Lost Souls

by Poppy Brite

  On an evening in early spring Steve and Ghost walked out to the old graveyard. Beside Miles Hummingbird’s weathered tombstone, unmarked, was a soft spot in the ground where Ghost had buried the foetus still wrapped in his handkerchief. He wished he could have placed Ann’s body here too, but this was part of her; this would have to do.

  Ghost wondered where Ann was now. He wished he could ask Miles, but he would not. What goes on between the dead, his grandmother had told him, is the dead’s own business.

  Steve rolled a joint, lit it, passed it to Ghost, and began to talk lovingly about what a piece of shit the T-bird was. He was going to sell it to the junkyard, he said, and throw a party to celebrate. Whenever Steve started talking that way, it meant he was thinking about a road trip. That might do them both good.

  Steve was quiet for a while. When the joint had burned down to a ragged end, he turned to Ghost. “Listen …”

  “What?”

  “Everything that happened last fall … I know it was real. I mean, I was there. But it’s still hard, Ghost.” Steve spread his arms wide. “What does it do to you? How do you deal with it? Doesn’t it fuck you up, to know that we touched something evil, that it’s still out there in the world?”

  Steve was letting himself think about those days again. For a long time he had refused to. His world was visibly torn apart, but he would not acknowledge what had sundered it. Ghost held him during his night terrors and never tried to make him talk.

  But a postcard had come in the mail last week, a brightly colored postcard, its edges ragged, its message blurred with the grime of small-town post offices. Ghost knew Steve had seen it. You are safe, the card had said. You will be safe as long as I live: forever, or nearly so. I love you. And the signature was scrawled large across the bottom, the t like a dagger thrusting down, the N and the loop of the g swooping like bats’ wings: Nothing.

  “I don’t know,” Ghost said at last. “Maybe they were evil, like Miz Catlin says. My grandmother told me you shouldn’t try to define evil, that the minute you think you’ve got it all pinned down, a kind of evil you never even thought of will sneak up behind you and jump inside your head. I don’t think anyone knows what evil is. I don’t think anyone has the right to say.

  “So maybe they were just like us. I hate what they did, what they do. But they’d hate our lives too. Maybe they did what they had to do to live, and tried to get a little love and have a little fun before the darkness took them.”

  “I love you, Ghost.”

  Ghost felt his heart expand. “Love you too.”

  He accepted the last of the joint from Steve, sucked at it, closed his eyes. When the smoke was gone, he stretched out on the pine needles, his head in Steve’s lap. Steve stroked his hair, and through those guitar-callused fingertips Ghost caught Steve’s mood: lonely, but not alone. Bitter, but not destroyed. They had made it through the winter.

  They stayed in the graveyard, talking sometimes, drifting off to sleep and waking to see their breath plume in the air, watching the sky until it grew pale with the first light of morning.

  EPILOGUE

  Fifty

  Years

  Later

  Night.

  Black night in a club, 4:00 A.M. relieved only by the watery neon pulse that filters through the holes in the ceiling. The club is in the basement of a burned-out building, so most of the light is lost in the charred and rusted skeleton of steel that towers seventeen stories into the night. But some light filters through, purplish and flat.

  Night in a club. These dives have changed very little. The walls are painted black, scorched in spots, crawling with arcane graffiti: spiky insignia, dripping band emblems sprayed in gold and red. This club is located a few blocks from the edge of the French Quarter, and Mardi Gras week has just begun. Less than a mile away the endless party rages through the streets, the bright costumes swirl by, the liquor flows like milk.

  They will be there soon enough.

  On the tiny stage, separated from the dance floor by strands of barbed wire, two members of a snuff-rock band are packing up their equipment: the cords and effects, the violin bows and bone-saws, the ampules of blood the audience thinks is fake. They mix it with alcohol to keep it from coagulating too quickly; they have not forgotten their old customs. Their faces are smudged white, with rows of tiny, slightly raised black dots in elaborate patterns of scarification. They wear their hair twisted into hundreds of matted, filthy little braids. Their eyes are ringed in gray. They still bleed from the slashes made by the singer’s chrome-tipped whip upon their hands and faces and naked pierced chests, but they are healing fast.

  On a steel bench that runs along the wall, a young man is curled on his side, asleep: the band’s singer. His fist is pressed against his mouth, and his lips make a slight sucking motion. He looks perhaps twenty, too thin for his height. His face has taken on a cool ivory beauty: the high sharp cheekbones, the twin black arches of his eyebrows sweeping toward his temples, the flickering dark pools of his eyes as he dreams. His hair falls across his forehead in a straight, smooth sheaf, blue-black. The air in the club is colder than the semitropical night outside, and in his sleep the young man has pulled his purple-lined coat tightly around him.

  He has good reason to be tired. He runs a tight crew, and he has kept them alive, well fed, and sated for half a century.

  The band have finished packing up. At the sound of their footsteps approaching the young man comes awake, blinking up at them. At first his vision makes them hazy, and he thinks there are three of them—three clumps of hair, three faces defined in blots of dark makeup—but slowly they come clear, and there are only two.

  The memory of singing tonight returns to him. He gives strange performances, alternately whispering his words and shrieking them, his hands clenched at his sides, then flung out gesturing at the crowd as if he would conjure them all into hell. He swirls his whip through the smoky air and watches the audience bleed. And sometimes as he sings, he remembers another night at a different club, a night when a pale-eyed wraith clung to a microphone as if the crowd would drown him. He remembers a hoarse golden voice.

  But the show is over. He smiles up at them and asks, “What did you bring me?”

  Molochai pulls his hand out of his pocket and opens his fingers. Lying on his grubby palm is a hypodermic needle full of blood. Nothing opens his mouth. Molochai places the sharp tip of the needle—carefully, ever so carefully—on Nothing’s tongue and pushes the plunger. The blood trickles down Nothing’s throat, rich and sweet.

  “We saved the last for you,” Twig tells him.

  “We can get more,” says Nothing. The others nod in agreement.

  “We can always get more,” says Nothing.

  A smile of happy anticipation spreads across Molochai’s scarified face, and he jabs Twig in the ribs. Twig returns the jab with a tug on one of Molochai’s tiny braids.

  “Because we have time,” Nothing tells them. “Forever and ever.” For the first time in years he thinks of Christian, his smooth impassive face, his coldly tragic eyes. He believes Christian would be proud of him now.

  “Or nearly so,” he whispers a beat later. But the others have already turned away.

  The stage lights have been turned off, and the neon of the buzz-vendors flickers only fitfully. Nothing leads his family out of the club in darkness. They are headed for Bourbon Street. Nothing knows how to get there, and where they can pick up a bottle of Chartreuse along the way.

  Molochai is playing with a heavy silver doubloon of the same shape and size as those thrown from Mardi Gras parade floats along with all the other colored trinkets. But this coin is older than any Mardi Gras doubloon. Molochai keeps tossing it into the air and catching it.

  Nothing snatches the coin in midair and looks at it. Over the years Molochai’s sticky fingerprints have worn away some of the carving: the man’s lips no longer appear so full, and his sharp teeth are barely visible.

  “Let me see that, kiddo,”
says Twig, making a grab for the coin.

  They bandy it about for a few moments, tossing it back and forth, trying to spin it on the ends of their fingers. As they climb the stairs to street level, the sound of their boots on the cement echoes back along the graffiti-swarming corridor, up through the spiderwebs and the maze of burned-out girders, out into the night.

  Night. And they are gone.

  The footsteps, still echoing.

  Then silent.

  Then black.

  SPECIAL PREVIEW FROM

  POPPY Z. BRITE’S TERRIFYING NOVEL

  DRAWING BLOOD

  Available from Dell

  Missing Mile, North Carolina, in the summer of 1972 was scarcely more than a wide spot in the road. The main street was shaded by a few great spreading pecans and oaks, flanked by a few even larger, more sprawling southern homes too far off any beaten path to have fallen to the scourge of the Civil War. The ravages and triumphs of the past decade seemed to have touched the town not at all, not at first glance. You might think that here was a place adrift in a gentler time, a place where Peace reigned naturally, and did not have to be blazoned on banners or worn around the neck.

  You might think that, if you were just driving through. Stay long enough, and you would begin to see signs. Literal ones like the posters in the window of the record store that would later become the Whirling Disc, but was now still known as the Spin’n’Spur. Despite the name and the plywood cowboy boot above the door, those who wanted songs about God, guns, and glory went to Ronnie’s Record Barn down the highway in Corinth. The Spin’n’Spur had been taken over, and the posters in the window swarmed with psychedelic patterns and colors, shouted crazy, angry words.

  And the graffiti: STOP WAR with a lurid red fist thrusting halfway up the side of a building, HE IS RISEN with a sketchy, sulkily sensual face beneath that might have been Jesus Christ or Jim Morrison. Literal signs.

  Or figurative ones, like the shattered boy who now sat with the old men outside the Farmers Hardware Store on clear days. In another life his name had been Johnny Wiegers, and he had been an open-faced, sweet-natured kid; most of the old-timers remembered buying him a candy bar or a soda at some point over the years, or later cadging from him a couple of beers. Now his mother wheeled him down Firehouse Street every day and propped him up so he could hear their talk and watch the endless rounds of checkers they played with a battered board and a set of purple and orange Nehi caps. So far none of them had had the heart to ask her not to do it anymore. Johnny Wiegers sat quietly. He had to. He had stepped on a Vietcong land mine, and breathed fire, which took out his tongue and his vocal cords. His face was gone to unrecognizable meat, save for one eye glittering mindlessly in all that ruin, like the eye of a bird or a reptile. Both arms and his right leg were gone; the left leg ended just above the knee, and Miz Wiegers would insist on rolling his trouser cuff up over it to air out the fresh scar. The old-timers hunched over their checkers game, talking less than usual, glancing every now and then at the raw, pitiful stump or the gently heaving torso, never at the mangled face. All of them hoped Johnny Wiegers would die soon.

  Literal signs of the times, and figurative ones. The decade of love was gone, its gods dead or disillusioned, its fury beginning to mutate into a kind of self-absorbed unease. The only constant was the war.

  If Trevor McGee knew any of this, it was only in the fuzziest of ways, sensing it through osmosis rather than any conscious effort. He had just turned five. He had seen Vietnam broadcasts on the news, though his family did not now have a TV. He knew that his parents believed the war was wrong, but they spoke of it as something that could not be changed, like a rainy day when you wanted to play outside or an elbow already skinned.

  Momma told stories of peace marches she’d gone to before the boys were born. She listened to records that reminded her of those days, made her happy. When Daddy listened to his records now, they seemed to make him sad. Trevor liked all the music, especially the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, who Daddy always called Bird. And the song Janis Joplin sang with his daddy’s name in it. “Me and Bobby McGee.”

  Trev wished he could remember all the words, and sing the song himself. Then he could pretend it was just him and his daddy driving along this road, without Momma or Didi, just the two of them. Then he could ride up front with Daddy, not stuck in the back with Didi like a baby.

  He made himself stop thinking that. Where would Momma and Didi be, if not here? Back in Texas, or the place they had left two days ago, New Orleans? If he wasn’t careful he would make himself cry. He didn’t want his mother or his little brother to be in New Orleans. That city had given him a bad feeling. The streets and the buildings were dark and old, the kind of place where ghosts could live. Daddy said there were real witches there, and maybe zombies.

  And Daddy had gotten drunk. Momma had sent him out alone to do it, said it might be good for him. But Daddy had come back with blood on his T-shirt and a sick smell about him. And while Trev huddled in the hotel bed with his arms around his brother and his face buried in Didi’s soft hair, Daddy had put his head in Momma’s lap and cried.

  Not just a few tears either, the way he’d done when their old dog Flakey died back in Austin. Big gulping, trembling sobs that turned his face bright red and made snot run out of his nose onto Momma’s leg. That was the way Didi cried when he was hurt or scared really bad. But Didi was only three. Daddy was thirty-five.

  No, Trev didn’t want to go back to New Orleans, and he didn’t want Momma or Didi to be there either. He wanted them all with him, going wherever they were going right now. When they passed the sign that said MISSING MILE TOWN LIMITS, Trevor read it out loud. He’d learned to read last year and was teaching Didi now.

  “Great,” said Daddy. “Fucking great. We did better than miss the highway by a mile—we found the goddamn mile.” Trevor wanted to laugh, but Daddy didn’t sound as if he was joking. Momma didn’t say anything at all, though Trev knew she had lived around here when she was a little girl his age. He wondered if she was glad to be back. He thought North Carolina was pretty, all the giant trees and green hills and long, curvy roads like black ribbons unwinding beneath the wheels of their Rambler.

  Momma had told him about a place she remembered, though, something called the Devil’s Tramping Ground. Trevor hoped they wouldn’t see it. It was a round track in a field where no grass or flowers grew, where animals wouldn’t go. If you put trash or sticks in the circle at night, they would be gone in the morning, as if a cloven hoof had kicked them out of its way and they had landed all the way down in Hell. Momma said it was supposed to be the place where the Devil walked round and round all night, plotting his evil for the next day.

  (“That’s right, teach them the fucking Christian dichotomy, poison their brains,” Daddy had said, and Momma had flipped him The Bird. For a long time Trevor had thought The Bird was something like the peace sign—it meant you liked Charlie Parker, maybe—and he had gone around happily flipping people off until Momma explained it to him.)

  But Trevor couldn’t blame even the Devil for wanting to live around here. He thought it was the prettiest place he had ever seen.

  Now they were driving through the town. The buildings looked old, but not scary like the ones in New Orleans. Most of these were built of wood, which gave them a soft-edged, friendly look. He saw an old-fashioned gas pump and a fence made out of wagon wheels. On the other side of the street, Momma spied a group of teenagers in beads and ripped denim. One of them, a boy, flipped back long luxuriant hair. The kids paused on the sidewalk for a moment before entering the record store, and Momma pointed them out to Daddy. “There must be some kind of a scene here. This might be a good place to stop.”

  Daddy scowled. “This is Buttfuckville. I hate these little Southern towns—you move in, and three days later everybody knows where you came from and how you make a living and who you’re sleeping with.” He caressed the steering wheel; then his fingers tightened convulsively around it.
“I think we can make it through to New York.”

  “Bobby, no!” Momma reached over, put a hand on his shoulder. Her silver rings caught the sunlight. “You know the car can’t do it. Let’s not get stranded on the highway somewhere. I don’t want to hitch with the kids.”

  “No? You’d rather be stranded here?” Now Daddy looked away from the road to glare at Momma through the black sunglasses that hid his pale blue eyes, so like Trevor’s eyes. Didi had eyes like Momma’s, huge and nearly black. “What would we do here, Rosena? Huh? What would I do?”

  “The same thing you do anywhere. You’d draw.” Momma wasn’t looking at Daddy; her hand still rested on his shoulder, but her head was turned toward the window, looking out at Missing Mile. “We’d find a place to rent and I’d get a Job somewhere. And you’d stay at home with the kids, and there’d be nowhere to get drunk, and you’d start doing comics again.”

  At one time Trev would have chimed in his support for Momma, perhaps even tried to enlist Didi’s help. He wanted to stay here. Just looking at the place made him feel relaxed inside, not cramped up and hurting the way New Orleans and sometimes Texas had made him feel. He could tell it made Momma happy too, at least as happy as she ever felt anymore.

  But he knew better than to interrupt his parents while they were “discussing.” Instead he stared out the window and hoped as hard as he could that they would stop. If only Momma needed cigarettes, or Didi had to go pee, or something. His brother was toying with the frayed cuff of his shorts, dreaming, not even seeing the town. Trev poked his arm. “Didi,” he whispered out the corner of his mouth, “you need to pee again?”

  “Uh-uh,” said Didi solemnly, too loudly. “I peed last time.”

  Daddy slammed his hands against the wheel. “Goddammit, Trevor, don’t encourage his weak bladder! You know what it means if I have to stop the car every hour? It means I have to start it again too. And you know what starting the car does? It uses extra gas. And that gas costs money. So you take your pick, Trev—do you want to stop and take a piss, or do you want to eat tonight?”