Rose Madder

by Stephen King

  In any case, the view was no longer of Tremont Street and Bryant Park; it was of a woman in a rose madder chiton standing on top of an overgrown hill, looking down at the ruins of a temple. But now the hem of her short gown was rippling against the woman's long, smooth thighs; now Rosie could see the fine blonde hairs which had escaped her plait wavering like plankton in the wind, and the purple-black thunderheads rushing across the sky. Now she could see the shaggy pony's head move as it cropped grass.

  And if it was a window, it was wide open. As she watched, the pony poked its muzzle into her room, sniffed at the floorboards, found them uninteresting, pulled back, and began to crop on its own side once more.

  More lightning, another roll of thunder. The wind gusted again, and Rosie heard the spilled pages stirring and swirling around in the kitchen alcove. The hem of her nightgown fluttered against her legs as she got up and walked slowly toward the picture which now covered the whole wall from floor to ceiling and side to side. The wind blew back her hair, and she could smell sweet impending rain.

  It won't be long now, either, she thought. I'm going to get drenched. We all are, I guess.

  ROSE, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? Practical-Sensible screamed. WHAT IN GOD'S NAME ARE Y--

  Rosie squashed the voice--at that moment it seemed she had heard enough of it to last her a lifetime--and stopped before the wall that was no longer a wall. Just ahead, no more than five feet away, was the blonde woman in the chiton. She hadn't turned, but Rosie could now see the little tilts and adjustments of her upraised hand as she looked down the hill, and the rise and fall of her barely glimpsed left breast as she breathed.

  Rosie took a deep breath and stepped into the picture.

  4

  It was at least ten degrees cooler on the other side, and the high grass tickled her ankles and shins. For a moment, she thought she heard a baby crying again, very faintly, but then the sound was gone. She looked back over her shoulder, expecting to see her room, but it was gone, too. A gnarled old olive tree spread its roots and branches at the place where she had stepped through into this world. Beneath it she saw an artist's easel with a stool in front of it. Standing open on the stool was a painter's box full of brushes and colors.

  The canvas propped on the easel was exactly the size of the picture Rosie had bought in the Liberty City Loan & Pawn. It showed her room on Trenton Street, as seen from the wall where she had hung Rose Madder. There was a woman, clearly Rosie herself, standing in the middle of the room, facing the door which gave on the second-floor hallway. Her posture and position were not quite the same as the posture and position of the woman looking down on the ruined temple--her hand was not upraised, for instance--but it was close enough to frighten Rosie badly. There was something else frightening about the picture, as well: the woman had on dark blue tapered slacks and a pink sleeveless top. This was the outfit Rosie had already planned to wear when she went motorcycling with Bill. I'll have to wear something different, she thought wildly, as if by changing her clothes in the future she could change what she was seeing now.

  Something nuzzled her upper arm, and Rosie gave a small scream. She turned and saw the pony looking at her with apologetic brown eyes. Overhead, thunder rumbled.

  A woman was standing beside the trim pony-cart to which the shaggy little beast was harnessed. She was wearing a many-layered red robe. It was ankle-length but gauzy, almost transparent; Rosie could see the warm tints of her cafe-au-lait skin through its artful layers. Lightning flared across the sky, and for a moment Rosie again saw what she had first seen in the painting not long after Bill had brought her back from Pop's Kitchen: the shadow of the cart lying on the grass, and the shadow of the woman growing out of it.

  "Don't you worry, now," the woman in the red robe said. "Radamanthus the least of your worries. He don't bite nothing but grass and clover. He's just gettin a little smell on you, that's all."

  Rosie felt a sudden, overwhelming sense of relief as she realized that this was the woman Norman had always referred to (in tones of aggrieved bitterness) as "that slutty high-yellow gal." It was Wendy Yarrow, but Wendy Yarrow was dead, and so this was a dream, Q.E.D. No matter how realistic it felt or how realistic the details might be (wiping a tiny bit of moisture off her upper arm, for instance, left there by the pony's enquiring muzzle), it was a dream.

  Of course it is, she told herself. No one actually steps through pictures, Rosie.

  That had little or no power over her. The idea that the woman attending the cart was the long-dead Wendy Yarrow did, however.

  The wind gusted, and once again the sound of the crying baby came to her. Now Rosie saw something else: sitting on the pony-cart's seat was a large basket made of green woven rushes. Fluffs of silk ribbon decorated the handle, and there were silk bows on the corners. The hem of a pink blanket, clearly hand-woven, hung over the end.

  "Rosie."

  The voice was low and sweetly husky. Nevertheless, it sent a scutter of gooseflesh up Rosie's back. There was something wrong with it, and she had an idea that wrongness might be something only another woman could hear--a man heard a voice like that, immediately thought about sex, and forgot everything else. But there was something wrong with it. Badly wrong.

  "Rosie," it said again, and suddenly she knew: it was as if the voice were striving to be human. Striving to remember how to be human.

  "Girl, don't you look straight at her," the woman in the red robe said. She sounded anxious. "That's not for the likes of you."

  "No, I don't want to," Rosie said. "I want to go home."

  "I don't blame you, but it's too late for that," the woman said, and stroked the pony's neck. Her dark eyes were grave and her mouth was tight. "Don't touch her, either. She don't mean you no harm, but she ain't got good control of herself no more." She tapped her temple with one finger.

  Rosie turned reluctantly toward the woman in the chiton, and took a single step forward. She was fascinated by the texture of the woman's back, her bare shoulder, and the lower part of her neck. The skin was finer than watered silk. But farther up on her neck ...

  Rosie didn't know what those gray shadows lurking just below her hairline could be, and didn't think she wanted to know. Bites were her first wild thought, but they weren't bites. Rosie knew bites. Was it leprosy? Something worse? Something contagious?

  "Rosie," the sweet, husky voice said for the third time, and there was something in it that made Rosie feel like screaming, the way that seeing Norman smile had sometimes made her feel like screaming.

  This woman is mad. Whatever else is wrong with her--the patches on her skin--is secondary to that. She is mad.

  Lightning flashed. Thunder rumbled. And, on the fitfully gusting wind, from the direction of the ruined temple at the foot of the hill, came the distant wail of an infant.

  "Who are you?" she asked. "Who are you, and why am I here?"

  For an answer, the woman held out her right arm and turned it over, revealing an old white ring of scar on the underside. "This one bled quite a bit, then got infected," she said in her sweetly husky voice.

  Rosie held out her own arm. It was the left instead of the right, but the mark itself was exactly the same. A small but terrible packet of knowledge came to her then: if she were to put on the short rose madder chiton, she would wear it so that her right shoulder was bare instead of her left, and if she were to own the gold armlet, she would clasp it above her left elbow instead of her right.

  The woman on the hill was her mirror image.

  The woman on the hill was--

  "You're me, aren't you?" Rosie asked. And then, as the woman with the plaited hair shifted slightly, she added in a shrill, shaking voice: "Don't turn around, I don't want to see!"

  "Don't jump so fast," Rose Madder said in a strange, patient voice. "You're really Rosie, you're Rosie Real. Don't forget that when you forget everything else. And don't forget one other thing: I repay. What you do for me I will do for you. And that's why we were brought together. That is our
balance. That is our ka."

  Lightning ripped the sky; thunder cracked; wind hissed through the olive tree. The tiny blonde hairs which had escaped from Rose Madder's plait wavered wildly. Even in this chancey light they looked like filaments of gold.

  "Go down now," Rose Madder said. "Go down and bring me my baby."

  5

  The child's cry drifted up to them like something which had labored here from another continent, and Rosie looked down at the ruined temple, whose perspective still seemed strangely and unpleasantly skewed, with new fear. Also, her breasts had begun to throb, as they had often throbbed in the months following her miscarriage.

  Rosie opened her mouth, not sure of the words that would come out, only knowing they would be some sort of protest, but a hand gripped her shoulder before she could speak. She turned. It was the woman in red. She shook her head warningly, tapped her temple again, and pointed down the hill at the ruins.

  Rosie's right wrist was seized by another hand, one as cold as a gravestone. She turned back and realized at the last moment that the woman in the chiton had turned around and was now facing her. Quickly, with confused thoughts of Medusa filling her mind, Rosie cast her eyes down so as not to see the face of the other. She saw the back of the hand gripping her wrist instead. It was covered with a dark gray blotch that made her think of some hovering ocean predator (a manta ray, of course). The fingernails looked dark and dead. As Rosie watched, she saw a small white worm wriggle out from beneath one of them.

  "Go now," Rose Madder said. "Do for me what I cannot do for myself. And remember: I repay."

  "All right," Rosie said. A terrible, perverse desire to look up into the other woman's face had seized her. To see what was there. Perhaps to see her own face swimming beneath the dead gray shadows of some ailment that made you crazy even as it ate you alive. "All right, I'll go, I'll try, just don't make me look at you."

  The hand let go of her wrist ... but slowly, as if it would clamp tight again the instant its owner sensed any weakening on Rosie's part. Then the hand turned and one dead gray finger pointed down the hill, as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had pointed out one particular grave marker to Ebenezer Scrooge.

  "Go on, then," Rose Madder said.

  Rosie started slowly down the hill, eyes still lowered, watching her bare feet slip through the high, rough grass. It wasn't until a particularly vicious crack of thunder tore through the air and she looked up, startled, that she realized the woman in the red robe had come with her.

  "Are you going to help me?" Rosie asked.

  "I c'n only go that far." The woman in red pointed toward the fallen pillar. "I got what she got, only so far it hasn't done much more than brush me."

  She held out an arm, and Rosie saw an amorphous pink blotch squirming on her flesh--in her flesh--between the wrist and the forearm. There was a similar one in the cup of her palm. This one was almost pretty. It reminded Rosie of the clover she had found between the floorboards in her room. Her room, the place she had counted on to be her refuge, seemed very distant to her now. Perhaps that was the dream, that whole life, and this was the only reality.

  "Those are the only two I got, at least for now," she said, "but they're enough to keep me out of there. That bull would smell me and come running. It's me it'd come to, but both of us'd get killed."

  "What bull?" Rosie asked, mystified and afraid. They had almost reached the fallen pillar.

  "Erinyes. He guards the temple."

  "What temple?"

  "Don't waste time with man's questions, woman."

  "What are you talking about? What are man's questions?"

  "Ones you already know the answers to. Come on over here."

  "Wendy Yarrow" was standing by the moss-encrusted end segment of the fallen pillar and looking impatiently at Rosie. The temple loomed close by. Looking at it hurt Rosie's eyes in the same way that looking at a movie screen where the picture had gone out of focus hurt them. She saw subtle bulges where she was sure there were none; she saw folds of shadow which disappeared when she blinked her eyes.

  "Erinyes is one-eyed, and that one eye is blind, but there ain't nothing wrong with his sense of smell. Is it your time, girl?"

  "My ... time?"

  "Time of the month!"

  Rosie shook her head.

  "Good, because we'd'a been done before we was begun if you was. I ain't, neither, ain't had no womanblood since the sickness started to show. Too bad, because that blood would be best. Still--"

  The most monstrous crack of thunder yet split the air open just above their heads, and now icy droplets of rain began to fall.

  "We got to hurry!" the woman in red told her. "Tear off two pieces of your nightgown--a strip for a bandage and a swatch big enough to wrap a stone in with enough left over to tie it up. Don't argue, and don't go askin no more questions, neither. Just do it."

  Rosie bent down, took hold of the hem of her cotton nightgown, and tore a long, wide strip up the side, leaving her left leg bare almost all the way to the hip. When I walk, I'm going to look like a waitress in a Chinese restaurant, she thought. She tore a narrower strip from the side of this, and when she looked up, she was alarmed to see that "Wendy" was holding a long and wicked-looking double-sided dagger. Rose couldn't think where it might have come from, unless the woman had had it strapped to her thigh, like the heroine in one of those sweet-savage Paul Sheldon novels, stories where there was a reason, no matter how farfetched, for everything that happened.

  That's probably just where she had it, too, Rosie thought. She knew that she herself would want a knife if she was traveling in the company of the woman in the rose madder chiton. She thought again about how the woman who was traveling in her company had tapped the side of her head with one finger and told Rosie not to touch her. She don't mean you no harm, "Wendy Yarrow" had said, but she ain't got good control of herself no more.

  Rosie opened her mouth to ask the woman standing by the fallen pillar what she intended doing with that knife ... and then closed her lips again. If a man's questions were ones you already knew the answers to, then that was a man's question.

  "Wendy" seemed to feel her eyes and looked up at her. "It's the big piece you'll want first," she said. "Be ready with it."

  Before Rosie could answer, "Wendy" had pierced her own skin with the tip of the dagger. She hissed a few words Rosie didn't understand--maybe a prayer--and then drew a fine line across her forearm, one that matched her dress. It fattened and began to run as the skin and underlying tissue drew back, allowing the wound to gape.

  "Oooh, that hurt bad!" the woman moaned, then held out the hand with the dagger in it. "Give it to me. The big piece, the big piece!"

  Rosie put it in her hand, confused and frightened but not nauseated; the sight of blood did not do that to her. "Wendy Yarrow" folded the strip of cotton cloth into a pad, which she placed over the wound, held, then turned over. Her purpose did not appear to be compression; she only wanted to soak the cloth with her blood. When she handed it back to Rosie, the cotton which had been cornflower blue when Rosie lay down in her Trenton Street bed was a much darker color ... but a familiar one. Blue and scarlet had combined to make rose madder.

  "Now find a rock and tie that piece of cloth around it," she said to Rosie. "When you got that done, take off that thing you're wearing and wrap it around both."

  Rosie stared at her with wide eyes, far more shocked by this order than she had been by the sight of the blood pouring off the woman's arm. "I can't do that!" she said. "I don't have anything on underneath!"

  "Wendy" grinned humorlessly. "I won't tell if you won't," she said. "Meantime, gimme that other 'un before I bleed to death."

  Rosie handed her the narrower strip of cloth, this one still blue, and the brown-skinned woman began to wrap it swiftly around her wounded arm. Lightning exploded on their left like some monstrous firework. Rosie heard a tree go over with a long, rending crash. This sound was followed by a cannonade of thunder. Now she could smell a
coppery odor on the air, like pennies that had been flash-fried. Then, as if the lightning had ripped open the sky's bag of waters, the rain arrived. It fell in cold torrents driven almost horizontal by the wind. Rosie saw it hit the pad of cloth in her hand, making it steam, and saw the first runnels of pink, bloody water coming out of it and trickling down her fingers. It looked like strawberry Kool-Aid.

  Without any further thought about what she was doing or why, Rosie reached over her shoulder, grasped the back of her nightgown, bowed forward, and stripped it off over her head. She was immediately standing in the world's coldest shower, gasping for breath as the rain needled her cheeks and shoulders and unprotected back. Her skin tightened and then broke out in hundreds of tiny hard goosepimples; they covered her from neck to heels.

  "Ai!" she cried in a desperate, breathless little voice. "Oh, ai! So cold!"

  She dropped her nightgown, still mostly dry, over the hand holding the bloody rag and spied a rock the size of a cinnamon bun lying between two of the fallen pillar's segments. She picked it up, dropped to her knees, and then spread her nightgown over her head and shoulders, much as a man caught in an unexpected shower might use his newspaper as a makeshift tent. Under this temporary protection she wrapped the bloodsoaked rag around the rock. She was left with two long, sticky ears, and these she tied together, wincing with disgust as "Wendy's" rain-thinned blood ran out of them and pattered to the ground. With the rock tied in the rag, she wrapped her nightgown (no longer even close to dry) around the whole thing, as instructed. Most of the blood was going to wash out anyway, she knew. This wasn't a shower, or even a downpour. This was a flood.

  "Go on!" the brown-skinned woman in the red dress told her. "Go on in the temple! Walk right through it, and don't stop for nothing! Don't pick nothing up, and don't believe in anything you see or hear. It's a ghos place, no doubt about that, but even in the Temple of the Bull there ain't no ghos can hurt a livin woman."

  Rosie was shivering wildly, water in her eyes doubling her vision, water dripping from the tip of her nose, drops of water hanging from the lobes of her ears like exotic jewelry. "Wendy" stood facing her, hair plastered to her brow and cheeks, dark eyes blazing. Now she had to shout in order to make herself heard over the relentlessly rising wind.