Lost Souls

by Poppy Brite

  “Yup,” said Twig. “Fourteen Burnt Church Road, Missing Mile, Enn Cee. Curb service, kiddo.”

  The roof of the van billowed and rippled. With an effort, Nothing focused his eyes. The streaky faces of Molochai and Twig hung over him, haggard and grinning, waiting to see what he would do.

  Where was Zillah? Asleep on the mattress nearby, his warmth close enough to touch, his head pillowed on a fold of Nothing’s raincoat. Wisps of his dry Mardi Gras hair trailed away over the black silk.

  “We could come with you,” Molochai offered generously. “We like musicians.”

  “We like you,” Twig said, the sharp tip of his tongue flickering over his lips. “It’s not often we meet a drinking man such as yourself.”

  Nothing struggled to his knees, cupped his hands to the window. He saw a small wooden house nestled among trees far off at the end of a gravel driveway. Was Ghost in that house right now, awake or dreaming? His vision seemed to shift again, and he realized that even the watery light of the early afternoon hurt his eyes. His pupils felt distended.

  Molochai turned on the tape player. As Bauhaus began blasting a live cut of “Stigmata Martyr,” Zillah came slowly and luxuriously awake. He opened first one brilliant eye, then the other, ran his hands through his silky hair, yawned and stretched his catlike body. When his eyes lit upon Nothing’s, he sat up and took Nothing into his arms and kissed him.

  Zillah’s mouth was as sour and sweet as wine, and his spit had a rich red corrupt taste. Nothing let it flow into him, drank it, took strength from it as if it were the potion in the wine bottle. That taste was everything. The taste of blood and Zillah’s spit and come and the roughplay and the drinking and all the long enchanted days and nights. Everything. Nothing still wanted to talk to Lost Souls?—he had come all this way—but he no longer ached for a family. He no longer wanted to pretend that Steve and Ghost were his long-lost brothers. He had his family now; he had chosen them and their nighttime world.

  “Come on,” he said. “You’re all going in with me.” He had asserted himself for the first time, he was becoming their equal, and he thought he saw approval in the slant of Zillah’s smile.

  He felt so good, so strong and confident, that he never stopped to think what might happen once they got into the house.

  They left the van parked near the road and made their way unsteadily up the driveway. Gravel crunched under Nothing’s feet. The house was thirty steps away. Twenty. Molochai and Twig clutched each other, trying to stay upright. Zillah’s hand brushed the back of Nothing’s neck. Nothing shivered at the touch. It made him want to be back in the van, on the mattress with Zillah, tangled, sweaty, biting again.

  But now he was so close to Ghost, he thought he felt the tendril of a golden aura touching him. The house loomed up, if such a scruffy little house could be said to loom. One shutter hung askew like the half-cynical tilt of an eyebrow. The windows were lidded, deeply humorous eyes. This house was good.

  The porch steps sagged a little under their weight. Not much; the house was old but sturdy. Someone had painted a hex sign at the threshold of the door: a red triangle and a blue one interlocking to form a six-pointed star, and in the center a small ankh traced in silver. Molochai and Twig drew back from it, still clutching each other uneasily, but Zillah cast them a look of contempt. “That thing won’t hurt you. Just step over it.”

  The door sported an incongruously fancy knocker: the face of a gargoyle wrought in silver, with a heavy ring through its nostrils and eyes that seemed about to bulge out of their sockets. Nothing used the ring to knock, first gently and then loudly, but no one stirred inside the house. He looked doubtfully at the old brown car in the driveway. Someone must be here. “Maybe they don’t want company,” he said, not sure whether the sinking inside him was disappointment or relief.

  “Try the door,” Twig suggested. Before Nothing could respond, Twig stepped up and rattled the knob himself. It would turn no more than a quarter inch in either direction. The door was locked.

  “I guess that’s it,” said Nothing. His hand, deep in the pocket of his raincoat, touched the single long bone he had found on the shoulder of the highway. Four days ago—a lifetime ago—he had set out thinking he might come here. Had he hoped to find his home in Missing Mile, at an address he had found on the liner of a tape put out by an obscure band? Now that he was here, it hardly seemed real.

  Molochai had been peering through the window next to the front door. Now he gave it a shove. It slid up with only a small groaning protest. “I found a way in,” Molochai said proudly.

  And before Nothing quite knew what was happening, the other three had climbed through the window—even Zillah, who stepped delicately over the sill and was received on the other side by the outstretched hands of Molochai and Twig. Nothing stared in at them. They grinned and waved back, daring him. But he couldn’t follow. The car was here; someone must be home. He couldn’t just let himself in, no matter how much he wanted to see the inside of the house. He couldn’t go through the window. He mustn’t. A splinter from the windowsill snagged his jeans as he went in.

  The jumble of decor—obscure, lovely jazz and acid rock posters, religious samplers, a bookshelf with volume after volume of herbal lore cheek by jowl with things like Kerouac, Ellison, Bradbury (the Bradbury books surely belonged to Ghost; Steve would never choose anything so romantic)—caught Nothing’s attention at first. Then he realized what the others were doing. Molochai and Twig were in the kitchen, ransacking the refrigerator. He heard pop-tops cracking open as they helped themselves to cans of beer. Zillah fell dramatically onto the couch and began unbuttoning his shirt with dreamy fascination, his long hair draped over the arm of the couch, streaming down.

  The passage down the hall, pale and wavering and tantalizing, held Nothing’s attention for a long time before he noticed the smell. When it finally breached his awareness, he did not recognize it at once. It was so faint—there, on a breath of air, and gone again. He licked his lips, took a shallow breath through his mouth. Although he did not realize it, he was testing the air, beginning to use sensitive scent organs that had lain dormant all his fifteen years. The scent was familiar, he had smelled it just last night, but now there was something different about it. Something foreign, more ethereal, more delicate …

  The dark metallic smell of blood. And beneath that, the bittersweet scent of rose petals.

  Now Zillah was beckoning to him from the couch. Nothing could tell from the tiny smirk on his lips what Zillah wanted, and he had to quash a tiny flare of irritation. Didn’t Zillah know how wrong it would be for them to make love in this house? Nothing could not go to him, not this time. At the end of that hall, drowning in that scent, might be Ghost. And Nothing thought that somehow the smell might be his fault. He should not have brought his new family here. He lived in a different world now, and could not cross back and forth.

  He started down that white passage.

  The hall was long. Light filtered into it from the open rooms. Someone had left the bathroom light on. Nothing reached in and turned it off as he passed, looking at the ivoried tub squatting on gryphons’ feet, the lone beer can on the edge of the sink. He was seeing things very lucidly now, aware of each detail. The air in the house was as clear as cool still water.

  Then he was at the door of someone’s bedroom. Ghost’s, it had to be. Delicate colored leaves and dead flowers were pinned to the ceiling. On the walls, in crayon and ink, pencil and Magic Marker, was a fabulous twisted riot of color—maps of real lands, maps of strange lands, faces that seemed about to speak. And words. Hundreds of words. There were words strung together in sentences and quotations and lyrics. There were words alone, written there because of their individual bright or dark glory. And there on the ceiling—above the bed, showing through a nest of brittle foliage—there were stars. A universe of stars and planets painted there, a thousand tiny heavenly bodies, yellow, glowing faintly.

  My god, I’m home, thought Nothing, and stepped
into the room. And in that instant, the figure on the bed—the figure that Nothing had not seen because it lay so still, swathed in a great heap of bedclothes, because its pale hair fell so transparent across the pillow—sat bolt upright and shrieked, “NOTHING!”

  In the living room, three heads swivelled toward the sound. Molochai’s throat stopped working in midswig, and beer cascaded over his chin. “Nothing?” he sputtered.

  “Nothing,” said Twig, nodding.

  Zillah’s eyes narrowed. “We’ll see about Nothing,” he hissed. With one fluid movement he was off the couch, disappearing into the recesses of the house. For a moment Molochai and Twig gaped after him. Then they looked at each other, shrugged, and followed Zillah down the hall.

  Steve was dreaming. Somewhere in his head Ann struggled, beat her fists against the inside of his skull, trying to force her way out. Fuck her. She could rot in there. (What the hell do you think she’s doing? his mind asked nastily, but he ignored it.) Why was she complaining? She liked to play with his mind.

  But suddenly there were teeth.

  At first he thought he had imagined the gnawing. But pain flared inside his skull, razor-sharp, ripping, and he knew. She was trying to chew her way out of his head. She was trying to eat her way out. He felt her teeth tearing at the soft meat of his brain. He clawed at his forehead, trying to stop her, trying to wrench her out before she made wounds that would never heal—

  “Jesus fuckin Christ,” he gasped, jerking himself awake. A Penthouse centerfold grinned at him from the wall above his bed, pulling her anatomy open like pink bubble gum. Steve snarled and tore it down, crumpled it, threw it into the corner.

  Ghost shrieked from the next room, his voice clear and terrified. Nothing, it sounded like he’d said.

  Nightmares for everybody this morning. Or this afternoon, more likely. What time had they finally gone to bed? No idea. A hangover began its stealthy gnawing inside Steve’s head, no dream this time, and he almost rolled over and let Ghost sleep through it. But Ghost’s dreams were always just a little too real to ignore.

  He rolled out of bed, dragged on semiclean underwear and a T-shirt that didn’t even approach a state of cleanliness. Got to do some laundry, he chided himself. Yeah, laundry, and maybe haul some whiskey bottles and beer cans out to the recycling dump, and maybe make some apologies and get his life back together while he was at it.

  That was when he heard the voices in the living room and the footsteps coming down the hall.

  Having his privacy or his belongings invaded anywhere, at any time, was enough to piss Steve off mightily. Someone had stolen the radio out of his T-bird right after he’d gotten it back in high school, and Steve had sat outside for three nights waiting for the asshole to show himself again. The asshole never had, of course. But the idea of this house, Miz Deliverance’s house, being broken into was almost unbearable. White magic had happened here. This place had sanctity, dammit.

  He had never expected anything bad to happen in this house, had vaguely thought it had a magic circle around it or something. But he hadn’t been willing to stake his life on it, so he kept a taped-up Louisville Slugger next to his bed. It reassured him, along with the claw hammer under the driver’s seat of the T-bird and the sock full of pennies he kept behind the cash register at the record store. Steve was hyperaware of the possibility that violence could erupt anywhere at any time; he supposed that meant he was really the one with the violent nature. But he was glad of it now.

  He grabbed the bat, hefted it, and stepped out into the hall.

  Right into the path of Zillah.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he had time to get out, and then the crazy green-eyed apparition was lunging at him, all bared teeth and hooked claw-hands, so Steve pulled the Slugger back and swung it straight into the fucker’s face. The crunch of bone and cartilage reverberated through the wood into Steve’s hands. It wasn’t a bad feeling.

  Green-eyes staggered back and hit the wall hard, but didn’t go down even with the fountain of blood pouring between his cupped hands. His mouth and nose were erupting blood; Steve had felt the bat take several teeth out. Two taller, bulkier figures were coming down the hall.

  Steve was afraid somebody might be in Ghost’s room too; he had to get in there first. He grabbed the bleeding figure by its long hair and one shoulder and with all his strength shoved it down the hall toward the approaching strangers. It crashed into them, spraying blood, and all three staggered and nearly went down.

  Steve ran into Ghost’s room, slammed the door behind him, and locked it.

  As Nothing approached the bed, Ghost went limp and collapsed back into the tangle of bedclothes. Reality did another slow giddy roll as Nothing stood looking down at the fair dreaming face, gone tranquil now. This was Ghost, the lost soul of all lost souls. This was his secret brother—some part of Nothing’s mind still clung dimly to that wish, though he knew now that it was not true. There was a deep scarlet rose in the lapel of Ghost’s rumpled army jacket, full blown and fragrant.

  Then he noticed the stain at the corner of Ghost’s mouth. Not much blood, not much at all. Just a drop. Ghost must have bitten his lip or his tongue. Nothing bent without thinking to lick the blood away, and Ghost’s eyes flew open and stared straight up into Nothing’s.

  “Born in blood,” Ghost whispered. “Born in blood and pain—”

  Then the door burst open and slammed shut again, and strong hands seized the back of Nothing’s raincoat and yanked him up. All at once he was flying toward the wall. His forehead caught the edge of something sharp. Tiny colored stars exploded through blackness. Blue, red, silver. All the stars from Ghost’s ceiling were showering down on him. He closed his eyes and let them land on his eyelids, tingling.

  Steve’s adrenaline rose another notch at the sight of the strange kid bending over Ghost’s bed. But he couldn’t bring himself to bash the kid’s skull in, not from behind. Instead he grabbed the kid by the back of his coat and threw him across the room. He did not know that he was screaming Ghost’s name, but later his throat would be sore.

  He turned, weighing the bat in both hands, keeping it between him and the kid, keeping himself between the kid and the bed. “What did he do to you?” he asked Ghost, who was looking dazed, not quite awake.

  “I didn’t do anything,” the kid said. “I wouldn’t hurt him, honest. Or you either, Steve.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I like your music and—”

  “Yeah? This how you usually show your appreciation for art? Breaking into people’s houses?”

  The kid looked so sad and shamefaced that Steve almost felt sorry for him. Not quite, though. The kid didn’t seem dangerous, didn’t seem to have any fight in him, and he was locked in here with Steve and the baseball bat. This kid might be the only weapon he had against those three creeps in the hall if Steve handled it right.

  “Ghost. Wake up, Ghost, WAKE UP, YOU DUMBFUCK.” Ghost would be worse than useless in your typical barroom brawl, but in mortal danger Steve suspected he could hold his own if he was fully awake.

  Ghost blinked and rubbed his eyes, trying to shake off the last shreds of nightmare. Steve edged closer to the kid, who was still sprawled on the floor staring miserably up at him. He had enormous street-orphan eyes and that phony dyed black hair that so many kids wore and Steve hated.

  “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Nothing. I—”

  “Nothing?” said Ghost. “Did you send a—” Something crashed against the door. It shuddered in its frame. The kid looked toward the source of the sudden noise. Steve reached down, hauled him up by his coat collar, and pinned his arms behind his back. It must have hurt, but he didn’t cry out; he was a tough little kid. Steve didn’t really want to hurt him. But he would if he had to. He got a good grip on the baseball bat and pulled Nothing back toward the bed.

  The object crashed against the door again—they must be using the big piece of quartz that sat in the hall; nothing el
se could make that much noise—and Steve saw the doorknob splinter loose from its moorings. Another crash and the door swung halfway open. From the corner of his eye Steve saw Ghost scrambling up in bed, pressing his back against the headboard.

  The two larger figures appeared in the doorway, supporting the smaller one between them. The entire lower half of the small one’s face was a mask of bruise and blood. His hands dangled at his sides, bloodied, the fingers clenching and unclenching. When he opened his mouth to speak, Steve saw with grim satisfaction that he had taken out most of the bastard’s front teeth.

  “You hurt my face,” said Green-eyes. Through the mush of blood and ruined tissue, his voice was low and smooth, smoother than it should have been considering how much he must be hurting. “I don’t like it when people hurt my face. We’re going to tear you up.”

  “Try it if you want your ugly face smashed in worse,” Steve said. He hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. To pull this off, he could not show an iota of fear in the presence of these creeps, even though they smelled as if they’d been eating roadkill for breakfast. Steve jerked his arm tight across the kid’s throat. He saw the light-colored roots of the kid’s hair and the tender scalp beneath, and knew that he could bring the Slugger down on it if he had to.

  Green-eyes stared at him for a moment, considering. “Let him go,” he said. “If you do, we’ll just settle our score with you. But if I have to take him away from you, I’ll rip open your pretty friend and have his intestines for breakfast.”

  “Yeah, fucker. I’m real eager to make deals with a bag of pus like you.” Steve throttled the kid a little harder and heard him choke, though he had not struggled or cried out.

  “Not ‘fucker,’ ” said Green-eyes. “Zillah. Remember the name. Remember it when you feel my teeth sink into your heart.”

  “Well, if you’re gonna sink ’em into my heart, you better go pick ’em out of the hall runner first.” Steve thought he felt the kid stifle a helpless laugh, of all things. He eased up on the boy’s throat a little.