Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (57 page)

 
          
Zillah
waved a languid hand. “In your bag. The closet, top shelf. Three bottles.”

 
          
Then
he leaned over, coughed, and vomited a great
gob
of
blood. It cascaded down his chin and trailed onto the floor. When he
straightened up, his face was as serene as ever. “Have a drink, Chrissy,” he
said. His voice was almost casual.

 
          
Could
he live like this, with Zillah always threatening him, dangling the constant
specter of loneliness over his head? Christian considered the alternative. If
they left, he would lose not only them but Nothing too. His heart clenched at
the thought of never seeing that fine fragile face again. His only moments of
love would be those he spent with the children, matching their caresses with
his own before he tore their pale throats out and stole their lives.

 
          
Whether
he could live with Zillah’s threats Christian did not know. But he knew he
could not live alone again. Humbly, as if in a dream from which he hoped to
wake, he moved toward the closet.

 
          
“Don’t
make me do this,” he said when he had the bottle in his hand. He spoke calmly,
but it was a plea born of desperation.

 
          
Zillah
only stared at him, eyes still flaring. His breath hissed in and out through
his teeth—quick, jagged, painful.

 
          
“Have
a drink, Chrissy,” he said.

 
          
The
first shot blazed green agony as it went down.

 
          
And
then Zillah made him drink another.

 
          
And
then another.

 
          
By
the time they got back to Arkady’s shop, Steve was running full tilt. Ghost
lost his breath trying to keep up. Cold drops of sweat flew from them, catching
the light of the street lamps. Ghost licked salt off his lips. The sweat in
Steve’s hair sparkled, as if his hair were full of a million tiny diamonds.

 
          
“Hurry
up,” Steve panted as they swung into the alley. “You’ve got the key.”

 
          
Ghost
fumbled with the key Arkady had given him, aware of Steve behind him wanting to
wrest it out of his hand. At last the door swung open. The shop was very cold.

 
          
There
was some other smell beneath the herbs and candles and incense, something dry,
ready to crumble. The mummy smell, Ghost thought. That’s what they smelled
like. Ghost had never seen a mummy, but his grandmother had looked at a bunch
of them in a museum once.

 
          
They
were all in glass boxes, she told him. You couldn’t smell them, but I knew just
how they would smell. Like spice kept in a jar too long. Like rags hung up to
dry for a thousand years.

 
          
Pink
and black candle wax had melted onto the velvet
dropcloth
of the altar.

 
          
Steve
took the stairs three at a time, kicking aside a heap of rags that lay across the
top tread. Ghost followed slowly. There was a bad feeling here, a feeling of
stillness, of nothing left alive. He didn’t want to go upstairs, but he knew he
had to.

 
          
At
the top of the stairs he nudged the heap of rags with the toe of his sneaker.

 
          
It
rolled over and gaped up at him, lips stretched tight over teeth like chips of
ivory.

 
          
A
tiny half-dried trickle of blood seeped from the torn socket of its right eye.
Arkady must have summoned the last of his strength to pull the knife out of his
robe and drive it into his eye socket. Ghost had seen the knife on Arkady’s
nightstand, a long, lethal-looking thing with a
jewelled
handle and a ten-inch tapered blade. His hands were still folded around the
haft. Ghost saw the gleam of precious stones between fingers like dry kindling.

 
          
Steve’s
boot had punched a sizable hole in Arkady’s brittle rib cage. Inside the body
cavity, withered organs hung like empty wineskins, grayish-brown, already
coated with a fine layer of dust. How the twins must have loved Arkady, Ghost
thought; how many wild nights they must have spent with him, to be able to suck
him so utterly dry. How could this bundle of
shrivelled
tissues have lived long enough to drive a knife into its own
eye?But
the knife protruded from the socket in mute
testimony. Gently, Ghost pried Arkady’s brittle fingers from the haft, drew the
blade from Arkady’s eye, and tried to tuck the white robe around the desiccated
little body. He closed Arkady’s withered eyelids as carefully as he could, but
they still flaked away beneath his fingers.

 
          
Then
he made himself go into the bedroom.

 
          
The
light was as flat and dead as neon, though it was only the light of the moon
shining through the window. Steve sat on the edge of the bed. Beside him was a
hump swathed in bloody sheets. Steve’s face had gone an absolute, eerie white.
Thick blood coated his hands. He raked his fingers through his hair, matting it
and streaking his forehead. “She’s dead,” he said.

 
          
“Are
you sure?”

 
          
Steve
laughed the most hopeless laugh Ghost had ever heard. “Oh yeah. I’m sure. Come
here and get a good look, why don’t you?” Ghost stepped closer to the bed, and
Steve yanked the sheet back.

 
          
Ann
lay on her side, twisted into an attitude that was painful to look at. Her neck
craned stiffly back. Her face was a grimace of pain. Crusted rivulets of blood
ran from the corners of her mouth. Her hands were thrust between her
outstretched legs as if she had been clawing at herself.

 
          
Blood
slimed her arms to the elbows like gory gloves.

 
          
Most
of the bandages had come
unravelled
, or Ann had torn
them away. They lay in a sodden heap beside the bed. The sheet beneath Ann’s
hips was a black nightmare of blood. She had bled so much that the sheet and
the mattress could not absorb it all; the overflow pooled in the wrinkles and
depressions of the bedclothes, clotting as thick and dark as jelly.

 
          
Cupped
in Ann’s hands, half-encased in a glob of gelatinous blood, Ghost saw a pale
shape no larger than a red bean: the dot of an eye, the veined bubble of a
skull, tiny fingers like the petals of sea anemones: He looked away.

 
          
Four
A.M. is when all my dreams die, Ann had told him. It would always be four A.M.
for her now; nothing could ever get her through this last, longest night.

 
          
“You
know what?” Steve laughed again and shoved his bloody hair back. “There’s even
blood on her eyeballs. How the fuck did it get on her eyeballs? What did he
give her? What did we give her?” He stared wildly around the room, at the dusty
walls, the cobwebbed ceiling. He met Ghost’s eyes, but there was no sign of
recognition in his empty stare. A long shudder ran through him.

 
          
Then
he seemed to pull himself together. His eyes were no longer blank; they shone
with the glaze of alcohol and unhealthy resolve. “I’m
gonna
kill them,” he said.

 
          
“You
found Ann. You can find where they live. And you’re
gonna
take me there and help me kill them all.”

 
          
Ghost
had to moisten his lips before he spoke. “I don’t want to kill anybody,” he
said.

 
          
“Yeah?”
Steve grinned his humorless grin. “Then how come you’re holding that ?”

 
          
Ghost
looked down at his hand. He was holding Arkady’s
jewelled
knife. The slender blade was dazzling in the cold neon light.

 
          
Ghost
raised his eyes back to Steve’s. Slowly he shook his head.

 
          
“Fuck
you, then!” Steve jumped up and bolted onto the landing, heading for the
stairs.

 
          
Ghost
started to follow.

 
          
But
before he reached the door, he turned back and dug a handkerchief out of one of
his pockets. Quickly, without thinking much about it, he took the head of the
foetus
between thumb and forefinger and extracted it from
the lump of congealed blood. The back of his hand brushed Ann’s inner thigh; it
was scaly with dried gore.

 
          
The
tiny skull was still warm, and for a moment the sticky skin seemed to twitch
between his fingers. But that was only his hand trembling. He wrapped the
foetus
in his handkerchief and tucked the bundle into his
pocket.

 
          
Out
on the landing, Steve snatched Arkady’s withered corpse up by the front of its
robe and slammed it against the wall. The brittle cranium shattered. Dust
sifted from the cavity, powdered Steve’s hands, mingled with Ann’s blood.

 
          
“What’d
you do to her?” Steve yelled into the ruined face. “What was that stuff?.
Drano? Why did we trust you?”

 
          
He
kicked the body down the stairs. At the bottom it crumbled, the white robe
settling over a pile of dust and splintered bones. Steve followed it.

 
          
Ghost
ran down after him and tried to grab him, but Steve was already raging through
the shop. He kicked Arkady’s altar, and it crashed over, though Ashley’s skull
was nowhere to be seen. He tore the beaded curtain down. Bright bits of plastic
skittered across the floor. He swept rows of bottles and boxes off the shelves.
Strange pungent smells wafted up from the spilt substances.

 
          
“Fucker,”
said Steve helplessly. “Goddamn shithead fucker.” He might have been speaking
of God or Arkady or himself. He stood with his feet splayed and his eyes
rolling wildly, looking for something else to destroy, something whose broken
fragments might magically
recoalesce
into a whole,
living Ann. He grabbed the knife from Ghost’s hand and raised it high above his
head.

 
          
Ghost
saw plainly what Steve intended to do next: he was going to bring the heavy
handle down on the glass case where Arkady’s bowls and jars were laid out.
Several hundred pounds of shattering glass, even in a back alley of the French
Quarter late at night, might attract attention. And with Ann lying in her own
blood upstairs and the proprietor smashed to powder in the back room, attention
was not what they wanted. “Don’t do that,” Ghost said, and caught Steve’s arm.

 
          
Steve
whirled on him. For a moment Ghost thought Steve would bring the knife down in
his face. But Steve only stood poised to attack, the muscles of his arms
trembling.

 
          
“Listen,”
Ghost said as calmly as he could. “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t even
Arkady’s fault. Ann made her own choice.” Bewitched, he thought, but that
wouldn’t help Steve.

 
          
Steve’s
lips worked soundlessly. His eyes were red and desperate. But ever so slowly he
lowered the knife. In that moment, despite the dark smears of blood on his
forehead and the lines of exhaustion bracketing his mouth, Steve’s face looked
younger and more vulnerable than ever.

 
          
It
was the face of the eleven-year-old kid Ghost had once known, wanting badly to
believe what Ghost was telling him, wanting to trust Ghost but not quite able.

 
          
At
last Steve said, “You don’t think it was my fault?”

 
          
“It
was never your goddamn fault.”

 
          
“Or
Arkady’s, even? You don’t think she died because of the poison we gave her?”

 
          
“She
would’ve died no matter what, Steve. Arkady told us she couldn’t have an
abortion.