Lost Souls

by Poppy Z. Brite - (ebook by Undead)

  Nothing saw it all. He was still on the bed, half-propped on his elbows, naked except for the vomit-stained sheet that covered him. He saw Steve bring the knife down into Christian’s chest, and he had not even had time to react to that when Zillah flew like a demented bat out of the corner and whipped his razor across Steve’s upraised forearms.

  Then the most extraordinary thing of all happened: Ghost took the knife, stepped forward, and lifted Zillah straight off the floor. He only had one arm around Zillah’s neck, but Nothing saw Zillah’s feet dangling an inch above the floorboards. Ghost hoisted Zillah around so that he was facing the bed.

  And Zillah’s eyes met Nothing’s as the knife went in.

  There was no love in them, no sorrow. Only pain and blame and blind rage. This was not the way Zillah had planned it. Through all the stupid risks he took he had never considered the possibility of his own death. This is your fault, those eyes told Nothing. You brought me to this, and this should be happening to you.

  Then the green light blazed once and went out. Zillah’s eyes were as dead as a blown light bulb. But their message had burned itself into Nothing, had hardened him faster and better than anything else could.

  Zillah’s feet kicked and shuffled an inch above the floor. Blood began to seep around the handle of the knife, then from his nostrils and the corners of his eyes. His mouth fell open, and a fountain of blood tumbled down his chin, washed over Ghost’s arm and hand. That seemed to wake Ghost. The strain of Zillah’s weight hit him, and he let the body fall. He stared unbelievingly at his hands.

  “Steve?” he said in a small voice. “What…?”

  Steve was slumped against the bed. He had taken off his shirt and was pressing it between his arms, trying to stop the bleeding from his slashed wrists. Tiredly, he looked up at Ghost.

  “I owe you another one,” he said.

  Nothing glanced around the room. Where were Molochai and Twig? He saw them huddled against the far wall, heard them puking more violently than ever. He didn’t know if they had seen Zillah die. Right now they sounded as if they were beyond caring.

  He looked at Ghost. Ghost stared back. His eyes were clear and very pale.

  “I could kill you, you know,” Nothing heard himself say. “I could make them get up and kill you.”

  Ghost didn’t move. “I know you could.”

  “I could make them kill both of you.”

  “It’ll be me first, then,” said Ghost.

  Nothing looked at Zillah’s body sprawled on the floor. Rivulets of blood crawled along the cracks between the floorboards where Zillah’s head had fallen. He thought of never feeling those strong veined hands on him again, of never kissing that lush mouth.

  He thought of never again having anyone tell him what to do.

  “Take that thing out of him,” he said.

  Ghost knelt and pulled the knife out of Zillah’s skull. He had to wiggle the blade free, but Nothing didn’t look away. The knife left a clean narrow wound in Zillah’s temple. A pale, slightly cloudy fluid began to trickle from it.

  “Now get out,” said Nothing.

  Steve and Ghost only stared at him.

  “Now. If they get up, I’ll let them kill you. They loved Zillah too.” Nothing wasn’t sure if he meant this. Could he really watch Steve and Ghost die, even now? He thought of the cold message he had seen in Zillah’s eyes and wondered whether he would ever have known the truth if Zillah had lived.

  Still, his father had loved him in his way. In the way of decadence and self-gratification. But even that was worth something. Nothing was amazed at how calm he felt. He never knew his face was wet with tears.

  Life was his now. When he was on the road he would want to think about Steve and Ghost, to know they were alive somewhere. He hadn’t wanted Ann’s baby to die either, not really. It would have been his brother or his sister. He would have taken care of it. He would have held it on his knees so it could look out the windows of the van and dabbed wine and blood on its soft little gums.

  He knew Ann must be dead. Why else would Steve have come on this murdering rampage? But if he never asked, he would be able to pretend the baby was alive somewhere, growing up without its family just as he had done. Maybe someday they’d be driving along some country road and suddenly there would be Zillah’s child, Nothing’s brother or sister, sticking out a hopeful thumb.

  Maybe.

  “Go on,” he told Ghost more gently. “Steve’s hurt. Get him to a hospital. Take him home.”

  Ghost pulled Steve up, and they left without a word. Nothing didn’t watch them go. He had enough goodbyes to say.

  Toward morning, when the sky was beginning to go from purple to transparent violet, Molochai and Twig awakened from their nauseated daze. At first they were frightened when they saw the bodies. Then they got mad, but Nothing only clamped his arms across his chest and stared them down.

  “Zillah would have killed them,” said Twig sullenly.

  “Zillah tried,” said Nothing. He knew how cold his words sounded. But if he could make Molochai and Twig feel his power now, in these first few minutes, he did not think they would challenge him again.

  “I did it the way I wanted to,” he told them, and no one had anything to say to that.

  All of them knew what to do for their dead. There was not much blood left in Christian’s body; the tapered blade of the knife had pierced his heart and crushed it, and most of his blood had drained into the mattress. They licked what they could from his face, his hands, his chest. They sucked at the edges of the wound. With a wet snuffling sound, Molochai buried his face in the hole the knife had made. He nibbled at Christian’s torn heart and pronounced it bitter.

  Tenderly they laid Zillah out on the bed and used his pearl-handled razor to slit him open from sternum to pubic bone. Nothing saw strangely shaped organs glistening in the pale aperture. They lifted the organs out and arranged them carefully, lovingly, on the bed around him. Then, one by one, they thrust their heads into the long wound and licked the husk of Zillah clean.

  As the sun rose, shedding its wan light upon the proud old buildings of the French Quarter and the trash in its gutters, they left Christian’s room and filed down the stairs. The black van was parked two blocks away. Nothing hated to leave so soon. He had spent only two nights here, one of them puking his guts out. It wasn’t fair.

  He smiled, though it barely touched his lips. Fair? How long had it been since he expected things to be fair? If you wanted something, you didn’t wait for the world to deal it out to you; you took it. If he had learned nothing else during his time with Zillah, he had learned that. And anyway, it didn’t matter that he had to leave New Orleans so soon. The city was in his blood. He would be back; there was always time.

  Nothing had left his long black raincoat behind, draped over the bodies like a shroud. In its place he wore Zillah’s jacket with its purple silk lining. The fresh bloodstains were like badges. The smell of them twisted his heart, but he wore them with pride.

  Just before they left the room, Nothing had pulled the shade up. As the first ray of light touched the bodies of Zillah and Christian, their flesh began to smolder and crumble. In less than an hour it was only ash.

  34

  Steve got his arms stitched and bandaged at Charity Hospital on the edge of the French Quarter. The doctors on duty in the emergency room suspected a suicide attempt, but Steve kept telling his story over and over, and Ghost kept backing him up. They’d been out drinking; a gang of kids had jumped them; one of the kids pulled a razor. Steve flung his arms up to protect his face and got slashed.

  They had to talk to a policeman, and Ghost could see Steve getting ready to break down: it was in the corners of his mouth, the way his shoulders sagged. Ghost closed his eyes and tried to send Steve strength. At last they were allowed to go.

  For a few minutes they stood outside the hospital in the cool dawn. Steve stared at his gauze-swathed arms. “If I wanted to kill myself,” he muttered, “I woul
dn’t have slashed my goddamn wrists like some kind of half-assed moron.” Ghost started walking back toward the car. After a moment Steve followed. “I’d get a shotgun. Straight through the brain.” Ghost shuddered, but Steve didn’t notice. “Or I’d drive up to the mountains and run my car over a guardrail. A thousand feet down and BAM! you’re spread out over a mile of rocks.”

  They reached the car. Steve stood staring around him, seeming to search for something in the faces of the old buildings, maybe just having a final look at the place that had claimed so much from him. Ghost wondered if they would ever come back here.

  Ghost drove all the way back to Missing Mile. The muscles of his shoulders and upper arms were sore. The palms of his hands tingled faintly, and he kept wiping them on his knees, on the fabric of the seat. Again and again he felt the knife going into Zillah’s skull, the terrible lack of resistance as it slid through Zillah’s brain. He had heard Zillah’s final shriek of rage and agony in his mind. He’d had to do it; Steve would be dead now if he hadn’t, his throat sliced wide open and his life bled away. Still Ghost felt the knife going in.

  Somewhere in the Louisiana swamps Steve said, “Pull over.” Ghost killed the ignition. In the dark phosphorescence of the swamp Steve’s tears shone as clear and bright as crystal. Blindly he reached for Ghost, pressed his face into Ghost’s hair, rubbed his hands over Ghost’s face, gathered the fabric of Ghost’s clothes between his fingers. “You’re here,” he gasped. “I know you’re here—I can feel you—I can smell you—you’re not gonna go away—”

  “Steve,” said Ghost, “oh, Steve…” He could hardly speak. Just to hold each other was not enough; again he wished that their hearts could be joined. Maybe that would clean some of the blood from their hands.

  Back in Missing Mile they were a little puzzled when their friends did not greet them with astonishment. It was hard to realize that they had only been gone a few days. Terry told them that Simon Bransby had been found dead in an easy chair in his living room. The house, Terry said with mild bemusement, was full of crazy shit—cat guts pickled in formaldehyde, terrariums full of toads that bounced off the glass as if they were tripping on high-grade acid. Simon had died of a Valium overdose, and everybody thought it was suicide, presumably because his only daughter had finally left home for good.

  Ann was never heard from, and only a handful of people in Missing Mile—R.J., Terry, Monica—knew anything about what had happened to her. Not even they knew the whole tale.

  * * * * *

  They discovered that even in the face of pain that seems unbearable, even in the face of pain that wrings the last drop of blood out of your heart and leaves its scrimshaw tracery on the inside of your skull, life goes on. And pain grows dull, and begins to fade.

  Steve went back to work at the Whirling Disc, played his guitar obsessively. Kinsey Hummingbird hired him to tend bar a couple of times a week at the Sacred Yew. Sometimes Steve would start screaming in the night. He would wake sobbing, clawing at the darkness in front of his face. Ghost held him and tried to warm the chill of nightmare out of his bones.

  By day, Ghost wandered around town picking up leaves and bits of colored glass, talking to the old men who had moved their checker game inside the hardware store for winter. They kidded him about the bad times he’d said were coming, but stopped when they saw the look on his face.

  One day he rode his bike out to Miz Catlin’s and told her everything. At the end of the hour it took him, he was sobbing. Miz Catlin patted his hand and said the things Ghost had known she would say: she believed it, every word, and his grandmother would be proud of him.

  Then she told him something he hadn’t known. “That Raventon fellow was a fake and a liar.”

  “Huh?”

  “Pennyroyal, yarrow, brooklime.” Miz Catlin flapped a wrinkled hand. “All those things are good to start a pessary with, but they wouldn’t do a damn thing together. Not strong enough. The girl would have died anyway, Ghost.”

  Ghost wondered. But when he was lying awake at night, staring at the stars on his ceiling and thinking about everything, Miz Catlin’s words made him feel better.

  One December day Ghost found himself out on Violin Road near the trailer where Christian and the others had lived. The tangle of rosebushes still grew wild in the backyard, and though Missing Mile was deep in winter, one rose blossomed in the heart of the thicket. When Ghost reached for it, a thorn sank like a tooth into the ball of his thumb. Bright drops of his blood spattered the frozen ground.

  “Blood for blood,” he whispered. Again he remembered how the knife had felt going into Zillah’s skull.

  On an evening in early spring Steve and Ghost walked out to the old graveyard. Beside Miles Hummingbird’s weathered tombstone, unmarked, was a soft spot in the ground where Ghost had buried the foetus still wrapped in his handkerchief. He wished he could have placed Ann’s body here too, but this was part of her; this would have to do.

  Ghost wondered where Ann was now. He wished he could ask Miles, but he would not. What goes on between the dead, his grandmother had told him, is the dead’s own business.

  Steve rolled a joint, lit it, passed it to Ghost, and began to talk lovingly about what a piece of shit the T-bird was. He was going to sell it to the junkyard, he said, and throw a party to celebrate. Whenever Steve started talking that way, it meant he was thinking about a road trip. That might do them both good.

  Steve was quiet for a while. When the joint had burned down to a ragged end, he turned to Ghost. “Listen…”

  “What?”

  “Everything that happened last fall… I know it was real. I mean, I was there. But it’s still hard, Ghost.” Steve spread his arms wide. “What does it do to you? How do you deal with it? Doesn’t it fuck you up, to know that we touched something evil, that it’s still out there in the world?”

  Steve was letting himself think about those days again. For a long time he had refused to. His world was visibly torn apart, but he would not acknowledge what had sundered it. Ghost held him during his night terrors and never tried to make him talk.

  But a postcard had come in the mail last week, a brightly colored postcard, its edges ragged, its message blurred with the grime of small-town post offices. Ghost knew Steve had seen it. You are safe, the card had said. You will be safe as long as I live: forever, or nearly so. I love you. And the signature was scrawled large across the bottom, the t like a dagger thrusting down, the N and the loop of the g swooping like bats’ wings: Nothing.

  “I don’t know,” Ghost said at last. “Maybe they were evil, like Miz Catlin says. My grandmother told me you shouldn’t try to define evil, that the minute you think you’ve got it all pinned down, a kind of evil you never even thought of will sneak up behind you and jump inside your head. I don’t think anyone knows what evil is. I don’t think anyone has the right to say.

  “So maybe they were just like us. I hate what they did, what they do. But they’d hate our lives too. Maybe they did what they had to do to live, and tried to get a little love and have a little fun before the darkness took them.”

  “I love you, Ghost.”

  Ghost felt his heart expand. “Love you too.”

  He accepted the last of the joint from Steve, sucked at it, closed his eyes. When the smoke was gone, he stretched out on the pine needles, his head in Steve’s lap. Steve stroked his hair, and through those guitar-callused fingertips Ghost caught Steve’s mood: lonely, but not alone. Bitter, but not destroyed. They had made it through the winter.

  They stayed in the graveyard, talking sometimes, drifting off to sleep and waking to see their breath plume in the air, watching the sky until it grew pale with the first light of morning.

  EPILOGUE

  Fifty

  Years

  Later

  Night.

  Black night in a club, 4:00 a.m. relieved only by the watery neon pulse that filters through the holes in the ceiling. The club is in the basement of a burned-out building, so mos
t of the light is lost in the charred and rusted skeleton of steel that towers seventeen stories into the night. But some light filters through, purplish and flat.

  Night in a club. These dives have changed very little. The walls are painted black, scorched in spots, crawling with arcane graffiti: spiky insignia, dripping band emblems sprayed in gold and red. This club is located a few blocks from the edge of the French Quarter, and Mardi Gras week has just begun. Less than a mile away the endless party rages through the streets, the bright costumes swirl by, the liquor flows like milk.

  They will be there soon enough.

  On the tiny stage, separated from the dance floor by strands of barbed wire, two members of a snuff-rock band are packing up their equipment: the cords and effects, the violin bows and bone-saws, the ampules of blood the audience thinks is fake. They mix it with alcohol to keep it from coagulating too quickly; they have not forgotten their old customs. Their faces are smudged white, with rows of tiny, slightly raised black dots in elaborate patterns of scarification. They wear their hair twisted into hundreds of matted, filthy little braids. Their eyes are ringed in gray. They still bleed from the slashes made by the singer’s chrome-tipped whip upon their hands and faces and naked pierced chests, but they are healing fast.

  On a steel bench that runs along the wall, a young man is curled on his side, asleep: the band’s singer. His fist is pressed against his mouth, and his lips make a slight sucking motion. He looks perhaps twenty, too thin for his height. His face has taken on a cool ivory beauty: the high sharp cheekbones, the twin black arches of his eyebrows sweeping toward his temples, the flickering dark pools of his eyes as he dreams. His hair falls across his forehead in a straight, smooth sheaf, blue-black. The air in the club is colder than the semitropical night outside, and in his sleep the young man has pulled his purple-lined coat tightly around him.