all they were apt to do was get them killed. Now her job was to take care of him, shelter him ... and that meant getting him to a place where he might be safe. Where they might both be safe.
Rose jerked open the closet door, expecting to see that strange other world filling it, the way it had filled her bedroom wall when she had awakened to the sound of thunder. Sunlight would come streaming out, dazzling their dark-adapted eyes . . .
But it was only a closet, small and musty and nothing at all in it—she was wearing the only two items of clothing she had stored in there, a sweater and a pair of sneakers. Oh yes, the picture was there, propped against the wall where she had put it, but it hadn’t grown or changed or opened up or whatever it was it did. It was only a picture broken out of its frame, the sort of mediocre painting a person was apt to find in the back of a curio shop or a flea market or a pawnshop. Nothing more than that.
Out in the hall, Norman rammed the door again. The crack was louder this time; a long splinter jumped out of the wood and clattered onto the floor. A few more hits would do it; two or three might be enough. Rooming-house doors were not built to withstand insanity.
“It was more than just some goddam picture!” Rosie cried. “It was left there for me, and it was more than just some goddam picture! It went into some other world! I know it did, because I’ve got her bracelet!”
She turned her head, looked at it, then ran over to the nighttable and snatched it up. It felt heavier than ever. And hot “Rosie,” Bill said. She could just make him out, holding his hands against his throat. She thought there was blood on his mouth. “Rosie we have to call the—” Then he cried out as bright light washed the room ... except it wasn’t bright enough to be the hazy summer sunlight she had expected. It was moonlight, flooding out of the open closet and washing across the floor. She walked back to Bill with the armlet in her hand and looked in. Where the closet’s back wall had been she saw the hilltop, saw tall grasses rippling in a soft and intermittent night breeze, saw the livid lines and columns of the temple gleaming in the dark. And above all was the moon, a bright silver coin riding in a purple-black sky.
She thought of the mother fox they had seen today, a thousand years ago, looking up at such a moon. The vixen looking up as her kits slept beside her in the lee of the fallen trunk, looking raptly up at the moon with her black eyes.
Bill’s face was bewildered. The light lay on his skin like silver gilt. “Rosie,” he said in a weak and worried voice. His lips continued to move, but he said no more.
She took his arm. “Come on, Bill. We have to go.”
“What’s happening?” He was pitiful in his hurt and confusion. The expression on his face roused strange and contrasting emotions in her: wild impatience at his slow, ox-like responses, and fierce love—not quite maternal—that felt like a flame in her mind. She would protect him. Yes. Yes. She would protect him unto death, if that was what it took.
“Never mind what’s happening,” she said. “Only trust me, the way I trusted you to drive the motorcycle. Trust me and come. We have to go right now!”
She pulled him forward with her right hand; the armlet dangled from her left like a gold doughnut. He resisted for a moment, and then Norman screamed and hit the door again. With a cry of fear and rage, Rosie renewed her grip on Bill’s arm. She yanked him into the closet and then into the moonlit world which now lay beyond its far wall.
13
Things started to go seriously wrong when the bitch pushed the coat-tree in front of the stairs. Norman got tangled in it somehow, or at least the London Fog he’d liked so much did One of the brass coathooks somehow ran right through a buttonhole, neatest trick of the week, and another was in his pocket, like an inept pickpocket groping for a wallet. A third speared one blunt brass finger into his much-abused balls. Roaring, cursing her, he tried to lurch forward and upward. The