Lost Souls

by Poppy Brite

  His passage was hidden by luxuriant hedges and the shadows they cast on verdant lawns, by sleek cars parked at the curb. Even if his parents missed him now, they’d never be able to find him. He had a sudden vision of them cruising the dark streets in his mother’s Volvo, calling his name, waving a bottle of good whiskey to lure him home.

  He was forcing himself to be absolutely silent, making a game of it so that he would not have to think too hard about what he had left behind. His room and all the things in it. Most of his tapes, most of his books, all his records and old toys and the stars on his ceiling. He thought of the stars still glowing there, lonely pinpoints of light above his empty bed, and he wondered if he would ever again sleep beneath a ceiling of painted yellow stars. Tears pressed against the backs of his eyes. He chewed his lower lip, hugged himself tight, and waited for the wave of loneliness to subside. Not even two blocks away and already homesick. This time tomorrow, alone on some Greyhound in the night, he might be a real mess.

  He unzipped his backpack and felt around inside. He had brought only the bare essentials: his collection of Dylan Thomas’s poems, his notebook, the note stolen from his mother’s drawer that would tell his family who he was when he found them, his Walkman, and as many tapes as he had been able to cram in. He would honor the backpack well; it would never have to lug schoolbooks again.

  His fingers found the Walkman and the edge of a cassette tape. He didn’t care what he listened to. He just wanted to hear something, something to carry him away, to blot out his thoughts for a while. He knew he didn’t really have to watch for his parents. They’d never miss him. He had heard them come in sometime after ten, boozed up on expensive wine and stuffed with French food, arguing about him. “You want him to follow any asinine whim that catches his fancy,” Father had said, and Mother replied, “He has to find himself,” but she didn’t sound as serene as usual. They’d gone into their bedroom and shut the door. Nothing lay in bed and thought about going south where he could follow his whims, asinine or not. Where no one would ever have to argue about him again.

  He put on the Lost Souls? cassette. The music was soft and wailing, the singer’s voice pulling him down south, down along the ways the trains travelled, down through the green land. Nothing wondered whether these musicians might be his family, his long-lost brothers. He thought again of the eerie-sounding town where they lived. Maybe he would go there.

  What the hell, he decided, and lit a cigarette. Its red firefly glow would pick him out of the darkness if anyone was looking for him. But no one was. He knew that. Even if his parents missed him, they would figure he’d sneaked out to party with his friends. We’ll cancel his allowance for a week, they’d say, and then they’d roll over and sleep their dreamless sleep. When he didn’t come home the next day, they would call the police and set up a halfhearted search for him, but perhaps they would be secretly relieved. Now they could live their comfortable lives with no strange son to look at them and silently judge them. Now they need no longer wonder what they had raised, why their child had disappointed them so, whether they might have been happier if he had not been left on their doorstep that cold morning. Now he was on the road. He would smoke Lucky Strikes and wander, and he would find his home. He was on his way already.

  Skittle’s was almost empty when Nothing walked in. The cuffs of his jeans were wet with night-dew. The fresh cut on his wrist throbbed in time with his heartbeat. He saw Jack in a corner booth with four other kids, two boys and two girls. One of the boys was Laine. The table was littered with empty wax cups and half-eaten pizza, the ashtray choked with butts.

  Nothing looked at Jack. “Can you still drive me to Columbia?”

  “I said I would, dude. Since when do I go back on my word? I need the five dollars if you have it.” Nothing handed him a bill, and Jack tucked it into his pack of Marlboros.

  “I have to be at the bus station by one,” Nothing said pointedly. “The bus leaves then,”

  Jack heaved a great sigh. “Okay. Okay. Let’s peel out.” He stood up, the chains on his boots jangling.

  The others stood too. Laine slipped out of the booth and pressed up close to Nothing. His breath, sweet with cloves, tickled Nothing’s ear. “Where are you gonna go?”

  “I don’t know. South.”

  “How come you didn’t tell me?”

  “I didn’t know until tonight.”

  Laine took Nothing’s hand between both of his, twined his fingers into Nothing’s. “You should’ve called me. I would have gone with you. I hate it here too.”

  Nothing looked at Laine. Laine’s lips were smeared with black lipstick; his feathery white-blond hair hid his eyes. Nothing wanted to brush the hair away, but he couldn’t. He slid his hand out of Laine’s and shoved it into the pocket of his jeans. “I thought you were going out with Julie,” he said.

  Laine shrugged, an unconcerned, eloquent gesture. “We broke up. She’s such a damn poser.”

  “She’s all right,” said Nothing. “She gave me her Lost Souls? tape.”

  “Yeah, well, she never listened to it anyway. She doesn’t listen to anything but English fashion bands.” Laine sneered. Nothing wondered whether Julie had dumped Laine this afternoon, or possibly even earlier tonight. The wounds seemed fresh.

  If Laine wanted Nothing to lick them, though, he was out of luck. Laine wasn’t getting an invitation to go south with him. No way. Nothing was leaving all this behind tonight—the school, the parents, and this goddamn pizza joint where the kids sat and smoked and talked about how great their lives would be if only they lived anywhere but here.

  Jack and the others were heading for the parking lot. Laine grabbed Nothing’s hand and pulled him along. “You don’t want to get left, do you? You’re getting the hell out of here!” Laine’s voice was exalted, envious.

  The ride to Columbia seemed to take no time at all. Guardrails, underpasses, dead orange sodium lights flashed past at a great speed. Skinny Puppy played on Jack’s tape deck, so loud that the notes were mangled beyond recognition. Someone passed around a flask of cheap vodka, and Jack drank most of it in one long gurgling swallow—like the Irishman chauffeur in a story Nothing had read, Jack could not drive unless he was blind drunk.

  Nothing was squeezed in the backseat between Laine and a diminutive purple-haired girl who called herself Sioux. Sioux pulled a little knife from her boot and passed it over to Laine. “See what Veronica traded me for that Cramps poster? It’s fucking sharp!”

  Laine fingered the tip of the knife and yelped as the blade pierced his skin. “Seriously! That hurt.”

  A spot of blood glistened on Laine’s fingertip, wet and black in the orange light of the highway. Nothing bent and took Laine’s finger into his mouth and licked the blood away. Laine lay back smiling. Nothing touched his tongue to the spot, questing for more, but Laine slid his other hand under Nothing’s chin, tilted Nothing’s face up, and kissed him deeply, wetly, hugging him close.

  “I’ll miss you,” said Laine into Nothing’s mouth, and pushed Nothing against the back of the seat and kissed him again.

  Then Sioux leaned over and licked Nothing’s throat, and Laine’s hands were in his hair and Sioux’s hands were on his thighs, sliding up under his shirt. Nothing closed his eyes and smiled into the darkness. His friends had disappointed him in every other way, but they certainly knew how to give a good send-off.

  The others waited at the bus station with him until Jack put a nickel in the gum machine and kicked it over when no gum came out. Then the old man who sold tickets made them all leave, and Nothing sat alone in the dark waiting room, looking at the frosted glass of the ticket window, the dingy scrolled ceiling high above, the shiny pink bald spot on the back of the old man’s head and the way his ivory-colored hair straggled over the buckle of his dirty visor.

  Nothing took out his Dylan Thomas book, but there was no light to read by. He looked at his hands in his lap. Two weeks ago he’d put on some of Laine’s black nail polish, but most o
f it was gone now. He examined the chips and flecks that were left. They looked like shapes on a map, like tiny states. Maybe like the places he was going. He cupped his hands over his face. They were scented with vodka and smoke, with Laine and Sioux. He felt his eyes closing.

  The old man’s bawling voice woke him a few minutes later. “Coach boarding for Silver Spring, Fairfax, Wash’ton DC, Fredericksburg …” Nothing felt for his backpack and stood up. Now he could get started.

  The bus smelled of cigarettes and prickly upholstery and some heavy sweet disinfectant. Nothing decided he liked the odor. A few heads lifted to stare blearily at him, then drooped back against the dark windows. He took a seat in the back and lit a cigarette. The bus shuddered, heaved a sigh, and pulled away from the station.

  Nothing smiled at himself in the window. He was on his way. His journey had begun. He was already a little closer to home.

  11

  Several hours after Nothing climbed the steps of a Greyhound bus in Maryland, Christian opened his eyes and saw dawn bleeding palely across the New Orleans sky. At first he could not remember why he was lying on the riverbank, why his clothes were wet with mist and his limbs so stiff and cold. He could not think why it seemed strange to see another dawn, why he had never expected to open his eyes again.

  Then the whole night came rushing back, and he gave an involuntary shudder and let the relief and the fury wash over him. Relief because he had not wanted to die at the hands of one like Wallace, so clumsy and drained of passion; fury because Wallace should not have been able to defeat him, Wallace with his tired, ancient eyes. Christian’s belly should be warm and heavy with Wallace’s blood now; Wallace should be drifting away along the river bottom, the water filling his eyes, the creatures of the mud beginning to nibble at his hands.

  Christian sat up and examined himself. There was a scorched hole in the fine black cloth of his shirt, its edges perfectly round. He undid the top two buttons. The bullet had shattered the third one. In the center of his chest was a shiny pink scar, the skin pulled tight and slightly rippled. There would be no matching scar on his back; Wallace’s bullet was still in him, and there it would stay. It was not the first.

  He had bled only a little. There was a crust of dried blood on his skin, ringing the scar, and the ground where he had lain all night was stained dark red. But the spot was small, hardly worth noticing. The fool, he thought with a touch of incredulity. He had to destroy my brain or my heart, and he had his chance at either one, and the old fool missed my heart by an inch. With an intensity that he had not thought himself still capable of, Christian wished that Molochai, Twig, and Zillah had been there. They would have taken Wallace’s silver cross away, thrown it in the river, and ripped Wallace’s throat out, joking all the while.

  But the fury faded even as he recognized it, and Christian sat quietly in the breaking light for several minutes, resting his head on his drawn-up knees, unable to identify his new emotion. As he pushed himself to his feet and gathered his cloak around him, he realized what this was, his reaction to waking healed and alive and still alone. It was disappointment.

  Last night’s trash lay tranquil in the gutter as he made his way home. The toe of his boot connected with a plastic Hurricane glass and sent it skittering across the pavement. The noise was too loud in this early-morning calm. Christian caught the odor of the sticky drops left in the bottom of the glass: rum and passion fruit gone sour, a rancid pink smell. The glass rolled into the arch of a courtyard where green and golden light was beginning to filter down through mimosa branches. The smell of the blossoms reached him, rosy-delicate, clear as the smell of water.

  The Quarter was nearly quiet. Christian trailed his hand along the walls, along wrought-iron gates between high ornate pillars of brick and stone, along the doors and windows of the dark shops, the sleeping bars. He passed an all-night diner and caught a stew of breakfast odors: the savory, greasy smell of sausage and eggs and coffee for those on their way to early-morning jobs, hot fried oysters and the sliced ham and vinegar tang of po-boys for those who had been out drinking all night, who would soon head back to cheap hotel rooms and drab boardinghouses for sodden daytime slumber. He felt his stomach shift, last night’s nausea raise its head, roll over, and settle back into uneasy sleep.

  The sky was brightening more quickly now. As he turned east from Bienville onto Chartres, the nascent sunlight caught him full in the face. Again came pain that burned through his eyes and seared his brain. Christian flung up his arm and sagged back against the wall. The bricks were rough and cool. He pressed his face to them, resting for a moment. His eyes felt scorched. When he had to venture out into sunlight, he always wore dark glasses, a wide-brimmed black hat, gloves, and dark loose clothing that he could huddle into. This morning he had only the cloak to pull around him. Already he was beginning to be blinded by the new day, and he was so very tired. The sidewalk seemed to stretch endlessly before him, shimmering and baking in the sunlight.

  Surely his bar was just ahead. He groped along the wall. He had to rely on his sense of smell, but the mélange of odors confused him; he could not tell where he was. Was the bar in this block, or the next? He couldn’t have crossed Conti yet. Idiot, he told himself. How long have you lived here? How many nights have you walked this street? You should carry a map of scents in your head, in your very being.…

  He forced himself to concentrate on separating the smells and identifying them. Here was the slimy sea-smell of the trashcans behind an oyster bar. Here was a sewer smell, brown and gassy. Here was the leather trade shop, black tanned hides and chrome and the dizzying chemical bite of butyl nitrate, and that meant his bar was only a few doors down.

  He felt his way to it and let himself in. There was a separate street entrance that led straight up to the rooms, but Christian usually came in through the bar because that way he knew he would meet no one on the stairs. For a long time he stood in the lightening gloom of the bar, breathing the dark dust, the ghosts of liquor and beer and all the drinkers who had been here. If he breathed in deeply enough, he thought he could still catch the scent of Wallace Creech, the dry sick smell.

  Wallace. Poor Wallace, who thought he had killed his nemesis, his daughter’s supernatural defiler. What would he do when he discovered otherwise?

  Christian closed his eyes. He would not think about Wallace now, would not plan. He looked around the room, saw the dark wood of the bar, the bottles gleaming softly on their shelves, the colored light filtering through the unbroken stained-glass window. In here the light could not hurt him.

  But his eyes were sore, exhausted. He climbed the stairs to his room and burrowed into bed, into his own comforting, familiar smell. Cool dry skin and ancient spice and a hint of something darker, something thick and garnet-colored and faintly rotten. The smell from deep inside him, where the blood never quite washed clean. Borne away on the river of it, he slept.

  When he awoke, the light seeping around the edges of the window shade was diffuse, milky, no longer bright and searing. Outside on the street, twilight must be drawing nigh. The streetlamps would blink on soon, softly illuminating each corner through opaque glass panes, and all the children of the French Quarter would come out to play.

  Christian lay flat on his back, tangled in sheets that were not so very much paler than his skin. He pulled tendrils of his hair over his shoulder and twisted them as he daydreamed, and he stared at the delicate brown and cream pattern of water marks that had spread across the ceiling over the years, almost too dim to see in this fading light. He was not planning, not worrying, not even truly thinking. He was only waiting for full night to come, for he knew it was time to leave again.

  This had happened so many times before. He might live in a place for five years or fifty before anyone became suspicious of him. But someone always became suspicious, and he always moved on. It was easier than trying to hide from them; it made him less heartsick than fighting them. When he was young he had fought them, and he had never lost.
But he always had to kill so many. Eventually he realized that when he was not killing for lust and hunger, he hated it. Breaking the fragile span of their forty or fifty or eighty years made him feel vicious and cruel. He could outlast them; he could return long after they were dust and bones.

  And it was most important to remain secretive, to remain a little afraid. For even if he killed them all, tore their throats out one by one, there were always more. This was the one thing he knew Molochai, Twig, and even Zillah would never recognize: no matter how invulnerable they thought they might be, their race was few, and the others were many.

  Once he had been found out, they would rain down upon him. They would scream for his blood in return for the blood he had taken, and they would have it no matter what the cost.

  Wallace might not be so dangerous. Not by himself. He was old and alone; perhaps he would have no friends to tell. But Wallace had God, and the godly. He belonged to a church. Christian knew the eagerness of the religious to believe in evil and their lust to crush it. To do something tangible in return for the intangible reward they spent their lives awaiting. Wallace by himself might not be so dangerous, but his faith could be deadly.

  And so it was time to leave again. It was easier than being on his guard all the time, easier than slapping a hundred crucifixes out of a hundred hands, easier than ripping into a hundred terrified faces. Let Wallace die believing he had avenged his daughter.

  Christian packed a very small bag. There was little to pack; for a long time now possessions had seemed fleeting and cumbersome, and his room was almost bare. He brought his day clothes, his hat and gloves and glasses, and he brought the money he had saved from the bar. He kept it in a box under the bed, but there wasn’t very much of it. No one else would have been able to afford the rent and the upkeep—the bar was so far down Chartres, and no one ever came in until ten—but Christian had none of the expenses of a usual human life. He did not need food; he did not go out drinking. His enjoyments were more exotic and carried a potentially higher price. This money he would spend along the way, for gasoline. He could get more money when he needed it; there was always work for a good bartender. With a glimmer of hope, he put three bottles of Chartreuse in his bag. There was no telling whom he might meet on the road.