Lost Souls

by Poppy Z. Brite - (ebook by Undead)

  “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 cit) pickings were—in the clubs, in the alleys, under the midnight moon.

  “Yeah.” Molochai managed a sticky smile, thinking o: 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 of 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 of 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.

  Ghost knew all the stories of that oak. He said an Indian had climbed it to escape from a bear once. The marks of the bear’s claws were still there, eight feet up the trunk, deep and twisted in the thick bark. The claws had hurt the tree, Ghost said, and it had bled clear sap to fill the wound, to stop the blaze of blind pain. Now the scar was knotted, invulnerable, and the tree sang with the hum of the power plant far away on the lake.

  Ghost looked at the tree, silently greeting it most likely. Steve stood watching, one hand on the warm hood of the T-bird. He ran his other hand through his hair, shoving it back behind his ears, trying to tame it. Finally, against his will, he said, “What killed that kid?”

  Ghost shrugged, pulled his hair over his face. “Something bad. Something really bad.”

  Steve started to say no shit, then thought better of it. Sometimes you didn’t want to say such things to Ghost. They walked to the fence and looked out over the pastures toward the power plant. Steve curled his fingers around the barbed wire. It was cold, colder than the night air, as cold as dead flesh. He shivered. “A psycho,” he said. “A dog. Maybe that Doberman the lady had. You suppose there’s any wolves left around here?”

  Ghost tossed his hair back and slowly shook his head. “It wasn’t any wolf or dog. How could they suck him dry like that? And if you think it was a psycho, how come you’re not scared to be up here? He would’ve taken off. He could be anywhere.”

  “Probably across the Virginia border by now.” Steve saw again the cavernous throat, the sad brown hand with road dirt ground into the creases of its palm. He was aware of the cool air against his eyes, drying and chilling them. He squinted at the power plant, making the lights run together fuzzily, dazzlingly … and then Ann was in his head again.

  He remembered the last time he’d come up here, months ago. With her. They had made love on a blanket in the backseat of the T-bird, hot and sweaty, but the clear cool air of the hill had blown over them, and the lights of the power plant had run together in just the same way.

  Steve’s shoulders drew up and he clamped his arms across his chest, ready to say Let’s leave, let’s get the hell out of here… and then Ghost was offering him a green apple. Distracting him. It worked; Steve had to wonder where in hell the apple had come from. He took a big bite and handed it back, chewing slowly, letting the golden-tasting juice run over his tongue: crunchy, sweet. The taste made him feel better. “You remember the Hook?” he asked after he had swallowed the mouthful. “That old spook story?”

  “Uh-uh,” said Ghost, eating the core of the apple. Steve watched to see whether Ghost would spit out the seeds. When he didn’t, Steve spoke again. “You know, that story about the kids out at Lovers Lane. They’re fucking in the backseat, and all of a sudden this bulletin comes on the radio about a crazy man escaped from the asylum outside of town. A psycho killer with a hook instead of a hand.”

  Steve looked at Ghost. Ghost was leaning against one of the fence posts, head tilted back, staring at the sky. The moon had gone behind a cloud. Ghost’s face was shadowed, his eyes dark. He might have been listening; then again, he might have been receiving messages from an agrarian collective civilization somewhere near Alpha Centauri.

  “So they hauled ass out of Lovers Lane,” Steve went on anyway, “and when they got home, the boy went around the car to open the door for the girl. And what do you think he found? A bloody hook, hanging from the handle of the door!” He leaned over and spoke the last words right into Ghost’s ear.

  Ghost jumped, almost fell over. He stared at Steve for several seconds, then grinned. “Out at Lovers Lane?” he asked. Both of them turned to look at the T-bird parked in the clearing. It sat large and dusty, its engine giving an occasional metallic groan as it cooled.

  “How come—” Ghost began, and Steve knew Ghost was about to exhibit the weird, irritating logic that sometimes possessed him. He was going to ask how come the couple had the radio on while they were fucking, or why the psyche killer would have reached to open the car door with his hook when he could have used his hand. But then the moon sailed out from behind its cloud and flooded the hill with cold white light, and Ghost sucked in his breath
, sharp and scared.

  Steve followed Ghost’s gaze to the oak and saw nothing at all. But he knew Ghost saw something there. And somehow that was scarier than seeing it himself.

  Ghost felt his feet moving. He hadn’t told them to move. He wasn’t even sure he wanted them to move. He took several steps toward the oak, and when he got close enough, the outline of the twins grew clearer, more solid.

  They were balanced on a low branch, their legs swinging, their hands climbing like delicate white insects along the trunk. Closer still, and Ghost could smell them: their strange, heady bouquet of strawberry incense, clove cigarettes, wine and blood and rain and the sweat of passion. All the things they had loved when they were alive, the things that dragged them down, drove them to live upon each other’s essence until they ran dry. But here on this midnight hill, in the pallid moonlight, the twins were beautiful still. They wore colored silks, silks that caught the moon and threw it back in a thousand shades of iridescence. And Ghost could see no spiderweb tracery of age on their faces. He saw only their dark lips, their brittle, false-colored, silken hair of lemon-yellow and cherry-red, their eyes like silver pearl, filmy and pupilless.

  But they were looking at him, he knew that, and when he was close enough to touch the trunk of the tree, one of them spoke to him. It was only his name, whispered through the branches, “Ghost,” but it was like a wind blowing from across a strange sea, like an unseen rustle in an empty room. Ghost put his hand on the trunk, near a slender silk-clad leg so tangible he wanted to stroke it.

  Why was he seeing them now, these creatures from his dream? He had thought they were pitiful, but now they frightened him. He found himself wondering what they had become after their death, how death had changed them. If they were somehow alive even now, what allowed them to be? And why had he dreamed of them in the first place?