He has good reason to be tired. He runs a tight crew, and he has kept them alive, well fed, and sated for half a century.
The band have finished packing up. At the sound of their footsteps approaching the young man comes awake, blinking up at them. At first his vision makes them hazy, and he thinks there are three of them—three clumps of hair, three faces defined in blots of dark makeup—but slowly they come clear, and there are only two.
The memory of singing tonight returns to him. He gives strange performances, alternately whispering his words and shrieking them, his hands clenched at his sides, then flung out gesturing at the crowd as if he would conjure them all into hell. He swirls his whip through the smoky air and watches the audience bleed. And sometimes as he sings, he remembers another night at a different club, a night when a pale-eyed wraith clung to a microphone as if the crowd would drown him. He remembers a hoarse golden voice.
But the show is over. He smiles up at them and asks, “What did you bring me?”
Molochai pulls his hand out of his pocket and opens his fingers. Lying on his grubby palm is a hypodermic needle full of blood. Nothing opens his mouth. Molochai places the sharp tip of the needle—carefully, ever so carefully—on Nothing’s tongue and pushes the plunger. The blood trickles down Nothing’s throat, rich and sweet.
“We saved the last for you,” Twig tells him.
“We can get more,” says Nothing. The others nod in agreement.
“We can always get more,” says Nothing.
A smile of happy anticipation spreads across Molochai’s scarified face, and he jabs Twig in the ribs. Twig returns the jab with a tug on one of Molochai’s tiny braids.
“Because we have time,” Nothing tells them. “Forever and ever.” For the first time in years he thinks of Christian, his smooth impassive face, his coldly tragic eyes. He believes Christian would be proud of him now.
“Or nearly so,” he whispers a beat later. But the others have already turned away.
The stage lights have been turned off, and the neon of the buzz-vendors flickers only fitfully. Nothing leads his family out of the club in darkness. They are headed for Bourbon Street
. Nothing knows how to get there, and where they can pick up a bottle of Chartreuse along the way.
Molochai is playing with a heavy silver doubloon of the same shape and size as those thrown from Mardi Gras parade floats along with all the other colored trinkets. But this coin is older than any Mardi Gras doubloon. Molochai keeps tossing it into the air and catching it.
Nothing snatches the coin in midair and looks at it. Over the years Molochai’s sticky fingerprints have worn away some of the carving: the man’s lips no longer appear so full, and his sharp teeth are barely visible.
“Let me see that, kiddo,” says Twig, making a grab for the coin.
They bandy it about for a few moments, tossing it back and forth, trying to spin it on the ends of their fingers. As they climb the stairs to street level, the sound of their boots on the cement echoes back along the graffiti-swarming corridor, up through the spiderwebs and the maze of burned-out girders, out into the night.
Night. And they are gone.
The footsteps, still echoing.
Then silent.
Then black.
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Lost Souls Page 36