Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (11 page)

 
          
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 heat.

 
          
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.

 
          
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 dragged.

 
          
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
Tshirts
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.