Lost Souls

by Poppy Z. Brite

  Nothing had his doubts about how much Laine really liked girls. The walls of his room were plastered with posters of the Cure; he had seen them in concert three times, and once he had sneaked backstage to present Robert Smith, the singer, with a bouquet of bloodred roses into which he had tucked two hits of blotter acid. Julie wore her hair wildly teased in all directions, and she favored lots of black eyeliner and smudged red lipstick. Nothing suspected that Laine liked her mainly because of her superficial resemblance to Robert Smith.

  He looked around the room. Several of the kids were groping each other ineptly, kissing each other with sloppy wet mouths. Veronica Aston had pulled Lily Hartung’s skirt up and had two fingers inside the elastic of Lily’s panties. Nothing stared at this for several minutes, dully interested. Bisexuality was much in vogue among this crowd. It was one of the few ways they could feel daring. Nothing himself had made out with several of these kids, but though he had tasted their mouths and touched their most tender parts, none of them really interested him. The thought made him sad, though he wasn’t sure why.

  He lay back on the floor and stared up at a poster tacked on the ceiling above Laine’s bed: Robert Smith’s lips enlarged several thousand times, smeared with hot orange-red lipstick, shiny and sexual. Nothing wished he could fall into them, could slide down Robert Smith’s throat and curl up safe in his belly. The marijuana made him feel restless; he wanted to do a hundred things at once, but none of them here. He realized that among these kids he called his friends he felt much more alone than he had felt in his room last night.

  The Bauhaus tape ended, and no one put anything else on. The party began to break up. A hippie-looking girl Nothing didn’t know flashed a peace sign at Laine as she left. Julie got up to leave too; she was supposed to be grounded, she explained, because her mother had smelled beer on her breath when she came home from a party last weekend. “Bummer,” said Laine, not sounding as if he cared very much.

  Nothing stared at the floor, feeling depressed. He had seen Julie so strung out on acid that she thought the flesh was melting from her bones, and her parents couldn’t even deal with her drinking beer.

  As she was about to leave, Julie reached into her purse. “You can have this,” she told Nothing. “You said you liked it, and I never listen to it—sounds like shitkicker music to me.” She handed him a cheap home-produced cassette tape. The crayon writing on the liner said LOST SOULS?

  Nothing’s heart quickened. When he had heard this tape at Julie’s house, something in it had sung out to him. He remembered a snatch of lyrics: “We are not afraid … let the night come … we are not afraid.” The singer’s golden voice chanting those words had awakened in him a courage he didn’t know he had, a belief that someday his life would be more than this. But to show an excess of feeling in this crowd was considered uncool; as far as Nothing could tell, you were supposed to act bored all the time. He only smiled at Julie, said “Thanks,” and stuck the cassette in his backpack.

  As soon as Julie was gone, Laine got up and put on a Cure tape. Then he came and lay beside Nothing on the floor. His bleached white-blond hair fell in long strands over his eyes. His hand found Nothing’s and squeezed. Nothing didn’t squeeze back, but he didn’t pull away.

  “Do you want a blowjob?” said Laine. He was one of the youngest of the crowd, only fourteen, but he cultivated arcane talents. Nothing had seen the legend Laine Gives Killer Head inscribed on more than one bathroom wall at school.

  “What about Julie?”

  “Julie doesn’t turn me on much,” said Laine. “I like you, though. I think you’re really cool.” Lazily he propped himself on his elbow and reached over to touch Nothing’s face. Nothing closed his eyes and let himself be touched. The contact felt good. Laine hugged him, buried his face in Nothing’s shoulder; he smelled of shampoo and clove cigarettes.

  “Seriously,” he said. “I haven’t given you a blowjob since August. I want to.”

  “Okay,” Nothing told him. He pulled Laine’s face to his and kissed him, nudging his mouth gently open. Laine’s mouth tasted delicately salty, like tears. He suddenly felt terribly sad for Laine, who was too young to know so much. He wanted to show Laine some gesture of tenderness, something that might make them both feel as young as they really were.

  But Laine’s tongue was already tracing a wet path down Nothing’s chest; Laine’s hands were already unfastening Nothing’s jeans and tugging them open. Nothing stared up at Robert Smith’s magnified mouth. The singer’s lush clotted voice surrounded him, making him feel again as if he were tumbling between those lips. Laine’s hands and tongue worked him with a skill born of practice. Nothing felt something twist inside him. He put his hand down to touch Laine’s brittle hair, and Laine looked up at him with clear, guileless eyes.

  As he began to come, Nothing thought again of the black van that had driven past the school today, of the snatch of song he had heard trailing from its windows. He wondered where the van was now.

  Wherever it was, he wished he were there too.

  3

  The road was long and hilly, the black van was hurtling along like a roller coaster, and the day was fine. Twig drove with an elbow cocked out the window. Molochai hung out the other side, gnawing on his sticky fingers, letting the wind blow in his face. Zillah lolled on a mattress in the back, luxuriating in the clear autumn warmth. The mattress was filthy, parts of its fabric caked with stiff stains that faded from dark maroon to nearly black. They would have to unload it at a dump and find a cleaner one soon.

  Molochai swivelled his head as they passed the school. “Hey! Kiddies!”

  Twig swatted him. “Small game. How boring.”

  “There’d be plenty to do at a high school. All those candy boys, all those sugar girls …” Molochai pictured himself gliding through shadowy afternoon halls when almost everyone had gone home, his nose and mouth full of the dry smell of paper, the soft scent of years’ dust grimed into the corners, the underlying thrill of odor left behind by healthy young flesh shot through with sizzling hormones, greased with quickening blood. Maybe one of them would have stayed behind, kept after school: a bad girl, sulking in an empty classroom, her eyes downcast. She would never see the shape coming down the hallway, pausing at the door. Molochai thought of ripping soft bellyskin, white and firm just above the tangle of pubic hair. That was his favorite spot to bite girls.

  “A temple of boredom,” Zillah offered from the back. He was braiding his hair. He kept a streak of it dyed purple, gold, and green, and he was weaving the three colored strands together, toying with the braid, then delicately pulling it apart with his fingers. “Boredom is a sin. Boredom is unholy.”

  Molochai snorted. “What do you know about it? When have you ever been bored?”

  “I’m a hundred,” said Zillah, studying his long fingernails critically. He produced a bottle of black nail polish and began painting his nails, neatly, carefully. “You two are only seventy-five, but I am one hundred years old this very year. I have been bored. I’m bored now.”

  “I’m a hundred.” Twig reached under the driver’s seat and found a bottle. “And this wine was born last Tuesday! Let’s drink to it.”

  “I’m a hundred,” Molochai mumbled around the neck of the bottle. The wine was sticky, sweet as rotten grapes. He licked his lips and took another swig.

  They kept driving, kept drinking, never looked at a map. They did not need maps; the possibility of alternate routes, charted yellow and red and green roads, cryptic legends, held no fascination for them. By some warm alcoholic magnetism in their blood they were drawn on to the next city and the next. Twig always knew what roads to take, what highways he could roar along the fastest, what country blacktops were haunted by state troopers and God-fearing folk. They had just come from New York City where they were able to sate their appetites every night on blood rich with strange drugs, where a hophead chick they met had let them sleep the days away in her East Village apartment until they grew careless and left
a shredded mess in her bathtub. Kinky stuff was fine, she said, but she wasn’t into death. And there were gore stains on her only set of towels. She had still been trying to decide how to get rid of the body when they sneaked out.

  Molochai, Twig, and Zillah were good at sneaking out. They had plenty of practice at it: Zillah had taught Molochai and Twig how to act nonchalant, how to wipe the blood off their faces and control their passionate breathing before they left the scene of a kill. Without his guidance, Zillah reflected, they would both have been dead several times over, probably with stakes driven through their punky little hearts. It was true that Zillah was a hundred and the others only seventy-five; even so, they were just teenagers by the standards of their race. Zillah remembered the depthless eyes of Christian, his quiet, almost painful dignity. How old would Christian be now? Three hundred years? Four? But even when Christian had been a mere babe of fifty, Zillah found it hard to imagine him acting as stupid as Molochai and Twig.

  Still, they were his charges. They took orders without question, and in return they expected Zillah to take care of them, to do their thinking for them. They had perhaps half a brain between them. They knew Zillah was the smart one. But they were good fun.

  Zillah had met them at an elegant garden party in the roaring twenties, a Great Gatsby-ish affair with paper lanterns and drunken croquet games on the lawn. Molochai and Twig were huddled in a corner of the garden making fun of the women’s fancy dresses. Whenever a waiter came by with a tray of champagne flutes, they would reach out and grab two glasses apiece, one in each hand. When Zillah approached them, they were too drunk to recognize him as one of their own, but they liked his pretty face and his natty suit of white linen. They led him into the big house, thinking they were luring him to his death, and tried to attack him in an upstairs parlor decorated entirely in animal skins and trophy heads. Zillah threw them across the room, hoisted them up, and cracked their heads together beneath the eternally roaring jaws of a stuffed lion. Then he opened a vein in his wrist and tenderly gave them to drink. After that they were his forever. Or nearly so.

  Several miles outside the town, they gave up on finding the doughnut shop that Molochai thought he remembered once seeing along this highway. They stopped at a 7-Eleven instead. Molochai filled a big bag with candy and Hostess cakes. Twig chose a package of sliced bologna and stocked up on cheap wine.

  The cashier watched them with an absorption that bordered on awe, readjusting her heavy ass on the stool behind the register, pushing at the colored plastic barrettes that held her stringy hair in place. When Zillah’s eyes met hers, she felt her insides go runny. The unfamiliar territory between her legs twitched, suddenly moist.

  She had moles on her face, and she was vastly overweight, and she figured she would reach forty untouched by a man. But something in his green eyes made her feel the way she used to when she would look at the Playboy and Penthouse magazines that were sold in the store, before she told herself she wasn’t interested and started going to church again. Something in his eyes made her wonder how it would feel to let a man lie on top of her, to push his thing inside her. She felt for her pack of Mores, lit one, and sucked the smoke up hungrily, watching the black van pull away, wondering if that green-eyed angel would ever return.

  On the road again, Twig peeled off slices of bologna and stuffed them into his mouth, tossing his head like a feeding leopard as he swallowed, hardly chewing the soft meat. Molochai gulped sticky mouthfuls of cake and cream. Zillah licked at a sliver of bologna, nibbled delicately around the edges of a Twinkie, sipped from the bottle of Thunderbird None of them were satisfied.

  “Will we be in DC by tonight?” Molochai asked, licking chocolate off his fingers.

  Twig stared at the road. “Shit, we’ll be there in an hour But you can count on staying hungry till way after dark.” No one bothered asking why. They knew where the best city pickings were—in the clubs, in the alleys, under the midnight moon.

  “Yeah.” Molochai managed a sticky smile, thinking of nights in the city. “So we stay in DC for a couple of nights Then what?”

  Twig thought. “We could check out California again. You liked the ice cream shops in Chinatown.”

  “But that’s so far. And the whole desert in between us and it. Nothing to eat. Nothing to drink. No people. No blood.’

  Zillah closed his eyes, stroked his eyelashes with the tip o one shiny black nail. “We could drive down to New Orleans,” he said. “We could visit Christian.”

  Twig’s eyes lit up. “Christian! Remember Christian?”

  “Good old Christian!”

  “He doesn’t drink—wine!”

  They all laughed.

  “Yeah, but he might still be tending bar. Free drinks!”

  “And everyone’s blood full of wine and beer and whiskey—”

  “And Chartreuse,” said Zillah.

  They paused for a moment, tongues tasting a memory of altars, of the Garden of Eden.

  “Let’s do it.”

  “Let’s go see good old Christian.”

  “Good old Chrissy,” said Molochai.

  “Chrissy!” Twig collapsed in giggles over the wheel.

  Zillah passed the wine up to Molochai. “Let’s start saving our empties. We’ll need to bottle some up tonight. Things may be quite a bit drier after DC.”

  Molochai and Twig were quiet, considering the possibility of a long dry spell. Then Twig shrugged and said, “Yeah, but fuck it—we’re going to New Orleans!”

  Molochai turned the music back on, and they sang along with Bowie, leaning on each other, their voices soft and lilting as they got drunker. Zillah ran his hands through Molochai’s hair, pulling out the knots. Twig grinned as the road stretched out ahead, long and smooth and magical, unrolling like a carpet all the way down to Christian’s bar in New Orleans.

  4

  Heading south again, away from the Virginia border toward home, Steve swung the car onto a side road and drove toward the hill. The town of Roxboro usually fascinated Ghost, made him press his face to the window trying to see all its barbecue shacks and barbershops; its Southern Pride car wash whose sign read, mysteriously, AS WE THINK, SO WE ARE; its one dilapidated nightclub outside which dark shapes always lurked, regardless of hour or temperature.

  But tonight Ghost had been silent all through Roxboro, his eyes open and vacant; he seemed still lost in his story. Steve wanted to take him away from those twins, those dream twins dying or dead. Too often the phantoms of Ghost’s dreams possessed him even after he woke, claimed all his attention and a little of his soul.

  The visions worried Steve as much as they enchanted him. Ever since they had become friends, Steve had thought of himself as Ghost’s protector because he was a year older and because so often Ghost seemed to hover precariously on the edge of reality. Ghost lived with one foot in Steve’s world of beer and guitars and friends, the other in the pale never-never land of his visions. Reality was often too much for Ghost; it could puzzle and hurt him.

  Sometimes it seemed that Ghost consented to live in the world only because Steve was there, and Ghost would not leave Steve alone. Please, God or Whoever—Steve crossed his fingers on the steering wheel—please don’t let him change his mind about that.

  Ghost was so damned important, so valuable. When Ghost was along, ordinary surroundings—a pizza joint, a lonely stretch of highway—became strange, maybe threatening, maybe wild and beautiful. Ghost tinged reality. And Steve consented to let it be tinged and saw things he would never have seen otherwise, things he did not always believe or understand. He credited Ghost with saving his imagination from the death-in-life of adolescence.

  What about another time you were driving late at night, he thought, too late at night, driving with Ghost, and he had you convinced you’d driven into the ocean? Saw flying fish, starfish. Saw a swimming pool full of air. Maybe he’d fallen asleep behind the wheel that time; maybe he and Ghost were lucky the T-bird hadn’t wrapped around a tree, creaming both o
f them. Maybe that was what had happened. But mostly Steve accepted the share of magic the world had given him in Ghost, deluded himself that he, fearless old Steve Finn, was the leader. The protector. Yeah, right.

  Because, especially now, what would life be without Ghost? He thought he knew the answer to that one. So much shit, that’s what life would be. So much lonely, aching, empty shit. Ghost was taking care of him nowadays. The thing with Ann had nearly convinced Steve that his life was worthless. More than once he had found himself thinking about death in the middle of the night. Just drive over to Raleigh and score some barbs, then pick up a quart of whiskey on the way home. Take ’em all at once. There’s one cocktail that’ll never give you a hangover. But he could no more swallow that cocktail than he could have shoved it down Ghost’s throat. Their friendship was the only thing keeping him sane right now, and he guessed he owed it more of a debt than that.

  Somehow the last image of Ghost’s dream—the twins lying on their bare mattress, flat, their beauty spent—had gotten all mixed up in his mind with the sight of the dead kid on the roadside thirty miles behind. Both pictures drifted in front of Steve’s face, obscuring the road. He shook his head to banish them. When Ghost turned to look at him, Steve saw death in Ghost’s eyes, a faint pale shadow.

  “Let’s drive up to the hill,” said Steve. “It’ll be nice there. See the stars.”

  “The stars were waiting for us,” Ghost said when the T-bird reached the end of the road and pulled off. They were in a clearing thick with weeds and late-summer wildflowers. In the tall grass, empty cans and bottles shone dully, not marring the weird beauty of the hill but mirroring the huge luminous stars in the sky.

  Behind them stretched the road, winding all the way back to Missing Mile; before them, a barbed-wire fence marked the break of the hill, and acres of pastureland fell away, rolling gently down to the shore of Lake Hyco. Miles off—Steve thought it was miles, but he couldn’t be sure, the air was so clear—the electric power plant shimmered, all green and white and dimly roaring, reflected in the lake. It was so green here, so lush even after the hot Carolina summer, with the tall grass and the cow pastures and the great oak that spread its branches over the clearing.