Manitou Blood (42 page)

Jenica nodded. “It means, yes, you can come with me.”

“Well, that's exactly what I'm getting at. In order for me to become infected with this
strigoica
strain, we have to—you know, become intimate.”

“Yes.”

“And that isn't a problem, as far as you're concerned?”

“Why should it be?”

“I don't know. No special reason. If it's okay with you, then it's absolutely fine by me.”

She reached up and gently took hold of my earlobe, and rubbed it between finger and thumb. It was the most arousing thing that a woman had ever done for me.

“Harry,” she said, “we have no choice, do we? Our destiny says that we must.”

I finished another glass of wine while Jenica looked up Samodiva in her father's books of Romanian mythology. I needed something to give me courage, after all. I wasn't scared about being infected with vampiritis, especially the way that Jenica was going to do it, but I was deeply afraid of Misquamacus. I had been hoping that the monster slayers would do the job for me, but now that Misquamacus had escaped from Manhattan, I knew that the chances of that happening were slim to anorexic.

“Here,” said Jenica, at last. “ ‘The ritual of Samodiva, which takes away a man's natural defenses against the strain of
strigoica,
and other infections caused by witches and possessed women. It adds his name to the list of the dead without erasing it from the list of the living, because he does not actually die.”

“You're sure about that?”

“One day, Harry, we will all die, and
all
of our names will be written in black.”

“Go on, then. Tell me what we have to do.”

“This is in very old Muntenian dialect, from Wallachia. ‘To commence, the woman or witch must purify the man by shaving him.' ”

I rubbed my chin, which now had three days' stubble on it. “That's okay, I could use a shave anyway. Better to die looking sharp, don't you think?”

“ ‘The razor must be stained with the blood of the woman or the witch.' ”

“Oh. Well, I guess you could just nick the ball of your thumb, couldn't you? That wouldn't hurt too much.”

“ ‘The man must be completely shaved from head to toe.' ”

“Say
what?
”

Jenica ignored me, and carried on translating. “ ‘His skin is to be used as the parchment on which the names of the dead are to be written. Every person he has known who is now dead shall have their name inscribed in black ink upon his skin. The names of these people will be his passport and his protection in the world of the dead that he will now partly inhabit. When these names are written and the ink is dry, the witch or the woman shall recite these words three times, while sugar and thyme shall be burned together in a bowl. “Accept this man's name in the list of the dead, O Samodiva. Record his entry into the realm of shadows and paint his likeness on the face of the moon. For the names of all people living or dead are yours to record, and in the columns of blood and in the columns of darkness his name shall appear according to your something.' ”

“According to your something?”

“It's an old word, borrowed from the Church Slavic. I think it means ‘judgment' or ‘decision' or ‘whim.' ”

“You're going to shave me bald on somebody's whim?”

“It says here that this is the authentic ritual of Samodiva, which can be traced back as far as 1189. It was usually used when a man wanted to talk to a dead friend . . . for instance, if his friend had died without telling him where all his money was hidden.”

“All right, then, if that's what we have to do. Bring on the shaving cream.”

It was well past midnight. The moon was shining high above the blacked-out Empire State building, and the Hudson was gleaming like a sheet of polished steel. Every now and then we saw a bright flicker of intense white light, as if somebody was welding, and we heard men and women screaming, which told us that the monster slayers were still out and about. There was still a feeling of hysteria in the air, but at least we knew that the
strigoi
were on the run.

Because we had emptied the bathtub, Jenica had to fill the washbasin with water bailed out of the toilet cistern. In her father's bedroom bureau she found an old straight razor in a mahogany box. It was clear from the (very detailed) etchings in Jenica's book that a Gillette Mach 3 was not going to be suitably mythological for the ritual of Samodiva.

First of all, Jenica sat me down in the middle of the kitchen. She took a large pair of scissors and cut my hair off as close to the scalp as she could. I was glad there were no mirrors for me to see myself. I felt like a half-plucked turkey.

When she was done chopping, we went through to the bathroom. I pulled off my sweaty shirt and stepped out of my pants and my red-and-white striped shorts. For some reason I felt incredibly shy, and I stood there with my hands protectively cupped between my legs.

Jenica picked up the razor and opened it.

“I hope it's sharp,” I said.

Without hesitation, she sliced the ball of her thumb, so that blood welled up. “Yes,” she said, “it is extremely sharp.” She smeared her blood along the blade, on both sides. Then she sucked her thumb and wrapped a piece of toilet tissue around it to stop it from bleeding any more. “Are you ready?” she asked me.

“I guess so. Shave away.”

She wet my prickly scalp and rubbed menthol shaving gel all over it. When she was halfway through, however, she stopped and said, “You're embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed? Me? Do I look embarrassed?”

“Yes, you do. You are standing like a small boy.”

“I'm just . . . keeping all my bases covered, that's all.”

“I know what I will do,” said Jenica. She wiped her hands on a towel, crossed her arms, and lifted up her short linen dress. Underneath she was wearing a lacy white bra and a lacy white thong. “Here,” she said, turning her back to me. “Undo me.”

I was never Harry Houdini when it came to bra hooks, but this time I managed to slide the hooks out of the eyes with one amazingly deft movement. Her enormous breasts came out of the cups like perfectly set
blancmanges
. She turned around again, and laid one hand on my shoulder to balance herself while she tugged off her thong. She had black pubic hair that was trimmed like a pair of butterfly wings.

“Now you have no need to be embarrassed,” she said. She was kidding, wasn't she? My cock started to stiffen and by the time she started shaving my scalp I needed at least two more pairs of hands to hide it.

She shaved my scalp quickly and silently, with the tip of her tongue held between her teeth. She was very good at it, very assured, as if she had often used a straight razor before, and she only nicked my ear once. I stayed as still as I possibly could, even when her nipples brushed against my arms.

Next, she smothered my face and my throat with shaving gel, and started to shave my chin. She was so close that I could feel her breath. When she reached my neck, she held her hand against my chin to stretch my skin. I closed my eyes and didn't move a muscle while the blade scraped around my Adam's apple.

I felt the edge of the razor against the left side of my throat and then she suddenly stopped. I opened my eyes
and found that she was staring at me from only inches away. There was an expression on her face that I couldn't interpret. I thought to myself: Harry, this woman is half a vampire. She has the
strigoica
strain in her system, and whatever the legends say, that makes her a drinker of human blood. And she is holding a straight razor right across your carotid artery.

“What?” I asked her.

For one very long moment she said nothing. Then she carried on scraping the stubble from my throat. “I was thinking,” she said. “What will you do, when all this is finished? You will still have the infection in your blood.”

“It doesn't affect
you
, does it? You never even knew you had it.”

“But I am a woman. Maybe it affects men differently.”

“Maybe it does. But if I start eating steak tartare for breakfast, at least I'll know why.”

Once she had turned me into Mr. Clean, she lifted my arms in turn and shaved my armpits. I didn't have a whole lot of hair on my chest, just a sketchy kind of a crucifix, but she shaved that off, too.

She shaved all the hair off my legs, which gave me an extraordinary sensation, especially up the backs of the thighs. By the time she had finished my cock was sticking out like a hard, curved tusk, and steadily beating in time to my heart. Without hesitation, though, she rubbed gel into my pubic hair and all over my balls and deep between the cheeks of my ass. Then she knelt down next to me and slowly began to edge the hair away, a little at a time, wiping the blade on pieces of toilet paper.

She was very careful, but she still managed to cut me two or three times. A drop of blood ran down my right thigh, and she dabbed at it with her finger and sucked it. Another drop ran down, and she leaned forward and licked that with her tongue.

Now she was shaving the last few hairs away from my
cock, and the razor was right across my distended vein. I held my breath in. I couldn't help it. She had tasted my blood now, and here was her chance to have it gushing out of me like a hosepipe.

But “there,” she said, and sat back on her heels, and splashed three handfuls of water between my legs, and picked up a towel. “Now you are a parchment, Harry, ready for me to write on you.”

I made myself comfortable on Jenica's bed while she rummaged through her father's desk to find a fine brush and a bottle of India ink. All around the bedroom she had lit clusters of red and yellow candles, rose- and vanilla-scented. Naked and completely hairless, I felt strangely new born, and different.
Spiritual
, almost. I could understand why Buddhist holy men shaved their bodies.

Beside the bed stood six or seven silver-framed photographs of Jenica and her father. I recognized some of the places where the pictures had been taken: the Champs Elysées, in Paris; St Mark's Square, in Venice; the Houses of Parliament, in London. I thought that maybe my eyes were tired, but in almost every photograph her father seemed to be slightly out of focus, as if he had moved. From what I could make out, though, he looked quite handsome, in a very Romanian way, and he was wearing a dangly earring in his left ear.

Jenica came back into the room, wearing a man's white dress shirt, with a wing collar, and only one button fastened. She sat down next to me, unscrewed her hexagonal glass bottle of India ink, and dipped her brush into it.

“Tell me the name of somebody you know who is now dead.”

“Anybody?”

“Anybody at all, so long as they no longer living.”

“Singing Rock,” I said. Under the circumstances, I thought that my spirit guide deserved pride of place.

Very carefully, in beautiful italic handwriting, Jenica painted the name
Singing Rock
across my chest.

When she had finished, I said, “David Erskine. That's my father. George Erskine, that's my grandfather. Jimmy Bonasinga—he was in my class at school.”

Without a word, Jenica covered my naked body in names. I was amazed and sad at how many dead people I had known. It took her nearly three hours, and by the time she had finished I had more than a hundred names written all over me. There on my left shoulder was Adelaide Bright, God bless her, who had taught me how to read the Tarot and the tea leaves and most of all how to read the future in people's faces. Along my right forearm was my woodworking teacher, Kenneth Bukaski, who had shown me that putting up shelves that stayed up was more than a matter of faith. And here on my thigh was Sandra Lowenstein, pale and fey, who had written incomprehensible poems for me about smoke and flowers, and eventually died of an overdose in some shitty squat in Baltimore.

I couldn't see the names that were written across my back, but their memories were just as dear to me. The only name that was written on my penis was Jane Forward, my very first love. Jane had been stunning, even with braces on her teeth. Green eyes, long blonde hair, and over two inches taller than I was. We all thought that she was going to be a famous actress, but she had married a stock analyst called Roger and moved to Darien, Connecticut, and drowned in a stupid swimming-pool accident. Eventually Jenica put down her brush and screwed the top back onto her bottle of ink. She took off the shirt that she was wearing and lay down next to me. “Do you know what you are now? You are the book of the dead.”

“After all this, I just hope that this works.”

With her fingertip, she touched the last name that she had written, John Franzini. “I think that John Franzini is dry now. We can start the ritual.”

She had brought in a small ceramic dish. It was filled with molasses and dried thyme, mixed together. She lit a taper and laid its flame in the center of the dish so that the sugar and the herbs started to bubble and burn. The smell was very evocative, but I couldn't think what it reminded me of. Something that had happened a long time ago and very far away.

Jenica opened the book of mythology and laid it on the pillow. Then she leaned over me, with her left nipple brushing against my right nipple. She was so close to my face that I couldn't focus on her properly.

“Accept this man's name in the list of the dead, O Samodiva,” she recited. “Record his entry into the realm of shadows and paint his likeness on the face of the moon.”

She said this three times, as instructed. As she started the third recitation, however, she took hold of my cock in her right hand and started to massage it. I have to admit that the sensation was not entirely unpleasant. By the time she had said, “. . . according your judgment,” Jane Forward's name was at least twice as long as it had been before.

Jenica climbed on top of me. I tried to reach up to touch her breasts, but she pushed my hand away. Since she was in charge of this particular ritual, I decided that I should just lie there and follow instructions. After all, we weren't supposed to be doing this for our own gratification.