Steve winced. Arkady made his exit, white robes swirling behind him.
Ghost stood there for a moment, gripping Steve’s shoulder. Then he followed Arkady out of the room and shut the door, and Steve was alone with Ann.
At first she only drifted.
Her lungs felt stuffed with cotton, and there was an acrid chemical burn in the back of her throat. She was too tired to open her eyes: her eyelids were weighted with sand. She let herself slip back into sleep, and she drifted. The backs of her knees and the back of her neck turned to warm water. Her muscles melted from her bones. Soon she began to see pictures.
They were too vivid to be dreams. Her dreams had always been in black and white, as precise and disjointed as Fellini films. The pictures she saw now were in virulent color. For a time she struggled against them, trying to wake up; then she gave in, because the pictures swelled in her brain and made her head hurt when she struggled.
She saw her father’s fragile-boned face, weirdly phosphorescent in the gloom of the living room back home. Newspapers were strewn in disarray around his feet, and an empty coffee mug sat on the arm of his chair near his outstretched hand. She tried to call his name, but if he heard her, he made no response.
She saw a jack-o’-lantern lit orange against a black night, bobbing as if some shadow-wraith carried it. The glowing grin split open, and a great frothy rose blossomed out, withering and rotting in the space of a few seconds.
She saw a girl’s face with dark eyes half-hidden by a curtain of hair; then the girl’s eyes rolled up white and silver, and the girl’s mouth opened impossibly wide, and a gout of blood and whiskey tumbled down her chin.
She saw a jumble of streets laid out like a glowing map. Neon danced and rippled: purple, green, gold. In the streets, crowds of thin children in black frolicked. They wore studded belts and wristlets, skull-and-crossbone earrings, hair dyed every color, teased and twisted into every conceivable style. She saw pale faces slashed across with scarlet lipstick, with great smudges of eyeliner. Stalking among the children, everywhere, were corny silent-film vampires. They pulled black silk capes up over their noses, drew back in mock horror at crucifixes dangling from multipierced earlobes. Beside the children in their gaudy mourning, the vampires were old-fashioned and hokey—except that all of them had green eyes that glowed and snapped like strange acid fire.
As the final image dwindled into darkness, Ann realized that someone was touching her. Fumbling with the button of her skirt, sliding her tights down over her hips. She would know that touch anywhere, would know it even if she hadn’t felt it in ten years: half-rough but trying to be gentle, half-desperate but trying to be tender.
Steve. At first she wanted to push his hands away, but she could not muster the will to move, so she lay quietly and let him ease her panties down. Those panties are really skanky, she thought. Then she thought, Who cares, it’s only Steve, he’s smelled me before. Then some distant part of her mind realized what was happening and shrieked, Steve!
He would not let himself part her legs to look. He knew the warm saddle between her thighs too well, knew its perfumed scent and its tangy taste, knew just how to slide into its warmth. For some perverse reason he had a raging, aching hard-on. Maybe because you haven’t touched a girl in over two months, the demon in his mind babbled, not even an unconscious one.
He knew that if he looked at her too long, he would want her, even passed out. Yes, he could slip inside her so easily, it would be like coming home—but what if the thing in her womb reached a tiny hand down and grabbed him? What if it got ahold of him with its teeth?
His hard-on was suddenly gone.
Steve slid one hand under Ann’s hips—she was thinner, he noticed; there was only a scant handful of flesh on each buttock that had once been so sweetly round—and started winding the bandages around her. Between the milk-pale thighs, snug against the treacherous cunt, up around Ann’s slender waist and back down.
Would these keep her from bleeding to death when the poison started to work? He didn’t know. But Arkady had said to wrap her up, and Ghost trusted Arkady because there was no one else to trust, so Steve had to trust him too. Even if he was a rat-faced little fuckwad.
When Ann was wrapped from her waist to the middle of her thighs in white cotton, Steve pulled the sheet up to her chin. The coarse cloth seemed to settle flat over Ann’s body; even the rise of her swaddled pubic mound was nearly imperceptible.
Steve sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, looking at her face. She didn’t look any different. Tired, that was all. They might have just made love. She might be catnapping in that lovely twilight lull that happened after good sex, waiting for him to roll over and give her one more long deep kiss.
He bowed his head and rested his cheek against her breasts. Beneath their softness he felt the trembling of her heart. Turn back, he thought with sudden incoherence. Something got fucked up bad. None of this was supposed to happen. Time, turn back!
But time would not.
He kissed her through the bandages, right at the V where her thighs met. Then he stood up and walked toward the door, and only when he saw how blurred it was did he realize his eyes were overflowing.
Steve! her mind shrieked.
But he never turned around.
30
Arkady lit a candle and started down the stairs. He would get a packet of dried leaves that needed grinding; he would sift them to dust between his fingers as he sat beside Ann’s bed. He would bring up an old fragile book that he had not looked at in too long, and the decanter of sherry that rested beneath the altar with Ashley.
He would keep vigil beside the girl all night, or at least until Steve and Ghost returned. He would mark her bleeding, watch her temperature, daub her forehead with ice. He would take good care of her.
And he would think about the way Ghost had slighted him, rejected him, made a fool of him. He would think about the way Steve had shown him nothing but sullenness and discourtesy. He would sit beside the beautiful unconscious girl and think about these things, pondering the power he wielded over Steve and Ghost now. He would look upon the girl’s pale fevered face and contemplate the administration of another poison, one for the mother instead of the child, one that would never be detected. He knew a poison made from the spleen of a certain fish, a poison that duplicated the structure of normal stomach acids. He would contemplate unwrapping the bandages that Steve had tucked so carefully around her hips, would imagine himself straightening a wire coat hanger and sliding it up inside her, as tenderly as a lover, until the sharp end punctured her womb…. But no. He wielded great power over Steve and Ghost through this helpless girl, but he must not use it. That would be allowing the vampires to triumph. He must save her with his poisons; otherwise the vampires would have killed her as surely as they had killed his brother Ashley. As surely as they had turned that lovely aristocratic face to dust, dried that sweet white flesh, shrivelled those eyes, those eyes…
He only hoped his concoction would work. He had told Ghost he’d developed it after the death of Richelle, and this was true; but he had neglected to mention that it had never been tested on anyone.
Something wavered at the foot of the stairs. His shadow, huge and unsteady in the flickering light of his candle. Arkady stepped on it—a trick he had learned long ago, stepping on one’s own shadow, good for nothing but show—and ducked under the velvet curtain into the back room of the shop. Mullein-leaf he thought. I must bring the mullein-leaf to be crumbled, and the book and the sherry. Drawing near the altar, he bent to retrieve the decanter—and stopped, his dry lips hissing air, his hands frozen in their movement toward the dropcloth.
He always kept Ashley’s skull beneath the altar, safe in the dark. Sometimes in the night he would wander downstairs to speak to Ashley and stroke the smooth ivory curve, but he always put Ashley back in his resting place. Why, then, was the skull here on top of the altar, nestled among the relics and offerings?
Some of the other
objects had been displaced as well: the floor at the foot of the altar was littered with dead flowers, stray coins, the powdery ash of incense sticks. One of the plaster saints had toppled over, but the candles still burned, two on either side of Ashley, dripping pink and black wax onto the altar. Arkady reached out to touch what was left of his brother, hoping the contact might give him an answer, or at least lessen his confusion and his fear.
The skull was as cold as a November wind, as cold as frozen earth.
“What?” he whispered. “What’s wrong? What’s happening?”
The eye sockets retained their velvety tragic darkness; the teeth did not meet in reply. But as Arkady stroked the dome of the skull, all the candles—the four upon the altar, and the one he was carrying—suddenly flickered and then burned stronger than before. But now their flames were a bright, cold blue.
A sure sign of evil spirits present in the room.
“Ashley?” he whispered. “My brother? Is it you?” But that made no sense. Ashley was not evil. Ashley would never hurt him. Arkady groped under the altar for the sherry. He would need it tonight. When his fingers found the faceted glass of the decanter, he clutched it and started for the stairs.
But just before he was about to sweep the velvet curtain aside, he paused, then turned and went back to get Ashley. This meant he must abandon his candle and ascend the stairs in darkness, but Arkady would not leave his brother down here alone with whatever spirits roamed tonight.
The first stair tread creaked when he rested his weight upon it. With his bare toes he felt for the edge of the next stair, tried to ease his foot onto it without making a sound. His eyes strained against the dark. His shoulder brushed the wall—or did the wall lean in to crush him? Under his feet the boards felt unpleasantly dry, almost furry. He climbed two more stairs, three, four.
He was halfway to the top when he heard the light footsteps coming up behind him.
The stairs were dark, but the two faces seemed lit by an unhealthy glow from within. Arkady could make out their sharp features, their drawn mouths, the tired gleam of their eyes through the cheap sunglasses they wore. “It’s only you two,” he said. “You gave me a turn.”
They started up the stairs toward him.
“Look at us, Arkady,” said one of them. His voice was only a rustle, like a voice sifting through dried moth wings.
“We’ve waited too long,” said the other, and his voice was like a wind that blew from far away over a stagnant sea. “We can’t find anyone. We can’t even look in the mirror. And we have a show to do….”
Arkady kept backing up the stairs. He heard his own breath sobbing in and out of his throat. “What do you want?”
“It’s time, Arkady,” said the first one. He smiled, and patches of ivory skin flaked away from his cheeks, powdering the stairs, mingling with the dust.
The other one smiled too. His lips were caked with dry rouge, once red, now faded to dusty orange. Even in this dim light, Arkady could see the delicate tracery of lines that webbed the twins’ faces and disappeared beneath their sunglasses.
“We need you,” said the first one.
“It’s easy. You can join your brother.”
“There’s a girl upstairs,” Arkady heard himself say. “Young, pretty. You can have her—”
The first one shook his head in mock reproach. His ruby hair whipped his face. “No, Arkady. We don’t want your pretty girl, not yet anyway. Next you’ll be telling us to go find a whore on Bourbon Street. We’re hungry. We know you. We need you.”
“We love you, Arkady,” said the other, smiling even more widely. One of his upper front teeth fell out of its socket and landed with a tiny plink on the stairs. He picked it up and fitted it back into the ragged hole in his gum, still smiling. There was no blood, not a drop. “You see? Would you have our beauty wither and crack as your brother’s did? You can help us, Arkady. You can feed us. You know it’s easy.”
“Easy…” echoed the other.
They ascended the stairs toward him. Arkady could not run, could not move; already his feet and his ankles felt withered, useless. He wondered how they would feed. Did they have a sort of proboscis that would thrust deep into his body to search out every last drop of life? Or would they just bury their mouths in him, rend him with their teeth and let his life force flow into them?
Whatever it was, Ashley had felt it too; it was the last thing Ashley had felt, apart from a rope around his neck. The thought gave Arkady a sick sort of comfort. He would try not to be afraid.
The twins kept climbing toward him. Now he could see the silver sheen of their eyes behind their sunglasses. He could see the minute cracks that glazed the surface of their skin. He could see the thin layer of dust that coated their tongues.
When their graceful hands were almost upon him, he uttered a low desperate cry and hurled Ashley’s skull at them. It struck the redhead’s chest and bounced away. As the first dry hand touched his cheek, Arkady saw the skull tumbling from stair to stair, down into the darkness.
The twins fed for two hours. They pressed themselves close against Arkady’s body, and every crack and pore of their skin became a tiny mouth, a minuscule suckhole, questing deep into Arkady’s tissue to extract every drop of moisture, of vitality, of whatever love might still be buried in Arkady’s bitter heart. They stopped occasionally to stretch toward each other and exchange long kisses oiled and flavored by the inner workings of Arkady. Sex was only a stopgap measure for them now, a means to an end. The usual sorts of lovemaking seemed pallid, tame. Feeding was ever so much more sensual.
Eventually the redhead sat up and yawned. The blond stopped sucking and regarded Arkady with mild curiosity. Arkady’s fingers were little more than bone now, but they still scraped weakly against the wooden floor of the landing where the twins had dragged him. The husk of his head still creaked from side to side in blind denial; the dried leaf of his tongue still thrust from his crumbling mouth, questing for a drop of moisture. There was no drop of moisture left anywhere in Arkady’s ruined body; the blond twin knew that. But they always took so long to die.
It was sort of interesting.
The redhead glanced over his shoulder, back toward the warren of rooms down the hall. “Arkady said there was a girl,” he suggested.
The blond smirked at him. “Greedy, greedy.”
“I don’t care….”
“Let’s have a look, then.”
They tiptoed into Steve and Ghost’s room and stood on either side of the bed. There was a strong smell of blood. Arkady had left no light on, and their eyesight was not as strong as their other senses, but they did not really need it. They leaned over the bed and breathed in deep, going past the girl’s odor of sweat, blood, and sorrow, trying to scent out the pulse of life still beating.
Then they looked at each other and shook their heads.
“This girl belonged to Ghost, you know,” said the blond.
“Who?”
“Ghost! Don’t you remember? The beautiful dreamer?”
“Oh! I didn’t like him. Not our sort. Too…”
“Too asexual?”
“Too pure,” said the redhead, and they both giggled. But their laughter died as they stared at the indistinct curled form on the bed. Arkady had been so dry.
“A shame.”
“A pity. But we have a show to do.”
What Arkady had said about the twins’ being musicians was not precisely true. They were dilettantes who welcomed any chance to perform almost any act in public. Currently they had captured the affections of a local band whose Gothic act had failed to ignite the French Quarter club scene. The guitarist and former singer, Pearl, was a lovely young woman with opalescent skin, masses of dyed and crimped blue-black hair, and no hint of a brain in her head. “You’ll inject some life into the act,” she enthused. With a perfectly straight face, the blond twin had replied, “And perhaps you will inject some life into us, too.”
Pearl and the other members of Midnight S
un had agreed to let the twins front their act for as long as they wished to. Audiences were enthralled; club owners loved them. The band particularly liked the fact that the twins never took their cut of the door. They had no use for money.
At the foot of Ann’s bed they embraced. Their brittle hair drifted together; their eyes glittered silver behind the sunglasses they still wore.
“Let’s leave after the show tonight,” the redhead murmured. “Let’s blow this town.”
“But Pearl…” The blond had taken a particular liking to the empty-headed, lush-bodied guitarist.
“We can do her later. I don’t care. But let’s leave after that. My darling? Please?”
“Of course, then, anything you want. But why so suddenly?”
The redhead glanced at the bloody hump on the bed. Then he tilted his head back and smiled into his brother’s silver eyes. His grin was warm, lazy, insouciant. “Don’t you see what happened to her?” he asked. “Where’s the elegance in that? This is a trashy town.
“Too many damned bloodsuckers here.”
Out on the landing Arkady’s fingers still scraped uselessly at the floorboards. Flakes of parchment skin sifted from him with every feeble twitch. “Goodbye, Arkady dear,” said the redhead unconcernedly.
The twins picked up Ashley’s skull at the bottom of the stairs and took it with them as they left.
31
“I think this is the place,” said Steve.
They’d been out since dusk hitting all the Bourbon Street bars they had missed before. Now it was almost midnight, and they were staggering along Decatur searching for the club Arkady had told them about.
Steve backed up, stumbled into the gutter, and stared wearily up at a big black sign above a set of ironwork doors. The sign was written in enormous Gothic letters that dripped lurid red blood, the corners decorated with a delicate spiderweb motif: PASKO’S. Steve narrowed his eyes, trying to make the swimming letters come together. “Is this the place?”
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