Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel (19 page)

On the dais, Isaac was letting the Basalt Madonna devour Isobel, while the
loup
in me watched on, while I tried to remember how to shut my eyes.

“Okay, Quinn,” said Charlee. “Hang on. Time to come home.”

I cursed him, and the scene in the cavern began disintegrating around me, and I let go.

NOT A ROAD MOVIE

I
didn’t come to in the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs, surrounded by petrified bones, tourists, and noisy children. In fact, I didn’t come to anywhere in the museum. I opened my eyes, after all that falling and the whirling black stars and the void, fucking Carcosa, and I was sitting on a bench in the park. I couldn’t even remember crossing the street. Not that it mattered. I opened my eyes, and B was sitting on my right and Pretty Boy Charlee was sitting on my left. Charlee was holding on to my arm, just above the elbow. And the Basalt Madonna, still wrapped in Selwyn’s Morrissey T-shirt, it was right there in his lap.

I gasped, sucking in air like I’d never tasted the stuff before. Like I was a breather. It smelled good, clean. Well, as clean as November in New York City gets. It was, in fact, the best goddamn air I’d ever tasted. But there was a chill, too, in the afternoon breeze rustling the leaves, and I pulled the stolen peacoat tighter.

“You’re okay,” said Charlee, and he gave my arm an encouraging little squeeze. “You’re just fine. The disorientation, that’ll pass really soon.”

But it wasn’t the Tilt-A-Whirl wooziness—apparently a side effect of Charlee’s magical mystery tour—that I wanted gone. It was the twins, their grotto, the altar and the garret, Mama Snow, the frenzied ghouls, the Madonna, all
that
shit, Isobel Snow looking me in the eyes—
that
was what I needed to pass really fucking soon. But I knew better.

Some stains don’t come out, no matter how hard you scrub.

“Quinn, if you need to throw up—” Charlee started, and I cut him off.

“No, I’m fine,” I lied. “I’m not going to throw up,” I added, though I felt like that was a distinct possibility.

“So you see,” said B, speaking so softly that his voice was almost drowned out by the buses and taxis on Central Park West.

“Yeah, asshole. I see.”

He was sipping a bottle of peach Snapple through a pink bendy straw, and he glanced at me. Out in the light of day, Jesus, he looked even worse than he had in the museum. Haggard. Broken. Empty. The swaggering pansy thug who’d bullied and haunted me so long reduced now to a dry shell and not much fucking else. Just a few hours
before, nothing would have pleased me more than seeing this man so completely undone. But a lot can happen to a dead girl in a few hours, and all I felt, looking at him, all I felt was revulsion and pity. And that made me angry. It made me
very
angry, feeling sorry for B after all the shit he’d visited upon my person. But there you go. Sympathy for goddamn devils, indeed.

“You’re going to Boston?” he asked, then took another swallow of Snapple.

“What the fuck for?” I asked him right back.

B cleared his throat and set the Snapple bottle on the ground at his feet.

“She wasn’t there, B. Yeah, I saw a lot of shit, but I didn’t see Selwyn. I need a cigarette.”

Charlee took a yellow pack of American Spirits from an inside pocket of his faux fur, shook one out, lit it, and passed it to me; he left lipstick stains on the filter. The smoke tasted even better than the crisp fall air.

“Doesn’t mean a thing,” said B. “In your heart of hearts, whatever’s left of it, you know she’s with them.”

The fucker had a point.

In the tunnel, I’d put the question to Isobel.

“She believes we have the traitor,” she’d said. And Isaac, he’d chimed in, “So, that’s how we’ll get your attention, Twice-Damned.”

I took another drag on the cigarette and held the smoke for a couple of minutes before I exhaled. Such are the questionable benefits of not needing oxygen.

“Charlee, what you showed me, it was past, future, everything all scrambled up together. I get that part, but the way it turned out, that last bit in . . .”

“Nothing’s set in stone,” he said. “What you saw, think of it like you would a weather forecast.”

I managed a coarse laugh.

“Wow. As accurate as all that?”

“As
mutable
as all that,” he replied.

“Yeah, well . . . I didn’t see anything that convinced me going to Boston was any sort of good idea.” Then I turned to B. “I do understand,” I told him. “The whole vendetta thing you’ve got going with the Snows. They fucked you up hard, and you want them dead, and they have it coming a hundred times over. But that’s
your
fight, old man, not mine. When Pickman contacts me, then I’ll—”

“You’ll what, precisely?” asked B.

He fixed me with his bleary gray eyes, then asked Charlee to light a cigarette for him, too. The boy took out a silver case filled with rainbow-colored Nat Shermans.

“All they want is the Madonna,” I said. “All I want is Selwyn back. Pickman said—”

“Oh, kitten.” He sighed and shook his head. “You disappoint me.” He accepted a baby-blue Nat Sherman from Charlee. He took a puff and shut his eyes.

“And how the hell’s that, exactly?”

He exhaled and scratched his whiskered chin.

He sighed again. “You’ve never missed a chance to remind me I’m a liar, have you? And it’s true; a liar is what I am.”

“Among other things,” I muttered.

“Exactly,” he said and nodded his head, smoke leaking from his nostrils. “I’m a liar, a killer, a cheat, a bugger of anything what stands still long enough. I’m a
goddamn heel and a miscreant; that’s me. A right and proper arse. A villain. So, when I tell you how I stand in awe of Pickman’s perfidious ways, you ought to know I’m telling you the truth.”

Ever heard of the liar’s paradox? No? Well, it goes something like that.

“Every single word I utter is a lie,” I said, “but right now? Right now, I’m telling you the truth. Is that the gist of it, Mr. Barrett?” I glanced at Charlee. He was watching a squirrel perched on the lowest branch of a sugar maple. The squirrel twitched its tail—once, twice, three times. Its black eyes stared warily back at Charlee, like he was just the sort of monster who eats squirrels.

“After what you’ve seen, you still don’t comprehend,” Charlee said, speaking very softly, as if he was trying not to frighten the squirrel. “You’re still willing to hand over the Madonna to the twins.”

“Not that Pickman’s ever going to let
that
happen,” said B. “But we’ve been over all this, and I’ve never been one for repeating myself.”

The smoke from the smoldering tip of my cigarette coiled into an almost perfect question mark.

And I said, and, in that moment, I meant what I said, “I’m not your avenging angel, B, and I’m not a hero. I’m not Pickman’s ace in the hole. I’m not motherfucking Frodo Baggins willing to walk into the Land of Mordor to stop Sauron from covering all the world in shadow. I’m not Dorothy Gale, and I’m not here to get rid of anyone’s wicked witches.

“You say there’s a war coming? Well, ain’t there always? I’ll find Selwyn, and we’ll go to ground, and every
one of these assholes can murder each other for all I care. They can burn this whole rotten world to the ground.”

I flicked ash into the grass and took a long drag.

“Well, well,” said B. “If I only still had me other hand, I’d applaud.”

The squirrel in the maple tree chittered angrily. Charlee told it to shut the hell up, and it did. For a few minutes, none of us said anything else at all, and there was nothing but the noise of traffic, the breeze in the branches, and the chirping birds.

Now, as you’ll see shortly, I
did
go to Boston. But here’s the weird thing: I cannot for the life of me remember exactly why, what argument swayed me. Or if there was some card B had yet to play that put me once more in his pocket, behind his damned eight ball. Way back at the beginning of Chapter Four, I mentioned how, writing all this down, lots of time I’m fully aware I’m just making shit up.

That might have annoyed a few of you.

Well, if someone’s telling you a story, and they claim to be a
reliable
narrator, as trustworthy as the length and girth of the night, they’re lying to you, sure as shit stinks. And it’s just as bad, you ask me, if they simply neglect to address the question and let their readers buy into some unspoken myth of total recall. So, yeah. Most of the time, I remember the broad strokes, whether I want to or not. But that’s about it. If this sort of confession rubs you the wrong way, then you’re not paying attention.

Every word I say is a lie. Fuckin’ A.

But I digress, and the time for digressions in this
story has probably come and gone. As I was saying, whatever swayed me to throw in with B that afternoon, that’s a blank. Sometimes I suspect it was an ugly little smudge of magic on the part of B or his pomegranate-haired molly, because all I needed was a slight push out the door, right?

So, right
here
we have a perfect blank.

And
then
here we have Charlee talking to someone on his iPhone, and Mean Mister B’s standing hunched a few feet away. The Madonna was in my lap, and I’d smoked my cigarette almost down to the filter. B had his back to me, and he was peering through the trees towards the museum. Right then, the man looked a hundred years old if he looked a day, and he was gnarled as the roots of the cranky squirrel’s red maple. Whatever they’d done to him, it went deeper than amputating a hand.

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.

He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.

“It’s all set,” Charlee said, putting away his phone.

B nodded, and I dropped my butt to the ground and crushed it out under the pointy toe of my most recent meal’s cowboy boot. I left the bundle lying on the bench with Charlee and walked over to where B was standing.

“So, Mr. Barrett,” I said, “do you know any more than I do about this much coveted unholy of unholies?” And I nodded towards the bench.

“La Virgen negra de la Muerte?”
he asked.

“I don’t mean the pretty boy in the go-go boots.”

“He’s a right wonder, is Charlee. I’ve never wanted to
tell my boys the secrets. You know what I mean, Quinn. Those secrets keep us tossing and turning at night. But now
he
tells
me
secrets.”

“About the Madonna?”

“Among other things,” said B, and he managed a tired smile.

“What is it? Just fucking tell me, if you know. And if you don’t, say so.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the bundle, then back at me. He nodded once or twice.

“What
is
she? She’s the whore that tilts the world, kitten. Pretty much a hydrogen bomb you don’t even have to aim. Fission and splitting and a chain reaction that starts small until Her Magma Highness tears a hole in the world.”

“What the fuck does that even
mean
?” I asked.

He squinted, and the briefest flash of the old B drifted across his face. He reached out and pressed the tip of his index finger hard against my forehead. It made me think of Selwyn, tapping her nose.

“She’s the Anti-Mater, Quinn. She unbirths.”

All at once then, the day seemed too bright, too loud. All the edges seemed drawn too sharply, and every sound was just a little bit louder and shriller than my ears could bear. In another life, I might have thought it was exhaustion, of head, body,
and
spirit. In this
after
life, fuck only knows. I rubbed at my eyes. How long had it been since I’d last seen Selwyn? Less than thirteen or fourteen hours? It felt like days had passed.

B’s finger was no longer pressed against my skin.

My mouth was dry, and I wished I had a few sips of a peach Snapple of my very own.

“And the
ghouls
made a thing like that?” I asked him, my voice sounding distant and pinched and skeptical.

I looked back at the bench, and Charlee was gone. The Madonna was still there, though. He hadn’t taken the bundle with him.

“Perhaps they were the architects and perhaps not,” replied B, half thoughtfully, half wearily. “I’ve heard tales told, and I’ve read some others, but I’m right cream crackered on what’s de facto actual.”

“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.