I’m giving you the benefit of my thinking just the same, Normie. If I was the one with my hands on the controls, I’d turn around and go back the way I came. Because nothing’s right here. It’s all hinky as hell, in fact. I don’t know what it is, but I know what it feels like—a trap. And if you walk into it you may have a lot more to worry about than a wiggly jaw or a mask that doesn’t want to come off. Why don’t you turn around and go back the way you came? See if you can’t find your way back into her rented room and maybe wait for her there?
Because they’ll come, Daddy, Norman told the voice. He was shaken by this ghost’s insistence and surety, but would not admit it. The cops will come and they will take me down. They’ll take me down before I so much as smell her perfume. And because she said fuck to me. Because she’s turned into a whore. I can tell it just by the way she talks now.
Never mind how she talks, you idiot! If she’s gone rotten, leave her to spoil on the ground with her friends! Maybe it isn’t too late to shut this thing down before it explodes in your face.
He actually considered it ... and then raised his eyes to the temple and read the words chiselled over the door. SHE WHO STEALS HER HUSBAND’S BANK CARD SHALL NOT BE SUFFERED TO LIVE, they read.
Doubt fled. He would listen to his craven, crotchgrabbing father no more. He passed through the yawning doorway and into the damp darkness beyond. Dark . . . but not too dark to see. Powdery shafts of moonlight fell steeply in through the narrow windows, illuminating a ruin that looked spookily like the church where Rose and her folks had worshipped back in Aubreyville. He walked through drifts of fallen leaves, and when a flock of whirling, squealing bats descended through the moonbeams to flutter about his face, he only flapped his arms, waving them away. “Get out, you sons of whores, ” he muttered.
As he emerged onto a small stone stoop through the door to the right of the altar, he saw a fluff of something hanging from a bush. He leaned over, pulled it free, held it up in front of his eyes. It was hard to be sure in this light, but he thought it was red or pink. Had she been wearing clothes of such a color? He thought she’d had jeans on, but everything was mixed up in his mind. Even if it had been jeans, she’d taken off the jacket the cocksucker had loaned her, and maybe underneath—
There was a soft sound behind him, like a pennant rippling in a breeze. Norman turned and a brown bat flew into his face, snapping at him with its whiskery mouth as its wings battered against his cheeks.
His hand had dropped to the butt of the gun. Now he let go of it and seized the bat, crumpling the bones in its wings back against its body like a lunatic concertina player. He twisted it against itself and tore it in two with such force that its rudimentary guts fell out on his shoes. “Shoulda stayed out of my face, asshole, ” Norman told it, and then flung the pieces back into the temple’s shadows.
“You’re great at killing bats, Norman.”
Jesus Christ, that was close—that was right behind him!
He spun around so fast this time that he almost lost his balance and tumbled off the stone stoop.
The ground behind the temple sloped toward a stream, and standing there halfway down, in what looked like the world’s deadest garden, was his sweet little rambling Rose—just standing there in the moonlight, looking up at him. Three things struck him in rapid succession. The first was that she was no longer wearing jeans, if she ever had been; she was wearing a minidress that looked like it belonged at a frathouse toga-party. The second was that she had changed her hair. It was blonde and pulled back from her face.
The third thing was that she was beautiful.
“Bats and women,” she said coldly. “That’s about it for you, isn’t it? I almost feel sorry for you, Norman. You’re a miserable excuse for a man. You’re not a man, not really. And that stupid mask you’re wearing will never make you into one. ”