by Poppy Brite
“I know you only have one inch, stupid, why are you telling me about your dick?”
Nothing’s stomach tightened and his head swam. This was going to make the other times he’d tripped look like children’s games, like dreams of dreams. Thousands of tiny fingers came alive inside him, crawling. He rubbed his hands over his face. His skin felt numb, tight, rubbery. His throat was closing. He breathed deep and with an effort was able to swallow. The spit ran down his throat, syrupy, slicking its way along the passages of his body. He started wondering about something he’d never thought of before: where did spit go when he swallowed? Did it all go to his stomach, and did that mean his stomach was full of spit?
He wanted to stop thinking.
He stared across the table at Molochai and Twig, who appeared to be primping. Twig took out an eyeliner pencil, pried Molochai’s left eye open, and drew a shaky line along the tender edge of the lower lid. Molochai sat through it without a protest. Despite their squabbling, the two seemed to trust each other unquestioningly.
Nothing’s gaze dropped to the table. At some point the others had gotten their food and devoured it; the remains of their meal lay there, mangled. Bits of Twig’s hamburger, fragments of meat and onion stuck to bread stained pink. The ruins of Molochai’s pie, smears of strawberry bleeding into smudges of whipped cream, gory as a roadkill. In the midst of the carnage rose Zillah’s glass, immaculate, free from fingerprints, half full of cold clear water.
Molochai put his fingers into the pie and licked them. He smiled across the table at Nothing. His eyes seemed all pupil, black-ringed and enormous, hectically shiny. There was red goo in the spaces between Molochai’s teeth: pie filling. It reminded Nothing of the bottle hidden under the mattress in the back of the van, still half full. That taste rose again in his mouth. Sharing their weird blood cocktail somehow made him feel closer to them than any drug or kinky sex act could. It made him more a part of their psychedelic nighttime world.
For the blood was the life—
He frowned. Where had that thought come from, out of what acid-swirled corner of his brain? A feathery touch slid up his thigh. Zillah was smiling at him too, a smile like the Mona Lisa’s, if the Mona Lisa had crazy green eyes and was blasted out of her mind on Crucifix acid.
“Are you having fun?” asked Zillah.
“Sure,” said Nothing, and realized that he was. He marvelled at how the world could shift in an instant. A moment ago he’d been getting tied up in mind knots, half-afraid of his new friends. His friends who were more exciting than anyone he had known before, their company more intoxicating because somehow they were like him. They accepted him. This was what he had wished for on nights alone in his room, rubbing the ash of incense between his fingers, drifting among the stars on the ceiling, bleeding from the wrist or from somewhere deep inside. What was there to be afraid of?
They got back in the van, cranked the music up again, and drove. Later in the evening they took another round of Crucifix, and sometime after midnight Nothing was just coming into the thick of his trip. He lay curled up on the mattress, his hands pressed to his eyes, watching the brilliant checkered patterns that swirled in the darkness behind his eyelids. His insides shifted; he thought he felt the ends of his intestines twitching. His mind plummeted, raced, soared. He wanted to raise his head and talk to Zillah, but just then a new design swirled up from the depths of blindness all black and silver and crimson, and he could only lie there and watch it.
“Cool,” said Molochai happily, as if he too could see Nothing’s designs. But Molochai was out of his head. He and Twig had taken two doses of Crucifix each, and they were tripping hard. Molochai might have been talking about the luminous colored stars in the sky or the moth that had just smeared itself stickily across the windshield or the sweet taste in his mouth.
Twig snorted. “There’s no room for another hitchhiker. Anyway, we’ve already got one.”
“I want that one too,” said Molochai, enraptured. “His hair was full of flowers.”
“We don’t know quite what we’ve got, do we?” Zillah mused. “This would be a good chance to find out. If not—then more for us.”
Nothing didn’t know what they were talking about, but he felt the van lurch to a stop. Zillah’s warm breath touched Nothing’s ear. “Wake up. We have a surprise for you. We’re taking on a passenger.”
Nothing looked up. Molochai was opening the side door. The hitchhiker climbed in, staring at the colored stickers, the graffiti, the dark stains all over the walls and the mattress, as scared and eager as Nothing must have looked yesterday. He was a boy of thirteen or fourteen, a boy too small and thin for his years, a pale child whose feathery white-blond hair hung in his eyes, escaping in wisps from a blue bandanna. As Nothing watched, the boy lifted a delicate hand and took a long drag on his cigarette. His clove cigarette. His mouth would taste of ash and spice, and surely of his tears, as it used to. If it was him … if it was impossibly, magically him.
“Laine?” said Nothing.
“Omigod,” breathed the boy, and then they were hugging each other fiercely. Nothing was brushing Laine’s hair from his eyes, forgetting how Laine had annoyed him, how he had risen above the futility of his friends’ lives, how he had felt such scorn for their complacent desperation. He had not thought he was homesick, but now seeing Laine was almost like being back in his room. The damp salty taste of Laine’s mouth made him remember the stars on his ceiling. Tears. Laine’s mouth always tasted of tears.
“I found you,” Laine said. “I can’t believe I found you. I knew I would.”
“What happened to you?”
“I left the day after you did. When we dropped you off at the bus station, I realized you were the only thing in my life that wasn’t bullshit. You were the only one of that whole crowd I ever cared about. I had to get out of there too. I didn’t know if I’d ever find you, but I had to try.” Laine kissed him again, timidly touching Nothing’s lips with the wet tip of his tongue.
Nothing looked up. The other three were watching him avidly. Twig looked on with a mild predatory interest. Molochai’s mouth hung open; his teeth glistened with spit, and his cheeks were flushed pink. He looked almost healthy. But Zillah … Nothing tried to disentangle himself from Laine. Zillah was sitting up very straight, his black-nailed hands clenched on his knees, his eyes full of that cold green fire again.
“He’s my friend,” Nothing managed to say. “From back home.”
“How nice,” said Zillah; his voice was like a bonbon of creamy white chocolate filled with some green corrosive poison. The fire in his eyes snapped, spat. It seemed about to burn a line through the air to Nothing, crisp Nothing’s eyes with its luminescence.
“He’s cool,” said Nothing without much conviction. “Maybe he could ride with us.” Surely Zillah wouldn’t make Twig stop the van and put Laine out in the chill September night just because Nothing knew him from back home. But worse than that—what if Zillah put them both out? What if they put him out on some glittering 2:00 A.M. stretch of nowhere, tripping his brains out, with only Laine’s cold little hand to hold?
He wouldn’t be able to stand looking at Laine’s face again, the sulky mouth and the eyes shadowed with wispy white-blond hair, not if Laine lost him his new family. Not if he was banished from this drugged dreamland of wine and song, where the graffiti writhed on the ceiling and the stars sped by all night long. Not if he was banished from Zillah’s arms, from the half-painful sorcery of Zillah’s lips. From the only place where he had ever felt truly accepted.
In an instant he made the choice that would fashion the rest of his life. Hating himself, but feeling something dark and fathomless begin to open within him, he slid out of Laine’s embrace and pushed him away.
“Nothing? What’s going on?” Laine stared around at the circle of eyes: Molochai’s and Twig’s tripped-out and hungry, Zillah’s still spitting green fire. He tried to crawl back across the mattress to Nothing, but Zillah hooked a finger through the string of bead
s around Laine’s neck and pulled back hard. Laine made a low choking sound as the beads tightened across his throat. Then the strand snapped, and bits of sparkling bright plastic were everywhere—rattling under the mattress, landing in the folds of Nothing’s raincoat, catching the moonlight and all the colored glints from the dashboard. Molochai grabbed at them as if they were candy, put one in his mouth.
Then Molochai and Twig were on either side of Laine, flanking him, pushing him down onto the stained mattress. Their hands encircled Laine’s arms just above the elbow. Their sharp fingers dug into the soft meat there.
Laine’s eyes, terrified but still trusting, found Nothing’s. “Make them stop,” he pleaded. “Don’t let them hurt me.”
Zillah grabbed Laine’s kicking feet and forced them to the mattress with one hand. Zillah’s grip seemed to span both of Laine’s ankles; on the back of the hand, veins stood out darkly purple. Laine was wearing pink hightop sneakers with laces of the kind that had been popular with trendy girls a couple of years ago, white patterned with small rainbow figures. Laine’s seemed to be striped, but looking closely, Nothing made out tiny letters. BULLSHITBULLSHITBULLSHIT, said Laine’s shoelaces.
Laine bucked on the mattress. His eyes never left Nothing’s. They had an accusing look now, and Nothing felt a flash of anger. I didn’t ask you to follow me, he thought, I didn’t tell them to hurt you. And he didn’t think they would hurt Laine, not really. Not yet. But why did Zillah look so expectant and yet so scornful? Why was Molochai drooling out of the corners of his mouth?
“He looks sweet,” said Molochai. “You’ll share, won’t you?”
“You can use this if you like.” Zillah held up a little pearl-handled straight razor, a lethal-looking thing he had produced from his pocket or some fold of the mattress. “But you really should do it with your teeth. That’s the best way. The most … intimate.”
Laine made a small sound deep in his throat, something between a laugh and a moan.
He’s talking about it like it was a drug, Nothing thought. Like he had some hash and he was talking about whether he should smoke it in a pipe or chop it up and roll it in a joint … Then, with a clarity that nauseated him, he realized just what Zillah was talking about. It all came together then, with no jagged edges and no loose threads. It all meshed like the strands of a rich and crimson tapestry, the time he had spent with these three, the eternity that had comprised a day and a half on the road. Their sharpened teeth, the bite marks Zillah left all over him. The blood in the wine bottle, which he had thought an exotic, delicious affectation.
It was not an affectation. It was their life.
For the blood was the life …
They were vampires. The cynical thought that they might be just a bunch of blood-drinking psychopaths never crossed Nothing’s mind. He had always believed implicitly in things supernatural, things beyond the ken of the world he woke to every day. He believed in them because they had to be there; otherwise there was no hope for him, because he had always known he could not live his whole life in the real world. He had had faith that someday he would find them … or they would find him. And now they had. They had seemed to recognize him from the first, and was that not sign enough?
Suddenly Laine cried out. But it was not a sound of mortal pain. Twig had grabbed Laine’s chin and forced his head back, and Zillah’s razor had flashed out to nick the exposed throat. Zillah dipped his finger in the blood and rubbed it over Nothing’s lips, painting his mouth, slicking it with Laine’s blood.
Nothing’s head had begun to clear a little, but the taste of the blood sent his brain swirling back down into acid-madness. Laine was sobbing, long hopeless sounds that seemed wrenched out of his guts. Molochai and Twig sat up straight, their eyes flickering from Zillah’s bloody finger to Nothing’s bloody mouth to Laine’s bloody throat. The blood glistened black in the moonlight.
Tears coursed down Laine’s face, silver in the night, dampening the hair at his temples. Nothing knew how they would taste, mild and salty like Laine’s mouth. But now he found himself wondering how they would taste mingled with Laine’s blood. He saw himself licking a sheet of wetness off Laine’s cheeks, a sheet of blood streaked through with crystal tears.
That was when he realized that he could do it. He could tear Laine’s pulse open and drink from it. Not because Zillah wanted him to—not even that—but because he wanted to. Somewhere in his mind was the knowledge that they would probably kill him along with Laine if he refused, but that hardly mattered anymore. The fresh blood had given him a hunger of his own.
“I’ll help you,” Nothing told Laine. “Don’t be scared.” He lay down beside Laine, spread himself on top of Laine. His arms stretched along the length of Laine’s arms, up to Laine’s wrists, which Molochai and Twig still held pinned. His hips met Laine’s hips, his legs locked with Laine’s legs. Laine’s body was shaking violently. It vibrated through Nothing, turned him electric. Faintly he was aware of music. Someone had put a tape on. Ziggy Stardust.
He kissed Laine deeply. His mouth moved down to Laine’s throat, to his pulse. He thought of the biker, Spooky. He thought of cutting his own wrist and suckling from it, thought of how unsatisfying that had been.
“Please,” Laine sobbed, and some small dim part of Nothing, some part untouched by acid or the night, realized what he was about to do. Laine had once held Nothing’s head over the toilet at a party, after too many screwdrivers. Laine had whispered meaningless words of comfort and kissed the sicksweat away from Nothing’s face. Laine had been his friend, in another life.
Nothing twisted to look at Zillah. Zillah smiled a dark smile and said, “Come and be one of us,” and Nothing knew he was being told to make his choice. Come and be one of us—or suffer the consequences of your refusal: die, or be alone, and never drink from the bottle of life again. For the blood was the life—
So he opened his mouth as wide as it would go and bit into the soft flesh of Laine’s throat. Zillah had marked the spot right over the pulse, and there was no cartilage or bone in his way. But the skin was hard to tear; his teeth would not go all the way through it. He had thought they would sink smoothly in, like needles, like fangs. Instead it was like trying to chew through tough raw steak. He ground his teeth into the skin and pulled at it and felt it begin to come away in a wet chunk, peeling away from the great vein. Then he felt the vein itself throbbing against his lips. What am I doing, that last sane part of his mind screamed, o god what am I doing WHAT AM I DOING, and it kept screaming even as his teeth tore out Laine’s jugular.
The torrent of blood washed over Nothing’s face and bubbled into his mouth. It was as different from his previous small tastes as whiskey from water. This was the taste of life, its very essence. More than that—he was actually dunking a life, swallowing it whole. He felt himself borne up by the mindless, agonized convulsions of the thin body beneath him and the churning guitar of the spiders from Mars.
The taste of blood meant the end of aloneness.
As Laine’s movements became weaker, the others fell upon him. Molochai and Twig nestled into the crooks of Laine’s elbows; there was the sound of their mouths churning, then a long wet sound like the last drops of soda being sucked from a glass. Zillah had pulled Laine’s pants off and buried his face in Laine’s crotch. He fed with delicate licks instead of noisy sucking, but when he looked up at Nothing, his smile was red, and a pulpy shred of flesh was caught in the corner of his mouth.
Soon Laine no longer struggled, but he was still alive. A long continuous sound came from his open throat, a keening beyond pain or hope. He had come away from home because Nothing had; he had followed Nothing, trusting him. But Laine should have learned by now that when you have too much faith in something, it is bound to hurt you. Too much faith in anything will suck you dry. In this way, all the world is a vampire.
Nothing held Laine close and drank his life, lost in the slowing pulse, in the taste of blood and salt. He never realized that most of the tears
he tasted were his own.
18
Heavy rains came to Missing Mile during the night and turned the weather cold, turned the sky leaden. The last sprays of goldenrod withered and died under a coat of rime, and people shovelled last year’s ash from their fireplaces. It would stay cold now.
Sometime in the dull gray afternoon, somnolent and weary of silence, Ghost put down the map he was drawing with crayons and said, “I’m gonna bike to town. I want some wine.”
Steve looked up from his book. “Shit, Ghost, it’s freezing. I have to go to work in half an hour. I’ll drive you in.”
“I don’t need a ride. I’m dressed warm.” Ghost pulled his drab layers of clothing around him. “I like the wind in my eyes.”
“Suit yourself.” Steve unfolded himself from the couch and pushed the straw hat more firmly down over Ghost’s head. “Call me if you get icicles on your balls. I’ll come pick you up.”
As Ghost rode, the wind sluiced over his face, froze the winter-tears in his eyelashes, whistled through the spokes of his bicycle wheels like a lonely song. His hair whipped across his face, pale and cold.
The grocery store was painfully bright after the dark day. Ghost wandered among the shelves, studied candy bars and magazines, finally chose a bottle of scuppernong wine. It took most of the change in his pocket—Ghost hated to carry cash, hated buying things at all—but the wine was forty proof, good and high. Wino wine, the kind he always drank, even though Steve ragged him to hell and back for it.
He put the bottle in his saddlebag and walked his bike down Firehouse Street, looking into dusty shop windows, stepping over the cracks in the sidewalk. Outside the hardware store he stopped to talk to the old men who congregated there, playing checkers with orange and grape Nehi bottle caps and a beat-up checkerboard. The men were as dry and tough as hard nuts and would not move their gatherings inside until snow flew. The grape team was winning today.
Ghost greeted the old men by name. “Hey, Mr. Galvin, Mr. Berry, Mr. Joe.”