Lost Souls

by Poppy Brite

  “But he died. Yes, I came back home and he had died. My Ashley. My brother. And now I am alone.”

  “Wait a second.” Ghost’s voice was halting; there was no doubt in it, only wonder. “You came home. You were there. Why didn’t you bring Ashley back from the dead, too?”

  Arkady held the skull a moment longer. Then he knelt and slid it back under the altar. He spent some time rearranging the velvet, brushing away dust, picking up some black feathers that had fallen from the altartop to the floor. When he stood, the joints of his knees cracked as loudly as shots in the silent room.

  He met Ghost’s eyes, and when he spoke, his voice was soft and even.

  “Ashley didn’t want to come back,” he said.

  “So was it vampires that killed your brother?” Ghost asked Arkady a little later. He figured it couldn’t hurt to find out just what the twins were. Allowing for the existence of one kind of vampire, it seemed to follow that there might be other kinds, feeding on things other than blood. The existence of the first type scared him but didn’t really surprise him. All his life he had been accepting as normal things that most people didn’t even believe in.

  They were sitting in the front room, talking over a decanter of sherry that Arkady had brought out from some recess of the shop. At least Ghost hoped it was sherry. It tasted funny, musty and a little sour, but Steve was putting it away with no problem. Ghost sipped from his first glass as Arkady poured Steve’s third.

  “Vampires?” Arkady’s hand twitched; he almost dropped the bottle of sherry. He crossed himself twice, first upside down, then right side up. “Lord, child. Why do you want to know about vampires?”

  “Jesus, Ghost,” Steve muttered. Ghost glanced at him, but Steve was bent over the counter examining things in the glass case. Ball canning jars full of pale rubbery orbs, the lids labelled CATS’ EYES and TOADS’ HEARTS in a faded flowing script that must be Arkady’s. Jewelry in the shape of silver pentagrams, ankhs, razor blades. A bowl of tiny, carefully molded clay skulls marked 50 CENTS APIECE.

  “I just wondered,” Ghost said lamely.

  Arkady looked hard at him. “Ghost. My child. It is difficult to imagine you ‘just wondering’ about anything.” He clasped Ghost’s hand between both of his. Ghost resisted the urge to pull his hand from the confines of that cool parched skin, all those tiny crackling bones. “You are a far more powerful sensitive than I could ever be. I pick up bits and pieces. I can hear thoughts when they are as pure and lucid as yours. And I can do little more than that. But you—you have an eye in your heart, Ghost. An eye that shines. An eye that feels.”

  “What the fuck is he babbling about?” Steve asked thickly.

  I’m the only person in this room who isn’t at least half-drunk, Ghost thought. He made himself drink more of his sherry, though the rancid taste lay upon his tongue like a sour old blanket. Sherry got worse with every sip, it seemed.

  “I should never, never like to lose your favor,” Arkady slurred. His hand was on Ghost’s knee now. His fingers brushed skin through a hole in Ghost’s sweatpants, and Ghost shivered at that dry touch. “But vampires, Ghost … vampires! They are not to be mentioned lightly. Not as in the cheap novels, the Hollywood legends. You think vampires are the Undead, the children of the night. You believe they rise from their graves when the moon hangs high, sucking the blood of virgins, melting into misty wraiths at sunrise, turning into bats and swooping away …”

  “I don’t think they turn into bats,” said Ghost, and Steve surprised him by saying, “Me neither.”

  Arkady ignored them. “You see, Ghost child, the myths are wrong. And that very wrongness makes the creatures all the more dangerous. They are not undead. They have never died. Some of them never do, or not for hundreds upon hundreds of years. They are a separate race—or races. There are those who suck blood, those who suck souls, those who feed on the pain of others. Some of them can walk among us, free in the sunlight. Some of them are able to live as human beings from day to day, from year to year. Of course, they must move about like nomads, because after a point they do not age. They are beautiful, and they stay beautiful. And no one must notice. So they move, and they live among us, and then one day—”

  “One day—BOOM,” Steve said.

  Arkady and Ghost turned to look at him. He grinned rather humorlessly at them and filled his glass again, slopping sherry onto the counter.

  “Then one day,” Arkady continued smoothly, “they discover their particular hunger. Some may live for ten, twenty, even thirty years before the lust comes upon them. Some can digest nothing but blood, and must be fed upon it from the time of their birth. But the hunger always comes.”

  Timidly, Ghost interrupted. “How come you know so much about them?”

  “I have known vampires of all sorts,” said Arkady. “On my first visit to Paris I met a most charming one. A blood drinker. She was elegant, well-mannered, cultured. Most of them are.”

  Ghost thought of the wine-swilling, Twinkie-gobbling occupants of the black van. He tried to stretch his imagination to picture Molochai and Twig as elegant, well-mannered, or cultured. Then he shook his head. Either those two were aberrations, or Arkady Raventon didn’t know as much about vampires as he thought he did.

  “We were never lovers,” Arkady went on, “though how badly I wanted her … Richelle. Violet-eyed, though she always wore dark glasses. Even at night. Hair as black as a thousand midnights, as eyeless sockets—with tips dyed white and fuchsia. She had lived two hundred years or more, and she knew where all the underground clubs in Paris were. I could never count the nights we danced away on dark smoky floors below the level of the street—”

  “How come you didn’t fuck her?” Steve interrupted.

  Arkady lowered his eyelids at Steve and gazed coldly from beneath them. Steve glared back. Arkady poured himself more sherry. He topped off Ghost’s glass too, though it was still half full. Ghost eyed it bleakly.

  “Richelle was celibate. She had a terror of becoming pregnant. She insisted that no precautions were reliable enough. Should she conceive, she told me, it would mean the end of her.

  “We occupied ourselves in other ways. We spent whole nights driving each other mad. She tasted lovely, hot and rich and always faintly bloody. Once—only once—she took me out on a kill. She found a child begging for milk money in some gutter far from the lights of the city, and she bent as if to whisper something to the child and sank her teeth into that soft face. When she had drunk, she undressed me and smeared the child’s blood over my body. She lathered me with it. And then … then her exquisite tongue lapped me clean.…”

  “Wait a second,” said Ghost. He was afraid that soon Arkady would start panting and clutching at himself. “How come she was so scared of getting pregnant? What would have happened?”

  “Did happen,” said Arkady. “Poor Richelle; her worst fear came true. One night she went to her favorite club, the Café Zeitgeist, without me. She met a boy … just a boy, she told me. Perhaps sixteen or seventeen. She took him behind the club, into an alley. I don’t know whether she meant to feed upon him or only to engage him in her usual sort of love. She needed blood, but semen would do in a pinch.

  “For a snack, you might say.

  “At any rate, he was a randy boy. He became too excited by Richelle’s beauty. Perhaps by the smell of bloody lust she exuded. Richelle should have been able to overpower him; she was very strong, but she had drunk too much vodka—that was easy to do at the Café Zeitgeist, where they flavored the vodka with essence of rosewater. The boy ripped her dress open … and he took her by force.”

  “Fucker,” said Steve. He let his head thump down on the glass counter. “But some girls don’t hafta be raped, huh, Ghost? Some girls just …” He mumbled and subsided.

  “What would happen if she got pregnant?” asked Ghost.

  “It would have eaten its way out of her,” Arkady told him with relish. “It was half vampire. Even in the womb they are killers. Our babies
are born without teeth, Richelle told me, but even so they manage to chew their way out. Perhaps they have a set of womb-teeth. Perhaps they claw their way out with their tiny fingers. But they kill, always they kill. Just as I ripped my mother apart.

  “I begged her to see one of the back-alley surgeons, to have the child removed as one would excise a cancer, but she refused. By that time she was half-mad with fear. It would know, she insisted. It is too late. It has already started eating me—I can feel it churning inside me, shredding my womb….

  “So Richelle took a little stiletto that she sometimes wore in her boot—to slit her lovers’ veins, of course, though she could use her teeth when she wanted to. She had very sharp teeth. Teeth that could give pleasure as well as pain.

  “She tried to cut the child out of her body. I found it in the ruins of her belly, half-hidden behind coils of entrails; it was shrivelled, bloody, long dead. It was still tiny, as large as a red bean. But I found it because her fingers were cupped around it. She had been trying to pull it out. She did not want to die with it still inside her.”

  Ghost’s mind was rocketing in too many directions, rebounding off the walls of his skull. A voice in his head was saying, Wait a second, wait a second. Maybe we need to think some more about this business of killer vampire babies that eat their way out of their mothers’ wombs. Maybe we need to think a whole LOT about it. That voice was still faint, but getting louder.

  At last Ghost was about half-drunk on the sherry too. Apparently it was strong stuff if you could keep it down. So he was able to keep his voice steady when he said, “I don’t get it. Richelle was your friend. How come you’re afraid of them now?”

  Arkady lowered his eyelids. “You might say I have a bone to pick with them now. You guessed right, Ghost. Ashley’s lovers were vampires. A different sort of vampire. They appreciate the taste of blood but do not need it. They feed on willing souls; they come into your dreams and try to find a niche in your brain; but they are real, and if you let them in, they will destroy you as surely as any bloodsucker. These were Ashley’s lovers. The lovers who killed him.”

  “Where are they now?” asked Ghost.

  “They took no blood from Ashley, but they sucked from him something just as vital,” Arkady went on, apparently unhearing. “They sucked his youth, his beauty. That is what they live upon; they only feed on the lovely. They left him a husk. Ashley could never have lived without his beauty; the nerves of his skin ran to his soul—”

  He stopped, sighed, shook his head. “They are beautiful too,” he said. “They took all of Ashley’s beauty, and their own beauty remains. They rejuvenate it often. And I cannot tell you why I let them live upstairs. Perhaps I hope that one day I will have my chance for revenge. Perhaps I am simply too afraid of them to refuse them anything.”

  Ghost’s thoughts still ricocheted. His skull felt too fragile; his mind might burst it. He put a hand to his forehead, and his palm came away damp with sweat. It was the sherry, the stuffy room. But more than anything it was the tales Arkady had told. Terrible love that sucked away beauty, that could invade your dreams; babies that could only be born in blood and agony. What can we do? he wanted to ask Arkady. How can we help our friend now, before the vampires tear her apart inside and out?

  But he couldn’t say that. Not in front of Steve.

  And he was pretty sure he already knew the answer.

  27

  Nothing awoke to bright afternoon sunlight filtered through dirty glass and dusty window shades. He could see only a pair of indistinct humps beside him, and for a moment reality did another of those slow giddy rolls: he recognized no part of this place. He had never seen it before. There were no stars on the ceiling as in his old room, no thrumming of wheels and rich smell of old bloodstains as in the van.

  He hitched himself up on his elbows and blew a limp sheaf of hair away from his eyes. To his left curled Zillah, deep in his catlike sleep. On his right slept Christian, laid out straight, narrow, immensely long, his eyes and mouth shut tight. Molochai and Twig must be on the floor, cuddled in some corner. Nothing couldn’t see them, but he thought he heard their breathing, deep and moist.

  He yawned, licked his lips. What was that taste in his mouth? Fuzzy and rancid and somehow green …

  Nothing’s eyes had begun to slip shut. Now they flew open again. He pushed the covers away, scrambled over Zillah, ran to the window. He stood for a moment with the shade-pull in his hand, wondering what he would see outside, hoping it hadn’t all been a drunken dream.

  The shade clattered up. No one else in the room stirred. Nothing pressed his face to the window. Below him lay a narrow alley strewn with broken glass that sparkled in the sunlight, and beyond that stretched a vista of bright streets. Royal? Bourbon? Dimly he remembered names from last night, magic talismanic names, names of streets where anything might happen. He saw tiny dark shops that beckoned to him, and he knew how they would smell—cool and dank and spicy, full of weird treasures. He saw wrought-iron balconies hung with colored flags that fluttered and winked like some silken sea. He saw gleaming whitewashed retaining walls spotted with soft brick-red where the paint had peeled away, and behind them, crumbling buildings that must surely house spiral staircases, palely lit ballrooms, secret chambers whose walls were stained with the leavings of blood sacrifice.

  It was real, it was there, it was his. New Orleans. He had made it all the way from the false home of his childhood to the true city of his birth, to the wondrous glittering French Quarter, to the very room where he had emerged between Jessy’s blood-slicked thighs.

  Christian had arrived before them and secured their lodging. The bar—the legendary bar where Zillah had met Jessy, had made love to her among the dusty cases of wine and liquor—was closed, its windows boarded up, but Christian’s room was still empty and he had no trouble renting it again. The landlady showed it to a prospective taker or two, Christian said with a glimmer of amusement, but they told her it smelled funny.

  The room of his birth. The thought made Nothing turn away from the window and stare into the dimness of the room. His eyes flicked from shadow to shadow. He wondered if the wraith of his mother would drift out of a corner, whispering to him: You killed me, my baby. In this room you killed me. On this very floor.

  But whatever wraiths lived here were silent. Nothing crouched to examine the threadbare carpet, but if the stains of his gory birth remained, he could not see them in this half-light.

  He decided not to wake the others. He wanted to explore the strange but somehow familiar maze of streets by himself. A small thrill of anarchy went through him as he tore a page out of his notebook and wrote a message to Zillah: Back by tonight was all it said. He signed it, the point of his t a dagger, the tail of his g an extravagant loop. This was the name Christian had given him, the name that undeniably belonged to him now. He would write it every chance he got. He signed the note again, then a third time, making the letters sprawl wildly across the page: Nothing, Nothing, Nothing. In this room Christian had held him all blood-slimed, had given him his name. Now he would go out and discover the streets that were his home.

  When his sneakers hit the cement, it was as if the whole of the French Quarter jarred through his bones. Last night in the hazy hours after their arrival, he had been dazzled by the carnival of Bourbon Street, drunk on Chartreuse. Now, sober and clear-headed in watery afternoon sunlight, he wanted to bound through these old streets shouting I’m here, I’m here! He wanted to embrace each ornate lamppost and street sign, to fly from every balcony. The French Quarter was his, every ancient brick, every heady drop of it.

  He pulled a pair of cheap sunglasses from his coat pocket and put them on. He’d taken to swiping them from convenience stores and gas stations in lieu of Lucky Strikes, which he’d almost stopped smoking. The cigarettes just didn’t taste good anymore. His newest pair of shades had small round frames with rainbow-mirrored lenses; they made him feel like John Lennon in his trippier days. It was good to keep a cou
ple of pairs of sunglasses on you all the time. Daylight didn’t hurt him and the others as it did Christian, but it could give them a headache that pulsed red and maddening behind the eyes.

  Nothing wandered the streets and the sidewalks for hours. A string of purple Mardi Gras beads was draped over a wrought-iron gatepost, left over from the carnival in the spring, a garland to welcome him home. He fastened it around his throat.

  He visited St. Louis Cathedral with its dizzy vaulted ceilings and its thousand votive candles flickering in stained-glass light. In the cathedral’s gift shop he palmed a rosary and added it to the beads around his neck; the two strands jangled against each other, then nestled together in an uneasy camaraderie of sacred and profane.

  He sat at the Café du Monde and sipped a cup of coffee shot through with hot steaming milk. He wandered to the top of the levee and looked down upon the surging brown river. My mother’s bones lie there, he told himself. And they do not rest, they drift and break apart and come back together year by year, and they never rest.

  When shadows began to stretch across the sidewalks and tired eyes watched his progress past the doorways of the bars, Nothing retraced his steps toward Christian’s room. The others would be ready to wake by now. Christian might accompany them on their rounds tonight, or might find some other way to amuse himself, since he no longer needed a job. “We get money in other ways,” Zillah had told him coolly when he proposed going back to work at some bar.

  They would descend upon the French Quarter, reeling from bar to bar, singing down Bourbon Street with their arms around one another’s shoulders. In the company of Molochai, Twig, and Zillah, Nothing was served drinks without a second glance. The taste of Chartreuse was magical, fragrant and heady beyond imagining; yet somehow it also tasted natural to him, as if he had been weaned on the blazing green liqueur. Already it felt as if they had been here forever.