Lost Souls

by Poppy Z. Brite - (ebook by Undead)

  “We just got into town,” said Ghost. “We’re looking for a place to stay a few days.” He stepped forward. His feet felt too big, his arms long and awkward. The shop seemed too full of stuff, the walls leaning in toward the center of the room. There were shelves crammed with tiny bottles and boxes. There were books—at a glance he saw the I Ching, titles by Aleister Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson, crudely printed booklets promising charms for love and luck and revenge. He saw a rack of bejewelled metal daggers, jars full of herbs, candles, sticks of incense. At the back of the shop hung a curtain of colored plastic beads, and beyond that, more blackness.

  “I am Arkady Raventon,” said the proprietor. Ghost could see his face more clearly now, but could discern no hint of age. The skin was smooth, the eyes depthless dark pools. He took the hand Arkady offered, a hand whose bones would surely crumble if Ghost squeezed too hard, a hand with bones like the bones of lizards. The hand was dry, cool, the grip surprisingly strong. Ghost opened his mouth to introduce himself and Steve, who was lounging near the door looking skeptical.

  But before he could speak, Arkady Raventon said, “You must be Miz Deliverance’s son. Or is it grandson? Yes, grandson surely. Miz Deliverance’s grandson.”

  Ghost heard Steve’s sharp intake of breath. He met Arkady’s limpid dark gaze. “How did you know?”

  Arkady smiled. Was that a youthful smile, open and easy? Or was it the wise, humorless grin of an old, old man? “Everyone knows of Miz Deliverance,” he said. “Everyone who has dealings with magick.” Ghost could hear the k. “You may be too young to know it, child, but your grandmother is a legend from here to the mountains of West Virginia.”

  “I knew it,” said Steve. “She was a witch.”

  “A white witch,” Arkady told him. “A benign conjurer. And a fabled beauty too, in her youth. My own mother told me tales of her hair like yellow spun glass, her lips bowed like the lips of the infant Christ, her clear unlying blue eyes. I saw a silvery old photograph of Miz Deliverance once, taken when she was about your age. Yes, she was a fabled beauty. And you are her image, Ghost. Her very image.”

  “I didn’t tell you my name,” said Ghost.

  Arkady smiled again. “Poor child! Did your grandmother let you think you were the only sensitive in the world? I have been to the other side, Ghost. I know things too. I know you.”

  Steve came forward and stood next to Ghost, positioning himself so that he shielded Ghost a little. “Wait a minute. What the fuck are you talking about? What do you mean, you’ve been to the other side?”

  “I brought myself back from the dead,” said Arkady Raventon.

  They went through the front room of Arkady’s shop, through the dimness, the smell of dust, cobwebs, herbs. They went through the back room, where flowers and plaster saints and bones (chicken bones, Ghost thought, though Steve eyed them warily) were arranged on a small altar covered with a velvet dropcloth. On either side of the altar, pink and black candles burned.

  In a torrent of dust, Arkady swept aside a heavy velvet curtain and led them up a narrow dark staircase. They climbed, climbed, turned a corner. The staircase grew even darker. Ghost had to feel for the stairs, placing his sneaker carefully each time. He raised his hand to his face and wiggled his fingers. Before his eyes, five pale wavering sticks danced; they might have been a trick of the darkness, an afterimage of light. Still Arkady led them upward.

  They went around another corner and now Ghost could see a dim rectangle of light far above them. At last they came to another velvet curtain; beyond that was daylight. Arkady pulled the curtain aside. At the top of the stairs was a cozy suite of rooms with clean white walls, large windows that let in dazzling sunshine, hardwood floors gleaming golden.

  Arkady showed them the rooms one after another. “That one is mine. The small one belongs to two of my brother’s friends. And this”—indicating it with a grand sweep of his arm—“is the room where you may stay. If you so wish. I would not think of turning Miz Deliverance’s grandson away from my door.”

  The room was simple. A clean mattress. A window high up on the rear wall. A square room. Four walls of equal length, four sensible walls to contain Ghost’s thoughts, to keep out green-eyed wraiths and voices that might invade his mind at night. A place for Steve and him to whisper the nights away, snatch a few troubled hours of sleep, then go out and do whatever it was they had come to New Orleans to do.

  “It looks okay to me,” he said, and waited for Steve to argue. Steve wouldn’t want to stay here in a room above a voodoo shop given to them like a gift by a creepy little proprietor who claimed to have known Ghost’s grandmother, or to have heard of her. Steve would be suspicious, cynical, probably spooked, though he wouldn’t want to admit that last one. But maybe Steve was exhausted from being on the road, or maybe he wanted a drink so badly that he would agree to anything, or maybe he just didn’t give a damn anymore.

  He only sighed and let his long body sag against the doorframe as he said, “Whatever you think. We’ll take it.”

  “You said you brought yourself back from the dead,” Ghost reminded Arkady as they finished descending the stairs. Behind him, Ghost heard Steve mutter something, but he ignored it.

  Arkady drew himself up to his full spare height. “Perhaps I spoke too soon.” The hem of his white robe shushed against the floor, raised a cloud of dust around his bony ankles.

  “No, Mr. Raventon. I’d really like to hear about it.”

  “Arkady,” said Arkady absently. His eyes had gone distant. He led them into the back room of the shop and stood beside the altar, stroking its corner.

  Ghost’s gaze wandered over the wooden framework, the dropcloth of dark sapphire velvet. He saw things he had not noticed before: intricate enamel charms, little scrolls of parchment, an inverted wooden cross bristling with nails.

  Arkady’s dry, faintly foreign voice brought him back to attention. “It was cold in Paris that winter. As cold as the moon. As cold as loneliness. As cold as the kiss that killed me.”

  His eyes flicked to Ghost’s, to Steve’s. Ghost’s were wide open, a little scared; he was picking up a barrage of feelings from Arkady, sorrow and fear and pain, but all of them were overlaid with the facile pleasure of a gifted actor performing a cherished role. Ghost didn’t know what to make of it. Steve’s eyes were hooded, wary, waiting for lies.

  “Yes, my young friends. My poor young friends with your beautiful faces and your innocent dreams. You think love is sweet, that it can never hurt. But it was not the Parisian cold that killed me, not the wind in my bones, not the ice that rimed my heart. It was the kiss of a lover.”

  “The kiss?” Steve’s voice was heavy with cynicism.

  “Well, perhaps a bit more than just the kiss. But you must allow me my bit of romance.” Sarcasm sharpened Arkady’s voice, and Ghost shot Steve a warning look. Steve stared at the altar.

  “So,” Arkady went on, “this, ah, kiss—and the rest of my lover’s body as well—was ripe with death. Ripe, and sweet as rotten fruit. Have you ever bitten into a rotten peach, either of you? A plum? A melon, perhaps? There is one moment of absolute, blissful, delicious sweetness before the taste of decay oozes over your tongue. That is how it was with my lover. And then the sickness rotted my lover away, and I had caught it too by that time, and I was alone. In Paris, in the winter. I was alone.” A faint smile played about Arkady’s lips.

  “Have I mentioned my brother Ashley? No? Ashley was my younger brother. The beauty of the Raventons.” Arkady laughed, a sound like wind among chips of crystal. “When I went to Paris, he stayed here, and I vowed that I would come back. I had to teach him, you see. I had to tell him all I knew of magick, of death and love and pain. Ashley was to be my apprentice. And I went to Paris, and the sickness took me. But I had vowed to Ashley that I would return. I had given him my word. And I would not break that.”

  Arkady’s fingers strayed to the altar, toyed with the dark velvet dropcloth. “So before I died, I prepared. I had
just enough time to find the things I needed. I sent for powders from Haiti, for potions from Guatemala. I procured the blood of an ancient man in the Rue aux Fers, the bones of a child in the catacombs of Montmartre.

  “But at last I could search no longer. The sickness came and smiled its final soft dark smile at me, and my blood dried in my veins, and my eyeballs shrivelled. One morning before dawn I swallowed the concoction I had made, and I let the sickness take me. I felt its lips upon mine, its tongue lapping the last sour drop of spit from my mouth. I felt my life leave me. I felt my very selfness slip away; there was one instant in which I thought, My God, now I am dead.

  “And then I was. And I awoke in the morgue of a Paris hospital, and when I stretched myself and smiled, one of the morgue attendants suffered a heart attack. Fortunately it was not fatal.”

  This time Arkady’s laughter was like the clanging of a heavy door, a door of stone or steel, a door that would not be opened again for a very long time. “Then I made my way home to New Orleans, to keep my vow to Ashley. But, as any sad story should end, Ashley too had died, and had not come back. He would never be my apprentice. He would learn none of my secrets.”

  Ghost licked his lips nervously. His tongue was as dry as Arkady’s must have been all through that long winter in Paris. “What happened to Ashley?” he asked.

  Arkady knelt and flipped up the velvet dropcloth. His hands disappeared into the blackness beneath the altar. Shadows lapped at his knuckles, his wrists. Then he withdrew his hands.

  Steve cursed and took a step backward. Ghost’s eyes widened. Arkady was holding a perfect human skull, smooth and narrow, bleached to the golden-white of old ivory.

  “Ghost and Steven,” Arkady said, “meet my brother Ashley.”

  Later, Steve thought that if he hadn’t known Ghost so well, he would have suspected Ghost of trying to win Arkady Raventon’s heart at that moment. But of course Ghost was Ghost, the most uncalculating of all people, and what he did next was just his nature—the pure crazy chemistry that flowed between his brain and his heart and his soul. Never mind how Arkady Raventon’s eyes melted when Ghost reached out his hands and said, “Can I hold him?”

  Arkady put the skull into Ghost’s hands. Ghost cradled it carefully. Its surface was somehow devoid of temperature, neither warm nor cold. He looked into the sockets of its eyes. It was the only skull he had ever seen that didn’t look as if it were grinning. It just stared, and the arch of its teeth was impassive, perhaps sad. He hoped Steve wouldn’t make a joke (Why can’t Ashley Raventon go to parties anymore? Because he doesn’t have any body to go with).

  Ghost was very aware that here had once rested a brain, a mind, an identity. A soul? Here had once been the cradle of a life. He felt as if he were holding something alive and vulnerable. Something that depended on him not to drop it. If he dropped it, it would surely crack. It might shatter. So Ghost held the skull carefully, and then the feelings began to come, as he had known they would. The essence of Ashley washed over Ghost, and he lost himself in the depths of the skull’s empty eyes and let the impressions come.

  A great loneliness. That was the first thing. Loneliness for Arkady, wanting him, wanting his arrogance, his self-assurance. Misgivings in spite of the desire to trust, and then the conviction that Arkady was never coming back from Paris. A void. A slew of things to fill the void—alcohol and opium, lovers and new leather boots—but still the late nights crept in, and Arkady was never coming back, never could, never…

  Then two familiar faces rose up before him, two pairs of silvery eyes, a tangle of scarlet and yellow hair. They were smiling at Ghost as they had the last time he’d seen them, sitting astride the branch of the old oak in the clearing, on that first night of strangeness. But this time their ripe mouths were smeared with blood and other juices, with shreds of tissue.

  Ghost felt sick. A stupid panic welled up in his throat. But he put the skull back in Arkady’s hands and said only, “Your brother was very handsome, wasn’t he?”

  “Not handsome. Beautiful. Did I mention that Ashley was the beauty of the Raventons?” Arkady pressed his lips to the top of the ivory cranium before continuing. “His hair was the color of burgundy, and he wore it long down his back, and it sparkled when he walked in the rain. His cheekbones were like razors—I always thought that I might cut my finger on one of them, but I never did.” With the tip of one forefinger, Arkady touched the skull gently. “And those eyes—I used to say to him, ‘O Ashley, those eyes, those eyes’—so dark and lost when they tilted up to me—like holes through time.” He ran his finger around the edge of one of the empty eye sockets. “Those eyes—how they could slay me.

  “But he died. Yes, I came back home and he had died. My Ashley. My brother. And now I am alone.”

  “Wait a second.” Ghost’s voice was halting; there was no doubt in it, only wonder. “You came home. You were there. Why didn’t you bring Ashley back from the dead, too?”

  Arkady held the skull a moment longer. Then he knelt and slid it back under the altar. He spent some time rearranging the velvet, brushing away dust, picking up some black feathers that had fallen from the altartop to the floor. When he stood, the joints of his knees cracked as loudly as shots in the silent room.

  He met Ghost’s eyes, and when he spoke, his voice was soft and even.

  “Ashley didn’t want to come back,” he said.

  “So was it vampires that killed your brother?” Ghost asked Arkady a little later. He figured it couldn’t hurt to find out just what the twins were. Allowing for the existence of one kind of vampire, it seemed to follow that there might be other kinds, feeding on things other than blood. The existence of the first type scared him but didn’t really surprise him. All his life he had been accepting as normal things that most people didn’t even believe in.

  They were sitting in the front room, talking over a decanter of sherry that Arkady had brought out from some recess of the shop. At least Ghost hoped it was sherry. It tasted funny, musty and a little sour, but Steve was putting it away with no problem. Ghost sipped from his first glass as Arkady poured Steve’s third.

  “Vampires?” Arkady’s hand twitched; he almost dropped the bottle of sherry. He crossed himself twice, first upside down, then right side up. “Lord, child. Why do you want to know about vampires?”

  “Jesus, Ghost,” Steve muttered. Ghost glanced at him, but Steve was bent over the counter examining things in the glass case. Ball canning jars full of pale rubbery orbs, the lids labelled CATS’ EYES and TOADS’ HEARTS in a faded flowing script that must be Arkady’s. Jewelry in the shape of silver pentagrams, ankhs, razor blades. A bowl of tiny, carefully molded clay skulls marked 50 CENTS APIECE.

  “I just wondered,” Ghost said lamely.

  Arkady looked hard at him. “Ghost. My child. It is difficult to imagine you ‘just wondering’ about anything.” He clasped Ghost’s hand between both of his. Ghost resisted the urge to pull his hand from the confines of that cool parched skin, all those tiny crackling bones. “You are a far more powerful sensitive than I could ever be. I pick up bits and pieces. I can hear thoughts when they are as pure and lucid as yours. And I can do little more than that. But you—you have an eye in your heart, Ghost. An eye that shines. An eye that feels.”

  “What the fuck is he babbling about?” Steve asked thickly.

  I’m the only person in this room who isn’t at least half-drunk, Ghost thought. He made himself drink more of his sherry, though the rancid taste lay upon his tongue like a sour old blanket. Sherry got worse with every sip, it seemed.

  “I should never, never like to lose your favor,” Arkady slurred. His hand was on Ghost’s knee now. His fingers brushed skin through a hole in Ghost’s sweatpants, and Ghost shivered at that dry touch. “But vampires, Ghost… vampires! They are not to be mentioned lightly. Not as in the cheap novels, the Hollywood legends. You think vampires are the Undead, the children of the night. You believe they rise from their graves when the moon hangs high,
sucking the blood of virgins, melting into misty wraiths at sunrise, turning into bats and swooping away…”

  “I don’t think they turn into bats,” said Ghost, and Steve surprised him by saying, “Me neither.”

  Arkady ignored them. “You see, Ghost child, the myths are wrong. And that very wrongness makes the creatures all the more dangerous. They are not undead. They have never died. Some of them never do, or not for hundreds upon hundreds of years. They are a separate race—or races. There are those who suck blood, those who suck souls, those who feed on the pain of others. Some of them can walk among us, free in the sunlight. Some of them are able to live as human beings from day to day, from year to year. Of course, they must move about like nomads, because after a point they do not age. They are beautiful, and they stay beautiful. And no one must notice. So they move, and they live among us, and then one day—”

  “One day—BOOM,” Steve said.

  Arkady and Ghost turned to look at him. He grinned rather humorlessly at them and filled his glass again, slopping sherry onto the counter.

  “Then one day,” Arkady continued smoothly, “they discover their particular hunger. Some may live for ten, twenty, even thirty years before the lust comes upon them. Some can digest nothing but blood, and must be fed upon it from the time of their birth. But the hunger always comes.”

  Timidly, Ghost interrupted. “How come you know so much about them?”

  “I have known vampires of all sorts,” said Arkady. “On my first visit to Paris I met a most charming one. A blood drinker. She was elegant, well-mannered, cultured. Most of them are.”

  Ghost thought of the wine-swilling, Twinkie-gobbling occupants of the black van. He tried to stretch his imagination to picture Molochai and Twig as elegant, well-mannered, or cultured. Then he shook his head. Either those two were aberrations, or Arkady Raventon didn’t know as much about vampires as he thought he did.