Lost Souls

  “Jesus wept, are you sure? How about I help you to your room? Don’t you even want to brush your teeth?”

  “No. I need a drink to kill the taste. I must have eaten something bad.”

  “I’m meeting a girl. Why don’t you come and have a drink with us?”

  At the mention of alcohol, Christian had to suppress a moan. The idea of having a drink with David and his girl made him feel terribly lonely. He could never do such a thing. And besides, now he was ravenous.

  They walked downstairs together, and David headed up Conti toward the lights of Bourbon Street. Christian checked the alley, but of course by now Wallace was gone. All that lingered was a breath of whiskey and fear. He would meet Wallace Creech again, though, with his old tired eyes and his silver cross. Christian knew it, and he smiled, feeling the night gather around him. He slipped away toward the river.

  * * *

  Nothing sat on his bed, naked and cross-legged, the quilt pooled around his waist and a candle before him. He cupped his hands around the flame and kept them there until his palms began to sweat. Then he raised his hands to his face and rubbed the heat onto his cheeks. He had his music turned up loud—Tom Waits, loud and splendidly drunk tonight, wishing he were in New Orleans. Nothing wished he were too.

  He looked toward the window. Outside, he could see a few lights: other windows in other houses, more houses beyond; houses with well-kept lawns and shade trees, like the one he lived in; houses with swing sets and poured concrete driveways and half-baths and redwood sundecks; streets travelled by Volvos and Toyotas picking the kids up from day care, going to the supermarket, the health club, the mall, or, if they were bored enough, the liquor store. Suburbs, stretching forever or until the end of Maryland, whichever came first. Nothing shivered, then swigged from the White Horse bottle next to his bed. He had refilled it from the supply in his parents’ liquor cabinet, watering down their bottle, but now it was nearly empty again.

  He kept looking toward the window. Most of the lights had gone out. He shivered again.

  Christian still wore a cloak, long and black and lined with silk, whenever he went out. Old habits died hard, if they ever died at all. The night had cooled. A black iron railing under Christian’s hand was warm, still saturated with the heat of the day, but a dark-smelling breeze wound its way up from the river, brushing Christian’s face, reviving him. Now he had nearly forgotten the burning in his stomach and the vomiting that had made his throat bloody and raw.

  His step quickened. His boot heels clocked along the sidewalk. He fell to wondering how many times he had walked along these ways, how infinitesimally his steps had worn down the sidewalks of these old streets, these exotically named, haunted streets—Ursulines, Bienville, Decatur. He wondered how much of his substance he had left here, how much of his substance was made up of the dust of these streets.

  There had always been New Orleans. Christian had lived in other places, far away across sunless seas, places older and darker and just as strange, with ghosts aplenty. But where else did slave spirits still lament in the Royal Street house of sadistic Madame Lalaurie, where else could one still smell the lingering sweat of a slave woman chained to a stove all the years of her life? Where else did crows flap over the crumbling ruins of St. Louis Cemetery and settle, inky and baleful of eye, on a tomb slashed with hundreds of red X’s—X’s in faded crimson chalk, X’s still fresh and glistening, X’s for voodoo curses, X’s to invoke the wrath of Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen who had stayed young forever?

  Christian passed a dark doorway. Inside, pale shapes moved through dull blue light. He remembered when this hole-in-the-wall had been a jazz club, when bright brassy music floated out late at night and spiralled up to the sky, when smoky-skinned women with ripe lips and red dresses stood outside smiling dark smiles at passersby. Once he had seen Louis Armstrong standing there on the sidewalk with his shirtsleeves rolled up, talking to a crowd of friends.

  Christian remembered the slow laughter, the white eyes that shone out of faces blue-black with sweat, the flasks of illicit liquor raw enough to burn a hole in the guts of even Molochai, Twig, or Zillah. Now the figures that waited uneasily on the sidewalk were as white as white could be, with eyes smudged black and ripped black clothes, little ghosts, like photonegatives of the dusky dancers who had once swirled all night to bright jazz. Now the music that drifted out of the doorway and up toward the moon was sparse and dark and strange, the anthem of all the lost children who began their lives at night, when the bars opened and the music began to play.

  Right now it was sainted Bauhaus, the pale long-boned gods of this crowd, doing “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” The eyeliner eyes glazed and the black lipstick lips moved in time with the words, and the children danced slowly, for their blood was thin, and they were under the spell of the DJ and the music and the night.

  Christian went in. As he passed the bar, he heard a girl say, “God, how tall is that guy?” He turned but could not search out her eyes. He rose like a narrow, pale beacon above most of the children in the club, and he could look down on leather-clad, studded shoulders, on earlobes hung heavy with chains and crucifixes and tiny silver skulls, on heads of hair dyed every unnatural color possible—blue-black, orange, red, white. The club smelled of sweat and melting hair mousse and hot leather, all underlaid with the sweet, spicy smell of clove cigarettes. A veil of smoke twisted gently around Christian’s shoulders.

  He stood against the back wall, not smoking, not drinking, just watching the children move, watching their faces lift and their hands flicker in the blue light. A boy came up to him and said, “Will you watch my leather?” When Christian nodded, the boy dumped the jacket on a chair near Christian and danced back into the crowd, lithe and T-shirted, his thin arms raised above his head. These children trusted one another; the adult world was obtuse and threatening, but in one another they had absolute faith. Still, a leather jacket was nothing to be left unattended. Each one was an individual masterpiece marked by its owner with intricate arrangements of studs and safety pins, arcane band logos, patches and chains.

  Bela Lugosi was still dead. The singer’s voice was low and smooth and insidious as throat cancer. Christian imagined him gaunt and bone-white, writhing onstage. When the song was over, the boy danced back and slung his jacket over his shoulders. He offered Christian a cigarette and lit it for him. Christian inhaled once: a clove, tasting of the Orient and ash, its paper sugared. Then he held it between two long fingers and let it burn, raising it to his lips occasionally, pretending to smoke. The taste nauseated him; all tastes nauseated him save one. And now he was so hungry, so thirsty.

  When the boy cupped his hand around his mouth and went on tiptoe to shout something in Christian’s ear—his name, perhaps, though Christian never caught it—Christian laid his hand flat against the small of the boy’s back. Through the T-shirt damp with sweat, the boy’s skin was hot, alive. Christian felt the little ridges of the spine through the thin cloth. The boy looked at Christian for a moment, his eyes darker than before. Then he smiled and moved so that his hip was touching Christian’s. Their hipbones met and spoke to each other in a secret bone language. The boy’s smile was heartbreakingly sweet.

  “Mind-eraser,” the boy shouted when they were at the bar. Christian paid for the concoction. It was the drink of a child alcoholic, a sweet fizz with a deadly bite. “Share with me,” the boy offered, holding up the cup. There were two straws in it.

  “No,” Christian said, remembering the nausea, imagining how Molochai, Twig, and Zillah would howl. “You have it.”

  For a moment he thought he heard them laughing raucously behind him, thought he saw them from the corner of his eye: three clumps of hair, three smudged faces. When he turned, there were only three girls in leather dresses giggling and staring at him. Christian turned back to the bar, but the boy was sharing his mind-eraser with the girl on his left. The girl’s teased red hair tickled the boy’s face, and Christian saw him laugh and brush strands of it
away.

  But when the drink was gone, the girl went off on the arm of a skinhead, and the boy turned to Christian. “Do you want to go somewhere?”

  The air outside was amazingly cool and fresh after the haze of smoke and liquor in the club, and the boy stood still for a few seconds, gazing up at the stars, breathing deeply. He smiled at Christian. “It’s nice. Let’s go down to the river.”

  As they wandered down to the river’s edge, Christian watched the boy, saw the ripe shine of his eyes and mouth in the dark, the softness of the blond hair that was cut short at the sides and tumbled in a pale cascade down the boy’s back, the grace of the boy’s drunken hands and the unconcerned, achingly lithe motion of his hips, the soft place under his jaw where his pulse beat. He smelled the leather and the clean sweat and soap and skin of the boy, and he smelled the French Quarter around them, the spice and the garbage, the grainy golden smell of beer, the deep brown fish smell of the river.

  The water shone dark and still tonight. Near its edge, the boy spread his jacket and pulled Christian down with him. Their tongues melted together. The boy’s spit was as sour and sweet as wine. Christian sucked at the boy’s mouth, let the spit flow down his throat, warming him, awakening his hunger even more.

  The boy twisted and stretched under him, hugging him close to bony childish chest and soft thin skin, and then the boy sat up and pulled his T-shirt over his head. The moonlight made him a creature of white and silver, striped dark with jutting ribs. He slipped back into his leather. “I like to feel it against my skin,” he explained shyly.

  Christian held the boy close, cradled him, kissed his throat. The boy moaned very softly when he felt the first touch of the long needle-sharp teeth that curved over Christian’s lips now, drawn out by the night and the smell of the river and the delicious beauty of the boy in his arms.

  The boy twisted his head to look at Christian. His eyes were big in his thin face, and very dark. “What are you?” he asked.

  Christian was silent. But his teeth had pricked the boy’s skin, and the first faint scent of blood reached him.

  “Are you a vampire?”

  Christian stroked the boy’s hair back from his forehead, kissed the side of the boy’s face tenderly, flicking the tip of his tongue across the smooth skin.

  “Make me into one too,” said the boy. “Please? I want to be one. I want to walk at night with you and fall in love and drink blood. Kill me. Make me into a vampire too. Bite me. Take me with you.”

  Christian nipped the boy’s throat gently, not breaking the skin this time. He ran his hands along the length of the boy’s body under the jacket, caressed his smooth bare chest, slipped one hand beneath the belt of the boy’s jeans and found molten trembling heat there. The boy’s back arched; he made a low gasping sound. Christian’s tongue found the tender spot under the jaw, and he sank his teeth in. The boy whimpered and went rigid in his arms. The raw yolky taste of life spilled into Christian’s mouth, bubbling out of the boy fresh and strong.

  Christian eased the boy’s body to the ground, held him, and sucked. The taste was all he remembered, all he dreamed about, all he would ever need. The boy pressed himself up against Christian. His hands found the long black hair that spilled down over Christian’s shoulders and tore at it in a passion born of pain.

  Then suddenly Christian’s vision blossomed red, black, red again, great gauzy flowers of light and darkness that blotted out the French Quarter, the river, the boy’s face. He clasped the boy more tightly, and their bodies locked together in a final wash of ecstasy, Christian’s belly warming and filling, the boy beginning to die. The boy’s sperm flooded warm over Christian’s fingers. Christian brought his hand up to his lips and sucked at that too. The two tastes mingling in his mouth, creamy and delicate and bitter and salty, raw as life, were almost too exquisite to bear.

  When the boy’s veins ran dry and his hair and hands trailed limply on the wet ground, Christian picked him up and held him like a baby, gazing into the face gone paler than before, the rapturous half-closed eyes. For several minutes he held the boy, and then he turned his cold eyes to the cold moon, and something passed between them, between Christian and the moon, something as ancient and implacable as the tides, as the distances between the stars.

  And had the moon been able to look into Christian’s eyes, it would have seen that Christian did not love what he had done, but now he was no longer hungry. He was no longer sick and cold. The drinking of a life left him a little less alone than he had been before, and if the boy had died thinking he would rise again as one with Christian, that could not be helped. It was kinder to let the children die believing as they did. He could not turn the boy into one of his kind any more than the boy could have bitten him and turned him human. They were of separate races, races that were close enough to mate but still as far away from each other as dusk and dawn. But the dead slept, and did not know.

  Christian kissed the white forehead and eased the empty little body into the river. The weight of the leather dragged it down, and for a moment Christian saw it hanging beneath the surface, limp and cold as a dream. Then it was gone.

  6

  Nothing cupped his hands around the candle again. He felt the heat biting into his palms, the bright point of the flame embedding itself in his eyes. When he looked away, yellow light burst out of the darkness and melted across his vision. He knuckled his fists against his eyes and rubbed hard.

  The candleholder, an ornate thing of black iron as fluted and curlicued as a balcony in some exotic city, tipped and spilled. Only when the hot wax touched his foot did he realize that something was wrong. The flame had begun to lick at the quilt. Small tongues of fire shot up, blackening the bright cloth, dazzling Nothing’s eyes. He watched the flames for several seconds, caught in their hot thrall, as still as a boy drugged. Then, slowly, he put Out his hand to touch them.

  The pain yanked him out of his trance. He grabbed a dirty T-shirt off the floor and threw it over the flames, beat at them, smothered them. Then, cautiously, he lifted the shirt and examined the mess. There was a large black-edged hole in the quilt, and the room was filled with the smell of charred cloth. It smelled almost like burnt marshmallows, but he couldn’t say he had been toasting marshmallows in his room; that would be pushing things too far.

  “Fuck,” he said softly, without conviction. He would catch hell for burning the quilt, but he couldn’t make himself care. His father’s impotent anger, his mother’s puzzled eyes held no dread for him, only a dull guilt. A sadness that he dismissed as stupid.

  If his parents watched him with bewilderment and a little fear, if they seemed happier when he asked to be excused from supper and shut himself in his room, that was all right with Nothing. He was strange to his parents, and they were incomprehensible to him. He rejected their world. There was not a thing in it that touched him, not a thing he could claim as his own. Sometimes he wondered whether there was a place for him outside the elaborate juju of his room, whether there was anyone in the world who would belong to him, whether he could ever belong to anyone. Who would want him? Not his parents, for sure. He had never belonged to them. They should never have taken him in from the doorstep that cold dawn fifteen years ago.

  Nothing pulled the quilt around him again, picked at the edges of the burn. They didn’t know he knew about that. Long ago they had told him he was adopted, making it all sound proper and respectable, watching him for signs of childish trauma. Maybe the knowledge that he was not of their blood assuaged their guilt when they saw their son looking at them and knew that he had caught the distance in their faces. Maybe then they were able to justify their longing for a normal son who would keep his hair brushed out of his eyes, who would be elected student council president instead of sitting in his strange bedroom reading strange books, who would bring home little fresh-faced girlfriends in clean skirts and pink blouses. Maybe they looked at him and thought, We did not make this creature out of our seed. He is not our mistake. And they were
right.

  They would never show him the adoption papers. They said he had been left at the orphanage as a newborn, that his parentage was unknown. But one day in early June, when he was twelve, he brought home an end-of-term progress report from school:

  Jason is a highly intelligent child. His achievements in areas where he chooses to apply himself, such as art and creative writing, are considerable. However, he seems unable to relate well to the other children; his remoteness and his apparent determination to be “different” keep him from becoming a successful member of the classroom community. Due to this, though all his marks are above average, I cannot call his passage through the sixth grade a fully satisfactory one.

  Yours,

  Geraldine Clemmons

  Two or three years later he could have laughed. But all through his sixth-grade year he had had no real friends, no one who would come to his house and play games of pretend in the woods, no one who offered to trade sandwiches at lunchtime or asked him to one of the boy-girl parties that were beginning to be all the rage. Through the girls’ thin T-shirts he saw their sore budding breasts. When he undressed for gym with the other boys, he tried to look at their bodies without seeming to look. On some of them he noticed those same fearfully secret hairs he had begun to find upon himself.

  He could not laugh at Mrs. Clemmons’s stupid progress report because he had begun to know how alone he was. All through his childhood he had amused himself without really thinking about it—reading, playing alone or with neighborhood children, never noticing that they were uncomfortable with the stories he liked to make up, that they seldom came back more than two or three times.

  But at twelve he became aware of himself, painfully so. He became aware that he did not know who he was. He dreamed often of a strange boisterous family who laughed all the time and cuddled him and took him along wherever they went. He discovered how to masturbate, thinking at first that it was something he had made up. Then he connected it with things he had read, and he learned how to turn it into a highly sensual experience, biting himself at first gently and then harder, thinking of other children in his class, imagining how it would be to hold them, taste them, feel their flesh between his teeth. It did not seem strange that he thought about these things.