Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  And behold, in the midst of the whirlwind I looked . . .

  Then I felt Charlee’s hand on my shoulder, yanking me roughly back from the mouth of that abyss. He cursed and muttered something in a language I’d never heard. The star field shimmered and quickly melted away until there was only the stairwell again.

  “That’s a trick,” he said. “And a trap. They want you rattled, Quinn. They want you scared shitless.”

  I dropped to my knees and puked.

  Yeah, not my proudest moment.

  Charlee held my hair back from my face while I coughed up what little was in my belly, the dregs of that unlucky girl from City Hall Park. I spat and wiped my mouth on the back of my hand, and then I spat again. Dark globs of half-digested blood spattered the stone.

  “We’re stronger than them,” Charlee said firmly, speaking with all the conviction I did not presently possess, and he kneeled beside me. “Whatever happens next, whatever you see down here, that’s what you have to keep telling yourself, girlbaby. We’re stronger than they are, and they know it. They’re just trying to freak you out.”

  “Well, it’s working,” I told him.

  “She’s down there,” he said. “Selwyn’s down there waiting for you. No one else will come for her. You know that.”

  On the one hand, yeah, that helped get me up on my feet and moving again. On the other, it made me want to punch him in the balls. I totally grok the utility of that sort of manipulative shit, okay, and I’m as susceptible to it as the next nasty who only wants to be a real girl again. But, in a way, it was as cheap a shot as the Snows’ counterfeit Azathoth.

  “It’s not much farther,” Charlee said.

  “How the fuck can you know that?”

  “Jesus, don’t you smell them?” he asked.

  I sniffed the dank air, and he was right. Past the stench of mushrooms and wet earth there was the unmistakable reek of ghoul. Just think wet dog crossed with a Port-a-Potty that’s been baking in the summer sun and you’re halfway there.

  Moving right along.

  There were more steps . . .

  . . . and then there weren’t.

  In fact, there was pretty much nothing at all, just a wrenching, sinking sensation in the pit of the pit of my stomach, below my stomach, all the way down in the subbasement of my bowels. My legs gave out from under me again, and I shouted for Charlee, because suddenly I couldn’t see him anymore. The stairwell was folding back upon itself, and, for just an instant I was looking up towards the night outside. The dim blue light from the fungi seemed to bend, warp, twist itself inside fucking out and outside fucking in. The bugs creeping and crawling across the swollen caps and stems of those mushrooms imploded in silent puffs of spores, and the spores hung and drifted in the air, milky clouds coalescing into dazzling psilocybin spirals.

  The dear Mr. Timothy Leary himself would have wept, I’m sure.

  Me, I just wanted a fixed point, anything real and solid to hang on to.

  For half an instant, I heard that awful fucking flute again, and I had just enough time to wonder exactly what sort of deals those two shitbirds had cut with their dark elder gods. “That’s a trick,” Charlee had told me, but now I wasn’t so sure. I’d seen their altars and their offerings, and maybe, I thought, Isaac and Isobel had been plenty naughty enough to get the attention of the Big Bads that even the Big Bads don’t like to talk about, the names we do not say aloud and try to avoid even thinking to ourselves. Maybe those primordial, alien not-gods that old HPL liked to go on about, maybe they had some vested interest in seeing the tables turned and the Ghul sent topside again, with all the bells and postapocalyptic whistles. Fuck, maybe those fifth-century Byzantine god botherers, so hell-bent on making Christians out of sows’ ears, had been in league with—

  You think a lot of crazy-ass shit when you’re stuck mind-surfing non-Euclidian hallways.

  “Open your eyes, puppy,” said Isobel Snow. I wasn’t even aware that I’d shut them.

  I met her halfway and opened one eye. I was relieved to see the world had decided to go back to being solid. I was down on my hands and knees on dusty flagstones. The air smelled of smoke and burning meat. And ghouls. I reached for the pistol in the waistband of my jeans, and someone or something kicked me in the ribs.

  “No,” growled a voice I recognized as Isaac’s. “Be still, corpse.”

  I heard whimpering and whining then, like whipped dogs. I opened my other eye and sat up, hugging my throbbing side, wondering if anything in there was broken and, if so, what the chances were that I’d be around long enough for it to heal. The Basalt Madonna lay a foot or so away from me, still wrapped up snug in Selwyn’s T-shirt. I reached out, winced, and picked it up. Then I raised my head, and the twins stood nearby, hand in hand. As in my vision, their long white hair was plaited together into a single braid that dragged behind them in the dirt, and they wore the same long blue-black velvet robes I’d seen in the museum. Their feet were bare and filthy, their toenails dirty and cracked, and their eyes burned like molten rubies.

  “Welcome, Twice-Damned, Twice-Dead,” said Isaac Snow. “As it was written, yes, as it was foretold, you’ve come to us in these last, desperate hours of our captivity, bearing the Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb, hallowed instrument of our deliverance.”

  So much for my being Pickman’s ace in the hole, an unknown variable the twins knew nothing about. I wondered what discount bin he’d scryed his information from.

  “We are more grateful,” said Isobel, “than mere words ever can express.”

  My head was still spinning, and I rubbed at my eyes and tried to blink back the disorientation and queasiness. I glanced down at the bundle in my hands, then up at the twins. My surroundings were beginning to swim hazily, slowly, into focus. Wherever the fuck I was, it wasn’t that great fancy cave from Charlee’s vision, though it was clearly some sort of underground chamber. There was no ebony dais laced with red crystalline veins. But there were ghouls, a goddamn sea of doglike faces and gangly, hunched backs. And they’d been whipped into a mad frenzy, presumably by my arrival. Or, more likely, the Madonna’s arrival. After all, I was nothing but the reluctant delivery girl. But the ghouls were hanging back, keeping a healthy, respectful distance between themselves and the twins. They yapped and gibbered and laughed the grating, barking way that ghouls laugh. They flailed and clawed viciously at one another, pushing, shoving, slamming their bodies together. It was impossible not to be reminded of a mosh pit.

  And then I saw what was behind the twins.

  A cage.

  Again, Charlee’s vision had embellished and missed the mark. It was nothing elaborate, not the amalgamation of gibbet and rack he’d shown me; its iron bars didn’t glow red hot, either. And what was inside, it wasn’t the Beast in me. It was Selwyn.

  It was what had become of Selwyn.

  Behind me, someone cleared his throat, and I turned away from the cage.

  It was Charlee, standing there in his lime-green patent-leather go-go boots and Russian-hooker fur, looking as silly as it’s possible to look in a pit of fiends, and I made the mistake of being glad to see him. He smiled and held up the pink Sanrio backpack he’d taken from the backseat of the Porsche.

  “My Lord and Lady,” he said, “Qqi d’Tashiva and Qqi Ashz’sara, ruthless and indomitable hands of the Fifty.” And he bowed to them.

  “Why, you lousy son of a bitch,” I snarled. “You cunt.”

  Charlee smirked, but he didn’t look at me.

  “You’ve brought them?” asked Isobel, cocking her head to one side. “What the traitor Throckmorton stole from us, you’ve returned those treasures?”

  Charlee nodded his pretty pomegranate head. “Precisely as you asked, my Lady.”

  One of the ghouls, a skinny little shit so thin it looked like it hadn’t eaten since Pong was the next big thing, scuttled out of the shadows o
n all fours and snatched the backpack from Charlee’s hands. Charlee, he kept his cool and kept his eyes on the twins. The skinny ghoul carried the pack to Isaac, groveled and slobbered pitifully at his feet, then quickly melted back into the throng.

  “It would have been an awful tragedy,” Isobel said, turning to her brother, “if such precious things as these were lost in the coming holocaust, if they’d been caught in the unmaking.”

  I watched as Isaac removed an antique wooden box from the pink backpack, the very same antique wooden box that Selwyn had taken to the Meatpacking District and sold to a fat oddities dealer who’d called himself Skunk Ape. Isaac passed the box to his sister, and he took a second object from the pack, a small gray silk pouch. I knew before he undid the drawstrings what was waiting inside.

  Riddle me this, television audience: How the fuck does a vamp steal from a member of the Unseelie Court and live to tell the tale? I know it was a question had me on the edge of my fucking seat. Sure, to the living, we might seem all that, but as nasties go—heinousness being relative—we’re really not so very far above ghouls, ourselves.

  The wooden box wasn’t locked, the way it’d been when Selwyn handed it over to Skunk Ape, and Isobel Snow opened the lid. She grinned like a kid on Christmas morning, and her teeth up close and in person were even worse than they’d been in the vision, worse than they’d been described in that anonymous document B had given me. Buckled, crooked, razor sharp. It seemed safe to assume dental hygiene and orthodontics weren’t a big part of Hera Snow’s approach to parenting. Anyway, Isobel set the box down on the flagstones at her feet and lifted the skull out of its velvet cradle. She stood, gazed into its empty sockets, then held it triumphantly above her head. All eyes turned towards her.

  “Though his name has been lost,” she said, and her voice swelled to fill the chamber, “behold the remains of he who, more than fifteen centuries ago, first received the Word. The Word that, on this night and before another dawn breaks, shall set us all free.”

  Like I said, And the crowd went wild.

  Clearly, these two knew how to work a room.

  As for me, I’d seen what was trapped in the cage behind them, and everything else had ceased to matter. My head swam with a sickening, intoxicating mix of hatred and sorrow, regret and bitterness. I hurt like I hadn’t hurt since that night some five years before when Mercy Brown bedded me and murdered me on a filthy mattress. Like I never thought I’d hurt again. I was so small, so irrelevant, a spider pinned to a board, nailed down and twitching at the eye of a storm of plots and bullshit intrigues, agendas and subterfuge and contradiction. Pickman, B, the twins, Charlee, fuck them all equally and fuck their ambitions and greed. I cursed every soul and every soulless being that had ever been willing to maim and butcher and rape and destroy in the name of [Fill in the Fucking Blank]. I did not exclude myself.

  My mind was swelling with blood and fire.

  And I felt my Beast begin to stir. She wasn’t going to need a megadose of Aconitum to wake up. Not tonight.

  From the satin bag, Isaac produced the necklace that Aster, the Faerie bitch beekeeper of East 4th Street, had called the Tear of Dis. In the dim light, the diamonds twinkled dully, and the ruby leaked a glow of its own literally hellish creation. Isaac dropped the satin bag to the floor and turned to his sister, his bride, his partner in DIY End Times.

  “My love,” he said, “no throat but yours should ever wear this jewel.” And then he unclasped the necklace and hung it around Isobel’s neck. Still holding the skull in her left hand like some genderfuck Hamlet, she lovingly fondled the stone with the fingers of her right. Isaac leaned in close and bit her on the cheek, keeping her flesh clenched tightly between his teeth for a full minute or more. She didn’t even wince.

  “La Saignement de gorge,” he said, when he’d finally released her. Isaac had bitten hard enough to break the skin, and a trickle of blood wound its way down Isobel’s pale cheek. There was a scarlet smear on Isaac’s lips. He licked it away and gently kissed her forehead.

  I’d seen enough. I’d seen enough and back. I put my head down. I reached out and pulled the Madonna to me. It had come partly unwrapped, and I could see a corner of the dark volcanic stone, a hint of the graven image of Mother Hydra. I shut my eyes.

  Behind my lids, I saw that burning field, a memory so vivid it might as well have been taking place in the here and now. The fire and the field, the white horse and its white riders, their armor white as snow.

  “And Hell followed after,” I said.

  “My Lord, what would you have me do with this one?” Charlee asked, and then I felt his fingers twining themselves in my hair. He yanked my head back with enough force that my neck popped. I opened my eyes and stared up into his face. His features had hardened, and I wondered why I’d ever thought him pretty at all.

  “In her way,” Isaac replied, “the Twice-Damned has served us well. That she did so unwittingly is of no concern to me.”

  And Isobel said, “She has guarded the Mother and the Child, and she has traveled the long Night Road to bring them to us. Faithless, yes, faithless and treacherous and disbelieving. Infidel. But she has surely earned some meager reward for her tribulations. Some favor before death.”

  “If that’s your wish, my Lady,” said Charlee.

  “Fuck you,” I said, and I spat in his face. He smirked again and wiped my spittle away.

  “We’ve come, at last, to the end of a tale,” Isobel continued. “The end of one, which is also the beginning of another. There is a little space on the threshold for . . .” And Isobel trailed off and was silent for a moment. Charlee tightened his grip on my hair, and I glared up at him, unable to look away.

  “. . . an act of mercy,” Isobel finished.

  “Our poor cousin cannot speak,” said Isaac.

  “So she cannot whisper secrets,” added his sister.

  “Siobhan Quinn, we shall allow you—” began Isaac.

  “—one final caress,” finished Isobel.

  I tried to pull free, and Charlee drove his knee into my back. He let my hair go then, and I crumpled to the ground, doubled over and tasting my own blood. Charlee had said he was older than me by at least a few decades, and he was a lot stronger than me. And, to tell the truth, I’d never been any good at the hand-to-hand melee shit. I’d always relied on guns and crossbows and enchanted lockets and pointy sticks and what the hell ever else got the job done.

  “Cousin Selwyn is our smiling little lamb,” Isobel said. “She told us much about you, Twice-Damned, before we took her tongue.”

  I’d seen what was in the cage.

  Whatever else happened, I wouldn’t be leaving Mount Auburn with Selwyn. I was pretty damn sure I wouldn’t be leaving at all. And I discovered that being fairly damn certain of my guaranteed doom, it cleared my head a little.

  “Get up,” Charlee growled, sounding hardly like himself at all. He grabbed my left shoulder and lifted me roughly to my feet.

  “What’s your percentage in all this?” I asked him. “Short con or long?”

  He didn’t reply. Instead, Charlee with two e’s took the Madonna from me, and shoved me, stumbling, towards the cage. The twins had stepped aside, moving as one, and there was Selwyn waiting behind the cold iron bars. It wasn’t necessary for Charlee to push me again. I walked the rest of the way on my own.

  In a dream of a fairy-tale forest and a burning autumn field, a girl with my name had said, “You saw. You saw us in a cage, an awful sort of cage. You saw that the twins had locked us up inside a cage.”

  Days and days ago, Selwyn had said, “In their eyes, of course, it makes me an abomination.”

  “We have shown mercy on her, also,” said Isobel, and there was no hint of sarcasm in her voice. The madwoman absolutely believed what she was saying. “Twice-Damned, by the All Mother we have given her a gift, a gift that even my brother and I are
denied.”

  Selwyn stared out at me, and her star-sapphire eyes had turned a rusty shade of amber, like blood in a glass of beer. There was nothing in those eyes but suffering.

  “We are making her whole,” said Isobel.

  You saw that the twins had locked us up inside a cage.

  The woman that had been Selwyn Throckmorton was quickly being gnawed apart by whatever corrosive spell of germ-line genetic transmutation the twins had cast on her. She crouched in one filthy corner, her knees pulled up close to her chest. In places, her flesh bubbled and steamed as if someone had poured acid on it. Bones popped and shifted beneath her mottled skin as the double helices of her DNA were ripped apart and rebuilt. Tears streamed from her eyes, but they were the tears of a ghoul, sticky and yellow, pustulant. She opened her mouth, and only a strangled, choking sound escaped her ruined lips.

  Do you know what’s on the other side of the meadow, Quinn?

  Whatever angle Selwyn had been playing, it had cost her everything. Like Mean Mister B, she’d crossed the twins, and like him, she’d been caught at it. He’d only lost a hand, his dignity, a few teeth. Lucky motherfucker, but then he always was. I think it’s more likely than not that Selwyn had cast her lot with Richard Upton Pickman and his rebels, but, as it happens, I would never know for sure. Where the twins had sent her, she was never coming back from that place.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and maybe I even meant it. I drew the Browning and put three bullets in her head. They did the trick.

  And the ghouls, they finally shut up.

  Isobel Snow was laughing, a quiet, uneasy titter.

  Those scraps of my humanity the Bride of Quiet had somehow missed, those died in the space of three gunshots. Bam, bam, bam. That’s all she wrote. Selwyn was gone, and with luck she wasn’t hurting anymore. I like to tell myself she was dead already, before I pulled the trigger.