Lost Souls

by Poppy Brite

  Ghost knew all the stories of that oak. He said an Indian had climbed it to escape from a bear once. The marks of the bear’s claws were still there, eight feet up the trunk, deep and twisted in the thick bark. The claws had hurt the tree, Ghost said, and it had bled clear sap to fill the wound, to stop the blaze of blind pain. Now the scar was knotted, invulnerable, and the tree sang with the hum of the power plant far away on the lake.

  Ghost looked at the tree, silently greeting it most likely. Steve stood watching, one hand on the warm hood of the T-bird. He ran his other hand through his hair, shoving it back behind his ears, trying to tame it. Finally, against his will, he said, “What killed that kid?”

  Ghost shrugged, pulled his hair over his face. “Something bad. Something really bad.”

  Steve started to say no shit, then thought better of it. Sometimes you didn’t want to say such things to Ghost. They walked to the fence and looked out over the pastures toward the power plant. Steve curled his fingers around the barbed wire. It was cold, colder than the night air, as cold as dead flesh. He shivered. “A psycho,” he said. “A dog. Maybe that Doberman the lady had. You suppose there’s any wolves left around here?”

  Ghost tossed his hair back and slowly shook his head. “It wasn’t any wolf or dog. How could they suck him dry like that? And if you think it was a psycho, how come you’re not scared to be up here? He would’ve taken off. He could be anywhere.”

  “Probably across the Virginia border by now.” Steve saw again the cavernous throat, the sad brown hand with road dirt ground into the creases of its palm. He was aware of the cool air against his eyes, drying and chilling them. He squinted at the power plant, making the lights run together fuzzily, dazzlingly … and then Ann was in his head again.

  He remembered the last time he’d come up here, months ago. With her. They had made love on a blanket in the backseat of the T-bird, hot and sweaty, but the clear cool air of the hill had blown over them, and the lights of the power plant had run together in just the same way.

  Steve’s shoulders drew up and he clamped his arms across his chest, ready to say Let’s leave, let’s get the hell out of here … and then Ghost was offering him a green apple. Distracting him. It worked; Steve had to wonder where in hell the apple had come from. He took a big bite and handed it back, chewing slowly, letting the golden-tasting juice run over his tongue: crunchy, sweet. The taste made him feel better. “You remember the Hook?” he asked after he had swallowed the mouthful. “That old spook story?”

  “Uh-uh,” said Ghost, eating the core of the apple. Steve watched to see whether Ghost would spit out the seeds. When he didn’t, Steve spoke again. “You know, that story about the kids out at Lovers Lane. They’re fucking in the backseat, and all of a sudden this bulletin comes on the radio about a crazy man escaped from the asylum outside of town. A psycho killer with a hook instead of a hand.”

  Steve looked at Ghost. Ghost was leaning against one of the fence posts, head tilted back, staring at the sky. The moon had gone behind a cloud. Ghost’s face was shadowed, his eyes dark. He might have been listening; then again, he might have been receiving messages from an agrarian collective civilization somewhere near Alpha Centauri.

  “So they hauled ass out of Lovers Lane,” Steve went on anyway, “and when they got home, the boy went around the car to open the door for the girl. And what do you think he found? A bloody hook, hanging from the handle of the door!” He leaned over and spoke the last words right into Ghost’s ear.

  Ghost jumped, almost fell over. He stared at Steve for several seconds, then grinned. “Out at Lovers Lane?” he asked. Both of them turned to look at the T-bird parked in the clearing. It sat large and dusty, its engine giving an occasional metallic groan as it cooled.

  “How come—” Ghost began, and Steve knew Ghost was about to exhibit the weird, irritating logic that sometimes possessed him. He was going to ask how come the couple had the radio on while they were fucking, or why the psyche killer would have reached to open the car door with his hook when he could have used his hand. But then the moon sailed out from behind its cloud and flooded the hill with cold white light, and Ghost sucked in his breath, sharp and scared.

  Steve followed Ghost’s gaze to the oak and saw nothing at all. But he knew Ghost saw something there. And somehow that was scarier than seeing it himself.

  Ghost felt his feet moving. He hadn’t told them to move. He wasn’t even sure he wanted them to move. He took several steps toward the oak, and when he got close enough, the outline of the twins grew clearer, more solid.

  They were balanced on a low branch, their legs swinging, their hands climbing like delicate white insects along the trunk. Closer still, and Ghost could smell them: their strange, heady bouquet of strawberry incense, clove cigarettes, wine and blood and rain and the sweat of passion. All the things they had loved when they were alive, the things that dragged them down, drove them to live upon each other’s essence until they ran dry. But here on this midnight hill, in the pallid moonlight, the twins were beautiful still. They wore colored silks, silks that caught the moon and threw it back in a thousand shades of iridescence. And Ghost could see no spiderweb tracery of age on their faces. He saw only their dark lips, their brittle, false-colored, silken hair of lemon-yellow and cherry-red, their eyes like silver pearl, filmy and pupilless.

  But they were looking at him, he knew that, and when he was close enough to touch the trunk of the tree, one of them spoke to him. It was only his name, whispered through the branches, “Ghost,” but it was like a wind blowing from across a strange sea, like an unseen rustle in an empty room. Ghost put his hand on the trunk, near a slender silk-clad leg so tangible he wanted to stroke it.

  Why was he seeing them now, these creatures from his dream? He had thought they were pitiful, but now they frightened him. He found himself wondering what they had become after their death, how death had changed them. If they were somehow alive even now, what allowed them to be? And why had he dreamed of them in the first place?

  Ghost was used to asking himself such questions. He had been visited in his dreams by the dead; he had dreamed the future as clearly as a story in a book; he had been able to pick up the thoughts and feelings of people he was close to—and other people if he concentrated—for as long as he could remember. But he had never been visited while awake by creatures from one of his dreams.

  “What is it?” Steve called from across the clearing.

  “Hello, Ghost,” said the crimson-haired twin, smiling down at him with rouged lips. Those lips were too dark in that pale, peaked face, and there was no warmth in that smile, only a spasm of muscles long forgotten, a memory of a smile. But Ghost looked up into those flat silvery eyes, and he was not afraid for his own safety. Not yet. These twins had been dead a long time, if indeed they had ever lived outside his dream.

  “Of course we haven’t,” said the first twin, catching Ghost’s thought. “We’re just your dream.”

  “We don’t go around killing little niggerboys on lonely roadsides long past midnight just to suck their lives out.”

  “He didn’t taste exquisite, did he, love, at the moment of death? No, we didn’t suck out that little boy’s life, Ghost.”

  “Nooo, not us, not so we could stay beautiful. We’re just your dream.…”

  Obviously they did not intend him to believe it. Beneath the twins’ exotic scent Ghost caught a whiff of decay, dry and stale, edged with pale brown. Their skin suddenly looked brittle, as if the touch of a breeze would flake it away from fragile ivory bones. Ghost wanted to ask them whether it hurt to rot, whether they grew lonely in the grave. He wanted to know whether they were buried together in a casket big enough for two bodies—big enough for two small dry bodies that knew how to fit together like a puzzle of blood and bone. Or did their graves lie side by side, and did they have to reach through the earth to clasp hands?

  He had to find out what they were, whether they were dangerous. Reluctantly he reached out and tri
ed to touch their minds; reluctantly he found them. Their minds were like echoes, like haunted rooms from which all the life had gone. The touch of their thoughts was light, fluttering, as cold and silver as graveyard stone, as voracious as feeding animals. They took Chost into the grave with them, and he saw the darkest darkness that ever was, darker than a starless night on the mountain where he’d been born, darker than the darkness that swam up behind his closed eyelids when he lay in bed at night, darker than the hour before dawn.

  He was lying on rotten satin, and he felt his tissues drying and shrivelling inside him, felt the secret loving movement of the creatures that shared his grave, the pale worms, the shiny beetles with their delicate black legs, the things without shape or name, too tiny to be seen, the hungry things turning his flesh back into new rich earth—

  “Ghost! What the fuck are you doing?” Steve’s hands were on him, large and strong and undeniably real, Steve’s bony fingers digging into Ghost’s shoulders.

  Ghost leaned back against Steve. “It doesn’t hurt,” he said—to Steve? to the twins? He knew not, he cared not.

  “What doesn’t hurt? Who are you talking to?”

  “Death doesn’t hurt,” said one of the twins, and a light came into his silver eyes. “Death is dark, death is sweet.”

  The other twin took up the litany. “Death is all that lasts forever. Death is eternal beauty.”

  “Death is a lover with a thousand tongues—”

  “A thousand insect caresses—”

  “Death is easy.”

  “Death is easy.”

  “DEATH IS EASY DEATH IS EASY DEATHISEASYDEATHIS—”

  “Shut up!” Ghost screamed. The chant swelled inside his head, became the rhythm of his heartbeat, sucked him in. “Stop it! Leave me alone!”

  Then Steve’s arms were around him, and instead of the twins’ rotten-spice odor there was only Steve’s smell, beer and dirty hair and fear and love, and Ghost buried his face in the soft black cotton of Steve’s T-shirt. When he opened his eyes again, the twins were gone. Ghost heard only the faraway roar of the power plant across the water, saw only the branches of the oak, tangled and twisted, stretching up to the clear, glittering sky.

  Ghost didn’t talk much on the drive back to Missing Mile. He told Steve only about the lovely feral faces of the twins and their bright silks and their bewitching dead smell. He didn’t want to wonder, he said, what kind of an omen those twins might have been … or, worse than an omen, if they might have been real. Instead he finished the whiskey and went to sleep with his head hung out the window and his hair streaming in the wind, and Steve looked from the shimmering road to the hill of Ghost’s cheek, the dark curve of his eyebrow, the satin scrap of his lashes.

  Again Steve wondered what manner of things lived in that pale head, what Ghost was made of, of what substance were his visions. Steve had heard nothing back there on the hill, nothing but the wind and the power plant’s faraway hum. He had seen nothing but the old scarred oak tree, wild against the sky. But he believed that Ghost had seen a pair of twins long dead, the twins that had died in his dream and come back to life in his waking hours. Steve no longer even considered disbelieving the things Ghost saw and heard, the things Ghost knew without knowing.

  Steve’s faith in the high omniscient gods of his childhood—Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and an eccentric creature apparently designed just for him, the Haircut Fairy—had been blasted by older, more worldly friends who advised him to stay awake and see whether it wasn’t his dad spiriting away the carefully wrapped package of dark and unruly hair clippings, whether it wasn’t his mother delivering all those mystical goodies. The Easter-morning chocolate never tasted quite so wondrously creamy after he found out that it wasn’t brewed and molded under the roots of a tree deep in some enchanted forest, in the vast subterranean workshop of a giant rabbit he had pictured as bearing a strong resemblance to Bugs Bunny, but with bright pink fur.

  Years later, when his aunt and cousins took him to church, he suspected that this was more of the same magical gobbledygook updated for grown-ups. With the cynical hope of an eleven-year-old he prayed for the successful flight of the hyperspace machine he and his friend R.J. were building in the Finns’ garage. But the motors they had salvaged from hair dryers, refrigerators, and one precious wrecked motorcycle left them stranded on earth, no matter how many adjustments they made, how many dials they twisted, no matter how many times R.J. pushed his glasses up on his nose and checked the spiral notebook from Walgreen’s that contained his calculations, no matter how bitterly Steve cussed and kicked at the mess of machinery.

  Steve thought his belief in magic might well have died there, at the hands of a God who cared nothing for a hyperspace machine built by the labor and thievery and faith of two skinny, sweaty boys who had hoped all through a long summer. Steve’s faith might have been shattered beyond salvation, might have died right there on that garage floor, along with the snips of wire, the scraps of metal, the broken drill bit that his dad whaled him for.

  He might never have believed in magic again. But a few weeks later—right around this time of year, he realized, twelve years ago to the month—he met Ghost, and everything changed forever.

  It was near the end of his eleventh summer, when the season was about to turn, when Steve was poised at the last reach of childhood. The passions and excitements of children no longer seemed so heady to him. He felt faintly silly for having tried to build a hyperspace machine, or indeed for doing anything that was not dictated by the realm of the practical. He cringed now to think how different he might have been. He might never have picked up a guitar, might have graduated from N.C. State with a bachelor’s degree in advertising or some such deathsome thing. If he hadn’t met Ghost.

  The locusts were still singing in the trees and in the long weeds by the side of the road, but their song grew sad, the harbinger of another summer’s end. School was in session. The days would be relentlessly hot and sticky for another month at least, but some new coolness in the night air signalled the golden mantle of fall. As at the beginning of every school year, there was a new kid. This year the new kid was a pale, frail-looking boy whose hair was a little too long to meet the current standards, who came to school wearing shirts that were clean but always seemed to hang from him too loosely, Steve sat behind him in class and saw that his shoulder blades were as distinct and articulated as the joints of birds’ wings.

  By rote the new kid was ignored at first, though there was some discussion of his funny name and his hillbilly origins. Then, by virtue of his appearance, his quietness, and his disinclination to join in the sixth-grade touch-football games at recess, he was judged a fag and thereafter jeered at. Everyone knew he must be smart because he’d come up a grade and was a year younger than the rest of the class. Most of the kids in Missing Mile had something weird about them: their fathers had died in the big fire at the old cotton mill, or their mothers worked as strippers in Raleigh, or they lived out on Violin Road and were so poor, the rumor went, that they had to eat roadkill.

  These children were happy to have someone to look down upon. The new kid didn’t seem to care, or even really notice; even when the sixth-grade boys zinged him with pinecones and chunks of gravel, he looked around bewilderedly as if he thought they might have fallen out of the sky. He checked out grown-up books about space from the school library and spent his recesses in the fringe of woods at the edge of the yard.

  Steve was curious. He’d heard the new kid and his grandmother had moved here from the mountains, and he wanted to hear about the mountains. He and his parents had driven through them once, and to Steve they had seemed a place of dark mystery, of lushness, of a foreboding beauty that verged on the sinister. In the mountains you wouldn’t need a hyperspace machine; in the mountains they kept giant possums for yard dogs.

  So one day Steve forsook the touch-football game—it was kind of a stupid affair anyway, less concerned with the actual rules of football than with knocki
ng down as many kids as possible and grinding their faces into the dirt—and took his own walk in the woods. He walked with his hands stuffed in his pockets, feeling awkward, half-hoping he wouldn’t meet the new kid, who probably only wanted to be left alone, who surely thought he was just a roughneck jerkoff like the others. The woods were sun-dappled and quiet, but Steve kept walking into old strands of spiderweb that stuck to his face and made him think tickly legs were racing down his back. He was about to give it up and go play football after all when he heard a quiet “hey” from above his head.

  Steve looked up into the calmest blue eyes he’d ever seen. No wonder this kid didn’t mind insults or pinecones. Set in a face that was far too delicate, framed by wisps of rain-pale hair, those eyes were nevertheless at peace. Steve wondered what it felt like to have eyes like that.

  The kid was perched comfortably in a tree, his legs stretched out along a low branch, his back snuggled against the trunk. He raised an arm and pointed to a spot along the path just past Steve.

  At first Steve didn’t see anything. Then all at once it came clear, the way an optical illusion will suddenly resolve itself: an intricate and enormous web that spanned the path, and hanging head-down at the middle of the concentric gossamer circles, a particularly large, juicy-looking brown weaver. Another couple of steps and Steve would have walked right into it. He tried unsuccessfully to suppress a shudder.

  “Spiders are spinning all over the woods,” said the kid. “That means it’ll be cold soon.”

  This went against the rationality that Steve so loved. It sounded childish. What could spiders have to do with the weather? “How do you know?” he said.

  “My grandmother knows all that stuff.” The blue eyes did not challenge Steve to believe. The kid had an air of quiet sureness; there was nothing cocky about him, nothing arrogant, but he seemed to know he spoke the truth.