Lost Souls

by Poppy Brite

  “Okay,” said Ghost, so soft that Steve could barely hear him.

  Up ahead was a riot of lights and movement. Red lights, blue lights, someone standing in the road flagging the T-bird down. Steve stopped, and the flagman motioned him forward. Slow, he signalled. An ambulance. Two police cars. An officer talking to a tired country woman in a torn bathrobe and curlers. The woman held the collar of a Doberman, restraining it. The dog snarled at the police, strained toward the T-bird as it passed at five miles per hour. A brick ranch house built close to the road, its scrubby yard littered with broken toys and car parts; on the porch the woman’s family, a man holding four small children back, apparently telling them not to look. The man was small and red and scrawny as a chicken neck. The children craned their necks, pointing, curious.

  There was something else in the yard, near the roadside, something that had excited the dog, something the children were trying to see. Something naked, dry, withered. A child—but what could have shrivelled it so, leached its life away? Steve saw a backpack lying nearby, spilling the kid’s life. Clothes. A couple of toy robots. Transformers, Steve knew from watching the Saturday-morning commercials. The kid must be a runaway. Flecks of gravel were embedded in the soft skin of his face; his head lolled back, half severed, the dark red cavern of his throat glistening—but there was so little blood, and the raw tissues within looked wasted, parched. A gray blanket settled over the planes and angles of the little body. A small brown hand protruded, thin and dirty, scraped by roadside grit.

  As Steve rolled down his window and handed his driver’s license to one of the cops, Ghost turned his head and stared back at the blanket, at the body beneath it. His eyes lost their focus; then, slowly, they closed. Ghost saw through the blanket, through death. He saw how the boy had looked alive, curiosity and intelligence in his young eyes. The name came to him as clearly as a memory: Robert. He felt the fury that had made Robert climb out his window, steal away from home and parents who used him as a receptacle for their overprotective love. There was something they had not let him do—go to a ball game or spend the night at a friend’s house. Ghost almost had the knowledge; then it slipped away. It didn’t matter. The important thing was that the boy need not have died. Ghost felt Robert’s fear at being alone under the tall trees and the wide midnight sky, the great glittering impassive sky. He felt the boy almost turn around, almost save his own life, but the wounded pride of adolescence would not allow him.

  Ghost felt Robert’s terror mount as he caught sounds—insidious whispers, soft laughter—sounds not of the night and its usual spooks but something darker, stranger, more purposeful and far, far deadlier. And then the hands, grabbing him from behind, four strong and sharp-fingered hands, and the hungry mouths all over him, sucking out his strength and his life. At the end there was only pain that spiralled up and up and stretched itself impossibly thin—exquisite pain, pain that precluded all thought, all memory, all identity. To know such pain was to lose one’s self, to become the pain, to die borne away on pain, its high soundless song in the ears. That was what had happened to Robert.

  Ghost lay quiet, and he knew the insensate loneliness of a corpse on the roadside, growing cold, the taste of blood melting from the tongue, the eyes filming over, the impossibility of human contact ever again, of comfort ever again. Ghost tried to swallow, but his throat would not work, and he made some small gasping sound and felt Steve’s big hand covering his own, enfolding his fingers, squeezing life back into him.

  “Let it go, Ghost,” Steve said. “You can’t take on all the pain in the world. Let it go, man.”

  Ghost shuddered, then began to slip back. Warmth. Blood where it ought to be, in his veins, flowing safely and sanely. The ambulance, the police cars, the lonely dry dead thing under the blanket were far away now, left behind.

  “What happened to those twins?” Steve asked as they drove on. “In your dream.”

  Ghost thought, remembered. Suddenly he didn’t want to think about those twins.

  But Steve wanted to hear the rest of the story. Ghost hoped it was only a story, only a dream. He never knew, not at first. “They grew weak,” he said. “Eventually they had to spend alternate days alive. One would watch over the other, keeping vigil over the still chest, the blotted-out eyes, the drying mouth. At the first tinge of dawn the dead twin would begin to move, and the living twin would lie down and stretch himself taut on the mattress, his skin already crackling on his bones, his hair straggling like grass across his bare hollow shoulders. One day … one day … One day their eyes were open, but neither of them moved.”

  Ghost finished in a rush of breath, whiskey and fear breath, upset all over again. Steve kept hold of Ghost’s hand. Ghost’s fingers twitched.

  “Jesus, Ghost,” Steve said. “Jeeesus, Ghost.”

  2

  The last dying days of summer, fall coming on fast. A cold night, the first of the season, a change from the usual bland Maryland climate. Cold, thought the boy; his mind felt numb. The trees he could see through his bedroom window were tall charcoal sticks, shivering, afraid of the wind or only trying to stand against it. Every tree was alone out there. The animals were alone, each in its hole, in its thin fur, and anything that got hit on the road tonight would die alone. Before morning, he thought, its blood would freeze in the cracks of the asphalt.

  On his razor-scarred, wax-scabbed desk before him lay a picture postcard. The design on its front was multicolored and abstract. There were splotches of deep lipstick pink, streaks of sea green and storm gray, flecks of gold embossed in thin bright leaves. He picked up his fountain pen with the graceful heart-shaped nib, dipped its delicate tip into his bottle of ink (pen and ink having been stolen from the art room at school), and wrote a few spidery lines on the message side of the postcard.

  Then the boy stretched his legs under the desk and with the bare toes of both feet grasped the bottle he had hidden there. The liquor inside was a darker amber than he was used to, and when he took a swig, there was a sharp taste of smoke behind the familiar musky burn that hurt his throat. He swallowed the whiskey, licked his lips to wet them with liquor-essence and his clear spit. Then he picked up the postcard, brought it to his mouth, gave it a whiskey tongue-kiss, kissed it as hungrily as he had ever dreamed of kissing the sweetest, richest mouth. And he picked up the pen again and signed his name: Nothing.

  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 Homeward, 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.