Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (60 page)

 
          
Sometimes
Steve would start screaming in the night. He would wake sobbing, clawing at the
darkness in front of his face. Ghost held him and tried to warm the chill of
nightmare out of his bones.

 
          
By
day, Ghost wandered around town picking up leaves and bits of colored glass,
talking to the old men who had moved their checker game inside the hardware
store for winter. They kidded him about the bad times he’d said were coming,
but stopped when they saw the look on his face.

 
          
One
day he rode his bike out to
Miz
Catlin’s and told her
everything. At the end of the hour it took him, he was sobbing.
Miz
Catlin patted his hand and said the things Ghost had
known she would say: she believed it, every word, and his grandmother would be
proud of him.

 
          
Then
she told him something he hadn’t known. “That Raventon fellow was a fake and a
liar. “Huh?”

 
          
“Pennyroyal,
yarrow, brooklime.”
Miz
Catlin flapped a wrinkled
hand. “All those things are good to start a
pessary
with, but they wouldn’t do a damn thing together. Not strong enough.

 
          
The
girl would have died anyway, Ghost.”

 
          
Ghost
wondered. But when he was lying awake at night, staring at the stars on his
ceiling and thinking about everything,
Miz
Catlin’s
words made him feel better.

 
          
One
December day Ghost found himself out on Violin Road near the trailer where
Christian and the others had lived. The tangle of rosebushes still grew wild in
the backyard, and though Missing Mile was deep in winter, one rose blossomed in
the heart of the thicket. When Ghost reached for it, a thorn sank like a tooth
into the ball of his thumb. Bright drops of his blood spattered the frozen
ground.

 
          
“Blood
for blood,” he whispered. Again he remembered how the knife had felt going into
Zillah’s skull.

 
          
On
an evening in early spring Steve and Ghost walked out to the old graveyard.

 
          
Beside
Miles Hummingbird’s weathered tombstone, unmarked, was a soft spot in the
ground where Ghost had buried the
foetus
still
wrapped in his handkerchief. He wished he could have placed Ann’s body here
too, but this was part of her; this would have to do.

 
          
Ghost
wondered where Ann was now. He wished he could ask Miles, but he would not.

 
          
What
goes on between the dead, his grandmother had told him, is the
dead’s
own business.

 
          
Steve
rolled a joint, lit it, passed it to Ghost, and began to talk lovingly about
what a piece of shit the T-bird was. He was going to sell it to the junkyard,
he said, and throw a party to celebrate. Whenever Steve started talking that
way, it meant he was thinking about a road trip.

 
          
That
might do them both good.

 
          
Steve
was quiet for a while. When the joint had burned down to a ragged end, he
turned to Ghost. “Listen…”

 
          
“What?”

 
          
“Everything
that happened last fall … I know it was real. I mean, I was there. But it’s
still hard, Ghost.” Steve spread his arms wide. “What does it do to you?

 
          
How
do you deal with it? Doesn’t it fuck you up, to know that we touched something
evil, that it’s still out there in the world?”

 
          
Steve
was letting himself think about those days again. For a long time he had
refused to.

 
          
His
world was visibly torn apart, but he would not acknowledge what had sundered
it. Ghost held him during his night terrors and never tried to make him talk.

 
          
But
a postcard had come in the mail last week, a brightly colored postcard, its
edges ragged, its message blurred with the grime of small-town post offices.
Ghost knew Steve had seen it. You are safe, the card had said. You will be safe
as long as I live: forever, or nearly so. I love you. And the signature was
scrawled large across the bottom, the t like a dagger thrusting down, the N and
the loop of the g swooping like bats’ wings: Nothing.

 
          
“I
don’t know,” Ghost said at last. “Maybe they were evil, like
Miz
Catlin says.

 
          
My
grandmother told me you shouldn’t try to define evil, that the minute you think
you’ve got it all pinned down, a kind of evil you never even thought of will
sneak up behind you and jump inside your head. I don’t think anyone knows what
evil is. I don’t think anyone has the right to say.

 
          
“So
maybe they were just like us. I hate what they did, what they do. But they’d
hate our lives too. Maybe they did what they had to do to live, and tried to
get a little love and have a little fun before the darkness took them.”

 
          
“I
love you, Ghost.”

 
          
Ghost
felt his heart expand. “Love you too.”

 
          
He
accepted the last of the joint from Steve, sucked at it, closed his eyes. When
the smoke was gone, he stretched out on the pine needles, his head in Steve’s
lap. Steve stroked his hair, and through those guitar-callused fingertips Ghost
caught Steve’s mood: lonely, but not alone. Bitter, but not destroyed. They had
made it through the winter.

 
          
They
stayed in the graveyard, talking sometimes, drifting off to sleep and waking to
see their breath plume in the air, watching the sky until it grew pale with the
first light of morning.

 
          
Fifty
Years Later

       
Night.

 
          
Black
night in a club, 4:00 A.M. relieved only by the watery neon pulse that filters
through the holes in the ceiling. The club is in the basement of a burned-out
building, so most of the light is lost in the charred and rusted skeleton of
steel that towers seventeen stories into the night. But some light filters
through, purplish and flat.

 
          
Night
in a club. These dives have changed very little. The walls are painted black,
scorched in spots, crawling with arcane graffiti: spiky insignia, dripping band
emblems sprayed in gold and red. This club is located a few blocks from the
edge of the French Quarter, and Mardi Gras week has just begun. Less than a
mile away the endless party rages through the streets, the bright costumes
swirl by, the liquor flows like milk.

 
          
They
will be there soon enough.

 
          
On
the tiny stage, separated from the dance floor by strands of barbed wire, two
members of a snuff-rock band are packing up their equipment: the cords and
effects, the violin bows and bone-saws, the ampules of blood the audience
thinks is fake. They mix it with alcohol to keep it from coagulating too
quickly; they have not forgotten their old customs. Their faces are smudged
white, with rows of tiny, slightly raised black dots in elaborate patterns of
scarification. They wear their hair twisted into hundreds of matted, filthy
little braids. Their eyes are ringed in gray.

 
          
They
still bleed from the slashes made by the singer’s chrome-tipped whip upon their
hands and faces and naked pierced chests, but they are healing fast.

 
          
On
a steel bench that runs along the wall, a young man is curled on his side,
asleep: the band’s singer. His fist is pressed against his mouth, and his lips
make a slight sucking motion. He looks perhaps twenty, too thin for his height.
His face has taken on a cool ivory beauty: the high sharp cheekbones, the twin
black arches of his eyebrows sweeping toward his temples, the flickering dark
pools of his eyes as he dreams.

 
          
His
hair falls across his forehead in a straight, smooth sheaf, blue-black. The air
in the club is colder than the semitropical night outside, and in his sleep the
young man has pulled his purple-lined coat tightly around him.

 
          
He
has good reason to be tired. He runs a tight crew, and he has kept them alive,
well fed, and sated for half a century.

 
          
The
band have finished packing up. At the sound of their footsteps approaching the
young man comes awake, blinking up at them. At first his vision makes them
hazy, and he thinks there are three of them three clumps of hair, three faces
defined in blots of dark makeup—but slowly they come clear, and there are only
two.

 
          
The
memory of singing tonight returns to him. He gives strange performances,
alternately whispering his words and shrieking them, his hands clenched at his
sides, then flung out gesturing at the crowd as if he would conjure them all
into hell. He swirls his whip through the smoky air and watches the audience
bleed. And sometimes as he sings, he remembers another night at a different
club, a night when a pale-eyed wraith clung to a microphone as if the crowd
would drown him. He remembers a hoarse golden voice.

 
          
But
the show is over. He smiles up at them and asks, “What did you bring me?”

 
          
Molochai
pulls his hand out of his pocket and opens his fingers. Lying on his grubby
palm is a hypodermic needle full of blood. Nothing opens his mouth. Molochai
places the sharp tip of the needle—carefully, ever so carefully—on Nothing’s
tongue and pushes the plunger. The blood trickles down Nothing’s throat, rich
and sweet.

 
          
“We
saved the last for you,” Twig tells him.

 
          
“We
can get more,” says Nothing. The others nod in agreement.

 
          
“We
can always get more,” says Nothing.

 
          
A
smile of happy anticipation spreads across Molochai’s scarified face, and he
jabs Twig in the ribs. Twig returns the jab with a tug on one of Molochai’s
tiny braids.

 
          
“Because
we have time,” Nothing tells them. “Forever and ever.” For the first time in
years he thinks of Christian, his smooth impassive face, his coldly tragic
eyes.

 
          
He
believes Christian would be proud of him now.

 
          
“Or
nearly so,” he whispers a beat later. But the others have already turned away.

 
          
The
stage lights have been turned off, and the neon of the buzz-vendors flickers
only fitfully. Nothing leads his family out of the club in darkness. They are
headed for Bourbon Street. Nothing knows how to get there, and where they can
pick up a bottle of Chartreuse along the way.

 
          
Molochai
is playing with a heavy silver doubloon of the same shape and size as those
thrown from Mardi Gras parade floats along with all the other colored trinkets.
But this coin is older than any Mardi Gras doubloon. Molochai keeps tossing it
into the air and catching it.

 
          
Nothing
snatches the coin in midair and looks at it. Over the years Molochai’s sticky
fingerprints have worn away some of the carving: the man’s lips no longer
appear so full, and his sharp teeth are barely visible.

 
          
“Let
me see that, kiddo,” says Twig, making a grab for the coin.

 
          
They
bandy it about for a few moments, tossing it back and forth, trying to spin it
on the ends of their fingers. As they climb the stairs to street level, the
sound of their boots on the cement echoes back along the graffiti-swarming
corridor, up through the
spiderwebs
and the maze of
burned-out girders, out into the night.

 
          
Night.
And they are gone.