Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (33 page)

 
          
Ghost
sipped his beer—he didn’t need it, not tonight; he would drink music–and
watched the kids come in. Soon the club was full of them. College students from
Raleigh, and dropouts like Steve and Ghost. High school students from Windy
Hill, the hippie Quaker place, but hardly any from the county school; they were
all
metalheads
over there.

 
          
Younger
kids too—junior high kids smoking Marlboros and Camels, kids trying to look
jaded and managing only to look bored. Kids with wide-open innocent faces and
easy smiles, kids with long dark hair and eyeliner, kids with razor scars on
their wrists, kids already sick of life, kids happy to be alive and drunk and
younger than they would ever feel again.

 
          
They
were so very young. Ghost thought as he stood among them, feeling their pain
and their exuberance, their stupidity and terror and beauty brush his mind.
They were so young, and they wore their thrift-shop jewelry, their ragged
jeans, their black clothes like badges of membership to some arcane club. Some
club that required drunkenness—on cheap liquor, on rainy midnights, on poetry
or sex. Some club that required love of obscure bands and learning to lie awake
at 4:00 A.M., bursting with terrors and wide-awake dreams.

 
          
None
of these kids was Nothing. Ghost looked for the long silk coat, the lank black
hair, the three lurking figures that would surround the boy. But he was not
here, though many of these kids looked like him—the same big, black-rimmed,
blasted eyes, the same pale flickering hands.

 
          
Ghost
hoped Nothing wouldn’t come. Not with those three. But he knew they would be
there.

 
          
Something
in him ached for that boy. For the sadness in his face, for his eyes yearning
to stay young. He wanted to grab Nothing away from his companions and tell him
that sometimes everything could be all right, that pain did not have to come
with magic, that childhood never had to end. And yet he wondered whether
Nothing had not known all those things when he made his choice. Whatever that
was.

 
          
The
right choice was not always clear. Nevertheless, Nothing had had to make one.

 
          
Ghost
had felt him do it, right there in the bedroom as he woke up, and he had felt
the boy grow a little older. He felt his mind straining at something it could
not quite grasp, and the feeling was odd; there wasn’t much Ghost could not
empathize with. He reminded himself that he had not really tried, had not
wanted to try.

 
          
Then
Steve grabbed Ghost’s arm and dragged him through the crowd toward the stage.
It was time to play. Ghost felt the small shiver of something like stage fright
and something like wild intoxication, when the room swims, when you can no
longer stand up straight or trust your eyes.

 
          
Hands
plucked at Ghost’s clothes, at the streamers on his hat. He was greeted by a
multitude of young voices. He felt the brush of their fingers and their minds;
he breathed their cigarette smoke. Then they were stumbling onstage, Steve and
Ghost, Lost Souls? come back again.

 
          
Steve
clawed at his guitar, letting loose the night’s first jangling scream.

 
          
Ghost
glanced at the set list taped to the floor, scrawled in Steve’s illegible
handwriting, and the words of the first song rose to his lips. He stepped up to
the microphone and, gripping it with both hands, whispered those words: “Don’t
go on the beach … Realize the lions have come in …”

 
          
The
audience swayed at the touch of his voice. He looked into those upturned young
faces bathed in dim
stagelight
, the fresh faces, the
pale hollow-boned faces with their darkly lined eyes.

 
          
And
there in the middle of the crowd was Nothing, not swaying but standing very
still, his face tilted up with the rest, his eyes wide and shadowed. His three
friends were there too, clustered around him. Zillah stared at the floor, his
face in darkness.

 
          
One
of the two bigger ones poked Nothing and shouted something into his ear, but
Nothing only shook his head and kept staring at Ghost.

 
          
Then,
as the first song ended, Zillah looked up at the stage. Even from behind the
lights, from fifteen feet away, Ghost could see that Zillah’s face was perfect
as a mask again. His nose was straight, his lips full and lustrous. There were
no bruises.

 
          
There
was no swelling.

 
          
Zillah
caught him staring and smiled.

 
          
Smiled
with a complete mouthful of sharpened, shining teeth.

 
          
Ghost
faltered. He forgot the words of the next song. Steve was trying to give him
the cue, but Ghost couldn’t look at him, couldn’t turn his head away from that
perfect mouthful of teeth. What was he dealing with here? What the hell had
decided to visit itself on Missing Mile?

 
          
The
moment of silence stretched, became unbearable. Now Steve was at the back of
the stage fucking with the equipment, trying to cover for him. They did a
couple of songs that required a prerecorded bass and drum track, and Steve was
turning knobs that didn’t need turning, adjusting levels that were already set.
But how long could that stretch out? Where were his words?

 
          
Then
Ghost tore his gaze away from Zillah’s shining smile and looked out over the
sea of faces again, and the spell was broken. So Zillah had new teeth, new
skin. So what?

 
          
He
and Steve had a show to do. The fragile faces could not be turned away; the burning
hearts could not be quenched by disappointment. Ghost felt a righteous anger
fill him.

 
          
Hypnotized
by a smile? Oldest trick in the book! It couldn’t trick him, though, not now.

 
          
He
had to sing.

 
          
Steve
was staring at him, half pissed off, half scared. He tapped his foot three
times and gave Steve the nod. And when Ghost started singing again, the words
poured from him like a river of gold.

 
          
They
played “Mandrake Sky,” an odd chiming melody, the first song Ghost had more or
less composed on his own, then an assortment of their older songs, rocking
numbers.

 
          
Ghost
began to be drunk on the music. When he felt himself swaying, he clung harder
to the microphone.

 
          
The
audience was a sea. The music pulled like the Mississippi; he could be swept
away, he could drown. But drowning might be sweet. In his throat, his voice was
thick wine. The pale hands snatched it and bore it up on a cloud of clove
smoke. For those children Ghost sang harder, letting his voice soar, pushing it
down deep and gravelly, stringing it out in a howl like a shimmering gold wire.

 
          
Between
him and Steve the electricity crackled. Ghost clenched his hands in front of
him, raised his face to the gilded tries of the ceiling. Steve shook his head
madly.

 
          
His
hair stood out like a scribbled black cloud. Sparkling drops of sweat landed
sizzling on his guitar, on the audience, on Ghost’s upturned face. Ghost licked
the sweat off his lips and tried to breathe. There was no breath left in him.
The audience had taken it all. In him there was only song, endlessly swelling.
If he did not let it out his heart would burst.

 
          
He
had forgotten all about Zillah’s perfect new face.

 
          
At
the end, Steve joined Ghost at the microphone to sing backup on the last song.

 
          
It
was “World,” the song they always closed with. Steve’s fingers stroked the
strings, lingering on them, making them chime. “World out of balance,” Ghost
sang. Steve gave the accompanying line, “World without end,” in his usual
off-key tenor. But Steve’s singing was bettor tonight than ever before. It was
still pretty bad, but there was an element of rawness to it, a hoarseness born
of beer and sorrow. The audience rose on tiptoe. “‘WE ARE NOT AFRAID,” Ghost
chanted, throwing his shoulders back, pushing his voice harder.

 
          
“‘WE
ARE NOT AFRAID.”

 
          
Behind
him, Steve sang, “Let the night come, let the night come …” That wetness on his
face was only sweat, or so he would claim. And Ghost wouldn’t say different,
not for anything.

 
          
“We
are not afraid,” he whispered, and the audience whispered back, “Let the night

 
          
come
. .”

 
          
Steve
shoved his guitar into its case, snapped the catches shut, and headed for the
bar. He was already half-drunk, and he registered that this was not Kinsey
Hummingbird handing him his beer. This bartender was even taller and paler, and
a hell of a lot weirder-looking, but Steve didn’t remember seeing the guy
before. A vague impression of a black hat and sunglasses flashed into his mind.
It didn’t mean anything to him, and he forgot it.

 
          
Ghost
had wandered off into the crowd. At the bar Steve saw a curly head wrapped in a
tie-dyed bandanna: Terry
Buckett
, who owned the
Whirling Disc record store where Steve worked, who played drums on their tape
and sat in on their shows sometimes. Terry had been out of town recently. When
he saw Steve, he
signalled
the bartender for two more
beers, The bartender took two bottles of National Bohemian out of the cooler.
Natty
Bohos
, Terry called them. Steve called them
possum piss, himself, but Terry was buying.

 
          
“What’s
up?” Steve asked after a long and companionable swig.

 
          
“Been
tripping for two weeks, man. Hey, no shit—bike tripping. You know I rode down
to New Orleans?” Steve knew, had in fact discussed it with Terry at work, but
Terry talked to so many people that he often forgot who had heard what. “They
got a bar in the French Quarter”—Terry was just about drooling at the
memory—“serves twenty-five-cent draft every Thursday night. And they play these
same two Tom Waits albums over and over all night. Blue Valentine and Heart
Attack and Vine …”

 
          
Steve
imagined the place. The floor would be sticky, the walls slicked with blue
light from an old beer sign. The records would get scratchier every Thursday
night, as if Tom had progressive cancer of the larynx. He wished he were there,
sucking the foam off his fifth or sixth draft, forgetting all about Missing
Mile and the Sacred Yew. (Those aren’t the things you really want to forget,
said a small demon-voice in his head. It was quiet enough to be ignored, but a
couple more beers would drown it for sure.) Terry’s bar sounded pretty good.
Maybe he and Ghost could take the T-bird on a road trip one of these days.

 
          
“Man,
you can get some heavy shit down there in the Quarter,” Terry said. The new
bartender was turned away, filling plastic cups, but his back had an attitude
of listening. “I got an ounce of this stuff called
Popacatepetl
Purple. Couple bong hits of that’ll give you some heavy mind groove—”

 
          
“Did
somebody mention bong hits?” R.J. Miller boosted himself onto a bar stool on
Terry’s other side. He had grown up from a skinny hyperspace-machine-building
kid into a skinny young man who could play a bass line like the thunder of God,
but right now he was having trouble holding onto his beer. He swayed against
the bar, then managed to prop himself up on his elbows. His glasses were
crooked. He pushed them up with his forefinger. “Hey, Steve. Awesome show,
man.”

 
          
Terry
considered him gravely. “How many beers have you had?”

 
          
“Three,”
said R.J., and burst into sudden laughter. “Seriously, you guys, what about
those bong hits? You
wanna
go outside or what?”

 
          
“You’re
not old enough to smoke,” Terry told him. Under the bar, Terry nudged Steve’s
knee. Steve looked down. Terry was holding a pack of Camels. From the pack
protruded the end of a joint, fat and twisted. Steve palmed the joint and
slipped it into the pocket of his jeans.