When Rose Wakes

by Christopher Golden

  “I am the uninvited,” the voice replies, self-amused.

  It comes from everywhere and nowhere, making it impossible for her to know if she can reach the door without being caught, but she must try. Steadying herself, she shifts slightly in the arched window frame and prepares to bolt.

  A skittery sound makes her skin crawl and she freezes, peering into the gloom. Candlelight dances on the walls of her bed chamber and she thinks she’d best cry out, that flight might be impossible but a scream may bring help running before her unseen enemy can do her harm.

  The skittering comes again, and this time she sees it, a tiny motion down on the floor—a cockroach, scuttling from one shadow to another. Her shiver of revulsion is followed by a moment of relief. Disgusting it may be, it is only a cockroach. The intruder remains hidden; Rose still has a chance to make her escape.

  She pushes off from her perch, drops to the floor, and begins to run. Two steps, three, and then a wave of sound washes over the room, echoing off the walls. Skittering, the noise like an avalanche of small stones. They come from every corner and shadow, from beneath table and bed and wardrobe. Cockroaches. She screams and backs up as they flow toward her, spreading across the floor, and she scrambles back to the window and climbs once again to the precarious safety of the stone sill.

  But they do not attack. Instead, the flow ebbs, cockroaches retreating, or so she thinks until she sees them gathering together in the middle of the floor, climbing upon one another with such speed that in seconds she realizes that they are building something… building someone.

  The roaches sculpt themselves into a singular form, the figure of a woman, black and brown, many thousands of bug carapaces gleaming in the candlelight. And the roach woman smiles.

  “Hello, Rose,” she says, that voice, the whisper of the uninvited.

  “What do you want?” Rose shouts.

  “Only to relish your anguish on this, the night before your father dies.”

  “No,” Rose says, shaking her head. “You know nothing. My father’s army will turn your people back—”

  The roach woman laughs. “Your enemies are not my people. My hatred is older than this foolish war.”

  Questions cascade through her mind but Rose pushes them away.

  “Get out!” she cries. “Leave me be!”

  But the woman glides forward on a million skittering feet, drawing closer, reaching for Rose with that smile and with arms that are churning nests of clicking bugs, and Rose screams, feeling the vast nothing yawning behind her, the drop to the courtyard below tugging at her, more inviting than the embrace of the witch.

  “Darling Rose,” the roach woman whispers.

  A raven’s cry startles Rose from behind and she hugs the window frame, presses herself against the stone even as the bird darts past her into the room. It plunges into the roach woman and the body collapses, cockroaches showering to the ground and beginning a skittering exodus, flowing back toward the shadows from which they came. In their midst the raven drops its beak, snatching one up, crunching and swallowing before snatching up another.

  No cry of warning accompanies the other birds, just the sudden flutter of wings as they stream through the window, knocking Rose onto her hands and knees on the stone floor. Dozens of ravens, dipping their beaks, killing and eating as many cockroaches as their speed will allow. The feast is swift and savage.

  Where the roach woman had stood, one of the ravens goes still, cocks its head, and studies her sidelong with one black, gleaming eye.

  “You must be careful, Rose,” it croaks.

  She throws herself backward, scrabbling away from the birds, and strikes her head on the wall…

  •

  And she wakes.

  Rose opened her eyes, heart thundering with a fear that chased her up out of her dreams. She took a deep breath, drawing comfort from the familiar surroundings of her room in the rehab wing of the hospital. Drab as it might have been, it was the only home she could remember and the ordinariness of it soothed her, even as the claustrophobia she had been developing of late returned. She might be safe here, but she wanted to get outside, to see people other than doctors, nurses, and physical therapists. Her aunts were wonderful, but Rose hadn’t seen anyone her own age since she had woken from her coma, and since she could not remember anything, it was as if she had never met another teenager.

  The television bolted high on the opposite wall showed a woman mixing some recipe in a bowl, the volume on low. Rose was alone in the room, but the TV had been tuned to the Food Network, which—since her awakening—she had learned could only mean Aunt Suzette had been watching over her. The two women were her guardians and took turns sitting with her. While Rose went through painful physical therapy, they would talk to her about the world, educating her about all the things she had forgotten. And after those sessions, one or both aunts would sit with her, sometimes massaging her leg muscles to relieve the tension there, and they would watch television.

  Aunt Suzette loved the Food Network, while Aunt Fay preferred the History Channel. But when Rose managed to get some time to herself, or when her guardians fell asleep in their chairs, she used the remote control to skim through channels, watching a little bit of everything, trying to block out the terrible pain in her arms and legs. Physical therapy was agony. All through her coma, her aunts and the nurses had exercised her limbs to prevent the muscles from atrophying and the tendons and ligaments from shortening. The doctors seemed satisfied with the results and confident that she would be able to live an ordinary life—in fact, they were constantly amazed by the speed of her progress—but when the physical therapists were putting her through her paces, Rose thought of them as her torturers.

  Or she had. In the past few days the pain had become more manageable and she finally believed that she would one day be able to walk, even run, without torment. At last she had come to think of the therapists as her saviors. But the closer she came to being able to leave the hospital, the more she yearned to do so.

  “Oh, good, you’re awake!” Aunt Suzette said, entering the room. “It’s late, you know. Only an hour before PT, but that gives you time to have some breakfast. I asked the nurse to leave the tray for you.”

  She gestured to the rolling table beside the bed. A plastic container of bitter orange juice sat beside a metal-covered plate, her breakfast shrouded in mystery. The thought made Rose smile. The only mystery about the meals here was how the facility managed to make every meal taste as bland as the last. Yesterday morning she’d had scrambled eggs and breakfast sausages and found it difficult, closing her eyes, to tell the difference in flavor. Texture, yes, but both tasted greasy and salty, obviously fried in the same pan.

  “Great,” Rose said, smiling. She would never complain, not to her aunts and not to the staff. They had taken care of her all this time. But she did find it ironic that Aunt Suzette, who loved watching those cooking shows, thought Rose might actually be enjoying the food in this place.

  Sitting up, Rose grimaced at the tightness of her muscles, but her discomfort was so diminished now that she was barely conscious of it. She swung the rolling table around, bringing the tray in front of her, and uncovered the plate to discover fresh melon, waffles, and three undercooked strips of bacon. Despite her revulsion at the fatty bacon, her stomach growled with hunger. Considering that she hadn’t been able to eat much by way of solids for the first couple of days, she thought she was doing rather well. At least the melon looked edible—after all, it was the only thing on the plate that was supposed to be cold.

  “Is everything all right?” Aunt Suzette asked, standing at the end of the bed.

  Rose glanced at the window, where prisms caught the sun and little figures made of sticks and twine spun in the barely noticeable late September breeze. She smiled, thinking about the way the doctors had been forced to indulge Suzette’s and Fay’s superstitions. Her aunts could be very charming and persuasive, but if charm didn’t work, they simply used their status as
slightly odd middle-aged women to bulldoze over objections.

  “Those things aren’t working,” Rose said, nodding toward the windows.

  “What?” Aunt Suzette said, a flicker of alarm crossing her face. “What makes you say that?”

  “I had those dreams again last night.”

  Aunt Suzette sighed as though with relief. “I’m sorry, Rose, but anyone who tells you they can ward off dreams is just lying. Nightmares may upset you, but they won’t make you sick. Those wards keep malicious spirits away.”

  Rose arched an eyebrow. “Auntie, you don’t really think some kind of evil spirits are going to make me sick again. Please tell me you don’t believe that.”

  Almost sheepishly, Aunt Suzette shrugged. “Superstition is more about tradition than anything else. I believe in luck, though, good and bad, and sometimes we make our own. My mother believed things that would make you roll your eyes, but to her they were no joke.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rose said. “I’m not trying to insult you.”

  “Of course not. I think they’re a little silly, too, but I can’t help believing good thoughts help keep the bad things away, and I just want you to get better so you can come home.”

  Rose smiled. “Me, too.” She speared a piece of melon on her fork and popped it into her mouth. “I wish I remembered France.”

  Her aunts had told her all about their house in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, a small seaside village in France, where the three of them had lived until they had taken Rose to the United States to see if the American doctors would have any better luck at waking her from her coma than the French physicians had. The house had been sold so that they could buy a place here in Boston, but her aunts promised that they would bring her back to France to visit sometime. They seemed confident she would remember, then.

  “Anything else you need, darling?” Aunt Suzette asked.

  Rose hesitated.

  “Yes, go on,” Aunt Suzette prodded.

  “Answers,” Rose replied, hating the edge in her voice. She loved her aunts, but they could be frustratingly flighty and seemed reluctant to tell her too much about her life, as if somehow that would be cheating. “I want to know more about what my life was like before my accident.”

  Aunt Suzette narrowed her eyes with concern, her gaze sad and sincere. “Ask away, sweetie. I’ll tell you whatever I can.”

  Rose perked up. Up until now her aunts had doled out information in small portions, concerned about rushing her. But Rose thought that knowing whatever she could about her life before could only help jar loose some real memories. The doctor still seemed confident that the past would come back to her eventually, as part of a natural healing process, but Rose didn’t want to wait.

  “My horse,” she said.

  “Yvette,” Aunt Suzette replied, nodding.

  Rose smiled. “Why did I name her that?”

  “I don’t know where the name came from originally, but when you were a small girl you had a stuffed animal, a horse, and you called it Yvette. When your father gave you a horse of your own, you named her after the doll.”

  Rose tried hard to remember, to imagine herself riding a horse, or crushing that stuffed animal to her chest, but nothing would come.

  “What color was she?”

  “Yvette was a chestnut mare, and tall,” Aunt Suzette said, glancing away. “Probably too tall for a girl your age.”

  Rose wanted to ease her aunt’s conscience. The horse had thrown her, and the injury had resulted in her coma, but by all accounts she had been an excellent rider and the horse a gentle animal. There was no way that her aunts could have predicted she would be thrown.

  “It’s not your fault, Auntie.”

  Aunt Suzette smiled.

  “Tell me more about our house,” Rose said.

  That lifted her aunt’s spirits. “It was such a beautiful place. From the top floor, we had a lovely view of the sea. You used to help me in the garden. We worked hard but always laughed. You and I are very silly, Rose, and I love you for it. Fay can be so grim sometimes.

  “The front steps were stone. It was an old house. We had high ceilings and beautifully carved archways leading from room to room on the first floor. The kitchen—I had old copper pots I made fudge in. I wish you could remember. Your favorite was the chocolate. Someday I’ll make it again.”

  Rose’s heart felt heavier than ever. Instead of helping her retrieve her memories, these reminiscences were making her feel worse. The life she’d had, and the things she’d shared with her aunts, were lost to her, at least for now. Talking about them hurt.

  “I think I remember that fudge,” she said.

  Aunt Suzette brightened. “Really?”

  Rose nodded, smiling. She did not want to speak the lie aloud a second time.

  “What about other family?” she asked.

  “You have cousins,” Aunt Suzette said, as if she were searching her own memory for a long-forgotten answer. “An uncle in Italy, somewhere. Your father’s brother, Clement. But they were not at all close. It’s been ages since I even thought of him. I think Fay met Clement once, but I never did. I know he had children, but…” She shrugged. “I am sorry, Rose. I know this isn’t the answer you wanted. Fay and I are… well, we’re all you have.”

  Crestfallen, Rose glanced toward the window, wanting more than ever to get out of there. When she heard Aunt Suzette sigh, it took her a moment to realize that her reaction might have hurt her aunt’s feelings.

  “Auntie,” Rose said. “You know I love you and Aunt Fay. I just… I want to remember. I feel like I’m… like… I saw part of a movie this morning about an alien who comes to Earth and he looks like this woman’s husband, but he’s not him. He doesn’t know anything about the world, but he had to learn how to fit in, how to pretend he belongs here.”

  Aunt Suzette sat on the edge of the bed and laid a comforting hand on her arm. “And that’s how you feel?”

  Rose smiled. “Exactly how I feel.”

  “Ask me more questions,” Aunt Suzette said.

  “I’m not sure I want to. In some ways it makes me feel worse.”

  Aunt Suzette patted her arm. Rose had the strange feeling she was almost relieved not to have to answer any more questions. But when Aunt Suzette got up from the bed, Rose realized she didn’t want to stop.

  “What did I like?”

  “Like?”

  “To do? And what was my favorite color? What music did I listen to?”

  With a laugh, Aunt Suzette threw up her hands. “Oh, my goodness. Listen to you. You’re not sure you have more questions?” She smiled, but there was a tightness behind her eyes, and Rose wondered if she, too, was saddened by the reminiscences of things lost to them both. “Blue, like the ocean. That has always been your favorite color. Other than riding Yvette, you loved to swim and ride your bicycle. You used to go into the attic and play dress-up with old clothes, and pretend you were hiding from monsters, or that you’d been made princess of some kingdom—”

  Rose flinched, and stared at her. “Like in my dreams.”

  “Oh, yes,” Aunt Suzette agreed, nodding enthusiastically. “That must be where such fancies come from. It was always your favorite game. As for music, well, my tastes are so old-fashioned. I have no idea what you were listening to, but I know it hurt my ears.”

  Rose laughed, feeling better. “And friends? Who were my friends, Auntie?”

  The question gave Aunt Suzette pause. She frowned. Her mouth opened and closed, as though the question had taken her by surprise and she didn’t have an answer for it.

  “I did have friends, didn’t I?” Rose asked.

  “Of course, darling. Everyone loves you. It’s just in your nature. You have that effect on people. You were born with charm. But, to be honest, Aunt Fay and I didn’t know many of your friends. They were… school friends. The only one you brought home very often was that little thing…”

  Aunt Suzette seemed lost in thought, trying to remember. “What was her name
? Rochelle? Something like that.”

  Abruptly Aunt Suzette seemed to lose interest in the subject. She focused on the breakfast tray in front of Rose.

  “You’re not eating much, dear. And you never drink your juice.”

  Rose wanted to ask more questions, but they would keep. What she had learned thus far hadn’t prompted any big breakthrough in her memory, but she would keep trying to remember.

  She looked at the little foil-capped cup of orange juice on her tray. “It’s kind of nasty, actually. Do you think they have apple juice instead?”

  “Of course!” Aunt Suzette said, happy to be helpful. “I’ll get you a big glass from the cafeteria.”

  “Are you sure? I hate to ask.”

  “Nonsense. It won’t take a minute. And then I’ll fix your tea.”

  Rose smiled. Her aunts made her their own special-recipe herbal tea twice a day, insisting that its holistic properties were responsible for the speed of her recovery. They swore by it, and Rose could not deny them the pleasure of feeling that they were helping her, so she added extra milk and drank the horrid stuff down.

  “Thank you, Auntie,” she said. “For everything.”

  “Back in two shakes,” her aunt said, dashing from the room with a quickness that belied her girth.

  After she had eaten a few more pieces of melon, Rose threw back her sheets and climbed out of the bed. She stood tentatively, straightening up with only a modicum of pain, and walked to the window holding the small plate of melon and her fork.

  Taking a bite of honeydew, she studied the world outside the window with great anticipation. Her room was on the third floor, giving her a good view of the parking lot and the road beyond it, despite the trees that grew close to the window. The doctors talked so often about how quickly her physical therapy was getting results. One of them, Dr. Kittredge, had told her that he felt her attitude had a great deal to do with the speed of her recovery, and Rose believed him. Her aunts planned to give her a couple of weeks to adjust after she left the clinic before sending her to school, and she was really looking forward to that. Rose knew so much about school—about teachers and homework and tests, about sports and cliques and drama queens—but she had no memory of ever going to school. All the information seemed to exist in her mind, but without any experiences tethered to it. The thought of going thrilled and terrified her in equal measure, but she couldn’t wait to be around other people her own age.