Blood Oranges (9781101594858)

by Tierney, Kathleen; Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  I’ll say it was wicked hot that night. How appropriate is that? Fucking punch line, that was, right? Sure it was.

  On the way out of Providence, I stopped at a Shaw’s and bought five gallon jugs of water (“from the White Mountains of Vermont”).

  It was almost midnight by the time I exited I-278 onto the Prospect Expressway, and took . . . well, I parked the Honda on Fort Hamilton Avenue near the Green-Wood Cemetery. I poured three of the jugs of water over my head, and tossed the other two over the ornate wrought-iron fence before scaling it. It’s a wonder they didn’t burst, the water bottles. But I can’t say I was thinking clearly by that point. A girl doesn’t stroll into Hades every goddamn night. I moved through the labyrinth of headstones and obelisks, marble and granite and Bellville brownstone. Over grave-studded hill and dale, and the night was filled with the songs of night birds and the distant noise of cars. There were a couple of close calls with security as I neared Battle Hill. That’s the highest point in Brooklyn, by the way, rising some two hundred feet above sea level, part of an ancient glacial moraine. And maybe that’s why Penderghast chose it for her catacombs, to stay high and dry. But me, I suspect it was the fact that about three hundred victims of the 1876 Brooklyn Theater Fire are buried there, all those unrecognizable corpses consigned to a common grave. For her, that’s probably as irresistible as horseshit is to flies. She must have been standing across from the theater that long ago evening, watching the festivities.

  Anyway, yeah. Oodles of history attached to this vast boneyard, sprawling across the manicured landscape like a Disneyland for the dear departed, but I wasn’t there to sightsee. I moved as quickly as possible, lugging those twin gallons of water, towards the mausoleum—guarded by twin marble lions—that led down to Evangelista’s halls.

  There was a massive lock on the mausoleum door, meant for some huge antique key, but that’s only for historians and caretakers. For the mortals who come here. All I needed were a few choice words of Latin (they’d been written in B’s hand on a slip of paper tucked inside the DVD’s jewel case, thoughtful bastard), and the door didn’t so much open as melt away. I stepped inside, and in place of the musty smell I’d expected, I was greeted by the acrid reek of sulfur and gasoline and everything that could ever be made to burn. Which, when you pause to consider, is pretty much everything. The arched passageway with stairs that led down and down, spiraling steeply round and round, each round wider than the last. Imagine descending the inside of a seashell’s whorl, from top to bottom. The deeper I went, the greater the heat, until I might as well have been standing before a blast furnace. I stopped long enough to open the two remaining bottles of pure Vermont water and soak my hair and skin and clothes. And yeah, fire and vamps are a bad mix, even if the sun’s not an issue. But, like I said, at the right temperature, everything burns. Humans, vamps, steel, rock, whatever. But Penderghast, she’d spent centuries learning to cheat the laws of nature and supernature. She’d become a pyromancer of the first order. Fire was her lover, and she’d made damn sure it’d never bite back.

  I walked, and the water on my skin began to turn to steam. So much for precautions. The walls were increasingly illuminated by an orange-red glow, as though I was making my way into the belly of a volcano, towards the hearth of Pele. Maybe that’s purple prose, or maybe you just had to be there to appreciate how well that melodramatic simile manages to go about the cutting of the mustard.

  Eventually after I have no idea how long, the spiral ended in a wide platform or ledge, and suddenly the firelight was so bright the Wayfarers were useless and I had to cover my eyes. Again, my expository powers are not even half equal to the task at hand, at any attempt to even half describe the pit stretched out below and before me. Maybe Dante could have come close, but I kinda doubt it. Just think of a cavern that seems to run on forever in all directions, infinitely so far as I could tell, and think of an equally infinite churning molten sea beneath, and, hey, just maybe you’re a millionth of the way there. Just maybe. Thousands of chains dangled from the cavern’s roof, each ending in a meat hook, and almost every hook was buried in charcoal that had once been some manner of living thing. The rest of them held creatures that hadn’t yet died, beasts and men and women whose agonies Evangelista might protract for quite a bit longer. The air broiled.

  I wanted to turn and . . . but I’ve already mentioned what happens to the runners, haven’t I?

  A rusty iron cage slid towards me, sort of like a cable ferry above the molten sea. No, cable ferry isn’t right. I’m not a damn engineer. It was a cage, all right? A cage suspended from a chain by loops of cable, and there was a wheel that let it roll to and fro along the cable. You’ve seen a ski lift, right? It wasn’t like that, but that’s as near as I can come. The cage’s door swung open, and no one had to tell me I was meant to step inside. It wasn’t an invitation, it was a command. Already, I’d begun to feel a bubble of cooler air surrounding me—by the grace of Penderghast, who couldn’t have me combusting prematurely, after all. Not until my usefulness was over and done with. I stepped into the cage, it clanged shut again, and then began to creak along the cable, a hundred feet above that sea of fire. I hadn’t even been asked to pay the fucking ferryman, and I wondered if the ride back would also be free. That is, assuming there would be a ride back. I was doing my best to hang on to those few, stingy shreds of halfhearted optimism I’d ever been able to call my own.

  The door opened, and what crouched on the sizzling dais before me put the pathetic, pale grotesquerie that was Mercy Brown all the way to shame and back again. In some ways, it was almost her polar opposite; the Bride, she was an Antarctic world that had never known the sun, and Evangelista, she was the fusion-reactor heart of the sun, the very act of hydrogen flashing to helium, that hellish proton–proton chain reaction (yeah, I read a book about stars once upon a fucking time, okay?). But, even so, there was no valid point of comparison. Oh, if the televangelists and “lake of fire and brimstone as an eternal punishment” crowd could have gotten a peek at her, I think they’d begin to consider the merits of giving the whole matter of damnation a second, third, and fourth thought.

  “How sweet,” she said. No, screw she. Let’s dispense with any pretense at gender and/or sex. You remember what I said at the start about a vamp’s nethers withering away after such and such amount of time? Yeah, well. Whatever had once been female about this monster, those attributes had long since packed their bags and fled the scene. Its flesh—if that was flesh—was ebony shot through with shimmering, spiderweb cracks. The crusty black scum that floats along on lava. Its eyes were bluish, ultraviolet holes punched into the fabric of space.

  Now there’s a sentence even Lovecraft would have been proud of. But I’m not gonna take it back. That’s what I saw, until I had the good sense to look away. That’s what I still see sometimes when I close my eyes. That’s what watched me from a glistening obsidian face.

  “She actually came, and I thought for sure she wouldn’t. I thought she didn’t have the nerve for this rendezvous.”

  “She wasn’t left with much choice,” I said. “And can we stop speaking of her in third person, please. She’s standing right here, and she has a name.”

  “That you do,” said Evangelista Penderghast. “I thought, Quinn, I might be doing you some kindly service, not speaking it aloud.”

  It wasn’t wrong on that score. No matter how bad the blazing sapphire eyes had been, my name dripping off that tongue, that was way worse.

  “He sent you, good boy that he is, and now you’ll want to know why? No, you already know the why. You’ll want to know how.”

  “I never meant to kill the bitch’s daughter.”

  “Which is neither here nor there, Quinn.” And, seriously, liquid steel pouring out of an electric-arc furnace, but something that pure rendered irredeemably filthy, that was its voice.

  “We can switch back to third person,” I whi
spered. “Really. She won’t mind at all.”

  It might have laughed then. If that wasn’t laughter, I don’t know what else you’d call the sound she made.

  “As she wishes. I wouldn’t have it any other way, not a scion of the Bride of Quiet.”

  “Don’t think I had anything to do with that, either. Or the shit with the werewolf.”

  “He told me,” it sighed, and I know, the moment that breath touched me, I’d have been gone in a puff of smoke if not for my magical, insulating bubble. “I know how her wretched, woebegone circumstances have come to pass. I don’t care, but don’t suppose that means I don’t know.”

  I thought about apologizing. Fortunately, it didn’t give me a chance.

  “The Bride is entirely insane. It’s proof enough this . . . this . . . repulsive half-caste amalgam was forged in the belief such was sufficient to end me.”

  “You’ll get no argument there. I mean, her being insane and all. At least a few fries shy of a Happy Meal.”

  I felt its eyes on me, and time passed before it spoke again. I don’t know how much time.

  “She thinks I care about her opinion, the scion of the Bride? She thinks maybe her idiot contemplations have some bearing on what’s to come?”

  “Sorry. She’ll keep her idiot contemplations to herself from here on. She has absolutely no problem at all with that.”

  “No, no. Oh, no. I’m not offended. Rather, she amuses me with these recitations of the obvious. She’ll not stand silent before me. I’ll not have that.”

  “Fine,” I whispered (actually, pretty much everything I said, there below Green-Wood Cemetery, was hardly spoken louder than a whisper).

  “Fine,” Evangelista echoed. “Yes, fine. She is a prize. I’ll grant her that. I’d almost keep her here with me, time and pressure to make a diamond, a fractured jewel among my jewels to look upon from time to time, only my hatred, it would never allow such a concession. Such an indulgence of my own meager desires when I have been so insulted by little more than a worm.”

  By this point, my mind was casting about for anything to keep myself sane as that voice seeped all around me. And I realized something about this fiend reminded me of the Red Queen, the Queen of Hearts, in Alice In Wonderland. Maybe it would have a change of heart, and shout “Off with her head!” and that would be that. It would have been a kindness. I was no longer afraid for my existence. More like, I was terrified of what my existence could become, if it should suddenly suit Evangelista’s scalding fancy. I stared at the basalt (at least I think it was basalt) between my shoes. There was that cacophony again, the one that might have been laughter.

  “‘That’s right,’ shouted the Queen. ‘Can you play croquet?’” quoted Evangelista Penderghast.

  So I started thinking about a Johnny Cash song instead. Maybe it didn’t know about Johnny Cash.

  “Fine then, here’s the how. She best listen close, because I’ll not say it but the once.”

  “Don’t worry. She’s paying attention,” I said.

  There were words, precise instructions, though they sunk at once into some subconscious cranny of my mind, and I’ve never been able to recall them. And in my right hand I held a black dagger, a dagger black enough to consume planets. Around my throat there was a brass locket on a brass chain. The dagger and the locket were both warm, but not uncomfortably so. My left hand went immediately to the little locket.

  “There,” it said. “There’s more, but I know she’ll improvise, being clever and resourceful. Now, we have concluded our dealings, and she’ll not ever have cause to come back to me again, if she is a most fortuitous beast. She’ll go now, the same way she came. She’ll go, and won’t dare look back.”

  I did as I was told. I knew the story of Eurydice and Orpheus. On the other side of the chasm, the cooling bubble popped, and I found myself racing up those spiraling stairs. I didn’t stop until I was outside the mausoleum and had once again passed between those silent stone lions. Then—fuck it, tell the truth, and ego be damned—I collapsed on the cool, dew-dappled grass and gasped against the pain that seared the back of my neck, my shoulders, my calves. When I reached the car, I’d discover that patches of my hair were scorched. Later, after I’d returned to Providence and my apartment, I’d find the complex network of keloid scars that snaked from the base of my skull to my heels. Like Boston Harry, she’d left me with a souvenir, as good as her signature. My hair would grow back, but the scars, those I still have.

  Patience, constant reader. It’s almost over.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AND THE WORLD FALLS DOWN

  Remember way back in Chapter One when I noted how readers complain about the way characters do stupid things in horror films and protest that no one’s that stupid? Remember that? And how I said, from a monster’s point of view, how very surprised you’d be at the stupid shit people do that gets them killed? Right. Well, anyway, even us creatures of the night aren’t immune to that kind of imbecilic behavior, and you’d think we’d know better.

  Case in point (as dear ol’ Rod Serling used to say): When I got back to Providence, and realized that somewhere during all these jolly misadventures I’d lost my cell phone, I should have snagged a new one. There’s a RadioShack on North Main, or I could have grabbed one of those prepaid pieces of crap at a Walgreens. Easy as pie. But no. That’s not what I did. I did the stupid thing instead. I went to the troll bridge below I-195, the late, lamented Aloysius’ former digs. I went there, called for Otis, and asked him if he had Aloysius’ things. Because, as has been mentioned, by this time I was jake with the Unseelie.

  It was maybe an hour past dawn.

  He sauntered out from those special shadows, the boom box around his neck like a gigantic pendant. At least this time he wasn’t listening to the Beastie Boys. He was listening to the Ramones. Yeah, I get the punk-rock troll. He closed one eye, and squinted at me with the other.

  “You still walking around in one piece?” he inquired, sounding more than a tiny bit surprised.

  “Looks like,” I replied.

  “The wheels turn slow sometimes. Time below the hills ain’t like time above.”

  I could have told him he was wasting his time trying to scare me. I could have told him about what I’d just met lurking below that hill in a Brooklyn cemetery, but I didn’t.

  “I’m sure they’ll run me down as soon as they get around to it. In the meanwhile, do you have his stuff or not?” I asked again.

  Otis scratched at one albino armpit. “Let’s just say I do, twice-dead Quinn, twice-cursed daughter of Eve. Why would I tell you?”

  Good damn question. We return to the issue of stupidity in these sorts of tales.

  “I was his friend,” I said, ’cause, you know, I already knew he wasn’t buying that.

  “What got him killed.”

  “Hey, dude. A simple yes or no would be wicked useful at this juncture.”

  “Wicked,” he growled, a soft, soft growl, like faraway thunder. “Yes, you are. You are wicked, indeed.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I Don’t Care” blared from the boom box.

  Otis closed his left eye again, and the right rolled about in its socket like whatever muscles and nerves hold eyeballs in place had suddenly failed him.

  “Please,” I said. “I’ll be in your debt.”

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. Hell, you might just as well decide I’m making this up to create a more suspenseful scene, like where, in The Stand, Stephen King has Larry Underwood leave New York via the Lincoln Tunnel instead of, say, the George Washington Bridge, just because it would make a way scarier scene, having him down there in the dark. Oh, and having Larry forget to even take along a flashlight, and . . . never mind. Point is, rule of thumb, never tell any sort of fairy you’ll be in its fucking debt. Not eve
r. Same with demons. And angels, I imagine, if they actually exist (which I tend to doubt).

  “All I want is his phone. He had a cell phone. I know, because he was using it to harass Mr. B, right? That’s all I want, I swear.”

  “My debt?” Otis asked, and cocked a scabby eyebrow. “Mayhap, if you elaborate. Mayhap, then, a bargain could be struck. What about that, for instance?” And he pointed at the golden locket Evangelista Penderghast had given me.

  “Not a chance,” I told him.

  “Strikes me beggars can’t be choosers.”

  I closed my own eyes a moment. I was getting awfully tired of deals and bargains, promises and broken promises. Right then, I wished I had anything at all forged from cold steel. Hell, a chunk of raw hematite would have done just fine. I spoke without opening my eyes.

  “What do you want, Otis?”

  “I want that shiny bauble hanging ’bout your throat.”

  “Well, you’re not getting it, so try again.”

  “Stingy ape,” he said. “Stingy, ungrateful ape. But very well. Still, I should think about this, long and hard I should think about this, twice-cursed. Has to be dear to you. Has to be precious—like that shiny bauble.”

  I opened my eyes, and maybe I have a friend below, because only a few feet away, I spotted a rusty stainless-steel hubcap someone had lost and not noticed they’d lost, or just not bothered to retrieve. I reached for it, and Otis made a panicked expression, and I saw the special shadows sliding across the ground towards him.