Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,44

it Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off that hideous plaque.

“Just how many languages do you speak?” I asked her.

“Only eight,” she said.

“Right. Only eight. Go on. I’m listening.”

Mostly, I was. I admit that chunk of gray rock was taking up a good deal of my attention. Especially the ammonite. There seemed to be something wrong about it, like the golden whorl of the shell went on and on and on, spiraling inward forever, never quite reaching the spot that should have been its center. Neat trick, I thought.

“I’ve heard of Balfour,” I told her.

“Yeah. Not too many copies of Cult of Ghouls left. Right off, it made the Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum and most of the copies were destroyed. Supposedly, Richard Upton Pickman, he had one, but it vanished with him.”

I’d heard of Pickman, too.

“I thought that book was a nasty urban legend,” I said. “Like the mad Arab and the Necronomicon.”

She was silent a moment.

I stared at the ammonite. It was beginning to make me woozy, the fucked-up optical illusion of it. At least, I hoped it was an illusion.

“Quinn, the Necronomicon isn’t a myth,” she finally said. “Lovecraft didn’t invent it. Dad saw a partial copy when he was in Iran, back in the sixties.”

“You’re shitting me.”

She shook her head. I definitely remember her shaking her head, though I don’t remember looking away from the ammonite, which makes me wonder about . . .

Never mind. Let’s not go there.

“It was under lock and key at the Jam’karaˉn mosque just outside Qom.”

“It was under lock and key, but your dad saw it?”

“An imam owed him a favor.”

The woozy feeling was turning into genuine nausea, and I bit my lip hard enough to draw blood. Which ain’t really very hard with teeth like mine. The pain was enough to break whatever hold the bas-relief was exerting over me. Thank holy fuck. You know how at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark the bad guys’ heads all explode? I’m pretty sure that was next, after nausea. Also, the Ark of the Covenant thing seems a good comparison, since Selwyn’s father was starting to sound an awful lot like Indiana Jones.

“Wrap it up again,” I told her, turning back to the dark tunnel walls outside the subway car. She did as I told her, and I said, “So this is what Isaac Snow’s after.”

It wasn’t a question, because I already knew the answer.

“Yeah. This and the skull and the necklace. A couple of years ago, he thought he’d found the Basalt Madonna. A hack novelist woman named Aimee Downes made what was apparently a pretty convincing counterfeit, and she sold it to him. Didn’t fool him for long, though. Right after that, she sort of went missing.”

“Sort of?”

“I heard parts of her body turned up here and there,” Selwyn said. “An eye. A hand. A breast. But no one knows if he actually had her killed.”

Ghoul justice. Happy fun time.

“Anyhow, when he hired me to find the stuff, I didn’t have any idea what it was, the Madonna, or, more to the point, why he wanted it.”

“And what has all this got to do with the Byzantine Empire?”

“It’s a long story,” Selwyn said. “It’s hard to make a short version out of it.”

“Try anyway.”

The train lurched and swayed, and she gripped the pole a little tighter. I could see her reflected in the glass. I was so regretting not having left her back in that apartment. In fact, I was regretting ever having met her. If I hadn’t, I’d still have been shacked up with my CEO, safe and snug and bored.

“Sometime during the fifth century,” Selwyn began, “though no one’s sure exactly when, I don’t think, a monk in Constantinople found a ghoul—only he didn’t know it was a ghoul. He thought it was a leper, you know. That sort of almost makes sense—”

“Not really,” I cut in. “Not if you’ve ever actually seen a ghoul, which—”

“—I have. I’m just telling you that’s how the story goes. The monk thought the wretch he found huddled in the shadows was a leper, and he led it back to the abbot, who saw that whatever it was, it definitely wasn’t human.

“Father, look what followed me home,” I said. “Can I keep it? Please? Pretty please?”

Selwyn didn’t laugh like I’d hoped she would.

No, I admit it wasn’t very funny.

She just tapped her nose and soldiered on.

“The abbot, he realized that the monk—and no one knows his name, or the abbot’s—had