Blood Oranges

by Kathleen Tierney

  “And yet, she did notice, pronto and forthwith. On the ball, that old cunt, isn’t she? And she sent a message . . . to me, of course. As if Penderghast had not been in back of the proceedings, as if it were me, myself, and I had it out for her precious baby. Hardly fair, you ask me.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, and I glanced at the ashtray again. I imagined the satisfying collision of glass on glass, his unctuous visage dissolving in a burst of smoke and sparks. “So, this part you may or may not have worked out. Don’t be insulted if you have, and I’m being presumptuous. The Bride, she sends me a message: I’ve got to square things with her, and right quick unless I want to go the way of Alice Cregan . . . or worse. With her sort, ‘or worse’ is always an option, as you well know.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “As you wish, kitten. An eye for an eye. Seemed straightforward enough. I’d cost her a lover, so she takes one of my lot. I happily offered up any number of my mollies. But, alas, she’d have none of them. She dismissed them, one and all. But finally, a few weeks back, she made up her mind.” Here he stopped and pretended to frown. You’ve heard of crocodile tears? This was a crocodile frown.

  “I wish it were not so,” he said.

  “I wish I had your balls in a blender, but ain’t life a bitch.”

  “But it was so, and nothing I could say or do would assuage her decision. She knows how valuable you are to me, and, besides, you were the one who offed Cregan. That it was unintentionally you made no matter.

  “Here we come to the heart of it. I arranged for Grumet to show up at the reservoir. And getting you to go after him, that was a piece of cake. You’d downed Cregan. I mistakenly thought one loup would be a breeze. Oh, I knew Mercy planned to intercept, but I hadn’t counted on your being infected. Please, even in your present loathing and despair, kindly grant me that much credit. Of course, the rest is history. The Bride must have decided why simply take her prize in retribution when she could turn, instead, that prize against all involved . . .”

  “. . . in the killing,” I finished, and he winked at me again. It wasn’t as bad as the fake frown had been.

  “The bitch made of you her weapon, her forbidden pet, and she proceeded to set you on everyone who’d played a role in Cregan’s death, down to the last mother’s son. She put an invisible choke collar around your neck, and fastened a leash to the collar. Don’t know the exact spell, but we’re coming to that. You have to admire her elegance. Circumventing the usual loup triggers, the moon and anger and what have you, she controlled your changes. You get near a target—Ng, Boston Harry, Doyle—and she gives that leash a fierce tug, and voila. Revenge. Brilliant. I’m half ashamed I didn’t think of it first.”

  “Where’s this headed?” I asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious? She’s working her way along the food chain. Albeit somewhat haphazardly, but still.”

  “Which leads to you, doesn’t it?”

  He made a kind of disappointed face, like he’d expected better of me, and I took some small measure in his apparent disappointment, whether it was genuine or not.

  “I think you’d find me terribly greasy, worse than last night’s duckling. Maybe not as foul as Boston Harry, but . . . and pay close attention . . . I think there may be an alternative. A way to cheat the Bride, if you will. My apologies for having taken so long to devise it.”

  “Oh, like you give a shit.”

  “You wound me, truly.”

  “Will you please stop doing that, talking back. It’s freaking me out.”

  “As you wish, cupcake.”

  “What do I do?” I asked, and fuck what I’d just said about having a conversation with my television.

  “You go to Penderghast, and she’ll tell you the rest. She’s asked for the honor herself, and who am I to argue? She desires to meet the infamous Siobhan Quinn, enemy of her enemy, the girl who nailed the spawn of her nemesis. She won’t be so hard to find as you might think. She’ll almost come to you.”

  “No way,” I growled, whirling towards the face on the TV screen. “You’re crazy. No fucking way am I going anywhere near that . . .”

  “. . . terrible, terrible woman?” he finished for me. “I’m afraid we’ve been left no option. Now, I haven’t time to argue. Give Miss Penderghast my regards, and I hope you’ll thank me again for having found such a convenient solution to our dilemma. Ta.”

  And then he was gone. The DVD player switched itself off. I sat down, and lit a cigarette, and listened to the night outside my apartment. Belatedly, it occurred to me I hadn’t asked the bastard who’d sent the three goons after me, the same three who’d probably killed Aloysius. But, honestly, it hardly seemed to matter anymore.

  * * *

  Back at the start of this mess, I sat down to write a story, knowing parts of it would be true and other parts of it would surely be bullshit. Some would be actual recollection, and some would be me making up whatever was required to fill in the gaps in my memory. Frankly, I thought I’d get bored after a few pages and set it aside, a moment’s diversion forgotten (and likely for the best). Vamps have notoriously short attention spans, unless the subject at hand is them. Anyway, I didn’t set it aside, this thing of pages and pages and pages. Instead, the few pages have become . . . this. Whatever this is. It feels more and more like a confession. Or a row of milk bottles at a county fair, waiting to be knocked over with a good forkball or slider. What the hell was that? I’ve never even been to a county fair. And I don’t watch baseball. But vampires are also cultural sponges. Helps with the necessary camouflage. Anyway, yeah. A confession of my crimes and acts of criminal stupidity, and of my arrogance.

  Also, it’s become, I see, a peculiar sort of rogue’s gallery (thank you, Mr. Pinkerton), my setting forth of the dramatis personae of the fiasco of that August. All the wicked, ridiculous, men, women, and what have you merely players, and me recounting their various exits and their entrances: Mean Mr. B (yes, it’s a Beatles’ reference, you dullard), the Bride, Monsieur Grumet, unfortunate Bobby Ng, the more unfortunate Aloysius and Clemency Hate-evill, Alice Cregan, then Boston Harry, Jack Doyle, and, finally—here—the vampire named Evangelista Julia Penderghast.

  Which means we’re coming to the end of this story, and, perhaps, to the beginning of some other.

  Looking back, I see I’ve said plenty of shit about just what a hard-ass son of a bitch Mr. B is, and how you didn’t dare fuck around with the likes of Boston Harry. I’ve painted my grim portrait of Mercy Brown. I’ve hinted at the majestic horrors and fucked-up beauty of beings like Clemency and Alice. I’ve exaggerated and understated. Usually I’ve ladled it on thick as molasses, just how bad the bad can be. And so I can’t fault anyone who approaches the following with a grain of salt. “Oh, here Quinn goes again. Yet another nasty, even nastier than the last. Yeah . . . right.”

  But . . .

  Evangelista Penderghast. Words are never going to do her justice. At some point evil ceases to be a useful adjective (and concept), and sadistic or depraved fail, losing all descriptive value in the face of that which has transcended mere human concepts. And that’s what you are, however I may feel about the lot of you. You’re humans, and your minds would mercifully shatter before a creature like Penderghast. That summer two years back, I had no such blessing in store. Oh, sure. The damned can be blessed. Happens lots . . . but best if we leave that for some other time. It’s complicated.

  Even the nasties have their boogeymen, and Penderghast, she’s one of those. As vamps go, she’s old. If you believe all the hype, she’s beaten the odds, dodged the expiration date, and has been lurking around the world since sometime in the fifteenth century. Maybe that’s true, and maybe that’s not. There are questions you don’t ask, ’cause there isn’t any point in asking, since no one has an answer, and if they do, you’ll never learn it. But here’s some of what I know about her. Some of it I knew that summer, and some, gratefully, I’ve only learned since then.
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  There are rumors out the wazoo. Like, she’s Joan of Arc, who actually escaped her execution in the Vieux-Marché in Rouen. There are those who want to cast her as a bride of Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia—Stoker’s Dracula. Dozens of romantic, craptacular, nonsensical tales. But all the truth you need to know is that she’s been keeping court in a labyrinth of catacombs below Brooklyn since at least the early 1800s, when she left the Old World for the New. And that nothing on this continent has ever dared to stand against her. And that if she loves anything, she loves fire. The sight of it. The sound and smell of it. The spark that gives birth to inferno. The charred stench that follows. These are her glimpses of the Outer Ring of the Seventh Circle of Dante’s Hell, of the river Phlegethon, all fire and boiling blood. I imagine she longs for the day she’ll take her place between its banks, if you buy into that sort of thing.

  Evangelista is said to have been sighted at many of the world’s most terrible fires. The first and second great fires of Amsterdam (1421, 1452), the burning of Moscow in 1571, ringside seats for the Great Fire of London in September 1666. And a hundred and ten years later, at the burning of Manhattan in 1776 (this one, of course, contradicts reports that she didn’t reach America until the early nineteenth century). Then the Second Great Fire of New York City, in 1835. She likely watched Sherman’s troops raze Atlanta in 1864, and must have been disappointed that the general permitted citizens to evacuate beforehand. Sort of like great sex with no orgasm, right? Right. Oh, and what a fucking rush the first week of October 1871 must have been for this bitch. That triangle of fire that reached from Port Huron to Marinette, Wisconsin and south to Chicago. That unspeakable tornado of fire then erased the town of Peshtigo, and left more than two thousand dead, many simply incinerated, reduced to handfuls of ash. Perhaps the second worst natural disaster in American history. There’s a photograph of her among the ruins. There are also photos I’ve seen that place her at the firestorm following the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, and she was a regular at testing sites for the Manhattan Project, beginning with Trinity in 1945. Ad infinitum, ad fucking nauseam, ad conflagrationem. Surely you get the picture. If the child vamp Mercy Brown styled herself the Bride of Quiet, then Evangelista Penderghast might style herself the Bride of Holocaust.

  No one ever claimed she started any of the fires, but you really gotta wonder on that particular account.

  Fuck, but there’s a lot of fire in this story.

  Now, maybe you see why B’s instructions left me truly afraid for the first time since I’d been taken in the arms of my “blood mother” (near as I can tell, that asinine phrase was borrowed from a role-playing game, Vampire: The Masquerade, all the rage with goth nerds back when). He was sending me into the belly of the beast, off to meet the devil on earth, and, somehow, this undead pyromaniac was going to be our salvation—mine and his—from my lycanthropic curse that, again somehow, that alabaster she-goat had found a way to manipulate to her own ends in order to exact revenge for everyone responsible for Cregan’s death. Right on up to Penderghast, and, gotta admit, that took some balls. Great big brass ones. Like a fucking flea getting the notion it could lay waste to a Great Dane.

  Okay, that’s enough of the historical sidebar, setup for the next scene’s spectacle. We now return you to our story, already in progress. . . .

  * * *

  I’ve always hated road movies. Not sure why, just always have. Bonnie and Clyde, The Badlands, Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise, all those Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, and Bing Crosby comedies, My Own Private Idaho, Grapes of fucking Wrath. All of them. Oh, and I have a special hatred for that one example (of which I am aware) of the vampire road movie, Near Dark. I’m even capable of recognizing some of these are great flicks, but I hate them anyway, and no, I’ve no idea why. They bore me or something. No accounting for taste, right?

  I suppose that’s what you call prefacing remarks, or a prolegomenon—though you’d think my long-winded introduction to Dame Penderghast would have been enough. Only, this introduction, it’s my way of avoiding all the pages recounting my drive from Providence to Brooklyn. It was not an uneventful drive. I’m just not in the mood. I almost took the train or the bus, then realized what a boneheaded move that would have been. Don’t look now, old lady busy with your knitting or frat boy looking at porn on your fancy new iPad, but there’s a dead girl sitting next to you.

  After I watched the DVD, I touched up my makeup, and I said good-bye to Hector and the domino guys (who were out again, their Mexpop blaring louder than usual). I was fairly certain—however this went down—that I wasn’t coming back. I figured this was Penderghast reeling in the threat (that could not possibly have ever been a threat to a nasty of her caliber, but surely I’d become an inconvenience, and, besides, she couldn’t allow the Bride to continue to have the upper hand). Reeling in the embarrassment. I did think about running. I freely admit that. But it would have been futile, at best. You can’t run from this shit. You might elude your just or unjust comeuppance for a few days, a week, a month, but sooner or later, and most likely sooner, you’re tracked down. Trust me, running only makes it worse. I’ve had to track runners before, and the end of the road, for them and for me, is always much uglier than if they’d just faced up to their fate straightaway.

  I’ll say it was wicked hot that night. How appropriate is that? Fucking punch line, that was, right? Sure it was.

  On the way out of Providence, I stopped at a Shaw’s and bought five gallon jugs of water (“from the White Mountains of Vermont”).

  It was almost midnight by the time I exited I-278 onto the Prospect Expressway, and took . . . well, I parked the Honda on Fort Hamilton Avenue near the Green-Wood Cemetery. I poured three of the jugs of water over my head, and tossed the other two over the ornate wrought-iron fence before scaling it. It’s a wonder they didn’t burst, the water bottles. But I can’t say I was thinking clearly by that point. A girl doesn’t stroll into Hades every goddamn night. I moved through the labyrinth of headstones and obelisks, marble and granite and Bellville brownstone. Over grave-studded hill and dale, and the night was filled with the songs of night birds and the distant noise of cars. There were a couple of close calls with security as I neared Battle Hill. That’s the highest point in Brooklyn, by the way, rising some two hundred feet above sea level, part of an ancient glacial moraine. And maybe that’s why Penderghast chose it for her catacombs, to stay high and dry. But me, I suspect it was the fact that about three hundred victims of the 1876 Brooklyn Theater Fire are buried there, all those unrecognizable corpses consigned to a common grave. For her, that’s probably as irresistible as horseshit is to flies. She must have been standing across from the theater that long ago evening, watching the festivities.

  Anyway, yeah. Oodles of history attached to this vast boneyard, sprawling across the manicured landscape like a Disneyland for the dear departed, but I wasn’t there to sightsee. I moved as quickly as possible, lugging those twin gallons of water, towards the mausoleum—guarded by twin marble lions—that led down to Evangelista’s halls.

  There was a massive lock on the mausoleum door, meant for some huge antique key, but that’s only for historians and caretakers. For the mortals who come here. All I needed were a few choice words of Latin (they’d been written in B’s hand on a slip of paper tucked inside the DVD’s jewel case, thoughtful bastard), and the door didn’t so much open as melt away. I stepped inside, and in place of the musty smell I’d expected, I was greeted by the acrid reek of sulfur and gasoline and everything that could ever be made to burn. Which, when you pause to consider, is pretty much everything. The arched passageway with stairs that led down and down, spiraling steeply round and round, each round wider than the last. Imagine descending the inside of a seashell’s whorl, from top to bottom. The deeper I went, the greater the heat, until I might as well have been standing before a blast furnace. I stopped long enough to open the two remaining bottles of pure Vermont water and soak my hair and skin and clothes. And yeah, f
ire and vamps are a bad mix, even if the sun’s not an issue. But, like I said, at the right temperature, everything burns. Humans, vamps, steel, rock, whatever. But Penderghast, she’d spent centuries learning to cheat the laws of nature and supernature. She’d become a pyromancer of the first order. Fire was her lover, and she’d made damn sure it’d never bite back.

  I walked, and the water on my skin began to turn to steam. So much for precautions. The walls were increasingly illuminated by an orange-red glow, as though I was making my way into the belly of a volcano, towards the hearth of Pele. Maybe that’s purple prose, or maybe you just had to be there to appreciate how well that melodramatic simile manages to go about the cutting of the mustard.

  Eventually after I have no idea how long, the spiral ended in a wide platform or ledge, and suddenly the firelight was so bright the Wayfarers were useless and I had to cover my eyes. Again, my expository powers are not even half equal to the task at hand, at any attempt to even half describe the pit stretched out below and before me. Maybe Dante could have come close, but I kinda doubt it. Just think of a cavern that seems to run on forever in all directions, infinitely so far as I could tell, and think of an equally infinite churning molten sea beneath, and, hey, just maybe you’re a millionth of the way there. Just maybe. Thousands of chains dangled from the cavern’s roof, each ending in a meat hook, and almost every hook was buried in charcoal that had once been some manner of living thing. The rest of them held creatures that hadn’t yet died, beasts and men and women whose agonies Evangelista might protract for quite a bit longer. The air broiled.