Lost Souls

by Poppy Z. Brite

  “Hey there, Ghost. How you?”

  “I feel bad times coming on,” he told them. He hoped one of them would know something about it.

  But the old men just laughed at him. “You and your longhaired friend been smokin’ that dope out at your place, Ghost?”

  “Naw, he’s Miz Deliverance’s grandkid. If he says bad times comin’, then there’s bad times comin’. Mebbe we’ll be dead by the time they get here.”

  The oldest, most wrinkled man shot a stream of brown spit into the gutter. “Shit-fire, save matches.”

  Ghost took the long way home. It was twilight now, and the streets of Missing Mile were deserted. The hills were checkered with the yellow light of faraway houses. Steve would have gone to work by now, but Ghost hoped he had left a light burning. He rode past the town-limits sign. The fields that stretched away on either side of the road were bare and dry, already stripped of their harvest. Across the furrows a window glimmered on the dusk.

  He thought of the twins he had seen up at the hill, the twins who should have been shrivelling in their graves but were instead vibrant and alive. He hoped the bad times that were coming didn’t have anything to do with them. He was pretty sure they had been nothing but shades, things only he could see, maybe even brought to brief life by the dream he had had about them. But they had terrified him for no good reason. And they had known about the little boy dead on the road, had even implied in the sly manner of spirits that they had killed the boy.

  At the corner where Burnt Church Road met the highway, a tall figure sat hunched behind a sign that said ROSES. The flower-seller—the same one he had seen on the way back from Miz Catlin’s. He was sure of it. A few huge frothy bouquets shivered in the wind. Some stunted pumpkins and gourds were piled around the base of the stand.

  Ghost tried to ride past without seeming to notice the flower-seller, but as he drew close, the figure got to its feet and spread its arms wide … wider … immensely wide, stretching. The sleeves of its long dark cloak billowed. Ghost slowed his bike. Everything in him screamed danger, but he had never been one for turning away from things that scared him, or running from them. He would talk to this person, try to figure out what the sick feeling and the worry were about.

  “Roses?” asked the flower-seller. “Or a jack-o’-lantern to light your path?”

  Ghost pulled his hair in front of his face. He had seen people who looked a little like this, their pale gauntness and loose black clothes vaguely similar. Such people had sometimes visited his grandmother, bringing her mysterious powders and oils in murky bottles or buying herbs from her. They had scared him; sometimes he saw the skulls beneath their faces, long pale orbs, or the bones of their hands as clear and luminous as an X ray. Sometimes he felt their thoughts focusing on him for an instant with a flicker of cold interest like a flame in a dark tunnel of wind. But none of those had worn sunglasses and gloves in hot September weather; none had sold roses and pumpkins at the side of the road. And none had had eyes quite so cold … or so desolate.

  “I don’t have any money,” he said, “or I’d buy a pumpkin. But you ought to pack up for tonight. It’s too cold to sit out here.” Even as he spoke, a night wind seemed to be whipping up, carrying the russet smell of autumn in from the fields.

  “Pity? For pity you may have a rose. And I was just packing up.” The figure stepped closer and tucked a deep red bud into the lapel of Ghost’s army jacket. When one of those long thin hands brushed the bare triangle of skin at the base of his throat, Ghost shivered. Even through his gloves the flower-seller’s fingers were as cold as bone, as loneliness. Ghost looked up into the flower-seller’s face. Those cold eyes glittered somewhere deep in shadowed sockets. Ghost looked quickly down at his own torn white sneakers.

  But it was too late: all at once he caught a rush of images, not words but feelings. The first thing he sensed was age and dark wisdom beyond his ability to measure; he knew this was no man. The second was a terrible, resigned loneliness, a longing for someone he thought might never come. The flower-seller’s mind was like a sentient void, too empty even to be sad, colder than the night. Without thinking, Ghost said, “You’ll be warm when your friends get here.”

  The pale face snapped up. “What friends? Have you news of Zillah?”

  Ghost stumbled backward. “No—I mean, I only know somebody’s coming—I mean, somebody must be coming to pick you up. Or I guess maybe you live around here—” He shut his mouth before his words could get any more tangled. Ghost seldom had to make excuses for the things he knew. Not everybody wants his heart looked into, his grandmother had told him when he was very young. So look if you have to, but learn to keep your mouth shut. Since her death six years ago, he spoke of such things only to Steve, or to no one at all. But sometimes things just materialized in his head, and he said them out loud before he could stop himself. As soon as he felt that emptiness pouring out of the flower-seller, he had known that friends were coming, already on the way. And as much as he feared to wonder what sort of friends they might be—the resurrected dream-twins, or worse?—he had had to say it. Comfort might warm those cold eyes.

  But the eagerness glittering in those eyes put a stupid panic into Ghost, panic like a moth beating itself against a window, panic that made him want to hide anything he might know, hide his own head. This is the bad times coming, he realized. The start of it, anyway.

  “You don’t know them,” the flower-seller said flatly.

  Now Ghost was no longer afraid. Now he felt only a terrible empathetic loneliness. He might have been as hollow as a gourd. What if nobody in the whole world loved you? What if you were alone?

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Ghost said wildly.

  The flower-seller leaned across his wooden stand. His eyes met Ghost’s, and his tongue darted out over his pale lips. The long thin hands trembled. Then that cold gaze darted toward the moon, and the flower-seller drew himself up and knotted his fingers together. “Get away from here,” he said.

  “What—”

  “Go.” Now there was a light of desperation in the deep-set eyes. Hungry desperation, it looked like. “Go now if you want to live.”

  The last light of day disappeared from the sky. The flower-seller’s face was partially obscured by the growing dark, making it look pointed, feral. He made a half-despairing, half-starved sound deep in his throat, and seemed about to lunge right over the stand. But Ghost was already straddling his bike, shoving at the kickstand, reaching up with one hand to steady his hat and pedaling as hard as he could. After a few minutes he stopped and looked back over his shoulder. But the flower stand and the lone figure, if there, were hidden in shadow.

  The T-bird was still parked in the driveway when Ghost rode up, though the house was unlit. He leaned the bike against the side of the house, where the paint was flaking away. By now it was almost too dark to see, though weak moonlight limned the edges of the clouds. On the porch Ghost almost fell over a crate of beer bottles that Steve had dragged out of the house. Then he pushed the door open and was inside, throwing the deadbolt lock, turning on lamps. There must be light. Light to keep him from thinking about the flower-seller out there in the deepening night.

  Steve lay on the couch, blearily rubbing his eyes against the sudden brightness, several empty beer bottles on the floor beside him. He had been using a pile of dirty sweatshirts for a pillow, and his face still bore the faint pattern of seams and creases. Ghost felt something under his foot—Steve’s keyring lay by the door as if Steve had hurled it across the room. He picked it up, rubbed his thumb over the plastic tab that said Budweiser, held it in his hand. The keys jingled faintly against one another—the house key, the keys to the T-bird and the Whirling Disc record store where Steve worked, other keys obsolete and useless but too venerable to be thrown away or tossed into a drawer. There was a feeling on the keyring like the object’s aura, Steve’s emotion as he had last touched it. Disgust and nausea. It gave the metal a cold, faintly slimy feel. “Did you call
in sick?” he asked.

  Steve nodded. “Was just gonna have a beer before I went to work. Next time I looked down, four of ’em were gone, so I just kept on drinking. Might as well call in drunk for all the difference it makes.”

  “What happened?”

  “I fell asleep and had this dream … about Ann. I dreamed her face was all bloody and some of her teeth were knocked out. I reached out to touch her and saw my hand was bloody too. I’d done it to her. You know what I really did to her? Do you know about it, Ghost?”

  Ghost looked at the floor. “I guess you raped her.”

  “I guess I raped her too. I guess she didn’t mind. I guess she liked it pretty good.”

  “Come on, Steve. That’s a shitty thing to say. She didn’t like it.”

  “Whose side are you on?”

  “Yours.”

  “How do you know she didn’t like it? You read her sick little mind or something?”

  “No. I went over to see her the other day.”

  All at once Steve was up off the couch, grabbing handfuls of Ghost’s sweatshirt, pushing his face up close to Ghost’s. “What the fuck you mean you went to see her? You went over there without telling me?”

  “I wanted to see how she was.”

  Steve stared into Ghost’s placid face. He knew he wasn’t scaring Ghost, not in the slightest; he was only making a fool of himself. But the alcohol in his brain refused to let him shut up. “You stay away from that lying cunt,” he snarled, “or else you decide whose friend you really are.”

  Ghost’s wide blue eyes met Steve’s, forgiving but unrelenting. Ghost would not soothe Steve this time, would not capitulate. What the fuck did Ghost know? Ghost hadn’t gone through Ann’s mind-games, hadn’t been betrayed by her. But here he stood, oh so self-righteous. It would be easy enough to slap that obstinate look off Ghost’s face, shake the visions out of that thin body …

  What was he thinking? Hit Ghost? What the hell was he turning into? “Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus Christ.”

  “He’s not here,” said Ghost sullenly. “You gonna put me down?”

  “Shit, no,” said Steve. He pulled Ghost down on the couch with him, hugged him tight. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Don’t hate me.”

  Ghost didn’t say anything, but his hands found Steve’s face, touched Steve’s aching temples and smoothed back his messy dark hair. Steve let his head droop onto Ghost’s shoulder. Holding any other guy this way would have made him feel like a fag; with Ghost it wasn’t an issue, it never seemed to matter.

  After a few minutes he tried to speak. The words came like slow drops of blood from a ragged wound. “I … I tried to call her a couple of times. Hung up when she answered, real cool. Then I got Simon, and he wouldn’t let me talk to her. She asked him to screen her calls, I guess. I guess I fucked up pretty good.”

  “I know,” said Ghost. “I know how things were.”

  And you probably do, too, Steve thought. You probably know everything that ever happened to us, the hot nights and the sodden-silk texture inside her, the weeks when things were starting to go bad, the ether of betrayal, the look on her face, and the moment of absolute shock, like falling into deep icy water, when I realized I had really for chrissake raped her.

  He pulled away from Ghost. He felt his face contorting, but he would not cry; he would not cry.

  For a long time they sat in companionable silence. Steve felt his drunkenness receding to a comfortable buzz, and Ghost opened his bottle of scuppernong wine to catch up. They were booked at the Sacred Yew the following night, so Steve dragged out his guitar and they ran haphazardly through their set, knowing it didn’t matter. They had played the Yew hundreds of times. They might play there a hundred times more, and their little group of fans would come to drink and dance, and nothing would matter except the exuberance of playing.

  “Let’s listen to the tape,” Steve suggested. He thought he ought to remind himself what the songs really sounded like. Ghost stumbled to the stereo, and soon Lost Souls? filled the little house, the guitar hard-edged and gloriously mad, Ghost’s words bittersweet, with a visionary longing. “We need the roots but you can’t dig up the tree …” Ghost sang along with his own golden-gravel voice. “So walk the mountain roads with me and drink some clear water …”

  Steve sang along too, strumming the guitar. Those were the words of a visionary, weren’t they? Those were the words of somebody who remembered what magic was. There was magic left in the world; there had to be. Steve banged at the strings. Beneath the noise he heard a fiery, chiming melody.

  Ghost lifted his head and sang louder. His voice soared high and found its way through cracks in the windows and walls, out into the sparkling night, down to the road that led past the house.

  At the sound of that voice, an old passing drifter looked up and remembered a train track he had hiked along down to Georgia some thirty years ago. A train track flanked with rioting kudzu and towering pines and the bewitching scent of honeysuckle, a train track that made a two-bit bottle of wine taste of nectar and cool shade. The drifter, whose name was Rudy, lifted his face to the chill cloudy sky. A mile down the road he would find himself in the arms of Christian, whose hunger by now overshadowed his taste for thin children in black. But the last few minutes of Rudy’s life were spent in sweet memory.

  Back in the house, Steve stopped playing and smacked his forehead. “I forgot. Some mail came for you. Our first fan letter, I guess.” Steve dug through the clutter on the floor and found a postcard, creased and dog-eared, its colors muted with the grime of small-town post offices.

  Ghost read it: “ ‘You don’t know me, but Dylan Thomas drank eighteen straight whiskeys on November ninth, 1953, and I am drinking one for you.’ ” He looked up at Steve. “It’s signed ‘Nothing.’ ”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Why don’t you hold it to your forehead and find out? Go on, tell me to fuck myself.”

  “Suck my aura,” said Ghost, and swigged the last sweet drops of his wine.

  19

  “WAKE UP!” said a loud voice that seemed to reverberate from the center of Nothing’s brain. “WE’RE HERE!”

  Nothing opened and shut his eyes several times. “I wasn’t asleep,” he said. “How could I sleep?”

  Zillah had placed another hit of Crucifix on his tongue sometime between midnight and dawn, and since then Nothing had not known where he was, or who he was with, or why he had ever bothered to wonder. He roamed the corridors of his mind, hopelessly lost, unable to find his way back to the familiar voices he could hear—faintly, faintíy—arguing and laughing outside his skull, and his body jittered like a skeleton on a string.

  Yet maybe he had slept, for he thought he had dreamed strange dreams. Dreamed of sucking at a hot torn pulse, splashing in blood that still pumped in weak spurts from the vein with each beat of the dying heart. Dreamed of rubbing his gory hands over Zillah’s face, licking blood off Zillah’s eyelashes, drinking it from Zillah’s lips where it tasted sweeter yet. He had dreamed of Molochai and Twig wallowing in blood, sudsing it into each other’s hair, rolling in it half-naked, their pallid skin streaked sticky red. Why was there so much blood?

  Because your teeth weren’t sharp enough, a voice in his mind answered. There was nothing neat about it. Don’t you remember how you had to tear chunks of his throat away before you could lap up that sweet blood? Don’t you remember Zillah’s face buried in the ruin of his crotch like a sadistic lover?

  Nothing shied away from that voice. But he could not forget the music of screams that died away to a tired confused whimper of pain, then to silence. He had dreamed of standing in front of a culvert somewhere, a dank concrete pipe choked with weeds, kudzu, highway trash. It was dark, soul-dark in this hour long past midnight and far from dawn, but Nothing could see. He could see clearly in the dark: the acid, or some new vision refining itself? Slung over his shoulder he held a limp little bundle, a bundle of stained ra
gs and skin gone paler than before.

  “Put it in there,” Zillah had said, and Nothing stuffed the bundle deep into the culvert. Looking back, he caught a last glimpse of feathery white-blond hair straggling from a blue bandanna. Wet threads of scarlet ran through that hair … and for a moment Nothing stopped, struck by the enormity of what had happened. Of what you did, his mind amended. The blood would never get washed out of that hair, except by rainwater and runoff from the highway. No one was going to shampoo that hair or give it a fresh blond dye job ever again. Perhaps for a while it would keep growing, dark roots pushing slowly up through the cold waxy scalp. Then it would loosen and separate and scatter, washed away strand by strand, stolen even as Laine’s bones would soon be.

  But he had dreamed, surely he had dreamed. He must have dreamed. “Oh God,” he said, and shuddered.

  “Who?” Molochai, hovering over him, looked honestly puzzled: Do you remember how we slaughtered your friend and half-tore him apart, or are you just hung over? Molochai’s eyes glittered through enormous smudges of black eyeliner. Nothing smelled something sweet on Molochai’s breath, some buried childhood odor. Twinkies.

  “What’s wrong, kiddo?” Twig asked from the front seat.

  Nothing didn’t answer. Instead he sat up, put his arms around Molochai’s neck, and buried his face in the dirty black cloth of Molochai’s jacket, cloth that smelled of sweat and sweets, of sex and … blood. Laine’s blood. Nothing knew it was probably on his own clothes too, on his skin and greased into his hair. Because he had not dreamed. Last night had really happened. He had killed Laine, killed him with bare teeth and hands and only a little help from his friends.

  They really are vampires, he thought. You’ve consigned yourself to a life of blood and murder, you can never rejoin the daytime world. And he answered himself: Fine. As long as I don’t have to be alone again.

  “We’re here,” Molochai said, dropping Nothing back onto the mattress. “This is it, right, Twig?”