Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (28 page)

 
          
“Yours.”

 
          
“How
do you know she didn’t like it? You read her sick little mind or something?”

 
          
“No.
I went over to see her the other day.”

 
          
All
at once Steve was up off the couch, grabbing handfuls of Ghost’s sweatshirt,
pushing his face up close to Ghost’s. “What the fuck you mean you went to see
her? You went over there without telling me?”

 
          
“I
wanted to see how she was.”

 
          
Steve
stared into Ghost’s placid face. He knew he wasn’t scaring Ghost, not in the
slightest; he was only making a fool of himself. But the alcohol in his brain
refused to let him shut up. “You stay away from that lying cunt,” he snarled,
“or else you decide whose friend you really are.”

 
          
Ghost’s
wide blue eyes met Steve’s, forgiving but unrelenting. Ghost would not soothe
Steve this time, would not capitulate. What the fuck did Ghost know? Ghost
hadn’t gone through Ann’s mind-games, hadn’t been betrayed by her. But here he
stood, oh so self-righteous. It would be easy enough to slap that obstinate
look off Ghost’s face, shake the visions out of that thin body

 
          
…

 
          
What
was he thinking? Hit Ghost ? What the hell was he turning into? “Jesus,” he
whispered. “Jesus Christ.”

 
          
“He’s
not here,” said Ghost sullenly. “You
gonna
put me
down?”

 
          
“Shit,
no,” said Steve. He pulled Ghost down on the couch with him, hugged him tight.

 
          
“I’m
sorry. I’m so sorry. Don’t hate me.”

 
          
Ghost
didn’t say anything, but his hands found Steve’s face, touched Steve’s aching
temples and smoothed back his messy dark hair. Steve let his head droop onto
Ghost’s shoulder.

 
          
Holding
any other guy this way would have made him feel like a fag; with Ghost it
wasn’t an issue, it never seemed to matter.

 
          
After
a few minutes he tried to speak. The words came like slow drops of blood from a
ragged wound. “I … I tried to call her a couple of times. Hung up when she
answered, real cool.

 
          
Then
I got Simon, and he wouldn’t let me talk to her. She asked him to screen her
calls, I guess. I guess I fucked up pretty good.”

 
          
“I
know,” said Ghost. “I know how things were.”

 
          
And
you probably do, too, Steve thought. You probably know everything that ever
happened to us, the hot nights and the sodden-silk texture inside her, the
weeks when things were starting to go bad, the ether of betrayal, the look on
her face, and the moment of absolute shock, like falling into deep icy water,
when I realized I had really for
chrissake
raped her.

 
          
He
pulled away from Ghost. He felt his face contorting, but he would not cry; he
would not cry.

 
          
For
a long time they sat in companionable silence. Steve felt his drunkenness
receding to a comfortable buzz, and Ghost opened his bottle of scuppernong wine
to catch up. They were booked at the Sacred Yew the following night, so Steve
dragged out his guitar and they ran haphazardly through their set, knowing it
didn’t matter. They had played the Yew hundreds of times. They might play there
a hundred times more, and their little group of fans would come to drink and
dance, and nothing would matter except the exuberance of playing.

 
          
“Let’s
listen to the tape,” Steve suggested. He thought he ought to remind himself
what the songs really sounded like. Ghost stumbled to the stereo, and soon Lost
Souls? filled the little house, the guitar hard-edged and gloriously mad,
Ghost’s words bittersweet, with a visionary longing. “We need the roots but you
can’t dig up the tree …” Ghost sang along with his own golden-gravel voice. “So
walk the mountain roads with me and drink some clear water …”

 
          
Steve
sang along too, strumming the guitar. Those were the words of a visionary,
weren’t they? Those were the words of somebody who remembered what magic was.
There was magic left in the world; there had to be. Steve banged at the
strings. Beneath the noise he heard a fiery, chiming melody.

 
          
Ghost
lifted his head and sang louder. His voice soared high and found its way
through cracks in the windows and walls, out into the sparkling night, down to
the road that led past the house.

 
          
At
the sound of that voice, an old passing drifter looked up and remembered a
train track he had hiked along down to Georgia some thirty years ago. A train
track flanked with rioting kudzu and towering pines and the bewitching scent of
honeysuckle, a train track that made a two-bit bottle of wine taste of nectar
and cool shade. The drifter, whose name was Rudy, lifted his face to the chill
cloudy sky. A mile down the road he would find himself in the arms of
Christian, whose hunger by now overshadowed his taste for thin children in
black. But the last few minutes of Rudy’s life were spent in sweet memory.

 
          
Back
in the house, Steve stopped playing and smacked his forehead. “I forgot.

 
          
Some
mail came for you. Our first fan letter, I guess.” Steve dug through the
clutter on the floor and found a postcard, creased and dog-eared, its colors
muted with the grime of small-town post offices.

 
          
Ghost
read it: ‘You don’t know me, but Dylan Thomas drank eighteen straight whiskeys
on November ninth, 1953, and I am drinking one for you.” He looked up at Steve.

 
          
“It’s
signed ‘Nothing.’”

 
          
“What’s
it about?”

 
          
“Who
knows?”

 
          
“Why
don’t you hold it to your forehead and find out? Go on, tell me to fuck myself.
“Suck my aura,” said Ghost, and swigged the last sweet drops of his wine.

 
          
“WAKE
UP!” said a loud voice that seemed to reverberate from the center of Nothing’s
brain. “WE’RE HERE!”

 
          
Nothing
opened and shut his eyes several times. “I wasn’t asleep,” he said. “How could
I sleep?”

 
          
Zillah
had placed another hit of Crucifix on his tongue sometime between midnight and
dawn, and since then Nothing had not known where he was, or who he was with, or
why he had ever bothered to wonder. He roamed the corridors of his mind,
hopelessly lost, unable to find his way back to the familiar voices he could
hear faintly, faintly–arguing and laughing outside his skull, and his body
jittered like a skeleton on a string.

 
          
Yet
maybe he had slept, for he thought he had dreamed strange dreams. Dreamed of
sucking at a hot torn pulse, splashing in blood that still pumped in weak
spurts from the vein with each beat of the dying heart. Dreamed of rubbing his
gory hands over Zillah’s face, licking blood off Zillah’s eyelashes, drinking
it from Zillah’s lips where it tasted sweeter yet. He had dreamed of Molochai
and Twig wallowing in blood,
sudsing
it into each
other’s hair, rolling in it half-naked, their pallid skin streaked sticky red.

 
          
Why
was there so much blood?

 
          
Because
your teeth weren’t sharp enough, a voice in his mind answered. There was
nothing neat about it. Don’t you remember how you had to tear chunks of his
throat away before you could lap up that sweet blood? Don’t you remember
Zillah’s face buried in the ruin of his crotch like a sadistic lover?

 
          
Nothing
shied away from that voice. But he could not forget the music of screams that
died away to a tired confused whimper of pain, then to silence. He had dreamed
of standing in front of a culvert somewhere, a dank concrete pipe choked with
weeds, kudzu, highway trash. It was dark,
souldark
in
this hour long past midnight and far from dawn, but Nothing could see. He could
see clearly in the dark: the acid, or some new vision refining itself? Slung
over his shoulder he held a limp little bundle, a bundle of stained rags and
skin gone paler than before.

 
          
“Put
it in there,” Zillah had said, and Nothing stuffed the bundle deep into the
culvert.

 
          
Looking
back, he caught a last glimpse of feathery white-blond hair straggling from a
blue bandanna. Wet threads of scarlet ran through that hair … and for a moment
Nothing stopped, struck by the enormity of what had happened. Of what you did,
his mind amended. The blood would never get washed out of that hair, except by
rainwater and runoff from the highway. No one was going to shampoo that hair or
give it a fresh blond dye job ever again. Perhaps for a while it would keep
growing, dark roots pushing slowly up through the cold waxy scalp. Then it
would loosen and separate and scatter, washed away strand by strand, stolen
even as Laine’s bones would soon be.

 
          
But
he had dreamed, surely he had dreamed. He must have dreamed. “Oh God,” he said,
and shuddered.

 
          
“Who?”
Molochai, hovering over him, looked honestly puzzled: Do you remember how we
slaughtered your friend and half-tore him apart, or are you just hung over?
Molochai’s eyes glittered through enormous smudges of black eyeliner. Nothing
smelled something sweet on Molochai’s breath, some buried childhood odor.
Twinkies.

 
          
“What’s
wrong, kiddo?” Twig asked from the front seat.

 
          
Nothing
didn’t answer. Instead he sat up, put his arms around Molochai’s neck, and
buried his face in the dirty black cloth of Molochai’s jacket, cloth that
smelled of sweat and sweets, of sex and … blood. Laine’s blood. Nothing knew it
was probably on his own clothes too, on his skin and greased into his hair.
Because he had not dreamed.

 
          
Last
night had really happened. He had killed Laine, killed him with bare teeth and
hands and only a little help from his friends.

 
          
They
really are vampires, he thought. You be consigned yourself to a life of blood
and murder, you can never rejoin the daytime world. And he answered himself:
Fine.

 
          
As
long as I don’t have to be alone again.

 
          
“We’re
here,” Molochai said, dropping Nothing back onto the mattress. “This is it,
right, Twig?”

 
          
“Yup,”
said Twig. “Fourteen Burnt Church Road, Missing Mile,
Enn
Cee
. Curb service, kiddo.”

 
          
The
roof of the van billowed and rippled. With an effort, Nothing focused his eyes.
The streaky faces of Molochai and Twig hung over him, haggard and grinning,
waiting to see what he would do.

 
          
Where
was Zillah? Asleep on the mattress nearby, his warmth close enough to touch,
his head pillowed on a fold of Nothing’s raincoat. Wisps of his dry Mardi Gras
hair trailed away over the black silk.

 
          
“We
could come with you,” Molochai offered generously. “We like musicians.”

 
          
“We
like you,” Twig said, the sharp tip of his tongue flickering over his lips.

 
          
“It’s
not often we meet a drinking man such as yourself.”

 
          
Nothing
struggled to his knees, cupped his hands to the window. He saw a small wooden
house nestled among trees far off at the end of a gravel driveway. Was Ghost in
that house right now, awake or dreaming? His vision seemed to shift again, and
he realized that even the watery light of the early afternoon hurt his eyes.
His pupils felt distended.