Warren Murphy: The Ultimate Death

"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.

"Why me?" he finally asked.

The old Asian's long, thin, drooping eyebrows furrowed. "You must know," he said. "Can't you even perceive it?" His long, wide palm rose smoothly like an ornate kite, his fingernails looking even stronger and sharper than his nurse's. They came to rest lightly on Gideon's vest.

Gideon was surprised by the man's gentle touch, and perfect placement. Although his white eyes were turned away, it was as if the diseased old man could see.

"You are not of the stomach-desecrators," the pale purple Asian said. "Although I can smell the meat you have eaten, you are not one of them."

"One of who?" Gideon said quickly, in panic. He looked pleadingly at the young woman, but her expression was as placid as an untroubled pond.

"The stomach is the center," said the old man, lightly rolling a button on Gideon's vest between his middle and fore fingernails. "It is the house of all life and death. The soul dwells there. Destroy the stomach, and you destroy all. It is the death of the Final Death."

There were those words again: "the Final Death." It was not where the old man was coming from. If he could be believed, or even comprehended, it was where he was going.

"We are the holy saviors of the stomach," continued the old man with a sickly, unseeing smile. "We travel the earth as the living dead, punishers of all those who embrace meat."

"Oh, God!" Gideon moaned. A cult, he thought. He had heard of these wild-eyed crazies who lived in the Catskill Mountains, but he had never encountered them.

"No God," the old man intoned. "Only the Final Death." He brought his visage directly in front of Gideon's face. "You had promise," he told the frightened man. "You could have been one of us."

The old man sighed leakily. "But the gweilo tiger must be punished. He must know the Final Death. He must become one with it."

He turned his head until his large, delicate left ear was pointing directly at the girl's mouth, his white eyes staring at Gideon. "Do you remember?" the old man asked her.

"Oh, yes," she said with a warm smile, and looked directly at Gregory Green Gideon. "I'm sorry," she told him pleasantly. "You're a nice man." Then she flicked her finger.

All at once, Gregory G. Gideon could hear the sea. He could feel the wind off the desert. And far in the distance, he could see his wife Dolly waving at him. She had never looked more beautiful.

Free of the fingernail in his throat, he stumbled away. His hands slapped the edge of the tureen, and he lurched over the edge. He caught himself just before his feet left the walkway.

Odd, he thought. Someone was whistling. It was an odd whistling. Tuneless. Prolonged. But that wasn't possible, because both strangers were still talking.

"The cutting of the lifeblood," the old man recited.

"The slitting of the throat," the girl answered.

"The release of the life-force," he continued.

"The slicing down the stomach," she replied.

"The destruction of the Holy House," he said.

"The stripping of the carcass," she said.

"The homage."

"The Final Death."