Rose Madder - By Stephen King Page 0,111

did herself, her gauzy red gown now plastered to her body like paint.

“Who’s Erinyes?” Rosie shouted. “What is he?” She ventured a glance at the temple over her shoulder, almost as if she expected the god to come at the sound of her voice. No god appeared; there was only the temple, shimmering in the downpour.

The brown-skinned woman rolled her eyes. “Why you act so stupid, girl?” she yelled back. “Go on, now! Go on while you still can!” And she pointed wordlessly at the temple, much as her mistress had done.

6

Rosie, naked and white, holding the soaked ball of her nightgown against her stomach to protect it as much as she could, started toward the temple. Five paces took her to the fallen stone head lying in the grass. She peered down at it, expecting to see Norman. Of course it would be Norman, and she might as well be prepared for it. That was the way things worked in dreams.

Except it wasn’t. The receding hairline, fleshy cheeks, and luxurious David Crosby moustache belonged to the man who had been leaning in the doorway of The Wee Nip tavern on the day Rosie had gotten lost looking for Daughters and Sisters.

I’m lost again, she thought. Oh boy, am I.

She walked past the fallen stone head with its empty eyes that seemed to be weeping and the long wet strand of weed that lay across its cheek and brow like a green scar and it seemed to be whispering from behind her as she approached the strangely configured temple: Hey baby wanna get it on nice tits whaddaya say wanna get it on wanna do some low ridin wanna do the dog whaddaya say?

She walked up the steps, which were slippery and treacherous with overgrown vines and creepers, and seemed to sense that head rolling on its stone cranium, squelching muddy water up from the soaked earth, wanting to watch the flex of her bare bottom as she climbed toward the darkness.

Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think.

She resisted the urge to run—both from the rain and from that imagined stare—and went on picking her way, avoiding the places where the stone had been cracked open by the elements, leaving jagged gaps where one might twist or even break an ankle. Nor was that the worst possibility; who knew what sorts of poisonous things might be coiled up in those dark places, waiting to sting or bite?

Water dripped from her shoulderblades and ran straight down the course of her spine and she was colder than ever, but she nevertheless stopped on the top step, looking at the carving above the temple’s wide, dark doorway. She hadn’t been able to see it in her picture; it had been lost in the darkness under the roof’s overhang.

It showed a hard-faced boy leaning against what could have been a telephone pole. His hair fell over his forehead and the collar of his jacket was turned up. A cigarette hung from his lower lip and his slouched, hipshot posture proclaimed him as Mr. Totally Cool, Late Seventies Edition. And what else did that posture say? Hey baby was what it said. Hey baby hey baby, want to get down? Want to do some low riding? Want to do the dog with me?

It was Norman.

“No,” she whispered. It was almost a moan. “Oh, no.”

Oh yes. It was Norman, all right, Norman when he had still been the Ghost of Beatings Yet to Come, Norman leaning against the phone pole on the comer of State Street and Highway 49 in downtown Aubreyville (downtown Aubreyville, now there was a joke), Norman watching the cars go by while the sound of the Bee Gees singing “You Should Be Dancing” came drifting out of Finnegan’s Pub, where the door had been chocked open and the Seeburg turned up loud.

The wind dropped momentarily and Rosie could hear the baby crying again. It didn’t sound hurt, exactly; rather as if it might be very hungry. The faint howls got her eyes off that wretched carving and got her bare feet moving, but just before she passed into the temple doorway, she looked up again ... she couldn’t help herself. The boy-Norman was gone, if he had ever been there at all. Now she saw carved words directly above her. SUCK MY AIDS-INFECTED COCK, they said.

Nothing stays steady in dreams, she thought. They’re like water.

She looked back over her shoulder and saw “Wendy,” still standing by the fallen pillar,

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