Blood Oranges

by Kathleen Tierney

  I spotted the sign for my turnoff—Purgatory Road (the Bride, her flair for the cliché and melodramatic seems to know no bounds). And . . . I just kept going. Passed right on by, heading deeper into what Lovecraft might have employed his purple prose to name “dread and shade-haunted Exeter.” The afternoon was still so bright. Roll down the window and get a face full of hot air, yeah? Only twenty-five minutes, half an hour ago, I’d been at India Point, talking to that loup bitch, offering her a piece of the action.

  But how long would it take the doggies to reach the address I’d given her? No goddamn idea, but I’ll tell you this for free—right about then I was wishing for the pretty fairy tales spun by the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, wishing for the company and backup of my own “Scooby gang.” Give me a lesbian witch named Willow, and the bumbling dork who sometimes fucks up and saves the day despite himself, and an ex-vengeance demon, and, most of all, please give me Giles—all his wisdom in the ways of the nasties and his grimoires and mannered-bad assery. But that’s the shit that can get you killed, wishing for the comfort of fantasies. Wishful thinking. Wind up some poor deluded boob like Bobby Ng. Wind up even worse off than I was that day in Exeter. You go into battle, you stay as sober as sober gets . . . and here, ha, ha, ha, case in point, we’ve come full circle, me stopping to shoot up by the Scituate Reservoir. Screw this. I’m talking in circles.

  I went to the last place I ever thought I’d go that day, the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church and the cemetery out behind it. See, here’s the place where that gang of superstitious yahoos I mentioned early on exhumed the body of a twenty-nine-year-old, way back in March of 1892. The Real Mercy Brown. The woman who was not a vamp.

  I parked in front of the church. The day was so hot and still. I stared at the sky and cursed it for not being decent enough to offer at least a few clouds. My shoes seemed so loud on the sandy road leading into the cemetery, crunch, crunch, crunch, my LOUD vamp senses pumping up the volume. There are times I want to pop my goddamn eardrums, I kid you not. Just take a pencil or a penknife and pop, no more LOUD. Unless—and here’s an ugly thought—maybe I’d still be able to hear afterwards.

  There was a listing, broken-down sign as I entered the graveyard, a stenciled warning—NO PARKING UNLESS VISITING CEMETERY PLOT. The kids like to park out here for necking and third-base action, and I understand the place is a teenage nightmare round about Halloween. Not far beyond the sign, on the left side of the road (my left), stood one of the few trees in the place, the tall cedar that shelters Mercy’s grave. The tombstone’s nothing fancy, a slab of marble with dates of birth and death, just the usual. Visitors had left a random assortment of tokens lined up along the top of the stone: pennies, small stones, a pewter pin from the Newport Folk Festival. In front of the stone there was no grass at all, just a dirt patch worn smooth by long years of the feet of those who came to see. The letters engraved in the marble had become ever more indistinct as a hundred and sixteen years of rain had eaten at the stone. Another hundred, it’ll likely only be an anonymous slab. But maybe I’ll still be around, and I’ll remember.

  The stone was securely bolted down with iron bands and concrete to ensure some damned frat boy, goth kid, or eBay huckster wouldn’t try to make off with it.

  Jesus, what am I on about?

  Am I stalling so I won’t have to write about the shitstorm that went down outside that old house on Purgatory Road? Yeah, probably. Ask me, I’ve always been a coward, no matter how it might look from the outside.

  Maybe here’s the point, what I’m trying to get at: even the infamous are washed away, given time. The truly infamous and the falsely infamous. So, maybe one day the Bride would be only a legend, and then a whisper, and then . . . well, then nothing at all. That was the curse in my heart. I’d come to kill her, sure. But I’d also come to curse her with utter obliteration from the world. That’s the worst fate you can visit upon anything “immortal,” seeing how they get it in their head they’ll be feared for always and forever. Take that away from them, and presto, check fucking mate, dude.

  But, I sat down in the shade by Mercy’s grave and watched the afternoon slide towards twilight. Towards the gloaming. That sounds more appropriate, yeah? I dug a quarter from my pocket and left it atop the stone. No one ain’t a nasty deserves to have her body desecrated like she was; no one who ain’t deserves that infamy.

  I sat there with her, with all the others who’d escaped life the way it was meant to be escaped. Even to my ears, it was halfway quiet. Only the occasional car rushing past on Ten Rod Road, and insects in the trees, and the birds. Finally, pulled out my cell phone and I checked the time. Almost six p.m. That was a bit of a shock. I’d let much more time slide by than I’d intended. Maybe the loups had already descended on the Bride, and I’d missed the show. I half hoped that, but I was also half scared I’d missed my chance to send her to Hell myself. Anyway, I reminded myself, apparently you needed that dagger Evangelista had given me to end the bitch’s misbegotten tenure upon the world. And I had that. All the loups had were jaws, and claws, and anger.

  I stood up, dusted off my jeans, said good-bye to Mercy. The real Mercy, the actual tragedy. Maybe I’d come back and visit again one day, I told her. And then I retraced my way to the car.

  * * *

  So, I took a left out of the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church parking lot, and the turnoff onto Purgatory Road was so close (on my right) I almost missed it. It’s a narrow road, lined with tall hardwoods and white pines that were doing a damn fine job of shutting out whatever remained of that August day. Only splashes of sun dappled the road. I was entering a cool green tunnel of trees, a narrow, winding tunnel, and maybe it would have been just a mile or so of good ol’ New England scenery, fit for postcards and Robert Frost poems. Only, I knew what waited for me a little farther down that road, coiled like a serpent in some fetid hidey-hole. And knowing that sort of ruined the scene.

  It was upon me sooner than I’d expected, that house, that house at the address Evangelista Penderghast had filed away in my head. It had clearly been something fine, before neglect and decay and the Bride had gotten her mitts on it. Before a hard-core case of entropy had taken hold. Must have dated back to the eighteenth century, that farmhouse, which had been painted a sort of cinnamon red the last time anyone had bothered painting it (and I’m guessing that had been decades before). The wide front porch listed drunkenly to one side. But that evening, if ever a house had sagged in upon itself, in every way it’s possible for a house to sag in upon itself, that house had turned the trick. It looked fucking exhausted. Just please, let me lie down and fucking die, it seemed to sigh from every broken window and missing shingle. It had the cancers of dry rot, mold, termites, and a vampire’s filth in its ancient bones, and I imagined that house must dream every night of the kindly, purifying kiss of flames.

  But there was something in between me and the house, and it was the first thing that commanded my attention. Before I got a good look at the house itself, I mean. Check this shit out: sort of slewed to one side in front of the house, taking up the wide patch of gravel and weeds that separated the house from Purgatory Road, was a battered antique school bus. A periwinkle antique school bus (I remember that color from my box of Crayola crayons, not quite pink and not quite violet, but periwinkle). The bus had been gaily decorated with flowers and a rainbow, rendered with all the artistic skill of a kindergartner, and, in among the periwinkle and daisies and that rainbow, in big black blocky letters—WOONSOCKET SACRED HEART PENTECOSTAL CHURCH. The bus was filled with men and women, the scruffy vengeance I’d brought down upon the Bride with my phone call to Hannah Grumet. Most of them could still pass for human, but a few were already going wolfish. They spilled out of that cheerful periwinkle bus from both doors, and, honest injun? I thought maybe I should just keep right on driving, and not look back.

  But that’s not what I did.

  Because, by definition, werewolves are fuckups.

  And because I was an
gry, and because Penderghast had embedded something in this or that part of my brain that demanded I see this farce through to its bitter end.

  I pulled up next to the church bus, cut the engine, checked to be sure the dagger was still in the waistband of my jeans, and got out of the Honda. I stared at the bus, and managed not to laugh; I think the sight of it was just too goddamn weird.

  Okay, so far, so good, right? Right. Everything according to Hoyle, near as I could tell. Right on schedule, and here we all were, sticking to the plan.

  And then . . .

  “Hey!” a redheaded woman in a Narragansett Beer T-shirt yelled at me. She was standing near the front fender of the bus. I pointed at myself, and she jabbed a very long black nail at me and yelled again. “Yeah, I mean you, you fucking vamp piece of garbage! You’re exactly who the hell I mean!”

  Every loup eye turned towards her, and then turned towards me. I didn’t have to ask if this was Grumet’s widow. Anyway, I was too busy asking myself all sorts of other questions that seemed a whole lot more pressing.

  “She’s the one,” the redheaded woman yelled. No, excuse me. By this time, she was howling, and the words were only just intelligible, because she was in the throes of the change. “She’s the one helped kill my Jack!”

  I looked at the crowd, most gone halfway to full-on fuzzy in the time it had taken for her to start shouting at me, and every one of them was advancing on me. I knew there was no way I had time to make it back to the car. I thought I might, you know, respond to this predicament by turning wolf myself, but nope. Wasn’t happening. All bristling hair, lolling tongues, snapping teeth, and . . . well, you get the picture—all of that was barreling down on me. I had maybe, I don’t know, ten seconds before I was as good as undead hamburger.

  Now, I know what you’re probably expecting right about now. An expertly executed dance of violence, as our plucky heroine, armed only with her fists, well-aimed kicks, and a magical dagger takes down werewolf after werewolf, carving a bloody trail of fur and gristle, bone and sinew, to finally stand triumphant atop a great mound of dead loups. And maybe, if this were a film by Tarantino, or Robert Rodriquez, or maybe, let’s say, someone like Zack Snyder, that’s what would have happened. You could sit back with your overpriced popcorn and soda and enjoy the interplay of fight choreography, CGI entrails, and my body double. A regular summer blockbuster. But this ain’t no action movie. And that’s not what happened.

  This is what happened (and if it smacks of the convenience of a deus ex machina plot device, and you’re disappointed, you can blow me; it’s what fucking happened).

  The pendant Evangelista had given me, that brass locket on its brass chain, rose suddenly from my chest like it was being tugged at by the grandmother of all magnets. It yanked violently once or twice, seeming to want to tear itself free of the chain. And, yeah, I know brass isn’t magnetic, but, magic, right? It was yanked so hard that I almost tumbled forward towards the oncoming wall of loups. But I didn’t. I heard a sound that reminded me of thunder, though it was not at all the sound of thunder.

  Then the lycanthropic congregation of the Woonsocket Sacred Heart Pentecostal Church, every mother’s son and daughter of them, even the kids (there were a few children, pups, yeah), went up in flames. A storm of flames that engulfed them in an instant, flames licking skyward, and I was able to turn away just as the blast wave hit me. I felt myself lifted a few inches off the ground and blown across Purgatory Road, where I tumbled over one of the crumbling fieldstone walls. I lay there, listening to the screams and howls, to the roar of the fire, and, before too much longer, the dull, but almost deafening, fwump as the bus’ gas tanks exploded. There was a second smaller fwump, and I guessed (correctly, as it turned out) that was my Honda’s tank. The air reeked LOUDLY of burning flesh and hair, and chunks of flaming loup and bus rained down all around me. A damned miracle nothing hit me. My back was awash with searing pain, all that keloid scar tissue Penderghast had blessed me with not the least bit numbed to the heat that had lifted me like a rag doll and tossed me into the woods. I shut my eyes against the pain and the stink and the fading cries of dying monsters, and I felt consciousness slipping away. For a merciful while—not long, but you take what you get, yeah?—everything was dark and cool.

  * * *

  I didn’t come to until after sundown. But it wasn’t quite dark. There was still a yellow-orange flicker reflected off the trunks of the birches and maples rising up around me. I was nauseous, and everything from my shoulders on down to my ankles felt thoroughly fucking seared. A lot of my clothing had been burned away, and I stripped off the scraps that remained, and lay naked in the detritus of the forest floor. I wished for the cool soil to please, please, please swallow me up, and let me be a proper dead girl. Let me spend a hundred years with no other company but earthworms, grubs, black beetles, and nematodes. Let these trees drink me up, and wrap me in a burial shroud of roots. But I knew better. It wasn’t finished here, and neither my will nor Evangelista’s nor B’s was gonna let me stop until I was done. That bit with the puppies going up like Roman candles, that had only been a distraction. I lay in that mat of dead leaves, in the lee of a wall built before the American Revolution, until I could lie there no longer. I stood up slowly, hurting too much to move quickly.

  The scene before me would have put a big ol’ grin on the face of that pyro squatting below Battle Hill. The flames had spread to the porch and roof of the sagging house.

  At least, I thought, something here gets its wish. I climbed over the wall and stood at the edge of Purgatory Road. In places, the explosions had left the tar shiny, gummy, gone almost back to goo. I pulled off my shoes and socks (nothing looks more idiotic than a vampire crossing the street in only her socks and shoes; trust me on this), and wondered dimly where the hell the Exeter Fire Department was. People must have seen the Big Mystical Mushroom Cloud for miles around. More of Penderghast’s voodoo? After all, couldn’t have a bunch of hayseed do-gooders getting in the way of this avenging angel, now could you? I walked towards the husks of the Honda and the bus, taking care to avoid the sticky spots in the road. That’s really all that remained of the two vehicles, charred and twisted shells. Here and there, small flames still licked from them. What was left of the melted tires was still smoldering. As for Hannah Grumet’s swarm of righteous indignant loups—avenging angels in their own right, I suppose—it was no more than ash and a few bits of bone. What sort of heat is needed to reduce a corpse to ash? Fuck if I knew. I know now that crematoriums burn bodies at temps ranging from 1,598° to 1,796° Fahrenheit to get the task done. So, maybe that gives me some idea just how hot the spontaneous conflagration from the locket must have been. I walked naked through the sooty ruin of my fallen enemies, and a breeze made minute tornadoes of the ashes as I went. Whirlwinds to dance circles around me.

  Here’s a joke, but I won’t be offended if you don’t laugh. A naked vampire walks into a burning house . . .

  Never mind.

  That’s what I did, and Evangelista Penderghast’s sorcery kept the fire from touching me. It parted like the Red Sea is said to have parted for Charlton Heston. There was cool air around me, and I shivered as it caressed my burns. As the sagging house was consumed, not so much as an ember was allowed to fall upon my skin.

  I was pretty sure where I’d find the Bride.

  I followed what was left of a hallway to what was left of a basement door. The knob should have barbecued my palm, but it could have been ice in my hand. Even through all the smoke, I recognized the mustiness rising up from the basement. It was the place where I’d awakened on that mattress, needing a fix so badly I thought my guts might come crawling out and skip the light fantastic. The place where the china doll who called herself Mercy Brown sat on a stool and taunted me, promised me I’d be her weapon and her pet. The place where she’d taken my blood, and I’d become the creature the trolls called Siobhan Twice-Damned, Double-Cursed, undead and roiling with the beast. I descended the wooden sta
irs. The fire hadn’t made it this far yet, but it wouldn’t be very much longer. The house was dying all around me, and I was happy for it.

  Let’s not draw this out.

  There she sat on her stool, dressed exactly as she’d been the last time I saw her: so small, the protruding teeth and wisps of gossamer hair, the cyanotic lips, the ancient babe dressed in a white lace pinafore, and barefoot as her executioner to be. Her long toes curled about the rails of the stool, nimble as any bat’s. She was slowly clapping her hands, and smiling.

  “I’m most wonderfully impressed,” she said. “You truly are my child, blood of my blood.”

  I stared at her for a few seconds, and then I looked down at the glinting dagger of volcanic glass gripped in my hands. I don’t even remember how it got there, how it wasn’t lost in the explosion or when I pulled off my shredded clothes.

  “Then you knew it would go this way?” I asked her.

  “Of course I didn’t,” she replied in the high, sweet voice of the child she’d still been when she died. “I’m not clairvoyant, Siobhan. I had no idea. I only knew it would be a grand game.”

  “A grand game,” I muttered.

  “The grandest,” she gleamed. Overhead, fire was quickly chewing through the floors.

  The Bride sat up straight on her stool.

  “And the prize is yours,” she said.

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that,” and so maybe part of her wanted the void as much as the house she’d taken as her own and soured against any cleansing.

  “There were five deaths so you could play your game.” I said. “Two of my friends died. I killed them.” I recall no emotion in my voice, none whatsoever.

  “This is the way of our existence,” she said. “Life and death, births and murders. Now, you’re wasting time,” and she glanced up at the glowing timbers overhead. “I think you have me in checkmate, daughter.”

  “Daughter,” I whispered, and without another word I plunged the black dagger into her heart. The Bride of Quiet shattered precisely the way porcelain shatters. She shattered, and shards broke into still smaller shards when they hit the cement floor around the stool.