rather than actually rendered, but Rosie saw a hideous similarity just the same ... or thought she did. He looked like Norman’s old partner Harley Bissington, who had always checked her hem so assiduously whenever she sat down.
Below the drawing, the yellowed page was crammed with Cyrillic lettering, unreadable but familiar. It took her only a moment of thought to understand why; they were the same letters which had filled the newspaper Peter Slowik had been reading when she had approached the Travelers Aid booth and asked him for help.
Then, with shocking suddenness, the drawing began to move, its lines seeming to crawl toward her white, rain-wrinkled fingers, leaving little snail-trails of sludge behind. It was alive, somehow. She slammed the book shut and her throat clenched at the wet squelching noise that came from inside it. She dropped it, and either the bang it made when it hit the pew or her own revolted cry woke a flutter of bats in the shadowy area she supposed was the choir loft. Several of them turned aimless figure-eights overhead, black wings dragging loathsomely plump brown bodies through the dank air, and then they retreated back into their holes. Ahead was the altar, and she was relieved to see a narrow door standing open to its left and letting in an oblong of clean white light.
Yerrr reeely Roww-zey, the tongueless voice of the temple whispered, bleakly amused. And yerrr Rowww-zey Reeel ... come over here and I’ll give yewww ... a grrreat big feeeeel ...
She refused to look around; she kept her eyes fixed on the door and the daylight beyond it. The rain had abated, the hollow rushing sound from overhead now down to a steady low mutter.
It’s for men only, Rowww-zey, the temple whispered, and then added what Norman always said when he didn’t want to answer one of her questions, but wasn’t really mad at her, either : It’s a guy thing.
She looked into the altar area as she passed it, then quickly looked away. It was empty—there was no pulpit, no symbols, no arcane books—but she saw another hovering manta-shadow, this one lying on the bare stones. Its rusty color suggested to her that it was blood, and the size of the shadow suggested that a lot of it had been spilled here over the years. A lot.
It’s like the Roach Motel, Rowww-zie, the room whispered, and the leaves on the stone floor stirred, making a sound like laughter slipping between gumless teeth. They check in, but they don’t check owwwwwt.
She walked steadily toward the door, trying to ignore that voice, keeping her eyes fixed straight ahead. She half-expected it to slam shut in her face when she got close to it, but it didn’t. No capering bogey with Norman’s face leaped through it, either. She stepped out onto a small stone stoop, stepped into the cool smell of rain-freshened grass, and into air which had begun to warm again even though the rain had not completely stopped. Water dripped and rustled everywhere. Thunder boomed (but it was going-away thunder now, she felt sure). And the baby, of which she had not been aware for several minutes, resumed its distant wailing.
The garden was divided into two parts—flowers on the left, veggies on the right—but it was all dead. Cataclysmi-cally dead, and the lush greenery which surrounded it and the Temple of the Bull like encircling arms made that dead acre look so much the worse by contrast—like a corpse with its eyes open and its tongue lolling. Huge sunflowers with yellowy, fibrous stalks, brown centers, and curling, faded petals towered over everything else, like diseased turnkeys in a prison where all the inmates have died. The flowerbeds were full of blown petals that made her think, in an instant of nightmarish recall, of what she had seen when she had gone back to the cemetery where her family was buried a month after their interment. She had walked to the back of the little graveyard after putting fresh flowers on their graves, wanting to collect herself, and had been horrified to find drifts of rotting flowers piled in the declivity between the stone wall and the woods behind the cemetery. The stink of their dying perfume had made her think of what was happening to her mother and father and brother under the ground. How they were changing.
Rosie looked hastily away from the flowers, but at first what she saw in the moribund vegetable patch was no better: