“What—”
“Go.” Now there was a light of desperation in the deep-set eyes. Hungry desperation, it looked like. “Go now if you want to live.”
The last light of day disappeared from the sky. The flower-seller’s face was partially obscured by the growing dark, making it look pointed, feral. He made a half-despairing, half-starved sound deep in his throat, and seemed about to lunge right over the stand. But Ghost was already straddling his bike, shoving at the kickstand, reaching up with one hand to steady his hat and pedaling as hard as he could. After a few minutes he stopped and looked back over his shoulder. But the flower stand and the lone figure, if there, were hidden in shadow.
The T-bird was still parked in the driveway when Ghost rode up, though the house was unlit. He leaned the bike against the side of the house, where the paint was flaking away. By now it was almost too dark to see, though weak moonlight limned the edges of the clouds. On the porch Ghost almost fell over a crate of beer bottles that Steve had dragged out of the house. Then he pushed the door open and was inside, throwing the deadbolt lock, turning on lamps. There must be light. Light to keep him from thinking about the flower-seller out there in the deepening night.
Steve lay on the couch, blearily rubbing his eyes against the sudden brightness, several empty beer bottles on the floor beside him. He had been using a pile of dirty sweatshirts for a pillow, and his face still bore the faint pattern of seams and creases. Ghost felt something under his foot— Steve’s keyring lay by the door as if Steve had hurled it across the room. He picked it up, rubbed his thumb over the plastic tab that said Budweiser, held it in his hand. The keys jingled faintly against one another—the house key, the keys to the T-bird and the Whirling Disc record store where Steve worked, other keys obsolete and useless but too venerable to be thrown away or tossed into a drawer. There was a feeling on the keyring like the object’s aura, Steve’s emotion as he had last touched it. Disgust and nausea. It gave the metal a cold, faintly slimy feel. “Did you call in sick?” he asked.
Steve nodded. “Was just gonna have a beer before I went to work. Next time I looked down, four of ’em were gone, so I just kept on drinking. Might as well call in drunk for all the difference it makes.”
“What happened?”
“I fell asleep and had this dream… about Ann. I dreamed her face was all bloody and some of her teeth were knocked out. I reached out to touch her and saw my hand was bloody too. I’d done it to her. You know what I really did to her? Do you know about it, Ghost?”
Ghost looked at the floor. “I guess you raped her.”
“I guess I raped her too. I guess she didn’t mind. I guess she liked it pretty good.”
“Come on, Steve. That’s a shitty thing to say. She didn’t like it.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Yours.”
“How do you know she didn’t like it? You read her sick little mind or something?”
“No. I went over to see her the other day.”
All at once Steve was up off the couch, grabbing handfuls of Ghost’s sweatshirt, pushing his face up close to Ghost’s. “What the fuck you mean you went to see her? You went over there without telling me?”
“I wanted to see how she was.”
Steve stared into Ghost’s placid face. He knew he wasn’t scaring Ghost, not in the slightest; he was only making a fool of himself. But the alcohol in his brain refused to let him shut up. “You stay away from that lying cunt,” he snarled, “or else you decide whose friend you really are.”
Ghost’s wide blue eyes met Steve’s, forgiving but unrelenting. Ghost would not soothe Steve this time, would not capitulate. What the fuck did Ghost know? Ghost hadn’t gone through Ann’s mind-games, hadn’t been betrayed by her. But here he stood, oh so self-righteous. It would be easy enough to slap that obstinate look off Ghost’s face, shake the visions out of that thin body…
What was he thinking? Hit Ghost? What the hell was he turning into? “Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus Christ.”
“He’s not here,” said Ghost sullenly. “You gonna put me down?”
“Shit, no,” said Steve. He pulled Ghost down on the couch with him, hugged him tight. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Don’t hate me.”
Ghost didn’t say anything, but his hands found Steve’s face, touched Steve’s aching temples and smoothed back his messy dark hair. Steve let his head droop onto Ghost’s shoulder. Holding any other guy this way would have made him feel like a fag; with Ghost it wasn’t an issue, it never seemed to matter.
After a few minutes he tried to speak. The words came like slow drops of blood from a ragged wound. “I… I tried to call her a couple of times. Hung up when she answered, real cool. Then I got Simon, and he wouldn’t let me talk to her. She asked him to screen her calls, I guess. I guess I fucked up pretty good.”
“I know,” said Ghost. “I know how things were.”
And you probably do, too, Steve thought. You probably know everything that ever happened to us, the hot nights and the sodden-silk texture inside her, the weeks when things were starting to go bad, the ether of betrayal, the look on her face, and the moment of absolute shock, like falling into deep icy water, when I realized I had really for chrissake raped her.
He pulled away from Ghost. He felt his face contorting, but he would not cry; he would not cry.
For a long time they sat in companionable silence. Steve felt his drunkenness receding to a comfortable buzz, and Ghost opened his bottle of scuppernong wine to catch up. They were booked at the Sacred Yew the following night, so Steve dragged out his guitar and they ran haphazardly through their set, knowing it didn’t matter. They had played the Yew hundreds of times. They might play there a hundred times more, and their little group of fans would come to drink and dance, and nothing would matter except the exuberance of playing.
“Let’s listen to the tape,” Steve suggested. He thought he ought to remind himself what the songs really sounded like. Ghost stumbled to the stereo, and soon Lost Souls? filled the little house, the guitar hard-edged and gloriously mad, Ghost’s words bittersweet, with a visionary longing. “We need the roots but you can’t dig up the tree…” Ghost sang along with his own golden-gravel voice. “So walk the mountain roads with me and drink some clear water…”
Steve sang along too, strumming the guitar. Those were the words of a visionary, weren’t they? Those were the words of somebody who remembered what magic was. There was magic left in the world; there had to be. Steve banged at the strings. Beneath the noise he heard a fiery, chiming melody.
Ghost lifted his head and sang louder. His voice soared high and found its way through cracks in the windows and walls, out into the sparkling night, down to the road that led past the house.
At the sound of that voice, an old passing drifter looked up and remembered a train track he had hiked along down to Georgia some thirty years ago. A train track flanked with rioting kudzu and towering pines and the bewitching scent of honeysuckle, a train track that made a two-bit bottle of wine taste of nectar and cool shade. The drifter, whose name was Rudy, lifted his face to the chill cloudy sky. A mile down the road he would find himself in the arms of Christian, whose hunger by now overshadowed his taste for thin children in black. But the last few minutes of Rudy’s life were spent in sweet memory.
Back in the house, Steve stopped playing and smacked his forehead. “I forgot. Some mail came for you. Our first fan letter, I guess.” Steve dug through the clutter on the floor and found a postcard, creased and dog-eared, its colors muted with the grime of small-town post offices.
Ghost read it: “ ‘You don’t know me, but Dylan Thomas drank eighteen straight whiskeys on November ninth, 1953, and I am drinking one for you.’ ” He looked up at Steve. “It’s signed ‘Nothing.’ ”
“What’s it about?”
“Who knows?”
“Why don’t you hold it to your forehead and find out? Go on, tell me to fuck myself.”
“S
uck my aura,” said Ghost, and swigged the last sweet drops of his wine.
19
“WAKE UP!” said a loud voice that seemed to reverberate from the center of Nothing’s brain. “WE’RE HERE!”
Nothing opened and shut his eyes several times. “I wasn’t asleep,” he said. “How could I sleep?”
Zillah had placed another hit of Crucifix on his tongue sometime between midnight and dawn, and since then Nothing had not known where he was, or who he was with, or why he had ever bothered to wonder. He roamed the corridors of his mind, hopelessly lost, unable to find his way back to the familiar voices he could hear—faintly, faintly—arguing and laughing outside his skull, and his body jittered like a skeleton on a string.
Yet maybe he had slept, for he thought he had dreamed strange dreams. Dreamed of sucking at a hot torn pulse, splashing in blood that still pumped in weak spurts from the vein with each beat of the dying heart. Dreamed of rubbing his gory hands over Zillah’s face, licking blood off Zillah’s eyelashes, drinking it from Zillah’s lips where it tasted sweeter yet. He had dreamed of Molochai and Twig wallowing in blood, sudsing it into each other’s hair, rolling in it half-naked, their pallid skin streaked sticky red. Why was there so much blood?
Because your teeth weren’t sharp enough, a voice in his mind answered. There was nothing neat about it. Don’t you remember how you had to tear chunks of his throat away before you could lap up that sweet blood? Don’t you remember Zillah’s face buried in the ruin of his crotch like a sadistic lover?
Nothing shied away from that voice. But he could not forget the music of screams that died away to a tired confused whimper of pain, then to silence. He had dreamed of standing in front of a culvert somewhere, a dank concrete pipe choked with weeds, kudzu, highway trash. It was dark, soul-dark in this hour long past midnight and far from dawn, but Nothing could see. He could see clearly in the dark: the acid, or some new vision refining itself? Slung over his shoulder he held a limp little bundle, a bundle of stained rags and skin gone paler than before.
“Put it in there,” Zillah had said, and Nothing stuffed the bundle deep into the culvert. Looking back, he caught a last glimpse of feathery white-blond hair straggling from a blue bandanna. Wet threads of scarlet ran through that hair . . . and for a moment Nothing stopped, struck by the enormity of what had happened. Of what you did, his mind amended. The blood would never get washed out of that hair, except by rainwater and runoff from the highway. No one was going to shampoo that hair or give it a fresh blond dye job ever again. Perhaps for a while it would keep growing, dark roots pushing slowly up through the cold waxy scalp. Then it would loosen and separate and scatter, washed away strand by strand, stolen even as Laine’s bones would soon be.
But he had dreamed, surely he had dreamed. He must have dreamed. “Oh God,” he said, and shuddered.
“Who?” Molochai, hovering over him, looked honestly puzzled: Do you remember how we slaughtered your friend and half-tore him apart, or are you just hung over? Molochai’s eyes glittered through enormous smudges of black eyeliner. Nothing smelled something sweet on Molochai’s breath, some buried childhood odor. Twinkies.
“What’s wrong, kiddo?” Twig asked from the front seat.
Nothing didn’t answer. Instead he sat up, put his arms around Molochai’s neck, and buried his face in the dirty black cloth of Molochai’s jacket, cloth that smelled of sweat and sweets, of sex and… blood. Laine’s blood. Nothing knew it was probably on his own clothes too, on his skin and greased into his hair. Because he had not dreamed. Last night had really happened. He had killed Laine, killed him with bare teeth and hands and only a little help from his friends.
They really are vampires, he thought. You’ve consigned yourself to a life of blood and murder, you can never rejoin the daytime world. And he answered himself: Fine. As long as I don’t have to be alone again.
“We’re here,” Molochai said, dropping Nothing back onto the mattress. “This is it, right, Twig?”
“Yup,” said Twig. “Fourteen Burnt Church Road, Missing Mile, Enn Cee. Curb service, kiddo.”
The roof of the van billowed and rippled. With an effort, Nothing focused his eyes. The streaky faces of Molochai and Twig hung over him, haggard and grinning, waiting to see what he would do.
Where was Zillah? Asleep on the mattress nearby, his warmth close enough to touch, his head pillowed on a fold of Nothing’s raincoat. Wisps of his dry Mardi Gras hair trailed away over the black silk.
“We could come with you,” Molochai offered generously. “We like musicians.”
“We like you,” Twig said, the sharp tip of his tongue flickering over his lips. “It’s not often we meet a drinking man such as yourself.”
Nothing struggled to his knees, cupped his hands to the window. He saw a small wooden house nestled among trees far off at the end of a gravel driveway. Was Ghost in that house right now, awake or dreaming? His vision seemed to shift again, and he realized that even the watery light of the early afternoon hurt his eyes. His pupils felt distended.
Molochai turned on the tape player. As Bauhaus began blasting a live cut of “Stigmata Martyr,” Zillah came slowly and luxuriously awake. He opened first one brilliant eye, then the other, ran his hands through his silky hair, yawned and stretched his catlike body. When his eyes lit upon Nothing’s, he sat up and took Nothing into his arms and kissed him.
Zillah’s mouth was as sour and sweet as wine, and his spit had a rich red corrupt taste. Nothing let it flow into him, drank it, took strength from it as if it were the potion in the wine bottle. That taste was everything. The taste of blood and Zillah’s spit and come and the roughplay and the drinking and all the long enchanted days and nights. Everything. Nothing still wanted to talk to Lost Souls?—he had come all this way—but he no longer ached for a family. He no longer wanted to pretend that Steve and Ghost were his long-lost brothers. He had his family now; he had chosen them and their nighttime world.
“Come on,” he said. “You’re all going in with me.” He had asserted himself for the first time, he was becoming their equal, and he thought he saw approval in the slant of Zillah’s smile.
He felt so good, so strong and confident, that he never stopped to think what might happen once they got into the house.
They left the van parked near the road and made their way unsteadily up the driveway. Gravel crunched under Nothing’s feet. The house was thirty steps away. Twenty. Molochai and Twig clutched each other, trying to stay upright. Zillah’s hand brushed the back of Nothing’s neck. Nothing shivered at the touch. It made him want to be back in the van, on the mattress with Zillah, tangled, sweaty, biting again.
But now he was so close to Ghost, he thought he felt the tendril of a golden aura touching him. The house loomed up, if such a scruffy little house could be said to loom. One shutter hung askew like the half-cynical tilt of an eyebrow. The windows were lidded, deeply humorous eyes. This house was good.
The porch steps sagged a little under their weight. Not much; the house was old but sturdy. Someone had painted a hex sign at the threshold of the door: a red triangle and a blue one interlocking to form a six-pointed star, and in the center a small ankh traced in silver. Molochai and Twig drew back from it, still clutching each other uneasily, but Zillah cast them a look of contempt. “That thing won’t hurt you. Just step over it.”
The door sported an incongruously fancy knocker: the face of a gargoyle wrought in silver, with a heavy ring through its nostrils and eyes that seemed about to bulge out of their sockets. Nothing used the ring to knock, first gently and then loudly, but no one stirred inside the house. He looked doubtfully at the old brown car in the driveway. Someone must be here. “Maybe they don’t want company,” he said, not sure whether the sinking inside him was disappointment or relief.
“Try the door,” Twig suggested. Before Nothing could respond, Twig stepped up and rattled the knob himself. It would turn no more than a quarter inch in either direction. The door was locked.
“I guess that’s it,” said Nothing. His hand, deep in the pocket of his raincoat, touched the single long bone he had found on the shoulder of the highway. Four days ago—a lifetime ago—he had set out thinking he might come here. Had he hoped to find his home in Missing Mile, at an address he had found on the liner of a tape put out by an obscure band? Now that he was here, it hardly seemed real.
Molochai had been peering through the window next to the front door. Now he gave it a shove. It slid up with only a small groaning protest. “J found a way in,” Molochai said proudly.
And before Nothing quite knew what was happening, the other three had climbed through the window—even Zillah, who stepped delicately over the sill and was received on the other side by the outstretched hands of Molochai and Twig. Nothing stared in at them. They grinned and waved back, daring him. But he couldn’t follow. The car was here; someone must be home. He couldn’t just let himself in, no matter how much he wanted to see the inside of the house. He couldn’t go through the window. He mustn’t.
A splinter from the windowsill snagged his jeans as he went in.
The jumble of decor—obscure, lovely jazz and acid rock posters, religious samplers, a bookshelf with volume after volume of herbal lore cheek by jowl with things like Kerouac, Ellison, Bradbury (the Bradbury books surely belonged to Ghost; Steve would never choose anything so romantic)—
caught Nothing’s attention at first. Then he realized what the others were doing. Molochai and Twig were in the kitchen, ransacking the refrigerator. He heard pop-tops cracking open as they helped themselves to cans of beer. Zillah fell dramatically onto the couch and began unbuttoning his shirt with dreamy fascination, his long hair draped over the arm of the couch, streaming down.
The passage down the hall, pale and wavering and tantalizing, held Nothing’s attention for a long time before he noticed the smell. When it finally breached his awareness, he did not recognize it at once. It was so faint—there, on a breath of air, and gone again. He licked his lips, took a shallow breath through his mouth. Although he did not realize it, he was testing the air, beginning to use sensitive scent organs that had lain dormant all his fifteen years. The scent was familiar, he had smelled it just last night, but now there was something different about it. Something foreign, more ethereal, more delicate . . .
Lost Souls Page 17