Lost Souls

by Poppy Brite

  Ghost turned to look at Steve. Steve had pulled a plant out of the ground and was using its leaves to wipe pumpkin pulp off his face.

  “Are you okay?” Ghost asked.

  “Huh? Yeah. Why shouldn’t I be?” Steve looked at the leaves he’d been wiping his face with, held them up to the moonlight. “Poison oak. It figures. Shit.”

  “You won’t get it,” Ghost told him.

  “How do you—” Steve slapped his knees. “Okay. Okay. I won’t get it. Do we have to wait till somebody slings a rotting corpse at us, or can we go over to R.J.’s now?”

  “Sure. We can go to R.J.’s.” If Steve wanted to pretend he hadn’t heard Nothing’s parting words, if Steve had refused to notice that mouthful of sharpened teeth, Ghost wasn’t going to force it. It would catch up to Steve sooner or later, and then all hell would break loose.

  The lights were bright at the party. Terry Buckett answered the door wearing a pair of long johns with psychedelic peace signs painted all over them. He took one look at Steve, pointed over his shoulder, and said, “The keg’s that way.”

  They found it out on the back porch in a garbage can full of ice. As Ghost was pumping it, R.J. caught up with them. His Dracula makeup was smudged on his nose where he kept pushing his glasses up. “We’re having a vampire film festival,” he explained, supporting himself against the porch railing. “They’re just finishing up Near Dark, that one’s real cool. You missed The Lost Boys.”

  “Fuckin’ shame,” said Steve darkly, draining half of his first beer.

  R.J. put a dripping cup into Ghost’s hand. He sipped it, tasting the tingling foam and the barley funk and something metallic. Something metallic and red—No. The beer was clear, white and golden, pure. He swallowed that mouthful in a hurry. Then he drank off the rest of the cup.

  Ghost sat on the floor and drank two more cups of beer. Vamp was on now. All the vampires seemed to be aged, running a honky-tonk joint, the remainders of a glorious race. He tried to talk to Monica when she walked by, but she was dressed as the Raven and would only say “Nevermore.”

  He was about to go in search of some fruit juice when Steve loomed in front of him, swaying slightly, reeking of beer, his T-shirt stained with it. Steve grabbed Ghost’s hands and pulled him up. “Let’s go.”

  They staggered out to the T-bird, Steve leaning most of his weight on Ghost. When Steve tried to get behind the wheel, Ghost said, “Uh-uh. I’m driving.”

  Steve put the keys in his hand without argument. Ghost slid in and cranked up the engine. Beside him, Steve lay against the passenger door, eyes slitted, staring up at the night sky.

  Ghost reached over and touched Steve’s shoulder. “Steve. Hey, Steve. Where we going?”

  “New Orleans,” said Steve without looking away from the stars. “Drive.”

  23

  “She’s going to what?” said Molochai when Christian told them.

  “Again?” said Twig. “What would we do with a baby?”

  “We could eat it,” Molochai offered.

  Zillah grimaced. “Eat my baby! Are you mad?” After a moment’s reflection he added, “Nothing and I might eat it, but you couldn’t have any.”

  “Zilllllaaaah …”

  “Pleeeeeezzze? …”

  “Not one drop. Not one pink sugar drop.”

  They might eat it, too, thought Christian. They just might, even if it was Nothing’s half-brother or -sister. The idea did not strike Christian as particularly immoral, but it made him sad. He stood silently before them, considering Zillah. Those eyes, and the perfect pink lips twisted in amusement or disgust, and his entourage clustered around him.

  For a moment Christian almost disliked them. Not Nothing, but the other three. He hated their insouciance, their cheerful cruelty. They didn’t care about the girl. Their time in Missing Mile was done. They would go on to New Orleans and carry on their never-ending party without a backward glance. It did not matter to them that another girl’s belly would swell with a malignant child, a child that would eventually rip her open and bleed her dry.

  “You must get rid of it,” he had told her. He’d been out behind the trailer cutting the last roses of the season. The bushes were dry now, brown and gnarled. Somehow he would have to stretch his income from the bartending job to pay the rent on the trailer and buy the sweets and liquor that the others throve upon.

  Nothing had already offered to look for a job; he was good-hearted, but what place would hire a boy who looked so young and so strange? And Molochai, Twig, and Zillah were used to their luxurious nomadic life, travelling from city to city, living off the blood and money of their kills. But in Missing Mile there were no wealthy victims. There were only drifters and bastard children and travellers who had lost their way.

  As he was cutting the last rose, a great frothy pink-orange thing whose veined petals curled delicately into red at the edges, the girl Ann came up behind him and touched his sleeve. Christian had seen her near the trailer before, trying to look through the windows, tugging at the doors of the black van. He had not known precisely what had happened between her and Zillah. When she told him, Christian’s heart sank. Had Zillah grown up not at all in fifteen years? Had he never heard of condoms?

  “I’ll have a beautiful baby,” she said. “With green, green eyes.”

  “It will kill you,” he told her. “They’ll leave you and you’ll be alone, and it will kill you.” He turned to face her, the huge rose in one hand, a rusty pair of scissors in the other. “Listen to me. You have to get rid of it. You must.”

  “Why?”

  Christian met her eyes. Ann’s eyes danced like spiders; they gleamed, empty of reason. She had not looked that way a month ago at the Sacred Yew. Already Zillah’s essence was infecting her as it had infected Jessy.

  He could tell her the truth. That Zillah was of another race, a race whose seed was bloody poison. That Zillah’s baby would rip her apart inside and she would die as Jessy had died fifteen years ago, her thighs sticky with blood, her eyes rolled back silver-rimmed in her head. Yes, he might tell her all that. She was already mad enough to believe it. But if she knew what danger she was in, she might tell someone else. She might convince someone. And that would endanger Nothing, would endanger Zillah and the others. The young, the fine, the fire of a dying race. No. He could not betray them.

  “You must get rid of it because he will leave you,” Christian said lamely. “You’ll be alone.”

  “I’ll follow them wherever they go,” Ann said. “I’ll follow Zillah.”

  Her hair hung loose about her face, straggling, bright as flames. She was just a girl. A girl like Jessy, a human girl who should have a life without fear or pain caused by the whims of others. A girl who should have healthy children that she could live to care for. Babies she could nurse at her breast; babies that would not feed upon the tissue of her innards.

  Christian knew he could not let the others leave him a second time. He could not watch that black van disappear down the road and wonder whether he would ever see it again. If they left Missing Mile, he would follow them. They would protect him from Wallace Creech. And if Ann followed too, perhaps he could convince her. Perhaps there would be some way to keep her from giving birth to another of Zillah’s beautiful, deadly children.

  “They’ll go to New Orleans,” he told her. “To the French Quarter.” There; it was done. She might follow them; she might find them. She might not.

  Christian turned away toward the trailer. He did not look back at the girl who stood by the rosebushes, the girl with funereal black lace tied in her bright hair. The girl who even though there was no physical resemblance, none at all, reminded him so strongly of Jessy fifteen years ago.

  The same bewitched light shone in her eyes.

  24

  After they left the Halloween party, Ghost drove to Ann’s house. Her Datsun was not parked in the driveway, but her father’s red Buick was. Ghost didn’t want to talk to Simon Bransby, not tonight, not about all
this. And he could see that there was no light on in Ann’s corner room.

  Ghost swung past the Greyhound station over by the old Farmer’s Hardware store. Ann’s car was in the parking lot, but it already looked abandoned. The bus station was dark; no one sat on the lone bench out back. The southbound night bus came through Missing Mile every night at 10:05. It was long gone.

  Ghost drove back to Burnt Church Road, grabbed their toothbrushes and Steve’s bag of pot, and pointed the car out of town. He could think of nothing better to do. New Orleans, Steve had said, and Ann was probably headed there too.

  Steve slumped against the passenger door, his breathing deep, heavy, exhausted. He was in no shape to answer questions. So Ghost took N.C. 42 south out of Missing Mile without looking over his shoulder. He knew he would be back. He and Steve could travel anywhere, but they always came back to Missing Mile.

  The road made him as nervous as a racehorse. He wasn’t good at driving, not like Steve. Driving was in Steve’s blood. But the highway billowed and writhed before Ghost’s eyes; stars glittered in the rearview mirror; the moon dodged shreds of pale cloud. The night was dark, then bright, then dark again.

  Halloween night. A bad time to travel. What might be keeping pace with the T-bird? What strange eyes might mark the car’s passage? Ghost kept the windows cranked tight shut, kept his nostrils flared for trouble.

  As he drove past Miz Catlin’s place, Ghost saw a lone candle flickering in the front window. Miz Catlin knew enough to stay inside tonight, her small fire warming the good spirits and keeping the bad ones away.

  With a longing that ached in his bones, Ghost wished he were asleep between the crisp faded sheets of Miz Catlin’s guest bed. He had spent so many childhood nights in that bed, napping, waking and tossing, twining his fingers in his hair and trying to hear the quiet conversations of Miz Catlin and his grandmother in the next room. Sometimes they spoke of things he couldn’t understand, things that frightened him, names he could never recall when clear sunlight spilled through the windowpanes the next morning. Astaroth. He thought he remembered that. Or was it asafoetida? Sometimes, as old women will, they spoke of recipes and grown children and husbands strayed or buried. Still Ghost had listened rapt, turning over each word he could hear, keeping it like a jewel-colored pebble or a broken blue eggshell somewhere in his mind.

  And sometimes … sometimes they spoke of him. At those times he thought his ears would pull loose from his head and fly away, so hard did they stretch to listen.

  “He won’t ever have it easy, Deliverance. The boy’s gift is just too damn strong,” That was Miz Catlin. She meant him, Ghost. The gift was the things he knew, or felt, without having any way to know. The things he couldn’t tell just anybody, the things his grandmother always understood.

  “I know it, Catlin. Nobody with the gift ever has an easy time, ’specially not when they’re as open-hearted as my Ghost. Let that boy try to tell a lie and his forehead turns to glass.” That was his grandmother, her voice softer than Miz Catlin’s, her words softer too. “But I trust him to use it well. He’ll never hurt anybody with his gift.” Her voice had lowered then. “The only thing I worry about is, his gift might hurt him. He’ll spend his life feeling everybody else’s pain. Takes a lot of strength not to lay down and be crushed under that weight.”

  Ghost jerked awake and tossed his head. He was being lulled to sleep by voices from the past, by the night road, by the spirits drifting between midnight and dawn. As he drove past the graveyard outside Corinth, Ghost saw the humped stones palely gleaming, the rags of mist that rose from the cold ground.

  He felt the hair at the back of his neck trying to stand up. Lie down and be quiet, he told it. Those graves weren’t dangerous. Even if spirits roamed there, they were just people. Frightened, maybe, because their bodies were rotting and drying and dusting away. Frightened and maybe even angry. But still people. They couldn’t hurt him or Steve. Not like some things. Some of the monsters were alive.

  Ghost thought of Miles Hummingbird. Did Miles roam tonight? Did his spirit soar on the night winds like the roar of the ocean? And would Miles have to return to his grave at dawn, summoned back by some rooster crowing, some train whistle blasting far away in the cold morning? Ghost tried to send his mind into the night, out where Miles or Miz Deliverance might hear him. Help me, my dear dead, he thought. Help me stay awake. Help Steve wake up without a really bad hangover. Let him want to drive because I don’t know how much longer I can keep this steamboat on the road. Help me if you can.

  It didn’t work, not right then. But an hour later, as U.S. 1 took them down into South Carolina, Steve unfolded himself, groaned, and said, “What the fuck are you doing driving my car?”

  Thank you, thought Ghost as he went to sleep, his head leaning against the window, his eyes blessedly shut. Thanks. And good night.

  Speeding away from midnight, Steve felt good. Good because they had found a truck stop where four cups of bitter black coffee had sent his hangover to headache heaven. Good because he’d tuned in to an FM station that played classic rock all night long. He sang along with the old tunes loud enough to keep himself awake, soft enough to let Ghost sleep.

  But good most of all because they were on the road again. He was not thinking about Ann, or green-eyed Zillah (that little jerkoff, Steve’s mind automatically subtitled him), or even New Orleans. He was not brooding over the way the last few months had turned to shit. He was not thinking at all. He was only singing along with the radio, letting the cold wind whip his hair across his eyes, letting the road wash his soul clean. Heaviness fell away with each mile he left behind. He felt weightless. God, he could road-trip forever. He knew what lay at the end of the road: more of Ann’s bullshit, more fury, more pain. But the highway was home.

  After a while something began to nibble at his happiness. I’ve got maybe thirty-five bucks on me, he figured. My last paycheck from Whirling Disc, less beer money. And Ghost never carries any cash. We’re gonna need money soon.

  Okay, but there was a way to solve that problem. Dangerous. Fuckin’ renegade business. But so easy, if he could pull it off.

  Steve started scanning the roadside. Used-car dealerships, orange sodium lights glinting on rows and rows of souped-up wrecks, making them look like cars in an old black-and-white movie. A railyard, tracks crossing and diverging like some tangled puzzle of wood and iron, boxcars casting long square shadows. There, up ahead—that was what he wanted. A ramshackle little gas station, closed down for the night. And outside, the dim glow of a Coke machine. The old-fashioned kind. The kind you could jimmy. Steve pulled up in front of the store and killed the lights.

  “Don’t,” Ghost said thickly.

  “Go back to sleep,” Steve told him. “It’ll buy our beer in the French Quarter.”

  He fished through the mess in the backseat and found his trusty coat hanger, knelt, and fed it into the coin-return slot. It was about to catch … there … he could feel it nearly catch. If the Coke machine had been a girl, Steve would have been getting ready to make it come like a banshee.

  “That’s it, baby,” he muttered, and then something with a lot of weight behind it slammed into his back. Pain flared deep in his kidneys. Steve lost his balance and spilled backward into the dust of the parking lot.

  “Looks like we got us a trick-or-treater.”

  Steve twisted to meet the two most emptily gleeful pairs of eyes he had ever seen. These two made Zillah’s thug friends look like geniuses … or at least subgeniuses. They had sloping foreheads and tattoos that wound down ropy-muscled arms and spread dark tendrils over the backs of grimy hands. One of them was broad-chested with features that seemed too large and sensual for his face—a redneck Dionysus. The other was scrawny; his colorless hair fell straight and fine from under a mesh baseball cap stitched with the Coors logo, a trusty asshole indicator if there ever was one. In one knuckly fist he gripped a hammer.

  He grinned at Steve, showing crooked little teeth. “We got
anything for trick-or-treaters, Willy?”

  Willy laughed. The sound made up in malice what it lacked in humor. “Shit, I didn’t save no candy. You got any candy, Charlie?”

  “Yeah.” Charlie swung the hammer. It whistled past Steve’s head, inches away. “I got me a big jawbreaker right here.”

  “Fuck off,” he said, struggling to his knees. “I wasn’t bothering you.” His voice sounded thin and scared. He cursed it.

  “Now will you listen to this?” Willy’s face was suddenly the picture of shocked innocence. “Asshole was fixin’ to rip off my daddy’s Coke machine in the parking lot of my daddy’s store. And he thinks we ought fuck off and leave him be. What you say, Charlie?”

  “Uh-uh.” Charlie let loose a high, toneless giggle. “I think we better beat the shit out of him.”

  The gas station didn’t belong to Willy’s daddy. With a sudden helpless fury, Steve was sure of that. They were carrying a hammer, for fuck’s sake. Why would you carry a hammer around a deserted gas station in the middle of the night? To bash in the skull of some punk city kid you caught ripping off the Coke machine? Not likely. To bust a window, maybe? To pound hell out of the cash register? Bingo, Steve congratulated himself. You win the prize. Willy’s gonna give you the Golden Ticket.

  Steve sputtered laughter. It came with no warning, hysterical and beyond control. He leaned against the Coke machine and tried to catch his breath, but he couldn’t help it. Willy was going to give him the Golden Ticket, and bang-bang, Charlie’s silver hammer was going to come down upon his head. Then maybe they could make him sqeeeeeeal like a Pig.

  Steve knew he’d better stop laughing, knew things might get real unpleasant around here if he kept laughing, but he couldn’t quit. Not until Charlie’s fist smashed into his cheekbone and the sole of Willy’s boot came down on his ribs. Or maybe it was Willy punching him in the face and Charlie stomping his ribs. It didn’t matter.