Lost Souls

by Poppy Z. Brite - (ebook by Undead)

  Steve talked and talked. Laying blame. That bitch, he said. That fucking betraying bitch. And that green-eyed motherfucker, I wonder how he’d smirk if somebody cut off his balls…

  Ghost listened, saying “yeah” and “uh-huh” at the appropriate places. But where was the point in laying blame? Zillah had bewitched Ann. Ghost knew from his grandmother that love-spells don’t work on people who don’t want them, and they are surely the hardest kind of spells to undo once they are done. And as for Nothing… well, Nothing was home after all, wasn’t he? Blood calls to blood. If Nothing wanted to sleep every night in his father’s arms, then Ghost guessed that was what he must do.

  He wrapped his arms around his pillow and wondered, What will come of all this? Where will all these lost souls go? But that was not the question he wanted to ask. What would come, would come. He reached out with his mind and found Ann in the dark somewhere, wandering by herself, searching for something that would only hurt her if she found it. Bewitched. She could not feel his mind brushing hers, would not answer him. He closed his eyes and tried to will himself to sleep. He’d been crying a lot lately. But he didn’t want to cry alone in the dark.

  As Ghost began to dream, the inhabitants of the trailer on Violin Road congregated in the tiny kitchen and greeted the new night with plastic cups of wine. At the Sacred Yew, Christian watched the bar clock and counted off the hours until closing time. Night.

  22

  (Scratch)

  (Pop!)

  A yellow-orange explosion in the dark. Steve lit a fat joint that had been rolled from more of Terry’s Popacatepetl Purple. Sparks showered down, flared like tiny nighttime suns among the damp pine needles, and died.

  It was Halloween night, and they were sitting in the tiny Civil War graveyard in the woods behind their house. Ghost liked to come out here to smoke, to be among the trees and lie on the thick carpet of pine needles. He liked the gravestones that seemed to sprout like mushrooms from the forest floor, the weathered crosses of wood and granite, the white lambs and winged death’s-heads so worn away that they might have been natural outcroppings.

  When Steve sucked at the twisted cigarette, its light made his eyes into deep dark pools, threw his sharp nose and chin into spooky shadowed relief. Ghost took the joint and dragged deeply. The glow turned his hanging pale hair fiery, suffused his eyes. He held his breath for a long time, sighed out a great plume of smoke, and leaned back against his favorite gravestone: that of Miles Hummingbird, 1846-1865. Kinsey’s great-great-great-uncle. A private in the Confederate army, shot somewhere in the Virginia woods on a rainy day near the end of the war, trundled home to North Carolina and buried in the springtime mud. Miles’s gravestone was rough and gray and moldering, and Miles’s bones fell softly away to dust below. In the drifts of his body lay a shell with creamy pink insides, a shell he had carried home from his family’s one trip to the shore when he was twelve, a shell his sister had laid in his hands, over his torn chest, a shell with dry tears inside a hundred and twenty years old.

  Ghost put his cheek against the cool granite and thought, Is it cold in the shell tonight, Miles?, and Miles’s rusty Carolina voice, so very far away, said, It’s warm, Ghost. It’s warm and yellow as the sand, and the ocean is the color my sister’s eyes once were.

  “Blue-green?” said Ghost. “Like the calm ocean? Or blue-gray, like before a storm?” He didn’t realize he had spoken aloud until Steve glared at him.

  “Shit. What a way to spend Halloween, in the graveyard listening to you talk to the spooks. I ought to be over at R.J.’s party with five or six brews already down and another one ready to go. Not in the damn graveyard getting stoned.” Steve lay back in the pine needles with his hands behind his head and regarded the smeary glittering stars that were beginning to appear. He looked as if he would like to snuff them out.

  “You don’t need any beer,” Ghost told him. “You’ve been drinking too much. Weed clears out your brain.”

  “You think Ann will be at that party?”

  “Not if she thinks you will.”

  “No, I guess not. I guess she’s still hanging around that trailer on Violin Road. Out where those creeps moved in.” Steve was silent for a moment. “You know, they never let her in. I drove past there one day and saw her in their yard. Thought maybe her car had broken down, so I stopped and asked her if she wanted a ride into town, but she told me to get lost. Said she was waiting for her true love.” He sucked at the joint. “I hope they tell her to fuck off.”

  Ghost lay down next to Steve. “What did you do?”

  “I sprayed gravel. Peeled out of there. I figured if I hung around, I’d either kill her or that little green-eyed fucker.”

  Ghost heard Steve’s knuckles cracking. “You don’t want to mess with them,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know what you told me. His face was all healed up, and that means he must be Count Dracula or something. I don’t remember, Ghost. I don’t know.”

  “Trust me, then.”

  “Guess I better. What else have I got to trust?” There was no anger in Steve’s voice now. He only sounded sad, and very tired. A man who wanted to stop thinking.

  Ghost would have done anything to make Steve happier. But what could he do? Unbewitch Ann? Tell Zillah and his crew to get out of town before sunrise? He propped himself on his elbows and shook a few pine needles out of his hair. The sweet orange smell of singeing pumpkin flesh drifted in from the houses at the edge of the woods.

  Ghost wondered if the one-eyed jack-o’-lantern he had carved was still burning on their front porch. He felt desperate to talk about something, anything else. “The lost souls get to come out tonight,” he said.

  “Huh? You mean us?” The joint had gone out. Steve lit it again.

  “Uh-uh.” Ghost sucked spicy smoke, felt his lungs expand and his brain swirl. “All the dark things. All the sad things and the minds left over from the bodies, the minds who don’t know they’re dead, the ones with no place to go.” He felt his pupils grow larger against the dark. “And the evil things, too.”

  “Now you’re trying to give me the creeps. Well, I can play that game too. Want me to tell you the story of the Hook again? Huh?” The joint had burned down to a quarter inch. Steve snuffed it and dropped it in the pine needles, then began to cough. “Fuck it. I want a beer. Let’s go over to R.J.’s.”

  “Shhh.” Ghost’s head came up. His hair fell over his eyes, and he brushed it away. After a second Steve sat up and stared into the woods too. Something flickered through the pines and kudzu, a bright orange smudge on the night. A jack-o’-lantern, Ghost guessed, burning on someone’s porch. But he thought he heard a rustle, a noise just slightly too loud to be made by a squirrel or a night bird—a crunch. Footsteps. Soft footsteps, coming through the woods.

  “Something’s out there,” he told Steve.

  Steve opened his mouth and shut it again. He was going to say something about smoking too much weed, Ghost supposed, but had thought better of it. Good. “Okay,” Steve managed in a whisper. “What do we do?”

  “Get up quiet. Stay behind me.”

  Steve grabbed Ghost’s arm. Ghost felt electricity flowing between them, white and crackling and pure. “Like hell I will. I’m not letting you—”

  “Stay behind me,” Ghost said again, and looked straight into the woods, trying to feel out whatever might be coming.

  Then branches broke, dead leaves rattled down like dry brown bones. Something round and fiery hurtled toward them. Steve went down fast, pulling Ghost with him. Ghost fell as limply as a rag doll. The savage orb exploded against Miles’s gravestone. Ripe orange pulp splattered them.

  Ghost shielded his face with one hand and felt wildly for Steve with the other, then heard an unhappy young voice wail, “Shit—I tripped—my shoelace came untied—”

  Ghost lifted his head. “Nothing?” Chunks of pumpkin and pulp slimed the ground, shiny black in the moonlight. In the middle of the mess, the boy struggled to his knees and
swiped futilely at his raincoat. He wouldn’t meet Ghost’s eyes. “Shit! I tripped over my own goddamn shoelace—I’m sorry—”

  “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.” Ghost crawled over and put his hand on Nothing’s shoulder. Nothing’s face tilted up to Ghost’s. His eyes were shadowed, his cheekbones more prominent than they had been outside the Sacred Yew a month ago, his lips drawn tight across his teeth. For no good reason, Ghost thought suddenly of certain strange happenings in Missing Mile lately. The bodies of two railroad bums, mutilated and decayed, found half-buried in the dead kudzu near the train tracks. The disappearance of a little boy out on Violin Road. But those things did not bear thinking about right now. “What happened?” he asked Nothing. “They didn’t kick you out, did they?”

  At the thought, a breath of cold wind seemed to pass through Nothing. He shuddered. “No. Oh no. Christian gave me the jack-o’-lantern. I was bringing it to you. I walked over here—”

  “You walked all the way from Violin Road?” Steve interrupted. “Shit, kid, that’s three or four miles.”

  “Yeah,” said Nothing. “I didn’t want the others to know I was coming. I told them I was just going out for a—for a walk. And you weren’t home, but I heard your voices back here, and I saw you lighting matches.”

  “So what do you want?” said Steve. He seemed to have remembered that Nothing was on the wrong side. “Does your green-eyed buddy want me to send Ghost on over? He already took my girlfriend. He might as well have my best friend too.” Ghost poked him, but he kept talking. His voice was unsteady. “Maybe he wants my car. Or my bag of pot. I’ll just go home and pack it all up for him.”

  Nothing stared at the ground. “No. I just—I came to tell you that we’re leaving. All of us. Tonight. We’re going to New Orleans.”

  “Even Christian?” asked Ghost. “He’s from New Orleans. He’s going home?”

  “The new barkeep?” said Steve. “How the fuck do you know that?”

  “Yeah,” said Nothing. “He’s scared to go back. Somebody there is after him. But he can’t let us leave without him. And I was born in New Orleans. So this time I really am going home.”

  “I’m happy for you. I guess.” Ghost was surprised to find that he would miss Nothing. He hadn’t seen the boy since that night at the club, that horrible night, but now he realized he had been hoping that Nothing would show up on the doorstep one day. Forsaking his family, or forsaken by them. Saving himself.

  But that was impossible. Blood calls to blood. Nothing had to go home.

  “Wait a sec,” said Steve. “How come you walked all the way over here to tell us you were leaving? This doesn’t have anything to do with Ann, does it?”

  Nothing studied the ground some more, stirring the pine needles with the toe of his sneaker. “I was kind of hoping you knew. I’m afraid she’ll try to follow us. She came and told Christian yesterday—” Nothing swallowed, glanced at Steve, blinked several times. His eyes looked huge in the half-light. “Forget it,” he said. “Mostly I just came to tell you goodbye. I’m sorry things turned out like they did. I wish they could have been different. But I’m with my family now.” He slipped his arms around Ghost’s neck and quickly kissed Ghost’s cheek with cold chapped lips. Then he turned away.

  “Wait!” Ghost snatched at a thin black-clad arm. Nothing looked back, his face wary, half-hidden in shadow.

  “It scares me, Nothing.” Ghost pulled his hair over his face. “But I need to know. What are they? What are you?”

  “I think you know.” Nothing stepped back and gave them a wide smile. On any other face so young it would have been a sunny, angelic smile. But on Nothing’s face it was wrong, so wrong that at first Ghost could not grasp why. Then he knew. Most of Nothing’s front teeth had been filed to sharp points.

  “What did Ann say to Christian?” Ghost whispered.

  “I didn’t want to tell you,” said Nothing. “She’s going to have a baby. She says it’s Zillah’s baby.”

  Ghost could not speak. After a moment he had to close his eyes. When he opened them, Nothing had faded back into the woods. Without the glow of the jack-o’-lantern to mark his path, he disappeared quickly, melting like a black wraith into the shadows between the trees.

  Ghost turned to look at Steve. Steve had pulled a plant out of the ground and was using its leaves to wipe pumpkin pulp off his face.

  “Are you okay?” Ghost asked.

  “Huh? Yeah. Why shouldn’t I be?” Steve looked at the leaves he’d been wiping his face with, held them up to the moonlight. “Poison oak. It figures. Shit.”

  “You won’t get it,” Ghost told him.

  “How do you—” Steve slapped his knees. “Okay. Okay. I won’t get it. Do we have to wait till somebody slings a rotting corpse at us, or can we go over to R.J.’s now?”

  “Sure. We can go to RJ.’s.” If Steve wanted to pretend he hadn’t heard Nothing’s parting words, if Steve had refused to notice that mouthful of sharpened teeth, Ghost wasn’t going to force it. It would catch up to Steve sooner or later, and then all hell would break loose.

  The lights were bright at the party. Terry Buckett answered the door wearing a pair of long Johns with psychedelic peace signs painted all over them. He took one look at Steve, pointed over his shoulder, and said, “The keg’s that way.”

  They found it out on the back porch in a garbage can full of ice. As Ghost was pumping it, R.J. caught up with them. His Dracula makeup was smudged on his nose where he kept pushing his glasses up. “We’re having a vampire film festival,” he explained, supporting himself against the porch railing. “They’re just finishing up Near Dark, that one’s real cool. You missed The Lost Boys.”

  “Fuckin’ shame,” said Steve darkly, draining half of his first beer.

  R.J. put a dripping cup into Ghost’s hand. He sipped it, tasting the tingling foam and the barley funk and something metallic. Something metallic and red—No. The beer was clear, white and golden, pure. He swallowed that mouthful in a hurry. Then he drank off the rest of the cup.

  Ghost sat on the floor and drank two more cups of beer. Vamp was on now. All the vampires seemed to be aged, running a honky-tonk joint, the remainders of a glorious race. He tried to talk to Monica when she walked by, but she was dressed as the Raven and would only say “Nevermore.”

  He was about to go in search of some fruit juice when Steve loomed in front of him, swaying slightly, reeking of beer, his T-shirt stained with it. Steve grabbed Ghost’s hands and pulled him up. “Let’s go.”

  They staggered out to the T-bird, Steve leaning most of his weight on Ghost. When Steve tried to get behind the wheel, Ghost said, “Uh-uh. I’m driving.”

  Steve put the keys in his hand without argument. Ghost slid in and cranked up the engine. Beside him, Steve lay against the passenger door, eyes slitted, staring up at the night sky.

  Ghost reached over and touched Steve’s shoulder. “Steve. Hey, Steve. Where we going?”

  “New Orleans,” said Steve without looking away from the stars. “Drive.”

  23

  “She’s going to what?” said Molochai when Christian told them.

  “Again?” said Twig. “What would we do with a baby?”

  “We could eat it,” Molochai offered.

  Zillah grimaced. “Eat my baby! Are you mad?” After a moment’s reflection he added, “Nothing and I might eat it, but you couldn’t have any.”

  “Zilllllaaaah…”

  “Pleeeeeezzze? …”

  “Not one drop. Not one pink sugar drop.”

  They might eat it, too, thought Christian. They just might, even if it was Nothing’s half-brother or -sister. The idea did not strike Christian as particularly immoral, but it made him sad. He stood silently before them, considering Zillah. Those eyes, and the perfect pink lips twisted in amusement or disgust, and his entourage clustered around him.

  For a moment Christian almost disliked them. Not Nothing, but the other three. He hated their insouciance, t
heir cheerful cruelty. They didn’t care about the girl. Their time in Missing Mile was done. They would go on to New Orleans and carry on their never-ending party without a backward glance. It did not matter to them that another girl’s belly would swell with a malignant child, a child that would eventually rip her open and bleed her dry.

  “You must get rid of it,” he had told her. He’d been out behind the trailer cutting the last roses of the season. The bushes were dry now, brown and gnarled. Somehow he would have to stretch his income from the bartending job to pay the rent on the trailer and buy the sweets and liquor that the others throve upon.

  Nothing had already offered to look for a job; he was good-hearted, but what place would hire a boy who looked so young and so strange? And Molochai, Twig, and Zillah were used to their luxurious nomadic life, travelling from city to city, living off the blood and money of their kills. But in Missing Mile there were no wealthy victims. There were only drifters and bastard children and travellers who had lost their way.

  As he was cutting the last rose, a great frothy pink-orange thing whose veined petals curled delicately into red at the edges, the girl Ann came up behind him and touched his sleeve. Christian had seen her near the trailer before, trying to look through the windows, tugging at the doors of the black van. He had not known precisely what had happened between her and Zillah. When she told him, Christian’s heart sank. Had Zillah grown up not at all in fifteen years? Had he never heard of condoms?

  “I’ll have a beautiful baby,” she said. “With green, green eyes.”

  “It will kill you,” he told her. “They’ll leave you and you’ll be alone, and it will kill you.” He turned to face her, the huge rose in one hand, a rusty pair of scissors in the other. “Listen to me. You have to get rid of it. You must.”

  “Why?”

  Christian met her eyes. Ann’s eyes danced like spiders; they gleamed, empty of reason. She had not looked that way a month ago at the Sacred Yew. Already Zillah’s essence was infecting her as it had infected Jessy.