Rose Madder by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King [King, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2010-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

7

Annother five minutes brought her to the end of the path. It opened into a perfectly circular clearing, and within it was the only living thing in all this desolation. It was the most beautiful tree Rosie had ever seen in her life, and for several moments she actually forgot to breathe. She had been a faithful attendee of Methodist Little Folks Sunday School back in Aubreyville, and now she remembered the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and thought that if there really had been a Tree of Good and Evil standing at the center of that place, it must have looked just like this.

It was densely dressed in long, narrow leaves of polished green, and its branches hung heavy with a perfect bounty of reddish-purple fruit. The falls surrounded the tree in a rose madder drift which exactly matched the color of the short gown worn by the woman Rosie hadn’t dared to look at. Many of these falls were still fresh and plump; they had probably been struck from the tree in the storm which had just passed. Even those well advanced in rot looked almost unbearably sweet; Rosie’s mouth cramped pleasurably at the thought of picking up one of those fruits and biting deeply into it. She thought the taste would be both tart and sweet, something like a stalk of rhubarb picked early in the morning, or raspberries taken from the bush the day before they came to perfect ripeness. As she looked at the tree, one of the fruits (to Rosie it looked no more like a pomegranate than it looked like a bureau drawer) dropped from an overloaded branch, struck the ground, and split open in rose madder folds of flesh. She could see the seeds amid its trickling juices.

Rosie took a step toward the tree and stopped. She kept swinging back and forth between two poles: her mind’s belief that all this had to be a dream, and her body’s equally emphatic assertion that it couldn’t be, that no one on earth had ever had a dream this real. Now, like a troubled compass needle caught in a landscape where there are too many mineral deposits, she swung doubtfully back toward the dream thesis. Standing to the left of the tree was something that looked like a subway entrance. Broad white steps led down into darkness. Above them was an alabaster plinth upon which a single word had been carved: MAZE.

Really, this is too much, Rosie thought, but she walked toward the tree just the same. If this was a dream, it couldn’t hurt to follow instructions; doing so might even hasten the moment when she finally woke up in her own bed, groping for the alarm-clock, wanting to silence its self-righteous yell before it could split her head open. How she would welcome its cry this time! She was chilly, her feet were dirty, she had been groped by a root and ogled by a stone boy who, in a properly made world, would have been too young to know what the hell he was looking at.

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