by Poppy Brite
Ghost stood in the doorway a moment longer, pulling his hair over his face, staring through its pale curtain into the room. He didn’t want to know what the shape was. He wanted to pull the door shut, go on down the hall to the bathroom, and get back to bed. With Steve asleep beside him, he would not be afraid.
But he had to know what was going on here, whether this was a safe place or not. Before he could think about it any more, he made himself walk to the foot of the bed and prod the shape with one finger.
A pillow, wadded into a hard little knot. That was all it was. For a second he was glad Steve was in the other room passed out, not here to see him getting spooked over a pillow. Then he wished Steve were here, even though he knew Steve would call him a pussy. Steve hadn’t been laughing at much of anything these days. Even tonight. Usually when they went on a real bender, they would start remembering stuff they had done when they were kids, making stupid jokes, imitating each other. “Fuckin’ shit, Steve, you sure are sucking down that fuckin’ brew,” Ghost would say, and Steve would reply imperturbably, “Yeah, but I can feel the spirit of the beer inside me.”
But tonight Steve had swilled his beer silently, staring into its golden depths, at the mirror behind the bar, at the colored lights out on Bourbon Street. When he met Ghost’s eyes, he would not hold the gaze. But before Steve looked away, Ghost had seen stark terror in his eyes.
Ghost picked up the pillow and smoothed it out. As he was about to toss it back onto the bed, he saw the strands of hair clinging to the linen. He picked a few of them off—they were brittle, translucent—and held them up to the moonlight, trying to see their color. Some of the strands were clear ruby-red. Some were bright bleachy yellow. Neither color looked natural.
Over to his right, the closet door creaked and swung halfway open.
Ghost looked at it, his head lifted high, his nostrils flaring a little. The door was tauntingly still, trying to pretend it had been halfway open all the time. Trying to pretend a sudden gust from nowhere had swept through the room. Trying to pretend the floor wasn’t level and it had just happened to swing open while Ghost was standing there alone in the middle of the night.
Ghost wasn’t fooled. He moved toward the closet and put his hand on the knob. When no one twisted it from the other side, he yanked the door wide open.
For one terrible second he thought something was drifting toward him, some bright many-armed wraith. Then he saw that the closet was haunted only by clothes, strange, beautiful clothes of colored silk. Were they dresses? Shirts? Ghost took a sea-green sleeve between his thumb and his forefinger, rubbing the slippery sensuous cloth, wondering. Loose hangers kissed softly against each other.
Who wore these rich clothes? He pulled a swath of rose-colored silk toward him and buried his nose in its cool depths. The cloth was saturated with the smells of strawberry incense, of clove cigarettes, of wine, of tangy sweat.
The smells drew him in.
And as he breathed the heady mélange, a voice whispered to him from the depths of the closet: “Ghost … easy …”
He was never sure how he got out of the room and made a wrong turn down the hall. Maybe he meant to go racing back to his room; maybe he meant to lock himself in the bathroom and stay there all night. He never meant to barge into Arkady’s bedroom—that much was certain. But all at once there he was, and there was Arkady burning a candle on his nightstand, playing with several little heaps of colored powder on a white plate, pushing them into intricate convoluted patterns of arrows, curlicues, lines, and crosses.
When Ghost slammed into the room and leaned panting against the door, Arkady looked up and smiled. All the colored powders fell back in a bright spray across the plate. “What a lovely surprise,” said Arkady. “Well. Not precisely a surprise, since I heard you coming down the hall. But I am ever so pleased to see you nonetheless.”
First, Arkady made Ghost swallow a tranquilizing powder. Ghost didn’t want it, but in the end it was easy to make him swallow it: Arkady just slipped inside Ghost’s mind and pushed. Usually he would not have tried such a thing on a sensitive as powerful as Ghost, but the boy was terrified and exhausted. It was easy.
Then he made Ghost tell his tale: the whole thing, vampires and all. It was more convoluted and full of pain than Arkady could have guessed. Ghost’s hands twitched all the way through the telling; he tugged his pale hair over his eyes, and more than once Arkady heard a sob catch in his throat.
At last Ghost fell silent. He tried to remain sitting, but his head kept drooping and his eyes threatened to slip shut. Arkady saw Ghost’s hands clenching into loose fists: the poor boy was trying to will himself to stay awake.
With a light finger Arkady touched Ghost’s lips, those lovely lips so pale, so delicately lined, tucked in at the corners with worry and fear. Under his touch he felt Ghost’s lips tighten. Ghost was exhausted, nearly asleep; most likely he did not know who touched him. Nevertheless, Arkady imagined how it would be to slide his finger between those lips, to stroke the pink rag of a tongue, to be surrounded by the wet warmth of Ghost’s mouth. He wondered how it would he to taste Ghost’s sweet spit. Poor boy, he thought again. Poor lost boys, both of them. One trying to drown his fear in a bottle, and the other—this beautiful child—trying to confront it all alone.
“Poor boy,” murmured Arkady. “You are very brave, Ghost. Dreadfully, achingly brave.” He stroked the smooth curve of Ghost’s throat, feeling the flesh shudder beneath his touch, then let his fingers stray between the neckband of the voluminous tie-dyed shirt Ghost wore. When Ghost had come slamming into the room, Arkady’s heart melted for the child standing there trembling in that enormous shirt that made him look so terribly young. He had wanted to hold out his arms to Ghost.…
Why deceive himself? He had wanted to bewitch Ghost and lure him into bed, to drive him pleasure-mad, to drown him in a sea of silk sheets and feather pillows. It wasn’t as if he meant to seduce the boy—but might they not offer each other a night of creature comfort, a night of companionship? Ghost would not have to lie awake beside his poor drunken friend, pondering fate, bloody births, lost souls. Arkady would not have to sit up all night tracing useless vévés by candlelight, hoping for things he might never attain. Hoping to look up and see the beautiful proud face of his brother Ashley floating outside the window, begging admission with those eyes. Hoping to discover a way to hurt Ashley’s lovers, those two lovely dangerous creatures who would surely destroy him someday.
Arkady thought of what those creatures had done to Ashley. Might that story not win Ghost’s sympathy at least? The tranquilizing powder had made Ghost’s body somnolent, sapped the strength from his muscles, but his mind would still be alert. Absently caressing Ghost’s rigid shoulder, Arkady began to tell the tale.
“They gave you a bad scare, Ghost, did they not? In the guest room. In the closet. Ah, but you were snooping. You should never have looked in there—not with your gift. Not with that shining eye in your heart. They are far too strong, far too heady for one who feels things as you do. They are not even in that room, Ghost. Not tonight, though they will be back in the morning, or the next morning, or the one after that. Who knows? The Lord—” Arkady crossed himself with his free hand, upside down then right side up—“the Lord alone knows where they are tonight. What strange new substances they have swallowed or sniffed or shot into their perfect ruby veins, or whom they have found to love.
“Whom they have found to love.
“They leave their essence everywhere they go. It must be dreadfully strong in that closet where they throw their dirty clothes, the clothes full of their sweat, their smoke, their sweet clove-scented ectoplasm. Did that drift out at you, Ghost? Do they know you, perchance? Have you met? Or did they just speak to you as one lost soul to another? Ah, but you must not be afraid of them. To you they are as harmless as a forgotten song on an antique record. To you they are as harmless as a rotting old gravestone. It is me they can hurt. It was Ashley they could hurt, and whoev
er they have found to share their deadly ecstasy tonight.
“That is what they want, Ghost. Nay—that is what they need, for they feed upon your pleasure and your terror and your pain. They must terrify you, as they do the children who are their victims; they must enter your dreams and give you a nightmare so horrible that you never awaken from it. But their greatest pleasure is not to terrify—it is to bewitch. They want you to love them; it makes the final moment of betrayal sweeter. They must come to you in the flesh and make love with you. They must lure you down onto some ancient stained mattress, or beneath a silken coverlet, or into an alley where they will kneel before you in the filth. You must become addicted to their spit; you must breathe their scent until you are intoxicated.
“Only then will they consummate their love for you as they did for Ashley—by sucking you dry. By taking every drop of your beauty, your youth, the fire that drives you. By leaving you a husk, a dry, living shell. As they did to my brother Ashley.
“I found him when I returned home from Paris at the end of that long dying winter. We had been living in a church down by Bayou St. John, an abandoned place. Ashley hanged himself in the bell tower. He had no choice, truly; Ashley was born with a healthy dose of the Raventon dramatic flair. He hung there for a week before I came home. He knew I would be back—I never broke a promise to Ashley—but he could not wait.
“When I cut his body down, I saw why. It was as dry and twisted as a mandrake root. Ashley had been dead seven days, but nothing in him had rotted except his eyes and his tongue. There was nothing else left to rot—they had sucked all his juices out. He rustled in my arms as I cut the rope, and when I lifted him down and laid him on the floor of the bell tower, he rattled like a sack full of bones. His mouth was stretched open; his lips were bloodless, pulled away from his teeth. Teeth that had gone the color of old ivory. Far back in his head, his tongue lay withered. His hair was colorless, drifting. And his eyes—the eyes I wanted to die for when they tilted up to meet mine—those eyes … they were gone. Those eyes were gone, and Ashley looked at me out of the darkness of his shrivelled brain, and his face flaked away when I touched it.
“His lovers were still there, living on the top floor of the church, burning incense to mask the faint smell of Ashley’s decay. For seven days they had let him hang with his face sifting to dust and his eyes moidering. When I descended from the bell tower cradling Ashley’s skull—the flesh fell away from it as easily as old crumbling parchment—they were making love on a dirty mattress they had dragged in. Biting throats, clutching hands, laughing and sobbing with their pleasure. I sat with Ashley in my arms and waited for them to finish. At last one of them looked up at me and said It was easy for him, Arkady. As easy as breathing. And the other one told me, Death is easy. You should know that, Arkady. Death is easy.”
Ghost had been drifting back to sleep, his head pillowed on his arms; dreaming the story more than hearing it, his mind filling with pictures of the boy’s withered body on the long-ago roadside, the giant oak tree up on the hill, the final image of his dream in the car that had frightened him so badly—the twins lying side by side on the stained mattress, their skin drying and cracking, their beauty spent. Now he looked up and said sleepily, “Death is easy?”
Somehow, Arkady sensed, those words were familiar to Ghost. But he smoothed pale strands of hair from Ghost’s brow, and Ghost let his head sink back down.
Perhaps Ghost really would stay with him tonight. Perhaps Ghost wanted to drown in this bed. Surely such a thing was possible. Ashley was the beauty of the Raventons, to be sure, but Arkady too possessed the high clear forehead and the sharp proud cheekbones, if not the sparkling burgundy hair or the unbelievable eyes, those depthless eyes. Perhaps Ghost wanted to sigh in Arkady’s arms, to writhe and moan beneath the ministration of Arkady’s lips. It had been so very long.
The twins could still lure Arkady into their bed on occasion, because they were beautiful and he was alone. But he hated them for what they had done to Ashley, and he was afraid of the hold they already had upon him. And there was no one else. Not until now, not until this nervous magical Ghost-child with the pale blue eyes, the ragged clothes from some fantastic thrift shop, the translucent hair that fell across his eyes as he slept.
“Asleep, Ghost?” Arkady whispered. “Perhaps not yet.” He bent and kissed the corner of Ghost’s eye as lightly as he would have plucked a spider from its web to dry and grind for gris-gris. His tongue flickered across the silken scrap of Ghost’s eyelashes, then slid down Ghost’s cheek and sought passage between those exquisite lips.
Every nerve in Ghost’s body seemed to come instantly alive, tensing, uncoiling. He flew off the bed backward and landed in front of the door, back pressed flat against the wood, chin lifted and nostrils flared wide. Even his eyelids seemed to tremble. His eyes met Arkady’s and locked there, large and scared, aglow with pale blue fire.
Arkady held the look for a long moment. Then he let his gaze flick to the window, and he lifted one bony shoulder in a tiny, unconcerned shrug.
“She’ll die, Ghost. Unless that foetus comes out soon, its growth will be too far gone. This is no vulnerable morsel of meat to be scraped out by any back-alley abortionist with a curette and a roll of dirty cotton. Try that, and it will rip open her womb even sooner.
“No. You must poison it. Otherwise it will grow, and Ann will die, and perhaps your precious Steve will die too. Guilt twists a man, Ghost. You cannot protect him forever. He may bleed his life away in a car crash, or pick a fight with someone who carries a razor in his boot—the Vieux Carré is full of them. Or perhaps a slower death. A pickling of the liver? An insult to the brain? Death can come in a bottle, Ghost. And I think Steve has already opened that bottle and taken the first swallow.
“You must poison it, Ghost. To save Ann. To save Steve.” Arkady paused, then delivered the bitter coup de grace. “I know the recipe. I developed it after Richelle died. I can help you … if I wish.”
Arkady twitched the sheets back. They made a tiny dry rustling sound, like long linen wrappings falling away from a mummy’s face, like dead moth wings dusting down. Ghost jumped a little at the sound. With both hands he raked his hair, pulling it in front of his face. Arkady saw him shudder.
Then his back straightened, and his shoulders squared, and his eyes flared dark once and then were as pale as before.
“Okay,” he said.
Those few steps back to the bed were the worst Ghost had ever taken. He felt the floorboards under his bare feet, coated with a dry and silken dust. Arkady’s skin would feel that way against his own. Arkady’s hands would caress his soul; Arkady’s tongue would explore his brain.…
He would not think about it. He would think about singing at the Sacred Yew, with Steve going wild on guitar. Back when things were simple. That was what he would do. “Okay,” he said, refusing to hear his own words. “I’ll do whatever you want.”
He was onstage now, clutching at the microphone, ready to let his voice flow. But Arkady’s papery lips clamped over his mouth, sealing it. Arkady’s tongue cleaved to his, tasting of bitter herbs. Arkady’s dry touch spidered down his chest, under his T-shirt. He felt that touch in the depths of him, razoring along his backbone, turning his intestines shuddery. He began to choke.
“No,” said a voice from the dark doorway. A weary voice, a voice for speaking long after midnight, a voice to be used when all paths are blocked, when castles have fallen to ruin, when morning will not come again.
Ghost’s eyes swept the darkness. “Steve?” For the voice was Steve’s, and the smell was Steve’s too, the clothes stiff with drinking-sweat. But the smell of lonely desperation was gone. There was exhaustion, and fear, and the damp secret scent of sorrow. But beneath those was something new, something Ghost hadn’t caught from Steve for a long time. A vibration more than a scent. A tremor that thrummed the air between them, turned it electric, webbed it with white crackling lines of energy.
It was anger. Good
old pissed-off Steve Finn anger.
Arkady hissed air in through his teeth. “You.”
“Get your hands off him,” said Steve. He gripped either side of the doorjamb, holding himself up. His hair stood up in crazy dark tufts and wings, shoved messily behind his ears, a week dirty. “Let him go, motherfucker,” he told Arkady again. “I don’t care what kind of badass juju guy you are. Right now I could reach down your throat and tear your foul black heart out. With pleasure.”
Arkady let go of Ghost.
“Come on,” said Steve. He jerked a thumb toward the staircase. “We’re leaving. We’re getting in the goddamn T-bird and going home. Ann can get torn apart from inside out if that’s what has to happen. If that’s what she wants. You’re not gonna make yourself into a whore for her.
“Or for me.
“Or for anybody. You’re too good for that, Ghost. You’re too goddamn fine.”
Steve’s eyes shone crystal-bright in the dark. Two wet lines glistened their way down his cheeks. Tear-tracks. But he stood straight, and though his hands still gripped the doorjamb and his clothes hung from him like rags on a scarecrow, he was strong. Strength vibrated from him. He had made a decision, and he would abide by it. But not alone.
Ghost went to him. After a moment Steve let his arms drop onto Ghost’s shoulders, and Steve’s tears fell into Ghost’s hair and were lost there, palely tangled. They stood leaning on each other, strength passing between them.
“Let’s go,” Steve said at last.
“Wait!” called Arkady when they were halfway down the hall.
Steve stopped but did not turn. His grip on Ghost’s arm tightened. Ghost looked back over his shoulder, drawing closer to Steve, afraid to meet Arkady’s eyes.
“You are too fine, Ghost,” said Arkady, and though his voice was only a moth-whisper in the dusty hallway, they heard him. “I did not lie when I said you were brave—dreadfully, achingly brave. You shared none of my lust, but to save your friends you would have given yourself to me. And I would have let you.
