by Poppy Brite
Whatever it was, Ashley had felt it too; it was the last thing Ashley had felt, apart from a rope around his neck. The thought gave Arkady a sick sort of comfort. He would try not to be afraid.
The twins kept climbing toward him. Now he could see the silver sheen of their eyes behind their sunglasses. He could see the minute cracks that glazed the surface of their skin. He could see the thin layer of dust that coated their tongues.
When their graceful hands were almost upon him, he uttered a low desperate cry and hurled Ashley’s skull at them. It struck the redhead’s chest and bounced away. As the first dry hand touched his cheek, Arkady saw the skull tumbling from stair to stair, down into the darkness.
The twins fed for two hours. They pressed themselves close against Arkady’s body, and every crack and pore of their skin became a tiny mouth, a minuscule suckhole, questing deep into Arkady’s tissue to extract every drop of moisture, of vitality, of whatever love might still be buried in Arkady’s bitter heart. They stopped occasionally to stretch toward each other and exchange long kisses oiled and flavored by the inner workings of Arkady. Sex was only a stopgap measure for them now, a means to an end. The usual sorts of lovemaking seemed pallid, tame. Feeding was ever so much more sensual.
Eventually the redhead sat up and yawned. The blond stopped sucking and regarded Arkady with mild curiosity. Arkady’s fingers were little more than bone now, but they still scraped weakly against the wooden floor of the landing where the twins had dragged him. The husk of his head still creaked from side to side in blind denial; the dried leaf of his tongue still thrust from his crumbling mouth, questing for a drop of moisture. There was no drop of moisture left anywhere in Arkady’s ruined body; the blond twin knew that. But they always took so long to die.
It was sort of interesting.
The redhead glanced over his shoulder, back toward the warren of rooms down the hall. “Arkady said there was a girl,” he suggested.
The blond smirked at him. “Greedy, greedy.”
“I don’t care.…”
“Let’s have a look, then.”
They tiptoed into Steve and Ghost’s room and stood on either side of the bed. There was a strong smell of blood. Arkady had left no light on, and their eyesight was not as strong as their other senses, but they did not really need it. They leaned over the bed and breathed in deep, going past the girl’s odor of sweat, blood, and sorrow, trying to scent out the pulse of life still beating.
Then they looked at each other and shook their heads.
“This girl belonged to Ghost, you know,” said the blond.
“Who?”
“Ghost! Don’t you remember? The beautiful dreamer?”
“Oh! I didn’t like him. Not our sort. Too …”
“Too asexual?”
“Too pure,” said the redhead, and they both giggled. But their laughter died as they stared at the indistinct curled form on the bed. Arkady had been so dry.
“A shame.”
“A pity. But we have a show to do.”
What Arkady had said about the twins’ being musicians was not precisely true. They were dilettantes who welcomed any chance to perform almost any act in public. Currently they had captured the affections of a local band whose Gothic act had failed to ignite the French Quarter club scene. The guitarist and former singer, Pearl, was a lovely young woman with opalescent skin, masses of dyed and crimped blue-black hair, and no hint of a brain in her head. “You’ll inject some life into the act,” she enthused. With a perfectly straight face, the blond twin had replied, “And perhaps you will inject some life into us, too.”
Pearl and the other members of Midnight Sun had agreed to let the twins front their act for as long as they wished to. Audiences were enthralled; club owners loved them. The band particularly liked the fact that the twins never took their cut of the door. They had no use for money.
At the foot of Ann’s bed they embraced. Their brittle hair drifted together; their eyes glittered silver behind the sunglasses they still wore.
“Let’s leave after the show tonight,” the redhead murmured. “Let’s blow this town.”
“But Pearl …” The blond had taken a particular liking to the empty-headed, lush-bodied guitarist.
“We can do her later. I don’t care. But let’s leave after that. My darling? Please?”
“Of course, then, anything you want. But why so suddenly?”
The redhead glanced at the bloody hump on the bed. Then he tilted his head back and smiled into his brother’s silver eyes. His grin was warm, lazy, insouciant. “Don’t you see what happened to her?” he asked. “Where’s the elegance in that? This is a trashy town.
“Too many damned bloodsuckers here.”
Out on the landing Arkady’s fingers still scraped uselessly at the floorboards. Flakes of parchment skin sifted from him with every feeble twitch. “Goodbye, Arkady dear,” said the redhead unconcernedly.
The twins picked up Ashley’s skull at the bottom of the stairs and took it with them as they left.
31
“I think this is the place,” said Steve.
They’d been out since dusk hitting all the Bourbon Street bars they had missed before. Now it was almost midnight, and they were staggering along Decatur searching for the club Arkady had told them about.
Steve backed up, stumbled into the gutter, and stared blearily up at a big black sign above a set of ironwork doors. The sign was written in enormous Gothic letters that dripped lurid red blood, the corners decorated with a delicate spiderweb motif: PASKO’S. Steve narrowed his eyes, trying to make the swimming letters come together. “Is this the place?”
“I think so,” said Ghost, swaying as a breeze from the river brushed his face. The breeze was warmer than the night air, and it smelled of oysters and pearls, of bones, of dark mud. It made him nervous and thirsty. “Um—maybe we ought to walk down to that big café and get some coffee first.”
“Yeah, us and a million tourists. Let’s go on in. We can get some more beer.” Steve shoved the doors open and dragged Ghost in.
The kid working the door was dressed entirely in black. Somehow Ghost wasn’t surprised. His skin was so pale that it glowed in the blue light of the club; his eyes were nearly obscured by smudges of greasy black makeup.
“Fi’ dollar cover tonight,” he said.
Ghost rummaged through his pockets. Things sifted out—leaves, rose petals, everything but money. The kid’s sneer deepened. He looked like Billy Idol at the end of a long, rough night. There was a tic in his right eye, barely noticeable but constant. “You fags gonna pay or what?” He spoke less with malice than extreme indifference.
Steve leaned against the wall and produced a crumpled ten-dollar bill. The kid snatched it. With courtesy exaggerated to the point of great sarcasm, he waved them in.
As soon as they entered the club, Ghost was struck by the likeness of this place to the Sacred Yew back home in Missing Mile. It surprised him. The Yew was only a little hole-in-the-wall, more progressive than most of its kind. But this was a nightclub in the big city, in the heart of the French Quarter. Ghost had vaguely expected more glitter, more jazz. Revellers in spangled cat’s-eye masks, maybe, shaking confetti from their hair. But here were only the same sorts of kids that haunted the Sacred Yew. More of them, sure, but with the same dark-rimmed eyes, the studded ears, the pale jewelled throats. The sweet smell of clove cigarettes was familiar, and their smoke swirling through blue light.
There were differences too. Pasko’s served mixed drinks; Ghost saw mysterious crimson concoctions in fancy plastic goblets full of skewered fruit and paper parasols. And they had a decent PA here, one that not even Steve would be able to bitch about. Right now it was blasting Bauhaus at shattering volume. Ghost recognized the grave, guttural voice of the lead singer.
Ann had listened to them. Ghost couldn’t remember the singer’s name or the name of the album, upon which all the songs twined together to tell a kind of horror story. Nothing woul
d know. Ghost wondered whether Nothing would be here tonight; all the children looked like him. Their long dark raincoats or too-big leather jackets enveloped their fragile bones like shadow. Most of them looked so small, so frail, ready to break like soap bubbles if you touched them. But in all those black-smudged eyes lurked a certain hardness, a wall of glass to mask their terrible vulnerability. Show me what you can, those eyes said. Hurt me if you want to. I’ve seen it all, or I think I have, and where’s the difference?
Steve was already at the bar ordering them a couple of Dixie beers. In the past few days he had developed a taste for the brand; sometimes he drank it as a chaser for his whiskey. Ghost would rather have gone to one of the all-night groceries on Bourbon Street and bought a flask of scuppernong wine. Wild Irish Rose or Night Train. He liked the syrupy thickness of the wine, and the way the fermented, rotten-sweet flavor of the grapes melted over his tongue. It reminded him of the elixirs his grandmother had mixed for him long ago: the spoonful at bedtime, the tiny liqueur glass that often sat by his plate at breakfast. He remembered her saying Drink that right down, every drop. That will stop your cough. That one will put rose petals in your cheeks. And the one he had drunk most eagerly, the one he now knew had been mostly fruit juice and sugar-syrup: This one will keep you from growing all the way up. It will preserve the child in you forever.
Fruit juice and sugar-syrup.
Well, mostly.
Steve was coming back toward him with a dripping bottle in each hand. Ghost reached out to grab a beer and their fingers touched briefly, and Steve was grinning his old easy drunken grin, and for a moment it was as if they were back at the Yew, taking a break between sets, catching a buzz together. For a moment everything was all right.
That was when the band began to play.
The Bauhaus singer’s voice plunged from the heights of psychosexual ecstasy to the sepulchral depths of despair. Then the song cut off as abruptly as if a cancer had seized its throat. There came a ripple of wooden drums as the band took the stage, and a growling bass … and then the very air of the club was transfixed by an unearthly, blood-chilling, double-throated howl.
From where they stood near the back of the club, Steve and Ghost could not see the stage. They glanced at each other when they heard the howl, which vibrated through the layers of smoke, through the ivory bones of all the children, through the spray-painted walls of the club. As the first line of the opening song came whispering through the smoky air, the crowd rippled and parted. Now there was a clear path all the way to the stage, and Ghost got his first look at Ashley’s lovers. Ashley’s twin lovers.
He felt his nerves draw him rigid, taut as wire. His beer slipped from his hand and fell foaming on the sticky floor. Dimly he was aware of wetness soaking through his sneakers, of Steve staring at him, saying “What the fuck,” bending to rescue the bottle of Dixie before it all foamed away. He wanted to reach out and grab Steve’s wrist—for warning, for protection, for the simple feeling of warm familiar skin under his fingers.
But he could not move. He could only stare at the two figures onstage, could only watch their lips as they began to whisper into their microphones: “Death is easy …”
They hadn’t changed much since the night on the hill up by Roxboro. Since the night Ghost had dreamed of them. The only difference was the dark glasses both of them wore, even here in this dim club, in this air thick with smoke like blue cream. If anything, they were more beautiful than they had been in his dream, lusher than they had been up at the hill.
No more were they dry and brittle. No more did their skin look as if it might flake away from their bones at the lightest touch. Tonight their lips shone purple with rouge, and the ripe insides of their mouths glistened pink. Their skin was the smooth white of almonds. Their colored silks writhed around them. They clutched each other with their bird-boned hands and pressed their hollow cheeks together. Their hair twined together, long strands of ruby-red and yellow-white like mingling flames. Their faces echoed each other in a perfection that was at once opulent and dissolute.
As the twins’ song touched Ghost, he thought he caught their scent too, their heady bouquet of strawberry incense, clove cigarettes, wine and blood and rain and the sweat of passion. All the things they had loved when they were alive, the things that had dragged them down and carved the rich white flesh from their bones, the things that sustained them now. Incense and spice, wine and blood, sex and rain … and the juice of other lives, sucked away to saturate their brittle tissues, to restore them. They whispered their song to him.
Death is dark, death is sweet.
Death is eternal beauty—
A lover with a thousand tongues—
A thousand insect caresses—
Death is easy.
Death is easy …
DEATH IS EASY … DEATH IS EASY …
DEATH … IS … EASSSSSSY.
The patrons of the club must have seen these twins perform before, must have heard this susurrant song many times. They took up the chant. “Death is easy,” they wailed.
A girl near Ghost raised her arms, swaying. She wore a little black hat with a tattered veil that hung down over her face. A mourning hat. Beside her, a boy draped in fishnet and leather—a boy about Nothing’s age—wrapped his thin arms around himself. Ghost saw tears glistening on the boy’s fine-boned face.
“Death is easy,” the children whispered, and Ghost closed his eyes, but he could not keep their minds from brushing his. He knew that they believed those words. Why else did they shroud themselves in funeral garb; why else were their thin wrists scarred with razor-tracery delicate as spiderwebs? Why else did they make trysts in graveyards, starve themselves and then kill their hunger with cigarettes, suck down their drinks and swallow their exotic drugs with all the enthusiasm of children turned loose in a candy store?
Why else did they love the vampires?
If Arkady had spoken truly, the twins were vampires of a different sort. They did not live on blood, like Zillah and his pair of lollipop thugs, like Christian and Nothing. These vampires sucked lives. They had sucked Ashley Raventon’s life out, or so Arkady implied. They had left Ashley a dry husk, a skeleton bound together by withered skin, with only the strength to finish what they had begun. Ghost could see the withered body suspended in the tower, slowly turning.
The twins shared a microphone now, giving it head, taunting the crowd with their erotic narcissism. Their hands twined in each other’s hair; their ripe lips nearly touched. The rest of the band was obscured, cast into shadow; all eyes were on the twins.
Suddenly, through the fog of drunkenness that clouded Ghost’s brain, suspicion flared. Why were they so opulent tonight? Why did their lips shine so wetly; why did their bright hair writhe, alive with color? What had they found to sate them before the show?
Now the redheaded twin had a skull in his hands. He held it up and slowly turned it, letting the colored stagelights play over its ivory surface. The eye sockets caught two beams of golden light, and a ripple of pleasure went through the crowd. Now all the lights went off except the ones shining directly on the skull. It hung above the stage, suspended in darkness, revolving slowly.
Ghost thought he recognized it.
Had the twins been back to the shop tonight?
And if they had, who was taking care of Ann?
Steve was watching the band and the audience, transfixed if not actually enjoying himself. Ghost grabbed his elbow. Steve swayed a little as he turned; somehow his drinking had gotten ahead of Ghost’s. He rolled his eyes. “We never shoulda trusted Arkady’s taste in music. You heard enough of this Gothic crap? You wanna go find a bar?”
“No,” said Ghost. He tightened his grip on Steve’s arm. “Listen. I think we better go back to Arkady’s. I think something might be wrong.”
At any other time the look Steve gave him would have hurt like hell. But there was no time to worry about himself. Ghost only stared back, and at last Steve dropped his gaze and mutter
ed, “Okay. Whatever you say, man.”
* * *
“Death is easy!” a boy with red lipstick smudged around his eyes shouted into Steve’s face. Steve shoved the boy out of his way and continued toward the door. The kid stumbled backward, as drunkenly limp as a rag doll, and spilled his fancy cocktail all over his friend. The friend’s cigarette sputtered out.
Steve didn’t give a fuck. He stared at the back of Ghost’s head, at the pale hair that straggled over the collar of Ghost’s army jacket. For a second—just for a second—Steve wanted to grab a handful of that dirty, tangled, silky hair and yank it as hard as he could. He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans.
Not for the first time, and surely not for the last, Steve found himself wishing he could reach inside Ghost’s skull and pull out the magic there. He wished he could grind it under his boot, leave it smeared across the beer-sticky floor. He’d been standing there minding his own damn business, drunk enough to groove on the stupid music, a beer in each hand. For a couple of hours Steve had managed to forget Ann and everything else. Now they were tearing off on some mission that could only mean more pain and trouble. Ghost’s thoughts brushed Steve’s, Ghost’s fear was in him, and for a second he hated Ghost. If Ghost really did have a shining eye in his heart, as Arkady had said, Steve wished he could gouge it out.
“Have a nice night,” the doorman called nastily after them as they left the club.
When the cool night air touched his face, Steve calmed down a little. Crazy shit to be thinking about. What did he love best about Ghost? What had he always loved about Ghost? The magic. The weird, illogical, irritating magic.
“I’m sorry,” he said, bumping into Ghost, hugging him. For one more moment they were safe, they did not have to hurt. Neither wanted to move.
But finally Ghost stepped away and pulled Steve by the arm. “Come on,” he said. “We got to get back.”
