Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (29 page)

 
          
Molochai
turned on the tape player. As Bauhaus began blasting a live cut of

 
          
“Stigmata
Martyr,” Zillah came slowly and luxuriously awake. He opened first one
brilliant eye, then the other, ran his hands through his silky hair, yawned and
stretched his catlike body. When his eyes lit upon Nothing’s, he sat up and
took Nothing into his arms and kissed him.

 
          
Zillah’s
mouth was as sour and sweet as wine, and his spit had a rich red corrupt taste.

 
          
Nothing
let it flow into him, drank it, took strength from it as if it were the potion
in the wine bottle. That taste was everything. The taste of blood and Zillah’s
spit and come and the
roughplay
and the drinking and
all the long enchanted days and nights. Everything. Nothing still wanted to
talk to Lost Souls?—he had come all this way but he no longer ached for a
family. He no longer wanted to pretend that Steve and Ghost were his long-lost
brothers. He had his family now; he had chosen them and their nighttime world.

 
          
“Come
on,” he said. “You’re all going in with me.” He had asserted himself for the
first time, he was becoming their equal, and he thought he saw approval in the
slant of Zillah’s smile.

 
          
He
felt so good, so strong and confident, that he never stopped to think what
might happen once they got into the house.

 
          
They
left the van parked near the road and made their way unsteadily up the
driveway.

 
          
Gravel
crunched under Nothing’s feet. The house was thirty steps away. Twenty.

 
          
Molochai
and Twig clutched each other, trying to stay upright. Zillah’s hand brushed the
back of Nothing’s neck. Nothing shivered at the touch. It made him want to be
back in the van, on the mattress with Zillah, tangled, sweaty, biting again.

 
          
But
now he was so close to Ghost, he thought he felt the tendril of a golden aura
touching him. The house loomed up, if such a scruffy little house could be said
to loom.

 
          
One
shutter hung askew like the half-cynical tilt of an eyebrow. The windows were
lidded, deeply humorous eyes. This house was good.

 
          
The
porch steps sagged a little under their weight. Not much; the house was old but
sturdy. Someone had painted a hex sign at the threshold of the door: a red
triangle and a blue one interlocking to form a six-pointed star, and in the
center a small ankh traced in silver. Molochai and Twig drew back from it,
still clutching each other uneasily, but Zillah cast them a look of contempt.
‘That thing won’t hurt you. Just step over it.”

 
          
The
door sported an incongruously fancy knocker: the face of a gargoyle wrought in
silver, with a heavy ring through its nostrils and eyes that seemed about to
bulge out of their sockets. Nothing used the ring to knock, first gently and
then loudly, but no one stirred inside the house. He looked doubtfully at the
old brown car in the driveway.

 
          
Someone
must be here. “Maybe they don’t want company,” he said, not sure whether the sinking
inside him was disappointment or relief.

 
          
“Try
the door,” Twig suggested. Before Nothing could respond, Twig stepped up and
rattled the knob himself. It would turn no more than a quarter inch in either
direction.

 
          
The
door was locked.

 
          
“I
guess that’s it,” said Nothing. His hand, deep in the pocket of his raincoat,
touched the single long bone he had found on the shoulder of the highway. Four
days ago—a lifetime ago—he had set out thinking be might come here. Had he
hoped to find his home in Missing Mile, at an address he had found on the liner
of a tape put out by an obscure band? Now that he was here, it hardly seemed
real.

 
          
Molochai
had been peering through the window next to the front door. Now he gave it a
shove. It slid up with only a small groaning protest. “I found a way in,”
Molochai said proudly.

 
          
And
before Nothing quite knew what was happening, the other three had climbed
through the window—even Zillah, who stepped delicately over the sill and was
received on the other side by the outstretched hands of Molochai and Twig.
Nothing stared in at them.

 
          
They
grinned and waved back, daring him. But he couldn’t follow. The car was here;
someone must be home. He couldn’t just let himself in, no matter how much he
wanted to see the inside of the house. He couldn’t go through the window, He
mustn’t.

 
          
A
splinter from the windowsill snagged his jeans as he went in.

 
          
The
jumble of decor—obscure, lovely jazz and acid rock posters, religious samplers,
a bookshelf with volume after volume of herbal lore cheek by jowl with things
like Kerouac, Ellison, Bradbury (the Bradbury books surely belonged to Ghost;
Steve would never choose anything so romantic)— caught Nothing’s attention at
first. Then he realized what the others were doing. Molochai and Twig were in
the kitchen, ransacking the refrigerator. He heard pop-tops cracking open as
they helped themselves to cans of beer. Zillah fell dramatically onto the couch
and began unbuttoning his shirt with dreamy fascination, his long hair draped
over the arm of the couch, streaming down.

 
          
The
passage down the hall, pale and wavering and tantalizing, held Nothing’s
attention for a long time before he noticed the smell. When it finally breached
his awareness, he did not recognize it at once. It was so faint—there, on a
breath of air, and gone again. He licked his lips, took a shallow breath
through his mouth. Although he did not realize it, he was testing the air,
beginning to use sensitive scent organs that had lain dormant all his fifteen
years. The scent was familiar, he had smelled it just last night, but now there
was something different about it.

 
          
Something
foreign, more ethereal, more delicate …

 
          
The
dark metallic smell of blood. And beneath that, the bittersweet scent of rose
petals.

 
          
Now
Zillah was beckoning to him from the couch. Nothing could tell from the tiny
smirk on his lips what Zillah wanted, and he had to quash a tiny flare of
irritation.

 
          
Didn’t
Zillah know how wrong it would be for them to make love in this house? Nothing
could not go to him, not this time. At the end of that hall, drowning in that
scent, might be Ghost.

 
          
And
Nothing thought that somehow the smell might be his fault. He should not have
brought his new family here. He lived in a different world now, and could not
cross back and forth.

 
          
He
started down that white passage.

 
          
The
hall was long. Light filtered into it from the open rooms. Someone had left the
bathroom light on. Nothing reached in and turned it off as he passed, looking
at the
ivoried
tub squatting on
gryphons’
feet, the lone beer can on the edge of the sink. He was seeing things very
lucidly now, aware of each detail. The air in the house was as clear as cool
still water.

 
          
Then
he was at the door of someone’s bedroom. Ghost’s, it had to be. Delicate
colored leaves and dead flowers were pinned to the ceiling. On the walls, in
crayon and ink, pencil and Magic Marker, was a fabulous twisted riot of
color—maps of real lands, maps of strange lands, faces that seemed about to
speak. And words. Hundreds of words.

 
          
There
were words strung together in sentences and quotations and lyrics. There were
words alone, written there because of their individual bright or dark glory.
And there on the ceiling—above the bed, showing through a nest of brittle
foliage—there were stars. A universe of stars and planets painted there, a
thousand tiny heavenly bodies, yellow, glowing faintly.

 
          
My
god, I’m home, thought Nothing, and stepped into the room. And in that instant,
the figure on the bed—the figure that Nothing had not seen because it lay so
still, swathed in a great heap of bedclothes, because its pale hair fell so
transparent across the pillow—sat bolt upright and shrieked, “NOTHING!”

 
          
In
the living room, three heads
swivelled
toward the
sound. Molochai’s throat stopped working in
midswig
,
and beer cascaded over his chin. “Nothing?” he sputtered.

 
          
“Nothing,”
said Twig, nodding.

 
          
Zillah’s
eyes narrowed. “We’ll see about Nothing,” he hissed. With one fluid movement he
was off the couch, disappearing into the recesses of the house. For a moment
Molochai and Twig gaped after him. Then they looked at each other, shrugged,
and followed Zillah down the hall.

 
          
Steve
was dreaming. Somewhere in his head Ann struggled, beat her fists against the
inside of his skull, trying to force her way out. Fuck her. She could rot in
there.

 
          
(What
the hell do you think she’s doing? his mind asked nastily, but he ignored it.)
Why was she complaining? She liked to play with his mind.

 
          
But
suddenly there were teeth.

 
          
At
first he thought he had imagined the gnawing. But pain flared inside his skull,
razor-sharp, ripping, and he knew. She was trying to chew her way out of his
head.

 
          
She
was trying to eat her way out. He felt her teeth tearing at the soft meat of
his brain.

 
          
He
clawed at his forehead, trying to stop her, trying to wrench her out before she
made wounds that would never heal—

 
          
“Jesus
fuckin
’ Christ,” he gasped, jerking himself awake. A
Penthouse centerfold grinned at him from the wall above his bed, pulling her
anatomy open like pink bubble gum. Steve snarled and tore it down, crumpled it,
threw it into the corner.

 
          
Ghost
shrieked from the next room, his voice clear and terrified. Nothing, it sounded
like he’d said.

 
          
Nightmares
for everybody this morning. Or this afternoon, more likely. What time had they
finally gone to bed? No idea. A hangover began its stealthy gnawing inside
Steve’s head, no dream this time, and he almost rolled over and let Ghost sleep
through it. But Ghost’s dreams were always just a little too real to ignore.

 
          
He
rolled out of bed, dragged on
semiclean
underwear and
a T-shirt that didn’t even approach a state of cleanliness. Got to do some
laundry, he chided himself. Yeah, laundry, and maybe haul some whiskey bottles
and beer cans out to the recycling dump, and maybe make some apologies and get
his life back together while he was at it.

 
          
That
was when he heard the voices in the living room and the footsteps coming down
the hall.

 
          
Having
his privacy or his belongings invaded anywhere, at any time, was enough to piss
Steve off mightily. Someone had stolen the radio out of his T-bird right after
he’d gotten it back in high school, and Steve had sat outside for three nights
waiting
fur
the asshole to show himself again. The
asshole never had, of course. But the idea of this house,
Miz
Deliverance’s house, being broken into was almost unbearable. White magic had
happened here. This place had sanctity, dammit.

 
          
He
had never expected anything bad to happen in this house, had vaguely thought it
had a magic circle around it or something. But he hadn’t been willing to stake
his life on it, so he kept a taped-up Louisville Slugger next to his bed. It
reassured him, along with the claw hammer under the driver’s seat of the T-bird
and the sock full of pennies he kept behind the cash register at the record
store. Steve hyperaware of the possibility that violence could erupt anywhere
at any time; he supposed that meant he was really the one with the violent
nature. But he was glad of it now.