Blood Oranges

by Kathleen Tierney

I wanted to turn and . . . but I’ve already mentioned what happens to the runners, haven’t I?

  A rusty iron cage slid towards me, sort of like a cable ferry above the molten sea. No, cable ferry isn’t right. I’m not a damn engineer. It was a cage, all right? A cage suspended from a chain by loops of cable, and there was a wheel that let it roll to and fro along the cable. You’ve seen a ski lift, right? It wasn’t like that, but that’s as near as I can come. The cage’s door swung open, and no one had to tell me I was meant to step inside. It wasn’t an invitation, it was a command. Already, I’d begun to feel a bubble of cooler air surrounding me—by the grace of Penderghast, who couldn’t have me combusting prematurely, after all. Not until my usefulness was over and done with. I stepped into the cage, it clanged shut again, and then began to creak along the cable, a hundred feet above that sea of fire. I hadn’t even been asked to pay the fucking ferryman, and I wondered if the ride back would also be free. That is, assuming there would be a ride back. I was doing my best to hang on to those few, stingy shreds of halfhearted optimism I’d ever been able to call my own.

  The door opened, and what crouched on the sizzling dais before me put the pathetic, pale grotesquerie that was Mercy Brown all the way to shame and back again. In some ways, it was almost her polar opposite; the Bride, she was an Antarctic world that had never known the sun, and Evangelista, she was the fusion-reactor heart of the sun, the very act of hydrogen flashing to helium, that hellish proton–proton chain reaction (yeah, I read a book about stars once upon a fucking time, okay?). But, even so, there was no valid point of comparison. Oh, if the televangelists and “lake of fire and brimstone as an eternal punishment” crowd could have gotten a peek at her, I think they’d begin to consider the merits of giving the whole matter of damnation a second, third, and fourth thought.

  “How sweet,” she said. No, screw she. Let’s dispense with any pretense at gender and/or sex. You remember what I said at the start about a vamp’s nethers withering away after such and such amount of time? Yeah, well. Whatever had once been female about this monster, those attributes had long since packed their bags and fled the scene. Its flesh—if that was flesh—was ebony shot through with shimmering, spiderweb cracks. The crusty black scum that floats along on lava. Its eyes were bluish, ultraviolet holes punched into the fabric of space.

  Now there’s a sentence even Lovecraft would have been proud of. But I’m not gonna take it back. That’s what I saw, until I had the good sense to look away. That’s what I still see sometimes when I close my eyes. That’s what watched me from a glistening obsidian face.

  “She actually came, and I thought for sure she wouldn’t. I thought she didn’t have the nerve for this rendezvous.”

  “She wasn’t left with much choice,” I said. “And can we stop speaking of her in third person, please. She’s standing right here, and she has a name.”

  “That you do,” said Evangelista Penderghast. “I thought, Quinn, I might be doing you some kindly service, not speaking it aloud.”

  It wasn’t wrong on that score. No matter how bad the blazing sapphire eyes had been, my name dripping off that tongue, that was way worse.

  “He sent you, good boy that he is, and now you’ll want to know why? No, you already know the why. You’ll want to know how.”

  “I never meant to kill the bitch’s daughter.”

  “Which is neither here nor there, Quinn.” And, seriously, liquid steel pouring out of an electric-arc furnace, but something that pure rendered irredeemably filthy, that was its voice.

  “We can switch back to third person,” I whispered. “Really. She won’t mind at all.”

  It might have laughed then. If that wasn’t laughter, I don’t know what else you’d call the sound she made.

  “As she wishes. I wouldn’t have it any other way, not a scion of the Bride of Quiet.”

  “Don’t think I had anything to do with that, either. Or the shit with the werewolf.”

  “He told me,” it sighed, and I know, the moment that breath touched me, I’d have been gone in a puff of smoke if not for my magical, insulating bubble. “I know how her wretched, woebegone circumstances have come to pass. I don’t care, but don’t suppose that means I don’t know.”

  I thought about apologizing. Fortunately, it didn’t give me a chance.

  “The Bride is entirely insane. It’s proof enough this . . . this . . . repulsive half-caste amalgam was forged in the belief such was sufficient to end me.”

  “You’ll get no argument there. I mean, her being insane and all. At least a few fries shy of a Happy Meal.”

  I felt its eyes on me, and time passed before it spoke again. I don’t know how much time.

  “She thinks I care about her opinion, the scion of the Bride? She thinks maybe her idiot contemplations have some bearing on what’s to come?”

  “Sorry. She’ll keep her idiot contemplations to herself from here on. She has absolutely no problem at all with that.”

  “No, no. Oh, no. I’m not offended. Rather, she amuses me with these recitations of the obvious. She’ll not stand silent before me. I’ll not have that.”

  “Fine,” I whispered (actually, pretty much everything I said, there below Green-Wood Cemetery, was hardly spoken louder than a whisper).

  “Fine,” Evangelista echoed. “Yes, fine. She is a prize. I’ll grant her that. I’d almost keep her here with me, time and pressure to make a diamond, a fractured jewel among my jewels to look upon from time to time, only my hatred, it would never allow such a concession. Such an indulgence of my own meager desires when I have been so insulted by little more than a worm.”

  By this point, my mind was casting about for anything to keep myself sane as that voice seeped all around me. And I realized something about this fiend reminded me of the Red Queen, the Queen of Hearts, in Alice In Wonderland. Maybe it would have a change of heart, and shout “Off with her head!” and that would be that. It would have been a kindness. I was no longer afraid for my existence. More like, I was terrified of what my existence could become, if it should suddenly suit Evangelista’s scalding fancy. I stared at the basalt (at least I think it was basalt) between my shoes. There was that cacophony again, the one that might have been laughter.

  “‘That’s right,’ shouted the Queen. ‘Can you play croquet?’” quoted Evangelista Penderghast.

  So I started thinking about a Johnny Cash song instead. Maybe it didn’t know about Johnny Cash.

  “Fine then, here’s the how. She best listen close, because I’ll not say it but the once.”

  “Don’t worry. She’s paying attention,” I said.

  There were words, precise instructions, though they sunk at once into some subconscious cranny of my mind, and I’ve never been able to recall them. And in my right hand I held a black dagger, a dagger black enough to consume planets. Around my throat there was a brass locket on a brass chain. The dagger and the locket were both warm, but not uncomfortably so. My left hand went immediately to the little locket.

  “There,” it said. “There’s more, but I know she’ll improvise, being clever and resourceful. Now, we have concluded our dealings, and she’ll not ever have cause to come back to me again, if she is a most fortuitous beast. She’ll go now, the same way she came. She’ll go, and won’t dare look back.”

  I did as I was told. I knew the story of Eurydice and Orpheus. On the other side of the chasm, the cooling bubble popped, and I found myself racing up those spiraling stairs. I didn’t stop until I was outside the mausoleum and had once again passed between those silent stone lions. Then—fuck it, tell the truth, and ego be damned—I collapsed on the cool, dew-dappled grass and gasped against the pain that seared the back of my neck, my shoulders, my calves. When I reached the car, I’d discover that patches of my hair were scorched. Later, after I’d returned to Providence and my apartment, I’d find the complex network of keloid scars that snaked from the base of my skull to my heels. Like Boston Harry, she’d left me with a souvenir,
as good as her signature. My hair would grow back, but the scars, those I still have.

  Patience, constant reader. It’s almost over.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AND THE WORLD FALLS DOWN

  Remember way back in Chapter One when I noted how readers complain about the way characters do stupid things in horror films and protest that no one’s that stupid? Remember that? And how I said, from a monster’s point of view, how very surprised you’d be at the stupid shit people do that gets them killed? Right. Well, anyway, even us creatures of the night aren’t immune to that kind of imbecilic behavior, and you’d think we’d know better.

  Case in point (as dear ol’ Rod Serling used to say): When I got back to Providence, and realized that somewhere during all these jolly misadventures I’d lost my cell phone, I should have snagged a new one. There’s a RadioShack on North Main, or I could have grabbed one of those prepaid pieces of crap at a Walgreens. Easy as pie. But no. That’s not what I did. I did the stupid thing instead. I went to the troll bridge below I-195, the late, lamented Aloysius’ former digs. I went there, called for Otis, and asked him if he had Aloysius’ things. Because, as has been mentioned, by this time I was jake with the Unseelie.

  It was maybe an hour past dawn.

  He sauntered out from those special shadows, the boom box around his neck like a gigantic pendant. At least this time he wasn’t listening to the Beastie Boys. He was listening to the Ramones. Yeah, I get the punk-rock troll. He closed one eye, and squinted at me with the other.

  “You still walking around in one piece?” he inquired, sounding more than a tiny bit surprised.

  “Looks like,” I replied.

  “The wheels turn slow sometimes. Time below the hills ain’t like time above.”

  I could have told him he was wasting his time trying to scare me. I could have told him about what I’d just met lurking below that hill in a Brooklyn cemetery, but I didn’t.

  “I’m sure they’ll run me down as soon as they get around to it. In the meanwhile, do you have his stuff or not?” I asked again.

  Otis scratched at one albino armpit. “Let’s just say I do, twice-dead Quinn, twice-cursed daughter of Eve. Why would I tell you?”

  Good damn question. We return to the issue of stupidity in these sorts of tales.

  “I was his friend,” I said, ’cause, you know, I already knew he wasn’t buying that.

  “What got him killed.”

  “Hey, dude. A simple yes or no would be wicked useful at this juncture.”

  “Wicked,” he growled, a soft, soft growl, like faraway thunder. “Yes, you are. You are wicked, indeed.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I Don’t Care” blared from the boom box.

  Otis closed his left eye again, and the right rolled about in its socket like whatever muscles and nerves hold eyeballs in place had suddenly failed him.

  “Please,” I said. “I’ll be in your debt.”

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. Hell, you might just as well decide I’m making this up to create a more suspenseful scene, like where, in The Stand, Stephen King has Larry Underwood leave New York via the Lincoln Tunnel instead of, say, the George Washington Bridge, just because it would make a way scarier scene, having him down there in the dark. Oh, and having Larry forget to even take along a flashlight, and . . . never mind. Point is, rule of thumb, never tell any sort of fairy you’ll be in its fucking debt. Not ever. Same with demons. And angels, I imagine, if they actually exist (which I tend to doubt).

  “All I want is his phone. He had a cell phone. I know, because he was using it to harass Mr. B, right? That’s all I want, I swear.”

  “My debt?” Otis asked, and cocked a scabby eyebrow. “Mayhap, if you elaborate. Mayhap, then, a bargain could be struck. What about that, for instance?” And he pointed at the golden locket Evangelista Penderghast had given me.

  “Not a chance,” I told him.

  “Strikes me beggars can’t be choosers.”

  I closed my own eyes a moment. I was getting awfully tired of deals and bargains, promises and broken promises. Right then, I wished I had anything at all forged from cold steel. Hell, a chunk of raw hematite would have done just fine. I spoke without opening my eyes.

  “What do you want, Otis?”

  “I want that shiny bauble hanging ’bout your throat.”

  “Well, you’re not getting it, so try again.”

  “Stingy ape,” he said. “Stingy, ungrateful ape. But very well. Still, I should think about this, long and hard I should think about this, twice-cursed. Has to be dear to you. Has to be precious—like that shiny bauble.”

  I opened my eyes, and maybe I have a friend below, because only a few feet away, I spotted a rusty stainless-steel hubcap someone had lost and not noticed they’d lost, or just not bothered to retrieve. I reached for it, and Otis made a panicked expression, and I saw the special shadows sliding across the ground towards him.

  “You even think about making a break for it, I’ll nail you with this so hard you’ll think I was on the Olympic discus team. And we both know how that’ll go.”

  The shadows melted away, and the troll the color of those whitish pumpkins pouted and lowered his head. “I Don’t Care” segued into “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker.”

  “Don’t think I won’t use it,” I warned him.

  And then a burlap sack appeared at my feet. I reached down and opened it; there was porn inside, and half a quart of ginger brandy, several mouthfuls of human molars, an assortment of chess pieces, bottle caps, a dead, desiccated crow, and a cell phone.

  “This isn’t going to turn into a handful of gravel or a rotten mouse as soon as you leave?”

  “No,” he said sullenly.

  I had no reason on earth to believe him, but, still, I said, “Fine. Now get the hell out of my face. I’m tired of looking at you.” No, I didn’t have to be such an asshole. But I was tired, and the vamp hunger was taking hold, and I was pissed as pissed could be. But still, I felt like a jerk, pulling the iron trump card on him like that.

  “Hey, wait,” I shouted as the shadows began to wrap themselves about him. “You smoke?”

  “Time and again,” he mumbled.

  I reached into my jeans pocket and pulled out a crumpled half-full pack of Camel Wides and tossed them to him. He caught them in an enormous paw and stared at the cigarettes a moment.

  “No hard feelings, okay?”

  But then he was gone, and I was left alone below the underpass, the morning sun making my exhausted eyes ache. I dropped the hubcap back into the dust and stomped through the weeds to my Honda, Aloysius’ sad bag of goodies in my hand.

  * * *

  Of course, I didn’t for an instant believe that it was going to be so simple a matter as me picking up Aloysius’ phone and speed-dialing Mean Mr. B. But I could be a resourceful beast when the situation demanded that I be (nothing’s changed in the last two years, not in that respect). I knew the names of a few of his boys. Not their various aliases and drag-queen names. I had two or three of their actual names, and Nancy boys are susceptible to threats, couched just so. I’d not done this sooner because I hadn’t wanted things to come to that. It would only piss B off that much more, and, besides, none of this mess was their fault. They’re just a bunch of kids B drags into his various dramas, not so different from me (except, I’ve never had to take it up the ass so he can get his ya-ya’s off). But here I was, freshly returned from Evangelista’s inferno, this locket about my neck, this dagger in my hand, and my head full of stuff I could not consciously recall.

  I phoned the kid named West, B’s most recent acquisition and his current favorite. West almost hung up on me, before I began describing in detail the many means of castration I could devise using nothing more elaborate than a Taco Bell spork.

  “I don’t know where he is,” West said, the tone of his voice filled to overflowing with a curious mixture of nervousness and “Oh, I am so put upon.”

  “Then y
ou’d better find out,” I replied, “because I know how to find you.” (That part was sort of a lie. I didn’t know, not right off. But I’m fairly sure it wouldn’t have been too hard, here in the age of the internet.)

  “You’re not going to hurt me,” West said, attempting to come across all defiant and shit. “You harm one hair on my head, he’ll make you wish you were never born.”

  “Too late for that, Sunshine. Someone already beat him to the punch. Just make sure he calls me before lunch.”

  “Or?”

  “The spork,” I reminded him, and then he did hang up.

  I was sitting in my only kitchen chair, listening to the married couple upstairs fight. The guy, he was a drunk, and sometimes he showed up, any hour of the day or night, and they went at it like cats and dogs. I knew he hit her. I’d seen the bruises on her face to prove it. So, I was sitting there, listening, and beginning to feel the starvation, the hunger pangs, emptiness, the ache, that overwhelming ravenousness—call it what you will. I hadn’t had anything since Doyle, and I was thinking on that when I heard two dull smacks overhead. I might have missed it, if not for my fancy new vamp ears that made everything so LOUD. One was that drunken fuck hitting his wife. The other, I knew, was her colliding with a wall or a piece of furniture. Sappy as it might sound, I thought of dear old Mom and Dad. I thought about her, the stink of rye on his breath, him beating her with a bar of soap wrapped in a dish towel. I thought of me hiding until the ambulance came, then running away. Maybe it was just some fucked-up PTSD kicking in, but I dislike all those psychobabble acronyms. Let’s just say I was starving, and he was a convenient asshole that the world could do without. Yeah, that works for me.

  I took the stairs two at a time and had to bang on the door repeatedly before anyone came. It was her, trying to hide a bloody nose with that dish towel all spattered red.

  “You’ll want to step aside,” I said.

  “Did you call the cops?” she asked. “It’s nothing. I bumped into a doorframe, that’s all.”