Lost Souls

by Poppy Z. Brite - (ebook by Undead)

  Ghost was used to asking himself such questions. He had been visited in his dreams by the dead; he had dreamed the future as clearly as a story in a book; he had been able to pick up the thoughts and feelings of people he was close to—and other people if he concentrated—for as long as he could remember. But he had never been visited while awake by creatures from one of his dreams.

  “What is it?” Steve called from across the clearing.

  “Hello, Ghost,” said the crimson-haired twin, smiling down at him with rouged lips. Those lips were too dark in that pale, peaked face, and there was no warmth in that smile, only a spasm of muscles long forgotten, a memory of a smile. But Ghost looked up into those flat silvery eyes, and he was not afraid for his own safety. Not yet. These twins had been dead a long time, if indeed they had ever lived outside his dream.

  “Of course we haven’t,” said the first twin, catching Ghost’s thought. “We’re just your dream.”

  “We don’t go around killing little niggerboys on lonely roadsides long past midnight just to suck their lives out.”

  “He didn’t taste exquisite, did he, love, at the moment of death? No, we didn’t suck out that little boy’s life, Ghost.”

  “Nooo, not us, not so we could stay beautiful. We’re just your dream….”

  Obviously they did not intend him to believe it. Beneath the twins’ exotic scent Ghost caught a whiff of decay, dry and stale, edged with pale brown. Their skin suddenly looked brittle, as if the touch of a breeze would flake it away from fragile ivory bones. Ghost wanted to ask them whether it hurt to rot, whether they grew lonely in the grave. He wanted to know whether they were buried together in a casket big enough for two bodies—big enough for two small dry bodies that knew how to fit together like a puzzle of blood and bone. Or did their graves lie side by side, and did they have to reach through the earth to clasp hands?

  He had to find out what they were, whether they were dangerous. Reluctantly he reached out and tried to touch their minds; reluctantly he found them. Their minds were like echoes, like haunted rooms from which all the life had gone. The touch of their thoughts was light, fluttering, as cold and silver as graveyard stone, as voracious as feeding animals. They took Ghost into the grave with them, and he saw the darkest darkness that ever was, darker than a starless night on the mountain where he’d been born, darker than the darkness that swam up behind his closed eyelids when he lay in bed at night, darker than the hour before dawn.

  He was lying on rotten satin, and he felt his tissues drying and shrivelling inside him, felt the secret loving movement of the creatures that shared his grave, the pale worms, the shiny beetles with their delicate black legs, the things without shape or name, too tiny to be seen, the hungry things turning his flesh back into new rich earth—

  “Ghost! What the fuck are you doing?” Steve’s hands were on him, large and strong and undeniably real, Steve’s bony fingers digging into Ghost’s shoulders.

  Ghost leaned back against Steve. “It doesn’t hurt,” he said—to Steve? to the twins? He knew not, he cared not.

  “What doesn’t hurt? Who are you talking to?”

  “Death doesn’t hurt,” said one of the twins, and a light came into his silver eyes. “Death is dark, death is sweet.”

  The other twin took up the litany. “Death is all that lasts forever. Death is eternal beauty.”

  “Death is a lover with a thousand tongues—”

  “A thousand insect caresses—”

  “Death is easy.”

  “Death is easy.”

  “DEATH IS EASY DEATH IS EASY DEATHISEASYDEATHIS—”

  “Shut up!” Ghost screamed. The chant swelled inside his head, became the rhythm of his heartbeat, sucked him in. “Stop it! Leave me alone!”

  Then Steve’s arms were around him, and instead of the twins’ rotten-spice odor there was only Steve’s smell, beer and dirty hair and fear and love, and Ghost buried his face in the soft black cotton of Steve’s T-shirt. When he opened his eyes again, the twins were gone. Ghost heard only the faraway roar of the power plant across the water, saw only the branches of the oak, tangled and twisted, stretching up to the clear, glittering sky.

  Ghost didn’t talk much on the drive back to Missing Mile. He told Steve only about the lovely feral faces of the twins and their bright silks and their bewitching dead smell. He didn’t want to wonder, he said, what kind of an omen those twins might have been… or, worse than an omen, if they might have been real. Instead he finished the whiskey and went to sleep with his head hung out the window and his hair streaming in the wind, and Steve looked from the shimmering road to the hill of Ghost’s cheek, the dark curve of his eyebrow, the satin scrap of his lashes.

  Again Steve wondered what manner of things lived in that pale head, what Ghost was made of, of what substance were his visions. Steve had heard nothing back there on the hill, nothing but the wind and the power plant’s faraway hum. He had seen nothing but the old scarred oak tree, wild against the sky. But he believed that Ghost had seen a pair of twins long dead, the twins that had died in his dream and come back to life in his waking hours. Steve no longer even considered disbelieving the things Ghost saw and heard, the things Ghost knew without knowing.

  Steve’s faith in the high omniscient gods of his childhood—Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and an eccentric creature apparently designed just for him, the Haircut Fairy—had been blasted by older, more worldly friends who advised him to stay awake and see whether it wasn’t his dad spiriting away the carefully wrapped package of dark and unruly hair clippings, whether it wasn’t his mother delivering all those mystical goodies. The Easter-morning chocolate never tasted quite so wondrously creamy after he found out that it wasn’t brewed and molded under the roots of a tree deep in some enchanted forest, in the vast subterranean workshop of a giant rabbit he had pictured as bearing a strong resemblance to Bugs Bunny, but with bright pink fur.

  Years later, when his aunt and cousins took him to church, he suspected that this was more of the same magical gobbledygook updated for grown-ups. With the cynical hope of an eleven-year-old he prayed for the successful flight of the hyperspace machine he and his friend B.J. were building in the Finns’ garage. But the motors they had salvaged from hair dryers, refrigerators, and one precious wrecked motorcycle left them stranded on earth, no matter how many adjustments they made, how many dials they twisted, no matter how many times B.J. pushed his glasses up on his nose and checked the spiral notebook from Walgreen’s that contained his calculations, no matter how bitterly Steve cussed and kicked at the mess of machinery.

  Steve thought his belief in magic might well have died there, at the hands of a God who cared nothing for a hyper-space machine built by the labor and thievery and faith of two skinny, sweaty boys who had hoped all through a long summer. Steve’s faith might have been shattered beyond salvation, might have died right there on that garage floor, along with the snips of wire, the scraps of metal, the broken drill bit that his dad whaled him for.

  He might never have believed in magic again. But a few weeks later—right around this time of year, he realized, twelve years ago to the month—he met Ghost, and everything changed forever.

  It was near the end of his eleventh summer, when the season was about to turn, when Steve was poised at the last reach of childhood. The passions and excitements of children no longer seemed so heady to him. He felt faintly silly for having tried to build a hyperspace machine, or indeed for doing anything that was not dictated by the realm of the practical. He cringed now to think how different he might have been. He might never have picked up a guitar, might have graduated from N.C. State with a bachelor’s degree in advertising or some such deathsome thing. If he hadn’t met Ghost.

  The locusts were still singing in the trees and in the long weeds by the side of the road, but their song grew sad, the harbinger of another summer’s end. School was in session. The days would be relentlessly hot and sticky for another month at least, but some new cooln
ess in the night air signalled the golden mantle of fall. As at the beginning of every school year, there was a new kid. This year the new kid was a pale, frail-looking boy whose hair was a little too long to meet the current standards, who came to school wearing shirts that were clean but always seemed to hang from him too loosely. Steve sat behind him in class and saw that his shoulder blades were as distinct and articulated as the joints of birds’ wings.

  By rote the new kid was ignored at first, though there was some discussion of his funny name and his hillbilly origins. Then, by virtue of his appearance, his quietness, and his disinclination to join in the sixth-grade touch-football games at recess, he was judged a fag and thereafter jeered at. Everyone knew he must be smart because he’d come up a grade and was a year younger than the rest of the class. Most of the kids in Missing Mile had something weird about them: their fathers had died in the big fire at the old cotton mill, or their mothers worked as strippers in Raleigh, or they lived out on Violin Road and were so poor, the rumor went, that they had to eat roadkill.

  These children were happy to have someone to look down upon. The new kid didn’t seem to care, or even really notice; even when the sixth-grade boys zinged him with pinecones and chunks of gravel, he looked around bewilderedly as if he thought they might have fallen out of the sky. He checked out grown-up books about space from the school library and spent his recesses in the fringe of woods at the edge of the yard.

  Steve was curious. He’d heard the new kid and his grandmother had moved here from the mountains, and he wanted to hear about the mountains. He and his parents had driven through them once, and to Steve they had seemed a place of dark mystery, of lushness, of a foreboding beauty that verged on the sinister. In the mountains you wouldn’t need a hyper-space machine; in the mountains they kept giant possums for yard dogs.

  So one day Steve forsook the touch-football game—it was kind of a stupid affair anyway, less concerned with the actual rules of football than with knocking down as many kids as possible and grinding their faces into the dirt—and took his own walk in the woods. He walked with his hands stuffed in his pockets, feeling awkward, half-hoping he wouldn’t meet the new kid, who probably only wanted to be left alone, who surely thought he was just a roughneck jerkoff like the others. The woods were sun-dappled and quiet, but Steve kept walking into old strands of spiderweb that stuck to his face and made him think tickly legs were racing down his back. He was about to give it up and go play football after all when he heard a quiet “hey” from above his head.

  Steve looked up into the calmest blue eyes he’d ever seen. No wonder this kid didn’t mind insults or pinecones. Set in a face that was far too delicate, framed by wisps of rain-pale hair, those eyes were nevertheless at peace. Steve wondered what it felt like to have eyes like that.

  The kid was perched comfortably in a tree, his legs stretched out along a low branch, his back snuggled against the trunk. He raised an arm and pointed to a spot along the path just past Steve.

  At first Steve didn’t see anything. Then all at once it came clear, the way an optical illusion will suddenly resolve itself: an intricate and enormous web that spanned the path, and hanging head-down at the middle of the concentric gossamer circles, a particularly large, juicy-looking brown weaver. Another couple of steps and Steve would have walked right into it. He tried unsuccessfully to suppress a shudder.

  “Spiders are spinning all over the woods,” said the kid. “That means it’ll be cold soon.”

  This went against the rationality that Steve so loved. It sounded childish. What could spiders have to do with the weather? “How do you know?” he said.

  “My grandmother knows all that stuff.” The blue eyes did not challenge Steve to believe. The kid had an air of quiet sureness; there was nothing cocky about him, nothing arrogant, but he seemed to know he spoke the truth.

  Steve was interested despite himself. Anyway, a kid from the mountains was surely entitled to his share of weird folklore. “Yeah?” he said. “What else does your grandmother know about?”

  “Lots of stuff.” The kid hesitated. “If you want to meet her, you could come visit us sometime. We live out on Burnt Church Road right by the dead end.”

  It should have been hard to extend that invitation, being the new kid with no real friends, not knowing whether Steve might just laugh at him and walk away. And it should have been difficult for Steve to accept. But already there was an easiness between them that surpassed any words they had exchanged. Standing on the path in the sun-dappled September woods staring up at the skinny kid in the tree, the kid he had not yet known for ten minutes, Steve felt comfortable, as if he could say anything. It was not quite déjà vu; it was not so unsettling, but it was somehow familiar. When he remembered it now, Steve thought that it was not so much like meeting a friend as like recognizing one.

  He loosened his grip on the steering wheel and stared ahead into the sparkling night. Christ, but he was tense—first his bad mood and the whiskey, then the spooky shit on the hill. His nerves were as tight as the thrumming of the wheels on the road. Ghost mumbled something, but when Steve glanced over at him, Ghost was still sleeping, his eyes soundly shut and his hands lying limp in his lap. He was dreaming again. Ghost always dreamed, but only sometimes did his dreams come true.

  Now they were coming into the outskirts of Missing Mile, the place called Violin Road, where dark pine branches hung over the dusty gravel road, where the land was peppered with heaps of old scrap metal and chicken coops and family graveyards that sprouted from the tired grass like sad little crops of stone. Whenever Steve drove out here in the daytime, he saw kids with ragged clothes and faded eyes playing on rickety jungle gyms, digging holes in the dirt of the scrubby yards, standing aimlessly, their heads swivelling to follow the T-bird as it went by. Once he had seen a group of small kids hunkered down around a dead possum by the side of the road, poking it and turning it over with sticks, looking for maggots. That had been a hundred-degree August day, and Steve had caught a noseful of ripe possum as he’d driven past.

  But now, under the cold September moon, the trailers and rusty cars and trash heaps seemed to fade, to grow insubstantial. Only the grass and the low-hanging trees appeared to shimmer and come alive. Steve wondered who lived here, scratching out a place to exist, holding the kudzu and the wide empty sky at bay. Were they farmers gone broke trying to beg crops from this dirt that had gone barren fifty years ago? Were they field hippies, aging bohemians who thought living off the land meant a couple of scraggly tomato plants and Dannon yogurt from the 7-Eleven two miles up the road?

  Steve glanced down at the gas gauge. Nearly empty, but the change from the Pepsi machine would buy a tankful tomorrow. The T-bird was damn thirsty these days. Piece of shit, he thought with affection.

  They were almost home now. Steve would sleep in his once-cheerful wreck of a room, swathed in filthy sheets, trying to fend off nightmares. In the morning Ghost would make whole-grain banana pancakes and bring him a beer. The presence of Ghost in the next room, drunk and dreaming, would be a comfort. It had been a long night.

  5

  Fifteen years later, Christian’s bar was not so very different than it had been on that last night of Mardi Gras, that night of blood and altars. That delicious night.

  One of the stained-glass windows had been broken in a fight, on a rare evening when the bar was crowded and the liquor flowed too freely and tempers reached a sodden white-hot pitch. Christian never found a replacement for the antique glass. The window was covered with black cardboard; it kept the sunlight out during the daytime, kept the shadows in at night.

  Upstairs, in Christian’s room, the bloodstains Jessy had left on the carpet grew pale brown and edgeless as Christian walked over them in black leather boots, in slippers, with his bare, long-toed, knobby feet. Fifteen years of his footsteps wore Jessy’s blood away.

  The wood of the bar lost its sheen, grew dull, scarred. Christian forgot to replace the light bulbs in the imitation T
iffany lamps—a curse of excellent night vision. The tawdry, alcoholic, glorious life of the French Quarter went on way up Chartres, far away. No one ever came in before ten.

  Later, Christian often thought that the man who called himself Wallace should have appeared at Mardi Gras. There would have been a symmetry to that, a sort of correctness. But of course life was messy, Christian had lived long enough to know that. The man came to the bar one night early in September, during a late heat wave. He had rolled up the sleeves of his white cotton shirt, and the cloth at his armpits was circled with sweat. At first Christian thought he was an old man, by the usual standards at any rate, a very old, sad, tired man. Then he looked again and saw that the man could not be much older than fifty.

  But this was a man who carried himself as if expecting blows, a man turned inward, looking out at the world through guarded eyes. His clipped curly hair was only beginning to go from brown to gray. He had a face that might once have been kind—deep careworn lines, brown eyes that had seen too much pain. There was still warmth in those eyes, but it was warmth dampened with weariness and watchfulness. Christian thought that whatever this man chose to drink, he would take it straight, and he would take a lot of it.

  “Scotch,” said the man. “Chivas Regal.” Christian poured it over ice. The man held the glass up to the light, frowned into its amber depths. Then he brought it to his lips and tossed the whiskey down in one practiced motion. Christian heard the ice chitter against the man’s teeth. The man spat it back into the glass. Then he looked at Christian and said, “My name is Wallace Creech,” and held out his hand.

  “Christian,” said Christian, taking the hand. He looked straight into Wallace’s eyes. Wallace stared back, unflinching. Most people started at the touch of Christian’s fingers and withdrew quickly, rubbing their hands against their clothing to rid themselves of Christian’s icy touch, glancing away from the cold light of Christian’s eyes. But Wallace looked steadily back, grasped Christian’s hand harder, and said, “A fine name.”