Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (52 page)

 
          
But
somehow his hands were treacherous; instead of shoving Ghost away they slid
over Ghost’s shoulders and locked behind his back. Steve was pulling him
closer, Ghost realized.

 
          
Maybe
he could help Steve now, tonight. Maybe he could overcome that terrible
loneliness for a while. He nudged Steve’s mouth open just a little at first,
then wide, and their tongues met like two beating hearts.

 
          
Molasses,
he heard from somewhere. You still taste like Molasses.

 
          
“
Mmmm
?” said Ghost. “What?” Their mouths untangled briefly,
then met again.

 
          
Stray
thoughts weren’t important. These minutes had to stretch and stretch; this one
kiss had to last for a long, long time. In a moment Steve would pull away. That
golden flavor on Steve’s tongue, that was not Dixie beer. It was the taste of
childhood summers long gone, and laced through it was the dark taste of fear.
Already Steve was scared of how much he trusted Ghost; he had said so. This one
kiss would end, and there would not be another, because anything beyond this
would be too much for Steve to deal with. It was already freaking him out a
little, Ghost could feel that. But he needed it so bad.

 
          
They
slept clutching each other as if they might drown in the blankets and pillows.
Ghost stayed awake for a long time. Steve’s head burrowed fiercely into his
shoulder; Steve’s breathing stirred the fine hair on his neck; Steve’s long
legs entangled with his. Ghost knew full well that in the morning Steve would
wake, narrow his eyes against the sunlight, and mutter, “Shit, man, I was so
drunk last night, I don’t remember what happened.”

 
          
But
tonight Ghost could dream Steve’s nightmares for him. And so he did.

 
          
Ghost
walked the streets of old New Orleans looking for Ann.

 
          
When
he started out from Arkady’s shop, he thought he would never be able to do it.

 
          
Better
they should have hired a private detective, like the guy in Angel Heart. At
least Harry Angel might’ve had a chance of finding Ann by logic and luck. But
what chance did Ghost have, who knew these streets not at all, who had only his
intuition and blind faith to guide him?

 
          
At
first it seemed that there was too much magic here, that it could only cloud
intuition and distract faith. On every street comer was another story, in the
elegant shade of each courtyard another hovering spirit. Some of them were greedy
and reached out to his sensitive mind, whispering come in, come into me, listen
to my tale. The buildings and sidewalks themselves seemed to have a
susurrant
, subliminal voice.

 
          
But
soon Ghost realized that he was trying too hard. If he relaxed, he could listen
to these sounds with only part of his mind, like a radio playing far away. If
he didn’t think about it so hard, his feet would lead him the right way.

 
          
He
passed a group of kids wearing black clothes, black lipstick and eyeliner.

 
          
Silver
crosses, daggers, razor blades dangled from their wrists and earlobes. They
passed a joint among themselves, from hand to thin hand.
Deathers
:
kids who loved the night, loved the bands whose music spoke of dark beauty and
fragile mortality. Vampires were their dream come true, their ideal to aspire
to.
Bela
Lugosi might be dead, but the
deathers
would keep him alive in their hearts forever. At
the Sacred Yew one night, Ghost had seen a boy showing off his new tattoo: two
tiny scarlet fang marks on the white flesh of his throat.

 
          
The
kids could dream of vampires all they liked, but their faces bore the
undeniable stamp of humanity. It was in theft imperfections: pimples, scars,
the beginnings of laugh-lines.

 
          
The
real vampires had a uniform sort of beauty, ageless and cold. Ghost thought of
Zillah’s face, only imperceptibly older than Nothing’s, and then only because
of the smirking mouth and the dramatic, wanton eyes.

 
          
Would
Nothing catch up with Zillah and the others? Would he reach that same
indefinable age and just stop? Ghost wondered how it would feel to know that
you weren’t going to age anymore, weren’t going to change anymore, that your
skin would never grow creased and delicate, your hair would not turn brittle
white, your hands would stay smooth and strong. He shivered. He wouldn’t like
it, looking in the mirror every day and seeing the same face, with none of the
sorrow and laughter of life reflected there.

 
          
Ghost’s
heart twitched at the thought of Nothing becoming one of those blanks.

 
          
The
other three had faces like stylized masks, smooth and white, with only drunken
madness blazing out of their eyes. Even Christian’s face was blank, though a
faint frigid sorrow gleamed in his eyes. But Nothing… Nothing’s face was so
young, the comers of his mouth so tender, his eyes full of wondrous pain. All
that should not be wiped away by immortality.

 
          
But
Ghost was here to save Ann, not Nothing. Still, he could not stop hurting for
Nothing, no more than he could stop his heart beating, But … Help the ones you
love, his grandmother had told him, help them when you can, and after that,
mind your business.

 
          
Your
gift doesn’t give you the right to go rearranging other people’s lives for
them. You might see their souls, but they won’t always want you to be their mirror.

 
          
Yes,
he could see Nothing’s soul. It was in those haunted eyes, and in the shadows
under them—fatigue, drink and chemicals, yesterday’s makeup. Nothing was a lost
soul because he wanted to be. It was what he had always wanted; it was his
birthright.

 
          
But
Ann had been bewitched. Done in by the light of chartreuse eyes, by loneliness,
by the opium of Zillah’s spit and the poison juices of whatever grew inside
her.

 
          
And
what was that? All along, Ghost had been thinking of the baby as a dark lump of
blood, the seed of Ann’s death. And it was. But it was also Nothing’s brother
or sister, and Nothing was not evil. Only lost, as surely lost as Ann’s child
would soon be.

 
          
Ghost
imagined himself trapped in the womb, his soft bones crumbling, the poison searing
his raw new skin away. The poison he and Steve had asked Arkady to make. Had
ended up giving Arkady twenty dollars to make.

 
          
Ghost
leaned against a wall and closed his eyes. There were a million sides to
everything.

 
          
Most
people were able to block out some of them. Ghost sometimes thought he saw them
all—not that it helped.

 
          
“Come
in and kiss me…” whispered a voice that seemed to emanate from within the wall.

 
          
He
jumped and opened his eyes. Voices from nowhere made him more nervous than
usual these days, but this hadn’t sounded like the voice in the closet: it was
faint and dry, almost too tiny to hear, like the voice of an insect.

 
          
When
the voice didn’t speak again, Ghost looked around and found himself lost. He
didn’t even seem to be in the French Quarter anymore. To his back were
forbidding, scorched-looking apartment towers. A wide, busy avenue stretched in
front of him; a small gate opened in the wall to his left. He slipped through
the gate and entered the city of the dead.

 
          
Ghost
had heard about the cemeteries of New Orleans. The groundwater here was so high
that the coffins had to be entombed above ground. There was no real earth to
bury them in; if you tried to dig a hole, it would quickly turn into a pit of
oozing mud. A heavy rain could float coffins and corpses to the surface. But
nothing he’d heard had prepared him for the blinding whitewashed landscape of
Saint Louis Number One, possibly the oldest cemetery in the city, certainly the
gaudiest and most haphazardly arranged.

 
          
There
were coffins bricked into the walls, layer upon layer. That was the first thing
Ghost noticed. Some of the brickwork had collapsed, and he could see ashy
shadows within the wall, the occasional glint of sunlight on bone, brick, or
broken glass. No wonder there were voices in these walls. At his feet a maze of
narrow pathways stretched away into the necropolis.

 
          
Farther
in, he was amazed at how tightly packed together the tombs were. In some places
he had to turn sideways and squeeze between them. High peaked vaults loomed
over the path.

 
          
Tall
iron crosses jabbed into the sky, bristled along the tops of the intricate
ironwork fences that bordered several plots. Almost all the tombs were
white—made of moon-pale marble, silvery granite, or whitewashed brick–and the
sunlight upon them dazzled Ghost’s eyes.

 
          
Against
all the whiteness a thousand bits of color swarmed. There were flowers
everywhere, plaster Virgins and saints with gaily painted robes, colored-glass
tumblers full of rainwater, copper and silver coins embedded in cement. Some of
the ironwork fences around the graves fluttered with ribbons; others were hung
with rosaries or Mardi Gras beads.

 
          
Ghost
passed a tomb chalked with hundreds of red X’s in groups of three. He stopped
and looked at it for a long moment. At first it gave him no feeling at all; it
might have been empty.

 
          
Then
suddenly he knew what he was supposed to do. Chips of brick and nubs of red
chalk were scattered near the base of the tomb. Ghost picked one up, turned
three times around, and carefully inscribed his own three X’s on the door of
the tomb. “I wish I knew where Ann was,” he said. His lips barely moved, but
even the softest whisper seemed to bounce off the tombs and echo along the
empty paths.

 
          
Then
he closed his eyes and listened with all his heart. When the presence came into
his head, he was ready for it.

 
          
It
was a greedy spirit, and an arrogant one. In fact, it reminded him of no one so
much as Arkady Raventon—but without Arkady’s weak flesh, without his craven
lust.

 
          
This
was a spirit like a flaming ebony arrow. Look behind you, it said. That was
all.

 
          
Then
it was gone. Ghost stepped backward and almost hit his head on the overhanging
doorway of another tomb.

 
          
Then,
very slowly, he turned his head and looked behind him.

 
          
Nothing
there but gleaming white walls and flowers trembling in the breeze.

 
          
Feeling
stupid, obscurely tricked, Ghost headed back the way he had come. But after a
couple of minutes he realized he was no longer on the same path. That made him
feel even more stupid, because the tomb with the red X’s had been less than
twenty feet inside the gate. He was sure of it. How could he have gotten turned
around? This path led deeper into the cemetery.

 
          
Soon
there were tombs on all sides of him, and he had no idea which path led toward
the gate. The tombs in the center of the cemetery must be taller; that was why
they seemed to tower above him, soaring up into the bright cloudless sky. Over
the edge of the far wall reared the dark mass of the apartment blocks … the projects,
he realized. It was probably dangerous to be in here alone. The night before,
when they were walking down the dark street that led back to Arkady’s, Steve
had talked morosely about the crime in New Orleans. Little kids would run up
and shoot you in the head, then rifle through your pockets. At least that was
what Steve said.

 
          
The
path twisted deeper in. Now the sky was a bristling forest of iron crosses.

 
          
Granite
peaks wavered overhead, seemed to bow over the path. The tombs pressed closer.