The Hunger (20 page)

London had been a good choice — populated, chaotic, growing. They had come with nothing but a single Venetian gold ducat and six Burgundian pennies.

The ducat bought them a year’s lodging. To obtain more money they scavenged the palaces of the aristocrats.

A hundred years of love and prosperity passed like a winking dream.

Then Lollia changed. Her youth evaporated. She ate weekly, then daily and of late every few hours. Recently, she had been going on night-long frenzies, giving herself up to the hunger until she becomes bloated. And her beauty, once so great that it made men bow their heads, has dissolved into memory. She has grown horrible, her voice shrilling through the house, her eyes agleam for blood. And now she has been captured, dragged gnashing and growling to the Assizes. Miriam raced down Eastcheap to Tower Street — just too late.

She waits for whatever they are going to bring home. She cannot look at the gowns, the street-worn slippers, the brown ringlets Lollia had bought for her hair. They lie now in a little paper box beside her wig fork. Miriam gathers handfuls of coins from their cache, pouring them into a leather pouch and lashing it under her breasts. She will take a boat from Ebgate down to the docks. Because of Lollia’s certain confession, all of this is lost, and Miriam also will be seized if she waits too long. Three days ago she placed her chests aboard a Genoese galley, all except Lollia’s. The ship sails tomorrow or the next day and she will be on it. But she will not leave without Lollia. To keep them safe has been her promise to all, and to herself.

The girl’s resting place is ready, a squat box of oak and iron sitting in the middle of the room, its newly rubbed wood smelling faintly of fish oil.

If Miriam cannot escape, she will be burned at the stake.

Now she counts her coins — fifty gold ducats, three gold pounds, eleven ecus d’or. It is enough to keep all of Cheapside for a year or support Cardinal Beaufort for a week.

They come.

She bites her tongue when she hears the blaring crumhorns of the Waits that precede the cortege. This must work, it
must!

If only she could leave Lollia — but she would never forgive herself. There is a powerful morality in her relationship to her lovers. By vowing never to abandon them, she gives herself the right to deceive them. She rushes into Lombard Street, pushes wildly through the crowd toward the squat figures with the black-shrouded body on their shoulders.

She has a fistful of silver. It will take at least two silver pence to get Lollia’s body and another one to save herself. In one man’s hand she sees a flutter of seals — the writ ordering that the body of one woman called Miriam, accused of being a witch, be brought with all haste —

“I have silver,” she says over the roar of the Waits, “silver pennies for my poor mother!”

“Oho, pretty, we’ve got to take thee too!”

“I have silver!”

The big man with the writ comes up and jolts his hand down on her shoulder. “The King cannot be bought with a scrap of money.”

The Waits have stopped. All is silence. The crowd is fascinated as Miriam pleads for her life. She displays two silver pennies on the palm of her hand.

“That’s what you have?”

“It is, all in the world.”

“Then three it must be!” And he laughs, the whispering cackle of a man with diseased lungs.

“All my monies in the world,” Miriam wails. She takes out another little coin and holds the three in cupped, trembling hands.

They are snatched up and Lollia is dropped onto the stone stoop of the house. The Waits melt into the throng, the bailiffs march away, the writ is lost in the mud of the street.

Miriam can hardly bear to unwrap the shroud. Lollia is bright red, tongue like a purple, blistered flower, eyes popping half out of her head.

They have boiled her in oil. Some of the stinking stuff still clings to her distended flesh.

And there is a tiny noise, the sound of skin breaking as her hands slowly unclench.

“It’s a nightmare,” Tom murmured.

Sarah was mesmerized by the racing graphs. “I know,” she said distantly. The blood had astonished her. Tom was no doubt waiting for some error to emerge, but Sarah knew that the sample Geoff was testing now would only confirm the unbelievable. Her mind rang with the question, what is she,
what is she!
It made her almost dizzy, her own voice shouting in her head, confusion threatening to become panic.

“I’m going to wake her.” Tom started to get up.

“Don’t! You — you’ll disturb the record.”

His eyes searched her face. “She’s obviously suffering —”

“Look at the graphs! You don’t want to disturb a unique record. We don’t even know if it’s a nightmare. It might be a dream of paradise.”

“The REM readings are consistent with a high-intensity nightmare.”

“But look at respiration and skin conductivity. She’s practically comatose.”

Sarah was relieved when Tom’s eyes returned to the monitors. Their place right now was here, recording phenomena. Mrs. Blaylock’s extraordinary sleep pattern continued to flicker across the displays. Sarah tried to add it up — low-intensity delta waves, alpha waves curving as in a trance state. This was the intercranial activity pattern of an injury victim or perhaps some kind of meditation master. “Let’s do a zone scan,” Sarah said slowly.

“You think there’s something we’re not picking up?”

“We’re getting too many nil readings. Yet her eyes are moving as if she was in an intense dream.”

“Maybe it’s the hippocampus. You can get intensive hallucinatory effects when it’s stimulated. They’d cause REM.”

“That’s a good idea, Doctor. But to pick up electrical activity from that deep we’re gonna have to move our electrodes.”

“So let’s do it.”

“You’re elected, Thomas. You told me not to go back in there alone, remember?”

“OK.” He started for the door, then paused. “You’re better at placement than me, darling.”

“One on each temporal bone and two side by side just above the lambdoid suture. If we can’t read the hippocampus from there we need a probe.”

“How the hell can I get to the lambdoid suture? I’ll have to lift her head.”

“Tom, the woman is immobilized with some incredibly powerful equivalent of dreaming sleep. She’s not going to know if you lift her head.” Sarah felt her stomach turn. The very idea of being near that creature again made her feel queasy. This brain activity was no more human than the blood.

Tom left, but there was a long pause before he appeared on the video monitor. He wasn’t hurrying. She watched him move the electrodes. At first the graphs went absolutely straight. No pickup. Sarah was adjusting electrode sensitivity when all hell broke loose. The four electrodes were switched into two different needles in case pickup was better from one region than the other. But it didn’t matter, the voltage surges were tremendous.

“God damn,” Tom said as he returned.

“It’s brain damage,” Sarah said. “Has to be.”

“If it is, then there aren’t any gross effects.”

A hand dropped to her shoulder. Leaning her head back, she saw Geoff standing over her, the rims of his glasses glittering in the fluorescent light. “You were right,” he said, “she’s a freak.”

Sarah looked at the woman on the video monitor. She was a stirring beauty, there was no doubt of it. But she was also this other thing, what Geoff called a freak.

The needles swung wildly across the graph paper. Sarah remembered the hippocampus from her studies. It is one of the deepest brain areas. When it is stimulated electrically, patients sometimes relive their past in every detail, as if it were happening again. It is the seat of ancient senses, the most hidden country of the mind. It is perhaps the place where the unconscious stores the remembrances by which we are ruled. Certainly dragons march there, and deep creatures crawl. When it is destroyed by injury or disease, the victim’s past disappears and he lives forever in that disoriented state that is felt upon waking from a particularly terrible nightmare.

The graphs hissed in the silent room. Geoff dropped a yellow sheet of paper on the desk space before the computer console, his new workup on the blood.

“The woman must literally be reliving her life,” Tom said. “It must be a thousand times more vivid than a normal dream.”

“I hope it’s been a nice life.” Geoff was fingering his workup sheet.

“It hasn’t,” Sarah said. She knew that it was true.

JOHN SAW DIM PATTERNS against his closed eyelids. He could not tell exactly when he had become conscious, but he knew that he had ceased to dream in the past few minutes and returned to the agony of his body.

What a fool he had been to stand over her like that, savoring his victory, waiting for her to awaken. But he had wanted her to
know
.

He could still hear the carbon steel blade of the cleaver ringing on the slates.

He had to move! He longed to stretch out, to feel fresh movement in his joints. Panic started again, but he quelled it. He felt his tomb’s walls and low ceiling, touched the mud beneath the puddle of water he was in. And he heard that dripping, steady, echoing, as if it were in a larger space.

He shouted. Also an echo. He took a deep breath. The air was fresh and cool. In such a small space as this even a few minutes would have made the air heavy.

Unless there was an opening.

He couldn’t turn around, there wasn’t enough room. His feet rubbed along solid stone, however. Plunging his fingers as deep into the mud as they would go also brought no results — until he clawed at the place where the wall before his face met the water. Here there was no mud.

A current went under the stone, through an opening about eight inches deep. Perhaps he could push himself under. He leaned down as far as he could without immersing his face in the water and waved his hand in the opening. He could not feel a surface to the water, but he could feel a distinct flow. If he stretched his arms full length and pushed with his feet he could get his head and shoulders through the opening. There was no guarantee that he would reach an air pocket but even drowning seemed like a relief compared to this.

He plunged his face into the water, pressing himself as far into the mud as he could, found purchase with his feet, and shoved. In order to get through he had to turn his head to one side. Water poured in his nose, seared his throat and lungs. He screwed his eyes shut, fighting the impulse to gag, and shoved and kicked and twisted. Pressed tightly between the mud bottom and the stone, his head pounded. The ear that was scraping against the stone felt as if it were on fire. He realized that it was being torn off, so tight was the space.

The mud seeped between his lips, poured into his mouth. He began to need air. Helpless, he convulsed, felt a rush of bubbles pour from nose and mouth, gagged. Somewhere far behind him his feet were kicking, drumming impotently in the shallow water. His hands, stretched before him, clutched water.

Then his ear stopped hurting. He could lift his head! More frantic jerking and his eyes were out of the water. He pushed against the mud, heard bones crack as he pulled his legs up under him, heaved again and again.

Bright red flashes filled his eyes, his mind began to wander. The withering sensation of air hunger coursed through his body. He felt himself urinating, a hot stream in the freezing water.

His struggles were becoming more sporadic. The pain was giving way to a kind of release, a relaxed drifting. He hungered for the peace that seemed to lie just beyond the last of his struggles.

He remembered Miriam, saw her face glowing before him, her lips parted, teasing him to passion.

Mocking his love.

He couldn’t let her win! She had lied to him from the beginning. For weeks after their first encounter she had come to him nightly with her evil little kit and sat stroking his head as her blood ran into his veins and the fever raged. It nearly killed him, but he recovered. And when he did he was a new man, impervious to sickness, ageless, with new needs and an extraordinary new lover to fulfill them.

He also had a new hunger. It had taken him years to get used to it, to reach a point where his moral revulsion was at least equaled by his sense of acceptance. At first the hunger had propelled him, wild with need, through the streets of London.

She had caused that.

Finally he had learned, bitter and desperate and trapped, to satisfy the demands of his hunger.

She had taught him how.

He had to reach her!

A last frantic heave brought him clear of the water and he sucked in air at last. He could hear his heart clattering, feel exhaustion in every muscle and bone. For how long he did not know, he lay where he had fallen, his head and arms entangled in a thick mass of roots, his legs still in the muddy water.

But he was free of Miriam’s tomb.

Free. An image of the steel box waiting for him in the attic flashed in his mind. He gasped air, coughed, spat froth from his lungs. A cold steel box in a stack of such boxes.

And in each — one of his predecessors.

She had always said that he was her only one.

Now that he saw the truth, he was horrified by the sheer coldness of the creature, the depths of its indifference, the extent of its power. Some of those boxes were
old!
The thing itself must be ancient, some dreadful exponent of Satan himself. He no longer thought of it as male or female. It chose to call itself “Miriam” but that was doubtless only a matter of convenience.

John’s hands clutched up among the roots, seeking some further passage out of the prison. Everything that he believed about Miriam had proved to be false. All that she had told him was a monstrous lie.

One among many. Miriam had been doing this since the beginning of time.

He had to break the chain of destruction in some way. His revenge was due him a thousand times over. The very earth around him seemed to seethe with the restless souls of those he had killed in service to his own immortality.

Indeed. The 180-odd years he had lived seemed only a moment now that the end was near. Certainly there were no eternity. If he had known that he was only delaying the inevitable he would never have wasted the lives of others. “Or so I tell myself,” he said aloud.