lowered. One huge front hoof, cloven so deeply it almost looked like a gigantic bird’s talon, pawed restlessly at the stone floor. Its shoulders overtopped Rosie’s five-feet-six by at least four inches and she guessed its weight at two tons, minimum. The top of its dropped head was flat as a hammer and shiny as silk. Its horns were stubby, no more than a foot in length, but sharp and thick. Rosie had no trouble imagining how easily they would punch into her naked belly ... or into her back, if she tried to run. She couldn’t imagine how such a death would feel, however; not even after all her years with Norman could she imagine that.
The bull raised its head slightly and she saw it did indeed have only one eye, a filmy blue thing, huge and freakish, above the center of its snout. As it lowered its head and began to thud its cloven hoof restlessly against the floor again, she understood something else, as well: it was getting ready to charge.
The baby let out an earsplitting howl, almost directly into Rosie’s ear, making her jump.
“Hush,” she said, bouncing it up and down in her arms. “Hush-a-baby, no fear, no fear.”
But there was fear, plenty of it. The bull standing over there in its narrow slot of doorway was going to unzip her guts for her and decorate these peculiar glowing walls with them. She supposed they would look black against the green, like the shapes which occasionally seemed to twist deep in the stone. There was nothing in this center chamber to hide behind, not so much as a single pillar, and if she ran for the passage she’d come out of, the blind bull would hear her feet on the stone and cut her off before she had gotten halfway—it would gore her, toss her against the wall, gore her again, and then trample her to death. The baby as well, if she managed to keep hold of it.
One-eyed blind, but there ain’t nothing wrong with his sense of smell.
Rosie stood watching it with wide eyes, mesmerized by the tapping front hoof. When that tapping finally stopped—
She looked down at the damp, crumpled ball of nightgown in her hand. The ball of nightgown with the rag-wrapped stone in the center.
Nothing wrong with his sense of smell.
She dropped to one knee, keeping her eyes trained on the bull and holding the baby against her shoulder with her right hand. She used the left to open out her nightgown. The piece she had wrapped around the rock had been a dark red, rich with “Wendy Yarrow’s” blood, but the downpour had washed much of it away, and the fabric was now a fading pink. Only the ears of cloth, where she had tied it over the rock, were brighter—were, in fact, rose madder.
Rosie cupped the stone in her left hand, feeling the heft of it. Just as the bull’s haunches flexed, she underhanded the stone, bowling it along the floor to the bull’s left. Its head swung heavily in that direction, its nostrils flared, and it charged toward what it both heard and smelled.
Rosie was on her feet again in a flash. She left the crumpled remnant of her nightgown lying beside the baby’s pad of blankets. The little packet containing the last three pomegranate seeds was still in her hand, but Rosie wasn’t aware of them. She was aware only of sprinting across the room toward the passageway she wanted, while behind her Erinyes charged the rock, kicked it aslant with one flying hoof, chased it down again, butted it with the flat hammer of its head, sent it flying into one of the other passages, and then chased after it, grunting thickly in its throat. She was sprinting, yes, but in slow motion, and now all this seemed like a dream again, because this was the way one always ran in dreams, especially the bad ones where the fiend was always just two steps behind. In nightmares, escape became an underwater ballet.
She burst into the narrow corridor just as she heard the hoofbeats wheel around and begin to approach. again. They came fast, bearing down on her, and as they closed in, Rosie screamed and clutched the yowling, frightened baby to her breasts and ran for her life. It did no good. The bull was faster. It overtook her ... and then passed by on the far side of the wall to her right. Erinyes had