Lost Souls Read online

  LOST SOULS

  Poppy Z. Brite

  PROLOGUE

  In the spring, families in the suburbs of New Orleans—Metairie, Jefferson, Lafayette—hang wreaths on their front doors. Gay straw wreaths of gold and purple and green, wreaths with bells and froths of ribbons trailing down, blowing, tangling in the warm wind. The children have king cake parties. Each slice of cake is iced with a different sweet, sticky topping—candied cherries and colored sugar are favorites—and the child who finds a pink plastic baby in his slice will enjoy a year of good luck. The baby represents the infant Christ, and children seldom choke on it. Jesus loves little children. The adults buy spangled cat’s-eye masks for masquerades, and other women’s husbands pull other men’s wives to them under cover of Spanish moss and anonymity, hot silk and desperate searching tongues and the wet ground and the ghostly white scent of magnolias opening in the night, and the colored paper lanterns on the veranda in the distance.

  In the French Quarter the liquor flows like milk. Strings of bright cheap beads hang from wrought-iron balconies and adorn sweaty necks. After parades the beads lie scattered in the streets, the royalty of gutter trash, gaudy among the cigarette butts and cans and plastic Hurricane glasses. The sky is purple, the flare of a match behind a cupped hand is gold; the liquor is green, bright green, made from a thousand herbs, made from altars. Those who know enough to drink Chartreuse at Mardi Gras are lucky, because the distilled essence of the town burns in their bellies. Chartreuse glows in the dark, and if you drink enough of it, your eyes will turn bright green.

  Christian’s bar was way down Rue de Chartres, away from the middle of the Quarter, toward Canal Street

  . It was only nine-thirty. No one ever came in until ten, not even on Mardi Gras nights. No one except the girl in the black silk dress, the thin little girl with the short, soft dark hair that fell in a curtain across her eyes. Christian always wanted to brush it away from her face, to feel it trickle through his fingers like rain.

  Tonight, as usual, she slipped in at nine-thirty and looked around for the friends who were never there. The wind blew the French Quarter in behind her, the night air rippling warm down Chartres Street

  as it slipped away toward the river, smelling of spice and fried oysters and whiskey and the dust of ancient bones stolen and violated. When the girl saw Christian standing alone behind the bar, narrow, white, and immaculate with his black hair glittering on his shoulders, she came and hopped onto a bar stool—she had to boost herself—and said, as she did most nights, “Can I have a screwdriver?”

  “Just how old are you, love?” Christian asked, as he did most nights.

  “Twenty.” She was lying by at least four years, but her voice was so soft that he had to listen with his whole cupped ear to hear it, and her arms on the bar were thin and downed with fine blond hairs; the big smudges of dark makeup like bruises around her eyes, the ratty bangs, and the little sandaled feet with their toenails painted orange only made her more childlike. He mixed the drink weak and put two cherries in it. She fished the cherries out with her fingers and ate them one by one, sucking them like candy, before she started sipping her drink.

  Christian knew the girl came to his bar because the drinks were cheap and he would serve them to her with no annoying questions about ID or why a pretty girl wanted to drink alone. She always turned with a start every time the street door opened, and her hand would fly to her throat. “Who are you waiting for?” Christian asked her the first time she came in.

  “The vampires,” she told him.

  She was always alone, even on the last night of Mardi Gras. The black silk dress left her throat and arms bare. Before, she had smoked Marlboro Lights. Christian told her that only virgins were known to smoke those, and she blushed and came in the next night with a pack of Camels. She said her name was Jessy, and Christian only smiled at her joke about the vampires; he didn’t know how much she knew. But she had pretty ways and a sweet shy smile, and she was a tiny brightness in every ashen empty night.

  He certainly wasn’t going to bite her.

  The vampires got into town sometime before midnight. They parked their black van in an illegal space, then got hold of a bottle of Chartreuse and reeled down Bourbon Street

  swigging it by turns, their arms around one another’s shoulders, their hair in one another’s faces. All three had outlined their features in dark blots of makeup, and the larger two had teased their hair into great tangled clumps. Their pockets were stuffed with candy they ate noisily, washing it down with sweet green mouthfuls of Chartreuse. Their names were Molochai, Twig, and Zillah, and they wished they had fangs but had to make do with teeth they filed sharp, and they could walk in sunlight as their great-grandfathers could not. But they preferred to do their roaming at night, and as they roamed unsteadily down Bourbon Street

  , they raised their voices in song. Molochai peeled the wrapper off a HoHo, crammed as much of it into his mouth as he could, and kept singing, spraying Twig with crumbs of chocolate.

  “Give me some,” Twig demanded. Molochai scooped some of the HoHo out of his mouth and offered it to Twig. Twig laughed helplessly, clamped his lips shut and shook his head, finally relented and licked the creamy brown paste off Molochai’s fingers.

  “Vile dogs,” said Zillah. Zillah was the most beautiful of the three, with a smooth, symmetrical, androgynous face, with brilliant eyes as green as the last drop of Chartreuse in the bottle. Only Zillah’s hands gave away his gender; they were large and strong and heavily veined beneath the thin white skin. He wore his nails long and pointed, and he wore his caramel-colored hair tied back with a purple silk scarf. Wisps of the ponytail had escaped, framing the stunning face, the achingly green eyes. Zillah stood a head and a half shorter than Molochai and Twig, but his ice-cold poise and the way his larger companions flanked him told onlookers that Zillah was the absolute leader here.

  Molochai and Twig’s features were like two sketches of the same face done by different artists, one using sharp straight angles, the other working in curves and circles. Molochai was baby-faced, with large round eyes and a wide wet mouth he liked to smear with orange lipstick. Twig’s face was angular and clever; his eyes tracked every movement. But the two were of the same size and shape, and more often than not they walked, or staggered, in step with each other.

  They grinned and bared their teeth at a tall boy in full Nazi uniform who had veered directly into their path. From a distance Molochai and Twig’s filed teeth were unremarkable except for the film of chocolate that webbed them, but some small bloodlust in their eyes made the boy turn away, looking for trouble somewhere else, somewhere vampires would not trouble themselves to go.

  They made their way through the gaudy throngs to the sidewalk, steadying themselves against posters that screamed MEN WILL TURN INTO WOMEN BEFORE YOUR EYES!!!, pictures of blondes with tired breasts and five-o’clock shadows. They stumbled past racks of postcards, racks of T-shirts, bars that opened onto the sidewalk and served drinks to passersby. Overhead, fireworks blossomed and turned the sky purple with their smoke, and the air was thick with smoke and liquor-breath and river-mist. Molochai let his head fall back on Twig’s shoulder and looked up at the sky, and the fireworks dazzled his eyes.

  They left the sleazy lights of Bourbon Street

  behind, swayed left onto dark Conti and right onto Chartres. Soon enough they found a tiny bar with stained-glass windows and a friendly light inside. The sign above the door said CHRISTIAN’S. The vampires staggered in.

  They were the only customers except for a silent little girl sitting at the bar, so they commandeered a table and slammed down another bottle of Chartreuse, talking loudly to each other, then looking at Christian and laughing, shrugging. Hi
s forehead was very high and pale, and his nails were as long and pointed as Zillah’s. “Maybe—” said Molochai, and Twig said, “Ask him.” They both looked at Zillah for approval. Zillah glanced over at Christian and raised a languid eyebrow, then lifted one shoulder in a tiny shrug.

  No one paid any attention to the girl at the bar, although she stared at them ceaselessly, her eyes bright, her lips moist and slightly parted.

  When Christian brought them their tab, Molochai dug deep in his pocket and produced a coin. He did not put the coin in Christian’s hand, but held it up to the light so that Christian might look well at it. It was a silver doubloon, of the same shape and size as those thrown from Mardi Gras parade floats along with the treasure trove of other trinkets—the beads, the bright toys, the sweet sugar candy. But this doubloon was heavier and far, far older than those. Christian could not make out the year; the silver was scarred, tarnished, smudged with Molochai’s sticky fingerprints. But the picture was still clear: the head of a beautiful man with enormous sensuous lips. Lips that would be as red as blood were they not carved in cold, heavy silver. Lips pricked by long, sharp fangs. Below the man’s face, in ornate letters, the word BACCHUS curved.

  “How—how do you come?” Christian stammered.

  Molochai smiled his chocolatey smile. “In peace,” he said. He looked at Zillah, who nodded. Molochai did not take his eyes from Zillah’s as he picked up the empty green-and-gold Chartreuse bottle, broke it against the edge of the table, and drew a razor-edge of glass across the soft skin of his right wrist. A shallow crimson gash opened there, nearly obscene in its brightness. Molochai, still smiling, offered his wrist to Christian. Christian pressed his lips to the gash, closed his eyes, and sucked like a baby, tasting the Garden of Eden in the drops of Chartreuse that mingled with Molochai’s blood.

  Twig watched for a few moments, his eyes dark, his face lost, almost bewildered. Then he picked up Molochai’s left arm and bit at the skin of the wrist until the blood flowed there too.

  Jessy watched with eyes wide and disbelieving. She saw her dignified friend Christian’s mouth smeared with blood, trembling with passion. She saw Twig’s teeth at Molochai’s wrist, saw the flesh part and the blood flow into Twig’s mouth. Most of all she saw the lovely impassive face of Zillah looking on, his brilliant eyes like green jewels set in moonstone. And her stomach clenched, and her mouth watered, and a secret message travelled from the softest fold between her legs to the deepest whorl of her brain—The vampires! The VAMPIRES!

  Jessy stood up very quietly, and then the bloodlust she had wanted so badly was upon her. She leapt, tore Molochai’s arm away from Twig, and tried to fasten her lips on the gash. But Molochai turned furiously on her and batted her away, hard across the face, and she felt the pain in her lip before she tasted the blood there, her own dull blood in her mouth. Molochai and Twig and even kind Christian stood staring at her, bloodied and wild-eyed, like dogs startled at a kill, like interrupted lovers.

  But as she backed away from them, a pair of warm arms went around her from behind and a pair of large strong hands caressed her through the silk dress, and a voice whispered, “His blood is sticky-sweet anyway, my dear—I can give you something nicer.”

  She never knew Zillah’s name, or how she ended up with him on a blanket in the back room of Christian’s bar. She only knew that her blood was smeared across his face, that his fingers and his tongue explored her body more thoroughly than any had before, that once she thought he was inside her and she was inside him at once, and that his sperm smelled like altars, and that his hair drifted across her eyes as she went to sleep.

  It was one of the rare nights that Molochai, Twig, and Zillah spent apart. Zillah slept on the blanket with Jessy, hidden between cases of whiskey, cupping her breasts in his hands. Molochai slept in Christian’s room above the bar with Christian and Twig cuddled close to him, their mouths still working sleepily at his wrists.

  Below, far away on Bourbon Street

  , the mounted police rode their high-stepping steeds through the crowd, chanting, “Leave the street. Mardi Gras is officially over. Leave the street. Mardi Gras is officially over,” each one ready with a sap for a drunken skull. And the sun came up on the Wednesday morning trash in the gutters, the butts and the cans and the gaudy, forgotten beads, and the vampires slept with their lovers, for they preferred to do their roaming at night.

  Molochai, Twig, and Zillah left town the next evening after the sun went down, so they never knew that Jessy was pregnant. None of them had seen a child of their race being born, but they all knew that their mothers had died in childbirth. They would not have stayed around.

  Jessy disappeared for nearly a month. When she came back to Christian’s bar, it was to stay for good. Christian gave her the richest food he could afford and let her wash glasses when she insisted on earning her keep. Sometimes, remembering Molochai’s blood smeared around Christian’s mouth, remembering Zillah’s fragrant sperm inside her, Jessy crept into bed with Christian and sat on top of him until he would make love to her. He would not bite her, and for that she beat at his face with her fists until he slapped her and told her to stop. Then she moved quietly over him. He watched her grow gravid through the sweltering oily summer months, lazily shaped her tight distended belly and her swollen breasts with his hands.

  When her time came, Christian poured whiskey down her throat like water. It wasn’t enough. Jessy screamed until she could scream no more, and her eyes showed only the whites with their silvery rims, and great gouts of blood poured from her. When the baby slipped out of Jessy, its head turned and its eyes met Christian’s: confused, intelligent, innocent. A shred of deep pink tissue was caught in the tiny mouth, softening between the working gums.

  Christian separated the baby from Jessy, wrapped it in a blanket, and held it up to the window. If its first sight was of the French Quarter, it would know its way around those streets forever—should it ever need such knowledge. Then he knelt between Jessy’s limp legs and looked at the poor torn passage that had given him so many nights of idle pleasure. Ruined now, bloody.

  So much blood to go to waste.

  Christian licked his lips, licked them again.

  Christian’s bar was closed for ten nights. Christian’s car, a silver Bel Air that had served him well for years, headed north. He drove up any road that looked anonymous, along any highway he knew he would not remember.

  Little Nothing was a lovely baby, a sugar-candy confection of a baby with enormous dark blue eyes and a mass of golden-brown hair. Someone would love him. Someone human, away from the South, away from the hot night air and the legends. Nothing might escape the hunger for blood, might be happy, might be whole.

  Toward dawn, in a Maryland suburb full of fine graceful houses, dark grassy lawns, long sleek cars in sweeping driveways, a tall thin figure draped in heavy black clothes stooped, set a bundle down on a doorstep, and went slowly away without looking back. Christian was remembering the last night of Mardi Gras, and the taste of blood and altars was in his mouth.

  The baby Nothing opened his eyes and saw darkness, soft and velvety, pricked with sparkling white light. His mouth drew down; his eyebrows came together in a frown. He was hungry. He could not see the basket that cradled him, could not read the note in spidery handwriting pinned to his blanket: His name is Nothing. Care for him and he will bring you luck. He lay in the basket snug as a king cake baby, pink and tiny as the infant Christ in plastic, and he knew only that he wanted light and warmth and food, as a baby will. And he opened his mouth wide and showed his soft pink gums and yelled. He yelled long and loud until the door opened and warm hands took him in.

  PART ONE

  Fifteen

  Years

  Later

  1

  The night wind felt wonderful in Steve’s hair. The Thunderbird was huge. It always drove like a fucking monster, but tonight Steve felt as if he were piloting some great steamboat down a magic river, a river of shimmering asphalt
banked by pine forest and thick, rioting expanses of kudzu. They were somewhere far outside Missing Mile, somewhere on the highway that led up to the Roxboro electric power plant and, beyond that, the North Carolina-Virginia border.

  Ghost was asleep beside him, his head hung out the window on the passenger side, his pale hair whipping in the wind, his face washed in moonlight. The bottle of whiskey was propped between Ghost’s legs, three-quarters empty, in danger of tipping despite the limp hand that curled around it.

  Steve leaned over and grabbed the bottle, took a healthy swig. “The T-bird has been drinking,” he sang into the wind, “yes, the T-bird has been drinking… not me.”

  “Um,” said Ghost. “What? What?”

  “Forget it,” Steve told him. “Go back to sleep. Have another drink.” He drove faster. He’d wake Ghost on the drive home, to keep him company. Now he wanted Ghost to stay asleep awhile longer; there was bad business ahead. Dangerous business. Or so Steve liked to think of it.

  Ghost took the bottle back and stared at the label, trying to focus on it. His pale blue eyes swam, narrowed, sharpened only slightly. “White Horse,” he read. “Look, Steve, it’s White Horse whiskey. Did you know Dylan Thomas was drinking at a pub called the White Horse the night he died?”

  “You told me. That’s why we bought it.” Steve crossed his fingers and tried to will Ghost back to sleep.

  “He drank eighteen straight whiskeys,” Ghost said, awed.

  “You drank eighteen straight whiskeys.”

  “No wonder my brain is sailing with the moon. Sing to me, Steve. Sing me back to sleep.”

  Just at that moment they crossed a bridge that seemed to bow under the weight of the old brown T-bird, and Steve saw moonlight shimmering on black waters, so he raised his voice in the first song that came to mind: “Silver southern moon … for ten years I thought I was born of you…. Silver moon, I’ll be back someday….”