Rose Madder

by Stephen King

  Rosie saw one thing she didn't like much, however, something that flashed her back to the bad old days with terrible and unexpected suddenness: blood. They were the prints of thin lines rather than drops, however, and they were too far down to have come from a punched nose or a split lip ... unless, of course, her sleeping movements had been so vigorous she'd actually turned around in her bed. Her next thought was that she'd had a visit from the cardinal (this was how her mother had insisted Rosie speak of her menstrual periods, if she had to speak of them at all), but it was entirely the wrong time of the month for that.

  Is it your time, girl? Is the moon full for you?

  "What?" she asked the empty room. "What about the moon?"

  Again, something wavered, almost held, and then floated away before she could grasp it. She looked down at herself, and one mystery was solved, at least. She had a scratch on her upper right thigh, quite a nasty one, from the look. That was undoubtedly where the blood on the sheet had come from.

  Did I scratch myself in my sleep? Is that what--

  This time the thought which came into her mind held a little longer, perhaps because it wasn't a thought at all, but an image. She saw a naked woman--herself----edging carefully sideways along a path which was overgrown with thorn-bushes. As she turned on the shower and held one hand under the spray to test the temperature, she found herself wondering if you could bleed spontaneously in a dream, if the dream was vivid enough. Sort of like those people who bled from their hands and feet on Good Friday.

  Stigmata? Are you saying that on top of everything else, you're suffering stigmata?

  I'm not saying anything because I don't know anything, she answered herself, and how true that was. She supposed she could believe--just about barely--that a scratch might appear spontaneously on a sleeping person's skin, matching a scratch that was occurring at that same moment in the person's dream. It was a stretch, but not entirely out of the question. What was out of the question was the idea that a sleeping person could make the nightgown disappear right off her body simply by dreaming she was naked.

  (Take off that thing you're wearing.

  (I can't do that! I don't have anything on underneath!

  (I won't tell if you won't ...)

  Phantom voices. One she recognized as her own, but the other?

  It didn't matter; surely it didn't. She had taken her nightgown off in her sleep, that was all, or perhaps in a brief waking interlude which she now remembered no better than her weird dreams about running around in the dark or using white stepping-stones to cross streams of black water. She had taken it off, and when she got around to looking, she would no doubt find it wadded up under the bed.

  "Right. Unless I ate it, or someth--"

  She pulled back the hand which had been testing the water and looked at it curiously. There were fading reddish-purple stains on the tips of her fingers, and a slightly brighter residue of the same stuff under her nails. She raised the hand slowly to her face, and a voice deep down in her mind--not the voice of Practical-Sensible this time, at least she didn't think so--responded with unmistakable alarm. Dassn't put the hand that touches the seeds into your mouth! Dassn't, dassn't!

  "What seeds?" Rosie asked, frightened. She smelled her fingers and caught just a ghost of an aroma, a smell that reminded her of baking and sweet cooked sugar. "What seeds? What happened last night? Is it--" She made herself stop there. She knew what she had been about to say, but didn't want to hear the question actually articulated, hanging in the air like unfinished business. Is it still happening?

  She got into the shower, adjusted the water until it was as hot as she could take it, and then grabbed the soap. She washed her hands with particular care, scrubbed them until she could not see so much as a trace of that rose madder stain, even under her nails. Then she washed her hair, beginning to vocalize as she did so. Curt had suggested nursery rhymes in different keys and vocal registers, and that was what she did, keeping her voice low so as not to disturb the people above or below her. When she got out five minutes later and dried off, her body was starting to feel a little more like real flesh and a little less like something constructed out of barbed wire and broken glass. Her voice had almost returned to normal, as well.

  She started to put on jeans and a tee-shirt, remembered that Rob Lefferts was taking her to lunch, and put on a new skirt instead. Then she sat down in front of the mirror to plait her hair. It was slow going, because her back, shoulders, and upper arms were also stiff. Hot water had improved the situation but not entirely cured it.

  Yes, it was a good-sized baby for its age, she thought, so absorbed in getting the plait just right that what she was thinking did not even really register. But as she was finishing, she looked into the mirror which reflected the room behind her and saw something which widened her eyes. The morning's other, more minor discordancies slipped from her mind in an instant.

  "Oh my God," Rosie said in a strengthless little voice.

  She got up and walked across the room on legs which felt as nerveless as stilts.

  In most regards the picture was just the same. The blonde woman still stood on top of her hill with her plaited hair hanging down between her shoulderblades and her left arm raised, but now the hand shading her eyes made sense, because the thunderheads which had overhung the scene were gone. The sky above the woman in the short gown was the faded blue denim of a humid day in July. A few dark birds which hadn't been there before circled in that sky, but Rosie hardly noticed them.

  The sky's blue because the storm is over, she thought. It ended while I was... well ... while I was somewhere else.

  All she could remember for sure about that somewhere else was that it had been dark and scary. That was enough; she didn't want to remember any more, and she thought maybe she didn't want to have her picture re-framed, after all. She knew she had changed her mind about showing it to Bill tomorrow, or even mentioning it. It would be bad if he saw the change from overcast and thunderheads to hazy sunshine, yes, but it would be even worse if he saw no change at all. That would mean she was losing her mind.

  I'm not sure I want the damned thing anymore at all, she thought. It's scary. Do you want to hear something really hilarious? I think it might be haunted.

  She picked the unframed canvas up, holding the edges with her palms, denying her conscious mind access to the thought

  (careful Rosie don't fall in)

  that caused her to handle it that way. There was a tiny closet to the right of the door leading out into the hall, with nothing in it yet but the lowtop sneakers she'd been wearing when she left Norman and a new sweater made out of some cheap synthetic stuff. She had to put the picture down in order to open the door (she could have tucked it under her arm long enough to free one hand, of course, but somehow didn't like to do that), and when she picked it up again she paused, looking fixedly at it. The sun was out, definitely new, and there were big black birds circling in the sky above the temple, probably new, but wasn't there something else, as well? Some other change? She thought so, and she thought she wasn't seeing it because it wasn't an addition but a deletion. Something was gone. Something--

  I don't want to know, Rosie told herself brusquely. I don't even want to think about it, so there.

  Yes, so there. But she was sorry to feel the way she did, because she'd begun by thinking of the picture as her personal good-luck charm, a kind of rabbit's foot. And of one thing there was absolutely no doubt: it was thinking of Rose Madder, standing there so fearlessly on top of her hill, that had pulled her through on her first day in the recording studio, when she'd suffered the panic attack. So she didn't want to be having these unpleasant feelings about the picture, and most assuredly didn't want to be afraid of it ... but she was. After all, the weather in oil paintings usually didn't clear up overnight, and the amount of stuff you could see in them usually didn't grow and contract, as if some unseen projectionist were switching back and forth between lenses. She didn't know what she was going to do with
the picture in the long run, but she knew where it was going to spend today and the coming weekend: in the closet, keeping her old sneaks company.

  She put it in there, propped it against the wall (resisting an urge to turn it around so it would also face the wall), and then closed the door. With that done, she slipped into her only good blouse, took her purse, and left the room. As she walked down the long, dingy corridor leading to the stairs, two words whispered up from the very bottom of her mind: I repay. She stopped at the head of the stairs, shivering so violently she almost dropped her purse, and for a moment her right leg ached almost all the way up to her buttock, as if she had been struck with a savage cramp. Then it passed, and she went quickly down to the first floor. I won't think about it, she told herself as she walked down the street to the bus stop. I don't have to if I don't want to, and I most definitely don't want to. I'll think about Bill instead. Bill, and his motorcycle.

  12

  Thinking about Bill got her to work and into the dark-toned world of Kill All My Tomorrows without a hitch, and at lunch there was even less time to think of the woman in the painting. Mr. Lefferts took her to a tiny Italian place called Della Femmina, the nicest restaurant Rosie had ever been in, and while she was eating her melon, he offered her what he called "a more solid business arrangement." He proposed signing her to a contract which would pay her eight hundred dollars a week for twenty weeks or twelve books, whichever came first. It wasn't the thousand a week Rhoda had urged her to hold out for, but Robbie also promised to put her together with an agent who would set her up with as many radio spots as she wanted.

  "You can make twenty-two thousand dollars by the end of the year, Rose. More, if you want it ... but why knock yourself out?"

  She asked him if she could have the weekend to think about it. Mr. Lefferts told her she certainly could. Before he left her in the lobby of the Corn Building (Rhoda and Curt were sitting together on a bench by the elevator, gossiping like a couple of thieves), he held his hand out to her. She returned the gesture, expecting her hand to be shaken. Instead he took it in both of his, bowed, and kissed it. The gesture--no one had ever kissed her hand before, although she had seen it done in lots of movies--sent a shiver up her back.

  It was only as she sat in the recording booth, watching Curt thread up a fresh reel in the other room, that her thoughts returned to the picture which was now safely

  (you hope Rosie you hope)

  stashed away in her closet. Suddenly she knew what the other change had been, what had been subtracted from the picture: the armlet. The woman in the rose madder chiton had been wearing it above her right elbow. This morning her arm had been bare all the way to her shapely shoulder.

  13

  When she got back to her room that night, Rosie dropped to her knees and peered beneath her unmade bed. The gold armlet lay all the way in the back, standing on edge in the dark and gleaming softly. To Rosie it looked like the wedding ring of a giantess. Something else lay beside it: a small folded square of blue cloth. She'd found a piece of her missing nightgown after all, it seemed. There were reddish-purple spatters on it. These looked like blood, but Rosie knew they weren't; they were the spill of fruits better not tasted. She had scrubbed similar stains off her fingers this morning in the shower.

  The armlet was extremely heavy--a peund at least, perhaps even two. If it was made of the stuff it looked like it was made of, how much might it be worth? Twelve thousand dollars? Fifteen? Not bad, considering it had somehow come out of a painting she'd gotten by trading away a nearly worthless engagement ring. Still, she didn't like to touch it, and she put it on the nighttable beside the lamp.

  She held the little packet of blue cotton in her hand for a moment, sitting there like a teenager with her back propped against the bed and her feet crossed, and then she unfolded one side. She saw three seeds, three little seeds, and as Rosie looked at them with hopeless and unreasoning horror, those merciless words recurred, clanging in her head like iron bells:

  I repay.

  VII

  PICNICKERS

  1

  Norman had been trolling for her.

  He lay awake late in his hotel room on Thursday night and across midnight's dark knife-edge into Friday morning. He turned off all the lights except for the fluorescent bar over the bathroom sink; it threw a diffuse glow across the room that he liked. It made him think of the way streetlights looked when you saw them through a heavy mist. He lay almost exactly as Rosie had lain before falling asleep on that same Thursday night, only with just one hand under his pillow instead of both. He needed the other to smoke with, and to convey the bottle of Glenlivet standing on the floor to his lips.

  Where are you, Rosie? he asked the wife who was no longer there. Where are you and where did you ever find the nerve to cut and run, a scared little creepmouse like you?

  It was this second question he cared about the most--how she had dared. The first one didn't matter all that much, not in any practical sense, because he knew where she was going to be on Saturday. A lion doesn't have to bother himself about where the zebra feeds; all he has to do is wait by the waterhole where it drinks. So far, so good, but still ... how had she ever dared leave him in the first place? Even if there was no life for him beyond their final conversation, he wanted to know that. Had it been planned? An accident? An aberration born of a single impulse? Had anyone helped her (besides, that was, the late Peter Slowik and the Cavalcade of Cunts on Durham Avenue)? What had she been doing since she'd hit the bricks of this charming little city by the lake? Waitressing? Shaking farts out of sheets in some flea-bag like this? He didn't think so. She was too lazy to do menial work, you only had to look at the way she kept house to see that, and she had no skills to do anything else. If you wore tits, that left just one other choice. She was out there someplace right now, selling it on some streetcorner. Of course she was; what else? God knew she was a lousy lay, screwing her had been about as exciting as fucking mud, but pussy was something men would pay for even if it didn't do anything but lie there and drool a little after the rodeo was over. So yes, sure, she was probably out there selling it.

  He'd ask her about it, though. He would ask her everything. And when he had all the answers he needed, all the answers he ever wanted from the likes of her, he would wrap his belt around her neck so she couldn't scream, and then he would bite ... and bite .... His mouth and jaws still ached from what he had done to Thumper the Amazing Urban Jewboy, but he wouldn't let that stop him, or even slow him down. He had three Percodans at the bottom of his traveling bag, and he would take them before he went to work on his lost lamb, his sweet little rambling Rose. As for afterward, after it was over, after the Percs wore off ...

  But he couldn't see that, and he didn't want to see that. He had an idea that there was going to be no after, only darkness. And that was all right. In fact, a long dose of darkness might be just what the doctor ordered.

  He lay in bed and drank the best Scotch in the world and burned one cigarette after another, watching the smoke drift up to the ceiling in silky reefs that turned blue when they passed through the soft white radiance from the bathroom, and he trolled for her. He trolled for her, and his hook slipped through nothing but water. There was nothing there and it was driving him crazy. It was as if she had been abducted by aliens, or something. At one point, quite drunk by then, he had dropped a live cigarette into his hand and clenched his fist around it, imagining it was her hand instead of his, that he was holding his hands over hers, clamping hers tight on the heat. And as the pain bit in and wisps of smoke curled out around his knuckles, he whispered, "Where are you, Rose? Where are you hiding, you thief?"

  Not long after that he drifted off. He woke up around ten on Friday morning, unrested and hungover and vaguely frightened. He had dreamed peculiar dreams all night long. In them he was still awake and still lying in his bed here on the ninth floor of the Whitestone, and the light from the bathroom was still cutting softly through the darkness of his room, an
d the cigarette smoke was still rising through it in shifting blue membranes. Only in his dreams, he could see pictures like movies in the smoke. He could see Rose in the smoke.

  There you are, he thought as he watched her walk through a dead garden in a pelting rainstorm. Rose was naked for some reason, and he felt an unexpected bite of lust. He hadn't felt anything at the sight of her nakedness but weary revulsion for eight years or more, but now she looked different. Pretty good, in fact.

  It isn't that she's lost weight, he thought in the dream, although it looks like she has ... a little, anyway. Mostly it's something about the way she's moving what she's got. What is it?

  Then it came to him. She had the look of a woman who's fucking someone and hasn't had anywhere near enough just yet. If it had even crossed his mind to doubt this assessment--to say What, Rosie? You got to be kidding, cousin--one look at her hair would have been enough to settle the question once and for all. She'd dyed it slut-blonde, as if she thought she was Sharon Stone, or maybe Madonna.

  He watched the smoke-Rose leave the weird dead garden and approach a stream so dark it looked more like ink than water. She crossed it on a path of stepping-stones, holding her arms out for balance, and he saw that she had some sort of wet, crumpled rag in one hand. It looked like a nightgown to Norman and he thought: Why don't you put it on, you brazen bitch? Or are you expecting your boyfriend to come by and give your ticket a punch? I'd like to see that. I really would. Tell you one thing--if I so much as catch you holding hands with a guy when I finally track you down, the cops are going to find his goddam trouser-rat sticking out of his asshole like a birthday candle.

  No one came by, though--not in the dream, anyway. The Rose over his bed, the smoke-Rose, walked down a path through a grove of trees that looked as dead as... well, as dead as Peter Slowik. At last she came into a clearing where there was one tree which still looked alive. She knelt down, picked up a bunch of seeds, and wrapped them in what looked like another piece of her nightgown. With that done she got up, went to a set of stairs near the tree (in dreams you never knew what fucked-up thing was going to happen next), and disappeared down them. He was waiting around for her to come back up when he began to feel a presence behind him, something as cold and chill as a draft from an open meat-locker. He'd handled some fairly scary people during his years as a cop--the PCP addicts he and Harley Bissington had had to deal with from time to time were probably the scariest--and you developed a sense of their presence after awhile. Norman was feeling that now. Someone was coming up behind him, and he never doubted for a moment that it was someone dangerous.