Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,80
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 slithering 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.