far as he got. She turned, and when the bony light of the moon disclosed her, Norman shrieked. He fired the .45 twice into the ground between his feet without realizing it, then dropped it. He clapped his hands to his head and screamed, backing away, moving jerkily on legs he could now barely command. She answered his cry with one of her own.
Rot swarmed across the upper swell of her bosom; her neck was as purple-black as that of a strangulation victim. The skin had cracked open in places and was oozing thick tears of yellow pus. Yet these signs of some far-advanced and obviously terminal disease weren’t what brought the screams raking out of his throat and bolting from his mouth in howling spates; they were not what broke through the eggshell surface of his insanity to let in a more terrible reality, like the unforgiving light of an alien sun.
Her face did that.
It was the face of a bat in which had been set the bright mad eyes of a rabid fox; it was the face of a supernally beautiful goddess seen in an illustration hidden within some old and dusty book like a rare flower in a weedy vacant lot; it was the face of his Rose, whose looks had always been lifted just slightly beyond plainness by the timid hope in her eyes and the slight, wistful curve of her mouth at rest. Like lilies on a dangerous pond, these differing aspects floated on the face which turned toward him, and then they blew away and Norman saw what lay beneath. It was a spider’s face, twisted with hunger and crazy intelligence. The mouth that opened gave upon a repellent blackness afloat with silk tendrils to which a hundred bugs and beetles stuck fast, some dead and some dying. Its eyes were great bleeding eggs of rose madder red that pulsed in their sockets like living mud.
“Come closer yet, Norman,” the spider in the moonlight whispered to him, and before his mind broke entirely, Norman saw that its bug-filled, silk-stuffed mouth was trying to grin.
More arms began to cram their way out through the toga’s armholes, and from beneath its short hem, as well, only they were not arms, not arms at all, and he screamed, he screamed, he screamed; it was oblivion he was screaming for, oblivion and an end to knowing and seeing, but oblivion would not come.
“Come closer,” it crooned, the not-arms reaching, the maw of a mouth yawning, “I want to talk to you.” There were claws at the ends of the black not-arms, filthy with bristles. The claws settled on his wrists, his legs, the swollen appendage which still throbbed in his crotch. One wriggled amorously into his mouth; the bristles scraped against his teeth and the insides of his cheeks. It grasped his tongue, tore it out, flapped it triumphantly before his one staring, glaring eye. “I want to talk to you, and I want to talk to you right ... up ... CLOSE!”
He made one last mad effort to pull free and was instead drawn into Rose Madder’s hungry embrace.
Where Norman finally learned what it was like to be the bitten instead of the biter.
12
Rosie lay on the stairs with her eyes closed and her fists clenched above her head, listening to him scream. She tried not even to imagine what was going on out there, and she tried to remember that it was Norman who was screaming, Norman of the terrible pencil, Norman of the tennis racket, Norman of the teeth.
Yet these things were overwhelmed by the horror of his screams, his agonized shrieks as Rose Madder ... ... as she did whatever it was she was doing.
After awhile—a long, long while—the screaming stopped.
Rosie lay where she was, fists unrolling slowly but with her eyes still tightly shut, gasping in short, harsh snatches of air. She might have lain there for hours, had not the sweet, mad voice of the woman summoned her:
“Come forth, little Rosie! Come forth and be of good cheer! The bull is no more!”
Slowly, on legs that felt numb and wooden, Rosie got first to her knees and then to her feet. She walked up the steps and stood on the ground. She didn’t want to look, but her eyes seemed to have a life of their own; they crossed the clearing while her breath stopped in her throat.
She let it out in a long, quiet sigh of relief. Rose Madder was still