Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls Read Online Free PDF Page A

Before
morning, he thought, its blood would freeze in the cracks of the asphalt.
                 On
his razor-scarred, wax-scabbed desk before him lay a picture postcard. The
design on its front was multicolored and abstract. There were splotches of deep
lipstick pink, streaks of sea green and storm gray, flecks of gold embossed in
thin bright leaves.
                 He
picked up his fountain pen with the graceful heart-shaped nib, dipped its
delicate tip into his bottle of ink (pen and ink having been stolen from the
art room at school), and wrote a few spidery lines on the roes-sage side of the
postcard.
                 Then
the boy stretched his legs under the desk and with the bare toes of both feet
grasped the bottle he had hidden there. The liquor inside was a darker amber
than he was used to, and when he took a swig, there was a sharp taste of smoke
behind the familiar musky burn that hurt his throat. He swallowed the whiskey,
licked his lips to wet them with liquor-essence and his clear spit. Then he
picked up the postcard, brought it to his mouth, gave it a whiskey tongue-kiss,
kissed it as hungrily as he had ever dreamed of kissing the sweetest, richest
mouth. And he picked up the pen again and signed his name: Nothing.
                 His
capital N and the loop of his g swooped like kites’ tails. His ‘t’ was a dagger
thrusting down. He took another swig of his parents’ Johnnie Walker and
realized he could already feel the familiar half-queasy anticipation of
drunkenness in his stomach, the floating dizziness in his head. He was getting
drunk on two shots of whiskey. Evidently the shit from his parents’ liquor cabinet was stronger than the shit his friends poured
into empty Pepsi bottles and passed around in cars going too fast on the
highway outside town.
                 He
looked at the postcard, frowned at the signature, Nothing drying dull and
black, wishing he’d signed it in blood. Maybe it wasn’t too late. With the
pen’s tip he jabbed at his wrist until a bead of blood appeared, bright red
against his pale thin skin, with a prick of light from the lamp shining in it. He
signed his name again, Nothing in blood, tracing over the black letters with
scarlet. The ink ran into the blood, and the whole thing dried rusty
brown-black, the color of an old scab. The results did not altogether
disappoint him.
                 His
blood made a trickling path down the inside of his forearm, staining the fine
invisible hairs, covering some of his old scars, leaving some of their
razor-tracery exposed. He licked the blood away. It smudged his lips sticky,
and he smiled at himself in the window’s reflection. The night-Nothing in the
glass smiled back. The boy in the window had the same long sheaf of dyed black
hair, the same pointed chin, the same almond-shaped dark eyes—but his smile was
colder, far colder.
                 Nothing
turned off the light and watched the reflection of his bedroom click out of
existence, watched the cold night fill the panes. He lay on his bed and watched
the stars and planets glowing on his ceiling behind the layers of black fishnet
he had hung up. He’d painted them there, the rings of Saturn lopsided, the
constellations crazed.
                 He
felt his room gather itself in the dark and stand darkly around him, not
frightening but surely full of power. He was never certain what was here.
Cigarettes, he thought. Flowers from the graveyard, and that bone, that damned
bone, his friend Sioux wouldn’t say where it came from. Books, most of them
stolen from thrift-shop shelves where he left only his finger marks in the
dust. Horror stories, thin books of poems.
                 Dylan
Thomas, of course, and others. A copy of Look Homeward, Angel–on the cover the
stone, the leaf, the unfound door, and the angel with its expression of soft
stone idiocy. A lily drooped from the angel’s hand, dead