With peace on earth, good will to men!"
The whistling died.
Charles Halloway stepped out. Far up ahead, the man who had whistled the tune was motioning his arms by a telegraph pole, silently working. Now he vanished into the open door of a shop.
Charles Halloway, not knowing why, crossed the street to watch the man pasting up one of the posters inside the unrented and empty store.
Now the man stepped out the door with his brush, his paste bucket, his rolled papers. His eyes, a fierce and lustful shine, fixed on Charles Halloway. Smiling, he gestured an open hand.
Halloway stared.
The palm of that hand was covered with fine black silken hair. It looked like--
The hand clenched, tight. It waved. The man swept around the corner. Charles Halloway, stunned, flushed with sudden summer heat, swayed, then turned to gaze into the empty shop.
Two sawhorses stood parallel to each other under a single spotlight.
Placed over these two sawhorses like a funeral of snow and crystal was a block of ice six feet long. It shone dimly with its own effulgence, and its color was light green-blue. It was a great cool gem resting there in the dark.
On a little white placard at one side near the window the following calligraphic message could be read by lamplight:
Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show--
Fantoccini, Marionette Circus, and Your
Plain Meadow Carnival. Arriving
Immediately! Here on Display, one of our many attractions:
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD!
Halloway's eyes leaped to the poster on the inside of the window.
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD!
And back to the cold long block of ice.
It was such a block of ice as he remembered from traveling magician's shows when he was a boy, when the local ice company contributed a chunk of winter in which, for 12 hours on end, frost maidens lay embedded, on display while people watched and comedies toppled down the raw white screen and coming attractions came and went and at last the pale ladies slid forth all rimed, chipped free by perspiring sorcerers to be led off smiling into the dark behind the curtains.
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD!
And yet this vast chunk of wintry glass held nothing but frozen river water.
No. Not quite empty.
Halloway felt his heart pound one special time.
Within the huge winter gem was there not a special vacuum? a voluptuous hollow, a prolonged emptiness which undulated from tip to toe of the ice? and wasn't this vacuum, this emptiness waiting to be filled with summer flesh, was it not shaped somewhat like a ... woman?
Yes.
The ice. And the lovely hollows, the horizontal flow of emptiness within the ice. The lovely nothingness. The exquisite flow of an invisible mermaid daring the ice to capture it.
The ice was cold.
The emptiness within the ice was warm.
He wanted to go away from here.