Lost Souls Read online

  High Praise for

  POPPY Z. BRITE

  “A Major New Voice in Horror Fiction!”

  —Booklist

  and her acclaimed novel

  Lost Souls

  “Poppy Z. Brite combines the sensibilities of a poet with the unflinching eye of a surgeon.… Not merely a rising literary star, she is a full-fledged supernova who may well banish paler constellations and make us all far too fond of the night.… This young writer takes us to places few will have the courage to visit and none would dare tour alone. Brite’s vision is disturbingly dark, deliciously erotic, sweetly savage, and uniquely her own.”

  —Dan Simmons

  “If there is a novelist capturing the dark literary decadence of this waning millennium, that sorcerous poet is Poppy Z. Brite.… I can think of few other fantasists who so dangerously evoke the sensual allure of pure evil.”

  —Edward Bryant, Locus

  “Poppy Z. Brite strikes out into new uncharted land with a bold original voice; if you don’t like her stories, then you haven’t read her.”

  —Kathryn Ptacek, Women of Darkness

  “Brite creates a convincing, evocative atmosphere in which youthful alienation meets gothic horror.… Lost Souls will surely be devoured by genre aficionados.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The strengths of Lost Souls are evident from the start. Brite has a mastery of atmosphere and setting … her prose borders on the poetic, her dialogue rings of authenticity, giving a satisfying blend of surrealistic description and gritty realism.”

  —Today Newspapers

  “Brite remakes the language of horror with a bloodlust that reduces all competitors to dust.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “With its rich tapestries of decadence and forays into subculture, Lost Souls does infinitely more than infuse fresh life into the vampire theme. It also heralds the emergence of an author of immense talent, whose arrival should be rejoiced.”

  —Brian Hodge, author of The Darker Saints

  Also by Poppy Z. Brite

  DRAWING BLOOD

  WORMWOOD

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1992 by Poppy Z. Brite

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

  The trademarks Dell® and Abyss® are registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76828-5

  v3.1

  For Michael Spencer and Monica Kendrick, the best magicians I know

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part One - Fifteen Years Later Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part Two Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue - Fifty Years Later

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Very special thanks are due to Monica C. Kendrick. Two of the characters in Lost Souls, Arkady and Ashley Raventon, are her brainchildren. She has kindly allowed them to make a guest appearance here.

  Other thanks go to the brilliant and ravishing Mr. John Skipp, the urbane and witty Mr. Dan Simmons, and the awesomely generous and talented Mr. Harlan Ellison. These fine writers and even finer people are my trio of patron saints, and I love them very much.

  My agent, Richard Curtis, and the good people at Richard Curtis Associates; my editor, Jeanne Cavelos; David B. Silva and The Horror Show—I still miss it and always will; to another excellent writer and friend, Brian Hodge, for believing in Lost Souls from the beginning; Doug Winter for inducing me to write the damn thing in the first place; Ed Bryant and Tom Monteleone for kind words and deeds; everyone at Iniquities.

  Craig Spector, Lisa Wimberger, Linda Marotta, Kathryn Ptacek, A. J. Mayhew, J. R. McHone, Jodie and Steve Forrest, Pat Johnson, John Gillespie, John Hughes; Brad and Forrest Cahoon and John Ross for help with temperamental computers; all the fetuses in the Nantahala Street Compound for tearing me away from my work and giving me sustenance to continue it; Paul, the handsomest Ramone-clone in New Orleans, for forcing that first shot of Chartreuse down my throat.

  Lastly, ultimate thank-you’s to my mother, Connie Burton Brite; Christopher DeBarr, my home sweetie; my father, Bob Brite; and to the Mysterious Multitude for just being their ectoplasmic selves.

  The prologue of Lost Souls was published in the Summer 1988 issue of The Horror Show under the title “A Taste of Blood and Altars.”

  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—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.