Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,81

whirlwind I looked . . .

Then I felt Charlee’s hand on my shoulder, yanking me roughly back from the mouth of that abyss. He cursed and muttered something in a language I’d never heard. The star field shimmered and quickly melted away until there was only the stairwell again.

“That’s a trick,” he said. “And a trap. They want you rattled, Quinn. They want you scared shitless.”

I dropped to my knees and puked.

Yeah, not my proudest moment.

Charlee held my hair back from my face while I coughed up what little was in my belly, the dregs of that unlucky girl from City Hall Park. I spat and wiped my mouth on the back of my hand, and then I spat again. Dark globs of half-digested blood spattered the stone.

“We’re stronger than them,” Charlee said firmly, speaking with all the conviction I did not presently possess, and he kneeled beside me. “Whatever happens next, whatever you see down here, that’s what you have to keep telling yourself, girlbaby. We’re stronger than they are, and they know it. They’re just trying to freak you out.”

“Well, it’s working,” I told him.

“She’s down there,” he said. “Selwyn’s down there waiting for you. No one else will come for her. You know that.”

On the one hand, yeah, that helped get me up on my feet and moving again. On the other, it made me want to punch him in the balls. I totally grok the utility of that sort of manipulative shit, okay, and I’m as susceptible to it as the next nasty who only wants to be a real girl again. But, in a way, it was as cheap a shot as the Snows’ counterfeit Azathoth.

“It’s not much farther,” Charlee said.

“How the fuck can you know that?”

“Jesus, don’t you smell them?” he asked.

I sniffed the dank air, and he was right. Past the stench of mushrooms and wet earth there was the unmistakable reek of ghoul. Just think wet dog crossed with a Port-a-Potty that’s been baking in the summer sun and you’re halfway there.

Moving right along.

There were more steps . . .

. . . and then there weren’t.

In fact, there was pretty much nothing at all, just a wrenching, sinking sensation in the pit of the pit of my stomach, below my stomach, all the way down in the subbasement of my bowels. My legs gave out from under me again, and I shouted for Charlee, because suddenly I couldn’t see him anymore. The stairwell was folding back upon itself, and, for just an instant I was looking up towards the night outside. The dim blue light from the fungi seemed to bend, warp, twist itself inside fucking out and outside fucking in. The bugs creeping and crawling across the swollen caps and stems of those mushrooms imploded in silent puffs of spores, and the spores hung and drifted in the air, milky clouds coalescing into dazzling psilocybin spirals.

The dear Mr. Timothy Leary himself would have wept, I’m sure.

Me, I just wanted a fixed point, anything real and solid to hang on to.

For half an instant, I heard that awful fucking flute again, and I had just enough time to wonder exactly what sort of deals those two shitbirds had cut with their dark elder gods. “That’s a trick,” Charlee had told me, but now I wasn’t so sure. I’d seen their altars and their offerings, and maybe, I thought, Isaac and Isobel had been plenty naughty enough to get the attention of the Big Bads that even the Big Bads don’t like to talk about, the names we do not say aloud and try to avoid even thinking to ourselves. Maybe those primordial, alien not-gods that old HPL liked to go on about, maybe they had some vested interest in seeing the tables turned and the Ghul sent topside again, with all the bells and postapocalyptic whistles. Fuck, maybe those fifth-century Byzantine god botherers, so hell-bent on making Christians out of sows’ ears, had been in league with—

You think a lot of crazy-ass shit when you’re stuck mind-surfing non-Euclidian hallways.

“Open your eyes, puppy,” said Isobel Snow. I wasn’t even aware that I’d shut them.

I met her halfway and opened one eye. I was relieved to see the world had decided to go back to being solid. I was down on my hands and knees on dusty flagstones. The air smelled of smoke and burning meat. And ghouls. I reached for the pistol in the waistband of my jeans, and someone or something kicked