Manitou blood, p.32
Manitou Blood, page 32
“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.
All the same, as she reached down between my legs, and guided me inside her, she bent her head forward and kissed me on the lips. Her lips were wet and warm and slippery, and she was the same inside. In spite of everything, I couldn’t help groaning.
She rode up and down in silence. Each time she lifted up her hips, she almost lost me, but somehow she managed to judge the moment exactly, and slide herself back down again, until my naked cock was buried in her up to the hilt. The only sound was the bed creaking, and Jenica’s panting. Her perspiration dripped onto my lips, and it tasted like swimming in the ocean.
As I felt my climax rising up between my legs, I couldn’t stop myself from gripping the cheeks of her bottom, and digging my fingers deep into her flesh. Now she was almost galloping, and she started to pant “Samodiva! Samodiva! Samodiva!” The smoke from the burning molasses seemed to grow more and more pungent, until I could smell and taste nothing else, and I was sure that the shadows on the ceiling were dancing in time to our fucking, like mad goblins out of the Transylvanian forests.
Without warning, Jenica began to quake with orgasm. I had never heard a woman make a noise like that before. It was like a low, vibrato dirge. “Ohhhhhhh, ohhhhhh, dragostea, ohhhhhhhhh.” It was so erotic and so revealing, as if she had opened up her whole personality to me, everything she was, her folk culture and her fantasies, and everything that she had grown up to be, from her Romanian girlhood.
She arched herself right back, until the back of her head was actually touching her bottom, and I was deeper inside her than I had physically thought possible. I had forgotten that she was partly strigoica, and that she could bend herself like a contortionist. That did it. I said, “Jesus, Jenica,” and ejaculated, and ejaculated again, and then again.
Afterward, we lay together in sweaty silence. The shadows had stopped dancing, too, as if the Transylvanian goblins were taking a breather, or maybe the candles had simply burned low. I heard the clock in the living room whirr and then strike four, and between the bedroom curtains I could see that the sky outside was already growing light.
Jenica lifted her head and stared at me. “There is one more thing, just to make sure.”
“Really? I don’t mind doing it again, if you don’t.”
She put her hand down between her thighs, and then lifted it up to my lips.
“What’s this?”
“Taste. It is the taste of me, and the taste of you, and the taste of the strigoica.”
I licked her fingertips. “Now what? Does this mean I’m infected?”
“Now you sleep. Later, I will bring you tea, or wine, whatever you want.”
“I don’t think I can sleep.”
“Then close your eyes and rest.”
She climbed off the bed and picked up her shirt. I knew that there was no way that I was going to be able to get to sleep, not after having sex like that, and not when I knew that we were going to go hunting for Misquamacus. But I closed my eyes and tried to relax.
I could hear Jenica in the kitchen. She was singing what sounded like a love song, but for all the Romanian I knew, it could have been the Romanian equivalent of “You’re So Vain.”
22
BLOOD GROUP
Suddenly, I felt something cool and wet on my stomach. I opened my eyes and Jenica was wiping the writing off my skin with a makeup-removal pad.
“Did you sleep well?” she asked me.
“Give me a chance, I’ve only been lying here for a couple of minutes.”
“You’ve been sleeping for nine hours. It’s ten past one in the afternoon.”
I sat up. “What? You’re kidding me!”
But the clock next to the bed said 1:09 and through the triangular crack in the curtains I could see that the sun was shining. Jenica had changed into a black-and-white check shirt and tight blue Levis, and she had brushed her hair back and tied it with a black scarf.
“Why didn’t you wake me up earlier? Come on, Jenica, if we’re going to go after Misquamacus we need all the daylight we can get!”
“Ssh,” she said. “You slept so long because you were exhausted. Besides, you needed time to absorb the strigoica strain into your bloodstream.”
“Yeah, I forgot. I’m half a vampire now.” I rubbed the back of my head. “I don’t feel any different. Apart from having a bean like a bowling ball.”
“Believe me, Harry, you are different. You can do things now that you could never do before. Look.”
She took hold of my right hand, and pulled back my index finger. It was incredible. Without any effort at all, it bent right over until it was practically touching the back of my wrist. I tried my middle finger, and I could bend it back just as far.
“That’s fantastic. Harry Erskine, the India-Rubber Fortune-Teller. He unravels your future while he ties himself in knots.”
I bent back all of my other fingers, and they were just as flexible.
“There’s something else,” said Jenica. “While you were sleeping I went downstairs. I did what you suggested, and pushed my hand into the mirror.”
“Don’t tell me it wouldn’t go in?”
“At first, no. I had to try three times, but then it happened. But only when I said to myself, Jenica, this is nothing but a doorway. It needs very strong faith, I think, as well as strigoica blood.”
“Well, thank God. I’d hate to think that what we did last night was a waste of time.”
“Why don’t you dress now? Try some of my father’s clothes. I will make us some coffee.”
I got up, drew back the drapes, and stretched myself. To my amazement, I found that I could lean over backward almost as far as Jenica had. Actually, I did feel different. Looser, somehow, more active and alive, as if I were ten years younger.
I rummaged through Razvan Dragomir’s closet and found a black silk shirt and a pair of black pants. The pants were a little too snug between the nuts, but Razvan Dragomir probably didn’t drink nine cans of Guinness every day. I went into the kitchen where Jenica was making coffee with club soda, which was the only water we had left. There was no milk, of course, so I ate handfuls of cornflakes out of the box.
“We need to go to the Kensico Country Inn while it’s still daylight,” I said. “We need to check out how many mirrors they have. And after what happened yesterday, with that guy coming out of the bathtub, I think we should scout around for any kind of reflective water surface, too. Rain barrels, ponds, that kind of thing.”
“Then we wait until it gets dark, yes, and Vasile Lup comes out of his mirror?”
“You’ve got it. While he’s away, we break every mirror in the whole place, so that when he comes back, at sunrise, he doesn’t have any place to hide. That’s when you recite the disenchantment. Vasile Lup will be sent back to where he came from, and that leaves Misquamacus without a spirit to hide himself in.”
“But you still don’t know how you will destroy your Misquamacus.”
“I’m counting on that bone.”
“Is that all?”
“What else can I do? Agreed—I don’t have any idea what it does, or how it works, or why. But it seems to keep the strigoi at bay, doesn’t it, and it can kill rats better than Ramik Green, and Misquamacus didn’t seem to be at all happy when I waved it at him.”
“And that is all of your plan?”
“I guess so. I can’t think of anything else I can do.”
“Maybe you should call on your Singing Rock.”
I shook my head. “He won’t answer me, Jenica. I’ve already asked him for far too much help, and he’s a great believer in working things out for yourself. Don’t keep looking to dead people for advice, that’s his motto, or you might as well be dead yourself.”
“Okay,” said Jenica. “Then what shall we do? Go?”
I finished my coffee, stood up, and said, “Why not? You only live once.”
Jenica said, “I have one question. Once we step into the mirror, how do we find our way to the Kensico Country Inn?”
“In the ordinary way, I guess, except back-to-front.”
“You are not making me feel very confident.”
“Jenica, the whole world has gone crazy. Nine-eleven was madness but this is even madder. Let’s just try to take it as it comes. It’s the only way.”
She looked at me acutely. “You lost something very special, didn’t you, when you lost your wife and your daughter?”
“I never lost them. I mislaid them, that’s all.”
“You must never think that life is not really worth living. There is somebody waiting for you, somewhere.”
“Maybe. Right now, I have a vengeful Native American wonder-worker to deal with.”
Jenica packed her woven bag with her crucifix and her holy water and her book of svarcolaci. I took nothing except the bone.
We went downstairs to the hallway and stood in front of the mirror. Jenica said to me, “Try it first with your finger. Make sure that you can pass through it.”
I looked at my reflection. In my black silk shirt and my tight black pants, I reminded myself of an out-of-work conjuror. And now, for my next astounding trick, I will push my finger into the surface of this absolutely genuine real mirror, and it will penetrate the glass as if by magic. Which it did.
The sensation was extraordinary. I felt as if the glass was clinging to my finger, cold and heavy and liquid, like mercury. But my finger went in, and joined up with the finger in my reflection, and then it came out again, unharmed.
I turned to Jenica and said, “How about that. How about that.”
“Then, you see, the ritual of Samodiva really works.”
