one of the rows appeared to be full of blood. She wiped water out of her eyes, looked again, and sighed with relief. Not blood but tomatoes. A twenty-foot row of fallen, rotting tomatoes.
Rosie.
Not the temple this time. This was Norman’s voice, it was right behind her, and she suddenly realized she could smell Norman’s cologne. All my men wear English Leather or they wear nothing at all, she thought, and felt ice creep up her spine.
He was behind her.
Right behind her.
Reaching for her.
No. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe it even if I do.
That was a completely stupid thought, of course, probably stupid enough to rate at least a small entry in the Guinness Book of Records, but it steadied her somehow. Moving slowly—knowing if she tried to go even a little faster she was apt to lose it completely—Rosie went down the three stone steps (much humbler even than those at the front of the building) and into the remains of what she mentally named Bull Gardens. The rain was still falling, but gently, and the wind had dropped to a sigh. Rosie walked down an aisle formed by two ranks of brown and leaning cornstalks (there was no way she was going to walk through those rotting tomatoes in her bare feet, feeling them burst beneath her soles), listening to the stony roar of a nearby stream. The sound grew steadily louder as she walked, and when she stepped out of the corn she saw the stream flowing past less than fifteen feet away. It was perhaps ten feet across and ordinarily shallow, judging from its mild banks, but now it was swollen with runoff from the downpour. Only the tops of the four large white stones which crossed it showed, like the bleached shells of turtles.
The water of the stream was a tarry, lightless black. She walked slowly toward it, barely aware that she was squeezing her hair with her free hand, wringing the water out of it. As she drew close, she smelled a peculiar mineral odor coming up from the stream, heavily metallic yet oddly attractive. She was suddenly thirsty, very thirsty, her throat as parched as a hearthstone.
You dassn’t drink from it, no matter how much you want to. Dassn’t.
Yes, that was what she’d said; she’d told Rosie that if she wet so much as a finger in that water, she would forget everything she had ever known, even her own name. But was that such a bad deal? When you thought things over, was that really such a bad deal, especially when one of the things she could forget was Norman, and the possibility that he wasn’t done with her yet, that he had killed a man because of her?
She swallowed and heard a dust-dry click in her throat. Again, acting with almost no awareness of what she was doing, Rosie ran a hand up her side, over the swell of her breast, and across her neck, collecting moisture and then licking it out of her palm. This did not slake her thirst but only fully awakened it. The water gleamed a slick black as it flowed around the stepping-stones, and now that queerly attractive mineral smell seemed to fill her whole head. She knew how the water would taste—flat and airless, like some cold syrup—and how it would fill her throat and belly with strange salts and exotic bromides. With the taste of memory-less earth. Then there would be no more thoughts of the day when Mrs. Pratt (white as snow she had been, except for her lips, which were the color of blueberries) had come to the door and told her that her family, her whole family, had been killed in a highway wreck, no more thoughts of Norman with the pencil or Norman with the tennis racket. No more images of the man in the doorway of The Wee Nip or the fat lady who had called the women at Daughters and Sisters welfare lesbians. No more dreams of sitting in the comer while the pain from her kidneys made her sick, reminding herself over and over to throw up in her apron if she had to throw up. Forgetting those things would be good. Some things deserved forgetting, and others—things like what he had done to her with the tennis racket—needed forgetting ... except most people never got the chance, not even in a dream.
Rosie was trembling all over now, her eyes welded to the water flowing