LOST SOULS.

by 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. His 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

CHAPTER 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...."

"That's not the way it goes. I should know, I wrote it." Ghost's voice was fading. "Oh, silver southern moon... tell me your sweet lies, then let me drown deep in your eyes...."

"Somedaaay," Steve joined in. He and the whiskey sang Ghost to sleep, the whiskey with its somnolent amber song, Steve with a voice that cracked when he tried to hit the high notes. Behind them the river passed in silence; the lowest-hanging branches brushed the water, and the leaves rotted on the bough. The moon spread like butter on the black river, and Ghost's eyes closed; with his head pillowed on the hump between the seats, he began to dream.

They bypassed Roxboro, but Steve saw the power plant on Lake Hyco, lit up all glowing green and white like a weird birthday cake, its million pipes and wires and glass insulators and metal gewgaws reflected in the lake. On the way back, if Ghost was awake, they'd drive up there to a hill Steve knew and look out over the pastures and the lake and all the glittering Milky Way. An hour or so after passing out Ghost was usually raring to go again. His dreams gave him new strength. Or made him laugh or cry, or sometimes scared the shit out of him.

Steve put his hand on Ghost's head, smoothed back wisps of hair from flickering closed eyes. He wondered what was unfolding beneath his hand, beneath the thin bone, inside the orb of ivory that cradled Ghost's weird brain. Who was born and murdered and resurrected inside that skull? What walked behind Ghost's eyelids, what lithe secret phantoms tapped Ghost's shoulder and made him whimper deep in his throat?

Ghost often dreamed of things that were going to happen, or of things that had already happened that he couldn 't possibly know about. These premonitions could come when he was awake too, but the ones that came to him in dreams seemed to be the most potent. More often than not they were also the most cryptic. He had known when his grandmother was going to die, but then so had she. Though surely painful, the knowledge had given them the time they needed to say goodbye.

Goodbye for a while, anyway. Ghost had inherited his grandmother's house in Missing Mile, where he and Steve lived now. Steve had spent plenty of time in that house as a kid, watching Miz Deliverance mix herbs or cut out cookies with her heart-shaped cutters, building forts in the backyard, sleeping over in Ghost's room. Even now, five years after her death, Steve sometimes thought he felt the familiar presence of Miz Deliverance in a room, or just around a corner. He imagined this was something Ghost took for granted.

Suddenly unnerved by the prospect of touching Ghost's dreams, Steve put his hand back on the wheel.

They drove past a graveyard full of softly rotting monuments and flowers, an abandoned railyard, a barbecue shack whose sign advertised GRAND OPENING EVERY FRI AND SAT NITE. A rabbit darted across the road. Steve braked, and Ghost's head rolled back and forth on his thin neck-so fragile, so fragile. These days Steve was paranoid about something happening to Ghost. Ghost was spacy, sure, but he could take care of himself. Still, Steve couldn't help watching out for him, especially now that Ghost was the only person he felt like spending time with.

They had other friends, sure, but those guys mostly wanted to go out drinking and smoke weed and talk about Wolfpack football at the state university over in Raleigh. All of which was okay, even though the Wolfpack was always pretty shitty, but Ghost was different. Ghost didn't give a flying fuck about football, Ghost could drink everybody else under the table and not get a damn bit weirder, and Ghost understood all the shit that had gone down over the past few months. The shit with Ann.

Ghost never asked Steve why he didn't forget about Ann and get himself a new girlfriend; Ghost understood why Steve didn't want to see Ann or any other girl, not for months and months, maybe not ever.

Not until he could trust himself, anyway. Right now he did not deserve the company of women. However lonely or horny he got, he had it coming to him for what he had done to Ann.

He played with strands of Ghost's hair as he drove, winding them around his fingers, marvelling at their fineness, their silvery-gold luster. Just to feel the difference, he ran his hand through his own coarse hair, hair the color of a crow's wing, hair that stood up in wild loops and cowlicks. His hair was dirty, and he noticed that Ghost 's was too. Steve hadn't been taking care of himself-he'd gone days without a shower and over a month without washing his clothes; he'd been late for his job at the record store three times last week; he was putting away a twelve-pack of Bud every day or two-but he hoped it wasn't rubbing off on Ghost. There was such a thing as being too damn sympathetic. Steve's hand felt greasy. He wiped it on his T- shirt.

They were here. Steve had no idea where, but he saw what he wanted: the faded light of an ancient Pepsi machine sitting outside a fishin'-and-huntin' store, casting dim red and blue shadows in the dirt of the parking lot. Steve swung the T-bird in and killed the ignition. Ghost's head had slipped onto Steve's knee, and he eased out from under it. There was a little dark spot on the knee of Steve's jeans. Ghost's spit, Ghost's drunken sleeping spit. Steve rubbed it into the cloth, then absently put his finger in his mouth. A faint taste of whiskey and molasses... and what was he doing sucking someone else's spit off his finger? Didn't matter. Ghost was lost deep in dreams. Time to go to work.

Steve fished in the backseat. Cassette cases-so that was where Ann's damn Cocteau Twins tape had ended up. Steve had always hated it anyway, the girl 's feathery voice that was supposed to be so angelic and the ethereal -seasick wall of sound. Empty food bags and a veritable sea of beer cans. Finally he dug out his special tool, a length of coat hanger bent into a hook at one end. He wondered if he ought to pull the T-bird up so it was hiding the front of the Pepsi machine. No, he decided; anybody out driving this time of night is probably on business just as shady as mine.

With a last glance at Ghost, Steve knelt, fed the wire into the coin-return slot of the machine, and wiggled it around until he felt it catch. He tugged gently and seconds later was blessed by a shower of silver. Steve scooped the quarters, dimes, and nickels out of the dirt, shoved them into his pockets, hustled back to the car, and got the hell out of the parking lot.

Twenty fast miles later, Steve had the radio on a rock station and Ghost was trying to decide whether to rejoin the living. "Are we still in North Carolina?"

"Yeah." Steve turned Led Zeppelin down and waited for the stories. Ghost always told Steve his dreams, and they were sometimes coherent, sometimes nonsensical and lovely, and almost invariably a little frightening. Ghost sat up and stretched, working out his sleep cramps. Steve saw a flash of belly where Ghost's sweatshirt parted from his tie-dyed pants. Pale skin, golden hair sparse and curly. Ghost looked out the window for several miles, his brow furrowed, his eyes puzzled. That meant he was remembering. Steve waited, and Ghost began, haltingly, to speak.

"When they were young... they were the world's darlings. The world's opinion meant everything to them, even though they tried to pretend it meant nothing. Their town was even grayer and muddier when they pranced along the streets after midnight, and the rooftops bent to kiss their dyed hair. They wandered through the shops putting their delicate fingerprints on the window glass and china, touching anything colorful or sweet, pinching things between thumb and forefinger as if to grasp the town in both hands would dirty them. Sully them." Ghost rolled "sully" over his tongue as if it were scuppernong wine; in his thick Carolina voice the word took on a dark, rich flavor. "Sully them. The big boys at their school shouted things at them, black dirty things that stank of toilet-wall scrawls and smeared basins. But those boys never fought them because they knew the twins were magic. Everyone knew the twins would go away to the city someday, where they could pick rhinestones out of the cigarette sludge in the gutter, and the moon would be as aching and vivid as neon cheese in blue velvet sky. And they did.

They went to New Orleans."