Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “It’s not real,” I said, and the girl shrugged.

  “Real enough,” she said. “What does who want with us, Quinn? Do you mean the twins?”

  “Who the fuck else would I mean?” I asked her. “Don’t all you dreams ever bother to talk to each other?”

  The girl frowned, and the black wolf with the white eyes lay down at her feet. She scratched behind its ears for a moment or three, then sat down beside it, looping one arm about the animal’s neck. The wolf was a brute, at least twice her size—larger, I thought, than it had been the first time I’d dreamed of the pair. She buried her face in its fur and began to sing, very softly, for the wolf. And the song she sang was the song that Mercy Brown, the Bride of Quiet, had sung to me the night I’d died.

  Oh, where are you going, my pretty fair maid? Oh, where are you going, my honey?

  She answered me right cheerfully, I’ve an errand for my mummy.

  “Stop it,” I hissed. She did stop. Singing, that is. She raised her head, narrowed her blue eyes, and glared at me, angry, confused.

  “What did I do now?” she asked petulantly, defensive.

  “You know goddamn well. You know perfectly goddamn well.” I shifted my weight, and a handful of construction-paper leaves rained down from the pretend tree, red, orange, brown, yellow.

  “That song,” I added.

  “It’s just a song. It’s just a song I heard somewhere, a long, long time ago.” She went back to scratching the wolf behind its ears.

  “The night she killed—”

  “—us,” said the blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl at the edge of the dream field. She kissed the wolf on the top of its head and it gratefully licked her hands. “I do guess that sort of ruins it,” she said. “A shame. It’s such a pretty song.”

  “Fuck you. I have enough ghosts without haunting myself.” And I stood up, dusting off the seat of my jeans and scattering startled grasshoppers.

  “Quinn,” said the girl, looking up at me. The wolf, she was looking up at me, as well. Her eyes seemed damp, like she was about to cry. I didn’t want to see her anymore, and I stared out across the field again. For the first time, I did see something on the other side. There was a wall of smoke, and there were flames, and the sounds of battle drifted in the cold breeze blowing through the stalks of tall grass.

  “You saw,” said the girl. “You saw us in a cage, an awful sort of cage. You saw that the twins had locked us up inside a cage.”

  “I did,” I said, unable to take my eyes off the advancing inferno. Something was coming, and it might not be the worst thing I’d ever come up against. But, then again, it might. It might be the worst times ten. I heard the cries of men and women. I saw the sun glinting off swords and shields and the banners of war whipped about the heads of soldiers like flying serpents.

  “And I heard a voice,” said the girl, “in the midst of the four beasts, I heard a terrible, terrible voice saying to me ‘Come, child, and see.’ And behold, in the midst of the whirlwind I looked, and I saw a pale horse.”

  The fire beyond the field was spreading, driven and fed by the wind, and an enormous white stallion was charging towards me, a white horse bearing not one, but two riders, a man and a woman, brother and sister. Their armor was as white as snow.

  “And their names who sat on him were Death,” said the girl at my feet, “and Hell followed after.”

  The sound of the horse’s hooves was thunder.

  The sky had filled with smoke and crows.

  “We won’t die in a cage,” said the blonde girl.

  I looked down, and where the girl and the wolf had been, there was only the skeleton of something that was neither exactly a girl nor a wolf. The bones were charred, as was the earth all around them.

  I could feel the earth coming apart beneath me.

  And then . . .

  “Time to wake up, girlbaby,” said Charlee. “We’re almost there.”

  And I opened my eyes. The Porsche rolled along a darkened street, past darkened storefronts and restaurants and bars that were shut up tight for the night. I coughed and rubbed at my eyes. I could still smell smoke and scorched flesh. I reached for the pack of cigarettes and the lighter in the pocket of my peacoat. I asked Charlee what time it was and he tapped the clock on the dash.

  “We were being followed,” he said. “I had to take a serious detour after Hartford, and another at the state line. I wasn’t in the mood for escorts.”

  “So we’re late,” I said.

  “Don’t you fret your pretty head, sweets. You were invited, remember? More importantly, you’ve got the life of the party, the main attraction, right there beneath your ass. We’re not late.”

  “So, magician, how are you with dreams?” I asked him and lit a cigarette.

  “Better than most. But you don’t need me to tell you what you already know. Now, get your war face on.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  OPEN THE DOOR

  When we reached the cemetery at just past two in the morning, the gates were standing wide-open—Howdy! Come right in!—and there was no sign whatsoever of Mount Auburn security. Neither of us was surprised, and at least we wouldn’t have to scale any walls or chain-link fences. Charlee shifted the Porsche into park, letting the engine idle, and we sat in the shadow of the strange Egyptian Revival archways that greet the dead and the grieving and the merely morbidly inclined. Until recently, I had no idea that cemetery is taken from a Greek word that means “a sleeping place.” I certainly didn’t know it that cold November night. And that night, that particular cemetery didn’t feel the least bit like a sleeping place. In fact, it felt totally fucking awake and watchful, thank you very much. The air was, as they say, thick with expectation. Or anticipation. Whichever. Both. I rolled down my window and flicked the butt of my smoke out onto the asphalt, and it bounced away in a shower of sparks. Then I reached for the Browning—Pickman’s gun—still tucked into the waistband of my pants. The weight and solidity of it was, it should go without saying, reassuring.

  “Well,” said Charlee, gazing up at the gates, “we were invited.”

  I knew, as I’m sure he did, that anyone else passing by the cemetery—anyone who’d not received an invite to the evening’s festivities—would see the gates closed and locked, everything just exactly copacetic. All the little duckies in a row. The spell that made the difference for us was strictly kindergarten motherfuckery, so far as glamours come and go, but sometimes the most elementary tricks are all that’re needed. Keep it simple, stupid. Fuckin’ A.

  I started to open my door, but Charlee stopped me.

  “No,” he said. “We’ll drive in as far as we can. Just for shits and giggles, right? By the way, did you ever see any of Mr. Pickman’s artful handiwork?”

  “Nope,” I replied and lit another cigarette. “Wait. We’re calling that bastard mister now?”

  “There’s this one painting,” Charlee said, “it’s titled Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn. Bunch of ghouls squeezed into a mausoleum reading from a Boston guidebook by candlelight, laughing their silly heads off.”

  I wasn’t sure I got the joke, but I didn’t say so.

  “How long?” I asked him.

  “How long what, Quinn?”

  “How long since you died, pretty boy? That’s how long what.”

  He didn’t reply immediately. Charlee was busy looking up through the windshield at the night sky. When he did answer me, he sounded . . . different, you know? Far away.

  “I saw the Doors play the Whisky a Go Go. I was at Woodstock. So, well before your time, girlbaby. Well before your time.”

  “So, you ever done anything like this before?”

  Charlee shook his head and put the car into gear again. “Not lately,” he replied and let it stand at that.

  I exhaled and squinted through my own cigare
tte smoke.

  “Before the fireworks start,” I said, “I want to be clear on something. I’m not here for B. I don’t care how badly they’ve hurt him; that’s not why I’m here.”

  “I know that, Quinn. He knows that, too.”

  “Just so we’re clear, okay?”

  I popped the clip from the 9mm, checked it, and popped it back in.

  “I’m also not here because I believe Pickman and his comrades in arms—of whom I’ve actually not seen warty hide nor mangy fucking hair—are necessarily the lesser of two evils.”

  “You’re here for her,” he said. “Were it not for Selwyn—”

  “How about let’s not get started in on ‘were it not for Selwyn.’ I’m tired of that game.”

  “But she’s why you came.”

  “Looks like,” I told him, and then I held up the Browning Hi Power. “Please be a sweetheart and tell me this is not our only gun.”

  “As it happens . . .” he said and trailed off.

  “Oh, you are fucking shitting me.”

  “I don’t like guns. B doesn’t like guns, either. But I suspect you’re already aware of that.”

  The Porsche crept slowly past the visitors’ center and along a narrow, winding road leading us into the heart of the cemetery. We passed obelisks, a gaudy little chapel that would have been right at home in my storybook dreams, a goddamn sphinx, and all those headstones like warning signs we were too stupid to heed. But nothing moved.

  “You know where we’re going?” I asked.

  “I do,” he said. “It’s not much farther.”

  And it wasn’t. At the crest of what I took to be the highest point in Mount Auburn, we came to a granite tower. The thing, at least fifty or sixty feet tall, looked like someone had plunked one of the rooks from a giant’s chess set down onto that hilltop. Clearly, subtlety wasn’t something Isaac and Isobel were overly concerned with.

  “Here?” I asked, and he killed the engine.

  “Here,” he said. “The hill’s hollow. Well, if you know the way, the hill’s hollow.”

  “And you know the way?”

  “And I know the way. Are you ready?” he asked.

  I looked at him, and then I looked back at the tower.

  “So,” I said, “we are seriously just going to stroll into the Snows’ not-so-top-secret lair of unspeakable fucking evil, Madonna in hand. No backup, no escape plan, no contingency plans, no plans whatsoever. One gun. Don’t you remember what Boromir said about just walking into Mordor?”

  He turned and looked at me, and right then, I couldn’t imagine how I hadn’t realized, right off, that he was a vamp. Right then, there hardly seemed to be anything human about him.

  “Quinn, do you want to save her, or do you want to see her cut down in the crossfire?”

  I didn’t bother answering him. Instead, I tucked the pistol back into my jeans, then reached under the seat and retrieved the Madonna.

  “Who gets the honors?” I asked, holding out the bundle.

  “You, I’m afraid. That’s what they’re expecting. Let’s not disappoint our hosts.”

  I nodded, opened my door, and got out of the cherry-red Porsche. From the hill, the lights of Cambridge and the Boston skyline were spread out below us, and overhead there was only the waxing crescent moon and a handful of stars bright enough to shine through the urban light pollution. There was just one entrance to the tower, a gaping lancet-shaped archway at its base. A line of stairs led from where we’d parked straight up to that black hole.

  What are you waiting on, Quinn? Come and see!

  I looked across the roof of the car at Charlee. He’d pulled a small shoulder bag from the backseat. It was bubblegum pink, and the fabric was decorated with an assortment of Sanrio characters.

  “I do have something for you,” he said, reaching into the ridiculous pink bag.

  I laughed and rubbed at my eyes.

  “What the fuck could you possibly have in there, Charlee with two e’s? Maybe a handful of deadly, explosive chocolate-flavored Bad Badtz-Maru pocky? A sawed-off twelve-gauge over-and-under Hello Kitty charm bracelet?”

  He smiled, and his own set of piranha teeth glinted dully in the faint moonlight. He took out a corked bottle and tossed it to me. I held it up and saw there was water—or some clear liquid—and a few shriveled, discolored leaves inside.

  “I assume you know what it is?” he asked.

  Fuck me, but I did.

  “Aconitum,” I said. “Monkshood. Wolfsbane.”

  “When Selwyn accidentally poisoned you—”

  I lowered the bottle and stared at him.

  “How do you know she—”

  “—you changed, but you also remained lucid, for the first time ever. And please don’t start asking questions now, girlbaby, because we don’t have time for explanations. They are presently a luxury we cannot afford.”

  I looked at the bottle again.

  “I didn’t bring guns,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I came unarmed. Grim as all this might seem, I intend to live through tonight.”

  “So to speak.” I shook the bottle.

  “Exactly.”

  Back at the museum, under the Tyrannosaurus, when Charlee had barged into my skull and put the zap on my brainmeats, I’d seen my Beast hanging helpless inside a cage. So, you can probably understand why the last thing I wanted was to go getting fuzzy in the presence of Isaac and Isobel and all their gang of groovy ghoulies. Never mind the fucking dream.

  And Hell followed after.

  “It’s a last resort,” he said. “That’s all.”

  Or it was one last way that B could dream up to make me into a weapon, this time the Red Right Hand of his vengeance, set loose on the psychos who’d mutilated and crippled him. Ghouls can be scary monsters, sure. But next to a loup bitch with all her senses about her? Well, there are nasties, and then there are nasties. I came very close to smashing the bottle on the pavement. Instead, I stowed it in the pocket of the peacoat.

  “Well, fuck it,” I said. “Let do this thing.” And together we climbed the stairs, a brief ascent before the plunge.

  * * *

  One of the first lessons I learned after my rude awakening to the world of monsters and preternatural mayhem was that, more often than not, there are at least two of everything. Any given tree, or street, or interstate underpass, or, in this instance, the entrance into a granite tower at the center of a one-hundred-and-eighty-two-year-old Massachusetts cemetery. Most people, and I mean mortal, living, human people, they’ll only ever see one-half of the binary. To grasp the true multiplicity of objects, one needs these dark-adapted eyeballs. Anyway, yeah, there was the entrance to the Washington Tower (as it’s properly known) that Dick and Jane Mundane walk through in their visits to Mount Auburn, and then there’s the one that Charlee and I stepped through that night. I almost didn’t see the paper-cut-thin division between Door Number One and Door Number Two, though I certainly should have been expecting just that sort of sleight of hand.

  The entrance we took, instead of leading us up to the tower’s two observation decks, led us down. And down. And down a very narrow and very steep spiral staircase that had been carved out of the native stone of the hill. The steps were uneven, tilting this way and that, slick with groundwater and slime. In a Hammer horror or old Roger Corman picture, a passageway like this probably would have been lit with guttering torches, right? Well, the ghouls were content with the phosphorescent mushrooms that clung to the walls and low arched ceiling in thick, rubbery clumps, glowing a sickly pale blue. I’d seen those fungi in my vision, back at the museum. Me and Charlee, our eyes would have been just fine in complete darkness, and, truthfully, it would have been preferable to the damn, disgusting mushrooms. The air stank of mold and mud and wet rot. There were strange insects living among the mushrooms and spiders and s
lithering things I decided were some sort of underground salamander.

  Charlee had taken the lead, and he was counting off each step out loud—one, two, three, twelve, thirteen, forty-seven, eighty-three, and so fucking forth. It was irritating, but I didn’t tell him to shut up. For all I knew, he had good reason for keeping count, the sort known only to accomplished, disciplined practitioners of the true science of the Magi. I clutched the Madonna close to my chest and watched my step and tried to think of nothing but Selwyn. Keep your eyes on the prize, dead lady, and all that malarkey.

  I followed Charlee.

  And I followed.

  And followed.

  “Maybe we took a wrong turn back there somewhere,” I said, hoping for a laugh, anything to break the stillness. But he just kept on counting.

  One hundred and twelve.

  Two hundred and five.

  “It’s a trick,” I said, my voice echoing flatly in the stairwell. “Probably, it’s also a trap.”

  “It’s not a trick,” Charlee replied. “Trust me. Just chill, okay?” And then he went right back to counting. He didn’t bother denying it could be a trap.

  Trust me. Yeah, well, maybe B had neglected to mention to Charlee how me and Ms. Trust had never exactly been on the best of speaking terms. I looked back over my shoulder, and what I saw stopped me cold.

  “Don’t do that,” he said.

  “Don’t do what?” I whispered.

  “Don’t look back, Quinn.”

  “Too late . . .”

  The way we’d just come, there were no steps. There was no narrow passageway, no glowing mushrooms. No nothing. The stairwell was being erased as we moved deeper into the hill, and in its place there was only the pure velvet blackness of space. I mean interstellar fucking space, a forever void lit only by icy white constellations of stars hundreds of millions of light-years apart. It’s one thing to stare into the face of a demon capable of eradicating you with the twitch of a pinkie or a stray thought; it was another thing entirely, standing on that precipice, the entire cosmos yawning before me. I felt myself being pulled towards it, and I thought of the moon pulling on the tide, dragging the sea ashore. I heard a flute, and its music was insanity and chaos incarnate, the piper at the gates of lunacy.