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vi

  “I told you.” Stayed where she was but took a cigarette out of her purse; lighting it, she took a careful drag. “I’m a performance artist. I write or draw my art on skin. It’s part of the medium. I write in what we were given.”

  She motioned at his electronic device. “If you’ve found all that, you’ll know that all of them signed a waiver. You’ll know that they all let me create with them.”

  “On them, you mean.”

  “I don’t disclose that they’re going to die. That’s part of the art form for me: to create real books of blood, in whatever way. Whether it be through tattooing or piercing or cutting or branding.”

  “You mark their skin with nothing meaningful.”

  “I do.” She said. “I tell my stories and I tell theirs.”

  “They all still die.”

  “The poison acts differently in each creative subject. The deaths appear random. They die in their sleep and it looks like natural causes. I don’t see what the problem is.”

  Oliver threw down his phone with disgust. To its credit, it didn’t break, merely bounced around for a while, sounding like boot thuds on the roof. Thud, clackety clack, thud. The sound sent a shiver down Lenore’s spine.

  “Where’s the blood, Lenore? I taught you better than that. You carve the flesh, sure, but we’re supposed to bathe in it, to bask in it. Without the blood, those that are chosen have no meaning. And thirty is far too many. You have to be quiet about what you do. Fuck, aren’t most artists reclusive? You could go into hiding.”

  “Many great artists created up to several pieces a week, some artists produced hundred’s of works in their lifetimes.” She took a drag of her cigarette and watched him. The light coming in through the living room window was tinged with a holiday blue. She moved slowly towards the kitchen, towards the red and green lights that blinked through its pane of glass.

  “I can’t help it if you think my art of killing isn’t bloody enough.” She looked Oliver straight in the eye. “At least I take them, isn’t that enough?” She shook her head. “If we have to take them, can’t it be in the most humane way possible?” She stubbed out her cigarette and gave Oliver an angry look. “Given what we are, isn’t enough that I take their lives, even if it is mostly bloodless? I know you prefer more bloodier acts, but I just can’t do it. Not after so long.” She shook her head. “I’ve found a balance. I can tell stories, tell mine or theirs. I make them something, even if only for a little while. The woman with the wings tattooed along all of her back and arms, she was featured on Sixty Minutes. The man who had the whole text of the first Book of Blood, like the man from the first chapter, He went on all kinds of talk shows. He was on Oprah, Donahugh, Maury Povitch, Sally Jesse Raphael. He’s on fucking Ricky Lake next week.”

  “You mean taking their lives used as something. Instead of a canvass for words, you carve skin and tattoo and brand and scar. You mutilate them before their passing and ignore the ways of our kind. You ignore what must be done.”

  “I find a balance.” Lenore snapped. “I take people who have wanted to become something into something. They don’t die nothings. I also take what I need to. You know that my hunger has always been more rampant than yours.” She sniffed. “You’re older than I am, after all.”

  Oliver rose and followed her into the kitchen, another doorway, another shadow looming along the wall like a spider. Lenore knew that her web had finally caught her and that her thread was pulled tight. She had only a few moments. His eyes were black now. She wondered again if she had the same look in her eyes, either as she carved and worked, as Oliver did when he was about to kill.

  “You dare say such things to me.” He no longer wheezed. “You fucking dare.”

  “Yes, I do. I make them into something. You make your victims into mutilations, husks and deformities to be found by someone else after you’ve finished. I shove mine into the limelight, let the stars shine on them for a bit, before I take them. I can’t help it if I create more than you do. I can’t help it if I tell more stories. I make them into something,” She said again.

  He stopped to look at her. “So tell me.” He said. “How exactly do you do that?”

  She thought quickly, praying she wouldn’t have to think of a good enough example to use. Thankfully, her brain came through for her. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s one for you. A tattoo of a Christmas tree with a bottle of beer as the star on top. Did it three years ago for a very nice boy.” She lit another cigarette and went to the cupboards where she kept the whiskey. If she was going to die, she might as well have a drink first.

  “What the fuck did that mean?” Oliver asked. “What a stupid thing to tattoo on your body.”

  “Not for him. Not for Carleton. To him, that tattoo had a very personal meaning. I chose not to kill him the moment he came into my apartment. I tattoo on the side, in that room there.” She pointed to a wooden door beside her bedroom. There was a seal on the door. “I work here often. So I needed a space to do that work.”

  “Naturally.”

  “He said he wanted me to give him a tattoo of the best Christmas gift he had ever been given.”

  vii

  “See, part of tattooing is therapy, too. Some come into get a piece to forget a part of their lives, or to remember it. Some keep silent through the pain and some like to talk. Sometimes, if they are that kind of person, they’ll tell me things too.

  “I asked Carleton what he wanted for his tattoo. He had been referred to me by a fellow art colleague who knew I was branching out into tattooing. When Carleton told me he wanted a Christmas tree with a mug of beer as the star, I was intrigued enough to change my ink to fresh stuff right away and my needles. Both have the poison in them. Both will inflict death.

  “I was intrigued enough by Carleton’s request that I followed a gut instinct and switched. I wanted to hear what he had to stay. I also knew that this would not be a work for the public. No one would see it, no one would know what that tattoo meant except Carleton.

  “When we had agreed on a sketch and he was comfortable, he started talking right away. Some of them can’t wait to talk. You’ll find that with any profession where you sit. Some people talk to their dentist, their local store person, a bookstore owner. Some people are just brimming over with words.”

  viii

  “Do you celebrate Christmas?” He asked.

  “I do.” I dipped the fresh needle into the black ink. The needle gun hummed as I turned it on and it felt urgent in my grasp, as if it sensed the blood that would well to the surface.

  “I don’t like Christmas very much.” Carleton said. “It’s never a very good time of year for me.”

  “It isn’t for a lot of people.”

  “People are just so fucking mean around the Holiday Season. I mean, we’re supposed to be celebrating the birth of some fucking kid and remembering the joy he brought to the world, if you believe that kind of shit and remembering the gift he gave to us. Right? Isn’t that what Christmas is supposed to be about? I think Linus quoted some shit from the bible in its Christmas Charlie Brown. I don’t remember the exact quote.”

  I finished off with the bold outline he wanted and then started in on the green. The yellow would be the most painful for him, the most difficult to get under the skin. I wanted to save that for last so that he wouldn’t have too much pain to start off. When they start off with a lot of pain, something they didn’t count on, they don’t talk a lot. I wanted to hear what he had to say.

  “Then why are you getting a tattoo of a Christmas tree with a beer mug as the star?” I asked him. “That seems to be a little opposite to how you obviously feel about Christmas.”

  “I fucking hate Christmas. Everyone is tired, we’re all in debt, yet out we go and buy more, looking for sales, Black Friday deals, Cyber Monday bargains, hoping to find that perfect Christmas present for the people you love. You’ve probably forgotten what you got them last year and what they gave you. It’s not an ex
change of joy, its just a marker in time, a faded snapshot.”

  “Then why the fucking tree and beer?” I snapped. I don’t mind them talking, but I don’t like listening to rants. They bug the fuck out of me.

  “It’s to remind me that there is joy out in the world and to remind me that the greatest gift I got had no monetary value.”

  “What gift was that?”

  “My father stopped drinking for one day. Just Christmas Day. Every other day, he was blind stinking drunk. He’d throw me down the fucking stairs, lock me in my bedroom for a week, dunk me in ice cold bath’s and hold me there.” These words were recited as if by mentioning them, Carleton was just trying to remember, to mark his own time while was getting a mark on his own skin. As if he wanted to remember what the tattoo was about himself, or he was just really figuring out why he wanted that image etched into him.

  Many people don’t know why they’ve chosen that image, why their mind has called this image up through to their imagination. Some come with the story and purpose of the tattoo in mind. Some don’t. It sounded like Carleton had figured his out.

  I began etching on the ornaments in bright colours. Reds and purples, golds and blues. It was a very simple Christmas tree, like Charlie Brown’s at the end of the episode. There was no branch detail or pine needles. Just a tree with bright colour; I began to fill in the beer mug, a little yellow to make it look as if it were half full, a scrim of foam at the glasses edge. The tattoo covered Carleton’s left arm, up near his shoulder. He could cover it if he wished.

  “But that Christmas, he said he wouldn’t drink and he didn’t. He never did. I always knew that he wanted to, that the beer in the fridge was like the big fucking pink elephant in the room. I thought, at the time, I think I was eight or nine, that the beer mug he drank from should have been the star on the tree. He did not drink, yet the beer mug, the beer, what it brought out in him. It was there in the room with us. But it’s the happiest I remember being as a child. He did not drink, did not hit me, even gave me a book as a present. We even had food and ate a meal. That was the greatest gift.”

  ix

  “He didn’t say much after that.” Lenore said. She lit another cigarette and took a sip of her whiskey. She had refilled her tumbler three times. Oliver had yet to touch his glass. “He just let me finish up. I did keep the clothes with his blood on it and burned them like I’m supposed to. Do you know what that does to my bathroom tiles?”

  Oliver moved closer towards her. “That was a very touching story. Quite the Christmas treat. He reached into another pocket of his coat and took out a long knife. “I don’t have the time to do this properly. I hadn’t planned on choosing you, my daughter. You tried to betray me.”

  He moved surprisingly quickly for someone who appeared so old. He was standing in the entrance to the kitchen one moment, the next he had the knife at her throat. He pressed the blade to the skin there.

  Lenore let out a curse as blood welled to the surface. She could feel it running down her neck and soaking into the fabric of her shirt. Lenore knew that she was merely a moment away from death, that he would slice the knife across her throat. There would be no words carved into her skin, no quote from Edgar Allen Poe for her. Reaching into her pants pocket, she removed a small remote that consisted of a single button.

  When she pressed it, the door to the room that she had indicated earlier opened with a hiss as the air lock to the door disengaged. A black shape fell to the floor making Oliver jump, the knife blade slashing across her throat, the whisper of the blade against her skin leaving almost no trace of pain.

  Lenore had hoped that what she had kept hidden inside her workroom would save her. After all, she had gone through great trouble to attain the canvass for her father, hoping that it would keep her alive. She should have known that after killing so many, after taking so many lives, hers would not be circumspect, that she would have to pay her due in her own pound of flesh.

  That she would have to give payment to the blood. It had always been this way. As long as the blood had hummed between the two of them, she knew that this moment would come, that she would have to pay.

  She clutched at her throat, even as blood continued to flow through her fingers, further soaking her clothes, her hands, her skin. She didn’t know that the human body possessed so much blood. For all her carving and worship of it, she had not known that such a small layer of flesh held a river of blood like a canteen made of flesh.

  “I got you a Christmas present.” She said. Her words came out in a wet croak. She could feel her throat moving under her hands. She fell to her knees, blood spilling down her front and beginning to pool on the kitchen floor, her own river, spread out around her to carry her away.

  “Merry Christmas Daddy.” She said.

  Then there was no more as her body fell forward on to the floor and blackness claimed her.

  x

  Oliver approached the black shape carefully. He had stepped back as Lenore had started to bleed out. For now, the blood was contained in the kitchen. He would leave it that way and let her become a news item. She would become something, after all. Beloved performance artist displayed like a piece of her own art. She would become a book of blood for the media, her blood pressed into every word they wrote about her. Oliver supposed he owed her that much.

  When he got close enough, Oliver saw that the shape was a body, covered in dark red velvet and tied together with rope. He worked the rope free with his knife and peeled away the velvet.

  When the fabric fell away, he was staring down his son, gagged and tied even further, his bright blue eyes looking fearfully into Oliver’s own.

  “My little Edgar.” Oliver said. “What am I going to do with you?”

  About the Author

  Jamieson has been writing since a young age when he realized he could be writing instead of paying attention in school. Since then, he has created many worlds in which to live his fantasies and live out his dreams.

  He is a Number One Best Selling Author (He likes to tell people that a lot) and writes in many different genres. He’s been fortunate enough to have over sixty releases and has had his work featured on several best seller lists. How cool is that? 

  Jamieson is also an accomplished artist. He works in mixed media, charcoal and pastels and oil paints and mixed media. He is also something of an amateur photographer, a poet, cologne and graphic designer. 

  He currently lives in Ottawa Ontario Canada with his cat, Mave, who thinks she's people. He is also very much in love with a wonderful man he calls The Sexy Boyfriend (who is just as sexy as his name) and is a former Christmas Grinch.

  Learn more about Jamieson at www.jamiesonwolf.com