Lost Souls

by Poppy Z. Brite - (ebook by Undead)

  “He’s my friend,” Nothing managed to say. “From back home.”

  “How nice,” said Zillah; his voice was like a bonbon of creamy white chocolate filled with some green corrosive poison. The fire in his eyes snapped, spat. It seemed about to burn a line through the air to Nothing, crisp Nothing’s eyes with its luminescence.

  “He’s cool,” said Nothing without much conviction. “Maybe he could ride with us.” Surely Zillah wouldn’t make Twig stop the van and put Laine out in the chill September night just because Nothing knew him from back home. But worse than that—what if Zillah put them both out? What if they put him out on some glittering 2:00 a.m. stretch of nowhere, tripping his brains out, with only Laine’s cold little hand to hold?

  He wouldn’t be able to stand looking at Laine’s face again, the sulky mouth and the eyes shadowed with wispy white-blond hair, not if Laine lost him his new family. Not if he was banished from this drugged dreamland of wine and song, where the graffiti writhed on the ceiling and the stars sped by all night long. Not if he was banished from Zillah’s arms, from the half-painful sorcery of Zillah’s lips. From the only place where he had ever felt truly accepted.

  In an instant he made the choice that would fashion the rest of his life. Hating himself, but feeling something dark and fathomless begin to open within him, he slid out of Laine’s embrace and pushed him away.

  “Nothing? What’s going on?” Laine stared around at the circle of eyes: Molochai’s and Twig’s tripped-out and hungry, Zillah’s still spitting green fire. He tried to crawl back across the mattress to Nothing, but Zillah hooked a finger through the string of beads around Laine’s neck and pulled back hard. Laine made a low choking sound as the beads tightened across his throat. Then the strand snapped, and bits of sparkling bright plastic were everywhere—rattling under the mattress, landing in the folds of Nothing’s raincoat, catching the moonlight and all the colored glints from the dashboard. Molochai grabbed at them as if they were candy, put one in his mouth.

  Then Molochai and Twig were on either side of Laine, flanking him, pushing him down onto the stained mattress. Their hands encircled Laine’s arms just above the elbow. Their sharp fingers dug into the soft meat there.

  Laine’s eyes, terrified but still trusting, found Nothing’s. “Make them stop,” he pleaded. “Don’t let them hurt me.”

  Zillah grabbed Laine’s kicking feet and forced them to the mattress with one hand. Zillah’s grip seemed to span both of Laine’s ankles; on the back of the hand, veins stood out darkly purple. Laine was wearing pink hightop sneakers with laces of the kind that had been popular with trendy girls a couple of years ago, white patterned with small rainbow figures. Laine’s seemed to be striped, but looking closely, Nothing made out tiny letters. BULLSHITBULLSHITBULLSHIT, said Laine’s shoelaces.

  Laine bucked on the mattress. His eyes never left Nothing’s. They had an accusing look now, and Nothing felt a flash of anger. I didn’t ask you to follow me, he thought, I didn’t tell them to hurt you. And he didn’t think they would hurt Laine, not really. Not yet. But why did Zillah look so expectant and yet so scornful? Why was Molochai drooling out of the corners of his mouth?

  “He looks sweet,” said Molochai. “You’ll share, won’t you?”

  “You can use this if you like.” Zillah held up a little pearl-handled straight razor, a lethal-looking thing he had produced from his pocket or some fold of the mattress. “But you really should do it with your teeth. That’s the best way. The most… intimate.”

  Laine made a small sound deep in his throat, something between a laugh and a moan.

  He’s talking about it like it was a drug, Nothing thought. Like he had some hash and he was talking about whether he should smoke it in a pipe or chop it up and roll it in a joint… Then, with a clarity that nauseated him, he realized just what Zillah was talking about. It all came together then, with no jagged edges and no loose threads. It all meshed like the strands of a rich and crimson tapestry, the time he had spent with these three, the eternity that had comprised a day and a half on the road. Their sharpened teeth, the bite marks Zillah left all over him. The blood in the wine bottle, which he had thought an exotic, delicious affectation.

  It was not an affectation. It was their life.

  For the blood was the life…

  They were vampires. The cynical thought that they might be just a bunch of blood-drinking psychopaths never crossed Nothing’s mind. He had always believed implicitly in things supernatural, things beyond the ken of the world he woke to every day. He believed in them because they had to be there; otherwise there was no hope for him, because he had always known he could not live his whole life in the real world. He had had faith that someday he would find them… or they would find him. And now they had. They had seemed to recognize him from the first, and was that not sign enough?

  Suddenly Laine cried out. But it was not a sound of mortal pain. Twig had grabbed Laine’s chin and forced his head back, and Zillah’s razor had flashed out to nick the exposed throat. Zillah dipped his finger in the blood and rubbed it over Nothing’s lips, painting his mouth, slicking it with Laine’s blood.

  Nothing’s head had begun to clear a little, but the taste of the blood sent his brain swirling back down into acid-madness. Laine was sobbing, long hopeless sounds that seemed wrenched out of his guts. Molochai and Twig sat up straight, their eyes flickering from Zillah’s bloody finger to Nothing’s bloody mouth to Laine’s bloody throat. The blood glistened black in the moonlight.

  Tears coursed down Laine’s face, silver in the night, dampening the hair at his temples. Nothing knew how they would taste, mild and salty like Laine’s mouth. But now he found himself wondering how they would taste mingled with Laine’s blood. He saw himself licking a sheet of wetness off Laine’s cheeks, a sheet of blood streaked through with crystal tears.

  That was when he realized that he could do it. He could tear Laine’s pulse open and drink from it. Not because Zillah wanted him to—not even that—but because he wanted to. Somewhere in his mind was the knowledge that they would probably kill him along with Laine if he refused, but that hardly mattered anymore. The fresh blood had given him a hunger of his own.

  “I’ll help you,” Nothing told Laine. “Don’t be scared.” He lay down beside Laine, spread himself on top of Laine. His arms stretched along the length of Laine’s arms, up to Laine’s wrists, which Molochai and Twig still held pinned. His hips met Laine’s hips, his legs locked with Laine’s legs. Laine’s body was shaking violently. It vibrated through Nothing, turned him electric. Faintly he was aware of music. Someone had put a tape on. Ziggy Stardust.

  He kissed Laine deeply. His mouth moved down to Laine’s throat, to his pulse. He thought of the biker, Spooky. He thought of cutting his own wrist and suckling from it, thought of how unsatisfying that had been.

  “Please,” Laine sobbed, and some small dim part of Nothing, some part untouched by acid or the night, realized what he was about to do. Laine had once held Nothing’s head over the toilet at a party, after too many screwdrivers. Laine had whispered meaningless words of comfort and kissed the sick-sweat away from Nothing’s face. Laine had been his friend, in another life.

  Nothing twisted to look at Zillah. Zillah smiled a dark smile and said, “Come and be one of us,” and Nothing knew he was being told to make his choice. Come and be one of us—or suffer the consequences of your refusal: die, or be alone, and never drink from the bottle of life again. For the blood was the life—

  So he opened his mouth as wide as it would go and bit into the soft flesh of Laine’s throat. Zillah had marked the spot right over the pulse, and there was no cartilage or bone in his way. But the skin was hard to tear; his teeth would not go all the way through it. He had thought they would sink smoothly in, like needles, like fangs. Instead it was like trying to chew through tough raw steak. He ground his teeth into the skin and pulled at it and felt it begin to come away in a wet chunk, peeling away from the great vein. Then
he felt the vein itself throbbing against his lips. What am I doing, that last sane part of his mind screamed, o god what am I doing WHAT AM I DOING, and it kept screaming even as his teeth tore out Laine’s jugular.

  The torrent of blood washed over Nothing’s face and bubbled into his mouth. It was as different from his previous small tastes as whiskey from water. This was the taste of life, its very essence. More than that—he was actually drinking a life, swallowing it whole. He felt himself borne up by the mindless, agonized convulsions of the thin body beneath him and the churning guitar of the spiders from Mars.

  The taste of blood meant the end of aloneness.

  As Laine’s movements became weaker, the others fell upon him. Molochai and Twig nestled into the crooks of Laine’s elbows; there was the sound of their mouths churning, then a long wet sound like the last drops of soda being sucked from a glass. Zillah had pulled Laine’s pants off and buried his face in Laine’s crotch. He fed with delicate licks instead of noisy sucking, but when he looked up at Nothing, his smile was red, and a pulpy shred of flesh was caught in the corner of his mouth.

  Soon Laine no longer struggled, but he was still alive. A long continuous sound came from his open throat, a keening beyond pain or hope. He had come away from home because Nothing had; he had followed Nothing, trusting him. But Laine should have learned by now that when you have too much faith in something, it is bound to hurt you. Too much faith in anything will suck you dry. In this way, all the world is a vampire.

  Nothing held Laine close and drank his life, lost in the slowing pulse, in the taste of blood and salt. He never realized that most of the tears he tasted were his own.

  18

  Heavy rains came to Missing Mile during the night and turned the weather cold, turned the sky leaden. The last sprays of goldenrod withered and died under a coat of rime, and people shovelled last year’s ash from their fireplaces. It would stay cold now.

  Sometime in the dull gray afternoon, somnolent and weary of silence, Ghost put down the map he was drawing with crayons and said, “I’m gonna bike to town. I want some wine.”

  Steve looked up from his book. “Shit, Ghost, it’s freezing. I have to go to work in half an hour. I’ll drive you in.”

  “I don’t need a ride. I’m dressed warm.” Ghost pulled his drab layers of clothing around him. “I like the wind in my eyes.”

  “Suit yourself.” Steve unfolded himself from the couch and pushed the straw hat more firmly down over Ghost’s head. “Call me if you get icicles on your balls. I’ll come pick you up.”

  As Ghost rode, the wind sluiced over his face, froze the winter-tears in his eyelashes, whistled through the spokes of his bicycle wheels like a lonely song. His hair whipped across his face, pale and cold.

  The grocery store was painfully bright after the dark day. Ghost wandered among the shelves, studied candy bars and magazines, finally chose a bottle of scuppernong wine. It took most of the change in his pocket—Ghost hated to carry cash, hated buying things at all—but the wine was forty proof, good and high. Wino wine, the kind he always drank, even though Steve ragged him to hell and back for it.

  He put the bottle in his saddlebag and walked his bike down Firehouse Street, looking into dusty shop windows, stepping over the cracks in the sidewalk. Outside the hardware store he stopped to talk to the old men who congregated there, playing checkers with orange and grape Nehi bottle caps and a beat-up checkerboard. The men were as dry and tough as hard nuts and would not move their gatherings inside until snow flew. The grape team was winning today.

  Ghost greeted the old men by name. “Hey, Mr. Galvin, Mr. Berry, Mr. Joe.”

  “Hey there, Ghost. How you?”

  “I feel bad times coming on,” he told them. He hoped one of them would know something about it.

  But the old men just laughed at him. “You and your longhaired friend been smokin’ that dope out at your place, Ghost?”

  “Naw, he’s Miz Deliverance’s grandkid. If he says bad times comin’, then there’s bad times comin’. Mebbe we’ll be dead by the time they get here.”

  The oldest, most wrinkled man shot a stream of brown spit into the gutter. “Shit-fire, save matches.”

  Ghost took the long way home. It was twilight now, and the streets of Missing Mile were deserted. The hills were checkered with the yellow light of faraway houses. Steve would have gone to work by now, but Ghost hoped he had left a light burning. He rode past the town-limits sign. The fields that stretched away on either side of the road were bare and dry, already stripped of their harvest. Across the furrows a window glimmered on the dusk.

  He thought of the twins he had seen up at the hill, the twins who should have been shrivelling in their graves but were instead vibrant and alive. He hoped the bad times that were coming didn’t have anything to do with them. He was pretty sure they had been nothing but shades, things only he could see, maybe even brought to brief life by the dream he had had about them. But they had terrified him for no good reason. And they had known about the little boy dead on the road, had even implied in the sly manner of spirits that they had killed the boy.

  At the corner where Burnt Church Road met the highway, a tall figure sat hunched behind a sign that said ROSES. The flower-seller—the same one he had seen on the way back from Miz Catlin’s. He was sure of it. A few huge frothy bouquets shivered in the wind. Some stunted pumpkins and gourds were piled around the base of the stand.

  Ghost tried to ride past without seeming to notice the flower-seller, but as he drew close, the figure got to its feet and spread its arms wide… wider… immensely wide, stretching. The sleeves of its long dark cloak billowed. Ghost slowed his bike. Everything in him screamed danger, but he had never been one for turning away from things that scared him, or running from them. He would talk to this person, try to figure out what the sick feeling and the worry were about.

  “Roses?” asked the flower-seller. “Or a jack-o’-lantern to light your path?”

  Ghost pulled his hair in front of his face. He had seen people who looked a little like this, their pale gauntness and loose black clothes vaguely similar. Such people had sometimes visited his grandmother, bringing her mysterious powders and oils in murky bottles or buying herbs from her. They had scared him; sometimes he saw the skulls beneath their faces, long pale orbs, or the bones of their hands as clear and luminous as an X ray. Sometimes he felt their thoughts focusing on him for an instant with a flicker of cold interest like a flame in a dark tunnel of wind. But none of those had worn sunglasses and gloves in hot September weather; none had sold roses and pumpkins at the side of the road. And none had had eyes quite so cold… or so desolate.

  “I don’t have any money,” he said, “or I’d buy a pumpkin. But you ought to pack up for tonight. It’s too cold to sit out here.” Even as he spoke, a night wind seemed to be whipping up, carrying the russet smell of autumn in from the fields.

  “Pity? For pity you may have a rose. And I was just packing up.” The figure stepped closer and tucked a deep red bud into the lapel of Ghost’s army jacket. When one of those long thin hands brushed the bare triangle of skin at the base of his throat, Ghost shivered. Even through his gloves the flower-seller’s fingers were as cold as bone, as loneliness. Ghost looked up into the flower-seller’s face. Those cold eyes glittered somewhere deep in shadowed sockets. Ghost looked quickly down at his own torn white sneakers.

  But it was too late: all at once he caught a rush of images, not words but feelings. The first thing he sensed was age and dark wisdom beyond his ability to measure; he knew this was no man. The second was a terrible, resigned loneliness, a longing for someone he thought might never come. The flower-seller’s mind was like a sentient void, too empty even to be sad, colder than the night. Without thinking, Ghost said, “You’ll be warm when your friends get here.”

  The pale face snapped up. “What friends? Have you news of Zillah?”

  Ghost stumbled backward. “No—I mean, I only know somebody’s coming�
�I mean, somebody must be coming to pick you up. Or I guess maybe you live around here—” He shut his mouth before his words could get any more tangled. Ghost seldom had to make excuses for the things he knew. Not everybody wants his heart looked into, his grandmother had told him when he was very young. So look if you have to, but learn to keep your mouth shut. Since her death six years ago, he spoke of such things only to Steve, or to no one at all. But sometimes things just materialized in his head, and he said them out loud before he could stop himself. As soon as he felt that emptiness pouring out of the flower-seller, he had known that friends were coming, already on the way. And as much as he feared to wonder what sort of friends they might be—the resurrected dream-twins, or worse?—he had had to say it. Comfort might warm those cold eyes.

  But the eagerness glittering in those eyes put a stupid panic into Ghost, panic like a moth beating itself against a window, panic that made him want to hide anything he might know, hide his own head. This is the bad times coming, he realized. The start of it, anyway.

  “You don’t know them,” the flower-seller said flatly.

  Now Ghost was no longer afraid. Now he felt only a terrible empathetic loneliness. He might have been as hollow as a gourd. What if nobody in the whole world loved you? What if you were alone?

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Ghost said wildly.

  The flower-seller leaned across his wooden stand. His eyes met Ghost’s, and his tongue darted out over his pale lips. The long thin hands trembled. Then that cold gaze darted toward the moon, and the flower-seller drew himself up and knotted his fingers together. “Get away from here,” he said.