It was useless. There was a "gone fishing" sign inside the frosty blonde's eyes. She was deep inside her own head, double-checking her mental market-share.
"Think about it," he said anyway.
"I'll write a report," she replied tightly, and turned away, removing her white jacket in defiance.
Gideon watched her go, eyeing with curious detachment her firm, workout-toned rear beneath the tight, tailor-made skirt. Shaking his bald head, he turned away.
The sun warmed his face, and the garden blew in the upstate breeze. He inhaled deeply, feeling the expensive shirt, knotted silk tie, and tailormade, three-piece suit give with the breath. No piece of his wardrobe was cheap, or itched. He had money in his pocket and in the bank. He had a solid company, and a future.
Life wasn't bad. No, it wasn't bad at all. If only he could figure out how to make this brandung look like a bran bonbon.
Gregory G. Gideon put his hands on the edge of the giant tureen. The stainless steel felt thick and cold to the touch, creating its own strange comfort. He looked down into the lumpy brown mass, and tried to think like a health nut.
What did the mixture require to make it work? Gideon closed his eyes and saw a vision of Fru-Nutty Balls, wrapped in recyclable paper, with the G.G.G. imprint on the flat bottom of every single one. He imagined hands pulling open the paper seams to reveal a crunchy, chunky nugget of fiber, fruit, and pasty nuts, all held together with . . what?
"Color."
For the first time in years, Gregory G. Gideon began to think in color. There was more to the health food life than pasty white, deep black, sticky brown, or shades of gray. There were blueberries, and yellow corn, and oranges, and ripe red strawberries.
Gregory G. Gideon saw red. Ruby-red apples. Rich red cherries. Rose-red raspberries. He saw a swirl of red curling through the Bran-licious Chunk Bar. He saw the scarlet vein corkscrewing up along the sides of the circular muffin, giving it just a touch of sin and holding it together.
But what should it be? he wondered. Which berry should it be?
"Blood," a raspy voice intoned from somewhere in the room.
Gregory G. Gideon blinked. "What?" he said.
"Blood," the raspy voice repeated.
Gregory Gideon turned around, his hands still on the tureen lip for balance. He found himself staring into the face of the most beautiful girl he had seen since his wedding day.
She was as different from Elvira McGlone as a gem was from a rock. She shamed McGlone's sex. There was absolutely no purpose for McGlone to be a woman as long as this creature existed. Her hair was red-strawberry blond, in fact. Her eyes were green. Her nose long. Her lips curled in a tiny perpetual smile. And freckles danced across her smooth flesh.
She was a vision in white. She was dressed all in white; from the tip of the strange cap nestled in her fiery mane, through her zip-front dress, down her stockinged feet, to the bottom of her sensible white shoes. She was absolutely lovely.
But she was not the one who had spoken. She couldn't be. That voice had been raspy and thin, with a singsong tone. It had ended, even the single word, with a slight sound of complaint that grated on the ear.
"And who might you be?" he wanted to know.
She smiled down on him, a half-foot taller, and not as far away. Her curling lips curled all the more, and she said in a husky whisper, "Mercy."
Gideon was stunned, and enraptured. She was a sensual wild child, as natural as McGlone was packaged. She wore no makeup, but still her eyes shone, her lips were soft and inviting.
All manner of questions came immediately to mind, but what he said was, "What do you want?"
He immediately regretted it. Because that other voice returned, repeating what it had said before.
"Blood."
The beautiful, wild-haired girl with the cosmetics-free face stepped aside, looking over her right shoulder. As she gave way, another figure appeared. Standing in the center of the elevated walkway was a hunched, sunken-cheeked, emaciated Asian man.
He wore a black gown with ornate red piping that went from his chin to the bottom of his sternum. The ends of his sleeves and hem were likewise decorated with intricate red weaving. But that held Gideon's attention only for a fleeting second. What was most interesting was the skeletal man's head.
His hair was thick around the fringe of his skull, although the crown of his scalp was totally bald. The hair was long, coming to his shoulders, and a strange color of steel-blue. His skin tone was dark, and an equally strange color, as if he had a disease.
Gideon remembered that one of his wife's distant relatives had a fluid disorder, which flushed her flesh almost green. This man seemed to have rust inside him, because what once must have been pale, even yellowing, flesh, was now a deep, sickly purple.
His lips were dry, his nose upturned like a pig's, and his almond-shaped eyes covered with the stiffest of skin parchment.
"What did you say?" Gideon asked breathlessly, a sudden tightness in his chest.
"Blood," said the purple Oriental for the fourth time, his lips coming off his yellow-stained teeth, and his eyelids finally rolling up.
The Oriental's pupils were revealed, white as milk. Gregory Gideon could see that the other man could not. He was totally blind.
It was the purple-skinned man's sudden emptiness of expression that inspired Gideon to move. All emotion had left the man, as if a spigot on his throat had opened and any feeling had coursed out of his face and into his torso. He had the dull, dead look of a shark as it sinks its fangs into its prey.
"Missy," the Oriental hissed, and the radiant vision of femininity lifted her left hand.
It seemed the most gentle of movements, as if she were directing a servant where to put her ice tea, but abruptly the girl's hand got between Gideon and the space between the two strangers.
The health food entrepreneur stopped dead in his tracks when he felt her fore-fingernail slip beneath the flesh of his double chin.
He had just glimpsed it as it slid beneath his view. It had been a half-inch long, with no color-only the gleam of some strength-giving polish. Its edge had been cut diagonally in a perfect line, like a guillotine blade.
It was incredibly sharp and thin. So sharp and so thin that it slipped through two layers of his skin without igniting a single nerve ending.
But he knew it was there. He felt it, like a dull pressure. It seemed to spread across his entire body, paralyzing him.
"Hey!" Gregory Green Gideon said in surprise.
"Don't worry," the girl said mildly. "I'm a trained nurse."
Only then did he recognize her wardrobe. She had been too close, and he had been too surprised. It was a nurse's uniform. But now surprise had turned to shock, and she was holding an organic needle at the juncture where his head met his neck.
"My nurse," said the strange purple man, now as close to him as she was. "For a quarter-million days, she had nursed me back from life-the life which the gweilo with tiger's blood had cursed me to. For five million hours, she toiled to return me to my natural place-amid the Final Death."
Gideon's eyes were like pinballs, bouncing from one of the strangers to the other. He echoed the unfamiliar word. 'Gweilo'?"
"Foreign devil," the strawberry-blond goddess translated with a smile. "Devil-man."
Gideon started to protest, but the cuticle in his throat forced him to quiet down. "What," he whispered hoarsely, "are you talking about?"
"You must forgive me," the ancient one said without apology. It was more of an order. "I am an old man, who knows too much of human ways. Although I cannot see I can peer into human souls, and I know what evil lurks there."
Gideon frowned, wondering where he had heard that phrase before. He almost asked, but the implanted fingernail made him think better of it.