Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  I shook my head and looked out the window at the blackness rushing by.

  “I must have been playing hooky from the Monster Academy that day,” I said. “You got me. What’s the Byzantine Ghul? Short version.”

  “I’m not sure there is a short version, Quinn.”

  “But it’s got to do with Isaac Snow and why he’s trying to kill us.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It has everything to do with that. Do you know anything about the church during the Byzantine Empire?”

  “Hooky,” I reminded her. “Monster hooky. Jesus hooky.”

  Selwyn showed me what was hiding in the T-shirt. It was a plaque, a bas-relief carved into a slab of dark gray stone. It was one of those mother and child things, good old Catholic idolatry. Only, with a twist. The artist had managed to give what I assumed was meant to be the Virgin Mary a hungry, leering smirk. And the Baby Jesus, well, he looked as if he’d fallen out of an ugly tree and smacked into every branch on the way down. He was also smirking, like the two of them were gloating over some awful secret, a secret that amused them no end. There was a fossil ammonite, about as big around as a silver dollar, set into the plaque, clutched in the kid’s hands. It was some sort of glittering gold-colored mineral, the ammonite, and I guessed pyrite. Fool’s gold.

  “What the fuck, Selwyn?”

  “It has a lot of names,” she said. Just then the train lurched and she almost fell, almost dropped the carving. I wouldn’t have caught it. It would have been a relief to see the thing break into a hundred pieces at her feet.

  “Such as?”

  She held the thing closer to her chest.

  “Basaltes Maria Virgo, La Virgen negra de la Muerte, Unser Mutter von der Nacht—”

  “Anything in fucking English?”

  She sighed and frowned. Oh, the burden of having an ignorant vampire girlfriend.

  “Well, in Cultes des Goules, François-Honoré de Balfour translated Basaltes Maria Virgo as La Madone de basalte. The Basalt Madonna. And mostly that’s what it’s been called ever since he published his book in 1702. The ghoul call it Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off that hideous plaque.

  “Just how many languages do you speak?” I asked her.

  “Only eight,” she said.

  “Right. Only eight. Go on. I’m listening.”

  Mostly, I was. I admit that chunk of gray rock was taking up a good deal of my attention. Especially the ammonite. There seemed to be something wrong about it, like the golden whorl of the shell went on and on and on, spiraling inward forever, never quite reaching the spot that should have been its center. Neat trick, I thought.

  “I’ve heard of Balfour,” I told her.

  “Yeah. Not too many copies of Cult of Ghouls left. Right off, it made the Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum and most of the copies were destroyed. Supposedly, Richard Upton Pickman, he had one, but it vanished with him.”

  I’d heard of Pickman, too.

  “I thought that book was a nasty urban legend,” I said. “Like the mad Arab and the Necronomicon.”

  She was silent a moment.

  I stared at the ammonite. It was beginning to make me woozy, the fucked-up optical illusion of it. At least, I hoped it was an illusion.

  “Quinn, the Necronomicon isn’t a myth,” she finally said. “Lovecraft didn’t invent it. Dad saw a partial copy when he was in Iran, back in the sixties.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  She shook her head. I definitely remember her shaking her head, though I don’t remember looking away from the ammonite, which makes me wonder about . . .

  Never mind. Let’s not go there.

  “It was under lock and key at the Jam’karaˉn mosque just outside Qom.”

  “It was under lock and key, but your dad saw it?”

  “An imam owed him a favor.”

  The woozy feeling was turning into genuine nausea, and I bit my lip hard enough to draw blood. Which ain’t really very hard with teeth like mine. The pain was enough to break whatever hold the bas-relief was exerting over me. Thank holy fuck. You know how at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark the bad guys’ heads all explode? I’m pretty sure that was next, after nausea. Also, the Ark of the Covenant thing seems a good comparison, since Selwyn’s father was starting to sound an awful lot like Indiana Jones.

  “Wrap it up again,” I told her, turning back to the dark tunnel walls outside the subway car. She did as I told her, and I said, “So this is what Isaac Snow’s after.”

  It wasn’t a question, because I already knew the answer.

  “Yeah. This and the skull and the necklace. A couple of years ago, he thought he’d found the Basalt Madonna. A hack novelist woman named Aimee Downes made what was apparently a pretty convincing counterfeit, and she sold it to him. Didn’t fool him for long, though. Right after that, she sort of went missing.”

  “Sort of?”

  “I heard parts of her body turned up here and there,” Selwyn said. “An eye. A hand. A breast. But no one knows if he actually had her killed.”

  Ghoul justice. Happy fun time.

  “Anyhow, when he hired me to find the stuff, I didn’t have any idea what it was, the Madonna, or, more to the point, why he wanted it.”

  “And what has all this got to do with the Byzantine Empire?”

  “It’s a long story,” Selwyn said. “It’s hard to make a short version out of it.”

  “Try anyway.”

  The train lurched and swayed, and she gripped the pole a little tighter. I could see her reflected in the glass. I was so regretting not having left her back in that apartment. In fact, I was regretting ever having met her. If I hadn’t, I’d still have been shacked up with my CEO, safe and snug and bored.

  “Sometime during the fifth century,” Selwyn began, “though no one’s sure exactly when, I don’t think, a monk in Constantinople found a ghoul—only he didn’t know it was a ghoul. He thought it was a leper, you know. That sort of almost makes sense—”

  “Not really,” I cut in. “Not if you’ve ever actually seen a ghoul, which—”

  “—I have. I’m just telling you that’s how the story goes. The monk thought the wretch he found huddled in the shadows was a leper, and he led it back to the abbot, who saw that whatever it was, it definitely wasn’t human.

  “Father, look what followed me home,” I said. “Can I keep it? Please? Pretty please?”

  Selwyn didn’t laugh like I’d hoped she would.

  No, I admit it wasn’t very funny.

  She just tapped her nose and soldiered on.

  “The abbot, he realized that the monk—and no one knows his name, or the abbot’s—had discovered a subhuman race, and, what’s more, a pagan subhuman race that had yet to be converted to Christianity. So, that’s exactly what the abbot set out to do. He evangelized to the Ghul,” she said. “The abbot had the brothers lock the ghoul in a cell, so it was a sort of captive-audience situation. But they fed it, not cadavers or anything, but they fed it all the same, and they made it comfortable, and, in return, it told them stories of the Sunless Lands, of Thok and the Vale of Pnath, of the war with the Djinn.”

  Selwyn was now spouting stuff even the nasties take with a grain of salt. But I didn’t interrupt her again. I was hoping we were coming up fast on the next station. I wanted off the train in the worst fucking sort of way. I needed not to be shut up in that claustrophobic metal tube with Professor Indiana Throckmorton’s own beyond creepy Madonna of the Damned.

  “Knowing ghouls,” she continued, “the fucker was probably getting his rocks off horrifying them, shocking their monastic sensibilities. You can imagine those pious, ascetic men making the signum crucis and whispering prayers while the ghoul rattled off descriptions of the necropolises and the bone plains, while it introduced them to the likes of Shu
b-Niggurath, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth. Hell, some of them probably pissed themselves. Every now and then, the ghoul would lapse into its own language, and the monks slowly began to decipher some of it. Anyway, after a few months, they sent their pet off to spread the gospel to its fellows.”

  I snorted. “I bet that went well.”

  “I suppose it might have gone worse. The Hounds of Cain did listen, but you know how it often goes when the Church starts trying to fob its beliefs on other cultures. The ghouls picked and chose. Classic case of religious syncretism. They took what suited them. Invented new quasi-Christian deities and fused them with their existing pantheon. You know about the Qqi?”

  I’d heard the word.

  “Their word for god,” I told her. “But that’s all I know. I’m not exactly a goddamn Ghul scholar, Annie Smithfield.”

  “Quinn, I wish you’d stop calling me that. I really, truly do.”

  Okay, by this time, we definitely should have reached the next station. Seriously. But between Selwyn’s tale and getting a gander at her treasure, I’d been distracted.

  “I’m still not sure it isn’t your real name. Also, what with all those fake IDs of yours, I’m not so sure you could ever prove it isn’t.”

  She sighed, and she let go of the pole and sat down next to me. She held the bundle in her lap.

  “Fine, Quinn. Have it your way.”

  “I usually do.”

  She tapped the end of her nose and sighed again.

  “The Qqi,” she said, “which, in ghoulish, is the number Fifty, is their ancient pantheon. Their prehistoric pantheon, their version of the Elder Gods, Outer Gods, Great Old Ones, Nodens, whatever. When the australopithecines were still busy avoiding lions and leopards and hyenas, oh my, the Ghul had already been worshipping the Qqi for a twenty thousand centuries. The Qqi, the Fifty, the Ten Hands, Fifty Fingers, that menagerie fitting together like a Russian nesting doll.”

  “Matryoshkas,” I said, “Russian nesting dolls,” because it was something to say, and I didn’t want to admit I wasn’t really following her little history lesson. I was beginning to worry more about why the train was still zooming merrily along as if the next stop wasn’t until fucking Boston.

  “Right. Like a matryoshka. Anyways, the ghouls latched onto this brand-new theology, incorporated it with their own cosmogony, and out popped a host of new gods and goddesses. A freshly reconsolidated pantheon. Not that the Ghul gave up worshipping Claviceps, Amylostereum, or Paecilomyces, mind you.”

  Fairy tales for the eaters of the dead. The profane names rolled off her tongue like a rotten, off-key tune.

  “But,” she said, “they invented. They invented with a passion.”

  “I get the idea,” I told her. “Archetypes, cultural contamination, corn kings.” I was squinting at the doors to the car, squinting because the fluorescent lights were starting to hurt my eyes. I hate goddamn fluorescent lights. Forget what you hear about vamps and the sun. I’ll take a sunny day over fluorescent bulbs every time.

  “Have you read The Golden Bough?”

  “No.”

  “Joseph Campbell?”

  “No.”

  “Is something wrong?” Selwyn asked.

  “Probably not,” I replied. “Go on. Where does that . . . ?” I waved a hand at the thing in her lap. “Where does it fit into all this nonsense?”

  “Well, you see, the ghouls didn’t junk their many gods for monotheism, but they did take to the idea of a savior. They remade the Virgin and the Christ Child to fit their needs. Ever since they’d lost the war with the Djinn and been banished to the Dream Lands they’d prayed for deliverance. For a messiah who’d lead them back to the World Above. And that’s where the Basalt Madonna comes in.”

  I got to my feet. Unlike Selwyn, I didn’t need the pole for balance, but I sure as shit felt better hanging on to it with my good arm. I said, “Fascinating as all this is, you’re going to have to save the rest for later.”

  She frowned and glanced up at me. She looked just the tiniest bit worried.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked again, with a bit more oomph than before.

  “I’m gonna err on the side of caution and say yes.”

  “But you just said ‘probably not.’”

  “I lied.”

  I drew the Glock and checked the clip, which is when the doors separating the cars opened and four ghouls lumbered in, two from each end. They were big damn bastards, stinking of mold and shit and rotting meat, all four crusty with wicked cases of scabies. To my knowledge, no ghoul yet has ever been accused of good hygiene. Their hooves thumped loud against the floor, and they snarled and bared their yellowed fangs. That abbot in Byzantium shoulda spent his spare time proselytizing to the hounds about toothbrushes, not forgiveness and hellfire.

  If anyone back then had toothbrushes.

  Never mind.

  Their manes bristled. Their rheumy yellow eyes were chock-full of a serious desire to dole out mutilation and death. Near as I could see, no one was holding their leashes. One of the sons of bitches jabbed a crooked finger at me.

  “This does not concern you, Twice-Damned,” it snarled. “Step aside, Siobhan Quinn.”

  “Make me,” I said.

  “Step aside,” it repeated and took a step towards me.

  “Selwyn, you might wanna cover your ears.”

  Which she did.

  I squeezed the trigger and put a bullet through the nut sack’s skull, right between the eyes, and it went down like a bag of rocks. I pulled back on the slide and chambered another round, wishing I could have covered my own ears.

  “Who’s next?” I asked, hardly able to hear myself. None of them volunteered. All three were busy staring at their fallen comrade.

  “She shot Bustard,” said a ghoul with a jagged scar across its short muzzle. It had been standing directly behind the one I’d killed, and now it was hunched over the bloody, lifeless body.

  “Look at that. She shot him,” said the hound. It didn’t sound so much upset as surprised. “He’s dead.”

  “What the fuck did you expect?” I asked, taking aim at Scar’s face. To Selwyn, I said, “You watch those two behind me. Watch them close. If one of them so much as fucking twitches an ear, you tell me.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  “He only wants the Throckmorton,” one of the ghouls behind me grunted. “Not you, vampire. We were not told to harm you. This is not your fight. You are not the one who has betrayed him.”

  It sort of had a point.

  “He,” I said. “That he would be Isaac Snow?”

  “The Qqi d’Tashiva,” it replied.

  “You wanna translate that for me, Annie Smithfield?”

  “The God-King of Rags and Bones,” she answered. “Hand of the Fifty.”

  “Filthy vampire scum does not utter the name of the Qqi d’Tashiva,” Scar said, looking up from the dead ghoul. Its eyes had gone more muddy orange than yellow. “Your foul phantom’s tongue is not fit to—”

  I shot it. Two down. The odds were looking better. I turned my attention to the remaining pair; they were clearly dumbfounded.

  “You shot Chester,” one of them said and scratched the tuft of coarse hair on its scabby chin.

  “Guys, c’mon,” I said. “You are seriously starting to bore the shit out of me. Did you honestly believe you were gonna just waltz in here, pretty as you please, and take her without getting a fight?”

  “Siobhan Quinn,” growled the ghoul who’d scratched its chin at the death of poor deceased Chester.

  “Right. You know my name, but you obviously don’t have a clue what happens to weasely douche bag shitcicles without the good sense to stay out of my face.”

  I was standing there talking smack like I was the baddest of the bad, but to tell you the truth, I was am
azed through and through that I hadn’t yet found a way to fuck up and get me and Selwyn both killed.

  “Quinn,” whispered Selwyn.

  “What?”

  “The train’s slowing down,” she said.

  Which is when both the surviving ghouls dropped down onto all fours and charged me. I had time to get off one more shot, but it went wild and punched a hole in the ceiling of the train. To her credit, Selwyn didn’t scream. She was fast and got clear before four hundred or so pounds of stinking flesh and bone slammed into me. My gun went skittering away, and I heard bones snapping, all of them mine, natch, and the ache in my shoulder was drowned in a shimmering wall of fresh hell.

  Their breath was almost as bad as the pain.

  “Kill you,” growled one of my attackers, just before I drove a knee into its crotch and pushed my thumbs into its eyes. The left eye popped, and the ghoul howled and stumbled to its feet. But the other ghoul pinned me, good and proper, and wrapped a hand tight around my throat, those talons digging into my skin. I knew it could yank my head off easy as brushing away a fly. And there we were, nose to nose. It grinned, as ugly a grin as any nasty ever grinned. A grin to impress a true demon. It’s face lit up, and I knew the ghoul knew it had won.

  “Finish you now, vampire,” it said. “But finish you slow and hard. Make you beg and scream for the delight of the King of Bones.”

  I heard Selwyn racking back the Glock’s slide. The ghoul, it was too busy savoring the thought of picking me apart limb by limb, flaying and disemboweling me, to notice shit. She blew the top of its head off, spraying me with brains and gore and specks of skull in the process. Small price to pay, right?

  “More are coming,” she said, not sounding half as scared as she had a right to be, and then I caught the tattoo of many pairs of hooves pounding steel. Yeah, ghouls also have hooves where their feet should be. The floor beneath me vibrated with the weight and force of them.

  “They’re close, Quinn.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” I mumbled.

  I blinked and wiped at my face, trying to get dead ghoul out of my eyes. In a second or two, I could see well enough to see Selwyn was squatting next to me, still holding on to the Basalt Madonna. In the chaos, part of the T-shirt had slipped enough that one corner of the stone plaque was visible.