Red Delicious by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Author:Caitlin R. Kiernan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

FRIENDS OF

MR. CAIRO

So, there you have it. The supposedly fictional account of a supposedly fictional artifact from another universe that, according to Mean Mr. B, wasn’t at all fictional. An artifact that had somehow entered this universe and now four power-hungry bitches were scrambling to get their paws on it before one of the others did. It was a lot to take in, and mostly I thought it was bullshit. But I’d read the story, and then I’d passed out for twelve hours. I was finally awakened by the Hello goddamn Kitty iPhone on my bedside table chirping at me like a rabid canary. I sat up, glared at it, lit a cigarette, and considered tossing the thing out the window. I knew it was B, calling from one of his merry-go-round of blocked numbers. Pretty much no one else ever calls me. Finally, I answered it. If I hadn’t, he’d just kept calling back. Unless I turned off the phone, and then he’d only have sent one of his boys around.

“Yeah, what do you want?”

“Well, precious, good morning to you, too. You read the tale?” he asked.

“I did. It’s a load of malarkey. The Maidstone sisters, Drusneth, that Harpootlian, they’re all on a wild goose chase, and you know it. And I know you know it.”

“You can be very, very narrow-minded.”

“I have a headache,” I said. “I think whatever I ate last night didn’t agree with me. So, call back later. I need a whole fucking bottle of aspirin before I have to talk to you.”

There was a moment of silence. I took a drag on my Camel and stared at a water stain on the ceiling. Through the phone, I could hear another voice, faint but audible. At least to my supersensitive vamp ears. It wasn’t one of B’s fuck bunnies. Sounded like an older man, maybe in his sixties.

“Who the hell’s that?” I asked B.

“Another interested party,” he replied.

“Jesus on a pogo stick. How many people are mixed up in this foolishness?”

Another pause. More muttering in the background.

“I take it you don’t believe in the unicorn.”

“Or Santa Claus. Or the Tooth Fairy. Or Old Man Jehovah looking down on us sinners through his pearly goddamn gates.”

The water stain was getting as boring to look at as B was tiresome.

“Dude, even if I were to buy this whole ‘magazine from another world’ angle—and I don’t—it’s fiction. Or did you miss that part?”

Pause. Mutter. Mutter. Mutter. I caught “. . . move very quickly or . . .”

“Will you please tell whoever that is to shut the fuck up. He’s annoying me.”

“Your view of existence is sadly impoverished,” said Mean Mr. B. I didn’t bother asking him his name that day. I didn’t give two shits.

“Poor me,” I said, wondering if I even had any aspirin, wondering what the hell had been in the bloodstream of that girl I’d eaten the night before.

“The story is a fictionalized account,” he went on, “of events that actually transpired, over there, in their alternate 1935.

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