Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  At this, the ghouls once again began to howl and hoot and snarl, and the twins let them. The twins held their leashes, that much was plain as fucking day. I was watching a puppet show, and the two mongrels on the stage were pulling all the strings.

  I tried to stand, discovered that I was too dizzy, and sat down with my back against a stalagmite.

  Minutes passed. I can’t say how many. It was all a blur of goddamn yodeling ghouls and snapping jaws. But eventually they fell silent of their own accord, and now it was the brother’s turn to speak. Isaac kept his head down, same as Isobel had done, and he wore the same smile she’d worn.

  “My sister,” he said, “recites the sorrowful and cruel history of our fallen race. She speaks it true, yes. But remember that it is but history. It is only history. The crimes done to us in antiquity have gone unanswered for three thousand millennia while human men and woman—usurpers favored by the Djinn bastards—have risen and stolen all that should have been ours. But I stand here and tell you, there is a path back, long promised us, and this wrong will no longer be endured, these unspeakable indignities, this . . . captivity.”

  Pretty lame as “Let my people go” speeches go. But, once again, the ghouls raised their cries for justice, and again, the twins let them howl and slam themselves against one another and the sides of the black dais. I watched as more of the faithful went down, casualties of the frenzy, ripped apart, stomped to jelly under the hooves of their fellows. Once or twice I even looked away.

  No kidding.

  “I get the point,” I muttered. “I’ve seen enough.”

  I didn’t bother whispering. It’s not like the ghouls could possibly hear me over the ruckus they were raising.

  Not just yet, the boy with pomegranate hair replied.

  “Yes yet. Fuck you. Stop this now, right fucking now, or B’s gonna be window-shopping for a new favorite pillow biter.”

  Charlee didn’t respond.

  I can’t exactly blame him.

  The ghouls had all fallen silent once more, and I looked back at the dais, the stage for Isaac and Isobel Snow’s own private Altamont, this carefully ordered chaos good as their own DIY Nuremberg Rally. All eyes were on them, every fucker there waiting with fetid breath for the next proclamation.

  For the plan.

  For deliverance.

  “What has any of this shit got to do with me?” I growled, and maybe I ought to have been keeping my voice down after all, because Isobel’s ruby eyes went right to me. Finally, she raised her head. She licked her lips and nodded once, a nod that seemed to be something more meaningful than a mere acknowledgment of my presence, though what that might be I had no goddamn way of knowing. But neither her brother nor the ghouls seemed to have noticed what she’d noticed. None of them turned towards me, and Isobel, after a few seconds, looked away.

  Free of her gaze, I felt as if a concrete block had been lifted off my chest. I heard myself gasp.

  On the dais, the twins turned to face each other, and behind them appeared—just appeared—a contraption that looked a bit like what might happen if an indecisive metalworker set out to create a torture rack, then changed her mind and started work on a cross, only to change her mind a second time and attempt the sort of cage that could be hung from a gibbet. In places, the iron bands still glowed red hot.

  The twins opened their hands.

  “What rough beast—” said Isaac.

  “—its hour come round at last,” finished Isobel.

  They opened their hands again, or maybe I’d only thought they’d opened them the first time.

  They held, between them, the Basalt Madonna, and where the pyritized ammonite had been was a spiraling emptiness. A hole in space and time and the consciousness of everything that has ever had a halfway coherent thought, a hole in the universe, spinning around and around and around.

  They kissed.

  And the ghouls wailed, and their hoofed feet hammered at the travertine floor of the cavern.

  We’re almost done, said Charlee.

  For just an instant, like a few frames of film spliced into the wrong movie, I saw a squalid room where two hulking figures held B still while a third used a butcher’s cleaver to take off his hand a few inches above the wrist.

  I saw Charlee watching.

  I heard Mean Mister B scream.

  Isobel reached into the hole where the ammonite had been, and now there were tears flowing down her cheeks as a sticky blackness poured out of the Madonna and up her arm. Isaac Snow watched, eyes wide—but not with fear and not with horror for what was happening to the woman who was both his twin sister and his lover. That expression, it was glee. It was jubilation. The bastard was ready to cream himself. All his sick fucking dreams were coming true, right there before his eyes, and Isobel, I saw, was a price he was more than ready to pay.

  Power.

  Greed.

  A thirst for violence that would never be quenched.

  And, suddenly, right then, all I wanted was to see him dead. I struggled to my feet, shoving back against the dizziness and supporting myself against the stalagmite. I reached for the gun that should have been under my tattered peacoat, tucked into the waistband of the dead girl’s jeans. But it wasn’t there. Not that it much mattered, because an instant later I saw what was suspended from that device that was not exactly a rack or a cross or a gibbet’s cage.

  What rough beast.

  I’d never seen its face so clearly.

  My face. My wolf ’s face.

  I’d never imagined she could be in agony.

  On the dais, Isaac was letting the Basalt Madonna devour Isobel, while the loup in me watched on, while I tried to remember how to shut my eyes.

  “Okay, Quinn,” said Charlee. “Hang on. Time to come home.”

  I cursed him, and the scene in the cavern began disintegrating around me, and I let go.

  CHAPTER SIX

  NOT A ROAD MOVIE

  I didn’t come to in the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs, surrounded by petrified bones, tourists, and noisy children. In fact, I didn’t come to anywhere in the museum. I opened my eyes, after all that falling and the whirling black stars and the void, fucking Carcosa, and I was sitting on a bench in the park. I couldn’t even remember crossing the street. Not that it mattered. I opened my eyes, and B was sitting on my right and Pretty Boy Charlee was sitting on my left. Charlee was holding on to my arm, just above the elbow. And the Basalt Madonna, still wrapped in Selwyn’s Morrissey T-shirt, it was right there in his lap.

  I gasped, sucking in air like I’d never tasted the stuff before. Like I was a breather. It smelled good, clean. Well, as clean as November in New York City gets. It was, in fact, the best goddamn air I’d ever tasted. But there was a chill, too, in the afternoon breeze rustling the leaves, and I pulled the stolen peacoat tighter.

  “You’re okay,” said Charlee, and he gave my arm an encouraging little squeeze. “You’re just fine. The disorientation, that’ll pass really soon.”

  But it wasn’t the Tilt-A-Whirl wooziness—apparently a side effect of Charlee’s magical mystery tour—that I wanted gone. It was the twins, their grotto, the altar and the garret, Mama Snow, the frenzied ghouls, the Madonna, all that shit, Isobel Snow looking me in the eyes—that was what I needed to pass really fucking soon. But I knew better.

  Some stains don’t come out, no matter how hard you scrub.

  “Quinn, if you need to throw up—” Charlee started, and I cut him off.

  “No, I’m fine,” I lied. “I’m not going to throw up,” I added, though I felt like that was a distinct possibility.

  “So you see,” said B, speaking so softly that his voice was almost drowned out by the buses and taxis on Central Park West.

  “Yeah, asshole. I see.”

  He was sipping a bottle of peach Snapple through a pink bendy straw, and
he glanced at me. Out in the light of day, Jesus, he looked even worse than he had in the museum. Haggard. Broken. Empty. The swaggering pansy thug who’d bullied and haunted me so long reduced now to a dry shell and not much fucking else. Just a few hours before, nothing would have pleased me more than seeing this man so completely undone. But a lot can happen to a dead girl in a few hours, and all I felt, looking at him, all I felt was revulsion and pity. And that made me angry. It made me very angry, feeling sorry for B after all the shit he’d visited upon my person. But there you go. Sympathy for goddamn devils, indeed.

  “You’re going to Boston?” he asked, then took another swallow of Snapple.

  “What the fuck for?” I asked him right back.

  B cleared his throat and set the Snapple bottle on the ground at his feet.

  “She wasn’t there, B. Yeah, I saw a lot of shit, but I didn’t see Selwyn. I need a cigarette.”

  Charlee took a yellow pack of American Spirits from an inside pocket of his faux fur, shook one out, lit it, and passed it to me; he left lipstick stains on the filter. The smoke tasted even better than the crisp fall air.

  “Doesn’t mean a thing,” said B. “In your heart of hearts, whatever’s left of it, you know she’s with them.”

  The fucker had a point.

  In the tunnel, I’d put the question to Isobel.

  “She believes we have the traitor,” she’d said. And Isaac, he’d chimed in, “So, that’s how we’ll get your attention, Twice-Damned.”

  I took another drag on the cigarette and held the smoke for a couple of minutes before I exhaled. Such are the questionable benefits of not needing oxygen.

  “Charlee, what you showed me, it was past, future, everything all scrambled up together. I get that part, but the way it turned out, that last bit in . . .”

  “Nothing’s set in stone,” he said. “What you saw, think of it like you would a weather forecast.”

  I managed a coarse laugh.

  “Wow. As accurate as all that?”

  “As mutable as all that,” he replied.

  “Yeah, well . . . I didn’t see anything that convinced me going to Boston was any sort of good idea.” Then I turned to B. “I do understand,” I told him. “The whole vendetta thing you’ve got going with the Snows. They fucked you up hard, and you want them dead, and they have it coming a hundred times over. But that’s your fight, old man, not mine. When Pickman contacts me, then I’ll—”

  “You’ll what, precisely?” asked B.

  He fixed me with his bleary gray eyes, then asked Charlee to light a cigarette for him, too. The boy took out a silver case filled with rainbow-colored Nat Shermans.

  “All they want is the Madonna,” I said. “All I want is Selwyn back. Pickman said—”

  “Oh, kitten.” He sighed and shook his head. “You disappoint me.” He accepted a baby-blue Nat Sherman from Charlee. He took a puff and shut his eyes.

  “And how the hell’s that, exactly?”

  He exhaled and scratched his whiskered chin.

  He sighed again. “You’ve never missed a chance to remind me I’m a liar, have you? And it’s true; a liar is what I am.”

  “Among other things,” I muttered.

  “Exactly,” he said and nodded his head, smoke leaking from his nostrils. “I’m a liar, a killer, a cheat, a bugger of anything what stands still long enough. I’m a goddamn heel and a miscreant; that’s me. A right and proper arse. A villain. So, when I tell you how I stand in awe of Pickman’s perfidious ways, you ought to know I’m telling you the truth.”

  Ever heard of the liar’s paradox? No? Well, it goes something like that.

  “Every single word I utter is a lie,” I said, “but right now? Right now, I’m telling you the truth. Is that the gist of it, Mr. Barrett?” I glanced at Charlee. He was watching a squirrel perched on the lowest branch of a sugar maple. The squirrel twitched its tail—once, twice, three times. Its black eyes stared warily back at Charlee, like he was just the sort of monster who eats squirrels.

  “After what you’ve seen, you still don’t comprehend,” Charlee said, speaking very softly, as if he was trying not to frighten the squirrel. “You’re still willing to hand over the Madonna to the twins.”

  “Not that Pickman’s ever going to let that happen,” said B. “But we’ve been over all this, and I’ve never been one for repeating myself.”

  The smoke from the smoldering tip of my cigarette coiled into an almost perfect question mark.

  And I said, and, in that moment, I meant what I said, “I’m not your avenging angel, B, and I’m not a hero. I’m not Pickman’s ace in the hole. I’m not motherfucking Frodo Baggins willing to walk into the Land of Mordor to stop Sauron from covering all the world in shadow. I’m not Dorothy Gale, and I’m not here to get rid of anyone’s wicked witches.

  “You say there’s a war coming? Well, ain’t there always? I’ll find Selwyn, and we’ll go to ground, and every one of these assholes can murder each other for all I care. They can burn this whole rotten world to the ground.”

  I flicked ash into the grass and took a long drag.

  “Well, well,” said B. “If I only still had me other hand, I’d applaud.”

  The squirrel in the maple tree chittered angrily. Charlee told it to shut the hell up, and it did. For a few minutes, none of us said anything else at all, and there was nothing but the noise of traffic, the breeze in the branches, and the chirping birds.

  Now, as you’ll see shortly, I did go to Boston. But here’s the weird thing: I cannot for the life of me remember exactly why, what argument swayed me. Or if there was some card B had yet to play that put me once more in his pocket, behind his damned eight ball. Way back at the beginning of Chapter Four, I mentioned how, writing all this down, lots of time I’m fully aware I’m just making shit up.

  That might have annoyed a few of you.

  Well, if someone’s telling you a story, and they claim to be a reliable narrator, as trustworthy as the length and girth of the night, they’re lying to you, sure as shit stinks. And it’s just as bad, you ask me, if they simply neglect to address the question and let their readers buy into some unspoken myth of total recall. So, yeah. Most of the time, I remember the broad strokes, whether I want to or not. But that’s about it. If this sort of confession rubs you the wrong way, then you’re not paying attention.

  Every word I say is a lie. Fuckin’ A.

  But I digress, and the time for digressions in this story has probably come and gone. As I was saying, whatever swayed me to throw in with B that afternoon, that’s a blank. Sometimes I suspect it was an ugly little smudge of magic on the part of B or his pomegranate-haired molly, because all I needed was a slight push out the door, right?

  So, right here we have a perfect blank.

  And then here we have Charlee talking to someone on his iPhone, and Mean Mister B’s standing hunched a few feet away. The Madonna was in my lap, and I’d smoked my cigarette almost down to the filter. B had his back to me, and he was peering through the trees towards the museum. Right then, the man looked a hundred years old if he looked a day, and he was gnarled as the roots of the cranky squirrel’s red maple. Whatever they’d done to him, it went deeper than amputating a hand.

  There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.

  He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.

  “It’s all set,” Charlee said, putting away his phone.

  B nodded, and I dropped my butt to the ground and crushed it out under the pointy toe of my most recent meal’s cowboy boot. I left the bundle lying on the bench with Charlee and walked over to where B was standing.

  “So, Mr. Barrett,” I said, “do you know any more than I do about this much coveted unholy of unholies?” And I nodded towards the bench.

  “La Virgen negra de la Muerte?” he asked.

 
“I don’t mean the pretty boy in the go-go boots.”

  “He’s a right wonder, is Charlee. I’ve never wanted to tell my boys the secrets. You know what I mean, Quinn. Those secrets keep us tossing and turning at night. But now he tells me secrets.”

  “About the Madonna?”

  “Among other things,” said B, and he managed a tired smile.

  “What is it? Just fucking tell me, if you know. And if you don’t, say so.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at the bundle, then back at me. He nodded once or twice.

  “What is she? She’s the whore that tilts the world, kitten. Pretty much a hydrogen bomb you don’t even have to aim. Fission and splitting and a chain reaction that starts small until Her Magma Highness tears a hole in the world.”

  “What the fuck does that even mean?” I asked.

  He squinted, and the briefest flash of the old B drifted across his face. He reached out and pressed the tip of his index finger hard against my forehead. It made me think of Selwyn, tapping her nose.

  “She’s the Anti-Mater, Quinn. She unbirths.”

  All at once then, the day seemed too bright, too loud. All the edges seemed drawn too sharply, and every sound was just a little bit louder and shriller than my ears could bear. In another life, I might have thought it was exhaustion, of head, body, and spirit. In this afterlife, fuck only knows. I rubbed at my eyes. How long had it been since I’d last seen Selwyn? Less than thirteen or fourteen hours? It felt like days had passed.

  B’s finger was no longer pressed against my skin.

  My mouth was dry, and I wished I had a few sips of a peach Snapple of my very own.

  “And the ghouls made a thing like that?” I asked him, my voice sounding distant and pinched and skeptical.

  I looked back at the bench, and Charlee was gone. The Madonna was still there, though. He hadn’t taken the bundle with him.

  “Perhaps they were the architects and perhaps not,” replied B, half thoughtfully, half wearily. “I’ve heard tales told, and I’ve read some others, but I’m right cream crackered on what’s de facto actual.”