Lost Souls

by Poppy Brite

  From behind him came a great howl of delight as Molochai and Twig saw the whirlpool bathtub. Zillah turned to see them ripping at each other’s clothes, throwing shirts and sneakers and socks all over the room in their haste to get undressed. He watched them for a moment, still smiling, then untied the purple scarf that bound his ponytail and began combing his hair with his fingers, smoothing its silky length, untangling the snarls made by the wind on the road. Hair slipped between his fingers, tumbled down over his shoulders.

  Molochai and Twig stood together by the whirlpool, naked as babes, waiting to see what Zillah would do. Zillah slipped out of his trousers and jacket, pulled his loose black T-shirt over his head. He wore no underwear; none of them did. Slim as a girl, he stood looking at Molochai and Twig, his skin creamy pale, his hair the color of coffee with milk.

  They moved toward one another until their shoulders were almost touching. All three bodies bore the marks of various piercings, tattoos, and scarifications. Living so long in the same unchanging flesh made them restless; they were compelled to change it themselves. Age did its own decorating of human bodies—wrinkles, wattled flesh, random sproutings of coarse yellowish hair. Molochai, Twig, and Zillah were much more pleased with their own methods of decoration: silver rings, intricate patterns in ink or raised flesh.

  Twig had twin strands of barbed wire tattooed on his wrists, twining up both arms, and two long thin pieces of metal that pierced the thin skin of his stomach just below the rib cage on either side, capped with nuggets of bone he had saved to have honed and fitted. Zillah wore silver hoops through his nipples; Molochai’s were pierced with safety pins, from one of which dangled a polished fingerbone. All three had foreskin-rings (because of the circumstances surrounding their births, few of their race were circumcised as babies). They had linked these together to pose for a series of studies by a famous photographer of erotica, Zillah standing on an inlaid-teak stool that brought his ring up to the level of the others’.

  Zillah put his hand on Molochai’s shoulder and pushed gently down. Molochai knelt before him and embraced Zillah’s narrow hips. His mouth brushed soft skin and silky hair. He put out his tongue and felt Zillah shiver. Then Zillah’s hand was under his chin, cupping his face and tilting it up. Molochai looked up into Zillah’s eyes. Green. Glowing, melting green.

  “Molochai,” said Zillah.

  Molochai was lost in the luminescent sea of green; he could not answer.

  “Molochai.”

  He shook himself. “What?”

  Zillah’s face was calm. A small smile played about his lips.

  “Do you want something from room service?”

  Molochai stared up at Zillah for a few moments. Then he hugged Zillah tighter, and it was as if two jagged edges fitted together inside him. He turned and saw Twig standing jealously alone, watching them. They each put out an arm to Twig, and he came to them.

  “I want champagne,” said Molochai. “And I want whipped cream and kidneys and chocolate truffles and baby’s-blood ice cream.”

  They stood together, naked and embracing, the three of them as much a family as anyone could be, anywhere, ever.

  In the foamy waters of the whirlpool Zillah pulled Molochai and Twig to him and dipped his tongue into their mouths, sweet with cake and cream, sharp and sour with champagne. Once more they began their game of spit and skin and passion, of slippery hands and soft bites, and sometimes harder bites. They played the game they knew so well, the game they had played for such a long time, and when they were done Molochai and Twig snuggled against Zillah in the steamy swirling water, their heads on his shoulders, their hands linked across his chest.

  The three closed their eyes and dreamed their warm bloody dreams. For a few hours they could rest, and then it would be time to go out and party again.

  * * *

  When night folded like a deep blue cloak over the city, they roused themselves from their wet languor and began pulling on black shirts, black socks, dirty black sneakers. They favored black clothes because dark red stains would not show on them. Zillah put a tiny silver ankh through his earlobe. The other two wore large dangling crucifixes in their ears.

  Twig, smearing on eyeliner in front of the bathroom mirror, found a raw red crescent on his chest. “You bit me,” he complained to Molochai. “I’m bleeding.”

  Molochai, still half-naked, came closer and licked the blood from Twig’s chest. When Twig’s nipple puckered at the touch of the rough tongue, Molochai snapped at it. “I’m hungry,” he said, and this time there was something in his voice that told them he would not be satisfied with sweets and chocolate.

  When the sun set, Zillah sent the valet to get their van. They drove to Georgetown, taking wrong turns, being stopped by streets that suddenly turned one-way, weaving around and around traffic circles, swaying against each other every time the van navigated a curve. They had drunk more champagne back at the hotel, and by this time they were too blasted to care whether they got lost.

  By persistence and luck they arrived in Georgetown before midnight. The sidewalks swarmed with people: tourists out for a big night, students wearing school sweatshirts, a group of black kids with roller skates and stocking caps spray-painting arcane graffiti on a wall. Molochai pressed his face to the window. “ ‘Fresh,’ ” he read before the van was past.

  Twig licked his lips. “They better be.”

  “Trendies.” Zillah waved his black-nailed hand in an elegant gesture of dismissal. “Trendies, all of them. We’ll find better ones later, after these are home in bed.”

  They parked beside a fire hydrant. Zillah took a satchel full of empty wine bottles from the back of the van and gave them to Twig to carry.

  Molochai looked at the block of shops. A lingerie boutique, a newsstand, a vegetarian café. It might have been a street in any city in America. “There’s no magic in this town,” he complained.

  Zillah touched Molochai’s lips with the tip of a sharp nail. “There’s magic in every bloodstream.”

  Molochai nodded sullenly. He was hungry again. There might be magic in every bloodstream, but the bloodstreams in the French Quarter were tastier.

  It was Twig who found the girl. He had a nose for Indian curry. The window was painted CALCUTTA PALACE in a flowing strange script. Below it a sign said CLOSED, but the door swung open when Twig pushed at it. The inside of the restaurant was decorated like some fantastic far eastern fairy tale: red silk drooping from the ceiling, purple velvet covering the walls, tables lacquered in black and gold.

  Zillah looked around appreciatively, then sensed that Twig had gone quivering and taut beside him. He followed Twig’s eyes and saw a lone dark-skinned girl at the back of the restaurant sweeping the carpet with an electric vacuum. She had not yet heard them over the noise of the machine.

  As Twig watched, the girl raised her arm and pulled her heavy black hair back over one shoulder. The movement wafted a cloud of her scent to him. He could smell the oil of her hair, the sweat of her armpits, the odors of grease and spice and sandalwood that were a part of her being. And he could smell the dusky blood beneath the skin, hot and peppery, as exotic as all India. Her blood would taste of chili and almonds, of cardamom, of rosewater.

  He motioned to the other two, and they slid forward, moving as one creature, fused in this act of killing. The girl turned and flung up her hands, but Twig’s mouth stopped her cry, and they fell upon her. As Zillah grasped her head between his strong hands and twisted her neck to an impossible angle, as Molochai burrowed under her long cotton skirt and bit into his favorite spot, Twig cracked the bones of the girl’s throat between his teeth and tasted spice.

  * * *

  They drove back to the hotel sometime in the hazy zone between very late and very early. Twig’s eyes were glazed; with an effort he focused on the road. Molochai lay with his head in Zillah’s lap nibbling a little sugared cake he had found in the kitchen of the restaurant.

  Zillah’s wine bottles were full now. He had t
opped them off with vodka from the restaurant’s bar. The bar had been well stocked, and he had found a bottle of peppered Stolichnaya. It would blend well with the girl’s spicy blood. This hot red cache would be a treat later on, during the long dry stretch between here and New Orleans.

  They passed a nightclub. Children postured on the sidewalk, waving their spidery hands, tracking the van with their black-smudged eyes. A snatch of sepulchral song floated in their wake. Bauhaus.

  Zillah tilted his head to one side and smiled. “Listen to them—the children of the night,” he said. “What music they make!”

  9

  When Christian turned away from the river, Wallace was there, several feet away, watching him. Wallace had seen him with the boy. Christian’s first emotion was not anger or fear but shame, terrible fiery shame. Wallace had caught him at his most secret, most vulnerable moment, and Christian wanted to sink to the ground and cover himself, to shut his eyes tight, to vanish. He pulled his cloak around him and stared at Wallace, feeling his eyes grow colder, knowing he must not panic.

  The moonlight ravaged Wallace’s face. The hollows beneath his eyes grew deeper, the lines bracketing his mouth more harsh. The silver cross at his throat gleamed, and his hand went to it. “Vampire,” he said, spitting the word out, making it ugly. “Filthy, cursed thing—”

  “You knew,” said Christian. “The story you told me—it was all made up. You didn’t find her diary. You weren’t suddenly seized with a desire to see her after such a long time. You knew.”

  Wallace’s eyes glittered, dark, never leaving Christian’s. “I did.”

  “Then why?” Christian spread his arms in a gesture of bewilderment; the cloak billowed around him, made him seem immensely tall. Wallace, perhaps misunderstanding the gesture, took a step backward. “Why now? If you knew then, why are you following me after fifteen years?”

  “I knew then,” Wallace told him. “After Jessy disappeared, I began going to your bar, watching you, and I knew. I came to believe. And I knew what you had done to my daughter.” He hadn’t answered the question.

  But Jessy wasn’t even dead then, Christian thought, confused. He is wrong. She must have been alive still, living upstairs, gazing out my window all day and pulling me into her body at night—

  “You look very much the proper vampire, Christian,” Wallace went on, and Christian wondered whether he was supposed to take that as a compliment. “But I still could not quite believe. I was unsure. My religion does not acknowledge the supernatural. It considers such matters unholy, and consequently it ignores them. So one night I waited until you closed your bar down, and when you went out, I followed you. I saw you speak to a boy near Jackson Square, a young boy with long hair who wore beads around his neck. I followed the two of you to the river, and here I saw you—I saw you do what you did to the other boy tonight. And I wondered how many other children you had put in the river, and I thought of Jessy’s body sinking out of sight there, in that cold brown water—” Wallace’s voice broke.

  Yes, Jessy, thought Christian. I put Jessy in the river. But that was later, after the baby came. And I didn’t kill her, I wouldn’t have killed her—In an instant he realized who had killed Jessy. Zillah had, with the seduction of his hands and his lips, with his fertile seed. Or so Wallace would see it. Christian imagined himself trying to explain the events of that Mardi Gras to Wallace: He planted his child in her womb, and by the time the baby tore her apart inside, he was far, far away. But that night was so bloody, and oh so green …

  No. Wallace would not understand the drunkenness that comes with blood or the light in the Mardi Gras sky. He would see only the image of Zillah’s hands on Jessy’s fragile body. He would picture Zillah writhing atop Jessy, stifling her screams with his tongue. The blame would be taken away from Christian, and Wallace would no longer want to kill him. He would want Zillah’s blood.

  Zillah, with those languid, graceful hands, with those glowing green eyes, and the rest of that loud happy trio Christian had not seen for fifteen years, though he had looked for them every night of every Mardi Gras when the bright costumes staggered in and the laughter was high and drunken and the liquor flowed in the gutters. The only ones of his kind Christian had seen for so many years, more years than he wanted to remember, and the youngest, wildest, finest ones he had ever known.

  No, Wallace could not be allowed to go after Molochai, Twig, and Zillah. He would never be able to find them—they might be anywhere in the world, anywhere they could find liquor, sweets, and blood—and if by some chance he did find them, they would laugh in his face as they killed him.

  But Christian would not give Wallace even a wisp of a chance. He would deal with Wallace himself, and he would protect his kind. He did not love what he did, but for too long he had been alone in doing it. Wallace’s blood would spill for Molochai’s sticky smile, for the cleverness of Twig’s foxlike face, for Zillah’s luminescent green eyes.

  “All right,” he said. “You knew then. Why did you wait? Why have you come to me now?”

  “I was afraid of you then.”

  Christian nodded and took a step toward Wallace. Wallace didn’t back away this time.

  “I have no reason to fear you anymore,” Wallace shut his eyes, then opened them. “You are a godless thing, and you will die for that. Fifteen years ago I did not have the courage to avenge Jessy, but nothing else matters to me now.” He unfastened the crucifix from his throat and stepped toward Christian, brandishing it at the end of its chain. “Begone from the face of God’s earth, foul creature, thing of night, sucker at Death’s teat—”

  Christian shook his head sadly. He did not laugh, but there was a trace of amused contempt in his eyes. Wallace stopped chanting and lowered his arm. The crucifix swung from his hand, shimmering when the moonlight caught it.

  “You are a fool,” said Christian. “You are a fool, and your myths are wrong. If you touched me with that, it would not burn me. It would not blacken my skin. It would not poison my essence. I have nothing against your Christ. I am sure his blood tasted as sweet as anyone else’s.”

  Christian imagined Wallace waving a crucifix in the faces of Molochai, Twig, and Zillah. Those children, he thought, would laugh this silly old man into his grave.

  “Undead soul,” said Wallace, not quite steadily.

  “No. I am alive. I was born as you were born.” Well, not quite. Christian thought of the mother he had never seen, wondered whether he had left her as torn and bloody as Jessy had been. “I am not the creature of your myths. I did not rise from the grave. I have never been one of your race, Wallace Creech—I am of a different one.”

  Now Christian was smiling, letting the sharp tips of his teeth show; it was an icy smile, masking his lust. Wallace, no matter how ineffective, was a danger, a threat. And that meant Christian should kill him now and let him follow his daughter into the river where their bones might drift together in the intimacy Wallace seemed to long for.

  Still smiling, gazing steadily into the depths of Wallace’s eyes, Christian stepped forward and rested his hands on the old man’s stooped shoulders. Wallace stared back as if hypnotized, but Christian could feel the man’s muscles pulled painfully tight, tense to the point of trembling.

  Christian lowered his head and brushed his lips against Wallace’s throat. And suddenly he found himself wishing that all the ancient human myths were true. He had seen no others of his kind in fifteen years, since Molochai, Twig, and Zillah appeared by some Mardi Gras magic and left again when the sun set on Ash Wednesday. Christian wished he had the power that the legends ascribed to him. He wished his victims could rise again and run with him, others of his kind to share the smell of the streets past midnight, the long hot days with the shades drawn, the taste of the sweet fresh blood. Even Wallace would do, even old tired Wallace with the pain in his eyes. He put his mouth against Wallace’s throat. The skin there was dry, loose; it smelled of age. He bit down and tasted blood for the second time that night.…r />
  But it was bitter, it was foul, and he spat it back against Wallace’s throat and gagged. Christian’s nostrils flared. He had not detected it before, under the stinging mist of whiskey and sorrow, but now it was obvious, strong, and rank. The smell of sickness, deep rotting sickness that rioted through Wallace’s body, as wet and brown as the smell of the river. Some virulent disease, probably a cancer. The taste was corruption in his mouth.

  If that had been all, Christian could have fled or fought. He was very strong, surely stronger than Wallace. But a second later the nausea hit him, worse than the drunken sickness brought on by the Chartreuse, worse than the sharp immediacy of that pain. It knocked him down, and he lay as still as he could, languid with shock, trying not to move for fear of increasing the nausea. He felt his stomach convulsing, and he fought to keep the boy’s blood down. He did not want to relinquish that.

  Through the haze of sickness he was aware of Wallace pulling something from behind his back, something that had been tucked into the waistband of his trousers. The object caught the moon and became a thing of pure light, a slim pistol shining white and silver.

  He saw Wallace taking aim and closed his eyes. Then the night exploded and pain slammed into Christian’s chest. He could not breathe. He felt the hot pellet of lead tunnelling into him, through him. He kept his eyes closed so that he would not have to see the triumph on Wallace’s face.

  His last thought before the pain and the sickness washed his mind away was one of regret: Three hundred and eighty-three years … such a very long time … he should have been beautiful … not this sad, old, tired man … he should have been lovely.

  10

  Nothing hurried through the circle of brilliance made by a streetlight and slipped into the deserted darkness again. He pulled his raincoat around him (O sensuous black silk, as erotic as the touch of someone else’s skin!) and hoisted his heavy backpack on his shoulder.