Lost Souls

by Poppy Brite

  But on the day he brought the progress report home, he knew that he was alone and that he might be alone for a very long time.

  His parents were both at work, his mother counselling disturbed children at a day-care center, his father doing something that had vaguely to do with finance. The house was sunny and still, and all that afternoon he searched through their desk drawers, through their files and boxes, looking for his adoption papers. He had to know who his real parents were. He had to know where he had come from and whether someday he might find his way back.

  His parents’ papers were remarkably dull. There were no old love letters scented and tied with pastel ribbons, no scandals, no bloodstained lace handkerchiefs. There were no adoption papers. The shadows in the house lengthened. He became frantic, knowing with the terrible conviction of a twelve-year-old that these strangers named Rodger and Marilyn would murder him if they caught him going through their things; they would have an excuse at last. But he opened one final dresser drawer in their bedroom, not really expecting to find anything, and under his mother’s old granny glasses and McGovern buttons was the note. It was tucked into a corner of the drawer, not hidden very well. By this time he was sweaty and a little breathless. His hand shook as he extracted the note, trying not to disturb the rest of the mess.

  The paper was thick and cream-colored, with two small holes at the top as if it had been pinned to something. Slowly he deciphered the spidery handwriting: His name is Nothing. Care for him and he will bring you luck.

  All at once the story fell into place around him. A baby in a basket, abandoned on two strangers’ doorstep some night. That was what he had been. Surely this note had been pinned to his blanket. But the strangers had taken him in, changed his name, tried to make him into one of their kind. If he had brought them any luck at all, that luck had surely been bad. It was all so clear now. It was all so right.

  He slept with the note under his pillow that night and dreamed of a place where the buildings were gay with scrolled ironwork and the river flowed darkly past and soft laughter went on all night, every night. He roamed the streets and the alleyways and courtyards, a sweet, rotten, coppery taste on his tongue.

  The next day he put the note back in the drawer in case Mother ever looked there, but when he was alone in the house he took it out and read it again and again, holding the paper to his face, pressing it against his mouth, trying to catch the scent of the place it had come from. For that was where he had been born. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine the hand that had shaped those spindling black words, for that hand belonged to someone who knew him, who had held him. In the veins of that hand, his blood might flow.

  And he ceased to be Jason. He became Nothing, for that was what the note named him. He still answered to Jason, but the name was like an echo of a half-forgotten life. I am Nothing, his mind whispered. I am Nothing. He liked the name. It did not make him feel worthless; on the contrary, he began to think of himself as a blank slate upon which anything could be written. The words he inscribed on his soul were up to him.

  He grew taller, and some of the flesh of childhood melted from his bones. He was truly Nothing now; he knew it. When in junior high school he finally made friends—not friends who could share his soul, but friends who understood a little better than anyone else ever had, other skinny pale kids, hippie and punk kids, kids in black T-shirts and leather jackets and smudgy makeup shoplifted from the drugstore at the mall—he told them to call him by that name.

  The house was cold tonight. His room was the coldest of all. He shivered again, then threw off the quilt and pulled on gray sweatpants and an old black sweater with holes at the elbows. The Tom Waits album had finished playing and turned itself off. The hiss of the empty speakers filled the room, too loud here in the dark.

  Nothing rummaged through his backpack and found the cassette Julie had given him. It came from far away down south, and only five hundred copies of it had been printed—it was numbered on the liner, 217 of 500. But somehow one copy had ended up in a record store in Silver Spring, a nearby town, where Julie had picked it up.

  He put it on now. The singer’s voice wove in and out of the jangly guitar line, now losing itself in the music, now as strong and golden-green as some Appalachian summer mountain stream.

  Does your road go no place?

  Does it go someplace where you can’t see?

  If you follow it anyway

  It just might lead you here to me …

  Nothing sat on the edge of the bed and hummed the words under his breath, his head tilted back, his eyes searching the stars and planets on the ceiling. He thought of Julie taking the tape from her purse and handing it to him; he thought of Laine, sucking him off with innocent abandon.

  Somewhere in the music, perhaps outside the window in the cold night, somewhere above the melody and under the moon, those lonely little ghosts started whispering to him again: You’ve got to get out of here. You’ve got to find your place, your family, before you rot and die.

  “All right,” he said after listening for a while. “All right.” All at once he knew he had to leave. It was inevitable, and he wondered what he had been waiting for. He would go south, looking for what he wanted, hopefully knowing it when he found it. Maybe he would even hook up with the musicians from Lost Souls? The name of their town was fascinating: he pictured it as a mysterious southern crossroads, a hamlet where the ordinary became exotic. He had found it on a map of North Carolina, a tiny dot between the mountains and the sea, a town whose streets Nothing pictured as dusty and strange, whose shops were crammed with dark secondhand treasures, whose graveyards were haunted, whose moon rose full and honeyed behind the lacework of towering pines.

  He said the name to himself and shivered: Missing Mile.

  Nothing crossed his dark room and let himself into the hall. His parents were out somewhere—a consciousness-raising group, a holistic health class, an expensive dinner with other people like themselves. Their bedroom door was ajar, and the room within smelled of perfumed soap and aftershave. The odors struck him as stinging and chemical. They said his room smelled bad.

  His fingers searched the bottom of the dresser drawer, familiar by now, and found the note at once. Its presence in his hand was comforting, its ink faded, its edges soft and ragged from all the times he had held it over the past three years. He slipped it into his pocket. He considered the collection of crystals on top of the dresser, then picked up the one he liked best, a piece of rose quartz. He curled his hand around it. No, he decided; it was too tainted with Mother’s touch, with her antimagic. After a few minutes of hunting he found Mother’s cache of emergency money in her jewelry box and took that instead. A hundred dollars. It wouldn’t last until he got where he was going, but it would help. After that—Well, after that I’ll find something else, he told himself.

  Next he used the phone. Jack wasn’t home, but Nothing called around and found him at Skittle’s, the pizza shop downtown where his friends hung out at night. “Can you drive me to Columbia?” he asked.

  “Gas isn’t free, dude.” Jack was eighteen, had a fake ID that got him served at the liquor store, and considered himself the lord of the local scene.

  “I can pay you. I have to catch a bus. I’m getting the hell out of here.”

  “Folks giving you too much shit, huh?” Jack didn’t wait for an answer. “Okay, I can take you tonight. Five bucks for the gas if you got it. Meet me here at midnight.”

  How far could you ride a Greyhound for ninety-five dollars? Far enough to start with. “Thanks, Jack,” he said. “See you at midnight.”

  “Hey, Laine wants to talk to you,” Jack said, but Nothing was already hanging up.

  Back in his room he huddled under the quilt. It was only nine o’clock; he could sleep for a couple of hours before walking into town to meet Jack and the others. But his mind would not shut down. His eyes would not stay closed. Even the whiskey didn’t help; he realized he was maddeningly sober.

 
; He rolled over, hugged himself, then felt under his mattress and pulled out a single-edged razor blade. Gently, lovingly, he pulled the edge across his wrist. A thin line of crimson welled up, beading and running, bright against the pale tracery of old scars. Nothing lay under his charred quilt in his own safe room for the last time, and he sucked at his own blood because that was what comforted him, what he had always done when he grew too lonely, too hungry for something he did not know. He lay there with his mouth tight against his wrist, praying to the juju in his room: Come with me. Stay with me on the road until I find what I’m looking for, because now I’m going to be more alone than ever.

  At last, when his lips were stained red and a thin pink line of blood and spit trickled from the corner of his mouth, he was able to sleep.

  7

  I’m going to be a vampire, Daddy.

  Wallace shut his eyes tight and shook his head. “Begone, Jessy,” he muttered. “Torment me no more.” His hands came up hard against the side of the brick building that housed Christian’s bar, and he pushed himself away from the wall and staggered out of the alley.

  The palms of his hands stung dully. He had left some of his skin on the bricks, and he could feel dust and grime embedded in his lifelines, his heartlines. The pain did nothing to soothe his mind, nothing to stop the cursed past from rushing back. The streets and alleys and buildings around him swam and grew dark. Now he could actually see Jessy, see her as she had been that day.…

  “I’m going to be a vampire, Daddy.”

  It was all she had spoken of for weeks. Finding a vampire to bite her, turning into one, drinking the blood of others (her lovers, Wallace supposed, the lovers he didn’t know) and turning them into vampires as well. Her things spoke of this obsession too. Jessy had always been quite a reader, turning the pages of Charlotte’s Web and the Bobbsey Twins books with scowling concentration, but now the stack of books by her bed was all vampire stories. Dracula was there, dogeared and heavily underlined. Wallace had looked at the book one night while Jessy was out at one of her haunts. Some passages were circled over and over, in pencil and lipstick and what looked like blood.

  Wallace began reading, but after a few paragraphs he was too disgusted to continue. He hadn’t known the novel was pornographic. He touched the marks on the page. They were blood. Jessy’s blood. She had been cutting herself to get at it. Wallace found razor blades between the pages of the book. There were other novels that looked just as lurid, and a vial of some sort of red dust that must have come from one of the voodoo shops in the French Quarter, though he’d told her not to go to those places. There were all the posters from the movies she saw, cruel eyes and gaping, razor-toothed mouths all bloody, and the walls and ceiling festooned with black lace …

  “Daddy.”

  Wallace forced his eyes open. He was not at home, standing in the hallway outside Jessy’s room. He was weaving down Bienville, breathing in the cool night air, heading for the river. But the past sucked him in again, and it was that day.…

  Jessy was calling him. For ten years they had been alone except for each other, ever since the day Wallace had found Lydia in her cooling red bathwater with her forearms slashed open from wrist to elbow. He was Jessy’s father, and he had to go to Jessy when she called. She might need him.

  “Daddy,” she called softly. “Daddy …”

  Wallace looked at the old sign on Jessy’s bedroom door—a cartoon rabbit in rainbow-spattered overalls painting the words GENIUS AT WORK—then turned the knob and stepped out of the dark hallway into brightness. Jessy’s room always caught the morning sunlight.

  She’d just come out of the shower, and her skin was as pink and white and dewy as spring. Her hair fell wet and straight along her cheeks. As he stared at her, she let the green towel fall from her breasts. Wallace had not seen his daughter’s body since she was a young child, plump and androgynous, with pink buttons for nipples and a tiny clean fold of a sex. But now her breasts were round and smooth, with a girlish heaviness to them, and Wallace wondered how it would be to cup their weight in his hands, how it would taste if he took one of those creamy strawberry peaks in his mouth and sucked.

  “I’m going to be a vampire, Daddy.”

  He could not find his voice. There was no spit in his mouth. “Put your clothes on, Jessy.” It was a dry whisper, weak and useless.

  “I’m going to bite people, Daddy. I’m going to feed on them. I need blood. Hot … rich … red blood. I need your blood, Daddy. I’m hungry. Your Jessy’s hungry. Come to me.”

  He did not know how he got to the bed. Surely if she had not cajoled so, if she were not his daughter, his only joy, if he had not always tried to give her everything she asked for … surely if he had lain with some other woman in the ten years since Lydia was gone … surely then, if the ache in his groin had not come bursting forth, he would not have let her lay him out and undo his trousers and straddle him, slipping around him as smooth and tight as sea anemones. Surely he would not have groaned and squeezed her heavy soft breasts between his fingers and thrust up and up into his daughter’s wet-velvet heaven until she bent over him and he felt a metallic sting as of a razor blade beneath his jaw. Jessy fastened her lips there. He felt her throat working as she swallowed. Then a black and crimson mist began to drift into the edges of his vision.

  He awoke tangled in Jessy’s rumpled sheets that smelled of girl-skin. There was a nick on his throat, no worse than a bad shaving cut, smeared with dried blood and spit. He did not wash it. Jessy was gone.

  After a few nights he began to look for her in all the places she had mentioned. All the nighttime haunts, the dark bars and clubs in the French Quarter. He did not know what he would say if he saw Jessy. He had begun to feel as if the thing that had happened were his fault, as if he had seduced her. As if he had forced himself into her. He did not know whether he would be able to meet his daughter’s eyes. But that did not matter, for he never saw Jessy again.

  More and more often during his search, he found himself drawn to the place called Christian’s, the dark bar with the stained-glass windows that threw colored shadows onto the sidewalk. It was a little place way down Chartres, away from the life of the Quarter. He came here because he knew Jessy had liked the place, and he decided he might as well have a drink or two or three. He watched the bartender. Christian moved behind the bar, mixing drinks with detached expertise, answering his customers’ chatter politely if rather coldly. Unless someone spoke to Christian, he was silent.

  When Wallace watched Christian, studied the impossibly tall, gaunt, pale figure always dressed in black, the idea of Jessy’s vampires no longer seemed quite so preposterous. Something about Christian frightened him. Wallace thought of himself as a religious man, but when he was in that chilly presence, God’s warmth seemed to shrivel inside him. One night their eyes met across the bar, and Wallace felt his spine turn to ice. The coldness in Christian’s eyes—that awful, empty coldness, like winds blowing across barren plains—was more convincing than all Jessy’s talk, her books and movies, her fevered drinking of blood.

  Wallace could not forget those eyes. When he’d seen them again tonight, he had felt the same icy hand, the same helpless fury. Wallace believed in vampires now.

  Tonight, though, he would not be helpless. Fifteen years ago he had been afraid. His fear no longer mattered, not now. The finger of God had touched him, a fearful, excruciating touch that wrenched his insides and sometimes drew thin dirty blood from them, and soon he would be with Jessy. Tonight he would avenge her, and he would have his memories of her again, his memories of a child who danced and laughed, of a child who loved him, who was not a dark creature of sex and blood. He would eradicate his damnable sin. He would redeem himself.

  The air sobered him. He drew himself up, refused to sway, refused to let his dizziness and fear overtake him. Tonight belonged to him, and to Jessy.

  He walked toward the river.

  8

  Twig kept up a steady string of cur
ses as they drove into DC. The streets seemed skewed to him, the signs indecipherable. Finally he turned the wrong way down a one-way street, screeched to a halt in front of a fancy hotel, and said, “That’s where we’re staying.”

  Molochai waved the parking valet over, and Twig presented him with the keys to the van. “Remember which one is ours,” he told the valet. “We want this van back, not some pussy Volvo.”

  The lobby was all plush and marble opulence, red-carpet gaudy splendor. They appreciated it not a bit. As they checked in, Molochai gaped up at the three-tiered crystal chandelier, and Twig palmed the desk clerk’s cigarettes.

  Their room was not as gaudy as the public facade of the hotel. Here on the twentieth floor there was only pale carpeting as thick and rich as whipped cream. Zillah slipped his shoes off and wriggled his toes in its creamy depths. Here were only deep, cloud-soft beds and sofas that one might drown in, falling forever, never to be seen again. Oh yes, they could have fun here.

  He drifted to the window and pulled aside heavy draperies. The city gleamed far below, green and white, immaculate. The crazy pattern of the streets was a puzzle that wanted deciphering. In the center of it all the Washington Monument soared up, as clean and stark as a bone. Zillah smiled a small secret smile. The city was delicious. All cities were delicious. They had only to wait until nightfall.