Hotter Blood: More Tales of Erotic Horror

'Where to, bud?'

'Just drive,' he said.

'It's your money,' the driver sneered, dropping the meter. It's your money, chump.

Warren Childress, head of the biggest agency in North Kansas City, sighed and leaned back into the seat of the cab as it pulled out into traffic. All he could do was see his wife say to him, 'Tell Mother,' over and over, 'what hurts Daddy — 'and know now that she was cutting his nuts off even then. She'd probably already watched the videotape. Seen and heard him getting off. Heard «Daddy» and 'Daddy's girl.' God — she must have been enjoying herself.

The car. The CDs. The house. The paintings. And that bitch cunt even told her about the money he had squirreled away. It couldn't get much worse than this, he thought. But he was wrong.

Because Warren Childress had everything. And that night, in a lonely hotel room, watching the cancerous mole begin to bleed, he would start to comprehend just how much worse it could get.

ROCOCO Graham Masterton

It was such a warm spring day that Margot had decided to brown-bag it in the plaza outside the office, next to the ultramodern Spechocchi-designed waterfall. The plaza was always bustling with pedestrians, but after the high-tension hyper-air-conditioned chill of her single-window office in the Jurgens Building, eating lunch here was almost as good as a Mediterranean vacation.

She was as classy at brown-bagging it as she was at her job; and she laid out a crisp pink Tiffany napkin with sfinciuni, the thin Palermo-style pizza sandwich, with a filling of ussmoked ham, ricotta and fontina; a fruit salad of mangoes and strawberries macerated in white wine; and a bottle of still Malvern water.

It was while she was laying out her lunch that she first noticed the man in the dove-gray suit, sitting on the opposite side of the plaza, close to the edge of the waterfall. Most of the time he was half-hidden by passing pedestrians, but there was no doubt at all that he was staring at her. In fact he didn't take his eyes away from her once; and after a few minutes she began to find his unswerving gaze distinctly unsettling.

Margot was used to being stared at by men. She was tall, just over five feet nine inches, and she had striking dark brown hair that was upswept into curls. Her ex-fiance Paul had told her that she had the face of an angel about to cry: wide blue eyes, a straight delicately defined nose, and subtly pouting lips. She was large-bosomed and quite large-hipped, like her mother, but unlike her mother she could afford to flatter her curves in tailored business suits.

She was the only female account executive at Rutter Blane Rutter. She was the highest-paid woman she knew; and she was determined to reach the very top. No compromises. The top.

She began to eat, but she couldn't help raising her eyes to see if the man was still staring at her. He was — no doubt about it. He was sitting back on one of the benches in a very relaxed pose, one leg crossed over the other. He must have been about thirty-eight or thirty-nine years old, with shining blond hair that was far too long and wavy to be fashionable, at least in the circles in which Margot moved. He wore a pale cream shirt and a dove-gray bow tie to match his suit. There was something about his posture which suggested that he was very wealthy and very self-indulgent, too.

Margot had almost finished her sfinciuni when Ray Trimmer appeared. Ray was one of the hottest copywriters at Rutter Blane Rutter, although his lack of personal organization sometimes drove Margot crazy. He slapped a huge untidy package of sandwiches onto the concrete tabletop and sat down too close to her.

'Mind if I join you?' he asked, opening up his sandwiches one by one to investigate their fillings. 'My daughter made my lunch today. She's eight. I told her to use her imagination.'

Margot frowned at the sandwich on the top of the pile. 'Tuna and marmalade. You can't say that's not imaginative.'

Ray began to eat. 'I wanted to talk to you about that Spring Flower spot. I'm working toward something less suburban, if you know what I mean. I know a bed-freshener is an entirely suburban product, but I think we have to make it look more elegant, more up-market.'

'I liked your first idea.'

'I don't know. I ran it past Dale and he wasn't too happy. The woman looks like she's fumigating the bed to get rid of her husband's farts.'

'Isn't that just what Spring Flower's for?'

Ray bent forward to pick up another sandwich. As he did so, Margot became conscious again that the man in the dove-gray suit was still staring at her. Blond shining hair, a face that was curiously medieval, with eyes of washed-out blue.

'Ray, do you see that guy over there? The one sitting by the waterfall?'

Ray looked up, his mouth full of sandwich, then turned and looked around. At that moment a crowd of Japanese tourists were shuffling across the plaza, and the man was temporarily obscured from view. When the tourists had gone, so had the man; although Margot was at a loss to understand how he could have left without her seeing him go.

'I don't see any man,' Ray told her. He pulled a face, and opened up the sandwich he was eating. 'What the hell's this? Cheez Whiz and Cap'n Crunchberries. Jesus!'

Margot folded her napkin and tucked it into her Jasper Conran totebag. 'I'll catch you later, Ray, okay?'

'Don't you want to see what I've got for dessert?'

Quickly, Margot crossed the plaza toward the waterfall. The water slid so smoothly over the lip at the top that it didn't appear to be moving at all — a sheet of glass. To her surprise, the man was standing a little way behind it, in a brick niche where a bronze statue of a naked woman was displayed — a naked woman with a blindfold.

The man saw Margot coming and made no attempt to walk away. Instead he looked as if he had been expecting her.

'Pardon me,' said Margot, as commandingly as she could, although her heart-rate was jumping around like Roger Rabbit, 'do you have some kind of eye problem?'

The man smiled. Close up, he was very tall, six foot three, and he smelled of cinnamon and musk and some very perfumed tobacco.

'Eye problem?' he asked her, in a soft, deep voice.

'Your eyes seem to be incapable of looking at anything except me. Do you want me to call a cop?'

'I apologize,' the man replied, bowing his head. 'It was not my intention to intimidate you.'

'You didn't. But there are plenty of women who might have been.'

'Then I apologize again. My only excuse is that I was admiring you. Do you think I might give you something, a very small token of my regret?'

Margot frowned at him in disbelief. 'You don't have to give me anything, sir. All I'm asking is that you don't stare at women like Sammy the Psychotic.'

He laughed and held out his hand. In his palm was a tiny sparkling brooch — a minuscule pink-and-white flower embedded in glass.

Margot stared at it. 'It's beautiful. What is it?'

'It's a jinn-flower, from Mount Rakapushi, in the High Pamirs. It's extinct now, so this is probably the last one there is. It was picked high up on the snow line, and taken to Hunza, where it was encased in molten glass by a method that has been completely lost.'

Margot wasn't at all sure that she believed any of this. It sounded like an extremely devious and complicated line but a line all the same. She slowly shook her head. 'I couldn't possibly accept anything like that, even if I wanted to accept anything at all.'

The man said gently, 'I shall be extremely hurt if you don't. You see, I bought it especially for you.'

'That's ridiculous. You don't even know me.'