“That’s the happiest you’ve looked all night,” said a low voice beside him.
Poole turned and saw a tall, ambiguously sexed apparition in camouflage fatigues beaming at him. Bare shaven skin gleamed above its ears. Aggressive, shiny black hair swept across the top of the apparition’s head and hung down its back. Then Pumo noticed the apparition’s breasts bulging beneath the fatigue shirt. Her hips flared beneath a wide belt. He wondered what it would be like to go to bed with somebody with white sidewalls.
Fifteen minutes later the girl was squeezing herself up against him in the back seat of a taxi. “Bite my ear,” she said.
“Here?”
She tilted her head toward him. Pumo put one arm around her shoulder and took her earlobe between his teeth. Fine black stubble covered the side of her head.
“Harder.”
She squirmed when he bit down on the gristly lobe.
“You didn’t tell me your name,” he said.
She slid her hand over his crotch. Her breasts nuzzled his upper arm. He felt pleasantly engulfed. “My friends call me Dracula,” she said. “But not because I suck blood.”
She wouldn’t let him turn on the lights in his loft, and he groped his way to the bedroom in the dark. Giggling, she pushed him down on the bed. “Just lie there,” she said, and undid his belt, got rid of his boots, and pulled down his trousers. He got out of the chain-mail jacket and wrenched off his tie. “Pretty Tina,” Dracula said. She bent over and licked his erect cock. “I always feel like I’m in church when I do this.”
“Wow,” Tina said. “Where have you been all my life?”
“You don’t want to know where I’ve been.” She lightly scratched his scrotum with a long fingernail. “Don’t worry, I don’t have any nasty diseases. I practically live at the doctor’s office.”
“Why?”
“I guess I just enjoy being a girl.”
Exhausted, dulled by alcohol, Pumo let her proceed. When she sat up, straddling him, she looked like an Apache warrior with plucked eyebrows. “Do you like Dracula?”
“I think I’ll marry Dracula,” he said.
She unbuttoned the camouflage shirt and tore it off, exposing firm conical breasts. “Bite me,” she said, pushing them into his face. “Hard. Until I tell you to stop.”
He gently bit one of her nipples, and she ground her knuckles into the side of his head. “Harder.” She dug her nails into his cock. Pumo bit down.
“Harder.”
He increased the pressure.
When he tasted blood, she screamed and moaned and gripped his head in her arms. “Good good.” Her hand left his head and found his cock again. “Still hard? Good Tina.”
Finally she let him raise his head. A thin line of blood oozed from the bottom of her breast down her ribcage. “Now little Drac goes back to church.”
Pumo laughed and fell back on the pillow. He wondered if Vinh or Helen had heard her scream and decided they probably hadn’t—they were two floors below.
After a long delirious time Pumo’s orgasm sent looping ribbons of semen over her cheeks, into her eyebrows, into the air. She moaned and hitched herself onto his body so that his arms were pinned beneath her legs and astonished him by rubbing his semen into her face with both hands.
“I haven’t come like that since I was about twenty,” he said. “But you’re sort of hurting my arms.”
“Poor baby.” She patted his cheek.
“I’d really appreciate it if you got off my arms,” he said.
She looked down at him triumphantly and hit him hard in the temple.
Pumo struggled to get up, but Dracula struck him again. He found himself unable to move for a second. She grinned down at him, her teeth and eyes flashing in the murk, and slammed her fist against the side of his head.
He yelled for help. She struck him again.
“Murder!” he yelled, but no one heard.
Just before the twentieth blow to his temples, Pumo’s eyes cleared and he saw Dracula peering impersonally down at him, her mouth pursed and her lipstick smeared.
2
Pumo came to in darkness, he knew not how much later. His lips throbbed and felt the size of steaks. He tasted blood. His whole body ached, the pain radiating out from the twin centers of his head and groin. In sudden panic, he put his hand on his penis, and found it intact. His eyes opened. He held up his hands before his face—they were dark with blood.
Pumo lifted his head to look down his body, and a white-hot band of pain jumped from temple to temple. He fell back on the wet pillow and breathed heavily. Then he lifted his head more cautiously. He was very cold. He saw his naked body sprawled on dark wet sheets. Working its way from ache to ache, a thin hot wire of agony snaked through the middle of his head. Now his lips felt like rough red bricks. He touched his face with wet fingers.
He considered getting out of bed. Then he wondered what time it was. Pumo raised his right arm and looked at his wrist, which no longer wore a watch.
He turned his head sideways. The radio with its digital clock was gone from the bedside table.
He slid himself off the side of the bed, finding the floor first with one foot, then with both his knees. His chest slid across the sheets, and he swallowed a bitter mouthful of vomit. When he stood up, his head swam and his vision darkened. He propped himself up on the headboard with aching arms. A cut on the side of his head beat and beat.
Clutching his head, Pumo slowly made his way into the bathroom. Without turning on the light, he bathed his face in cold water before daring to look at himself in the mirror. A grotesque purple mask, the face of the Elephant Man, stared back at him. His stomach flipped over, and he threw up into the sink and passed out again before he hit the floor.
1
“Yes, I’ve been lying low, and no, I haven’t changed my mind about going,” Pumo said. He was talking on the telephone to Michael Poole. “You should see me, or rather you shouldn’t. I’m hideous. I stay inside most of the time, because when I go out I frighten children.”
“Is that some new kind of joke?”
“Don’t I wish. I got beat up by a psychopath. I also got robbed.”
“You mean you got mugged?”
Pumo hesitated. “In a way. I’d explain the circumstances, Mike, but frankly, they’re too embarrassing.”
“Can’t you even give me a hint?”
“Well, never pick up anybody who calls herself Dracula.” After Michael had laughed dutifully, Pumo said, “I lost my watch, a clock radio, a brand new pair of lizard-skin boots from McCreedy and Shreiber, my Walkman, my Watchman, a Dunhill lighter that didn’t work anymore, a Giorgio Armani jacket, and all my credit cards and about three hundred in cash. And when the asshole took off, he or she left the downstairs door open and some goddamned bum came in and pissed all over the hallway.”
“How do you feel about that?” Michael groaned. “Jesus, what a stupid question. I mean, in general how do you feel? I wish you’d called me right away.”
“In general I feel like committing murder, that’s how I feel in general. This thing shook me up, Mike. The world is full of hurt. I understand that there’s no real safety, not anywhere. Terrible things can happen in an instant, to anyone. That asshole just about made me afraid to go outside. But if you’re smart, you should be afraid to go outside. Listen—I want you guys to be careful when you get over there. Don’t take any risks.”
“Okay,” Michael said.