Lost Souls

by Poppy Z. Brite - (ebook by Undead)

  His capital N and the loop of his g swooped like kites’ tails. His t was a dagger thrusting down. He took another swig of his parents’ Johnnie Walker and realized he could already feel the familiar half-queasy anticipation of drunkenness in his stomach, the floating dizziness in his head. He was getting drunk on two shots of whiskey. Evidently the shit from his parents’ liquor cabinet was stronger than the shit his friends poured into empty Pepsi bottles and passed around in cars going too fast on the highway outside town.

  He looked at the postcard, frowned at the signature, Nothing drying dull and black, wishing he’d signed it in blood. Maybe it wasn’t too late. With the pen’s tip he jabbed at his wrist until a bead of blood appeared, bright red against his pale thin skin, with a prick of light from the lamp shining in it. He signed his name again, Nothing in blood, tracing over the black letters with scarlet. The ink ran into the blood, and the whole thing dried rusty brown-black, the color of an old scab. The results did not altogether disappoint him.

  His blood made a trickling path down the inside of his forearm, staining the fine invisible hairs, covering some of his old scars, leaving some of their razor-tracery exposed. He licked the blood away. It smudged his lips sticky, and he smiled at himself in the window’s reflection. The night-Nothing in the glass smiled back. The boy in the window had the same long sheaf of dyed black hair, the same pointed chin, the same almond-shaped dark eyes—but his smile was colder, far colder.

  Nothing turned off the light and watched the reflection of his bedroom click out of existence, watched the cold night fill the panes. He lay on his bed and watched the stars and planets glowing on his ceiling behind the layers of black fishnet he had hung up. He’d painted them there, the rings of Saturn lopsided, the constellations crazed.

  He felt his room gather itself in the dark and stand darkly around him, not frightening but surely full of power. He was never certain what was here. Cigarettes, he thought. Flowers from the graveyard, and that bone, that damned bone, his friend Sioux wouldn’t say where it came from. Books, most of them stolen from thrift-shop shelves where he left only his finger marks in the dust. Horror stories, thin books of poems. Dylan Thomas, of course, and others. A copy of Look Home-word, Angel—on the cover the stone, the leaf, the unfound door, and the angel with its expression of soft stone idiocy. A lily drooped from the angel’s hand, dead in stone. Dust. His old stuffed animals. A clay skeleton his friend Laine had brought him from the Day of the Dead festival in Mexico, its eyes red sequins, its ribs dusted with glitter. All the objects here, all the pencil drawings on the walls and pictures cut out of obscure music magazines and secret lists in notebooks, wove a web of power around him.

  He pulled his quilt around his legs and touched his ribs and hipbones, liking how thin he was. Then the bedroom door opened, and painfully bright light spilled in from the hallway. He jerked his hand away and pulled up his quilt.

  “Jason? Are you asleep? It’s only nine. Too much sleep is bad for you.”

  It might block my channels, he thought.

  His parents stepped into the room and he felt the web of power collapse and drift down, broken strands brushing his face. Mother, fresh from her crystal healing class at the Arts Center, looked exalted. Her eyes sparkled; there was too much blush on her cheeks. Father, behind her, only looked glad to be home. “Did you do your homework?” Mother asked. “I don’t want you going to sleep this early if you haven’t done your homework. You know what your father and I thought of a smart boy like you getting those grades last quarter. A C in algebra!”

  Nothing looked at the pile of schoolbooks near his closet. One of the covers was a vomitous shade of turquoise. One was bright orange. The black T-shirt he’d thrown over them blotted them out. He thought that if he stacked them all up, he might be able to build an altar.

  “Jason, I want to talk to you.” Mother came all the way into the room and squatted next to the mattress. Her sweater was woven of soft iridescent wool, pink and blue. In fascination Nothing watched a smudge of ash from the carpet transfer itself before his eyes onto the knee of her cream-colored cotton pants. He raised his head and checked the quilt; it was covering him decently. He thought he saw the two small ridges of his hipbones poking up under it.

  “My support circle meditated with our rose crystals tonight,” Mother said. “I thought of you. I don’t want to keep you from fulfilling yourself. I certainly don’t want to decrease your potential.” She paused to glance at Father glowering in the background, then let the great revelation fly. “You can get your ear pierced after all, if you still want to. Your father or I will go with you.”

  Nothing turned his head to hide the two tiny holes in his left earlobe, made with a thumbtack and several swigs of vodka one day at school. The Jewelry Box at the mall would not pierce the ears of anyone under eighteen without a parent’s permission, especially not the ears of a boy in black who looked younger than his fifteen years, who forged signatures on endless homemade permission slips. And no wonder Father was pissed off. This was the final indignity: a son who wanted to wear earrings.

  “Wait a minute. Wait one minute. Just what the hell is this?” Father crossed the room in two strides and pulled the bottle of Johnnie Walker from under the desk. The last gossamer strands of the web whispered past Nothing’s face and dissolved in the air. He smelled the ghost of incense. “Young man, I think I would like an explan—”

  “Just a minute, Rodger.” Mother radiated benevolence, spiritual wholeness. “Jason is not a bad child. If he’s drinking, we should spend more quality time—”

  “Quality time, my ass.” Nothing decided he liked Father better than Mother these days, not that he liked either of them much. “Jason is not a child at all. He is fifteen and runs with a gang of punkers who give him a liquor habit and God knows what else. He dyes his hair that phony black that rubs off on the pillowcases and stains my good shirts in the wash. He smokes cigarettes—Lucky Strikes,” Father said with distaste. Nothing saw the pack of Vantages poking out of Father’s breast pocket. “He throws away the clothing we buy him or rips it to rags before he’ll wear it. Now he’s stealing from us. Things are going to CHANGE—”

  “Rodger. We’ll talk about it, among ourselves. Don’t worry, Jason, you’re not in trouble.” Mother positively floated from the room, pulling Father after her. Father slammed the door. A stack of books fell over, spilling Plath and Bradbury and William Burroughs across the floor in an unlikely orgy of paper and dust.

  In the hall Father’s voice rose. “What the hell was that supposed to mean, he’s not in trouble… he goddamn well is in trouble….”

  Nothing closed his eyes for a moment and watched red spangles swirl away behind his lids. Then he got up and stretched his lithe naked body, shaking his hair and his hands to cleanse himself of Mother’s touch. Father had taken away the good whiskey, but Nothing had his own bottle of brainrot hidden in the closet. A flask of something called White Horse. He’d gotten his friend Jack to buy it for him because of the name: Dylan Thomas had drunk his last eighteen whiskeys at a pub called the White Horse in New York City.

  Nothing lay in the dark and sipped from the neck of the bottle, blinking up at the stars on his ceiling. After a while the constellations began to swim. I’ve got to get out of this place, he thought just before dawn, and the ghosts of all the decades of middle-class American children afraid of complacency and stagnation and comfortable death drifted before his face, whispering their agreement.

  In Nothing’s English class the next day, Mrs. Margaret Peebles plunged her hypodermic of higher learning into Lord of the Flies and sucked out every drop of its primal magic, every trace of its adolescent wonder. Nothing knew half the class hadn’t even read the book. If they were judging it by what the teacher said, he could hardly blame them. But he’d read it three years ago, one summer afternoon in bed with a fever, and when he had put the book down, his hands had been shaking. Those wild salty-skinned little boys had tumbled through his head, and he
had cried for them, so young, grown old so fast.

  He looked at the blank page of notebook paper in front of him. Pink and blue lines, neatly ruled. He began to count them but lost track of the number. The clock said 9:10. Twenty more minutes left of class. His head ached from last night’s whiskey, and he wanted to sleep. He began drawing in his notebook. Swirls. The first vestiges of a face. An eye, green because his pen was green. A tooth.

  “Jason—”

  Outside, far away across the wide green front lawn, past the pink granite sign that looked like a gravestone except for the snarling tiger carved on top (Gift of the Senior Class, 1972), a black van sped by. The road past the school was long and straight, and the van was going too fast for Nothing to catch more than a snatch of the singing that blew back on the wind out the open windows of the van, borne on the wings of the sweet September day. But he was sure it was Bowie. Someone in that van was singing a song by David Bowie. The voices were clear and loud and drunken. Nothing watched the van disappear and wished more than anything else in the world that he were going with it, going with those happy singers, drinking and singing and going away on the open road.

  “Jason.”

  He sighed. Peebles was staring at him. The rest of the class paid no attention; they were elsewhere too, in their own worlds, driving away on their own roads. “What?” he said.

  “We were discussing William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. You have read the book?”

  “I have.”

  “Then perhaps you can tell me about the rivalry between Jack and Ralph. What allows it to grow so bitter?”

  “Their attraction for each other,” Nothing said. “Their love for each other. They had this fierce love, they wanted to be each other. And only when you love someone that much can you hate them too—”

  A ripple of laughter went through the class. A couple of boys rolled their eyes at one another—what a fag!

  Peebles pressed her thin lips together. “If you had been paying attention, instead of doodling and staring out the window—”

  Suddenly he was too tired to care what happened to him. This was empty, all empty useless crap. “Oh fuck you,” he said, and felt the class suck in its breath and silently cheer him on.

  Half an hour later, sitting in the principal’s office waiting for the hand of petty academic fate to descend upon him, he thought again of the ghosts that had visited him last night. Visions, or whiskey vapors? It didn’t matter. You’ve got to get out of here, they’d told him. You’ve got to get out of here.

  After school, a bunch of kids met in the parking lot and went over to Laine Petersen’s house to get stoned. Laine’s older brother had gone off to college and left behind his water-bong, an elaborate ceramic affair shaped like a skull with worms twining in and out of the empty eye sockets. You put your finger over one of the nostrils to hold the smoke in.

  Laine’s girlfriend Julie had a bag of pot, real ragweed, the kind of stuff that scoured your throat and made your lungs feel like parchment if you held the smoke in too long. Still, it was all these kids knew, and within fifteen minutes they were stoned out of their minds. Someone put a Bauhaus tape on and turned it all the way up. Laine and Julie rolled around on the bed, pretending to make out.

  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 blood-red 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.