Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (25 page)

 
          
“Leave
it alone … mullein leaf, boneset leaf,
senna
pods,
anise, snakeroot … liverwort.” Ghost shook himself and opened his eyes. “Sorry.
I was smelling.”

 
          
“Balm’s
ready!”
Miz
Catlin called a few minutes later.

 
          
Ghost
took a final sniff of the room’s delicate crumbling scent. As they turned to
leave, Steve stepped onto the YOUR WEIGHT AND FORTUNE scale and dug in his
pocket for a penny. “It doesn’t work,” said Ghost. “It broke a long time ago.”
But Steve had already put the coin in. The scale clattered, clanked, ratcheted.
A yellowed card fell out of the slot.

 
          
“It
never did that before,” Ghost said.

 
          
Steve
handed him the card. Ghost read it twice, first silently, then aloud:

 
          
“‘Pain
lies ahead for you and your beloved.” Ghost’s eyes were dark and troubled.

 
          
“Big
fuckin
’ deal,” said Steve. “I don’t have a beloved.”
He crumpled the card.

 
          
Miz
Catlin eyed them suspiciously as they came out of the
back room. “
Somethin
’ the matter?”

 
          
“Your
scale gave Steve a bad fortune,” Ghost said. He told her what had been printed
on the card.

 
          
She
shook her head. “Well, I wouldn’t pay it too much mind. That old thing usually
stays broke, but once in a while it gets temperamental. You can predict a
passel of woe in anyone’s life if you’ve the inclination.” She stared at Steve,
and her eyes sharpened. “You, though—I remember what Deliverance said about
you. I don’t have the gift like her and Ghost, but I can see it too.

 
          
You’re
hotheaded, and you let your temper lead you. Don’t listen to your good heart as
much as you ought to. Deliverance said you’d hurt somebody someday, no doubt
about it—but that you’d end up
hurtin
’ yourself worst
of all.”

 
          
The
drive back to town was subdued. The day had clouded over, grown muggy and
stifling. Steve’s hangover was starting to come back. Ghost let the guitar lie
on the floor. From time to time he hung his head out the window and checked the
sky, his nostrils flaring anxiously, trying to scent rain.

 
          
Ghost
knew the next rain would bring on a cold spell; soon after that it would be
time to batten down for the winter.

 
          
“What
the fuck is that?” said Steve when they were halfway home.

 
          
Ghost
looked. They were past the spot and over the swell of the road before he
registered what he had seen: a lone angular figure huddled behind a flower
stand. ROSES, said the painted wooden sign. The figure was tall, pale, wrapped
entirely in black. Black cloak, black hat, big dark sunglasses. Even his hands
were sheathed in black gloves.

 
          
“Some
fun, huh,” said Steve, and nervously cranked up his window. The air in the
T-bird grew thick, smothering. Ghost didn’t know why the figure at the flower
stand gave him a sick feeling, but he did know that such feelings seldom came
to him without a reason. The worm of worry for Ann was still gnawing away in
him too. And until he knew the reason, there was nothing he could do about it.
Ghost put his forehead against the window and didn’t think again until they
were home.

 
          
Morning
on a sunny road with the music cranked up and the wine flowing free.

 
          
Morning
in this new world without long days at school and wasted evenings spent smoking
too many cigarettes at Skittle’s. Morning, and someone to wake up with, three
someones
with their warm friendly bodies and their
interesting, meaty smell. Nothing realized now that they smelled of blood, both
old and fresh, and he found himself getting used to it, liking it. And at last
he was in the South, with its green cathedrals of kudzu and its railroad tracks
to clatter over at eighty miles an hour.

 
          
Around
lunchtime Zillah passed out tiny squares of paper —blotter, he said.

 
          
“Crucifix”
from New York. Molochai and Twig gulped theirs down. Nothing looked
thoughtfully at his. He had only taken acid twice, weak stuff called Yin/Yang,
bought off Jack for three dollars a hit. Then he shrugged. The tempo of his
days would be different from now on; he might as well enjoy what came with
them. He touched the square of paper to his tongue and let it dissolve there.

 
          
Soon
afterward they stopped at a Waffle House. Molochai wanted pie, and Twig
requested a burger cooked very rare, but Zillah ordered only a glass of water
and Nothing did not dare eat anything. Already he could feel the acid beginning
to tickle inside him.

 
          
Molochai
and Twig spread their fingers on the greasy tabletop, laughing over some
obscure private joke. Molochai started opening packets of sugar. Zillah was
quiet, but Nothing could feel his gaze, green and hot and somehow demanding.
Nothing toyed with the cream pitcher, shredded the corner of a paper napkin.
What should he do? What did Zillah want him to do?

 
          
He
looked at Molochai and Twig hoping for some kind of clue, but they were
tussling.

 
          
Arguing
over who had more room in the plastic booth, it seemed. “I only have one inch—”

 
          
“I
know you only have one inch, stupid, why are you telling me about your dick?”

 
          
Nothing’s
stomach tightened and his head swam. This was going to make the other times
he’d tripped look like children’s games, like dreams of dreams. Thousands of
tiny fingers came alive inside him, crawling. He rubbed his hands over his
face. His skin felt numb, tight, rubbery.

 
          
His
throat was closing. He breathed deep and with an effort was able to swallow.
The spit ran down his throat, syrupy, slicking its way along the passages of
his body. He started wondering about something he’d never thought of before:
where did spit go when he swallowed? Did it all go to his stomach, and did that
mean his stomach was full of spit?

 
          
He
wanted to stop thinking.

 
          
He
stared across the table at Molochai and Twig, who appeared to be primping.

 
          
Twig
took out an eyeliner pencil, pried Molochai’s left eye open, and drew a shaky
line along the tender edge of the lower lid. Molochai sat through it without a
pretest.

 
          
Despite
their squabbling, the two seemed to trust each other unquestioningly.

 
          
Nothing’s
gaze dropped to the table. At some point the others had gotten their food and
devoured it; the remains of their meal lay there, mangled. Bits of Twig’s
hamburger, fragments of meat and onion stuck to bread stained pink. The ruins
of Molochai’s pie, smears of strawberry bleeding into smudges of whipped cream,
gory as a
roadkill
. In the midst of the carnage rose
Zillah’s glass, immaculate, free from fingerprints, half full of cold clear
water.

 
          
Molochai
put his fingers into the pie and licked them. He smiled across the table at
Nothing. His eyes seemed all pupil, black-ringed and enormous, hectically
shiny. There was red goo in the spaces between Molochai’s teeth: pie filling.
It reminded Nothing of the bottle hidden under the mattress in the back of the
van, still half full. That taste rose again in his mouth.

 
          
Sharing
their weird blood cocktail somehow made him feel closer to them than any drug
or kinky sex act could. It made him more a part of their psychedelic nighttime
world.

 
          
For
the blood was the life—

 
          
He
frowned. Where had that thought come from, out of what acid-swirled corner of
his brain? A feathery touch slid up his thigh. Zillah was smiling at him too, a
smile like the Mona Lisa’s, if the Mona Lisa had crazy green eyes and was
blasted out of her mind on Crucifix acid.

 
          
“Are
you having fun?” asked Zillah.

 
          
“Sure,”
said Nothing, and realized that he was. He mar-veiled at how the world could
shift in an instant. A moment ago he’d been getting tied up in mind knots,
half-afraid of his new friends. His friends who were more exciting than anyone
he had known before, their company more intoxicating because somehow they were
like him. They accepted him. This was what he had wished for on nights alone in
his room, rubbing the ash of incense between his fingers, drifting among the
stars on the ceiling, bleeding from the wrist or from somewhere deep inside.

 
          
What
was there to be afraid of?

 
          
They
got back in the van, cranked the music up again, and drove. Later in the
evening they took another round of Crucifix, and sometime after midnight Nothing
was just coming into the thick of his trip. He lay curled up on the mattress,
his hands pressed to his eyes, watching the brilliant checkered patterns that
swirled in the darkness behind his eyelids. His insides shifted; he thought he
felt the ends of his intestines twitching. His mind plummeted, raced, soared.
He wanted to raise his head and talk to Zillah, but just then a new design
swirled up from the depths of blindness all black and silver and crimson, and
he could only lie there and watch it.

 
          
“Cool,”
said Molochai happily, as if he too could see Nothing’s designs. But Molochai
was out of his head. He and Twig had taken two doses of Crucifix each, and they
were tripping hard. Molochai might have been talking about the luminous colored
stars in the sky or the moth that had just smeared itself
stickily
across the windshield or the sweet taste in his mouth.

 
          
Twig
snorted. “There’s no room for another hitchhiker. Anyway, we’ve already got
one.”

 
          
“I
want that one too,” said Molochai, enraptured. “His hair was full of flowers.”

 
          
“We
don’t know quite what we’ve got, do we?” Zillah mused. “This would be a good
chance to find out. If not—then more for us.”

 
          
Nothing
didn’t know what they were talking about, but he felt the van lurch to a stop.

 
          
Zillah’s
warm breath touched Nothing’s ear. “Wake up. We have a surprise for you. We’re
taking on a passenger.”

 
          
Nothing
looked up. Molochai was opening the side door. The hitchhiker climbed in,
staring at the colored stickers, the graffiti, the dark stains all over the
walls and the mattress, as scared and eager as Nothing must have looked
yesterday. He was a boy of thirteen or fourteen, a boy too small and thin for
his years, a pale child whose feathery white-blond hair hung in his eyes,
escaping in wisps from a blue bandanna. As Nothing watched, the boy lifted a
delicate hand and took a long drag on his cigarette. His clove cigarette. His
mouth would taste of ash and spice, and surely of his tears, as it used to. If
it was him … if it was impossibly, magically him.

 
          
“Laine?”
said Nothing.

 
          
“
Omigod
,” breathed the boy, and then they were hugging each
other fiercely.

 
          
Nothing
was brushing Laine’s hair from his eyes, forgetting how Laine had annoyed him,
how he had risen above the futility of his friends’ lives, how he had felt such
scorn for their complacent desperation. He had not thought he was homesick, but
now seeing Laine was almost like being back in his room. The damp salty taste
of Laine’s mouth made him remember the stars on his ceiling. Tears. Laine’s mouth
always tasted of tears.

 
          
“I
found you,” Laine said. “I can’t believe I found you. I knew I would.”