Lost Souls

by Poppy Z. Brite

At the end there was only pain that spiralled up and up and stretched itself impossibly thin—exquisite pain, pain that precluded all thought, all memory, all identity. To know such pain was to lose one’s self, to become the pain, to die borne away on pain, its high soundless song in the ears.

The singer’s golden voice chanting those words had awakened in him a courage he didn’t know he had, a belief that someday his life would be more than this. But to show an excess of feeling in this crowd was considered uncool; as far as Nothing could tell, you were supposed to act bored all the time.

Nothing lay under his charred quilt in his own safe room for the last time, and he sucked at his own blood because that was what comforted him, what he had always done when he grew too lonely, too hungry for something he did not know.

Three hundred and eighty-three years … such a very long time … he should have been beautiful … not this sad, old, tired man … he should have been lovely.

This was the distilled essence of all that was lost forever and all that came to replace it.

As Christian sank beneath the green waters of his death, he thought, Three hundred and eighty-three years. And he was as beautiful as he should have been. He was lovely.

They discovered that even in the face of pain that seems unbearable, even in the face of pain that wrings the last drop of blood out of your heart and leaves its scrimshaw tracery on the inside of your skull, life goes on. And pain grows dull, and begins to fade.

My grandmother told me you shouldn’t try to define evil, that the minute you think you’ve got it all pinned down, a kind of evil you never even thought of will sneak up behind you and jump inside your head. I don’t think anyone knows what evil is. I don’t think anyone has the right to say.

Steve stroked his hair, and through those guitar-callused fingertips Ghost caught Steve’s mood: lonely, but not alone. Bitter, but not destroyed. They had made it through the winter.