“How? Hoot are you talkin’ aboot?”
“A righteously pissed-off bitch whore of a succubus who’s gonna have my head on a pike if she doesn’t get that dildo sometime in the next couple of hours. The end of me, Aloysius, that’s what I’m talking about. Me and Mr. B and that skank Drusneth.”
“That’s a sin, ’tis, Quinn lassy.”
“A sin?”
“A shame,” he said, then continued. “Eh, not such a sin for that bastirt B whose-’is-name and for no sort of hoor succubus.”
“Agreed. I’d be plenty happy to be free of B, and . . . fuck Drusneth.”
“I’d not fuck her, not even if I was pished blind.”
“Don’t be an idiot. You know damn well what I meant.”
“Were a joke.”
I glared at him; then I reached into the plastic bag and pulled out the bottle of Jacquin’s brandy, unscrewed the top, and took a very long hit. Gods, it tasted sort of like hair tonic made from gingerbread and lighter fluid.
“Oh, holy motherfucking shit,” I said, and spat in the dirt. “How in the name of Job do you drink this stuff?”
“Just tips it up to my gob—”
“Okay, whatever. Here, take it,” I told him, handing over the pint. “I’m off to see Szabó and finally be done with this.”
“Who’s that?”
“Magdalena Szabó, my executioner, that’s who she is. It was nice knowing you, Aloysius.”
To tell the truth, I think I was only about half as terrified as I should have been. The soothing opiate of resignation had begun to set in, sooner than I’d have expected. He hugged me, spilling some of the brandy in the process. It was a gentler hug than he usually gave me. I didn’t hear any of my bones creaking.
“Nice knowin’ you, too, Quinn lass.”
And I left him there. I had no idea whatsoever where I was going, but I left. Maybe I’d head back to The Basement, or maybe back to my apartment, or maybe I’d just walk around in the snow. It hardly seemed to matter. When the time came—which I knew would be sooner, rather than later—Szabó would snatch me up wherever I was.
• • •
Remember the ending of Jaws? If so, it might help prepare you for where this story is headed. And if not, well, no big deal. Me, I loved that movie, but I love almost all movies about predators—natural and supernatural—devouring humans. Though I’m inevitably disappointed that the humans usually emerge triumphant in The End. Guess it truly is rare that we can have our cake and eat it, too.
Anyway, so, yeah, Aloysius “lost” the dingus.
And, turns out, there was even less time than I’d expected before I had to confess this unfortunate turn of events to Magdalena Szabó. Like, maybe, I don’t know—fifteen or twenty minutes after I left the underpass. I was contemplating one final meal, scoping out the people passing me by, looking for a juicy mark, when I wasn’t on Gano Street anymore and there wasn’t any snow. I was, instead, back in that very black room, that photonegative of Harpootlian’s very white room, sitting in that very black chair, and the painfully skinny girl in her ebony satin evening gown, that painfully skinny girl with skin just about the color of milk, was, once again, seated only several yards in front of me in that very black chair identical to mine. The ten gold rings on her bare toes glinted dully, and she was watching me with her emerald eyes. She smiled, revealing those teeth black as coal.
“You don’t have it,” the girl said, and she said it so matter-of-factly that, gotta admit, it sent a shiver down my spine.
“Word travels fast,” I said.
“You’ve failed.”
“True, that,” I admitted. “But, hey, at least your archenemy didn’t get it, either. Which means, you know, you sort of broke even.”
The milky girl licked her lips in a hungry sort of way. She clicked her long, sharp nails together. They sounded like castanets, which is, yeah, a pretty cliché analogy. But work with me here. I’m not goddamn Tolstoy or Nabokov. I’m not even a bestseller hack like Stephen King.
I’m just some dead bitch putting words down on paper.
“You’ve failed,” the girl said again. “Nothing else is of any consequence.”
“Well, maybe you could get it back from Faerie,” I ventured. “I mean, badass demon versus flitty Tinkerbell nobility, how hard can that be? Especially after what you pulled off back at Drusneth’s.”
“You’re a fool,” the pale girl sighed, and clicked her nail together again. “My strength in this world—”
“Harpootlian didn’t have any trouble whisking the Maidstones away. So, maybe you’re stronger than you—”
“You acted as her focus. Without your hatred for the sisters, she would have been helpless.”
You learn something new every day.
I pulled my duster tighter about me. Of course, I wasn’t cold. The duster was, I think, sort of like Linus and his blanket, something comforting to cling to in the last moments of my existence.
“Well, so, I go into Faerie. We team up for that possession maneuver of yours again, punch old Underhill in the box before she even sees us coming.”
“You truly are a fool,” the girl said, shook her head in a sort of disappointed way, and licked her lips again.
“What?”
“I would be even weaker in the domain of the Daoine Sidhe. I have already been greatly weakened jumping between two worlds. To jump into a third, I would be almost paralyzed. You’ve lost the unicorn to a witless troll.”
Now, Aloysius isn’t the brightest bulb in the pack, but I wouldn’t exactly call him witless. I wanted to take up for him, but I kept my mouth shut.
“I have tried,” said Szabó through the proxy of her living marionette, “to conceive of a punishment to suit this outrage, but it’s no simple task. However, we shall have eons, you and I, to devise an appropriate penance.”
I pulled the leather duster still tighter. Forget Linus van Pelt. Think, instead, about a flying fox folding its fuzzy wings about itself before bedtime.
“You know, I’m not the one who went and lost your pervy knickknack. If you ever even had the thing.”
“And your employer, he’ll join you,” Szabó went on. “I cannot take this Drusneth, as she belongs to the domain of another Hell, beyond my reach.”
“Poor you,” I said. “Lucky Dru.”
When you’re as fucked as I seemed to be, well, you might as well mouth off and get in a few parting shots. I stuffed my hands into the pocket of the duster. Right then, hearing that girl’s voice, they genuinely did feel cold.
“Enough of this,” she said, and lifted one hand. A whirl of oily blackness appeared, twining itself around and between her fingers. It reminded me of the inky shadows Aloysius uses to travel between here and the Hollow Hills. Tenebrous. How’s that for a ten-dollar word? The blackness was tenebrous. It began to crackle, spilling bursts of tenebrous electricity.
My left hand closed around something round and solid in the pocket of my duster.
Shit a brick and fuck me sideways with it. Twice.
Back at Drusneth’s, I apparently hadn’t used all the M67s. An earth-shattering, ball-crushing mind fuck of the faintest third cousin of hope swept over me. And then, constant reader, our complete moron of a heroine at least had the kamikaze satisfaction of going out with a bang. All at once, I was practically standing before the grand and glorious pearly gates of Fucktopia.
“Fine,” I said, “let’s get this show on the road.” I was doing my best to reveal not one damn iota of the joy coursing through me. But my poker face sort of sucks.
The girl made a fist, and the intensity of that crackling blackness coiling about her hand doubled, tripled. Her eyes narrowed. “Your first lesson, Twice-Damned, will be futility.”
“A whole lotta motherfuckers already beat you to it,” I said, and I flipped the black chair over and rolled across the black floor. Not a chance I was gonna come out of this fracas alive . . . undead . . . whatever. But I might as well add a dash
of style to that aforementioned satisfaction. Nothing to lose. Nothing whatsofuckingever.
I rolled fifteen, maybe twenty feet, and by then the grenade was out of my pocket. The painfully skinny girl, Szabó had ripped her apart and made a screaming harpy of a cyclone outta the leftovers.
I got to my knees and pulled the pin.
“Lady,” I said, “I got your unicorn right here.”
The demon shrieked bloody goddamn murder. In the whole history of the cosmos, probably nothing has ever sounded that thoroughly unhappy.
Words fail me.
But then, they often do.
Boom. Roy Scheider, wherever you are in that great beyond, eat your heart out.
• • •
No, I have no idea how I survived. That’s an uncertainty you’re just going to have to deal with, same as me. Maybe it had something to do with all that interdimensional, straddling-here-and-there gobbledygook. But there was light so bright it must have put the big bang to shame, and then I was lying in the snow on Gano, not far from my old apartment. The only sound was the wind.
I lay there a long, long time. It was almost an hour past twilight before I moved.
EPILOGUE
ASHES TO ASHES
Two days later.
I’d spent most of those two days sleeping. I’d made a messy, thirst-quenching kill the night of my escape from Szabó and the black room. I had no idea if Szabó had survived the blast, same as I had no idea how I had. For the time being, I didn’t give a shit. Like I said, I went back to my apartment, took a very long shower, and passed out naked on the bed. Surely, I’d earned a long winter’s nap.
Two days later, my phone woke me up. Mean Mr. B. Of course it was B. Now that Shaker Lashly was dead and gone, no one else had the number. Well, except for that geek Cutter. Anyhow . . .
“Time to rise and shine, sunshine. Meet me at the club.” See, B’s always called Babe’s “the club,” even though it ain’t nothing but a bar. It was dark outside. The clock by the bed told me it was a quarter past ten.
“We have some catching up to do,” he said.
I told him to go fuck himself. Then I told him to give me thirty minutes or so.
I wore my duster. Ever since that February, I’ve worn that duster. In the instant it had taken me to pull the safety pin of that M67, it had become my rabbit’s foot.
I didn’t bother with makeup or the contacts. Just a pair of wraparound shades. For one night, let the looky-loos gawk their beating hearts out.
I found B in the back, where I always found B. He sipped on a Cape Cod, probably his fourth or fifth of the evening, and told me to have a seat. I didn’t.
I said, “I figure you’ve got the lowdown by now. The highlights, at least.”
“I am not one to be kept in the dark, kitten.”
“Which is ironic,” I said. “Can think of no place better suited for you.”
He grinned and tapped his right index finger against his right temple.
“You’ve not lost your sense of humor,” he said. “Well, such as it is. Good, that.”
“Yeah, I’m a barrel of laughs.”
I was starving. The place smelled like an all-you-can-eat buffet. My stomach rumbled eagerly.
“Also, you’ll be pleased to know Drusneth’s decided to let bygones be bygones, so you needn’t worry your pretty little head over that.”
“It never even crossed my mind,” I said, and then I turned my back to him and stared towards the door and snowy Wickenden Street beyond.
“Anyway, love,” he said. “We can talk of your misadventures another time. Happens your return, your timing, it’s most fortuitious. Have an especially delicate job out in Tiverton I wouldn’t trust to anyone else.”
“That so?” I asked him, and glanced over my shoulder, then back to the door. It opened, and a guy came in. The door jingled shut behind him.
“That is very, very so. Before he died, that wanker Rizzo up and tangled with these other wankers who found at a bleedin’ yard sale—get this, kitten—a copy of the Dhol Chants and—”
“Not my problem,” I said.
You could have heard a pin drop. I mean, even if you weren’t a vamp.
“And how is that, Quinn?”
“I ain’t your bitch anymore, that’s how. Find someone else. You’re a resourceful sort. Shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Not a bright move,” he said. “Not a bright move at all. You’ve made a lot of people very unhappy.”
“B—”
“Bergman, sweetness. Tonight it’s Bergman.”
I began again. “Bergman, I’m starting to think I don’t need your protection half as much as you’d like me to believe I do. That I’ll do just fine on my own. But if that ain’t so, it ain’t so.”
I heard him light a Nat Sherman.
“It isn’t any better anywhere else,” he sighed. “What you are, what that means, it isn’t a predicament you can run from. It’s the sort that follows you.”
“I know,” I replied.
He sighed again, louder than the first time.
“And where do you think you’ll go?” he asked calmly, without the slightest hint of exasperation or irritation or even disappointment in his voice.
“I haven’t thought that far ahead. Maybe Brooklyn. Maybe Boston. Fuck, Miami sounds kind of nice.”
A song came on the radio, loud through the bar’s stereo speakers; Patti Smith singing about Johnny and horses. A song for my funeral.
“Well, if you’ve made up your mind.”
I told him I had.
“Then walk in the light, precious,” he said, and I imagine he raised his glass to me. “Until we meet again.”
“Yeah, until that day,” I said, and I left Babe’s for the last time ever.
I stood awhile on the sidewalk, staring up past the streetlights at the waning moon, the moon staring back down at me. Some eyes pry, no matter how much you try to hide your monster’s face. Some eyes, they know the truth of truths, and they watch you every goddamn place you go, and you just have to live with knowing how they always will.
AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY
Kathleen Rory Tierney, despite her very Irish name, has never once left her home state of Mississippi. She is a five-time recipient of the Howling Poughkeepsie Prize for Fictionalized Biographies of Dubious Reliability, and her haiku has been collected in three volumes—Severed Shrews and Other Perambulations, The Lives and Times of a Russion Entomologist, and I Wrote This While You Were Writing Reviews for Amazon.com. She currently resides in a shotgun shack in Bird in the Hand, Pennsylvania, where she whiles away the time polishing antique sex toys. Red Delicious is her second novel, written shortly after her untimely demise during a stampede of guinea fowl.
BOOKS BY CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN
Novels
Silk
Threshold
Low Red Moon
Murder of Angels
Daughter of Hounds
The Red Tree
The Drowning Girl: A Memoir
Writing as Kathleen Tierney
Blood Oranges
Red Delicious
Red Delicious Page 22
