Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (50 page)

 
          
At
last Ghost fell silent. He tried to remain sitting, but his head kept drooping
and his eyes threatened to slip shut. Arkady saw Ghost’s hands clenching into
loose fists: the poor boy was trying to
will
himself
to stay awake.

 
          
With
a light finger Arkady touched Ghost’s lips, those lovely lips so pale, so
delicately lined, tucked in at the corners with worry and fear. Under his touch
he felt Ghost’s lips tighten.

 
          
Ghost
was exhausted, nearly asleep; most likely he did not know who touched him.

 
          
Nevertheless,
Arkady imagined how it would be to slide his finger between those lips, to
stroke the pink rag of a tongue, to be surrounded by the wet warmth of Ghost’s
mouth. He wondered how it would be to taste Ghost’s sweet spit. Poor boy, he
thought again. Poor lost boys, both of them. One trying to drown his fear in a
bottle, and the other this beautiful child—trying to confront it all alone.

 
          
“Poor
boy,” murmured Arkady. “You are very brave, Ghost. Dreadfully, achingly brave.”

 
          
He
stroked the smooth curve of Ghost’s throat, feeling the flesh shudder beneath
his touch, then let his fingers stray between the neckband of the voluminous
tie-dyed shirt Ghost wore. When Ghost had come slamming into the room, Arkady’s
heart melted for the child standing there trembling in that enormous shirt that
made him look so terribly young. He had wanted to hold out his arms to Ghost ….

 
          
Why
deceive himself? He had wanted to bewitch Ghost and lure him into bed, to drive
him pleasure-mad, to drown him in a sea of silk sheets and feather pillows. It
wasn’t as if he meant to seduce the boy—but might they not offer each other a
night of creature comfort, a night of companionship? Ghost would not have to
lie awake beside his poor drunken friend, pondering fate, bloody births, lost
souls. Arkady would not have to sit up all night tracing useless
veves
by candlelight, hoping for things he might never
attain. Hoping to look up and see the beautiful proud face of his brother
Ashley floating outside the window, begging admission with those eyes. Hoping
to discover a way to hurt Ashley’s lovers, those two lovely dangerous creatures
who would surely destroy him someday. Arkady thought of what those creatures
had done to Ashley. Might that story not win Ghost’s sympathy at least? The
tranquilizing powder had made Ghost’s body somnolent, sapped the strength from
his muscles, but his mind would still be alert.

 
          
Absently
caressing Ghost’s rigid shoulder, Arkady began to tell the tale.

 
          
“They
gave you a bad scare, Ghost, did they not? In the guest room. In the closet.
Ah, but you were snooping. You should never have looked in there—not with your
gift. Not with that shining eye in your heart. They are far too strong, far too
heady
for one who feels things as you do. They are
not even in that room, Ghost. Not tonight, though they will be back in the
morning, or the next morning, or the one after that. Who knows? The Lord—”
Arkady crossed himself with his free hand, upside down then right side up—“the
Lord alone knows where they are tonight.

 
          
What
strange new substances they have swallowed or sniffed or shot into their
perfect ruby veins, or whom they have found to love.

 
          
“Whom
they have found to love.

 
          
“They
leave their essence everywhere they go. It must be dreadfully strong in that
closet where they throw their dirty clothes, the clothes full of their sweat,
their smoke, their sweet clove-scented ectoplasm. Did that drift out at you,
Ghost? Do they know you, perchance? Have you met? Or did they just speak to you
as one lost soul to another? Ah, but you must not be afraid of them. To you
they are as harmless as a forgotten song on an antique record. To you they are
as harmless as a rotting old gravestone. It is me they can hurt. It was Ashley
they could hurt, and whoever they have found to share their deadly ecstasy
tonight.

 
          
“That
is what they want, Ghost. Nay—that is what they need, for they feed upon your
pleasure and your terror and your pain. They must terrify you, as they do the
children who are their victims; they must enter your dreams and give you a
nightmare so horrible that you never awaken from it. But their greatest
pleasure is not to terrify—it is to bewitch. They want you to love them; it
makes the final moment of betrayal sweeter.

 
          
They
must come to you in the flesh and make love with you. They must lure you down
onto some ancient stained mattress, or beneath a silken coverlet, or into an
alley where they will kneel before you in the filth. You must become addicted
to their spit; you must breathe their scent until you are intoxicated.

 
          
“Only
then will they consummate their love for you as they did for Ashley—by sucking
you dry. By taking every drop of your beauty, your youth, the fire that drives
you. By leaving you a husk, a dry, living shell. As they did to my brother
Ashley.

 
          
“I
found him when I returned home from Paris at the end of that long dying winter.
We had been living in a church down by Bayou St. John, an abandoned place.
Ashley hanged himself in the bell tower. He had no choice, truly; Ashley was
born with a healthy dose of the Raventon dramatic flair. He hung there for a
week before I came home. He knew I would be back—I never broke a promise to
Ashley—but he could not wait.

 
          
“When
I cut his body down, I saw why. It was as dry and twisted as a mandrake root.

 
          
Ashley
had been dead seven days, but nothing in him had rotted except his eyes and his
tongue.

 
          
There
was nothing else left to rot they had sucked all his juices out. He rustled in
my arms as I cut the rope, and when I lifted him down and laid him on the floor
of the bell tower, he rattled like a sack full of bones. His mouth was
stretched open; his lips were bloodless, pulled away from his teeth. Teeth that
had gone the color of old ivory. Far back in his head, his tongue lay withered.
His hair was colorless, drifting. And his eyes—the eyes I wanted to die for
when they tilted up to meet mine—those eyes … they were gone. Those eyes were
gone, and Ashley looked at me out of the darkness of his
shrivelled
brain, and his face flaked away when I touched it.

 
          
“His
lovers were still there, living on the top floor of the church, burning incense
to mask the faint smell of Ashley’s decay. For seven days they had let him hang
with his face sifting to dust and his eyes moldering. When I descended from the
bell tower cradling Ashley’s skull the flesh fell away from it as easily as old
crumbling parchment—they were making love on a dirty mattress they had dragged
in. Biting throats, clutching hands, laughing and sobbing with their pleasure.
I sat with Ashley in my arms and waited for them to finish. At last one of them
looked up at me and said It was easy for him, Arkady. As easy as breathing. And
the other one told me, Death is easy. You should know that, Arkady. Death is
easy.”

 
          
Ghost
had been drifting back to sleep, his head pillowed on his arms; dreaming the
story more than hearing it, his mind filling with pictures of the boy’s
withered body on the long-ago roadside, the giant oak tree up on the hill, the
final image of his dream in the car that had frightened him so badly—the twins
lying side by side on the stained mattress, their skin drying and cracking,
their beauty spent. Now he looked up and said sleepily, “Death is easy?”

 
          
Somehow,
Arkady sensed, those words were familiar to Ghost. But he smoothed pale strands
of hair from Ghost’s brow, and Ghost let his head sink back down.

 
          
Perhaps
Ghost really would stay with him tonight. Perhaps Ghost wanted to drown in this
bed. Surely such a thing was possible. Ashley was the beauty of the
Raventons
, to be sure, but Arkady too possessed the high
clear forehead and the sharp proud cheekbones, if not the sparkling burgundy
hair or the unbelievable eyes, those depthless eyes.

 
          
Perhaps
Ghost wanted to sigh in Arkady’s arms, to writhe and moan beneath the
ministration of Arkady’s lips. It had been so very long.

 
          
The
twins could still lure Arkady into their bed on occasion, because they were
beautiful and he was alone. But he hated them for what they had done to Ashley,
and he was afraid of the hold they already had upon him. And there was no one
else. Not until now, not until this nervous magical Ghost-child with the pale
blue eyes, the ragged clothes from some fantastic thrift shop, the translucent
hair that fell across his eyes as he slept.

 
          
“Asleep,
Ghost?” Arkady whispered. “Perhaps not yet.” He bent and kissed the corner of
Ghost’s eye as lightly as he would have plucked a spider from its web to dry
and grind for gris-gris. His tongue flickered across the silken scrap of
Ghost’s eyelashes, then slid down Ghost’s cheek and sought passage between
those exquisite lips.

 
          
Every
nerve in Ghost’s body seemed to come instantly alive, tensing, uncoiling.

 
          
He
flew off the bed backward and landed in front of the door, back pressed flat
against the wood, chin lifted and nostrils flared wide. Even his eyelids seemed
to tremble. His eyes met Arkady’s and locked there, large and seared, aglow
with pale blue fire.

 
          
Arkady
held the look for a long moment. Then he let his gaze flick to the window, and
he lifted one bony shoulder in a tiny, unconcerned shrug.

 
          
“She’ll
die, Ghost. Unless that
foetus
comes out soon, its
growth will be too far gone.

 
          
This
is no vulnerable morsel of meat to be scraped out by any back-alley abortionist
with a curette and a roll of dirty cotton. Try that, and it will rip open her
womb even sooner.

 
          
“No.
You must poison it. Otherwise it will grow, and Ann will die, and perhaps your
precious Steve will die too. Guilt twists a man, Ghost. You cannot protect him
forever. He may bleed his life away in a car crash, or pick a fight with
someone who carries a razor in his boot—the Vieux
Carre
is full of them. Or perhaps a slower death.

 
          
A
pickling of the liver? An insult to the brain? Death can come in a bottle,
Ghost. And I think Steve has already opened that bottle and taken the first
swallow.

 
          
“You
must poison it, Ghost. To save Ann. To save Steve.” Arkady paused, then
delivered the bitter coup de grace. “I know the recipe. I developed it after
Richelle died. I can help you … if I wish.”

 
          
Arkady
twitched the Sheets back. They made a tiny dry rustling sound, like long linen
wrappings falling away from a mummy’s face, like dead moth wings dusting down.

 
          
Ghost
jumped a little at the sound. With both hands he raked his hair, pulling it in
front of his face. Arkady saw him shudder.

 
          
Then
his back straightened, and his shoulders squared, and his eyes flared dark once
and then were as pale as before.

 
          
“Okay,”
he said.

 
          
Those
few steps back to the bed were the worst Ghost had ever taken. He felt the
floorboards under his bare feet, coated with a dry and silken dust. Arkady’s
skin would feel that way against his own. Arkady’s hands would caress his soul;
Arkady’s tongue would explore his brain ….

 
          
He
would not think about it. He would think about singing at the Sacred Yew, with
Steve going wild on guitar. Back when things were simple. That was what he
would do.

 
          
“Okay,”
he said, refusing to hear his own words. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

 
          
He
was onstage now, clutching at the microphone, ready to let his voice flow. But
Arkady’s papery lips clamped over his mouth, sealing it. Arkady’s tongue cleaved
to his, tasting of bitter herbs. Arkady’s dry touch
spidered
down his chest, under his T-shirt.