Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite Read Free Book Online Page B

don’t let him change his mind
about that.
                 Ghost
was so damned important, so valuable. When Ghost was along, ordinary
surroundings–a pizza joint, a lonely stretch of highways’ became strange, maybe
threatening, maybe wild and beautiful. Ghost tinged reality. And Steve
consented to let it be tinged and saw things he would never have seen
otherwise, things he did not always believe or understand. He credited Ghost
with saving his imagination from the death-in-life of adolescence.
                 What
about another time you were driving late at night, he thought, too late at
night, driving with Ghost, and he had you convinced you’d driven into the
ocean? Saw flying fish, starfish. Saw a swimming pool full of air. Maybe he’d
fallen asleep behind the wheel that time; maybe he and Ghost were lucky the
T-bird hadn’t wrapped around a tree, creaming both of them.
                 Maybe
that was what had happened. But mostly Steve accepted the share of magic the
world had given him in Ghost, deluded himself that he, fearless old Steve Finn,
was the leader. The protector. Yeah, right.
                 Because,
especially now, what would life be without Ghost? He thought he knew the answer
to that one. So much shit, that’s what life would be. So much lonely, aching,
empty shit.
                 Ghost
was taking cam of him nowadays. The thing with Ann had nearly convinced Steve
that his life was worthless. More than once he had found himself thinking about
death in the middle of the night. Just drive over to Raleigh and score some
barbs, then pick up a quart of whiskey on the way home. Take ‘ em all at once. There’s one cocktail that’ll never give you
a hangover. But he could no more swallow that cocktail than he could have
shoved it down Ghost’s throat. Their friendship was the’ only thing keeping him
sane right now, and he guessed he owed it more of a debt than that.
                 Somehow
the last image of Ghost’s dream—the twins lying on their bare mattress, fiat,
their beauty spent—had gotten all mixed up in his mind with the sight of the
dead kid on the roadside thirty miles behind. Both pictures drifted in front of
Steve’s face, obscuring the road. He shook his head to banish them. When Ghost
turned to look at him, Steve saw death in Ghost’s eyes, a faint pale shadow.
                 “Let’s
drive up to the hill,” said Steve. “It’ll be nice there. See the stars.”
                 “The
stars were waiting for us,” Ghost said when the T-bird reached the end of the
road and pulled off. They were in a clearing thick with weeds and late-summer
wildflowers. In the tall grass, empty cans and bottles shone dully, not marring
the weird beauty of the hill but mirroring the huge luminous stars in the sky.
                 Behind
them stretched the road, winding all the way back to Missing Mile; before them,
a barbed-wire fence marked the break of the hill, and acres of pastureland fell
away, rolling gently down to the shore of Lake Hyco .
Miles off—Steve thought it was miles, but he couldn’t be sure, the air was so
clear—the electric power plant shimmered, all green and white and dimly
roaring, reflected in the lake. It was so green here, so lush even after the
hot Carolina summer, with the tall grass and the cow pastures and the great oak
that spread its branches over the clearing.
                 Ghost
knew all the stories of that oak. He said an Indian had climbed it to escape
from a bear once. The marks of the bear’s claws were still there, eight feet up
the trunk, deep and twisted in the thick bark. The claws had hurt the tree,
Ghost said, and it had bled clear sap to fill the wound, to stop the blaze of
blind pain. Now the scar was knotted, invulnerable, and the tree sang with the
hum of the power plant far away on the lake.
                 Ghost
looked at the tree, silently