Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (45 page)

 
          
“We
just got into town,” said Ghost. “We’re looking for a place to stay a few
days.” He stepped forward. His feet felt too big, his arms long and awkward.
The shop seemed too full of stuff, the walls leaning in toward the center of
the room. There were shelves crammed with tiny bottles and boxes. There were
books–at a glance he saw the I
Ching
, titles by
Aleister
Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson, crudely printed
booklets promising charms for love and luck and revenge. He saw a rack of
bejewelled
metal daggers, jars full of herbs, candies,
sticks of incense.

 
          
At
the back of the shop hung a curtain of colored plastic beads, and beyond that,
more blackness.

 
          
“I
am Arkady Raventon,” said the proprietor. Ghost could see his face more clearly
now, but could discern no hint of age. The skin was smooth, the eyes depthless
dark pools. He took the hand Arkady offered, a hand whose bones would surely
crumble if Ghost squeezed too hard, a hand with bones like the bones of
lizards. The hand was dry, cool, the grip surprisingly strong.

 
          
Ghost
opened his mouth to introduce himself and Steve, who was lounging near the door
looking skeptical.

 
          
But
before he could speak, Arkady Raventon said, “You must be
Miz
Deliverance’s son. Or is it grandson? Yes, grandson surely.
Miz
Deliverance’s grandson.”

 
          
Ghost
heard Steve’s sharp intake of breath. He met Arkady’s limpid dark gaze.

 
          
“How
did you know?”

 
          
Arkady
smiled. Was that a youthful smile, open and easy? Or was it the wise, humorless
grin of an old, old man? “Everyone knows of
Miz
Deliverance,” he said.

 
          
“Everyone
who has dealings with
magick
.” Ghost could hear the
k. “You may be too young to know it, child, but your grandmother is a legend
from here to the mountains of West Virginia.”

 
          
“I
knew it,” said Steve. “She was a witch.”

 
          
“A
white witch,” Arkady told him. “A benign conjurer. And a fabled beauty too, in
her youth. My own mother told me tales of her hair like yellow spun glass, her
lips bowed like the lips of the infant Christ, her clear
unlying
blue eyes. I saw a silvery old photograph of
Miz
Deliverance
once, taken when she was about your age. Yes, she was a fabled beauty. And you
are her image, Ghost. Her very image.”

 
          
“I
didn’t tell you my name,” said Ghost.

 
          
Arkady
smiled again. “Poor child! Did your grandmother let you think you were the only
sensitive in the world? I have been to the other side, Ghost. I know things
too. I know you.

 
          
Steve
came forward and stood next to Ghost, positioning himself so that he shielded
Ghost a little. “Wait a minute. What the fuck are you talking about? What do
you mean, you’ve been to the other side?”

 
          
“I
brought myself back from the dead,” said Arkady Raventon.

 
          
They
went through the front room of Arkady’s shop, through the dimness, the smell of
dust, cobwebs, herbs. They went through the back room, where flowers and
plaster saints and bones (chicken bones, Ghost thought, though Steve eyed them
warily) were arranged on a small altar covered with a velvet
dropcloth
. On either side of the altar, pink and black
candles burned.

 
          
In
a torrent of dust, Arkady swept aside a heavy velvet curtain and led them up a
narrow dark staircase. They climbed, climbed, turned a corner. The staircase
grew even darker. Ghost had to feel for the stairs, placing his sneaker
carefully each time. He raised his hand to his face and wiggled his fingers.
Before his eyes, five pale wavering sticks danced; they might have been a trick
of the darkness, an afterimage of light.

 
          
Still
Arkady led them upward.

 
          
They
went around another corner and now Ghost could see a dim rectangle of light far
above them. At last they came to another velvet curtain; beyond that was
daylight.

 
          
Arkady
pulled the curtain aside. At the top of the stairs was a cozy suite of rooms
with clean white walls, large windows that let in dazzling sunshine, hardwood
floors gleaming golden.

 
          
Arkady
showed them the rooms one after another. “That one is mine. The small one
belongs to two of my brother’s friends. And this”—indicating it with a grand
sweep of his arm “is the room where you may stay. If you so wish. I would not
think of turning
Miz
Deliverance’s grandson away from
my door.”

 
          
The
room was simple. A clean mattress. A window high up on the rear wall. A square
room. Four walls of equal length, four sensible walls to contain Ghost’s
thoughts, to keep out green-eyed wraiths and voices that might invade his mind
at night. A place for Steve and him to whisper the nights away, snatch a few
troubled hours of sleep, then go out and do whatever it was they had come to
New Orleans to do.

 
          
“It
looks okay to me,” he said, and waited for Steve to argue. Steve wouldn’t want
to stay here in a room above a voodoo shop given to them like a gift by a
creepy little proprietor who claimed to have known Ghost’s grandmother, or to
have heard of her.

 
          
Steve
would be suspicious, cynical, probably spooked, though he wouldn’t want to
admit that last one. But maybe Steve was exhausted from being on the road, or
maybe he wanted a drink so badly that he would agree to anything, or maybe he
just didn’t give a damn anymore. He only sighed and let his long body sag
against the door-frame as he said,

 
          
“Whatever
you think. We’ll take it.”

 
          
“You
said you brought yourself back from the dead,” Ghost reminded Arkady as they
finished descending the stairs. Behind him, Ghost heard Steve mutter something,
but he ignored it.

 
          
Arkady
drew himself up to his full spare height. “Perhaps I spoke too soon.” The hem
of his white robe shushed against the floor, raised a cloud of dust around his
bony ankles. “No, Mr. Raventon. I’d really like to hear about it.”

 
          
“Arkady,”
said Arkady absently. His eyes had gone distant. He led them into the back room
of the shop and stood beside the altar, stroking its corner.

 
          
Ghost’s
gaze wandered over the wooden framework, the
dropcloth
of dark sapphire velvet. He saw things he had not noticed before: intricate
enamel charms, little scrolls of parchment, an inverted wooden cross bristling
with nails.

 
          
Arkady’s
dry, faintly foreign voice brought him back to attention. “It was cold in Paris
that winter. As cold as the moon. As cold as loneliness. As cold as the kiss
that killed me.”

 
          
His
eyes flicked to Ghost’s, to Steve’s. Ghost’s were wide open, a little scared;
he was picking up a barrage of feelings from Arkady, sorrow and fear and pain,
but all of them were overlaid with the facile pleasure of a gifted actor
performing a cherished role. Ghost didn’t know what to make of it. Steve’s eyes
were hooded, wary, waiting for lies.

 
          
“Yes,
my young friends. My poor young friends with your beautiful faces and your
innocent dreams. You think love is sweet, that it can never hurt. But it was
not the Parisian cold that killed me, not the wind in my bones, not the ice
that rimed my heart. It was the kiss of a lover.”

 
          
“The
kiss?” Steve’s voice was heavy with cynicism.

 
          
“Well,
perhaps a bit more than just the kiss. But you must allow me my bit of
romance.”

 
          
Sarcasm
sharpened Arkady’s voice, and Ghost shot Steve a warning look. Steve stared at
the altar.

 
          
“So,”
Arkady went on, “this, ah, kiss–and the rest of my lover’s body as well—was
ripe with death. Ripe, and sweet as rotten fruit. Have you ever bitten into a
rotten peach, either of you? A plum? A melon, perhaps? There is one moment of
absolute, blissful, delicious sweetness before the taste of decay oozes over
your tongue. That is how it was with my lover. And then the sickness rotted my
lover away, and I had caught it too by that time, and I was alone. In Paris, in
the winter. I was alone.” A faint smile played about Arkady’s lips.

 
          
“Have
I mentioned my brother Ashley? No? Ashley was my younger brother. The beauty of
the
Raventons
.” Arkady laughed, a sound like wind
among chips of crystal. “When I went to Paris, he stayed here, and I vowed that
I would come back. I had to teach him, you see. I had to tell him all I knew of
magick
, of death and love and pain. Ashley was to be
my apprentice. And I went to Paris, and the sickness took me. But I had vowed
to Ashley that I would return. I had given him my word. And I would not break
that.”

 
          
Arkady’s
fingers strayed to the altar, toyed with the dark velvet
dropcloth
.
“So before I died, I prepared. I had just enough time to find the things I
needed. I sent for powders from Haiti, for potions from Guatemala. I procured
the blood of an ancient man in the Rue aux
Fers
, the
bones of a child in the catacombs of Montmartre.

 
          
“But
at last I could search no longer. The sickness came and smiled its final soft
dark smile at me, and my blood dried in my veins, and my eyeballs shriveled.
One morning before dawn I swallowed the concoction I had made, and I let the
sickness take me. I felt its lips upon mine, its tongue lapping the last sour
drop of spit from my mouth. I felt my life leave me. I felt my very selfness
slip away; there was one instant in which I thought, My God, now I am dead.

 
          
“And
then I was. And I awoke in the morgue of a Paris hospital, and when I stretched
myself and stuffed, one of the morgue attendants suffered a heart attack.

 
          
Fortunately
it was not fatal.”

 
          
This
time Arkady’s laughter was like the clanging of a heavy door, a door of stone
or steel, a door that would not be opened again for a very long time. “Then I
made my way home to New Orleans, to keep my vow to Ashley. But, as any sad
story should end, Ashley too had died, and had not come back. He would never be
my apprentice. He would learn none of my secrets.”

 
          
Ghost
licked his lips nervously. His tongue was as dry as Arkady’s must have been all
through that long winter in Paris. “What happened to Ashley?” he asked.

 
          
Arkady
knelt and flipped up the velvet
dropcloth
. His hands
disappeared into the blackness beneath the altar. Shadows lapped at his
knuckles, his wrists. Then he withdrew his hands.

 
          
Steve
cursed and took a step backward; Ghost’s eyes widened. Arkady was holding a
perfect human skull, smooth and narrow, bleached to the golden-white of old
ivory.

 
          
“Ghost
and Steven,” Arkady said, “meet my brother Ashley.”

 
          
Later,
Steve thought that if he hadn’t known Ghost so well, he would have suspected
Ghost of trying to win Arkady
Raventon’s
heart at
that moment. But of course Ghost was Ghost, the most uncalculating of all
people, and what he did next was just his nature—the pure crazy chemistry that
flowed between his brain and his heart and his soul. Never mind how Arkady
Raventon’s
eyes melted when Ghost reached out his hands and
said, “Can I hold him?”

 
          
Arkady
put the skull into Ghost’s hands. Ghost cradled it carefully. Its surface was
somehow devoid of temperature, neither warm nor cold. He looked into the
sockets of its eyes. It was the only skull he had ever seen that didn’t look as
if it were grinning.