Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (46 page)

 
          
It
just stared, and the arch of its teeth was impassive, perhaps sad. He hoped
Steve wouldn’t make a joke (Why can’t Ashley Raventon go to parties anymore?
Because he doesn’t have any body to go with).

 
          
Ghost
was very aware that here had once rested a brain, a mind, an identity. A soul?
Here had once been the cradle of a life. He felt as if he were holding
something alive and vulnerable.

 
          
Something
that depended on him not to drop it. If he dropped it, it would surely crack.
It might shatter. So Ghost held the skull carefully, and then the feelings
began to come, as he had known they would. The essence of Ashley washed over
Ghost, and he lost himself in the depths of the skull’s empty eyes and let the
impressions come.

 
          
A
great loneliness. That was the first thing. Loneliness for Arkady, wanting him,
wanting his arrogance, his self-assurance. Misgivings in spite of the desire to
trust, and then the conviction that Arkady was never coming back from Paris. A
void. A slew of things to fill the void—alcohol and opium, lovers and new
leather boots—but still the late nights crept in, and Arkady was never coming
back, never could, never …

 
          
Then
two familiar faces rose up before him, two pairs of silvery eyes, a tangle of scarlet
and yellow hair. They were stuffing at Ghost as they had the last time he’d
seen them, sitting astride the branch of the old oak in the clearing, on that
first night of strangeness. But this time their ripe mouths were smeared with
blood and other juices, with shreds of tissue.

 
          
Ghost
felt sick. A stupid panic welled up in his throat. But he put the skull back in
Arkady’s hands and said only, “Your brother was very handsome, wasn’t he?”

 
          
“Not
handsome. Beautiful. Did I mention that Ashley was the beauty of the
Raventons
?”

 
          
Arkady
pressed his lips to the top of the ivory cranium before continuing.

 
          
“His
hair was the color of burgundy, and he wore it long down his back, and it
sparkled when he walked in the rain. His cheekbones were like razors—I always
thought that I might cut my finger on one of them, but I never did.” With the
tip of one forefinger, Arkady touched the skull gently. “And those eyes—I used
to say to him, ‘O Ashley, those eyes, those eyes’—so dark and lost when they
tilted up to me—like holes through time.”

 
          
He
ran his finger around the edge of one of the empty eye sockets. “Those eyes—how
they could slay me.

 
          
“But
he died. Yes, I came back home and he had died. My Ashley. My brother. And now
I am alone.”

 
          
“Wait
a second.” Ghost’s voice was halting; there was no doubt in it, only wonder.
“You came home. You were there. Why didn’t you bring Ashley back from the dead,
too?”

 
          
Arkady
held the skull a moment longer. Then he knelt and slid it back under the altar.
He spent some time rearranging the velvet, brushing away dust, picking up some
black feathers that had fallen from the altar top to the floor. When he stood,
the joints of his knees cracked as loudly as shots in the silent room.

 
          
He
met Ghost’s eyes, and when he spoke, his voice was soft and even.

 
          
“Ashley
didn’t want to come back,” he said.

 
          
“So
was it vampires that killed your brother?” Ghost asked Arkady a little later.

 
          
He
figured it couldn’t hurt to find out just what the twins were. Allowing for the
existence of one kind of vampire, it seemed to follow that there might be other
kinds, feeding on things other than blood. The existence of the first type
scared him but didn’t really surprise him. All his life he had been accepting
as normal things that most people didn’t even believe in.

 
          
They
were sitting in the front room, talking over a decanter of sherry that Arkady
had brought out from some recess of the shop. At least Ghost hoped it was
sherry.

 
          
It
tasted funny, musty and a little sour, but Steve was putting it away with no
problem.

 
          
Ghost
sipped from his first glass as Arkady poured Steve’s third.

 
          
“Vampires?”
Arkady’s hand twitched; he almost dropped the bottle of sherry. He crossed
himself twice, first upside down, then right side up. “Lord, child. Why do you
want to know about vampires?”

 
          
“Jesus,
Ghost,” Steve muttered. Ghost glanced at him, but Steve was bent over the
counter examining things in the glass case. Ball canning jars full of pale
rubbery orbs, the lids
labelled
CATS’ EYES and TOADS’
HEARTS in a faded flowing script that must be Arkady’s.

 
          
Jewelry
in the shape of silver pentagrams, ankhs, razor blades. A bowl of tiny,
carefully molded clay skulls marked 50 CENTS APIECE.

 
          
“I
just wondered,” Ghost said lamely.

 
          
Arkady
looked hard at him. “Ghost. My child. It is difficult to imagine you ‘just
wondering’ about anything.” He clasped Ghost’s hand between both of his. Ghost
resisted the urge to pull his hand from the confines of that cool parched skin,
all those tiny crackling bones.

 
          
“You
are a far more powerful sensitive than I could ever be. I pick up bits and
pieces. I can hear thoughts when they are as pure and lucid as yours. And I can
do little more than that. But you—you have an eye in your heart, Ghost. An eye
that shines. An eye that feels.”

 
          
“What
the fuck is he babbling about?” Steve asked thickly.

 
          
I’m
the only person in this room who isn’t at least half-drunk, Ghost thought. He
made himself drink more of his sherry, though the rancid taste lay upon his
tongue like a sour old blanket. Sherry got worse with every sip, it seemed.

 
          
“I
should never, never like to lose your favor,” Arkady slurred. His hand was on
Ghost’s knee now. His fingers brushed skin through a hole in Ghost’s
sweatpants, and Ghost shivered at that dry touch. “But vampires, Ghost …
vampires! They are not to be mentioned lightly. Not as in the cheap novels, the
Hollywood legends. You think vampires are the Undead, the children of the
night. You believe they rise from their graves when the moon hangs high,
sucking the blood of virgins, melting into misty wraiths at sunrise, turning
into bats and swooping away …”

 
          
“I
don’t think they turn into bats,” said Ghost, and Steve surprised him by
saying, “Me neither.”

 
          
Arkady
ignored them. “You see, Ghost child, the myths are wrong. And that very
wrongness makes the creatures all the more dangerous. They are not undead. They
have never died. Some of them never do, or not for hundreds upon hundreds of
years. They are a separate race–or races. There are those who suck blood, those
who suck souls, those who feed on the pain of others. Some of them can walk
among us, free in the sunlight. Some of them are able to live as human beings
from day to day, from year to year. Of course, they must move about like
nomads, because after a point they do not age. They are beautiful, and they
stay beautiful. And no one must notice. So they move, and they live among us,
and then one day—”

 
          
“One
day—BOOM,” Steve said.

 
          
Arkady
and Ghost turned to look at him. He grinned rather humorlessly at them and
filled his glass again, slopping sherry onto the counter.

 
          
‘Then
one day,” Arkady continued smoothly, “they discover their particular hunger.
Some may live for ten, twenty, even thirty years before the lust comes upon
them.

 
          
Some
can digest nothing but blood, and must be fed upon it from the time of their
birth.

 
          
But
the hunger always comes.”

 
          
Timidly,
Ghost interrupted. “How come you know so much about them?”

 
          
“I
have known vampires of all sorts,” said Arkady. “On my first visit to Paris I
met a most charming one. A blood drinker. She was elegant, well-mannered,
cultured. Most of them are.”

 
          
Ghost
thought of the wine-swilling, Twinkie-gobbling occupants of the black van.

 
          
He
tried to stretch his imagination to picture Molochai and Twig as elegant,
well-mannered, or cultured. Then he shook his head. Either those two were
aberrations, or Arkady Raventon didn’t know as much about vampires as he
thought he did.

 
          
“We
were never lovers,” Arkady went on, “though how badly I wanted her … Richelle.
Violet-eyed, though she always wore dark glasses. Even at night. Hair as black
as a thousand midnights, as eyeless sockets—with tips dyed white and fuchsia.
She had lived two hundred years or more, and she knew where all the underground
clubs in Paris were. I could never count the nights we danced away on dark
smoky floors below the level of the street—”

 
          
“How
come you didn’t fuck her?” Steve interrupted.

 
          
Arkady
lowered his eyelids at Steve and gazed coldly from beneath them. Steve glared
back. Arkady poured himself more sherry. He topped off Ghost’s glass too,
though it was still half full. Ghost eyed it bleakly.

 
          
“Richelle
was celibate. She had a terror of becoming pregnant. She insisted that no
precautions were reliable enough. Should she conceive, she told me, it would
mean the end of her.”

 
          
“We
occupied ourselves in other ways. We spent whole nights driving each other mad.
She tasted lovely, hot and rich and always faintly bloody. Once—only once—she
took me out on a kill. She found a child begging for milk money in some gutter
far from the lights of the city, and she bent as if to whisper something to the
child and sank her teeth into that soft face. When she had drunk, she undressed
me and smeared the child’s blood over my body. She lathered me with it. And
then … then her exquisite tongue lapped me clean… ”

 
          
“Wait
a second,” said Ghost. He was afraid that soon Arkady would start panting and
clutching at himself. “How come she was so scared of getting pregnant? What
would have happened?”

 
          
“Did
happen,” said Arkady. “Poor Richelle; her worst fear came true. One night she
went to her favorite club, the Cafe Zeitgeist, without me. She met a boy … just
a boy, she told me.

 
          
Perhaps
sixteen or seventeen. She took him behind the club, into an alley. I don’t know
whether she meant to feed upon him or only to engage him in her usual sort of
love. She needed blood, but semen would do in a pinch. “For a snack, you might
say.”

 
          
“At
any rate, he was a randy boy. He became too excited by
Richelle’s
beauty.

 
          
Perhaps
by the smell of bloody lust she exuded. Richelle should have been able to
overpower him; she was very strong, but she had drunk too much vodka—that was
easy to do at the Cafe Zeitgeist, where they flavored the vodka with essence of
rosewater. The boy ripped her dress open … and he took her by force.”

 
          
“Fucker,”
said Steve. He let his head thump down on the glass counter. “But some girls
don’t
hafta
be raped, huh, Ghost? Some girls just …”
He mumbled and subsided.

 
          
“What
would happen if she got pregnant?” asked Ghost.

 
          
“It
would have eaten its way out of her,” Arkady told him with relish. “It was half
vampire. Even in the womb they are killers. Our babies are born without teeth,
Richelle told me, but even so they manage to chew their way out. Perhaps they
have a set of womb-teeth. Perhaps they claw their way out with their tiny
fingers. But they kill, always they kill. Just as I ripped my mother apart.