Lost Souls

by Poppy Brite

  In the center of the open area a girl lay supine on a low marble slab. Bunches of dried long-stemmed roses were arranged around the slab, crimson gone to black, white to ivory, yellow and pink to dusty echoes of themselves. The girl’s long red-gold hair hung down over the edge of the slab, and some of the roses had become ensnarled in it. She was not visibly breathing, but Ghost felt a weak tremor of life as he approached.

  Then the girl raised her head, and Ghost saw what he had known all along. It was Ann. And she was sick.

  “Ghost.” Her red-rimmed eyes tried to bring him into focus. “What are you doing here?”

  “Did you sleep out here all night?”

  She thought about it, then nodded slowly. “Nowhere else to go. I don’t have any money, and … I didn’t find …” She coughed, spat out a mouthful of phlegm. It glistened faintly iridescent against all the whiteness. Ghost heard the breath rasping in her chest.

  “What are you doing here?” Ann asked again. “Do you know where they are? Where Zillah’s staying?”

  Ghost swallowed. He wasn’t sure he could do this. He hadn’t counted on Ann being sick; it was too easy, she had no chance of resisting. But the fact that she had asked for Zillah instead of Steve—that helped. As did the emptiness he saw when he met her eyes.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know where they are. I can take you to him.”

  He found the path that led to the gate on his first try.

  “What’s that?” asked Ann. She was staring Wearily at the altar in the back room of Arkady’s shop. The shop was dark and empty, but Arkady had left the door unlocked.

  Ghost fumbled the velvet curtain back and ushered her ahead of him. “Careful on the stairs,” he said. “It’s dark up there.”

  Ann stared up into the blackness, then slowly began to climb. Up one flight, around the bend, up another flight to the wavering rectangle of light that was the door. Ann went through it, took two unsteady steps into the hall. “Zillah?” she said.

  And Steve stepped out from behind the door and plastered a wet cloth over her face. They couldn’t imagine why Arkady kept a bottle of ether in his back room, but he had said it would work.

  Ghost saw Steve’s eyes clench shut as Ann struggled against the sick-smelling cloth. When she went limp in his arms, Steve’s face slackened too. For a moment he looked as if he would collapse with her. But he held Ann upright and steadied her drooping head against his shoulder, then slid his other arm under her knees, cradling her.

  Ghost couldn’t remember the last time he had seen Steve hold Ann so tenderly.

  Arkady pulled his fingers out of Ann’s mouth and wiped them on her gray sweatshirt. He patted her cheek, then pushed her limp jaw shut. “Excellent,” he muttered.

  Ghost leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. Beside him, Steve shifted, crossed and uncrossed his long legs. “So what do we do now?”

  “Wait,” Arkady told him. “It is all you can do.”

  “Wait!” Steve spat out the word. He hauled himself up and began to pace, the heels of his battered boots clocking against the floor, his hands clawing at his hair. “I can’t wait. I’ll go crazy.”

  Ghost stood, steadying himself against the wall. He realized neither of them had eaten all day. “Look. Why don’t we go out for a while? Over to Bourbon Street or—”

  Arkady clapped his hands. The sudden sharp sound brought all movement in the room to an end: Steve stopped pacing; Ghost shut his mouth without finishing his sentence; even the dust seemed to stop sifting down. Arkady glanced at the window. Twilight had begun to filter through the glass, sending long gray fingers of shadow into the room. Below, on the street corners, Ghost could see lamps lighting one by one, like milky yellow fireflies.

  “I know just the thing,” said Arkady. “I will care for the girl. I will watch over her. You’d only get in the way.” There was no question which of them he meant, but for once Steve didn’t snarl. “I’ve told you about Ashley’s friends, the ones in the other guest room. They are musicians, and they will be performing tonight at a club on Rue Decatur. The club serves the strongest drinks in all the Vieux Carré, and when you come back, everything will be over. The child will be dead, and you can take your Ann home again.”

  Uh-uh, thought Ghost. His brain felt edged with hysteria; he smelled strawberry incense, cheap wine, clove cigarettes. He closed his eyes. Behind his lids he saw a closet door swinging slowly open, saw a silken sleeve reaching out for him, heard a voice whispering, Easy, Ghost … easy … He thought, No way. I don’t want to see any band that came out of that closet. We’ll find a two-dollar strip show on Bourbon Street, we’ll go to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, we’ll do anything but see poor dead Ashley Raventon’s lovers playing at some club on Decatur Street.

  But when Ghost opened his eyes again, Steve was looking morbidly interested. He had perked up at the mention of the strongest drinks in all the Vieux Carré. “That sounds pretty good,” he said. “I’d like to check out the club scene here. Sure sounds better than sitting around waiting.” He turned to Ghost. “You want to?”

  It would make Steve happy, or at least take his mind off Ann, or at least give him an excuse to get blind drunk. What could happen in a club? Ashley’s lovers couldn’t fly off the stage at Ghost, flapping their silks, whispering easy.… He and Steve would be safe in the crowd.

  “Okay by me,” he said, hoping he sounded surer than he felt.

  “Fine then,” said Arkady. As he turned to leave the room, he flapped his hand toward the foot of the bed. A tangle of cotton bandages trailed onto the floor. “You’ll want to wrap her up,” Arkady told Steve. “Tightly enough to keep some of the blood in, but loose enough to let out the … matter.”

  Steve winced. Arkady made his exit, white robes swirling behind him.

  Ghost stood there for a moment, gripping Steve’s shoulder. Then he followed Arkady out of the room and shut the door, and Steve was alone with Ann.

  At first she only drifted.

  Her lungs felt stuffed with cotton, and there was an acrid chemical burn in the back of her throat. She was too tired to open her eyes: her eyelids were weighted with sand. She let herself slip back into sleep, and she drifted. The backs of her knees and the back of her neck turned to warm water. Her muscles melted from her bones. Soon she began to see pictures.

  They were too vivid to be dreams. Her dreams had always been in black and white, as precise and disjointed as Fellini films. The pictures she saw now were in virulent color. For a time she struggled against them, trying to wake up; then she gave in, because the pictures swelled in her brain and made her head hurt when she struggled.

  She saw her father’s fragile-boned face, weirdly phosphorescent in the gloom of the living room back home. Newspapers were strewn in disarray around his feet, and an empty coffee mug sat on the arm of his chair near his outstretched hand. She tried to call his name, but if he heard her, he made no response.

  She saw a jack-o’-lantern lit orange against a black night, bobbing as if some shadow-wraith carried it. The glowing grin split open, and a great frothy rose blossomed out, withering and rotting in the space of a few seconds.

  She saw a girl’s face with dark eyes half-hidden by a curtain of hair; then the girl’s eyes rolled up white and silver, and the girl’s mouth opened impossibly wide, and a gout of blood and whiskey tumbled down her chin.

  She saw a jumble of streets laid out like a glowing map. Neon danced and rippled: purple, green, gold. In the streets, crowds of thin children in black frolicked. They wore studded belts and wristlets, skull-and-crossbone earrings, hair dyed every color, teased and twisted into every conceivable style. She saw pale faces slashed across with scarlet lipstick, with great smudges of eyeliner. Stalking among the children, everywhere, were corny silent-film vampires. They pulled black silk capes up over their noses, drew back in mock horror at crucifixes dangling from multipierced earlobes. Beside the children in their gaudy mourning, the vampires were old-fashio
ned and hokey—except that all of them had green eyes that glowed and snapped like strange acid fire.

  As the final image dwindled into darkness, Ann realized that someone was touching her. Fumbling with the button of her skirt, sliding her tights down over her hips. She would know that touch anywhere, would know it even if she hadn’t felt it in ten years: half-rough but trying to be gentle, half-desperate but trying to be tender.

  Steve. At first she wanted to push his hands away, but she could not muster the will to move, so she lay quietly and let him ease her panties down. Those panties are really skanky, she thought. Then she thought, Who cares, it’s only Steve, he’s smelled me before. Then some distant part of her mind realized what was happening and shrieked, Steve!

  He would not let himself part her legs to look. He knew the warm saddle between her thighs too well, knew its perfumed scent and its tangy taste, knew just how to slide into its warmth. For some perverse reason he had a raging, aching hard-on. Maybe because you haven’t touched a girl in over two months, the demon in his mind babbled, not even an unconscious one.

  He knew that if he looked at her too long, he would want her, even passed out. Yes, he could slip inside her so easily, it would be like coming home—but what if the thing in her womb reached a tiny hand down and grabbed him? What if it got ahold of him with its teeth?

  His hard-on was suddenly gone.

  Steve slid one hand under Ann’s hips—she was thinner, he noticed; there was only a scant handful of flesh on each buttock that had once been so sweetly round—and started winding the bandages around her. Between the milk-pale thighs, snug against the treacherous cunt, up around Ann’s slender waist and back down.

  Would these keep her from bleeding to death when the poison started to work? He didn’t know. But Arkady had said to wrap her up, and Ghost trusted Arkady because there was no one else to trust, so Steve had to trust him too. Even if he was a rat-faced little fuckwad.

  When Ann was wrapped from her waist to the middle of her thighs in white cotton, Steve pulled the sheet up to her chin. The coarse cloth seemed to settle flat over Ann’s body; even the rise of her swaddled pubic mound was nearly imperceptible.

  Steve sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, looking at her face. She didn’t look any different. Tired, that was all. They might have just made love. She might be catnapping in that lovely twilight lull that happened after good sex, waiting for him to roll over and give her one more long deep kiss.

  He bowed his head and rested his cheek against her breasts. Beneath their softness he felt the trembling of her heart. Turn back, he thought with sudden incoherence. Something got fucked up bad. None of this was supposed to happen. Time, turn back!

  But time would not.

  He kissed her through the bandages, right at the V where her thighs met. Then he stood up and walked toward the door, and only when he saw how blurred it was did he realize his eyes were overflowing.

  Steve! her mind shrieked.

  But he never turned around.

  30

  Arkady lit a candle and started down the stairs. He would get a packet of dried leaves that needed grinding; he would sift them to dust between his fingers as he sat beside Ann’s bed. He would bring up an old fragile book that he had not looked at in too long, and the decanter of sherry that rested beneath the altar with Ashley.

  He would keep vigil beside the girl all night, or at least until Steve and Ghost returned. He would mark her bleeding, watch her temperature, daub her forehead with ice. He would take good care of her.

  And he would think about the way Ghost had slighted him, rejected him, made a fool of him. He would think about the way Steve had shown him nothing but sullenness and discourtesy. He would sit beside the beautiful unconscious girl and think about these things, pondering the power he wielded over Steve and Ghost now. He would look upon the girl’s pale fevered face and contemplate the administration of another poison, one for the mother instead of the child, one that would never be detected. He knew a poison made from the spleen of a certain fish, a poison that duplicated the structure of normal stomach acids. He would contemplate unwrapping the bandages that Steve had tucked so carefully around her hips, would imagine himself straightening a wire coat hanger and sliding it up inside her, as tenderly as a lover, until the sharp end punctured her womb.…

  But no. He wielded great power over Steve and Ghost through this helpless girl, but he must not use it. That would be allowing the vampires to triumph. He must save her with his poisons; otherwise the vampires would have killed her as surely as they had killed his brother Ashley. As surely as they had turned that lovely aristocratic face to dust, dried that sweet white flesh, shrivelled those eyes, those eyes …

  He only hoped his concoction would work. He had told Ghost he’d developed it after the death of Richelle, and this was true; but he had neglected to mention that it had never been tested on anyone.

  Something wavered at the foot of the stairs. His shadow, huge and unsteady in the flickering light of his candle. Arkady stepped on it—a trick he had learned long ago, stepping on one’s own shadow, good for nothing but show—and ducked under the velvet curtain into the back room of the shop. Mullein-leaf, he thought. I must bring the mullein-leaf to be crumbled, and the book and the sherry. Drawing near the altar, he bent to retrieve the decanter—and stopped, his dry lips hissing air, his hands frozen in their movement toward the dropcloth.

  He always kept Ashley’s skull beneath the altar, safe in the dark. Sometimes in the night he would wander downstairs to speak to Ashley and stroke the smooth ivory curve, but he always put Ashley back in his resting place. Why, then, was the skull here on top of the altar, nestled among the relics and offerings?

  Some of the other objects had been displaced as well: the floor at the foot of the altar was littered with dead flowers, stray coins, the powdery ash of incense sticks. One of the plaster saints had toppled over, but the candles still burned, two on either side of Ashley, dripping pink and black wax onto the altar. Arkady reached out to touch what was left of his brother, hoping the contact might give him an answer, or at least lessen his confusion and his fear.

  The skull was as cold as a November wind, as cold as frozen earth.

  “What?” he whispered. “What’s wrong? What’s happening?”

  The eye sockets retained their velvety tragic darkness; the teeth did not meet in reply. But as Arkady stroked the dome of the skull, all the candles—the four upon the altar, and the one he was carrying—suddenly flickered and then burned stronger than before. But now their flames were a bright, cold blue.

  A sure sign of evil spirits present in the room.

  “Ashley?” he whispered. “My brother? Is it you?” But that made no sense. Ashley was not evil. Ashley would never hurt him. Arkady groped under the altar for the sherry. He would need it tonight. When his fingers found the faceted glass of the decanter, he clutched it and started for the stairs.

  But just before he was about to sweep the velvet curtain aside, he paused, then turned and went back to get Ashley. This meant he must abandon his candle and ascend the stairs in darkness, but Arkady would not leave his brother down here alone with whatever spirits roamed tonight.

  The first stair tread creaked when he rested his weight upon it. With his bare toes he felt for the edge of the next stair, tried to ease his foot onto it without making a sound. His eyes strained against the dark. His shoulder brushed the wall—or did the wall lean in to crush him? Under his feet the boards felt unpleasantly dry, almost furry. He climbed two more stairs, three, four.

  He was halfway to the top when he heard the light footsteps coming up behind him.

  The stairs were dark, but the two faces seemed lit by an unhealthy glow from within. Arkady could make out their sharp features, their drawn mouths, the tired gleam of their eyes through the cheap sunglasses they wore. “It’s only you two,” he said. “You gave me a turn.”

  They started up the stairs toward him.

 
; “Look at us, Arkady,” said one of them. His voice was only a rustle, like a voice sifting through dried moth wings.

  “We’ve waited too long,” said the other, and his voice was like a wind that blew from far away over a stagnant sea. “We can’t find anyone. We can’t even look in the mirror. And we have a show to do.…”

  Arkady kept backing up the stairs. He heard his own breath sobbing in and out of his throat. “What do you want?”

  “It’s time, Arkady,” said the first one. He smiled, and patches of ivory skin flaked away from his cheeks, powdering the stairs, mingling with the dust.

  The other one smiled too. His lips were caked with dry rouge, once red, now faded to dusty orange. Even in this dim light, Arkady could see the delicate tracery of lines that webbed the twins’ faces and disappeared beneath their sunglasses.

  “We need you,” said the first one.

  “It’s easy. You can join your brother.”

  “There’s a girl upstairs,” Arkady heard himself say. “Young, pretty. You can have her—”

  The first one shook his head in mock reproach. His ruby hair whipped his face. “No, Arkady. We don’t want your pretty girl, not yet anyway. Next you’ll be telling us to go find a whore on Bourbon Street. We’re hungry. We know you. We need you.”

  “We love you, Arkady,” said the other, smiling even more widely. One of his upper front teeth fell out of its socket and landed with a tiny plink on the stairs. He picked it up and fitted it back into the ragged hole in his gum, still smiling. There was no blood, not a drop. “You see? Would you have our beauty wither and crack as your brother’s did? You can help us, Arkady. You can feed us. You know it’s easy.”

  “Easy …” echoed the other.

  They ascended the stairs toward him. Arkady could not run, could not move; already his feet and his ankles felt withered, useless. He wondered how they would feed. Did they have a sort of proboscis that would thrust deep into his body to search out every last drop of life? Or would they just bury their mouths in him, rend him with their teeth and let his life force flow into them?