went up two stairs, then came back down on the other side of him, so she could use her left arm. If she was going to get him to the top of the stairs, she’d need all the power the gold armlet was putting out. She slipped her arm around his waist, and suddenly it was easy. She started to go up with him, breathing hard and canted over to the right, like a woman counterbalancing a heavy weight, but not gasping or buckling in the knees. She had an idea she could have hauled him up a high ladder like this, if that had been required. Every now and then he’d put a foot down and push, trying to help, but mostly his toes just dragged up the risers and across the carpeted stair-levels. Then, as they reached the tenth step — the halfway point, by her count — he started to help a little more. That was good, because there was a splintering sound from behind and below them as the coat-tree snapped beneath Norman’s two hundred and twenty pounds. Now she could hear him coming again, not on his feet — at least it didn’t sound that way — but crawling on his hands and knees.
‘You don’t want to play with me, Rose,’ he panted. How far behind? She couldn’t tell. And while the coat-tree had slowed him down, Norman wasn’t dragging a man who was hurt and only three-quarters conscious. ‘Stop right where you are. Quit trying to run. I only want to talk to y — ‘
‘Stay away!’ Sixteen . . . seventeen . . . eighteen. The light was off up here, too, and with no windows it was as dark as a mineshaft. Then she was staggering forward, the foot that had been searching for the nineteenth step finding only more level going. Apparently there were only eighteen stairs in the flight, not twenty. How marvellous. They had made it to the top ahead of him; at least they had managed to do that much. ‘Stay away from me, Nor — ‘
A thought struck her then, one so terrible that it froze her where she was. She sucked the last syllable of her husband’s name back into herself like someone who has been punched in the stomach.
Where were her keys? Had she left them dangling from the lock in the outside door?
She let go of Bill so she could feel in the lefthand pocket of the leather jacket he had loaned her, and as she did, Norman’s hand closed softly and persuasively around her calf, like the coil of a snake which squeezes its prey rather than poisoning it with venom. Without thinking, she kicked powerfully backward with her other foot. The sole of her sneaker connected squarely with Norman’s already battered nose, and he gave voice to a sick howl of pain. This changed to a yell of surprise as he grabbed for the bannister, missed it, and toppled backward into the darkened stairwell. Rosie heard a double crash as he somersaulted twice, heels over head.
Break your neck! she screamed silently at him as her hand closed on the comforting round shape of the keyring in her jacket pocket — she had stuck it in there after all, thank Christ, thank God, thank all the angels in the Kingdom of Heaven. Break your neck, let it end right here in the dark, break your stinking neck, die and leave me alone!
But no. She could already hear him stirring and moving around down there, and then he was cursing her, and then there was the unmistakable marching thud of his knees as he started crawling up the stairs again, calling her all his names — cunt and dyke and whore and bitch