Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  I glanced at the Tyrannosaurus looming over us, and though it was stripped of flesh and its bones turned to stone all those many tens of millions of years ago, it sure as shit still looked hungry. Ravenous, Mr. Dinosaur with those grinning jaws and petrified teeth long as my hand, like B, it wanted vengeance. And, I thought, like B, it’s shit out of luck.

  “I’m not for hire,” I told B. “And if I were for hire, I still wouldn’t come back to work for you.”

  He laughed, a quiet, sour laugh. A laugh that gave me goose bumps.

  “I don’t want to hire you, Quinn. Tell me, have you even seen them yet?”

  “Who?”

  “‘Who,’ she wants to know,” he said to Charlee. Then B jabbed me hard in the ribs with his cast. “The mongrel berks, that’s who. Have you seen them?”

  “No,” I said, rubbing my right side. “Talked to the brother on the phone. He called Selwyn’s place looking for her and got me instead. But I haven’t seen either of them. I’m beginning to think they don’t like being seen.”

  “It’s a right bitch, ain’t it, treacle tart?” he asked, staring at me now as if he were challenging me to disagree. “Trying to face off against fucking gits when you ain’t even got a face to put with the toil and trouble they’ve brought down upon you? Like boxing with your own shadow, wouldn’t you say?”

  And for just a second, Mean Mister B’s gray eyes had a hint of their old fire back. Just a spark, sure, but still enough for me to see that—no matter the damage the Snows had done to him—he was still in there.

  “I just want to get Selwyn back,” I said. And if we were playing chicken right then, well, I’m the one who blinked first. It was easier to watch all those anonymous faces filing past than the hate bubbling up from B’s soul.

  “Fuck what the fuckers look like,” I said.

  “Remember when I tried to get you to read The Art of War?” he asked.

  I said no, because I had no recollection whatsoever of B ever trying to get me to read so much as a take-out menu.

  “Right, well, you see, Sun Tzu, that wily sixth-century Celestial cocksucker, yeah, well, he wrote—and do forgive my paraphrasing, kitten—he wrote, if you know yourself and know your enemy, you can fight a hundred goddamn battles and always emerge the victor. But if you ride out into the jaws of death, into the mouth of Hell—like Lord Tennyson’s six goddamn hundred cavalrymen in eighteen hundred and what the fuck ever—and you don’t know your enemy, then, kitten, you are, make no mistake, righteously fucking fucked every goddamn time.”

  “Which means?”

  “It means you’re blind,” he said, raising his voice. “It means you’re in the dark, as the poets say. And the time’s come to have those scales fall from your blinkered eyes, just like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. Time for you to see your enemy, them two mad as a bag of ferrets with teeth just as sharp. If you really want her back, that is. You still got that much fight left in you, Siobhan Quinn? You still know how to dance the dance?”

  They didn’t wait for me to answer.

  I say they, because it was Charlee who placed a hand on my neck, two fingers at the base of my skull. I didn’t even have time to be surprised. There was a flash, as much pain as it was light, as much light as searing pain, and the sensation that I was falling. But that only lasted . . . well . . . it was pretty much over before it began.

  Boom.

  And I opened my eyes, though I didn’t remember having shut them.

  And I didn’t need anyone to tell me who I was seeing.

  I was seeing Isaac and Isobel Snow. It was night, and I was standing beneath a full moon in a grove of trees on a hill crowned with a weathered stone altar, the whole scene a cliché straight out of a tale of New England witchcraft, a Roger Corman film starring Vincent Price. The twins had their backs to me. Each was wearing an identical velvet robe the same shade as the night sky. I leaned against one of the trees, feeling queasy and weak, trying to ignore my discomfort and focus on nothing but those two. Their white hair had been twined together into a single ivory braid that hung between them, down past their hips. Something lay on the altar, but I couldn’t quite make it out. One of the twins raised a crude dagger, a blade chipped from flint and set into a wooden handle. A fucking caveman’s Neolithic knife. It rose up almost high as the moon, and both twins were calling out to “gods” even fouler than the things ghouls worship.

  “Shub-Niggurath!” they cried in unison. “Iä! Mighty Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, accept this oblation in thy name!”

  And the flint knife came down.

  Whatever was on the altar screamed, and I heard the crunch of bone, and the whole fucking night suddenly smelled of blood.

  Then I got hit by both barrels of Charlee’s flashbulb again: boom, boom. I’d been right; there was way more to that kid than questionable fashion sense, a wicked pretty face, and a headful of idiotic slang.

  “Where the hell did you find him?” I heard myself ask, without ever having moved my lips.

  “Where the hell did I find you, precious?” B replied.

  In the motherfucking gutter, B.

  Down in the motherfucking gutter, a needle in my arm.

  There was that pell-mell tumbling sensation again, but it went on longer than before. When it ended, I felt like I was being splashed with icy water, jolted awake from a nightmare. But the truth of it, I was being jolted awake into one.

  I was underground, and I knew where, even if I didn’t know how I knew. A tunnel below Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston, a secret path the ghouls had scratched out centuries before. There was orange torchlight flickering off the damp walls, off moldering heaps of bones and skulls, off rubbery fungi growing in fleshy clumps on the exposed granite. I took a step, and mud sucked at my boots.

  Ghouls crouched on either side of me, dozens of them, squatting in filth and half-devoured corpses. Their bristling hides seethed with lice and fleas, with maggots, and their eyes shimmered iridescent gold in the gloom. The air was cold, dank, and stank of mushrooms, rot, blood, shit, and wet dogs. I took a step backwards, just wanting to be anywhere except fucking right fucking there, but I tripped over my own clumsy feet and landed hard on my ass in the mud. I looked up, and the Snow twins had entered the passageway. They stood together, hand in hand—Isaac on the right, Isobel on the left—and the creatures crowded into the tunnels averted their gaze and murmured incoherent prayers.

  I didn’t look away.

  I’m sure there are those who’d have called them beautiful. There’s never a shortage of people in the world ready to look at the grotesque and the warped and call it lovely. I just don’t happen to be one of them. Isaac’s and Isobel’s skin seemed to have been dusted in flour, it was so pale. Their irises could have been cut from the reddest rubies ever mined. They were tall, lanky, long-boned, and thin, frail, and I couldn’t help but think that one good, hard shove and they’d have both shattered like antique porcelain dolls. They were completely naked, save for the mud and decay caking their pale bodies.

  “Well,” said Isobel, looking directly at me, “from somewhere and somewhen, somehow she’s finally found her way to us.” She grinned ear to ear and flashed a crooked mouthful of stained teeth filed almost as sharp as a vamp’s or a loup’s . . . or, hey, a goddamn Tyrannosaurus’.

  “Clever bitch,” her brother whispered. “So, she’s a sorceress after all.”

  “No, brother. No, it’s not her magic. She has no magic to call her own. Only curses. There is another guiding her. Pushing her.”

  Some of the ghouls were watching me now.

  Oh, and I had to piss.

  Funny how I remember how badly I suddenly had to piss. But, see, vampires do not actually pee, so I suppose that part was, by definition, rather memorable.

  “Where is she?” I heard myself ask, taking myself my surprise. “
Where is Selwyn?”

  Like cartoon villains, the twins exchanged curious, amused glances.

  “She believes we have the traitor,” said Isobel to her brother. And, “So, that’s how we’ll get your attention, Twice-Damned,” Isaac said to me. “I believed as much, but one can never be certain what will work.”

  “Never,” said Isobel. “Never certain.” And she leaned down and forward, reaching towards me with her long white fingers. Her nails reminded me of broken acorn shells.

  “No,” I heard myself say, and then, whatever Charlee was doing, he did it some more. The tunnel dissolved around me, swallowed up by the fall, the flash, the sonic fucking boom, and I felt my bladder let go.

  I hit the floor like a sack of potatoes.

  A sack of potatoes that had just pissed itself.

  Warm urine trickled down my thighs as this Third Circle of Fuck All swam into focus. My mouth tasted like blood, and I realized I’d bitten my tongue. I was lying on my right side, staring out across a hardwood floor so dusty and gray it might well have been the surface of the moon. The buckled floor of a room in a rotten old house, that floor and walls defaced with chalk pentagrams and seemingly random letters from the Enochian alphabet. Here and there were clusters of white candles burning on the floor. You know, I can ladle on description and adjectives all damn day, all damn night, but it really won’t say jack shit about how evil that place felt. How evil it smelled. Worse even than the tunnels, somehow worse than the summoning of good ol’ Shub-Niggurath. The pitched roof of a garret room rose high above me, impossibly high it seemed, and I wondered if maybe this wasn’t a real place at all. It struck me more as a carnival funhouse abstraction of a spooky old garret room than the real McCoy. Another page ripped from freaking Poe or Lovecraft or Stephen King and splashed across my frontal lobe. A wave of nausea swept over me, but I managed not to puke. Pissing myself was plenty bad enough.

  I lay at one end of the garret, and far, far away at the other end, what seemed like fifty miles off, was a sagging canopy bed. The canopy itself had rotted long ago, and nothing was left but cobwebs and tattered strips of fabric hanging from the head and foot posts, from the vaulted crisscross of rusted metal rods suspended above the bed.

  The twins were in the bed.

  In a corner not far from the footboard, a woman sat in a chair, watching them. Her fingers were steepled, echoing the inverted V of the garret roof, and her chin rested on her fingertips. She wasn’t young or old, beautiful or hideous. She was somehow completely unremarkable and entirely loathsome. Her hair was salt-and-pepper, and her eyes were golden. Amber. Eyes like honey. She wore a tailored pantsuit, black shirt, pants, vest, a stark white shirt with a ruffled collar. Her clothes were immaculate, despite the dustiness of the garret. She was barefoot.

  On the bed, the twins were fucking.

  “Who is she?” I whispered, and the woman in the chair looked my way, but only for a moment. The scene on the bed was far more important, more urgent, it seemed, than the vampire who’d just appeared on the attic floor ex nihilo.

  “Hera Snow,” Charlee answered, from someplace deep inside my brain. “Their mother.”

  “No way,” I whispered.

  “Yes way,” said Charlee. “But they’re hers by a ghoul father. Once in each generation, a daughter is sent down to the—”

  “Selwyn already told me that story,” I interrupted. “I absolutely do not need to hear it again.”

  There on that filthy mattress, Isobel was down on her hands and knees, her ass raised in the air, and Isaac was mounting her from behind. They both had ugly vestigial tails sprouting from the base of their spines, bent and hardly as long as my pinky finger. He growled and leaned over her. In response, she spread her thighs farther apart, just before he sank his teeth deep into the meat of her left shoulder. The smell of dust and candle wax took a backseat to the reek of blood and sex. Just before he entered her, I got a glimpse of Isaac Snow’s cock. There were bands of backwards-pointing hooks, like those on a cat’s penis. The sort of shit you see and can’t ever un-see, right? There was not even the faintest hint of love in that lovemaking. It was more like witnessing a consensual rape, which is exactly the sort of nonsensical phrase that comes of trying to apply human sensibilities to the mating of hopelessly inhuman beings. Isobel screamed when he pulled out, when those spines tore into her. Hera Snow practically beamed, proud as proud can be.

  “My pretty, pretty, pretty boy,” she cooed. “My sweet, sweet baby girl.”

  I expected the bitch to applaud.

  Isobel, sweat soaked and panting, turned her face towards me, and she smirked and said, “Hello there, little voyeur. Want to come out and play? I’ll share.”

  There was blood leaking from her nostrils.

  “Play with us, Quinn.”

  And my stomach rumbled.

  Suddenly, all those candles flared in unison, and the room grew much, much brighter. Painfully bright to my eyes. I instinctively shut them, but not before I saw the shadow looming over the twins and Hera Snow, the shadow of something both voracious and infinitely impatient. Yeah, I shut my eyes, but not before I saw it, and not before it saw me.

  Bring me back, I prayed to Charlee with two e’s. Whatever the fuck it is you’re doing back there, you fucking make it stop and bring me back, right fucking now.

  Not yet, he replied. I apologize, but we’re not finished yet.

  There’s more.

  What was. What is. What’s coming.

  What might come.

  The garret room broke apart around me, the world collapsing into splinters and shards, spilling me ass over tits back into the void. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, and down the goddamn rabbit hole with you, Quinn Alice.

  For a time, there was nothing at all.

  Nothing.

  That was nice. I’d have gladly spent several eternities drifting in that limbo, if it meant I’d be spared any more visions of the twins’ depravity.

  But you know what they say about all good things.

  I heard the mutterings of ghouls.

  And I smelled incense—myrrh, vetiver, frankincense, turmeric—cloying smoke from smoldering braziers.

  And once again I found myself in some subterranean place, but not the narrow tunnels hollowed out beneath Mount Auburn. This was somewhere cavernous, a veritable goddamn underground cathedral stretching away on all sides, its ceiling so far overhead not even my fancy undead eyes could find any trace of it.

  I’m in the belly of the world.

  No, whispered Charlee. But you’re in its maw.

  I was crouched on my knees, my clothing in rags, the clothes I’d taken off the girl in City Hall Park only hours before. My hands and face were bleeding from dozens of fine cuts, paper cuts, razor cuts. My magical mystery tour was taking a toll on more than just my mind.

  When I breathed, my breath fogged.

  Before me was a wide dais carved from rough ebony stone shot through with veins of scarlet crystal. There must have been two or three hundred ghouls crowded into the cavern, a grunting, restless mass of muscle and fur, all of them jostling for a spot nearer the edge of the dais. They snarled and spat curses in their guttural excuse for a language. Here and there, skirmishes broke out. I saw one big silverback motherfucker, three hundred pounds if he was an ounce, pop the skull of a scrawny ghoul who’d shoved him—inadvertently, I think. I mean, the brute just literally popped the little guy’s head in his hands. Then he licked his gnarled fingers clean of brain and gore and went back to watching the dais. They were, all of them, waiting on something. And I supposed that Charlee and B had seen to it that I was waiting, too. There was another dustup, not ten feet from me, and it ended in a spray of blood and the victor dancing with a garland of intestines draped merrily about his shoulders.

  In the three long years since my untimely death, I’d smelled a lot of rancid shit,
but nothing that quite compared to that gathering. I didn’t care what B’s boy had said; judging from the funk, I was lodged firmly in the world’s goddamn descending colon.

  Where is she, B? Where’s Selwyn in all this?

  Patience, kitten.

  The twins appeared on the dais—just appeared—and, as they say, sports fans, the crowd went wild. A howl rose up from the throat of every ghoul in the place, and you didn’t have to be wise in the ways of the hounds to know it was a joyful noise. The crowd surged forward, and I heard bones crack. Bodies were crushed to pulp against the sides of the black dais, and talons scratched desperately at the edges of the stone. But not one of the ghouls tried to climb up onto it. They wouldn’t dare. There were rules here, and the price for breaking them would, I suspected, be worse than being squashed and trampled to death.

  My eyes stung, and my vision blurred. When I wiped at them I realized there was blood trickling into them from a deep gash across my forehead.

  What the fuck, Charlee?

  The twins were dressed in the same midnight robes they’d worn when I watched as they summoned the Black Goat of the Woods, and, same as that night, their long white hair was plaited into a single braid. They stood there hand in hand, eyes downcast, their expressions just shy of solemn. It was Isobel who spoke first, and when she spoke, the rabble fell quiet as—if you’ll excuse the pun—the grave. She didn’t lift her head. She didn’t look at the congregation. But . . . she smiled. She smiled an awful smile.

  “Long ages ago,” she said, not raising her voice, not needing to raise her voice, “we walked freely beneath the sun. In immemorial nights, we lived beneath the moon. We did not fear the day. Nor did we have cause to fear the sky and stars. We did not skulk in graveyards, subsisting off the withered corpses of apes. We were a great race, until we were betrayed and cast down into the Sunless Lands, exiled to the peaks and plateaus and necropolises of Thok, lost to the Lower Dream Lands where most of our race now dwell. Before the Djinn made their war upon us.”