Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (53 page)

 
          
Ghost
wedged himself between two of them. For one horrible moment he was stuck. Soft
brick crumbled away. Something wriggled against his back. He felt his shirt
rip.

 
          
Then
he pulled free. He half-ran, half-stumbled into an open area where the tombs
were lower and squarer, the tallest ones only shoulder-high.

 
          
In
the center of the open area a girl lay supine on a low marble slab. Bunches of
dried long-stemmed roses were arranged around the slab, crimson gone to black,
white to ivory, yellow and pink to dusty echoes of themselves. The girl’s long
red-gold hair hung down over the edge of the slab, and some of the roses had
become ensnarled in it. She was not visibly breathing, but Ghost felt a weak
tremor of life as he approached.

 
          
Then
the girl raised her head, and Ghost saw what he had known all along. It was
Ann.

 
          
And
she was sick.

 
          
“Ghost.”
Her red-rimmed eyes tried to bring him into focus. “What are you doing here?”

 
          
“Did
you sleep out here all night?”

 
          
She
thought about it, then nodded slowly. “Nowhere else to go. I don’t have any
money, and … I didn’t find . .” She coughed, spat out a mouthful of phlegm. It
glistened faintly iridescent against all the whiteness. Ghost heard the breath
rasping in her chest.

 
          
“What
are you doing here?” Ann asked again. “Do you know where they are? Where
Zillah’s staying?”

 
          
Ghost
swallowed. He wasn’t sure he could do this. He hadn’t counted on Ann being
sick; it was too easy, she had no chance of resisting. But the fact that she
had asked for Zillah instead of Steve—that helped. As did the emptiness he saw
when he met her eyes.

 
          
“Yeah,”
he said. “I know where they are. I can take you to him.”

 
          
He
found the path that led to the gate on his first try.

 
          
“What’s
that?” asked Ann. She was staring blearily at the altar in the back room of
Arkady’s shop. The shop was dark and empty, but Arkady had left the door
unlocked.

 
          
Ghost
fumbled the velvet curtain back and ushered her ahead of him. “Careful on the
stairs,” he said. “It’s dark up there.”

 
          
Ann
stared up into the blackness, then slowly began to climb. Up one flight, around
the bend, up another flight to the wavering rectangle of light that was the
door.

 
          
Ann
went through it, took two unsteady steps into the hall. “Zillah?” she said.

 
          
And
Steve stepped out from behind the door and plastered a wet cloth over her face.
They couldn’t imagine why Arkady kept a bottle of ether in his back room, but
he had said it would work.

 
          
Ghost
saw Steve’s eyes clench shut as Ann struggled against the sick-smelling cloth.

 
          
When
she went limp in his arms, Steve’s face slackened too. For a moment he looked
as if he would collapse with her. But he held Ann upright and steadied her
drooping head against his shoulder, then slid his other arm under her knees,
cradling her.

 
          
Ghost
couldn’t remember the last time he had seen Steve hold Ann so tenderly.

 
          
Arkady
pulled his fingers out of Ann’s mouth and wiped them on her gray sweatshirt. He
patted her cheek, then pushed her limp jaw shut. “Excellent,” he muttered.

 
          
Ghost
leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. Beside him, Steve
shifted, crossed and uncrossed his long legs. “So what do we do now?”

 
          
“Wait,”
Arkady told him. “It is all you can do.”

 
          
“Wait!”
Steve spat out the word. He hauled himself up and began to pace, the heels of
his battered boots clocking against the floor, his hands clawing at his hair.
“I can’t wait. I’ll go crazy.”

 
          
Ghost
stood, steadying himself against the wall. He realized neither of them had
eaten all day. “Look. Why don’t we go out for a while? Over to Bourbon Street
or—”

 
          
Arkady
clapped his hands. The sudden sharp sound brought all movement in the room to
an end: Steve stopped pacing; Ghost shut his mouth without finishing his
sentence; even the dust seemed to stop sifting down. Arkady glanced at the
window. Twilight had begun to filter through the glass, sending long gray
fingers of shadow into the room.

 
          
Below,
on the street corners, Ghost could see lamps lighting one by one, like milky
yellow fireflies.

 
          
“I
know just the thing,” said Arkady. “I will care for the girl. I will watch over
her. You’d only get in the way.” There was no question which of them he meant,
but for once Steve didn’t snarl. “I’ve told you about Ashley’s friends, the
ones in the other guest room. They are musicians, and they will be performing
tonight at a club on Rue Decatur. The club serves the strongest drinks in all
the Vieux
Carre
, and when you come back, everything
will be over. The child will be dead, and you can take your Ann home again.”
Uh-uh, thought Ghost. His brain felt edged with hysteria; he smelled strawberry
incense, cheap wine, clove cigarettes. He closed his eyes.

 
          
Behind
his lids he saw a closet door swinging slowly open, saw a silken sleeve
reaching out for him, heard a voice whispering, Easy, Ghost … easy … He
thought, No way. I don’t want to see any band that came out of that closet.
We’ll find a two-dollar strip show on Bourbon Street, well go to the Ripley’s
Believe It or Not Museum, we’ll do anything but see poor dead Ashley
Raventon’s
lovers playing at some club on Decatur Street.

 
          
But
when Ghost opened his eyes again, Steve was looking morbidly interested. He had
perked up at the mention of the strongest drinks in all the Vieux
Carre
. “That sounds pretty good,” he said. “I’d like to
check out the club scene here. Sure sounds better than sitting around waiting.”
He turned to Ghost. “You want to?”

 
          
It
would make Steve happy, or at least take his mind off Ann, or at least give him
an excuse to get blind drunk. What could happen in a club? Ashley’s lovers
couldn’t fly off the stage at Ghost, flapping their silks, whispering easy ….
He and Steve would be safe in the crowd.

 
          
“Okay
by me,” he said, hoping he sounded surer than he felt.

 
          
“Fine
then,” said Arkady. As he turned to leave the room, he flapped his hand toward
the foot of the bed. A tangle of cotton bandages trailed onto the floor.
“You’ll want to wrap her up,”

 
          
Arkady
told Steve. “Tightly enough to keep some of the blood in, but loose enough to
let out the … matter.”

 
          
Steve
winced. Arkady made his exit, white robes swirling behind him.

 
          
Ghost
stood there for a moment, gripping Steve’s shoulder. Then he followed Arkady
out of the room and shut the door, and Steve was, alone with Ann.

 
          
At
first she only drifted.

 
          
Her
lungs felt stuffed with cotton, and there was an acrid chemical burn in the
back of her throat. She was too tired to open her eyes: her eyelids were
weighted with sand. She let herself slip back into sleep, and she drifted. The
backs of her knees and the back of her neck turned to warm water. Her muscles
melted from her bones. Soon she began to see pictures.

 
          
They
were too vivid to be dreams. Her dreams had always been in black and white, as
precise and disjointed as Fellini films. The pictures she saw now were in
virulent color. For a time she struggled against them, trying to wake up; then
she gave in, because the pictures swelled in her brain and made her head hurt
when she struggled.

 
          
She
saw her father’s fragile-boned face, weirdly phosphorescent in the gloom of the
living room back home. Newspapers were strewn in disarray around his feet, and
an empty coffee mug sat on the arm of his chair near his outstretched hand. She
tried to call his name, but if he heard her, he made no response.

 
          
She
saw a jack-o’-lantern lit orange against a black night, bobbing as if some
shadow-wraith carried it. The glowing grin split open, and a great frothy rose
blossomed out, withering and rotting in the space of a few seconds.

 
          
She
saw a girl’s face with dark eyes half-hidden by a curtain of hair; then the
girl’s eyes rolled up white and silver, and the girl’s mouth opened impossibly
wide, and a gout of blood and whiskey tumbled down her chin.

 
          
She
saw a jumble of streets laid out like a glowing map. Neon danced and rippled:
purple, green, gold. In the streets, crowds of thin children in black
frolicked. They wore studded belts and wristlets, skull-and-
crossbone
earrings, hair dyed every color, teased and twisted into every conceivable
style. She saw pale faces slashed across with scarlet lipstick, with great
smudges of eyeliner. Stalking among the children, everywhere, were corny
silent-film vampires. They pulled black silk capes up over their noses, drew
back in mock horror at crucifixes dangling from
multipierced
earlobes. Beside the children in their gaudy mourning, the vampires were
old-fashioned and hokey–except that all of them had green eyes that glowed and
snapped like strange acid fire.

 
          
As
the final image dwindled into darkness, Ann realized that someone was touching
her.

 
          
Fumbling
with the button of her skirt, sliding her tights down over her hips. She would
know that touch anywhere, would know it even if she hadn’t felt it in ten
years: half-rough but trying to be gentle, half-desperate but trying to be
tender.

 
          
Steve.
At first she wanted to push his hands away, but she could not muster the will
to move, so she lay quietly and let him ease her panties down. Those panties
are really skanky, she thought. Then she thought, Who cares, it’s only Steve,
he’s smelled me before. Then some distant part of her mind realized what was
happening and shrieked, Steve!

 
          
He
would not let himself part her legs to look. He knew the warm saddle between
her thighs too well, knew its perfumed scent and its tangy taste, knew just how
to slide into its warmth. For some perverse reason he had a raging, aching
hard-on. Maybe because you haven’t touched a girl in over two months, the demon
in his mind babbled, not even an unconscious one.

 
          
He
knew that if he looked at her too long, he would want her, even passed out.

 
          
Yes,
he could slip inside her so easily, it would be like coming home—but what if
the thing in her womb reached a tiny hand down and grabbed him? What if it got
ahold
of him with its teeth?

 
          
His
hard-on was suddenly gone.

 
          
Steve
slid one hand under Ann’s hips—she was thinner, he noticed; there was only a
scant handful of flesh on each buttock that had once been so sweetly round—and
started winding the bandages around her. Between the milk-pale thighs, snug
against the treacherous cunt, up around Ann’s slender waist and back down.

 
          
Would
these keep her from bleeding to death when the poison started to work? He
didn’t know. But Arkady had said to wrap her up, and Ghost trusted Arkady
because there was no one else to trust, so Steve had to trust him too. Even if
he was a rat-faced little
fuckwad
.

 
          
When
Ann was wrapped from her waist to the middle of her thighs in white cotton,
Steve pulled the sheet up to her chin. The coarse cloth seemed to settle flat
over Ann’s body; even the rise of her swaddled pubic mound was nearly
imperceptible.