Stephen King - Rose Madder (1995)

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S t e p h e n

KING

ROSE MADDER

Hodder & Stoughton

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the from the

following copyrighted works:

permission of Maurice Sendak

(Renewed 1992) EMI Music Publishing o/b/o Al Gallico Music Corp. Reprinted by

permission of Warner Bros. Publications Inc.

Excerpt from Out of the Sea, Early is reprinted with permission of Macmillan Books

for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division,

Literary Estate of May Swenson.

Music. (Renewed) All rights administered by Sony Music Publishing, 8 Music

1962 renewed 1990 by Erasmus Music, Inc. Administered by the Songwriter's Guild

International copyright secured.

First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Hodder and Stoughton

a division of Hodder Headline PLC

The right of Stephen King to be identified as the author

of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted

in any form or by any means, without the prior written

permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated

in any form of binding or cover other than that in which

it is published and without a similar condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious

and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,

is purely coincidental.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

King, Stephen

Rose Madder

I. Title

813.54 [F]

ISBN 0 340 64013 8

Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Polmont, Stirlingshire

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham PLC, Chatham, Kent

Hodder and Stoughton

A division of Hodder headline PLC

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

This book is for Joan Marks

I'm really Rosie,

And I'm Rosie Real,

You better believe me,

I'm a great big deal . . .

Maurice Sendak

A bloody

egg yolk. A burnt hole

spreading in a sheet. An en-

raged rose threatening to bloom.

May Swenson

PROLOGUE

Sinister Kisses

She sits in the corner, trying to draw air out of a room which seemed to have plenty just a few

minutes ago and now seems to have none. From what sounds like a great distance she can

hear a thin whoop-whoop sound, and she knows this is air going down her throat and then

sliding back out again in a series of feverish little gasps, but that doesn't change the feeling

that she's drowning here in the corner of her living room, looking at the shredded remains of

the paperback novel she was reading when her husband came home.

Not that she cares much. The pain is too great for her to worry about such minor matters as

respiration, or how there seems to be no air in the air she is breathing. The pain has

swallowed her as the whale reputedly swallowed Jonah, that holy draft-dodger. It throbs like

a poison sun glowing deep down in the middle of her, in a place where until tonight there was

only the quiet sense of a new thing growing.

There has never been any pain like this pain, not that she can remember — not even when

she was thirteen and swerved her bike to avoid a pothole and wiped out, bouncing her head

off the asphalt and opening up a cut that turned out to be exactly eleven stitches long. What

she remembered about that was a silvery jolt of pain followed by starry dark surprise which

had actually been a brief faint . . . but that pain had not been this agony. This terrible agony.

Her hand on her belly registers flesh that is no longer like flesh at all; it is as if she has been

unzipped and her living baby replaced with a hot rock.

Oh God please, she thinks. Please let the baby be okay.

But now, as her breath finally begins to ease a little, she realizes that the baby is not okay,

that he has made sure of that much, anyway. When you're four months pregnant the baby is

still more a part of you than of itself, and when you're sitting in a corner with your hair stuck

in strings to your sweaty cheeks and it feels as if you've swallowed a hot stone—

Something is putting sinister, slippery little kisses against the insides of her thighs.

'No,' she whispers, 'no. Oh my dear sweet God, no. Good God, sweet God, dear God, no.'

Let it be sweat, she thinks. Let it be sweat . . . or maybe I peed myself. Yes, that's probably

it. It hurt so bad after he hit me the third time that I peed myself and didn't even know it.

That's it.

Except it isn't sweat and it isn't pee. It's blood. She's sitting here in the corner of the living

room, looking at a dismembered paperback lying half on the sofa and half under the coffee-

table, and her womb is getting ready to vomit up the baby it has so far carried with no

complaint or problem whatsoever.

'No,' she moans, 'no, God, please say no.'

She can see her husband's shadow, as twisted and elongated as a cornfield effigy or the

shadow of a hanged man, dancing and bobbing on the wall of the archway leading from the

living room into the kitchen. She can see shadow-phone pressed to shadow-ear, and the long

corkscrew shadow-cord. She can even see his shadow-fingers pulling the kinks out of the

cord, holding for a moment and then releasing it back into its former curls again, like a bad

habit you just can't get rid of.

Her first thought is that he's calling the police. Ridiculous, of course — he is the police.

'Yes, it's an emergency,' he's saying. 'You're goddam tooting it is, beautiful, she's pregnant.'

He listens, slipping the cord through his fingers, and when he speaks again his tone is testy.

Just that faint irritation in his voice is enough to renew her terror and fill her mouth with a

steely taste. Who would cross him, contradict him? Oh, who would be so foolish as to do

that? Only someone who didn't know him, of course — someone who didn't know him the

way she knew him. 'Of course I won't move her, do you think I'm an idiot?'

Her fingers creep under her dress and up her thigh to the soaked, hot cotton of her panties.

Please, she thinks. How many times has that word gone through her mind since he tore the

book out of her hands? She doesn't know, but here it is again. Please let the liquid on my

fingers be clear. Please, God. Please let it be clear.

But when she brings her hand out from under her dress the tips of her fingers are red with

blood. As she looks at them, a monstrous cramp rips through her like a hacksaw blade. She

has to slam her teeth together to stifle a scream. She knows better than to scream in this

house.

'Never mind all that bullshit, just get here! Fast!' He slams the phone back into its cradle.

His shadow swells and bobs on the wall and then he's standing in the archway, looking at

her out of his flushed and handsome face. The eyes in that face are as expressionless as

shards of glass twinkling beside a country road.

'Now look at this,' he says, holding out both hands briefly and then letting them drop back

to his sides with a soft clap. 'Look at this mess.'

She holds her own hand out to him, showing him the bloody tips of her fingers — it is as

close to accusation as she can get.

'I know,' he says, speaking as if his knowing explained everything, put the whole business

in a coherent, rational context. He turns and stares fixedly at the dismembered paperback. He

picks up the piece on the couch, then bends to get the one under the coffee-table. As he

straightens up again, she can see the cover, which shows a woman in a white peasant blouse

standing on the prow of a ship. Her hair is blowing back dramatically in the wind, exposing

her creamy shoulders. The title, Misery's Journey, has been rendered in bright red foil.

'This is the trouble,' he says, and wags the remains of the book at her like a man shaking a

rolled-up newspaper at a puppy that has piddled on the floor. 'How many times have I told

you how I feel about crap like this?'

The answer, actually, is never. She knows she might be sitting here in the corner having a

miscarriage if he had come home and found her watching the news on TV or sewing a button

on one of his shirts or just napping on the couch. It has been a bad time for him, a woman

named Wendy Yarrow has been making trouble for him, and what Norman does with trouble

is share the wealth. How many times have I told you how I feel about that crap? he would

have shouted, no matter what crap it was. And then, just before he started in with his fists: I

want to talk to you, honey. Right up close.

'Don't you understand?' she whispers. 'I'm losing the baby!'

Incredibly, he smiles. 'You can have another one,' he says. He might be comforting a child

who has dropped her ice cream cone. Then he takes the torn-up paperback out to the kitchen,

where he will no doubt drop it in the trash.

You bastard, she thinks, without knowing she thinks it. The cramps are coming again, not

just one this time but many, swarming into her like terrific insects, and she pushes her head

back deep into the corner and moans. You bastard, how I hate you.

He comes back through the arch and walks toward her. She pedals with her feet, trying to

shove herself into the wall, staring at him with frantic eyes. For a moment she's positive he

means to kill her this time, not just hurt her, or rob her of the baby she has wanted for so long,

but to really kill her. There is something inhuman about the way he looks as he comes toward

her with his head lowered and his hands hanging at his sides and the long muscles in his

thighs flexing. Before the kids called people like her husband fuzz they had another word for

them, and that's the word that comes to her now as he crosses the room with his head down

and his hands swinging at the ends of his arms like meat pendulums, because that's what he

looks like — a bull.

Moaning, shaking her head, pedaling with her feet. One loafer coming off and lying on its

side. She can feel fresh pain, cramps sinking into her belly like anchors equipped with old

rusty teeth, and she can feel more blood flowing, but she can't stop pedaling. What she sees in

him when he's like this is nothing at all; a kind of terrible absence.

He stands over her, shaking his head wearily. Then he squats and slides his arms beneath

her. 'I'm not going to hurt you,' he says as he kneels to fully pick her up, 'so quit being a

goose.'

'I'm bleeding,' she whispers, remembering he had told the person he'd been talking to on

the phone that he wouldn't move her, of course he wouldn't.

'Yeah, I know,' he replies, but without interest. He is looking around the room, trying to

decide where the accident happened — she knows what he's thinking as surely as if she were

inside his head. 'That's okay, it'll stop. They'll stop it.'

Will they be able to stop the miscarriage? she cries inside her own head, never thinking

that if she can do it he can too, or noticing the careful way he's looking at her. And once again

she won't let herself overhear the rest of what she is thinking: I hate you. Hate you.

He carries her across the room to the stairs. He kneels, then settles her at the foot of them.

'Comfy?' he asks solicitously.

She closes her eyes. She can't look at him anymore, not right now. She feels she'll go mad

if she does.

'Good,' he says, as if she had replied, and when she opens her eyes she sees the look he

gets sometimes — that absence. As if his mind has flown off, leaving his body behind.

If I had a knife I could stab him, she thinks . . . but again, it isn't an idea she will even allow

herself to overhear, much less consider. It is only a deep echo, perhaps a reverberation of her

husband's madness, as soft as a rustle of batwings in a cave.

Animation floods back into his face all at once and he gets up, his knees popping. He looks

down at his shirt to make sure there's no blood on it. It's okay. He looks over into the corner

where she collapsed. There is blood there, a few little beads and splashes of it. More blood is

coming out of her, faster and harder now; she can feel it soaking her with unhealthy,

somehow avid warmth. It is rushing, as if it has wanted all along to flush the stranger out of

its tiny apartment. It is almost as if— oh, horrible thought — her very blood has taken up for

her husband's side of it . . . whatever mad side that is.

He goes into the kitchen again and is out there for about five minutes. She can hear him

moving around as the actual miscarriage happens and the pain crests and then lets go in a

liquid squittering which is felt as much as heard. Suddenly it's as if she is sitting in a sitz bath

full of warm, thick liquid. A kind of blood gravy.

His elongate shadow bobs on the archway as the refrigerator opens and closes and then a

cabinet (the minute squeak tells her it's the one under the sink) also opens and closes. Water

runs in the sink and then he begins to hum something — she thinks it might be 'When a Man

Loves a Woman' — as her baby runs out of her.

When he comes back through the archway he has a sandwich in one hand — he has not

gotten any supper yet, of course, and must be hungry — and a damp rag from the basket

under the sink in the other. He squats in the corner to which she staggered after he tore the

book from her hands and then administered three hard punches to her belly — bam, bam,

bam, so long stranger — and begins to wipe up the spatters and drips of blood with the rag;

most of the blood and the other mess will be over here at the foot of the stairs, right where he

wants it.

He eats his sandwich as he cleans. The stuff between the slices of bread smells to her like

the leftover barbecued pork she was going to put together with some noodles for Saturday

night — something easy they could eat as they sat in front of the TV, watching the early

news.

He looks at the rag, which is stained a faint pink, then into the corner, then at the rag again.

He nods, tears a big bite out of his sandwich, and stands up. When he comes back from the

kitchen this time, she can hear the faint howl of an approaching siren. Probably the

ambulance he called.

He crosses the room, kneels beside her, and takes her hands. He frowns at how cold they

are, and begins to chafe them gently as he talks to her.

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StephenKINGROSEMADDERHodder&StoughtonGratefulacknowledgmentismadeforpermissiontoreprintexcerptsfromthefromthefollowingcopyrightedworks:Lyricsfrom"ReallyRosie"copyright©1975byMauriceSendak,reprintedbypermissionofMauriceSendak"TheNameGame",wordsandmusicbyLincolnChaseandShirleyElliston;©1964(Renewed199...

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Stephen King - Rose Madder (1995)

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