Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Fuck, last I heard, the hounds were still struggling with Tinkertoys.”

  He coughed and cleared his throat, then spat in the brown grass.

  “Quinn, the ghouls you know, they’re the surface dwellers, the outcasts, as it were. Degenerates.”

  Now, the fact of the matter is I’d never yet seen a ghoul out and about beneath the sky, night or day, cloudy or clear, stars, moon, or sun, not even once, and I told him that.

  B smiled, flashing uneven, tobacco-stained teeth. “Well, then, let’s just say, love, that your concept of subterranean is impoverished and insufficient to the task at hand, id est comprehending the true depth of the world and, more precisely, the complex strata of the cosmos, both waking and sleeping, conscious and unconscious, as it pertains to the history and social mores of the venerable race of the Ghul.”

  I rubbed at my eyes again, wanting to go back to the bench and sit down. The day stubbornly remained excessively everything. I tasted new fillings, and a catbird in a nearby holly bush screamed like the sky was falling down.

  “You’ve hardly even glimpsed beneath the flinty rind of the world,” said B. And then he reached into his jacket and took out a few yellowed typewritten pages and handed them to me. They were rolled up tight and tied together with green velvet ribbon.

  “Read this,” he said. “When you two are out of the city and on the road, read this. It might help, if only a sconce.”

  “What the hell is it?”

  “A missive produced anonymia, incognito, so forth and what have you. People write things down and set them free, and that, pumpkin, is all I know. But it’s a damn interesting read.”

  “And it explains this unbirthing business?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “But you were coming to that, right?”

  “Was I?”

  If patience is a virtue, which I doubt, patience isn’t a virtue of mine. And it was clear that, even now, B was fucking with me for no other reason than it pleased him to do so. I considered a hastily conceived Plan B: Snap the motherfucker’s neck and leave town. Leave the bundle on the park bench for some unlucky passerby to find. Forget Selwyn; forget the twins and the threat of total all-out ghoulpocalypse; get the fuck out of Dodge and don’t look back.

  I’d never been to Mexico.

  Or London.

  Both seemed like a better idea than Boston.

  But then B said, “It’s fairly self-explanatory. Unbirthing. Erasure. He . . . or she . . . who wields the Madonna, they hold the power to take something from this world, from our dimension, to subtract from reality. Well, if you Adam and Eve the tales. Let’s say . . .” And here he paused, leaning nearer, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

  “. . . that your neighbor’s Chihuahua barks all night, every goddamn night. And this neighbor, he’s a real twat, all right, and the tosser won’t do shite to keep his wee ugly mutt quiet. So, you take up that hunk of stone, and by the power invested therein by beings not to be named, click the heels of your ruby slippers, and, voilà, it’s bye-bye, poochie wanker. Abracadabra, presto-chango, alakazam, nothing up your sleeve, and Bob’s your uncle. No trace remains. And I mean no trace remains, kitten. You wouldn’t even remember there’d been an annoying yappy Chihuahua that you had to get rid of, because, thanks to ye olde Unser Mutter von der Nacht, poof, there never was.”

  He laughed and stared at the plaster stump where his hand had been. And you know those little cartoon lightbulbs? Right then, one blinked on over my head.

  “Your name,” I said. “You’ve seen the Madonna before.”

  And he smiled that dingy smile again.

  “Well, it’s not as simple as that. Not quite, anyway, and it’s a dreadfully long story,” he said. “But maybe I’ll have time to tell it someday, should we live to see the far side of this commotion.”

  “So, what are Isaac and Isobel Snow planning to unbirth?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, and I think that it hardly matters. Whatever or whomever they’ve decided will give them what they want, which is this globe remade as their own personal charnel house.”

  “I think I need to lie down,” I said.

  And . . . I’m really dragging this out, aren’t I? Yeah, so . . . cut to the chase, already. I didn’t leave the Madonna lying on that bench in Central Park. Ten or fifteen minutes later, B and I met Charlee at the corner of Central Park West and West 77th. He was driving a shiny cherry-red Porsche 911, and he told me to get in. I got in. I was too tired and too confused to argue. I tucked the bundle snugly beneath my seat. B whispered something to Charlee and gave him a kiss, and then we pulled away and left the raggedy old man standing in the shadow of the American Museum of Natural History. I honestly thought that was the last I’d ever see of him.

  “Fasten your seat belt,” said Charlee with two e’s, and I did.

  “You know,” I said. “I don’t need a chauffeur. I could have done this on my own.”

  “Don’t be a braggart,” he said, and so I shut up as Charlee weaved his way through the traffic with as much disregard for red lights, stop signs, pedestrians, and other drivers as any cabbie ever born. In no time at all we were on FDR Drive, headed north at twenty or so miles above the speed limit. I had a feeling Charlee didn’t have to worry much about cops and tickets. I took out the pages B had given me back in the park, and I started reading. Some of it I’d already heard before, from Selwyn. Some of it completely contradicted what I’d seen and been told. The rest, well, it sure as shit didn’t make me any more eager to find myself face-to-face with Isaac and Isobel Snow. It was titled simply “A Prophecy,” and the last page was signed KPK:

  In the perpetual twilight of the Lower Dream Lands, the twins stand at the precipice, with the desolate plateau and peaks of Thok stretching behind them. Far below the precipice, lost in shadows, stretches the bone-littered vales of Pnath. They have imagined, these two from Above, that if they shut their eyes and listen very carefully, they can hear the rattle and rumble of gigantic bholes plowing through those jackstraw heaps. No one has ever set eyes on those creatures and lived to tell the tale. But, from time to time, the noise of their busy habits rises up the high cliffs of slate to the ears of any who are listening.

  The twins, though partway human, are neither guests nor tourists in the abyss. They belong here as much as any ghoul. They may travel awake down the seven hundred steps to the Gates of Deeper Sleep. They may pass freely; none dare bar their way.

  His name is Isaac, and her name is Isobel. They were born, not by chance, in the final minutes of an All Hallows’ Eve twenty-two years ago. One look at either and anyone at all would appreciate the aptness of their surname: Snow. Their skin is milk, and their corn-silk hair is white as white can be. But their eyes are the deep crimson of rubies, eyes that see as well in this gloom almost as any eyes may see. Their birth was not an easy passage, and it took the life of their mother, Hera. She saw them briefly, and then death came and delivered her from the blood-spattered crypt where the two were dragged out of the amniotic peace of Womb into the clamorous purgatory of the World. Had Hera Snow survived, herself only one-third a true Daughter of Eve, she’d have loved them and been proud, for the twins grew to be all that would have been expected of them by the three families and their Ghul father.

  Hera Salem Snow, a Boston Brahmin Yankee born to the fortune and power her family bargained for centuries before. Deals with the ghouls and with dark gods, obligating each of the three families—Snow, Cabot, and Endicott—to offer once in every generation a daughter for the Ghul to do with as they see fit. And as they see fit is almost always the birthing of half-breed children. Hera was herself the child of such a pairing, and was also such an offering, when the moon decided it was her time to bleed. She was neither fair of skin nor hair, but she shared the twins’ red eyes, and she shared their hungers. However, she could only ever have aspired to th
e ferocity of their terrible appetites and desires, for the son and daughter have excelled in the expectations of their father.

  Long before they were finally shown the way down through secret tunnels beneath Mount Auburn, they’d stalked and killed. They’d taught themselves the arts and sciences of torture, how to prolong the suffering of their victims as long as possible before the mercy of a killing stroke. It began—with kittens, puppies, songbirds, a hutch of rabbits—before their fifth birthday. As teenagers, they moved along to adult dogs and cats, a horse from the Snow stables, before, finally, they graduated to the cook. When they were done with her, they, appropriately, butchered the corpse and stewed the finest bits. They shared that meal, and then, for the first time, fucked beneath a full moon, upon an altar they’d fashioned to honor Shub-Niggurath, the All Mother and consort of the Not-to-Be-Named. That night they first tasted one another’s blood, and that night they became truly intertwined. They were wedded beneath and by the darkness between the stars, the void that watched on as they consecrated unholy, unspoken vows.

  Now.

  Here they stand, hand in hand, above the black gulf of Pnath. They have brought with them, in a burlap sack, the dry skeleton of their mother; they drop the bones, one by one, over the cliff, saving her skull for last. Isaac kisses its forehead. Isobel does the same. And then she releases Hera to her final resting place among the bholes. The twins drew lots to see which of them would be afforded that honor and responsibility. Isaac did a poor job of hiding his bitterness at losing the roll of a single soapstone die. Isobel has always found his sour moods especially endearing and particularly exciting.

  Their sacred duty done, the two walk together along the narrow, cobbled road leading back to the great necropolis of Zin, a city once held by the race of gugs until two years ago when the twins led an army of ghouls to shatter the ramparts and breach the walls and rain hellfire. For the twins have become what was never suspected any half-modab beings ever could become. Together, by bold and secret sorceries, they unseated the King of Bones, the Queen of Rags—Qqi d’Tashiva and Qqi Ashz’sara, respectively—and took for themselves the thrones of Thok. They put to death any who dared oppose them or question their right to rule, all traitors and rabble-rousers. These public executions were accomplished by such cruel and unsightly means that very few were necessary to quiet the dissidents. And they made the kingdom anew. No longer did the ghouls cower in mold and offal, gnawing gristle and marrow from withered, pilfered corpses. Isaac and Isobel raised them up, and made a proper army. The gugs were enslaved, and the night gaunts, as well. Within the Lower Dream Lands every foul thing that slithers, flies, hops, or goes about on two legs fell under their domain.

  The forever twilight became a new twilight.

  Rarely now do the twins bother climbing the seven hundred steps back to the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the cavern of flame beyond leading up and up and up to those catacombs beneath Mount Auburn. Never except when returning cannot be avoided. Those times come, as Isobel and Isaac are still the rightful matriarch and patriarch of the Snow clan. Too, there are other occasions when their duties force their return, as was the case with the exhumation of their mother. As was the case when the location of the Basalt Madonna—Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb—was discovered in a cave in the Sultanate of Oman, a hole in the Selma Plateau long known locally as Khoshilat Maqandeli and to the Arabs as Majlis al Jinn. Since the “death” of an artist named Richard Upton Pickman, the idol had been lost, as Pickman neglected to bring it with him when he made his own descent into the Underworld of the Lower Dream Lands. It disappeared in 1926, taken from the painter’s effects by some unknown woman or man or something that was neither. How it came to be hidden below the sun-blasted canyons near the southeastern coasts of the Arabian Peninsula no one knows. But the answer to that mystery is hardly important. All that matters is that it is no longer lost. The twins know well enough not to question the winds of Fortune, but only accept her boons when all too rarely they are handed down.

  The cobblestones twist and turn, coming at last to the towering gardens of fungi and more unspeakable vegetation. They’ve spent many wonderful private hours here alone in one another’s company. Beyond the gardens rise the fantastic archway framing the entrance to Zin, fashioned of obsidian, chrome tourmaline, and green fluorite. Isaac and Isobel cross the bridge above the moat, and she pauses a moment to observe a ring of bubbles rising from the inky waters. The trumpets of the Guards of the Wall announce the arrival of King and Queen, and the mighty doors to the city swing open on copper hinges. Isobel points into the moat, and her brother is quick to look for himself. It wouldn’t be the first time the moat has whispered a portent. This time, though, the disturbance seems to be no more than gases of decay escaping from the bottom. He looks a little disappointed, and she whispers promises of consolation. Then they pass into the royal city, and the doors draw shut again.

  “What if the preparations are not complete?” Isaac asks his sister. They’ve left the gatehouse fortifications behind and come to the first gloomy avenues. Per their standing orders, none have come to meet them, and at the sound of their approach, every ghoul falls to his or her knees, head bowed.

  “Then there will be a feast in the dungeon,” she says and smiles. Her smile, like his, is an unpleasant thing: uneven yellow teeth that she had no need to file to cannibal points because she and Isaac were both born with those teeth. “But don’t worry. The preparations will be complete.”

  For a reply, he only nods. Isobel is correct more often than she is wrong.

  When they reach the palace, there are more trumpets, ordering all within earshot to drop at once to their knees.

  The twins stroll hand in hand through the lightless corridors, acknowledging none of the supplicants.

  “Are we hungry, brother?”

  Isaac doesn’t answer her straightaway, so she asks again.

  “Well, are we?”

  He laughs and kisses her right cheek. “When are we ever not?”

  “There is time before the hour,” she tells him.

  “There is,” he agrees.

  So she calls for a meal to be prepared, and servants get to their splayed feet and rush off to the larder and busy themselves at the dining table in the Great Hall.

  So far as is recorded, the Basalt Madonna first appeared sometime in the fifth century Anno Domini Nostri Iesu Christi. Well, not the lord of any of the inhabitants of the city of Zin or, for that matter, in all the Lower Dream Lands. Nor even the Upper Dream Lands. In Constantinople, a monk happened across one of the Ghul who, in those days, slunk through the alleys and abandoned buildings of so many cities. The few ghouls still inhabiting the World Above were bolder than they are today, and they didn’t confine themselves to graveyards and to sewers. So, the pious monk encountered what he mistook for a wretched leprous man gnawing on something in a gutter (he wisely did not look too closely at what it was the ghoul gnawed), and he led the wretch back to his abbot. The abbot, being sharper of wit than the monk, was quick to realize that the man from the gutter wasn’t any sort of man at all, and thus did the “Hounds of Cain”—as they were christened—come to the attention of citizens of Christendom. As assimilation is inherent to that system, the abbot (his name and that of the monk are lost to history, and just as well) sent his monastic agents out to evangelize to and convert these misbegotten creatures, regardless of their foul habits and appearance and dubious origins.

  The effort was met with somewhat less success than the abbot would have wished.

  For, of course, ghouls have their own gods. When humanity had yet to move beyond their australopithecine progenitors, already did the ghouls worship their pantheon of Fifty, the Qqi. Ages before their fateful war with the Djinn, they had come to know the Hands of the Five, the Ten Hands, the fifty fingers. They weren’t about to cast aside their veneration of Great Amylostereum or Mother Paecilomyces, Camponotus the Tireless Maw or eyeles
s, all-seeing Claviceps, in exchange for one god who’d not even seen fit to send his martyr down to the Lower Dream Lands. Still, there’s always a gullible element in any assemblage, and a tiny but strident number, while not abandoning the Qqi, did engage in a notable act of syncretism. They wove their own rough patchwork of holy entities from the teachings of the monks. They brought into being the Maghor Rostrum (patron of the starving and toothless), Mortifien the Crypt Mason, Mistress Praxedes the Many-Limbed (midwife to the transformed who once were only women and men), bat-winged Pteropidion, and the maimed bride Saint Lilit (invoked for the endurance of exile and pain). These names and many others besides were set down in 1702 for the prying eyes of brave and foolish seekers after mystery by François-Honoré de Balfour in his infamous Cultes des Goules, a volume almost immediately consigned to the Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

  It is not known precisely how François-Honoré de Balfour learned the names, though his association with a handful of Jesuits would be sagely blamed.

  And those ghouls who so cleverly fashioned these new “gods” also fashioned for themselves a new idol, their own Pietà, a Beáta Maria Virgo Perdolens to fit their needs, and among men it became known as the Basalt Madonna, id est Basaltes Maria Virgo.

  When Isaac and Isobel Snow have finished their raw meal of the tongue, kidneys, ovaries, and heart of librarian, a woman lately of Providence, Rhode Island, they lick clean each other’s faces and hands before proceeding to the chamber where the priests have erected—to their exacting specifications—an altar of stacked skulls and blocks of volcanic rock mined from the quarries of Thok. The altar rests on a wide dais, and before the dais the priests have lain a bed of mammoth furs and tanned skins peeled from off half a hundred embalmed corpses. The smoky candles that illuminate the room have been made from the fat of both humans and ghouls.

  “Are we ready?” asks Isobel. Before Isaac answers her, he examines the brass contraption near the altar. A single shaft of pale moonlight is shining down through a hole in the high domed roof of the chamber, and it falls across the contraption. It looks a bit like a sextant, a bit like a sundial, yet also suggests an elaborate clock.