looking bedraggled in the collapsed cobwebs of her dress. Rosie raised the hand that wasn’t holding the wadded nightgown in a tentative wave. “Wendy” raised her own hand in return, then just stood watching, seemingly oblivious of the pelting rain.
Rosie stepped through the wide, cool doorway and into the temple. She stood at the back, tense, ready to dart out again at once if she saw ... well ... if she saw she didn’t know what. “Wendy” had told her not to sweat the ghosts, but Rosie thought the woman in the red dress could afford to be sanguine; she was back there, after all.
She guessed it was warmer inside than out, but it didn’t feel warmer—there was the deep chill of damp stone about the place, the chill of crypts and mausoleums, and for a moment she wasn’t sure she could make herself walk up the shadowy aisle, scattered with long-dead drifts and swirls of autumn leaves, which lay ahead of her. It was just too cold ... and cold in too many ways. She stood shivering and gasping for breath in short little pulls of air, with her arms crossed tightly over her breasts and little ribbons of steam rising from her skin. She touched her left nipple with the tip of her finger and was not much surprised to find it was like touching a chip of rock.
It was the thought of going back to the woman on the hill that got her moving—the thought of having to face Rose Madder empty-handed. She stepped into the aisle, moving slowly and carefully, listening to the distant howl of the infant. It sounded miles away, carried to her by some thin, magical communication.
Go down and bring me my baby.
Caroline. The name she had planned to give her own baby, the one Norman had beaten out of her, came easily and naturally to her mind. The fugitive throb in her breasts began again. She touched them, and winced. They were tender.
Her eyes were adjusting to the gloom now, and it occurred to her that the Temple of the Bull had a strangely Christian look to it—that it looked, in fact, quite a bit like the First Methodist Church of Aubreyville, where she had gone twice a week until she had married Norman. First Methodist was where that marriage had taken place, and it was from there that her father, mother, and kid brother had been buried after the road accident which had taken their lives. There were rows of old wooden pews, the ones at the back overturned and half-buried in drifts of cinnamon-smelling leaves. Closer down toward the front they were still upright, and ranked in neat rows. Lying on them at regular intervals were fat black books that might have been the Methodist Book of Hymns and Praise Rosie had grown up with.
The next thing she became aware of—this as she walked down the center aisle like some strange naked bride—was the smell of the place. Under the good smell of the leaves which had blown in through the open door over the years there lurked a less pleasant odor. It was a little like mold, a little like mildew, a little like late-stage decay, and really not like any of those things. Old sweat, perhaps? Yes, perhaps. And perhaps other fluids, as well. Semen came to her mind. So did blood.
After her awareness of the smell came the almost undeniable sensation of being watched by malevolent eyes. She sensed them studying her nakedness carefully, brooding over it, perhaps, marking each undraped curve and line, memorizing the movement of her muscles beneath her wet, sleek skin.
Talk to you up close, the temple seemed to sigh to her benooth the hollow drumming of the rain and the crackle of the old leaves beneath her bare feet. Talk to you right up close ... but we won’t have to talk long to say the things we need to say. Will we, Rosie?
She stopped near the front of the temple and picked up one of the black books from where it lay in the second pew. When she opened it, a gasp of putrefaction so strong it almost choked her wafted up. The picture at the top of the page was a stark line drawing which had never appeared in the Methodist hymnals of her youth; it showed a woman on her knees, performing fellatio on a man whose feet were not feet at all, but hooves. His face was suggested